In other words, the black box was not simply an isolated device. The black box grew to become a constituent element of how entities and systems of entities were conceived more generally.
Galloway, Alexander R.Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age. London: Verso, 2021.
This is a wild and hopeful story: grad students at Northeastern successfully pushed back against invasive digital surveillance in their workplace, through solidarity, fearlessness, and the bright light of publicity. It’s a tale of hand-to-hand, victorious combat with the “shitty technology adoption curve.”
What’s the “shitty tech adoption curve?” It’s the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech — say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 — you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.
That’s why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.
20 years ago, if you ate dinner under the unblinking eye of a CCTV, it was because you were housed in a supermax prison. Today, it’s because you were unwise enough to pay hundreds or thousands of dollars for “home automation” from Google, Apple, Amazon or another “luxury surveillance” vendor.
Northeastern’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute,” where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there’s one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.
Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern Senior Vice Provost for Research David Luzzi decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation. Luzzi signed the paperwork that brought the privacy institute into being.
Students throughout ISEC were alarmed by this move, but especially students on the sixth floor, home to the Privacy Institute. When they demanded an explanation, they were told that the university was conducting a study on “desk usage.” This rang hollow: students at the Privacy Institute have assigned desks, and they badge into each room when they enter it.
As Privacy Institute PhD candidate Max von Hippel wrote, “Reader, we have assigned desks, and we use a key-card to get into the room, so, they already know how and when we use our desks.”
So why was the university suddenly so interested in gathering fine-grained data on desk usage? I asked von Hippel and he told me: “They are proposing that grad students share desks, taking turns with a scheduling web-app, so administrators can take over some of the space currently used by grad students. Because as you know, research always works best when you have to
schedule your thinking time.”
That’s von Hippel’s theory, and I’m going to go with it, because Luzzi didn’t offer a better one in the flurry of memos and “listening sessions” that took place after the ISEC students arrived at work one morning to discover sensors under their desks.
This is documented in often hilarious detail in von Hippel’s thread on the scandal, in which the university administrators commit a series of unforced errors and the grad students run circles around them, in a comedy of errors straight out of “Animal House.”
After the sensors were discovered, the students wrote to the administrators demanding their removal, on the grounds that there was no scientific purpose for them, that they intimidated students, that they were unnecessary, and that the university had failed to follow its own rules and ask the Institutional Review Board (IRB) to review the move as a human-subjects experiment.
The letter was delivered to Luzzi, who offered “an impromptu listening session” in which he alienated students by saying that if they trusted the university to “give” them a degree, they should trust it to surveil them. The students bristled at this characterization, noting that students deliver research (and grant money) to “make it tick.”
[Image ID: Sensors arrayed around a kitchen table at ISEC]
The students, believing Luzzi was not taking them seriously, unilaterally removed all the sensors, and stuck them to their kitchen table, annotating and decorating them with Sharpie. This prompted a second, scheduled “listening session” with Luzzi, but this session, while open to all students, was only announced to their professors (“Beware of the leopard”).
The students got wind of this, printed up fliers and made sure everyone knew about it. The meeting was packed. Luzzi explained to students that he didn’t need IRB approval for his sensors because they weren’t “monitoring people.” A student countered, what was being monitored, “if not people?” Luzzi replied that he was monitoring “heat sources.”
Remember, these are grad students. They asked the obvious question: which heat sources are under desks, if not humans (von Hippel: “rats or kangaroos?”). Luzzi fumbled for a while (“a service animal or something”) before admitting, “I guess, yeah, it’s a human.”
Having yielded the point, Luzzi pivoted, insisting that there was no privacy interest in the data, because “no individual data goes back to the server.” But these aren’t just grad students — they’re grad students who specialize in digital privacy. Few people on earth are better equipped to understand re-identification and de-aggregation attacks.
[Image ID: A window with a phrase written in marker, ‘We are not doing science here’ -Luzzi.]
A student told Luzzi, “This doesn’t matter. You are monitoring us, and collecting data for science.” Luzzi shot back, “we are not doing science here.” This ill-considered remark turned into an on-campus meme. I’m sure it was just blurted in the heat of the moment, but wow, was that the wrong thing to tell a bunch of angry scientists.
From the transcript, it’s clear that this is where Luzzi lost the crowd. He accused the students of “feeling emotion” and explaining that the data would be used for “different kinds of research. We want to see how students move around the lab.”
Now, as it happens, ISEC has an IoT lab where they take these kinds of measurements. When they do those experiments, students are required to go through IRB, get informed consent, all the stuff that Luzzi had bypassed. When this is pointed out, Luzzi says that they had been given an IRB waiver by the university’s Human Research Protection Program (HRPP).
Now a prof gets in on the action, asking, pointedly: “Is the only reason it doesn’t fall under IRB is that the data will not be published?” A student followed up by asking how the university could justify blowing $50,000 on surveillance gear when that money would have paid for a whole grad student stipend with money left over.
Luzzi’s answers veer into the surreal here. He points out that if he had to hire someone to monitor the students’ use of their desks, it would cost
more than $50k, implying that the bill for the sensors represents a cost-savings. A student replies with the obvious rejoinder — just don’t monitor desk usage, then.
Finally, Luzzi started to hint at the underlying rationale for the sensors, discussing the cost of the facility to the university and dangling the possibility of improving utilization of “research assets.” A student replies, “If you want to understand how research is done, don’t piss off everyone in this building.”
Now that they have at least a vague explanation for what research question Luzzi is trying to answer, the students tear into his study design, explaining why he won’t learn what he’s hoping to learn. It’s really quite a good experimental design critique — these are good students! Within a few volleys, they’re pointing out how these sensors could be used to stalk researchers and put them in physical danger.
Luzzi turns the session over to an outside expert via a buggy Zoom connection that didn’t work. Finally, a student asks whether it’s possible that this meeting could lead to them having a desk without a sensor under it. Luzzi points out that their desk currently doesn’t have a sensor (remember, the students ripped them out). The student says, “I assume you’ll put one back.”
[Image ID: A ‘public art piece’ in the ISEC lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out ‘NO!,’ surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.]
They run out of time and the meeting breaks up. Following this, the students arrange the sensors into a “public art piece” in the lobby — a table covered in sensors spelling out “NO!,” surrounded by Sharpie annotations decrying the program.
Meanwhile, students are still furious. It’s not just that the sensors are invasive, nor that they are scientifically incoherent, nor that they cost more than a year’s salary — they also emit lots of RF noise that interferes with the students’ own research. The discussion spills onto Reddit:
Yesterday, Luzzi capitulated, circulating a memo saying they would pull “all the desk occupancy sensors from the building,” due to “concerns voiced by a population of graduate students.”
The shitty technology adoption curve is relentless, but you can’t skip a step! Jumping straight to grad students (in a
privacy lab) without first normalizing them by sticking them on the desks of poor kids in underfunded schools (perhaps after first laying off a computer science teacher to free up the budget!) was a huge tactical error.
A more tactically sound version of this is currently unfolding at CMU Computer Science, where grad students have found their offices bugged with sensors that detect movement
and collect sound:
The CMU administration has wisely blamed the presence of these devices on the need to discipline low-waged cleaning staff by checking whether they’re really vacuuming the offices.
While it’s easier to put cleaners under digital surveillance than computer scientists, trying to do both at once is definitely a boss-level challenge. You might run into a scholar like David Gray Widder, who, observing that “this seems like algorithmic management of lowly paid employees to me,” unplugged the sensor in his office.
This is the kind of full-stack Luddism this present moment needs. These researchers aren’t opposed to
sensors — they’re challenging the
social relations of sensors, who gets sensed and who does the sensing.
[Image ID: A flier inviting ISEC grad students to attend an unadvertised ‘listening session’ with vice-provost David Luzzi. It is surmounted with a sensor that has been removed from beneath a desk and annotated in Sharpie to read: ‘If found by David Luzzi suck it.’]
The Paris Agreement sets out a global framework to avoid dangerous climate change by limiting global warming to well below 2°C above pre-industrial levels and pursuing efforts to limit warming to 1.5°C.
Global temperatures in 2020 have already passed 1.1°C and are increasing at over 0.2°C per decade, driven predominantly by CO
2 emissions, over 85% generated by fossil fuels and industry.
We have only a few decades to reduce global CO
2 emissions to net zero if we are to meet the more ambitious goal of the Paris Agreement.
We cannot ban developing countries from using fossil fuels in 40 years’ time, so we have to work out a way to halt global warming before the world has stopped using fossil fuels.
The only way to do this is to ensure that one tonne of CO
2 is safely and permanently stored, not just dumped into the atmosphere, for every tonne generated by continued use of fossil fuels.
Right now, this stored fraction is less than 0.1%, and increasing at least 100 times too slowly to limit warming to 2°C, let alone 1.5°C.
The Idea
In order to incentivise development and growth of long-term CO
2 storage, extractors and importers of fossil fuels are required to permanently store a percentage of the CO
2 generated by the products they sell. This is called a Carbon Takeback Obligation (CTBO).
Over time, as levels of cumulative emissions monotonically increase, the CTBO will increase. Based on current projections, the CTBO could start at ~1% in 2023 before increasing to 10% in 2030 and reaching 100% (which means net zero emissions) by 2050.
