Of all the art movements of the 1960s, conceptual art is the one most aligned with computer art. In
Art of the Electronic Age, Popper places one of the origins of computer art in the rise of conceptual art; he cites Christina Tamblyn’s article “Computer Art as conceptual art,” which argued that because “computers were designed to augment mental process, as opposed to being visual or manual aids,” they were more suited to mental conceptualization. One could conclude that computer art became a category in its own right before conceptual art. Conceptual art was only formalized by critics and practitioners in the late 1960s. Henry Flynt’s conception of “concept art” varied in many ways from LeWitt’s later definition of “conceptual art,” which solidified in meaning through the 1967 essay “Paragraphs on conceptual art.” By the late 1960s, computer art had already been exhibited, and its discourse, interdisciplinary as it was, was well established. Nevertheless, the idea and term “concept art,” like “computer art,” was first employed in written form in 1963, and both were broadly transcultural and system-oriented. As early as 1962, Umberto Eco had coined the term “programmed art” to describe the new formalized trends in European art. “Programmed art” was often used as a blanket term for optical art and gestalt art and located its genealogy in modernist art practices.
Grant D. Taylor.
When the Machine Made Art: The Troubled History of Computer Art. New York, NY: Bloomsbury Academic, 2014.
The phrase, “everyone except workers” reminds me of that one poll that said AOC was unpopular with “everyone except women, poc, young people, and LGBTQ people.” Like such a circuitous to say they think older cishet white men are the default everyone, with all else being an abberation.
Like “everyone except workers” is just bosses, executives, and investors. Aka people that profit off of work without actually doing it, which is a far smaller group than workers are.
“The people that don’t actually do the work don’t like this thing that makes the lives of the people that actually do the work better,” is probably a less appealing headline to the readers of Fortune Magazine.
Ford has patented an augmented reality phone app to inform you that an autonomous murderbot has no intention of stopping at the crosswalk (US11396271B2)
The lives of most sharks remain cloaked in mystery, and the Greenland shark is no exception—but what we’ve learned recently is extraordinary.
Over the past few decades, scientists have discovered that these ancient Arctic animals can live upwards of 400 years and are often blind due to a parasite that attaches itself to their corneas. While they mainly feed on fish and squid, they have been known to scavenge the carcasses of mammals such as horses, reindeer, and even polar bears.
The latest surprise came when scientists spotted a Greenland shark in the western Caribbean, thousands of miles from its known range, in spring 2022. Although scientists have learned to expect the unexpected when it comes to these sharks, the sighting still came as a shock.
“It was both surprising and exciting,” says Devanshi Kasana, a doctoral candidate at Florida International University who, along with a crew of Belizean fishermen, caught the shark by accident during a tiger-shark tagging expedition. Their finding was announced in July in the journal Marine Biology.
Traversing through these origins, we can also arrive at an understanding of glitch as a mode of nonperformance: the “failure to perform,” an outright refusal, a “nope” in its own right, expertly executed by machine. This performance failure reveals technology pushing back against the weighty onus of function. Through these movements, technology does, indeed, get slippery: we see evidence of this in unresponsive pages that present us with the fatalistic binary of choosing to “kill” or “wait,” the rainbow wheel of death, the “Sad Mac” iconography, a frozen screen — all indicative of a fatal system blunder.
Legacy Russell.
Glitch Feminism: A Manifesto. London: Verso, 2020.
“I’m deeply suspicious when I see things like deep brain stimulation, another brain operation. When that has been put to a controlled trial test run by the manufacturers of the devices who wanted to find they were effective, those trials were aborted because the results were so terrible. Yet, there continue to be both media stories about this magnificent new treatment and publications in things like the American Journal of Psychiatry touting it as a possible remedy for the depression that afflicts 10%, 15%, even 20% of Americans.”
My initial guess would be that the mutants and structures are AI generated and then color graded and overlayed onto actual exploration photos by human hands.
Who knows, though? Maybe whatever network this is has been specifically trained on these types of creepy old “Kingdom of the Pygmies” image sets and it’s just taking it from there.
I’m assuming such a thing is possible at least in theory if not yet in practice.
“Art, and above all, music has a fundamental function, which is to catalyze the sublimation that it can bring about through all means of expression. It must aim through fixations which are landmarks to draw towards a total exaltation in which the individual mingles, losing his consciousness in a truth immediate, rare, enormous, and perfect. If a work of art succeeds in this undertaking even for a single moment, it attains its goal. This tremendous truth is not made of objects, emotions, or sensations; it is beyond these, as Beethoven’s Seventh Symphony is beyond music. This is why art can lead to realms that religion still occupies for some people.”
