There is no good reason to distinguish between nonhumans that are ‘natural’ and ones that are ‘artificial’, by which we mean made by humans. It just becomes too difficult to sustain such distinctions. Since, therefore, an artwork is itself a nonhuman being, this solidarity in the artistic realm is already solidarity with nonhumans, whether or not art is explicitly ecological. Ecologically explicit art is simply art that brings this solidarity with the nonhuman to the foreground.
Timothy Morton. 2021.
All Art is Ecological. London: Penguin Books.
The ideological argument for Web3 is very compelling, and I personally hold many of the same ideals. I strongly believe in working toward a more equitable and accessible financial system, creating a fairer distribution of wealth in society, supporting artists and creators, ensuring privacy and control over one’s data, and democratizing access to the web. These are all things you will hear Web3 projects claiming to try to solve.
I just don’t think that creating technologies based around cryptocurrencies and blockchains is the solution to these problems. These technologies build up financial barriers; they don’t knock them down. They seek to introduce a layer of financialization to everything we do that I feel is, in many ways, worse than the existing systems they seek to replace. These are social and societal issues, not technological ones, and the solutions will be found in societal and political change.
This means that art and art appreciation won’t stay still, in the way that a lot of art theory (for instance in Kant) wants. And in the absence of a single authoritative (anthropocentric) standard of taste with which to judge art, how we regard it is also about how wholes are always less than the sums of their parts.
Timothy Morton. 2021.
All Art is Ecological. London: Penguin Books.
Swirling rock formations are seen in the Sahara Desert, near the town of Reggane, Algeria. The climate in this region is torrid and almost rainless, with an average annual rainfall of less than 0.4 inches (10 mm). In the summer, daytime temperatures are known to consistently reach 122°F (50°C), earning this area its nickname — the “triangle of fire.”
Those good old days are gone forever. Since then, with keywords such “users interface,” “user friendliness,” and even “data protection,” industry has condemned human beings to remain human beings.
Friedrich A.Kittler,2013. “Protected Mode.” In The Truth of the Technological World: Essays on the Genealogy of Presence, edited by Hans Ulrich Gombrecht, 209-218. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press.
The Jwaneng Diamond Mine in Botswana is the richest diamond mine in the world, with an annual output of as much as 15.6 million carats. Mine richness takes into account the rate of diamond extraction combined with quality of the diamonds that are mined, by sale price per weight. To extract the diamonds, the facility produces 9.3 million tons of ore and an additional 37 million tons of waste rock per year.
I read Map for the first time last year, and a couple months later decided to already reread it. The first time around, you’re dropped into this story without knowing what’s going on in terms of either the character dynamics or the setting, and it’s like a puzzle you get to try to figure out. It’s delightful! The
second time around, you start out with a lot more puzzle pieces at hand (but absolutely not all of them yet!) and you manage to connect so many more dots. (I swore to myself to not go overboard and still ended up with a ten-way colour-coding system with stickers and writing margin notes. More recently, I decided to read all the comments on the Map AO3 pages, and they are so much fun to read! So many readers have shared really insightful observations, and the author has written a lot of very interesting replies as well. But having to switch back and forth between the story and the comment section is a bit of a bother, and I sensed an interesting typographical challenge, and that’s how I found myself typesetting the fic again while adding foot- and margin notes to my heart’s content. The book ended up being so long though that I decided to split it into two parts :-)
As for the cover of the first half: Each of the DTA fics introduces you—and the main characters—to a new, larger part of the world. In Map, the focus lies on Cas’s cabin as the foundation for the relationship between the two main characters is laid, so Dean and the reader have to open the bead curtain together to get to that part of the story. If I ever get around to giving a similar treatment to the other fics in the series, the cover design would continue correspondingly: opening the gate to Chitaqua for Stars, entering Ichabod’s main square for Lights, and stepping through one of the paintings in the white room for Game.