Companies need not be obliged to store CO
2 themselves. We envisage the growth of a marketplace, based around tradable certificates of storage, significantly reducing costs.
Stored CO
2 could initially come from factories, refineries and cement plants. Once these have all been tapped, getting to 100% storage would mean recapturing CO
2 from the atmosphere.
Britons are divided on many matters, but one uniting force that cuts across regional, party and class lines is jealous pride for the NHS and fierce resistance to its privatisation and the importation of America’s grisly omnishambolic health care “system.”
But while the British
people oppose privatisation, the British
investor class are slavering for it. Oligarchs
love to loot public services, which is why the IMF is so adamant that the countries it “helps” sell off their public water, housing, even their roads and schools and museums.
Normally, the corrupting, immiserating effects of privatisation happen so slowly that they can feel like a natural phenomenon, a gradual change in the weather that makes everyone a little colder, a little more uncomfortable every day, until one day, the situation is unbearable.
But there have been moments of “big bang” privatisation where governments and oligarchs speed-ran the process of looting the public coffers and transferring them to private hands — think of the sell-off of ex-Soviet state industries to connected insiders.
Or think of Thatcher’s sell-off of council homes, an airdrop that converted shelter from a human right to an asset, in which “market forces” were allowed to “optimise” the housing system, with the result that everyday people can’t afford a home, while wealthy speculators trousered billions.
Thatcher had a supermajority, and she understood how to play different economic blocs against each other, resulting in the “shock therapy” of the 1980s. Her successors — both Tories and New Labour — had to move more slowly:
Back to the NHS. It has been subject to the death of a thousand literal cuts, as Tories and Labour alike have starved it of resources. More importantly, both parties have turned ever-larger chunks of the NHS over to private-sector looters who have taken over hospitals, services, record-keeping and more.
These “public-private partnerships” were billed as a “third way,” combining the strengths of both the public and private sectors. In reality, they were a way to transfer a ever-larger sums from the public purse to private investors.
Public-private partnerships (PPPs) are a heads-I-win, tails-you-lose proposition. When a private sector manager takes over a public service and extracts so much profit from the system that it risks collapse, the public sector is blamed for undersubsidising the service, and the looter can demand
more money.
Lather, rinse, repeat. After decades of this, everyone understands how PPPs can be used to siphon endless sums out of the public coffers. But there’s a more sinister aspect to PPPs that is only just coming to light, exemplified by Palantir’s leaked plans to take over the NHS.
Palantir is one of the most sinister companies on the global stage, a company whose pitch is to sell humans rights abuses as a service. The customers for this turnkey service include America’s most corrupt police departments, who use Palantir’s products to monitor protest movements.
That includes the NHS, where Palantir has been jockeying for an ever-larger slice of the health service’s private procurements. But the company’s reputation has preceded it, and even NHS commissioners understand that they risk public outrage if they sign over the NHS to a notorious private-sector surveillance company.
Palantir has a solution. The company has effectively unlimited access to the capital markets, as well as to its deep-pocketed founder Peter Thiel, a cartoon villain who’s written that women shouldn’t be allowed to vote and that democracy and freedom are incompatible.
All that liquid capital means that Palantir doesn’t have to win NHS contracts — it can simply buy up
other companies that have won them. Palantir’s strategy leaked to
Bloomberg, and Olivia Solon lays it out:
In a Sept 2021 email with the subject line “Buying our way in…!” Palantir regional boss Louis Mosley describes a plan to go around “hoovering up” NHS contractors, to “take a lot of ground and take down a lot of political resistance.”
(A Palantir spokesman said the email was “regrettable” and “not an accurate characterization of our relationship with the NHS”)
Palantir’s Mosley said he’d target NHS software suppliers with “credible leadership” and revenue between £5–50m, offering their founders “v. generous buyout schedule (say 10x, especially if all stock),” adding “(we might even be their only real exit option).”
Palantir also urged the lobbying group TechUK to pressurise the NHS and other government departments to buy commercial, proprietary systems rather than building their own.
Palantir ran their own separate lobbying as well, hiring Indra Joshi and Harjeet Dhaliwal away from the NHS to push their agenda in Westminster:
For backup, they retained Global Counsel, a lobbying firm run by the Blairite archvillain Peter Mandelson, to push Palantir to the UK government. Mandelson is one of the great monsters of New Labour, masterminding a plan to permanenly disconnect British households from the internet if any member of the family was accused — without proof — of illegaly downloading music:
The deal was successfully challenged by Foxglove, who represented
Opendemocracy in a suit to force the government to make future Palantir deals subject to public tender:
The real prize isn’t a mere £23.5 contract, though: the NHS is about to open to bids for a massive, £360m IT project. That’s where Palantir’s plan to buy out its rivals for the deal could bear real fruit.
That’s not a bug in PPP, it’s a feature. The point of PPP is to apply market dynamics to public service provision. Foremost among these market dynamics is the right of company owners to sell their businesses to other companies.
The UK — along with the rest of the west — has spent 40 years waving through anticompetitive mergers, under a doctrine that holds that monopolies are “efficient” (Thiel agrees: according to him, “competition is for losers”).
The combination of lax merger scrutiny and PPP inevitably leads to this kind of play: one deep-pocketed company can “hoover up” all the contractors to the NHS and form a single entity that can hold the NHS to ransom.
Palantir’s commitment to proprietary, secretive software development methodologies makes it utterly unsuitable for NHS service provision. Compare the NHS to Ben Goldacre’s landmark “Better, broader, safer: using health data for research and analysis”:
Goldacre argues that the only way to unlock the medical insights in aggregate NHS patient data is with
public software: an open and free “trusted research platform” that anyone can audit and verify.
While the code for this platform would be public, NHS patient data would never leave it. Instead, researchers who wanted to investigate hypotheses about the effectiveness of different interventions would send queries to the platform and get results back — without ever touching the data.
This is a system that only works if it’s hosted by democratically accountable public services — not by private actors accountable to their shareholders, and certainly not secretive companies whose primary expertise is in helping spy agencies conduct mass surveillance.
[Image ID: A haunted, ruined hospital building. A sign hangs askew over the entrance with the NHS logo over the Palantir logo. Beneath it, a cutaway silhouette reveals a blood-spattered, scalpel-wielding surgeon with a Palantir logo over his breast, about to slice into a frightened patient with an NHS logo over his breast. Looming over the scene are the eyes of Peter Thiel, bloodshot and sinister.]
One might also compare Weaver’s device to the so-called Zuse palimpsest, the film stock used by Konrad Zuse to encode binary data for his Z3 computer, completed in 1941. […] Of course, Zuse’s filmstrips had no real relationship to photography or cinema; the image on the filmstrip was unimportant, a mere trace of the medium’s former life.
Alexander R.GallowayUncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age. London: Verso, 2021.
The Mount Whaleback Iron Ore Mine is located in the Pilbara region of Western Australia. It measures nearly 1 mile (1.5 kilometers) wide and more than 3 miles (5 kilometers) long. Nearly all of mined iron ore is used to make steel, and it is thus a major component in the construction of buildings, automobiles, and appliances such as refrigerators.
My last weird and awesome skull post was really popular, so I decided to do one about something else I’m excessively interested in: Megafauna! This isn’t at all a comprehensive list of the coolest ones, not by a long shot, so you should definitely look up some of the BBC docs on Youtube or google ones from your continent!
The cave bear! (N. America)
‘Hell Pigs’ (N. America) Actually entelodonts, unrelated to pigs at all and more closely tied to hippos and cetaceans! Dat sagittal crest amirite
The Stag Moose @allosauroid brought to my attention that this is the skull of the Irish elk, Megaloceros, not a stag moose! (Eurasia) Which stood 6 foot at the shoulder/withers
Platybelodon (widespread) Google artist renditions of these guys, you won’t be disappointed
Barbourofelis! (N. America) Like a smaller smilodon, with much cooler teeth. Look at those incisors!
Megatherium (S. America) Primitive sloths the size of elephants!
Titanus Walleri (N. America) Other continents had equally large if not larger ‘terror birds’
Paraceratherium (Eurasia) One of the largest terrestrial mammals we’ve ever discovered. It was actually a species of hornless rhino! Google artist recs of these guys, too
Diprotodon (Australia) The largest known marsupial, which was the size of a hippopotamus and stood 6 feet tall
I saved Glyptodon (S. America) for last, because these things have some of the
weirdest skulls I’ve ever seen. They were technically armadillos, but reached the size of a Volkswagen Beetle!
“There is no cloud, there is only other people’s computers.” It’s funny because it’s true, and the “other people” in this case are rapacious, vertically integrated monopolies that use their cloud businesses to put their customers in cages.
The Coalition For Fair Software Licensing is a group of businesses that have banded together to resist some of the most worst cloud-based abuses. Their main targets are companies like Oracle and Microsoft who sell software, software as a service, and cloud hosting, and use these three prongs to entrap and gouge their customers.
Writing for
Bloomberg, Brody Ford gives a high-level view of the scam: whereby integrated monopolists charge extra to run their rivals’ software on their cloud systems, or block them altogether. That makes it hard — or impossible — to shop around for cloud services:
The group itself lists nine demands for “cloud fairness,” ranging from no-brainers (“Licensing terms should be clear and intelligible”) to absolute yikes!es like “Freedom from retaliation for cloud choices” (involving “intrusive software audits” and “higher software licensing fees”).