XXXX Swatchbook shows the range of colours that can be achieved in handmade printing technique. But it also twists the idea of print by turning quick reproduction process into slow handmade process. It’s a book about a process, and with no less than six years in the making, the book itself is a process. It’s a catalogue of colour, a unique art book and an object of book art. The book documents 400 hand-stitched colour swatches in CMYK embroidery. The line screen in my book is incredibly low and ranges between 4 to 7 lines per inch (as opposed to 300 lpi in standard printing).
The book is made of
4 colours
16 elements
400 colour combinations
219.647 stitches
Computer security is really, really important. It was important decades ago, when computers were merely how we ran our financial system, aviation, and the power grid. Today, as more and more of us have our bodies inside of computers (cars, houses, etc) and computers in our body (implants), computer security is
urgent.
Decades ago, security practitioners began a long argument about how best to address that looming urgency. The most vexing aspect of this argument was a modern, cybernetic variant on a debate that was as old as the ancient philosophers — a debate that Rene Descartes immortalized in the 17th Century.
You’ve doubtless heard the phrase, “I think therefore I am” (
Cogito, ergo sum). It comes from Descartes’ 1637
Discourse on the Method, which asks the question, “How can we know things?” Or, more expansively, “Given that all my reasoning begins with things I encounter through my senses, and given that my senses are sometimes wrong, how can I know
anything?”
Descartes’ answer: “I know God is benevolent, because when I conceive of God, I conceive of benevolence, and God gave me my conceptions. A benevolent God wouldn’t lead me astray. Thus, the things I learn through my senses and understand through my reason are right, because a benevolent God wouldn’t have it any other way.”
I’ve hated this answer since my freshman philosophy class, and even though the TA rejected my paper explaining why it was bullshit, I
still think it’s bullshit. I mean, I’m a science fiction writer, so I can handily conceive of a wicked God whose evil plan starts with
making you think He is benevolent and then systematically misleading you in your senses and reasoning, tormenting you for His own sadistic pleasure.
The debate about trust and certainty has been at the center of computer security since its inception. When Ken “Unix” Thompson accepted the 1984 Turing Prize he gave an acceptance speech called “Reflections on Trusting Trust”:
It’s a
bombshell. In it, Thompson proposes an evil compiler, one that inserted a back-door into any operating system it compiled, and that inserted a back-door-generator into any compiler it was asked to compile. Since Thompson had created the original Unix compiler — which was used to compile every other compiler and thus every other flavor of Unix — this was a pretty wild thought experiment, especially since he didn’t outright deny having done it.
Trusting trust is still the most important issue in information security. Sure, you can run a virus-checker, but that virus checker has to ask your operating system to tell it about what files are on the drive, what data is in memory, and what processes are being executed. What if the OS is compromised?
Okay, so maybe you are sure the OS isn’t compromised, but how does the OS know if it’s even running on the “bare metal” of your computer. Maybe it is running inside a virtual machine, and the
actual OS on the computer is a malicious program that sits between your OS and the chips and circuits, distorting the data it sends and receives. This is called a “rootkit,” and it’s a deadass nightmare that actually exists in the actual world.
A computer with a rootkit is a brain in a jar, a human battery in the Matrix. You, the computer user, can ask the operating system questions about its operating environment that it will answer faithfully and truthfully, and
those answers will all be wrong, because the
actual computer is being controlled by the rootkit and it only tells your operating system what it wants it to know.
20 years ago, some clever Microsoft engineers proposed a solution to this conundrum: “Trusted Computing.” They proposed adding a second computer to your system, a sealed, secure chip with very little microcode, so little that it could all be audited in detail and purged of bugs. The chip itself would be securely affixed to your motherboard, such that any attempt to remove it and replace it with a compromised chip would be immediately obvious to you (for example, it might encapsulate some acid in a layer of epoxy that would rupture if you tried to remove the chip).
They called this “Next Generation Secure Computing Base,” or “Palladium” for short. They came to the Electronic Frontier Foundation offices to present it. It was a memorable day:
My then-colleague Seth Schoen — EFF’s staff technologist, the most technically sophisticated person to have been briefed on the technology without signing an NDA — made several pointed critiques of Palladium:
But his most salient concern was this: “what if malware gets into the trusted computing chip?”
The point of trusted computing was to create a nub of certainty, a benevolent God whose answers to your questions could always be trusted. The output from a trusted computing element would be ground truth, axiomatic, trusted without question. By having a reliable external observer of your computer and its processes, you could always tell whether you were in the Matrix or in the world. It was a red pill for your computer.
What if it was turned? What if some villain convinced it to switch sides, by subverting its code, or by subtly altering it at the manufacturer?