“But, the dynamic of forces in fact leads us to a distressing conclusion. When reactive force separates active force from what it can do, the latter also becomes reactive. Active forces become reactive. And the word ‘becoming’ must be taken in the strongest sense: the becoming of forces appears as a becoming-reactive. Are there no other ways of becoming? The fact remains that we do not feel, experience or know any becoming but becoming-reactive. We are not merely noting the existence of reactive forces, we are noting the fact that everywhere they are triumphant. How do they triumph? Through the will to nothingness, thanks to the affinity between reaction and negation. What is negation? It is a quality of the will to power, the one which qualifies it as nihilism or will to nothingness, the one which constitutes the becoming-reactive of forces. It must not be said that active force becomes reactive because reactive forces triumph; on the contrary, they triumph because, by separating active force from what it can do, they betray it to the will of nothingness, to a becoming-reactive deeper than themselves. This is why the figures of triumph of reactive forces (ressentiment, bad conscience, and the ascetic ideal) are primarily forms of nihilism. The becoming-reactive, the becoming nihilistic, of force seem to be essential components of the relation of force with force. – Is there another becoming? Everything tempts us to think that perhaps there is. But, as Nietzsche often says, we would need another sensibility, another way of feeling. We can not yet reply to this question, we can hardly even contemplate its possibility. But we can ask why we only feel and know a becoming-reactive. Is it not because man is essentially reactive? Because becoming-reactive is constitutive of man? Ressentiment, bad conscience and nihilism are not psychological traits but the foundation of the humanity in man. They are the principle of human being as such. Man, “skin disease” of the Earth, reaction of the Earth … (ZII “Of Great Events”). It is in this sense that Zarathustra speaks of his “great contempt” for man and of his “great disgust”. Another sensibility, another becoming - would they still be man’s?”
“The Ministry for the Future is a cli-fi novel by American science fiction writer Kim Stanley Robinson published in 2020. Set in the near future, the novel follows a subsidiary body, established under the Paris Agreement, whose mission is to advocate for the world’s future generations of citizens as if their rights are as valid as the present generation’s. While they pursue various ambitious projects, the effects of climate change are determined to be the most consequential”
The next time they tell you Americans are “happy” with their employer provided health insurance remember that that “happiness” is fueled by willful ignorance of what the alternatives are really like and fear of losing what little crappy health care they currently have.
To appreciate how unique electronic music is, consider the obvious: nonelectronic music, by definition, is performed by nonamplified, acoustic instruments or the human voice. Until electricity became available, music was generally produced with a relatively small choice of instruments and vocal types. Timbre, the characteristic “color” of any sound, has thus been one of the most stable elements of musical production; in other words, nonelectronic music is identifiable
as music (and identifiable in a very short period of time, usually within a second or two) on the basis of its timbres. Western music since the Middle Ages can thus be heard as a series of refinements of the other parameters of musical production that could be varied, traits such as rhythm, melody, harmony, texture, and form.
JoannaDemers, 2010.
Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
This Overview of Mars, captured by NASA’s Ingenuity helicopter, shows the wreckage of a “backshell” — a component that detached from the Perseverance rover when it landed on Mars in February 2021. We can also see the backshell’s 70-foot-wide (21-meter) parachute in frame.
The Ingenuity is a robotic helicopter that follows the Perseverance rover around Mars, taking photos as it hovers above the red planet’s surface. This photo was taken, along with 9 others, during its 26th flight last week, which lasted 159 seconds and spanned 1,181 feet (360 meters).
Keeper of Time is the first feature documentary about mechanical watchmaking, the history of horology, and the very concept of time. Featuring four of the world’s most renowned independent watchmakers - Philippe Dufour, Roger W. Smith, François-Paul Journe, and Maximilian Büsser – Keeper of Time contemplates the theoretical and philosophical notions of time, aging and mortality.
When Pierre Schaeffer began to lug his turntable engraver around Paris to record the sounds of trains, he permanently transformed musical aesthetics, introducing the possibility that the sounds of the outside world could be considered as aesthetic objects. But here lies the dilemma. Once electronic musicians took apart the musical frame, what did they do with the Pandora’s box of sounds unleashed into the concert hall? How does one listen to unmusical, everyday sounds?
JoannaDemers, 2010.
Listening Through the Noise: The Aesthetics of Experimental Electronic Music. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.
A show based on Levon Biss’s work that is opening at the American Museum of Natural History in June will spotlight insect decline, displaying insects that are extinct or severely threatened. Credit…Levon Biss.
Excerpt from this story from the
New York Times:
For most people, insects are an annoyance — sometimes, a frightening one. They are creatures to be smacked off an arm, stomped with a foot or, in the extreme, obliterated with pesticides.
But Levon Biss, a macrophotographer who shoots extreme close-ups of very small subjects, and curators and scientists at the American Museum of Natural History see the insect world in a radically different way: essential to life on earth, endangered and — in too many cases — headed for extinction.
A show opening in June, based on Mr. Biss’s work, will highlight 40 insects, some of which are already extinct and others that are considered imperiled, including some that are being raised in labs so they can be returned to the wild. Among those making an appearance: the Monarch butterfly, the nine-spotted ladybug, the Puritan tiger beetle, the Hawaiian hammer-headed fruit fly, the Mt. Hermon June beetle and the San Joaquin flower-loving fly. Most of the models for Mr. Biss’s photos have been selected from more than 20 million specimens that are part of the museum’s archives.