The Coalition’s beefs are familiar ones, echoing the fights that led to the creation of antitrust law in the 19th century. Back then, small businesses were at the mercy of another kind of infrastructure: railways, who operated chokepoints between producers and their customers.
These railways weren’t just operating the playing field — they also owned one of the teams. They would operate their own businesses that competed directly against the freighters whose goods they carried. They would charge the freighters more for carriage than they did their own businesses, making it impossible to compete with them.
This turned out to be an incredibly hard problem to solve with regulation. Even when there were rules ordering railroads to charge the same rates to all comers, there were so many subtle ways to cheat.
For example, Rockefeller’s Standard Oil owned many railroads and controlled the delivery of oil from the pumphead to the refineries and thence to market. Rockefeller was ordered to charge everyone the same rate — whether a train was carrying his oil or a rival’s.
And he did! All the oil shipped from Ohio to the port shipped at the same price. All the oil that shipped from Chicago to the port also shipped at the same price. But the Ohio price was
much higher than the Chicago price, and Rockefeller owned all the Chicago refineries, while the Ohio refineries were owned by the independents.
What’s more, the price-per-mile for everything that
wasn’t oil (lumber, for example) was the same from Chicago or Ohio — it was only oil that had this steep price differential. The nondiscrimination order for Rockefeller merely stipulated that there couldn’t be discrimination on a given route — but left open the door for discrimination
between routes.
When you own the infrastructure, there are just
so many ways to cheat against the companies that
use the infrastructure, and they can be incredibly hard to detect, and even when you do, it can be incredibly hard to write a loophole-free rule to block a given tactic.
That’s why the trustbusters were so big on “structural separation”: the principle that a business can own a platform, or use the platform, but not both. They banned the railroads from running their own freight businesses, and they banned the banks from owning businesses that competed with the firms they loaned money to.
Rather than trying to construct rules that kept the referee honest even when they played on one of the teams, they ordered the companies to choose one role — either you were the ref, or you were a player, but you couldn’t referee a match where you were also in the competition.
Today, with tech antitrust surging around the world, we’re speedrunning the lessons of the rail-barons, trying to impose rules on companies that ban them from abusing their vertical monopolies, rather than ordering them not to form vertical monopolies:
After all, if Microsoft and Oracle had to choose between running clouds and selling cloud software, they wouldn’t have any reason to screw with businesses to leverage their cloud into software licenses and their software licenses into cloud subscriptions. And for so long as they are in both businesses, they will have infinite tools at their disposal to subtly (and blatantly) cheat on whatever limits we put on them.
One fascinating wrinkle: Senator Gary Peters has proposed legislation that would overhaul federal procurement rules, requiring companies that want to sell cloud services to the US government to play fair.
This is a
very powerful move. Every government — US and foreign, federal, state and local — should have a rule that says, “If we’re going to spend public money on your products, you have to promise not to lock us in.” That’s just basic prudent governance, and there’s plenty of precedent for it. Lincoln had a policy that he would only buy rifles for the Union Army from companies that used interoperable tooling and bullets. No general wants to have to cancel a battle because the single-source supplier decided not to make any ammo this month.
This policy could and should be extended to cars in government motor-pools (requiring manufacturers not to block third-party parts and to supply diagnostic codes to independent mechanics). Likewise software like Google Classroom (requiring Goog not to block third-party textbooks, assessment tools, etc). It should be universal, all the way down to requiring printer companies that sell to the public sector to stop blocking third-party ink.
Cloud lock-in is incredibly unpopular. Bloomberg’s Ford cites a study that found that 90% of tech executives support the Coalition for Fair Software Licensing’s demands. But we need to do more than order tech monopolies to play fair — we have to take away their incentive to cheat.
I think there’s momentum for this. Before she took over the FTC, chair Lina Khan published “The Separation of Platforms and Commerce,” a banger of a law-review paper from the
Columbia Law Review (“the potential hazards of integration by dominant tech platforms invite recovering structural separations”):
And businesses are unlikely to be happy with mere rules ordering fairness, given the big companies’ propensity to cheat and the incredible upsides for doing so. They just can’t help themselves, whether that’s Amazon mining its sales data to figure out when to clone its own customers’ products:
We don’t let judges hear cases where they have a stake in the outcome, we don’t let lawyers represent the plaintiffs and the defendants, we don’t let referees call games where they own one of the teams.
[Image ID: A dark sky filled with thunderclouds, split by a jagged lightning bolt. On the left side, a remix of Monopoly’s Rich Uncle Pennybags dances atop a cloud; he has removed his face to reveal a grinning skull beneath it. On the left, a trustbuster-era editorial cartoon version of Roosevelt with his ‘big stick’ perches on another cloud-mass, ready to smite the Monopoly Man. Both are backlit by radiating penumbrae of light.]
Two underwater natural gas pipelines ruptured yesterday, causing a large disturbance on the Baltic Sea near the Danish island of Bornholm. Although both pipelines — the Nord Stream 1 and 2 — were not actively transporting gas, hundreds of millions of tons of methane sitting inside them leaked out, creating the half-mile-wide circle of churning sea seen here. European leaders believe the leaks were caused by intentional underwater explosions, and act of Russian sabotage toward Europe.
Facebook users claim to hate the service, but they keep using it, leading many to describe Facebook as “addictive.” But there’s a simpler explanation: people keep using Facebook though they hate it because they don’t want to lose their connections to the
people they love.
Calling Facebook “addictive” plays into the company’s own mythology, the sales-pitch they make to advertisers, in which they claim to be neuro-sorcerers whose mastery of “big data” and “dopamine loops” can sell anything to anyone, which is why you should buy ads on their service.
The simpler explanation - that Facebook is holding the people you love hostage, and you’ll put up with a bad situation in order to stay connected to them - has many advantages over the “evil sorcerer” hypothesis. For starters, it doesn’t require that you accept Facebook’s own self-serving and improbable claims about having invented a mind-control ray. Instead, the “hostage-taking” explanation rests on a visible, easily verified fact: if you leave Facebook, the service won’t let you send messages to the people who stay behind.
Economists have a name for this: “switching costs,” this being everything you have to give up when you switch from one service to another. Internally, Facebook’s product managers are very frank that they deliberately design their products to have the highest possible switching costs:
Here’s how their thinking goes: if leaving Facebook is easy, then we have to treat our users well or they’ll go somewhere else. But if leaving Facebook is
painful, then they’ll stick around, even if we abuse them. The higher the switching costs are, the worse we can treat our users without risking their departure.
Now, digital technology has intrinsically low switching-costs, because the only digital computer we know how to build - a Turing-complete Von Neumann machine - can run every program we know how to write. Someone can always figure out how to plug something new into something old.
Plugging something new into something old is called interoperability. There’s no real technical barrier to plugging a new service into Facebook, so that you could quit Facebook, join the new service, and continue to send messages to the friends you left behind. If Facebook was federated with lots of non-Facebook services, the switching costs would plummet.
Facebook might treat its users better if they could leave. But even if Facebook’s notoriously awful corporate culture meant that it continued to abuse its users despite falling switching costs, it wouldn’t matter as much, because those users could easily leave Facebook and find a better service.
That hypothetical “interoperable Facebook” is the subject of a new white paper and narrated slideshow I’ve just launched with @EFF, called “How to Ditch Facebook Without Losing Friends.”
The impetus for this project was our collective frustration with the implementation of the EU Digital Markets Act, an otherwise very promising interoperability law that will force all kinds of tech companies to lower switching costs by offering APIs to rivals:
The DMA is incredibly promising, but the implementation could create chaos and discredit the idea of interop altogether, thanks to the decision to start with mandating interop in end-to-end encrypted (“E2EE”) messaging services like Whatsapp and Imessage.
The thing is, secure, encrypted messaging is hard to do well, and even minor errors in E2EE can expose all users of the service (not just in the EU) to risk. There are deep-pocketed, vicious cyber-mercenaries like the NSO Group who weaponize these tiny, subtle errors to make interception tools for the world’s worst dictatorships.
Cyber-weapons like NSO’s Pegasus are used to attack opposition figures, human rights workers and journalists. Pegasus was key to the Saudi government’s kidnapping, murder and dismemberment of Jamal Khashoggi.
Making interoperable E2EE is a great idea, but it’s a long-term standardization project that must proceed with the utmost caution, and the DMA imposes an unrealistic timeline on interop for E2EE. I think they’re either going to miss that deadline, or, worse, press on with an immature standard despite security risks.
It’s a little baffling that the EU would start with E2EE, given the difficulty - especially when interoperable social media is such an obvious way to shatter the market power of the largest tech companies in the world.
I have a theory, though: I think that every EU policymaker has experienced interoperable messaging through SMS. If you’ve used your Dutch phone in Brussels to send a message to a German colleague having a vacation in Spain, it’s easy to imagine a multi-vendor, seamless, interoperable messaging system.
The problem is that SMS is a dumpster-fire, an absolute security disaster that has been compromised over and over again in increasingly horrible ways. SMS works well, sure, but it fails
very badly.
Meanwhile, interoperable, federated social media was snuffed out decades ago, with the death of Usenet (enclosed and suffocated by Google) and the enclosure of blogs and other promising successors. It’s likely that the decision-makers who decided to start with E2EE have never experienced federated social media and have no easy way to imagine what it would be like.