That is, what if Descartes’ God was a sadist who
wanted to torment him?
This was a nightmare scenario in 2002, one that the trusted computing advocates never adequately grappled with. In the years since, it’s only grown more salient, as trusted computing variations have spread to many kinds of computer.
The most common version is the UEFI — (“Unified Extensible Firmware Interface”) — a separate operating system, often running on its own chip (though sometimes running in a notionally “secure” region of your computer’s main processors) that is charged with observing and securing your computer’s boot process.
UEFI poses lots of dangers to users; it can (and is) used by manufacturers to block third-party operating systems, which allows them to lock you into using their own products, including their app stores, letting them restrict your choices and pick your pocket.
But in exchange, UEFI is said to deliver a far more important benefit: a provably benevolent God, one who will never lie to your operating system about whether it is in the Matrix or in the real world, providing the foundational ground truth needed to find and block malicious software.
So it’s a big deal that Kaspersky has detected a UEFI-infecting rootkit (which they’ve dubbed a “bootkit”), which they call Cosmicstrand, which can reinstall itself after your reformat your drive and reinstall your OS:
Cosmicstrand does some
really clever, technical things to compromise your UEFI, which then allows it to act with near-total impunity and undetectability. Indeed, Kaspersky warns that there are probably
lots of these bootkits floating around.
If you want a good lay-oriented breakdown of how Cosmicstrand installs a wicked God in your computer, check out Dan Goodin’s excellent
Ars Technica writeup:
But despite its long tenure, Cosmicstrand was only just discovered. That’s because of the fundamental flaw inherent in designing a computer that its owners can’t fully inspect or alter: if you design a component that is supposed to be immune from owner override, then anyone who compromises that component
can’t be detected or countered by the computer’s owner.
This is the core of a two-decade-old debate among security people, and it’s one that the “benevolent God” faction has consistently had the upper hand in. They’re the “curated computing” advocates who insist that preventing you from choosing an alternative app store or side-loading a program is for your own good — because if it’s possible for you to override the manufacturer’s wishes, then malicious software may impersonate you to do so, or you might be tricked into doing so.
This benevolent dictatorship model only works so long as the dictator is both perfectly benevolent and perfectly competent. We know the dictators aren’t always benevolent. Apple won’t invade your privacy to sell you things, but they’ll take away ever Chinese user’s privacy to retain their ability to manufacture devices in China:
But even if you trust a dictator’s benevolence, you can’t trust in their perfection. Everyone makes mistakes. Benevolent dictator computing works well, but fails badly. Designing a computer that intentionally can’t be fully controlled by its owner is a nightmare, because that is a computer that, once compromised, can attack its owner with impunity.
[Image ID: A remix of Benediction of God the Father by Luca Cambiaso, c. 1565, which depicts a bearded god holding the Earth under one arm. In the remix, God’s eyes have been replaced by the glaring red eyes of HAL9000 from 2001: A Space Odyssey. The Earth has been overlaid with a Matrix movie-style ‘code waterfall.’]
Little Island is a public park in Manhattan, New York City that was constructed between 2018 and 2021. The 2.4-acre (9,712-square-meter) space is perched above the Hudson River on 132 concrete “tulip” pillars. It contains more than 350 species of plants, a 687-seat amphitheater, and ample lawn space for visitors.
“Why shouldn’t there be a thousand or more ways of building loudspeakers? […] Every sculptured loudspeaker has certain special characteristics, so my problem becomes that of finding what sound I can put in so as to reveal the unique properties of the material.” — David Tudor
The evolution of David Tudor’s “Rainforest” goes back to a 1968 commission by Merce Cunningham. Tudor was asked to create a sonic element for Cunningham’s dance piece of the same name, also featuring Andy Warhol’s “Silver Clouds,” floating mylar pillows filled with helium and costumes by Jasper Johns. Using 8 audio transducers (essentially speakers without cones), phonograph cartridges, contact microphones and two sets of loudspeakers, Tudor came up with an approach to investigate the resonance of physical objects, utilizing simple signal generators, real-time filtering and feedback processes. Within a year, Tudor had expanded upon that initial vision, morphing the concept into a multi-channel system for performing in concert settings. He also added in field recordings of birds and insects to the initial use of electronic sounds, all modified by an interactive array of filters and resonant objects. (Realizations of both of these versions of “Rainforest” can be heard on the David Tudor & Gordon Mumma release.)
One of the most curious facts about living as we do today is that our future does not, strictly speaking, exist. This fact has been well elaborated by Bruce Sterling over the past few years (“Atemporality for the Creative Artist” being especially good), and picked up on ably by Justin Pickard in the recent Gonzo Futurist manifesto. Our philosophy of history has more or less collapsed, we are confronted with dizzying arrays of signals strong and weak, fair and foul.