Mr. Biss’s camera shows them in an entirely new way, using a technique that magnifies the tiny details of their minuscule beauty to enormous proportions. For now, the exhibition, with photographs as large as 54 inches by 96 inches, will be housed in the museum’s Akeley Gallery and the adjacent East Galleria. Mr. Biss, who is also the author of “Microsculpture: Portraits of Insects,” has had his work displayed in an array of museums in Houston, Copenhagen and beyond.
“People usually come here to see all the creatures they love; the elephants, the dinosaurs, the blue whale,” said Lauri Halderman, the museum’s vice president for exhibition. “We had to think differently about doing an exhibition about insects. They’re not charismatic and they’re always in the wrong place, like inside our apartments.
“The exhibition needs to be beautiful in order for people to care,” she added. “Most of us have never seen insects presented like this. Levon’s photos are beautiful, bizarre and so intricately detailed in ways that most of us just never imagined.”
“The concrete, rough dome became the "shelter” for a house and the gallery, with a spacious courtyard in its very centre by Kimiyoshi Sasaki + Takayuki Bamba.“
“It is a perfect marriage for an age of plutocracy: Twitter with its serious problems and Elon Musk, the embodiment of those problems. What happens when the incarnation of a problem buys the right to decide what the problem is and how to fix it? Twitter has a disinformation problem — fake news about Covid vaccines, climate and more running buck wild across the platform. Mr. Musk has shown himself to be a highly capable peddler of dubious claims, whether putting out misleading financial information or calling the British diver who helped rescue trapped schoolboys in Thailand a “pedo guy.” Twitter has a racism problem. Time and again, it has failed to consequentially answer the pleas of users of color to address the bigotry and harassment that are endemic for them. Tesla, the carmaker that Mr. Musk runs, has its own racism problem, with many workers complaining to the press and California’s Department of Fair Employment and Housing suing the company over an allegedly pervasive problem of racialized degradation. The agency recently described one of Tesla’s plants as “a racially segregated workplace” rife with slurs as well as discrimination “in job assignments, discipline, pay and promotion.” Twitter has a bullying and harassment problem, and the subtler but related challenge of bringing out the worst, not the best, in all of us. Mr. Musk is the incarnation of these problems, too. Though you might think that having more than $250 billion, according to Forbes, and wanting to solve the problems of Earth and space would fully occupy someone, he seems to have a compulsive need to belittle people and burp out his least-considered impulses and stoke bullying by his legions of admirers in a way that both reflects and shapes how Twitter is. And so it’s just perfect, absolutely fitting, that this guy, of all guys, could now own Twitter.”
“When activists started to use the term “prison industrial complex” they intended to say as much about the intricate connections reshaping the US landscape as were suggested by the term “military industrial complex.” From “tough on communism” to “tough on crime,” the consistency between the two complexes lies in how broadly their reach has compromised all sorts of alternative futures. The main point here is not that a few corporations call the shots—they don’t—rather an entire realm of social policy and social investment is hostage to the development and perfection of means of mass punishment—from prison to post–release conditions implicating a wide range of people and places. Some critics of this analytic framework find it weak because the dollar amount that circulates through the prison industrial complex is not “big” enough to set a broader economic agenda. The criticism is wrong in two different ways: first, the point of the term “prison industrial complex” is to highlight the devastating effect of industrialized punishment that has hidden, noneconomic as well as measurable dollar costs to governments and households; and second, the term’s purpose is to show how a social policy based in coercion and endless punishment destroys communities where prisoners come from and communities where prisons are built. The connection between prisons and the military is both a not-surprising material one (some military firms have become vendors to prison systems, though most beneficiaries of prison and jail spending are individual wage earners—including retired military) and a not-surprising ideological or cultural one—the broad normalization of the belief that the key to safety is aggression.”
“We knew of the heartlessness and falsity of the bourgeois class, but to think that the new communist ruling class would be even worse than the bourgeoisie, at that moment was absolutely impossible for us to imagine. We really thought that it was a temporary sickness due to the danger they were in, that once that danger had disappeared their reactionary methods would also disappear. And how wrong we were! There must be something in human nature for men to want power over other men so madly. And the truth is that power creates tyrants. I am ever more convinced of that. So the problem of liberty must be mostly: never put power over us in the hands of any human being. And if anyone tries to grab it against our will, fight the prospective tyrants to death!”
— Enrico Arrigoni (anarchist participant in the Spartacist Uprising of 1919 and the Spanish civil war reflecting on the Bolshevik “revolution”)
The former CEO of Smartlabs and Insteon, Rob Lilleness, appears to be concerned that the failure of his company might haunt him: he initially changed his LinkedIn profile to omit any mention of Smartlabs or Insteon and reduced his display name to initials. Then after the unannounced shutdown of Insteon’s servers was reported, his LinkedIn profile disappeared completely.