Hence this “interoperable Facebook” project. We describe how federated social media would work:
[Image iD: A dialog box confirming account migration from Facebook]
How you would move your account from Facebook to an interoperable platform run by a co-op, nonprofit or startup;
[Image ID: A dialog box seeking a user’s consent to maintain a connection to an off-platform user]
[Image iD: A dialog box allowing a user to set universal preferences for off-platform communications]
How your friends’ consent to send their messages to you would be obtained;
[Image ID: A dialog box telling a user that members their service can’t join a community]
[Image ID: A dialog box warning that an off-platform user has been blocked for violating community standards]
[Image ID: A dialog box telling FB users that an off-platform user has been blocked]
How a federated service could impose different moderation policies than Facebook’s, permitting things Facebook prohibits and vice-versa.
It’s hard to imagine how interoperable social media might work, but some lawmakers have got their heads around the idea; the US ACCESS Act would create an interoperability mandate for social media.
Getting the ACCESS Act passed - and getting the DMA on track - will need lots of public support for the idea of interoperability as a way back from an internet composed of “five giant websites filled with screenshots of text from the other four”:
That’s why we made this design fiction; to help people understand
why we need interop, and
how it would work. We need to get past the self-aggrandizing Big Tech story of evil sorcerers “addicting” us to their services and focus in on the real problem: Big Tech took everyone we love hostage inside their walled gardens. We need to smash those walls!
Numerous saltwater evaporation ponds have been built in China’s Qarhan Playa since the early 1990s. Located in Qinghai Province, Qarhan was once a single unitary lake and is now an expansive salt flat covering 2,261 square miles (5,856 square km). It is heavily exploited for its valuable reserves of salt, potash, lithium, iodine and other minerals.
Media today are reporting that Yvon Chouinard have basically given away their ownership interests in Patagonia to a trust and non-profit corporation. The earnings from those interests will be used to fund projects confronting climate change. The family didn’t undertake the transaction for tax benefits. In fact, had the family done this transaction as most of the hyper rich families do, they would have benefitted from a substantial tax break. So, this isn’t the typical play by a rich guy, but an honest philanthropic move to save the habitability of Earth for all its inhabitants.
This post is a link to a letter written by Yvon Chouinard to all of us, explaining what he’s doing and why. No firewall, but here’s the letter:
One option was to sell Patagonia and donate all the money. But we couldn’t be sure a new owner would maintain our values or keep our team of people around the world employed.
Another path was to take the company public. What a disaster that would have been. Even public companies with good intentions are under too much pressure to create short-term gain at the expense of long-term vitality and responsibility.
Truth be told, there were no good options available. So, we created our own.
Instead of “going public,” you could say we’re “going purpose.” Instead of extracting value from nature and transforming it into wealth for investors, we’ll use the wealth Patagonia creates to protect the source of all wealth.
Here’s how it works: 100% of the company’s voting stock transfers to the Patagonia Purpose Trust, created to protect the company’s values; and 100% of the nonvoting stock had been given to the Holdfast Collective, a nonprofit dedicated to fighting the environmental crisis and defending nature. The funding will come from Patagonia: Each year, the money we make after reinvesting in the business will be distributed as a dividend to help fight the crisis.
It’s been nearly 50 years since we began our experiment in responsible business, and we are just getting started. If we have any hope of a thriving planet—much less a thriving business—50 years from now, it is going to take all of us doing what we can with the resources we have. This is another way we’ve found to do our part.
Despite its immensity, the Earth’s resources are not infinite, and it’s clear we’ve exceeded its limits. But it’s also resilient. We can save our planet if we commit to it.
The limit(ation)s of literacy: meandering toward a (trans)media ecology of futures
Because, as I point out early in the talk, all futures are narratives, and all futures are thus media(ted). This has important implications for those of us producing futures, with regard to both the processes of (re)production, and the (re)distribution of the resulting product. Per Neil Postman, media are environments, which assign roles and preconfigure possible (and impossible) responses; understanding the affordances various media (and combinations thereof), and the particular ways in which they shape speculative narratives, is therefore vital to futuring as a critical utopian project.
Its an extremely interesting talk on experiential futures, media literacy, the imagination, narratives etc. well worth your time if you are engaging with solarpunk beyond / deeper than just its surface aesthetic.
Arguing that you don’t care about the right to privacy because you have nothing to hide is no different than saying you don’t care about free speech because you have nothing to say.
–Edward Snowden
FRANKENSTEIN, OR, THE MODERN PROMETHEUS by
Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1984) Illustrated by
Barry Moser. Art binding by
Karen Hammer.
Karen Hammer’s work is included in collections ranging from the Tate Britain and the Library of Congress to UCLA and Graceland.
For Paul de Saint-Victor, such metastases of the photographic view led not to an immaterial, omnipresent gaze but to a pure materiality, an immanent image — but a dead one. “The true mission of this useful and humble art form will be to bring sculpture into private life and to perpetuate the photographic image — by petrifying it.” What would it mean to petrify photography? Petrified photography is a kind of photography that has finally escaped the long shadow of the
camera obscura. Petrified photography converts photography into a plastic art. And in escaping the limitations of the
camera obscura’s single aperture, photography smeared itself across a limitless grid of points, neutering the axis of time while emboldening the axes of space.
Galloway, Alexander R.Uncomputable: Play and Politics in the Long Digital Age. London: Verso, 2021.
Excerpt from this story from
Earth Island Journal:
Our cities occupy less than 4 percent of Earth’s land surface, but they are resource-gobbling behemoths with ecological footprints that reach far beyond their boundaries. Herbert Girardet, cofounder of the World Future Council, refers to the modern city as the “petropolis,” a place that requires “massive injections of non-renewable fossil fuels” to keep it running and supplied with goods and services. The “metabolism” of such cities follows the linear input-output model of the Industrial Age, he says. Like a vortex, the city pulls in energy and resources from a depleting biosphere via global supply chains, and spits out refuse and waste that the biosphere cannot reuse. This system, says the German-British cultural ecologist and author of Creating Regenerative Cities, turns “inherently renewable systems like soils, forests, and rivers into non-renewable systems.” Today’s cities use up two-thirds of the world’s energy, account for more than 70 percent of global greenhouse gas emissions, have humongous water and waste footprints, are responsible for large-scale land conversion and degradation, loss of natural habitats, and land, water, and air pollution both locally and beyond — and they are growing.
It is time we reimagine cities, and urgently. According to the United Nations’ Department of Economic and Social Affairs, over the next eight years (the same amount of time we have to limit global warming to 1.5 degrees Celsius), the world is projected to add 10 more megacities — those with 10 million or more inhabitants — bringing the total to 43. Future projections also show that in less than 30 years, three out of four major cities will have a completely different climate from that for which their infrastructure was designed. In other words, while humanity is trending towards an urban future, the current fossil-fueled model of the city itself is trending towards collapse. Urban decline, accelerated by heat waves, droughts, and flooding, will be messy, and likely lead to local and regional conflicts over resources. And, as always, the heaviest costs will be borne by their most vulnerable residents: the old, the poor, the powerless.
FOR CITIES TO THRIVE, we need to rapidly transform the petropolis into an “ecopolis,” Girardet posits, shifting a city’s metabolic cycle to a “resource-efficient and regenerative circular system.” Such cities would incorporate the ecological principle that all things are connected, that there is no “waste” in nature. An ideal city would have a reciprocal relationship with living systems within and beyond its reaches, returning materials in forms that would allow those systems to reabsorb and regenerate as well. It would rely on locally or regionally sourced food and energy and be a natural refuge for plants and animals.
“People often judge the level of a civilization by the amount of paper it uses. That, however, is simply a matter of volume, not quality. Quality is how the heart and soul of a civilization should be measured. How can bad paper and high civilization possibly be bedmates? One can gain a glimpse of the quality of a people’s life by the kind of paper they use for writing letters, for literary works, and for various other tasks. Paper should not be deprecated. To do so is to deprecate beauty itself.”
— Soetsu Yanagi, The Beauty of Everyday Things, translated by Michael Brase
“Nothing is original. Steal from anywhere that resonates with inspiration or fuels your imagination. Devour old films, new films, music, books, paintings, photographs, poems, dreams, random conversations, architecture, bridges, street signs, trees, clouds, bodies of water, light and shadows. Select only things to steal from that speak directly to your soul. If you do this, your work (and theft) will be authentic. Authenticity is invaluable; originality is nonexistent. And don’t bother concealing your thievery – celebrate it if you feel like it.” -
Jim Jarmusch
Soon after taking office, Biden signed an executive order that called for creating a Civilian Climate Corps. The federally funded initiative was aimed at hiring tens of thousands of young people to pursue climate-friendly projects such as restoring wetlands, installing solar panels and removing invasive species.
The program was designed to resemble the Civilian Conservation Corps, the New Deal-era initiative that put millions of young men to work planting trees, constructing trails and making improvements to the nation’s infrastructure.
Congressional Democrats provided up to $30 billion in funding for a Civilian Climate Corps in an early version of their sweeping climate and social spending package, formerly known as the Build Back Better Act. But the program was dropped from the final version of the climate package, dubbed the Inflation Reduction Act, during private negotiations between Senate Majority Leader Charles E. Schumer (D-N.Y.) and Sen. Joe Manchin III (D-W.Va.).