Setting aside all the wonderful, promised technologies beating down our door, let’s be real about the fact that at least some of the following Bad Things will probably happen in the next century: dwindling fossil fuels, climate change and its attendant catastrophes, crises in water supplies, rampant antibiotic resistance, global pandemics, overpopulation, and black swans birthed from unceasing societal acceleration.
We must recognize that we cannot hold the same life expectations as that of mid-20th century Americans (no matter what country we live in). This has manifested itself in a fascination with social collapse that has penetrated the popular consciousness (Mayan prophecies, zombie chic), extending out to projects of managed despair among certain intellectual circles (the Dark Mountain project, most notably). Yet rarely does this talk of “diminished expectations” manifest itself in a questioning of those expectations in the first place. Progress/development not same as growth, and an integral thesis of solarpunk should be about decoupling the first from the second. More is not better.
Many of Adam’s open questions have been explored in the last decade. But there’s still so much more to create, learn and do. Both in the imaginative realm but also this one.
Solarpunk has come so far in the last 10 years. Let’s do the next 10 with the same generosity, community curiosity and sense of urgent activism that the previous one did.
Here’s to a brighter, fairer, more equitable future in the anthropo
green.
Nobody creates original content for Facebook anymore, and Facebook does nothing to support content creators, says Ryan Broderick at Garbage Day:
… unlike, say, YouTube which plastered their community’s biggest faces all over billboards and subway ads or TikTok, which was already hosting panels with their top creators at VidCons before the pandemic, Meta seems to actively despise the people who make content on their platforms. Unless they’re already celebrities, their creators don’t appear in Facebook’s ads, they don’t do panels together at conferences, and they don’t pop up in press releases or demo new features.
At best Meta seems embarrassed of the people who make the content that keeps users on their apps. Or, at worst, they seem to hate them. There’s really no other explanation. Creators I’ve spoken to have described a deeply precarious existence in which they have to constantly adjust how they create content by trying to divine what each new algorithmic tweak might mean for how their posts show up in other people’s feeds. They live in constant fear of their pages being “disappeared” for some weird infraction. It sounds like a nightmare. The women eating out of toilets on Facebook aren’t eating out toilets because they like doing it. They’re eating out of toilets because Facebook’s insanely aggressive recommendation engine has pushed their content to ludicrous extremes because it’s constantly over-optimizing its own users. And because TikTok has redefined how social media works and left Meta completely unprepared for a future that’s quickly approaching, they want you eating out of toilets, but, now, it has to be in a Reel.
Also, if you remove all the news from Facebook, there’s nothing left.
I’m far from the first person to point out that Facebook has been largely overrun with garbage content. Now [a study by Jean-Hugues Roy, at the University of Quebec in Montreal] suggests that, without news links, many users will find almost nothing of value.
Roy’s study found if you take the news out of Facebook, what you’re left with is mainly insipid viral content about teddy bears and kittens, as well as Bible quotes.
Not true for me—my friends post many interesting photos and discussion. And that’s what I’m there for.
Facebook recently announced it’s pivoting—yet again—this time to focus on algorithmically generated viral content. Depending on how far Facebook takes that pivot, that could drive me off Facebook entirely, simply because I am not interested in that kind of thing from Facebook. It’s not what I’m on Facebook for.
Prussian Blue, a pigment used by Picasso in his Blue Period and for Van Gogh’s “Starry Night,” could become useful for recycling cell phone components and disposing of nuclear waste
Jennifer Ouellette:
Prussian blue is the first modern synthetic pigment. Granted, there was once a pigment known as Egyptian blue used in ancient Egypt for millennia; the Romans called it caeruleum. But after the Roman Empire collapsed, the pigment wasn’t used much, and eventually the secret to how it was made was lost. (Scientists have since figured out how to recreate the process.) Before Prussian blue was discovered, painters had to use indigo dye, smalt, or the pricey ultramarine made from lapis lazuli for deep-blue hues.
It’s believed that Prussian blue was first synthesized by accident by a Berlin paint maker named Johann Jacob Diesbach around 1706. Diesbach was trying to make a red pigment, which involved mixing potash, ferric sulfate, and dried cochineal. But the potash he used was apparently tainted with blood—one presumes from a cut finger or similar minor injury. The ensuing reaction created a distinctive blue-hued iron ferrocyanide and eventually came to be called Prussian blue (or Berlin blue).
…
The pigment has other uses. It’s often used to treat heavy-metal poisoning from thallium or radioactive cesium … Prussian blue helped remove cesium from the soil around the Fukushima power plant after the 2011 tsunami. Prussian blue nanoparticles are used in some cosmetics, and it’s used by pathologists as a stain to detect iron in, for example, bone marrow biopsy specimens.
Sumela Monastery is a Greek Orthodox monastery dedicated to the Theotokos located at Karadağ within the Pontic Mountains, in the Maçka district of Trabzon Province in modern Turkey.
“A mind of limits, a camera of thoughts” is the name of this contribution from citizen scientist Prateek Sarpal. Jupiter inspires artists and scientists with its beauty. In this image, south is up, and the enhanced color evokes an exotic marble and childhood joy.
The original image was captured by JunoCam, the camera on NASA’s Juno mission in orbit around Jupiter. This image was taken on Juno’s 22nd close pass by Jupiter on Sept. 12, 2019.
The Lop Nur Potash Ponds are located in the Taklamakan Desert of northern China. Built and expanded over the last 20 years, the ponds occupy the basin of a dried up salt lake that once spanned 10,000 square kilometers (3,900 square miles) and left behind salt crusts as thick as 100 centimeters (39 inches). The variety of color seen here illustrates the stages of production—water is first dyed blue to absorb more sunlight and heat, and it gradually fades in color as it evaporates and potash crystallizes, ready for extraction.
The Lagrange points are equilibrium locations where competing gravitational tugs on an object net out to zero. JWST is one of two other craft currently occupying L2.
Though the billions of people on Earth may come from different areas, we share a common heritage: we are all made of stardust! From the carbon in our DNA to the calcium in our bones, nearly all of the elements in our bodies were forged in the fiery hearts and death throes of stars.
The building blocks for humans, and even our planet, wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for stars. If we could rewind the universe back almost to the very beginning, we would just see a sea of hydrogen, helium, and a tiny bit of lithium.
The first generation of stars formed from this material. There’s so much heat and pressure in a star’s core that they can fuse atoms together, forming new elements. Our DNA is made up of carbon, hydrogen, oxygen, nitrogen, and phosphorus. All those elements (except hydrogen, which has existed since shortly after the big bang) are made by stars and released into the cosmos when the stars die.
Each star comes with a limited fuel supply. When a medium-mass star runs out of fuel, it will swell up and shrug off its outer layers. Only a small, hot core called a white dwarf is left behind. The star’s cast-off debris includes elements like carbon and nitrogen. It expands out into the cosmos, possibly destined to be recycled into later generations of stars and planets. New life may be born from the ashes of stars.
Massive stars are doomed to a more violent fate. For most of their lives, stars are balanced between the outward pressure created by nuclear fusion and the inward pull of gravity. When a massive star runs out of fuel and its nuclear processes die down, it completely throws the star out of balance. The result? An explosion!
Supernova explosions create such intense conditions that even more elements can form. The oxygen we breathe and essential minerals like magnesium and potassium are flung into space by these supernovas.
This kind of explosion creates calcium – the mineral we need most in our bodies – and trace minerals that we only need a little of, like zinc and manganese. It also produces iron, which is found in our blood and also makes up the bulk of our planet’s mass!
Some elements only come from stars indirectly. Cosmic rays are nuclei (the central parts of atoms) that have been boosted to high speed by the most energetic events in the universe. When they collide with atoms, the impact can break them apart, forming simpler elements. That’s how we get boron and beryllium – from breaking star-made atoms into smaller ones.
Half a dozen other elements are created by radioactive decay. Some elements are radioactive, which means their nuclei are unstable. They naturally break down to form simpler elements by emitting radiation and particles. That’s how we get elements like radium. The rest are made by humans in labs by slamming atoms of lighter elements together at
super high speeds to form heavier ones. We can fuse together elements made by stars to create exotic, short-lived elements like seaborgium and einsteinium.
From some of the most cataclysmic events in the cosmos comes all of the beauty we see here on Earth. Life, and even our planet, wouldn’t have formed without them! But we still have lots of questions about these stellar factories.
In 2006, our Stardust spacecraft returned to Earth containing tiny particles of interstellar dust that originated in distant stars, light-years away – the first star dust to ever be collected from space and returned for study. You can help us identify and study the composition of these tiny, elusive particles through our Stardust@Home Citizen Science project.
Our upcoming Roman Space Telescope will help us learn more about how elements were created and distributed throughout galaxies, all while exploring many other cosmic questions. Learn more about the exciting science this mission will investigate on Twitter and Facebook.
This first image from NASA’s James Webb Space Telescope is the deepest and sharpest infrared image of the distant universe to date. Known as Webb’s First Deep Field, this image of galaxy cluster SMACS 0723 is overflowing with detail. Thousands of galaxies – including the faintest objects ever observed in the infrared – have appeared in Webb’s view for the first time. This slice of the vast universe covers a patch of sky approximately the size of a grain of sand held at arm’s length by someone on the ground.