The Civilian Climate Corps proposal was hugely popular. Recent polling from the Yale Program on Climate Change Communication found that 83 percent of Americans support reestablishing the New Deal-era Civilian Conservation Corps.
“The Civilian Climate Corps was one of the most popular parts of the Build Back Better proposal,” Sen. Edward J. Markey (D-Mass.), who introduced legislation to create the corps with Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez (D-N.Y.), said in an interview Wednesday.
“It’s something obviously that Congresswoman Ocasio-Cortez and I fought hard for,” he said. “So we’re going to find other avenues. We don’t have a specific legislative strategy yet. But we’re not going to give up on it.”
Markey also tacitly acknowledged that the program could help mobilize young people to vote for Democrats in November’s midterm elections.
Some Democrats are eyeing the annual appropriations bills as another avenue for creating the Civilian Climate Corps — albeit at a much lower funding level than $30 billion.
Some environmentalists are also taking solace in the fact that the Inflation Reduction Act includes two provisions that would accomplish similar goals as a Civilian Climate Corps.
The law provides $500 million for the Park Service and the Bureau of Land Management to pursue conservation and ecosystem restoration on public lands.
An additional $500 million is earmarked for the Park Service to hire new employees.
“There’s a lot in the IRA that looks like a Civilian Climate Corps in everything but name,” said Lena Moffitt, chief of staff at the climate advocacy group Evergreen Action.
COVID-19 vaccines have been effective at keeping people from getting severely ill and dying from the virus, but they’ve required different boosters to try to keep on top of all of the coronavirus variants that have popped up. Now, researchers have discovered an antibody that neutralizes all known COVID-19 variants.
The antibody, called SP1-77, is the result of a collaborative effort from researchers at Boston Children’s Hospital and Duke University. Results from mouse studies they’ve conducted were recently published in the journal Science Immunology, and they look promising.
But what does it mean, exactly, to have an antibody that can neutralize all variants of COVID-19, and what kind of impact will this have on vaccines in the future? Here’s what you need to know.
What is SP1-77?
SP1-77 is an antibody developed by researchers that so far can neutralize all forms of SARS-CoV-2, the virus that causes COVID-19. It was created after researchers modified a mouse model that was originally made to search for broadly neutralizing antibodies to HIV, which also mutates.
The mice used in the study have built-in human immune systems that mimic the way our immune systems develop better antibodies when we’re exposed to a pathogen. The researchers inserted two human gene segments into the mice, which then created a range of antibodies that humans might make. The mice were then exposed to SARS-CoV-2’s spike protein (which is what the virus uses to latch onto your cells) and produced nine different families of antibodies that bound to the spike protein to try to neutralize it.
Those antibodies were then tested and one—SP1-77—was able to neutralize Alpha, Beta, Gamma, Delta, and all Omicron strains (including the current circulating ones) of COVID-19.
The antibody works in a slightly different way than many of the antibodies people make to vaccines. To infect you, SARS-CoV-2 has to first attach to ACE2 receptors in your cells. The current COVID-19 vaccines block this binding from happening by attaching to the spike protein’s receptor-binding domain (RBD) at certain spots, a press release from Boston Children’s Hospital explains.
The SP1-77 antibody also binds to the RBD, but doesn’t prevent the virus from binding to ACE2 receptors. What it does do is block the virus from fusing its outer membrane with the membrane of your cells, which is what needs to happen to make you sick.
“SP1-77 binds the spike protein at a site that so far has not been mutated in any variant, and it neutralizes these variants by a novel mechanism,” study co-author Tomas Kirchhausen, Ph.D., said in a statement. “These properties may contribute to its broad and potent activity.”
“The names of hundreds of U.S. law enforcement officers, elected officials and military members appear on the leaked membership rolls of a far-right extremist group that’s accused of playing a key role in the Jan. 6, 2021, insurrection at the U.S. Capitol, according to a report released Wednesday. The Anti-Defamation League Center on Extremism pored over more than 38,000 names on leaked Oath Keepers membership lists and identified more than 370 people it believes currently work in law enforcement agencies — including as police chiefs and sheriffs — and more than 100 people who are currently members of the military. It also identified more than 80 people who were running for or served in public office as of early August. The membership information was compiled into a database published by the transparency collective Distributed Denial of Secrets.”
Stickybot by MarkCutkosky (2006), Center for Design Research, Stanford University, CA. Stickybot explores mobility on vertical surfaces using dry adhesion. The adhesion comes from van der Waals forces which don’t leave a sticky trail. Each of its sixteen toes has a synthetic adhesive patch with microscopic Directional Polymer Stalks that give it climbing abilities similar to those of a real gecko. These provide a strong shear force for climbing, but can be easily peeled off with a toe-curling action.
I recommend this article, for it story-telling and stunning photos (and infographics). We’re learning more about the Inuit culture and life in the Arctic as the Arctic warms, jeopardizing the Inuit culture as well as the welfare (and lives) of animals (mammals, fish, birds, insects) that are facing extirpation or extinction. This article lays it all out for you, in detail, and with interesting side stories.
This article is way too long for a fair excerpting. Hakai doesn’t have a paywall, so enter and read.
Then there’s this little essay from one of the two Hakai staff members who went up north to document this story. It’s worth a read:
I hadn’t expected to see whales die. Cheryl Katz and I had traveled to Arviat, Nunavut, to report on a story about a community-led seafloor mapping project. But reporting trips almost always necessitate rolling with what comes, and on our first day in the northern territory, we were swept along on a community beluga hunt. I lifted my camera, gunshots ringing out around me, and tried to both brace myself against the rocking boat and to ground myself in neutrality. As someone prone to feeling others’ pain too acutely, the plumes of blood blossoming in the shallow water and tails beating with last, desperate muscle twitches made my throat tighten. It was my first time seeing belugas in the wild, and it was hard to witness life draining from them. But I am also rooting for the people who rely on a challenging landscape for much of their food, and who have remained resilient in the face of invasive colonial influences. Whose well-being should take precedence? As a visitor, it is not my place to say. But as a photographer, I believe it is imperative that I share images responsibly. Photographs can be conduits for criticism, and there’s a troubling history of outsiders judging the actions of Inuit or other Indigenous hunters from afar. I don’t want my camera to invite disdain. In the end, our team chose to include a few images of the hunt, trusting that our readers are attuned to the complexities of and rights ingrained in sustenance hunting.
The handful of whales that died that night yielded bins full of jiggly meat that the hunters brought home to divvy up among family and friends. When we arrived back on shore, dozens of people were eagerly waiting with plastic bags or buckets to receive their portion. Far behind us, where the whales had been butchered, the remaining flesh would soon be consumed by hungry polar bears, birds, and other organisms—a few animals lost fueling so many others.
Through this summer (2022), severe drought is being experienced across much of Europe, North and Central America, China, and many other regions.
Some of this of course is making
existing problems worse. The Colorado River was in crisis long before this summer (for many years). The Mekong River which emerges in Tibet, and flows through China, Myanmar, Thailand, Laos, Cambodia and Viet Nam, has been in trouble for years due to a major series of dams in China.
Regional droughts are nothing new however the scale of the current crisis is historic and mostly due to climate change.
In this sonification of Perseus. the sound waves astronomers previously identified were extracted and made audible for the first time. The sound waves were extracted outward from the center.
(source)
No, thank you. I did not need to hear the souls of a universe calling to me from the afterlife.
Someone needs to make a space thriller/horror/whatever with this mixed into the music
why does it sound exactly like what it feels like a black hole should sound like
Design is inextricably interwoven with all aspects of life and has even produced its own astonishing genre of research. #Design research opens up new perspectives of interdisciplinary empiricism, joining with economics, sociology, #technology, and #philosophy to produce analyses and syntheses that get to the heart of daily life.
The twelve contributions from international authors that comprise this book vividly make this case. They cover the relationship between subject and object, animation, all forms of representation, #designactivism, and many other themes. This book is intended to inspire discussion. Its target reader is anyone seeking to expand their understanding of design, to fundamentally improve their praxis, and to more deeply appreciate life in all of its aspects.
Edited by Michelle Christensen, Wolfgang Jonas, Ralf Michel
Published by Birkhäuser, 2022
Hardcover, 160 pages, 119 b&w images, 6.45 × 9 inches
As theorist and historian Nicholas Lambert rightly points out, computer art was “heavily constrained by the available graphics technology”; the simple lines and abstract shapes were not “a self-imposed artistic limitation,” but represented a “boundary to image structure.”
Grant D. Taylor.
When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
the description on the group’s bio:
“Performing from Hyehwa, Korea, their powerful performance presents the spiritual blessings and positive energy of traditional music in a thoroughly modern and often comical style. ADG7 was organized in 2015, the year Korea commemorated its 70th anniversary of national liberation, and first performed in-person at globalFEST in January 2020. –The globalFEST staff”
I’ve come to conclusion that Meta’s metaversal aspirations are just a cold and cynical bet on a future where we just can’t go outside anymore. Meta’s big plan is to spend the next few years cobbling together something with enough baseline functionality that we can all migrate to it during the next pandemic. That’s the only explanation for the absolutely deranged amount of misplaced optimism Meta has about this stuff. This is a company who has decided they can make a lot of money off a catastrophic future by forcing us into their genital-free off-brand-Pixar panopticon and mining us for data while we Farmville ourselves to death.