“The geographic and climatic environment of the Japanese archipelago is unique on Earth. The climate is temperate and subtropical, with four distinct seasons. And it is surrounded by sea. No other country in the world has an environment like this. Nearby china is largely a desert climate, and South America is mostly tropical forest. In short, no other country has seasons with so many subtle nuances, or the same balance between sea, mountains and rivers. When you go to the sea, you can see all sorts of fish. And when you go to the mountains, there are lots of acorns and nuts. civilizations generally arise in order to combat hostile natural conditions. Take the culture of the Nile delta for example: civilization developed by working to counteract nature in order to domesticate it. The Japanese, on the other hand, have never needed to domesticate nature in order to survive: they simply had to show gratitude for its generosity, by dedicating prayers to nature. On the intellectual level, the Japanese evolved sufficiently. But since they never needed to move from hunting to agriculture, the Neolithic period lasted much longer here than elsewhere. Life in this peculiar environment shaped the Japanese sensibility. Our language has many more words that express many more nuances of colors and different aspects of nature than other languages. The fine precision of the Japanese sensibility comes from this History.”
— Hiroshi Sugimoto, Hiroshi Sugimoto on the end of the world, by Crash redaction
Here’s a media literacy rule of thumb: any time you hear about how the courts have done something outrageous and absurd to some poor, long-suffering, gigantic, wildly profitable corporation…dig deeper.
The canonical example is the “McDonald’s Hot Coffee Lawsuit” (aka Liebeck v. McDonald’s Restaurants). You know, that time that an old lady got burned by her McDonald’s coffee and then sued for for $2.7 million?! Most people heard that story — and they heard it for a reason.
The Hot Coffee story was propaganda — specifically, it was propaganda for the idea that corporations should be shielded from legal liability when they maim or even kill the public through gross negligence. The real Hot Coffee story is a lot more complicated than the “lady gets millions because her coffee was too hot” tale that circulated widely.
One of the best explorations of the Hot Coffee story is Adam Conover’s excellent “Adam Ruins The Hot Coffee Story” video from 2016. In that episode, Conover explains what really happened.
The coffee that burned Stella Liebeck in New Mexico in 1994 was served at 190°F. It caused third-degree burns that permanently disfigured Liebeck, required multiple skin grafts, and disabled her for two years. The surgery was so drastic that Liebeck lost 20% of her body-weight while she was recovering.
McDonald’s had a history of serving coffee that was dangerously hot. It had received 700 complaints about the matter, and had had to settle numerous claims from people who were horribly burned by its coffee. However, it declined to settle with Liebeck, who initially sought $20k to cover her medical expenses.
Denied a settlement, Liebeck sued. The jury did award $2.7m, but the judge clawed it back to $640k. Liebeck likely didn’t get that amount — she and McDonald’s reached a confidential settlement under threat of McDonald’s appealing.
So, the real story isn’t: “Old lady spills coffee and gets millions.”
It’s “McDonald’s ignores hundreds of dangerous incidents for years, then maims a customer for life and refuses to pay her medical bills or change its practices to avoid future incidents. A judge says she’s due a fraction of the jury award, but she doesn’t get it because McDonald’s uses its massive litigation war-chest to force her into a confidential settlement.”
So why did you hear so much about this story? And why was the moral of the story inevitably about how bloodsucking lawyers are victimizing poor l’il multinational corporations like Mickey Dees?
It was propaganda. The “bloodsucking lawyers preying on innocent corporations” story is a creation of the business lobby, which has, for decades, argued that it should be immune to legal consequences when it harms or kills the public. The cause of “tort reform” is, in actuality, a corporate charter of impunity.
It worked. Over the past four decades, corporations have steadily whittled away the public’s right to civil justice, no matter how egregiously a corporation behaves. The main mechanism for this was the expansion of binding arbitration, a 1920s-era law that initially allowed big companies to agree to have their contractual disputes worked out by a mediator, rather than going to court.
Since the 1980s, a series of Supreme Court decisions have steadily expanded binding arbitration, allowing corporations to add “arbitration waivers” to their terms of service, employment contracts and other non-negotiated boilerplates. Today, the mere act of removing some shrinkwrap or clicking a link can result in the permanent loss of your right to sue, no matter how badly a company treats you.
Instead, your grievances will be heard by a corporate arbitrator, a pretend judge who is paid by the company that wronged you. Your case must be heard in isolation, and not part of a class action. The proceedings are secret, and even if you win, you don’t set a precedent for others who are similarly wronged. It’s “a justice system just for corporations.”