“What causes events to happen in the world, what writes its history, is the irresistible mixing of all things, going from the few ordered configurations to the countless disordered ones. The entire universe is like a mountain that collapses in slow motion. Like a structure that very gradually crumbles.”
Amid historic drought in the Colorado River Basin, the Gila River Indian Community is taking a drastic step to protect their own water resources. In a statement last week, Governor Stephen Roe Lewis announced the tribe—located just south of Phoenix—would stop voluntarily contributing water to an important state reservoir. “We cannot continue to put the interests of all others above our own when no other parties seem committed to the common goal of a cooperative basin-wide agreement,” the statement reads.
Since 2021, Lake Mead, a crucial water supply for the region, has been boosted by voluntary water contributions from the Gila River Indian Community and the Colorado River Indian Tribes. The Colorado River is a crucial source of water in the West, supplying water to 40 million people across seven states and Mexico. For years, tribes and communities in those states have received river water based on a complex allocation system, but last week, the federal government announced historic water cuts that will force Arizona, the most impacted state, to reduce water withdrawals from the Lake Mead reservoir by 21 percent next year. Lake Mead’s levels are currently at a historic low of about 27 percent capacity.
By contributing their water to Lake Mead at affordable rates, the Gila River Indian Community was essentially subsidizing Arizona’s water supply while sacrificing an opportunity to sell that water at higher rates or put it to use on the reservation for agriculture or other industry. Now, facing cuts and other communities not willing to make sacrifices for the collective good, Gila River is putting its foot down. According to the statement, the lack of progress toward a sustainable water management plan left the tribe with no choice but to store the water independently rather than supporting the state water supply. “We are aware that this approach will have a very significant impact on the ability of the State of Arizona to make any meaningful commitment to water reductions in the basin state discussions,” Lewis said in the statement.
Meanwhile, the Colorado River Indian Tribes, which has also been contributing some of its water to help keep Lake Mead’s levels up, has opted to continue storing water in the reservoir. In a press release, chairwoman Amelia Flores reiterated her tribe’s commitment to an ongoing fallow and farming plan for their water allotments in response to the cuts. In other words, Colorado River Indian Tribes is sticking to a plan that forfeits the opportunity to maximize their agricultural and water revenues. “We recognize that the decades-long drought has reduced the water availability for all of us in the Basin,” Flores said. “We continue to conserve water and develop ways to use less water as we adjust to higher temperatures, more wind and less precipitation.”
These two decisions illustrate the difficult choices facing the thirty federally recognized tribes in the Colorado River Basin. Because tribes are sovereign governments, their water rights are determined with the federal government, rather than via the state, like cities and towns. Water rights allow tribes to maintain agricultural self-sufficiency, restore and steward the land, and support their communities. But to actually use their water, tribes face a unique set of challenges including inadequate infrastructure that limits some from accessing their water allocations. And for tribes still fighting to have their rights recognized, the ongoing shortage may make their battle even harder. As the region prepares for the cuts, tribes are working to ensure they have a voice during ongoing water management negotiations.
In just over a week, thousands of people from around the world will come together for the first Burning Man since 2019. Early arrivals have already begun constructing Black Rock City, the temporary home for the event’s 75,000+ attendees. One of Burning Man’s key principles is ‘Leave No Trace’ – meaning significant efforts are taken to ensure the city is fully disassembled after the event and the desert is returned to its previous state.
Melbourne, Australia has maintained significant population and land area growth since the 1990s. Its metropolitan area has sprawled outward around Port Phillip, spanning nearly 3,900 square miles (10,000 sq km), and its population has grown from 2.9 million in 1986 to nearly 5 million today. Melbourne is the second-most populous city in Australia and all of Oceania.
Three years ago to the date, the Business Roundtable unveiled its “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation” — a commitment by its 200 member-CEOs and companies to protect the environment. Then they spent three years and millions of dollars lobbying against that goal.
Writing in
The Guardian, Adam Lowenstein rounds up the Business Roundtable’s deep-pocketed, highly effective lobbying campaign, which has crushed numerous climate initiatives in the US, possibly dooming the human race to extinction.
The Roundtable bills itself as “an association of CEOs of leading US companies working to promote a thriving economy & expanded opportunity for all Americans through sound public policy.” Its members include the CEOs of the country’s most politically connected corporations, including Apple, Pepsi, Walmart and Google — the most powerful people in the nation.
But while the Roundtable continues to trumped its commitment to addressing the climate emergency, it has mobilized millions of dollars to neutralize our best hopes of dealing with that emergency. The Roundtable’s initiatives include spending millions lobbying against Build Back Better and its carbon reduction/clean energy provisions.
The Roundtable has gone to war against a SEC rule requiring publicly listed companies to disclose their carbon emissions and risks from climate change. Instead, the Roundtable prefers “voluntary” disclosures that allow companies to omit emissions and risks in their supply chains. The Roundtable has met with the SEC three times to oppose this rule, and Roundtable chairman Mary Barra (CEO of GM) personally met with SEC chair Gary Gensler.
In the first half of 2022, the Roundtable’s lobbying budget was $9.1m, much of which went to opposing a climate disclosure rule. The Roundtable says that measuring supply chain emissions is too burdensome — the fact that the majority of emissions are in the supply chain is just a coincidence.
Meanwhile, the Roundtable continues to insist that “we have to move now,” and that the best way to address the climate emergency is through “market-based” solutions where investors choose “green” investments based on reliable information about companies’ contribution to imminent human extinction.
The Roundtable insists that “voluntary disclosures” will provide sufficiently accurate information to allow investors to direct their money away from companies that will murder them and their children by rendering the planet unfit for human habitation. Every other stakeholder — “many investors, analysts, academics, voters and experts, even companies themselves” — disagrees vehemently.
The calls for mandatory disclosure aren’t emanating from campus Maoists and Greta Thunberg’s child army — they’re coming from giant, institutional investors, like this group of fund managers who direct $5t in capital:
The Roundtable’s most powerful members, like Apple CEO Tim Cook and Blackrock CEO Larry Fink, have also called for mandatory disclosure. I’m sure they’re frustrated that organization won’t listen to them — it’s just that they’re not frustrated enough to pull their funding from the Roundtable. After all, mostly the Roundtable lobbies to be sure they don’t pay taxes and can abuse their workers with impunity — weighed against those advantages, the Roundtable’s commitment to wiping out the human species is but a trifle.
It’s not just that the Roundtable’s members won’t hold the organization to its environmental commitments — the Roundtable also won’t hold the members to account on those commitments. Companies that signed the 2019 declaration were convicted of
more environmental infractions and emitted
more carbon that similar firms that didn’t sign:
And since 2019, the signatories to the environmental pledge were offered many chances to “formalize the pledge in corporate governance,” and virtually every time this happened, those signatories chose
not to make good on their promises:
The Roundtable’s opposition to climate action continues to this day. The org came out hard against the Inflation Reduction Act, which has billions in clean energy incentives — they objected to the 15% minimum corporate tax that will offset those billions in the federal budget:
To be fair to them, we don’t need to tax corporations — or anyone else — to pay for climate action. The US government is constrained by resources (which things are for sale in US dollars), not money (which it can create by typing into a spreadsheet).
The point of taxing companies is to constrain what their shareholders can buy — because those purchases might consume resources needed for the climate emergency; and, importantly, to prevent them from spending profits to corrupt the government:
Meanwhile, the CEOs who keep the Roundtable afloat keep declaring that time is short, action must be taken, and no price is too high for action.
And again, to be fair, there is no course of action so radical that these corporations and CEOs won’t promise to take it — provided they never, ever have to lift a finger to follow through on that promise.
[Image ID: The Earth seen from space, wreathed in flames. Atop the Earth dances a jaunty ‘Rich Uncle Pennybags’ from Monopoly; he has removed his face, revealing it to be a mask, and his head is a grinning skull.]
New coal mines have emerged throughout Ordos City, Inner Mongolia, China in recent years, and rapid urban development has occurred simultaneously. As China’s primary coal-producing region, Ordos is expected to produce nearly 1.2 billion tons of coal this year — more than any other country in the world. This mining boom has caused its population to grow from 1.3 million in 2000 to nearly 2.2 million today.
The Great Green Wall is an anti-desertification initiative underway in Africa’s Sahel region, on the southern edge of the Sahara Desert. Launched in 2007, it intends to restore 250 million acres (100 million hectares) of degraded land by 2030 by planting a 5,000-mile (8,000-kilometer) tree line. If effective, the Great Green Wall will stop the advancement of the desert, absorb 250 million tons of CO2 from the atmosphere, and create 350,000 rural jobs.
My next book is
Chokepoint Capitalism, co-written with the brilliant copyright expert Rebecca Giblin: it’s an action-oriented investigation into how tech and entertainment monopolies have destroyed creators’ livelihoods, with detailed, shovel-ready plans to unrig creative labor markets and get artists paid.
Ironically, the very phenomenon this book describes — “chokepoint capitalism” — is endemic to book publishing, and in audiobook publishing, it’s in its terminal phase. There’s no way to market an audiobook to a mass audience without getting trapped in a chokepoint, which is why we’re kickstarting a direct-to-listener edition:
What is “chokepoint capitalism?” It’s when a multinational monopolist (or cartel) locks up audiences inside a system that they control, and uses that control to gouge artists, creating toll booths between creators and their audiences.
For example, take Audible: the Amazon division controls the vast majority of audiobook sales in the world — in some genres, they have a 90%+ market-share. Audible requires every seller — big publishers and self-publishers alike — to use their proprietary DRM as a condition of selling on the platform.
That’s a huge deal. DRM is useless at preventing copyright infringement (all of Audible’s titles can be downloaded for free from various shady corners of the internet), but it is
wildly effective at locking in audiences and seizing power over creators. Under laws like the USA’s Digital Millennium Copyright Act, giving someone a tool to remove DRM is a felony, punishable by 5 years in prison and a $500k fine.
This means that when you sell your audiobooks on Audible, you lock them to Audible’s platform…forever. If another company offers you a better deal for your creative work and you switch, your audience can’t follow you to the new company without giving up all the audiobooks they’ve bought to date. That’s a lot to ask of listeners!
Amazon knows this: as their power over creators and publishers has grown, the company has turned the screw on them, starting with the most powerless group, the independent creators who rely on Amazon’s self-serve ACX system to publish their work.
In late 2020, a group of ACX authors discovered that Amazon had been systematically stealing their wages, to the tune of an estimated $100,000,000. The resulting Audiblegate scandal has only gotten worse since, and while the affected authors are fighting back, they’re hamstrung by Amazon’s other unfair practices, like forcing creators to accept binding arbitration waivers on their way through the chokepoint:
I have always had a no-DRM policy for my ebooks and audiobooks. Amazon’s Kindle store — another wildly dominant part of the books ecosystem — has always allowed authors to choose whether or not to apply DRM, but in Audible — where Amazon had a commanding lead from the start, thanks to their anti-competitive acquisition of the formerly independent Audible company — it is mandatory.
Because Audible won’t carry my DRM-free audiobooks, audiobook publishers won’t pay for them. I don’t blame them — being locked out of the market where 90%+ of audiobooks are sold is a pretty severe limitation. For a decade now, I’ve produced my own audiobooks, using amazing narrators like @wilwheaton, Amber Benson and @neil-gaiman.
These had sold modestly-but-well, recouping my cash outlays to fairly compensate the readers, directors and engineers involved, but they were still niche products, sold at independent outlets like Libro.fm, Downpour, and my own online storefront:
But that all changed in 2020, with the publication of
Attack Surface, an adult standalone novel set in the world of my bestselling YA series
Little Brother. That time, I decided to use Kickstarter to pre-sell the audio- and ebooks and see if my readers would help me show other creators that we could stand up to Audible’s bullying.
Holy shit, did it ever work. The Kickstarter for the
Attack Surface audiobook turned into
the most successful audiobook crowdfunding campaign in world history, grossing over $267,000:
Which brings me to today, and our new Kickstarter for
Chokepoint Capitalism. We produced an independent audiobook, tapping the incomparable Stefan Rudnicki (winner of uncountable awards, narrator of 1000+ books, including Ender’s Game) to read it.
We’re preselling the audiobook ($20), ebook ($15), hardcover ($27), and bundles mixing and matching all three (there’s also bulk discounts). There’s also the option to buy copies that we’ll donate to libraries on your behalf. We’ve got pins and stickers — and, for five lucky high-rollers, we’ve got a very special artwork called: “The Annotated Robert Bork.”
Robert Bork was the far-right extremist who convinced Ronald Reagan to dismantle antitrust protection in America, and then exported the idea to the rest of the world (Reagan tried to reward him with a Supreme Court seat, but Bork’s had been Nixon’s Solicitor General and his complicity in Nixon’s crimes cost him the confirmation).
Bork’s dangerous antitrust nonsense destroyed the world as we knew it, giving us the monopolies that have wrecked the climate, labor protections and political integrity. These monopolies have captured every sector of the economy — from beer and pro-wrestling to health insurance and finance:
“The Annotated Robert Bork” is a series of five shadow-boxes containing two-page spreads excised from Bork’s 1978 pro-monopoly manifesto
The Antitrust Paradox
, which we have mounted on stiff card and hand-annotated with our red pens. The resulting package is a marvel of museum glass and snark.
[Image ID: A prototype of ‘The Annotated Robert Bork]
Bork’s legacy is monopolistic markets in every sector of the world’s economy, including the creative industries.
Chokepoint Capitalism systematically explores how tech and entertainment giants have rigged music streaming, newspapers, book publishing, the film industry, TV, video streaming, and others, steadily eroding creators’ wages even as their work generated more money for the monopolists’ shareholders.
But just as importantly, our book proposes things we can do
right now to unrig creative labor markets. Drawing on both existing, successful projects and promising new experiments, we set out shovel-ready ideas for creators, artists’ groups, fans, technologists, startups, and local, regional and national governments.
Artists aren’t in this struggle alone. As we write in the book, chokepoint capitalism is the final stage of high-tech capitalism, which atomizes workers and locks in customers and then fleeces workers as a condition of reaching their audiences. It’s a form of exploitation that is practiced wherever industries concentrate, which is why creators can’t succeed by rooting for Big Tech against Big Content or vice-versa.
It’s also why creative workers should be in solidarity with
all workers — squint a little at Audible’s chokepoint shakedown and you’ll recognize the silhouette of the gig economy, from Uber to Doordash to the poultry and meat-packing industries.
40 years of official pro-monopoly policy has brought the world to the brink of collapse, as monopoly profits and concentrated power allowed an ever-decreasing minority of the ultra-rich to extract ever-increasing fortunes from ever-more-precarious workers. It’s a flywheel: more monopoly creates more profits creates more power creates more monopoly.
The solutions we propose in
Chokepoint Capitalism are specific to creative labor, but they’re also examples of the kinds of tactics that we can use in every industry, to brake the monopolists’ flywheel and start a new world.
I hope you’ll consider backing the Kickstarter if you can afford to — and if you can’t, I hope you’ll check out one of the copies our backers have donated to libraries around the world:
Every year, farmers in France’s central region of Auvergne repeat the same process. During summer and fall, their cows graze in pastures, eating to their hearts’ content. It’s only during this time that farmers can produce salers, a highly regulated semihard cheese with the same buttery depth as a well-aged cheddar.
That seasonal cycle remained uninterrupted for over 2,000 years until last week, when salers became the latest casualty of severe heat waves wreaking havoc across Europe, where human-caused climate change has intensified temperatures. France’s severe drought shut down the cheese production that had continued through two world wars, collapsed monarchies and the fall of the Roman Empire.
The decision to halt the cheesemaking was based on two factors: the meadows’ utterly parched state and the rules that regulate salers’ production.
In France, the dry spell has been so severe that the country has 62 regions with restrictions on water usage — including Cantal, where salers is produced. But it’s not only a drought; wildfires have also raged, displacing thousands of people. This year’s infernos have already scorched more acres there than any year before.
tagtype Garage Kit designed by Leading Edge Design Corp. is Gamepad-like keyboard for Japanese characters that was initially developed for a disabled novelist, Ransei Eto, and is today offered as a DIY kit.
In Islamic culture, geometry is everywhere. You can find it in mosques, madrasas, palaces and private homes. This tradition began in the 8th century CE during the early history of Islam, when craftsmen took preexisting motifs from Roman and Persian cultures and developed them into new forms of visual expression.
This period of history was a golden age of Islamic culture, during which many achievements of previous civilizations were preserved and further developed, resulting in fundamental advancements in scientific study and mathematics. Accompanying this was an increasingly sophisticated use of abstraction and complex geometry in Islamic art, from intricate floral motifs adorning carpets and textiles, to patterns of tile work that seemed to repeat infinitely, inspiring wonder and contemplation of eternal order.
Despite the remarkable complexity of these designs, they can be created with just a compass to draw circles and a ruler to make lines within them, and from these simple tools emerges a kaleidoscopic multiplicity of patterns. So how does that work? Well, everything starts with a circle. The first major decision is how will you divide it up? Most patterns split the circle into four, five or six equal sections. And each division gives rise to distinctive patterns.
There’s an easy way to determine whether any pattern is based on fourfold, fivefold, or sixfold symmetry. Most contain stars surrounded by petal shapes. Counting the number of rays on a starburst, or the number of petals around it, tells us what category the pattern falls into. A star with six rays, or surrounded by six petals, belongs in the sixfold category. One with eight petals is part of the fourfold category, and so on.
There’s another secret ingredient in these designs: an underlying grid. Invisible, but essential to every pattern, the grid helps determine the scale of the composition before work begins, keeps the pattern accurate, and facilitates the invention of incredible new patterns. Let’s look at an example of how these elements come together.
We’ll start with a circle within a square, and divide it into eight equal parts. We can then draw a pair of criss-crossing lines and overlay them with another two. These lines are called construction lines, and by choosing a set of their segments, we’ll form the basis of our repeating pattern.
Many different designs are possible from the same construction lines just by picking different segments. And the full pattern finally emerges when we create a grid with many repetitions of this one tile in a process called tessellation.
By choosing a different set of construction lines, we might have created this any of the above patterns. The possibilities are virtually endless.
We can follow the same steps to create sixfold patterns by drawing construction lines over a circle divided into six parts, and then tessellating it, we can make something like the above.
Here’s another sixfold pattern that has appeared across the centuries and all over the Islamic world, including Marrakesh, Agra, Konya and the Alhambra.