American corporations pushed the expansion of binding arbitration waivers as a get-out-of-court-free card, and for many years, it worked. Remember when Wells Fargo forged millions of its customers’ signatures to fraudulently open high-fee accounts in their names? The company argued that because the forged agreements included arbitration waivers, those customers couldn’t sue over the fraud:
Unsurprisingly, Trump loved binding arbitration. One of his first acts as president was to strip nursing home residents of the right to sue, which was great news for the nursing homes that murdered patients by abandoning them to covid:
(Older voters love the GOP, but it sure as hell doesn’t love them back.)
Forced arbitration wasn’t just a matter of civil justice — it was also a matter of economics. As Lina Khan and Deepak Gupta showed in their 2016 American Constitution Society paper “Arbitration As Wealth Transfer,” “Forced arbitration clauses are a form of wealth transfer to the rich”:
But the business leaders who bankrolled the forced arbitration epidemic were — characteristically — overconfident. It turns out that arbitration has weaknesses. It’s possible to do mass arbitration — to automate filing arbitration claims by thousands of corporate victims, which triggers hundreds of millions of dollars in arbitration fees, which the company is on the hook for, win or lose.
Uber was one of the first companies to discover this, when thousands of drivers brought arbitration claims at once. Not only would Uber have to pay for arbitrators in each case, but because arbitration decisions do not constitute precedents, it would have to argue each case, over and over again, even if it won. The company surrendered and paid drivers $146m:
Something wonderful and wild started to happen. The companies that had argued for decades that binding arbitration was, well, binding, began to argue that arbitration waivers were unconstitutional, despite the precedents that they, themselves had bankrolled, at enormous expense.
The poster child of arbitration buyer’s remorse is Intuit, a company that has stolen hundreds of millions of dollars in tax-prep fees from the poorest Americans by tricking them into fake “Free File” products using dark patterns on its website.
Intuit is now facing arbitration at scale — more than 100,000 claims — and a court has ordered them to hire arbitrators to hear each and every one of them. After all it was Intuit — not its customers — who put the arbitration clauses in its terms of service, claiming that court cases were a bad way to resolve their disputes:
Which brings me back to McDonald’s, hot coffee, and juicy stories about giant corporations being abused by the courts.
Have you heard about the Geico STD judgment? A woman caught an STD from her then-boyfriend when they had sex in his car. She won a judgment against him for $5.2m. Geico insures his car. A court has ordered Geico to pay that judgment.
It’s not a court that ordered Geico to pay the judgment — it’s an arbitrator. Geico is one of the companies that forces its customers into arbitration. Why would an insurance company want arbitrators to hear cases about its refusal to pay claims, rather than judges?
I mean, duh. Insurance companies have a long, dishonorable tradition of taking your premiums every month, then stranding you when you actually experience an “insured event,” arguing that the obscure, obfuscating language in their contract doesn’t cover your losses.
The real Geico STD story is this: Geico demanded that the case be heard by its arbitrator, who ruled against Geico, because Geico’s insurance terms did cover this event. Now, Geico is claiming that the arbitration it insisted upon “violates the company’s due process rights” and that its own arbitration agreement is unenforceable.
The case that’s being reported on isn’t about the $5.2m award for the STD. That happened way back in 2021. The case that’s in the news this week is a court telling Geico that when it forces its customers into arbitration, it has to abide by the arbitrator’s decision, even in those rare instances in which the arbitrator finds against the company who pays their fees.
But you wouldn’t know it from the coverage. All this stuff about arbitration is buried way down in the story. The headline is: $5.2m judgment for a venereal disease!
This is McDonald’s Hot Coffee 2.0. Someone pitched this story, and the pitch emphasized the poor, downtrodden corporation (Geico is owned by Warren Buffet and has $32b in assets) — not the fact that Geico is reaping what it sowed. The real story here is: “Corporation seeks to replace civil justice system with a kangaroo court, and gets kicked by its own kangaroo.”
Incidentally, if you miss Adam Conover’s “Adam Ruins Everything” and you have a Netflix password, check out “The G-Word,” his incredible new show about regulatory competence and the deadly threats it holds at bay:
[Image ID: The Adam Ruins Everything title card for ‘The Hot Coffee Case.’ It is a split panel with Adam Conover on the left at a judge’s bench, banging a gavel, and a confused Hamburgler on the right, in the witness box. They are separated by the center of the ’M’ in the McDonald’s ‘Golden Arches’ logo. Superimposed over this separator is the Geico lizard.]
Vatnajökull Glacier in Iceland has retreated rapidly in recent years. As the ice has melted, a lagoon known as Jökulsarlón has formed and grown. This area is now a popular tourist attraction, with large chunks of glacial ice melting before entering the Atlantic Ocean. Sixty years ago, when the glacier reached all the way to the shore, Jökulsárlón did not exist and since the 1970’s it has more than quadrupled in size.
The Black Thunder Coal Mine in Gillette, Wyoming, USA, opened in 1977 and has grown to become one of the largest coal mines in the world. Massive dragline excavators — the largest of which holds 160 cubic yards (120 cubic meters) in a single bucket — strip away the earth’s surface to extract coal deposits below. Now covering roughly 200 square miles (518 square kilometers), Black Thunder provides the US with 8% of its coal supply.
Yesterday the US Supreme Court ruled to limit the Environmental Protection Agency’s ability to regulate carbon emissions from power plants, making it much more difficult for the country to achieve its goal of cutting greenhouse gas emissions in half by the end of the decade. Coal combustion in particular is more carbon-intensive than burning natural gas or petroleum for electricity. Although coal use accounted for about 54% of CO2 emissions from the energy sector, it represented only 20% of the electricity generated in the United States in 2020.
Storming out of Richmond Virginia, Parker Black AKA Poozy and Warren Jones AKA False Prpht are here to tell us in no uncertain terms
“we are all fucked up”. They elaborate on this observation over a maelstrom of industrial noise that combines the culture jamming of Negativland, the visceral grind of Throbbing Gristle and the shoutiest end of DC hardcore. Given that many are aware of their state of fucked-uped-ness and the duo’s intention to rescue us from the prison of hypocrisy, a question arises as to the efficacy of this particular PSA. Their method is to atomize and collage tropes of noise and hardcore to allow something new to emerge. If Prison Religion doesn’t quite deliver on that,
Hard Industrial B.O.P crackles with a caustic energy strong enough to strip the stucco from your ceiling.
Shadowgraph of a human foot in a shoe. Tesla obtained the image in 1896 with x-rays generated by his own vacuum tube, similar to Lenard’s tube, at a distance of 8 feet. (Courtesy of the Tesla Museum, Belgrade, Serbia; document no. MNT, VI/II, 122.)
Hrabak, M., Padovan, R. S., Kralik, M., Ozretic, D., & Potocki, K. (2008).
Nikola Tesla and the Discovery of X-rays. RadioGraphics, 28(4), 1189–1192. doi:10.1148/rg.284075206
With time, @Horse_ebooks regained its status as a mysterious source of wisdom and art, and “Everything happens so much” came to be a mantra. Twitter users have called it the “general tweet of the decade” and “the defining text of our age.” It has been used as the title for essays, songs, at least one novel, and an orchestral arrangement.
“It is of interest that many of the trickster gods display a confusing ambiguity in their gender, such as Hermes, Mercury, Loki and Dionysius. However, it is not just in their gender-characteristics where there is uncertainty, these beings that walk between the worlds often conflate those things that are opposite by simultaneously displaying two contrary behaviours at once, such as being sacred and profane, foolish and wise, prince and pauper etc. This overturning of restrictive hidebound tradition is exemplified in the many revels wherein social norms are inverted, and which are often held in honour of transgressional gods, such as the Hysteria held in honour of Aphrodite, the feasts of Dionysius, the 15th Century Festival of Fools and the Topsy Turvy where the poor dress as kings, men as women, women as men, bishops as monks etc. Such inversions were also utilised by witches as an outward sign of their magical calling, some choosing to wear their clothes back-to-front or inside out, wearing petticoats over dresses or wearing scarves about their waists instead of their necks, all of these evoking a sense of ‘otherness’. Besides preserving freedom by a refusal to be bound, confined or defined as one thing or another, it also exemplifies the one true path to Wisdom wherein duality is resolved, this being symbolised by the Fire of Enlightenment burning between the Twin Horns of the Fallen Star.”
— Martin Duffy - The Devil’s Raiments: Habiliments of the Witch’s Craft
“Didn’t threaten the lives of justices”? Fuck that bullshit.
Justice Blackmun, who wrote the
Roe majority opinion, had a bullet shot through his living room window. This after years of receiving letters threatening his life. The bullet occurred right after he had received a particularly concerning letter, and was at the end of a year in which DC-area clinics had been subjected to
seven bombings. Not threats, bombings.
Tagebau Hambach is a surface coal mine in North Rhine–Westphalia, Germany. The mine opened in 1978 and currently covers 44 square kilometers (17 square miles). Here, bucket-wheel excavators – considered to be the largest land machines in the world at 315 feet (96 meters) tall and 730 feet (223 meters) long – continuously scoop materials from the surface in order to extract coal and will eventually expand the facility to cover 85 square kilometers (33 square miles).
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