Fourfold patterns fit in a square grid, and sixfold patterns in a hexagonal grid.
Fivefold patterns, however, are more challenging to tessellate because pentagons don’t neatly fill a surface, so instead of just creating a pattern in a pentagon, other shapes have to be added to make something that is repeatable, resulting in patterns that may seem confoundingly complex, but are still relatively simple to create.
This more than 1,000-year-old tradition has wielded basic geometry to produce works that are intricate, decorative and pleasing to the eye. And these craftsmen prove just how much is possible with some artistic intuition, creativity, dedication along with a great compass and ruler.
In one of the essays in
Art in the After-Culture, Ben Davis cited this lecture by art historian Jennifer L. Roberts about her efforts at “teaching students the value of deceleration and immersive attention.” I can’t remember if it is cited in Jenny Odell’s
How to Do Nothing,but it’s of a piece with it.
During the past few years, I have begun to feel that I need to take a more active role in shaping the temporal experiences of the students in my courses; that in the process of designing a syllabus I need not only to select readings, choose topics, and organize the sequence of material, but also to engineer, in a conscientious and explicit way, the pace and tempo of the learning experiences. When will students work quickly? When slowly? When will they be expected to offer spontaneous responses, and when will they be expected to spend time in deeper contemplation?
I want to focus today on the slow end of this tempo spectrum, on creating opportunities for students to engage in deceleration, patience, and immersive attention. I would argue that these are the kind of practices that now most need to be actively engineered by faculty, because they simply are no longer available “in nature,” as it were. Every external pressure, social and technological, is pushing students in the other direction, toward immediacy, rapidity, and spontaneity—and against this other kind of opportunity. I want to give them the permission and the structures to slow down.
Thus Roberts requires students to spend three hours looking at some specific object before writing about it. This seems like a nice enough idea, but it also seems somewhat one-sided, abstracting the idea of mental “speed” away from specific contexts and putting forward a fetishized idea of “slowness” as intrinsically deep and rewarding. There is an economical, quantitative understanding of attention that characterizes this approach just as much as it characterizes “speed reading” or “doomscrolling” or the various techniques that try to make cultural consumption more efficient.
Your brain will generate ideas just as easily by staring at a blank wall for three hours as at a particular painting. What gets lost is the work involved in calibrating attention to specific objects, and explaining to oneself how one arrives at those decisions to keep looking or to look away.
The Suez Canal was expanded between 2014 and 2015, when a second channel was dredged near the city of Ismailia, Egypt. This channel, dubbed the “New Suez Canal,” spans 22 miles (35 kilometers) between the Great Bitter Lakes and El Ballah bypasses, allowing ships to transit the canal in both directions simultaneously. It nearly doubled the capacity of the Suez Canal, from 49 to 97 ships per day.
I wanted to store these quotes from Susan Stewart’s
Crimes of Writing (1994) somewhere, though I am not sure what their implications might be yet. They seem to harmonize with (1) the interest in the financialization of subjectivity, (2) the adoption of a ”speculative” approach to identity and community, and (3) how algorithmic recommendation conjures identity and audiences based in probabilities and speculation.
In this passage, Stewart is writing about George Psalmanazar, an early 18th century impostor who pretended to be from Formosa (a.k.a.Taiwan) but was really from France. He wrote a book about Formosan customs and language that was entirely made up.
This kind of imposture was made possible — or was even made inevitable — by the “speculative” relation between books and the audience. I take “speculation” here to refer to both the publishers (who were in the process of discovering what sorts of publishing and what sorts of print objects would be profitable) and audiences (who were in the process of discovering what kinds of stories were possible, plausible, engaging, distracting, etc. and what sorts of new pleasures were enjoined by print).
“During this period, the ‘responsibilities’ of authorship were undergoing a great upheaval: conventions of originality, genius, authenticity, documentation, and even genre itself remained subjects of speculation and interest rather than of either natural ‘rights’ or formulated law.” Stewart writes. In other words, profit opportunity was going to partly dictate what would eventually be ideologically naturalized or legally enshrined with respect to what authors and publishers could do and what they could write about and how.
If those speculations were made possible by the transition to print culture, similar forms of speculation are being engendered by the move to “post-print culture” or internet culture or network culture, or however you want to describe our current condition. The new forms of speculation, however, are paradoxically driven by a surfeit of data, by new forms of measurement and outcome assessment that prompt new moments for gambling and for determining winners and losers and so on. Authors speculate on audiences not in terms of who they are or what they want, but in terms of how well they will allow themselves to be defined, to be packaged as a particular audience commodity or engage in forms of productive “interactivity” that can be exploited.
And of course the “conventions of authenticity” are continually being renegotiated by the new forms of mediation available — new “social” apps drive new standards of authentic practice, also inflected by opportunity for profit for users and platforms and various third parties.
I guess what strikes me about this is how much speculative opportunity drives the development of new forms of mediation and representation: These necessarily appear as “destabilizing reality” — enacting a “creative destruction” or liquifaction of “all that is solid.” The speculative opportunities aren’t grafted on later; they are intrinsic to the development of new media forms.
According to our 2018 study in which we mapped the patch, the total amount of accumulated plastic is 79,000,000 kg, or 100,000,000 kg if we include the Outer GPGP. Thus, if we repeat this 100,000 kg haul 1,000 times – the Great Pacific Garbage Patch will be gone.
…So there’s quite a ways to go.
However:
Now our technology is validated, we are ready to move on to our new and expanded System 03, which is expected to capture plastic at a rate potentially 10 times higher than System 002 through a combination of increased size, improved efficiency, and increased uptime.
Southern California Logistics Airport in Victorville, California is usually used as a graveyard for retired airplanes, but between 2016-2020 served as a parking lot for thousands of diesel-powered Volkswagens. Following an emissions scandal in 2015, Volkswagen leased enough land here to park 21,000 vehicles after giving customers the option to sell back their cars. More than 350,000 customers elected to do so, causing the vehicles to sit in locations like this until they were repaired or approved for export.
Edge effects are the changes in biodiversity that occur inside the space surrounding the shared edge of two or more distinct ecosystems. This transitional zone rich in biodiversity is known as the ecotone; examples are between woodlands and plains, forests and mountains, and land and water. Informally known as the edge, the ecotone affects the plants and animals living there in a way that is unique from the connecting habitats.
In larger habitats, there is a smaller percentage of area affected by the edge. This allows flora and fauna to thrive in both ecosystems and along the edge. But in smaller habitats, it is more likely for conditions from the edge to threaten the stability of individual biomes—making it difficult, if not impossible, for many plants and animals to survive. Here, we review some examples of positive and negative edge effects.
When two adjacent habitats have enough individual space to allow for an ample gradient edge, the ecotone is uniquely positioned to provide habitable conditions for certain plants and animals. Thriving edges house the greatest variety of natural structures, ranging from small to tall, and they often boast wildlife populations exceeding any bordering habitats.
Changes to the landscape, including geographic features, soil types, temperatures, and humidity levels, are called inherent edges.
When people infringe upon the natural world, ecological edges sharpen, and the biodiversity of the ecotone diminishes. Narrow, human-induced edges can increase the risk for infectious diseases, degrade soil quality, and decrease humidity levels.
Arabic manuscript on paper consisting of 325 leaves plus 2 flyleaves. Written in black ink, ruled in black, gold and blue. Completed 3 Safar 951 AH (April 1544 AD) and dedicated to Shams al-Din Yusef Qabji.
Currently, the policy of the United States on the Taiwan question is that the US recognizes that polities on both sides of the Taiwan Strait hold that there is only one China and that Taiwan is part of China. In the current tense international climate, it may be useful to considers alternatives to that policy.
Two Chinas Policy: The United States recognizes the independence of Taiwan as a sovereign state, separate from the People’s Republic of China.
Three Chinas Policy: The US recognizes Taiwan, Hong Kong, and the mainland as independent states.
Four Chinas Policy: The US recognizes Taiwan, Hong Kong, Macau, and the mainland as independent states.
One China Policy (Retro 1978): The US switches its diplomatic recognition back from the PRC to the ROC.
One China Policy (Retro 1911): The US recognizes the Qing Dynasty as the legitimate government of China and finds some schmuck to play Emperor-in-Exile.
Many Chinas Policy: The US recognizes the sovereign independence of every Chinese province.
Too Many Chinas Policy: Hong Kong makes a perfectly fine city-state, so why not let everyone do that? The US recognizes every Chinese municipality as its own independent state.
1436506450 Chinas Policy: The US recognizes the sovereign independence of every Chinese person.
2^1436506450 Chinas Policy: The US recognizes the sovereign independence of every subset of of the set of all Chinese persons.
2^1436506450-1 Chinas Policy: Same as above, but not including the empty set,
because that doesn’t even make sense because it’s already claimed by Germany.
Infinite Chinas Policy (Countable): The US recognizes that (1) The PRC is a China and (2) for every China
c, the successor S(
c) is also a China, and (3) for every China
c, c != S(
c).
Infinite Chinas Policy (Uncountable): The US recognizes that the set
C of all Chinas is an ordered field, and that every non-empty subset of
C with an upper bound in
C has a least upper bound in
C.
No Chinas Policy: The United States embraces mereological nihilism and recognizes only atoms and the void.