That prompted one visitor to Reddit’s /r/Insteon forum to post a screen capture of the company’s suddenly coy management. Insteon’s leadership-bios page at the time this story was filed returned a “404 not found” error. Another forum visitor has taken the opportunity to acquire the domain Insteoff.com and populate it with a single-page website that makes the company’s shutdown more evident.
Insteon’s goodbye message acknowledges the “extraordinary following and community” that developed around the firm’s IoT products – a group that clearly resents being blindsided by a deal closed on March 22, 2022 and was made public by a server shutdown only a few days ago. And it expresses hope that a buyer can be found before concluding with a statement of regret…
“A World is a construction. It is nothing compared to the true infinite game of Nature, but it is infinite enough because it sustains the qualities of an infinite game long enough and surprising enough for humans to treat it with the status of being alive. A World is an artificial living thing, but a living thing nonetheless. It is ongoing, absorbs change, and attracts players to help perpetuate it. x”
— Ian Cheng. Emissary’s Guide To Worlding (pp. 17-18). Kindle Edition.
“Freedom – free time – real free time – is something which is absolutely crucial to the idea of a socialist society. Genuinely free time for everyone to do whatever they like is the measure of what socialism aspires to. If you ask every body right now, “How much free time do you have?” the typical answer is “I have almost no free time whatsoever. It’s all taken up with this, that, and everything else.” If real freedom is a world in which we have free time to do whatever we want, then the socialist emancipatory project proposes that as central to its political mission.”
I entered the field of mental illness in the early 1970s, when I was a graduate student in Sociology at Yale University. As it happened, the DSM was being developed at Yale at the time. I did my dissertation at the Connecticut Mental Health Center and this was the age before patient confidentiality. I had free access to the charts of people, which in retrospect, seems amazing to me. These charts didn’t have diagnoses, and they would go in detail into the problems that people were having. Diagnoses just weren’t an important aspect of how patients were being looked at and how they were being treated.
Then all of a sudden, in 1980, when the DSM-III is published, not only are diagnoses a critical part of psychiatry, they’re probably the most critical aspect. [Psychiatrists] start by getting a diagnosis for the person, and then that diagnosis guides how that person is treated, what kind of drugs they’re getting, what sort of psychotherapy they’re getting. It was such a tremendous transformation in a very short period of time, and it’s going from diagnosis playing almost no role to it being the central aspect of psychiatric treatment.
… the mainstream of the profession in the 1950s and 1960s was clearly psychoanalysis, and psychoanalysts couldn’t care less about diagnoses. It just wasn’t important if you were looking for the hidden unconscious factors that shaped who a person was. Then, beginning in the 1950s and intensifying in the 1960s, you have an entirely different type of psychiatry emerging, which is called biological psychiatry, and these were hardcore researchers who generally didn’t really see patients. But they were devoted to developing specifically targeted drugs, especially focused on depression.The analysts had this very global notion of anxiety, which drove their work, so the new biological researchers ceded anxiety to the analysts. They weren’t going to go there and instead took depression as their stronghold and strived to develop very targeted drugs.
Meanwhile, and this is happening simultaneously, the drug industry came out with a whole new class of what come to be called antidepressants, even though they’re not really antidepressants, but they have to be called that because the anti-anxiety drugs that were wildly popular in the 1950s and 1960s became discredited in the 1970s and there was this movement to strictly regulate the tranquilizers. So they don’t want to call the new selective serotonin reuptake inhibitors anti-anxiety drugs. Instead, they hit upon calling them—and it’s a brilliant marketing tactic—antidepressants.
At the same time, in the late ’80s, pharmaceutical companies are able to develop direct-to-consumer advertisements, and they spend tens of millions of dollars promoting these drugs, clearly aiming at the normal depressions that stem from everyday problems. You don’t see in these advertisements seriously depressed suicidal people who are in the hospital. You find the wives who are squabbling with husbands or having trouble raising their children. They’re targeted at everyday problems, and they are hugely successful.
“To claim that hunter-gatherers perceive their environment as a “wilderness”—in contrast to a domesticity that one would be hard put to define—is to deny that they are aware that, in the course of time, they modify the local ecology by their techniques of subsistence. Over recent years, for example, Aboriginals have been protesting to the Australian government against its use of the term “wilderness” to qualify the territories that they occupy and by so doing frequently justifying the creation of natural reserves that they do not want. The notion of a “wilderness,” with all its connotations of terra nullius, of an original and preserved naturalness, an ecosystem to be protected against the degradations liable to be introduced by human beings, certainly runs contrary to the Aboriginals’ own concept of the environment and the multiple relations that they have established with it, and above all it ignores the subtle transformations that they have produced in it. As a leader of the Jawoyn of the Northern Territory said, when part of their land was converted into a natural reserve, “Nitmiluk national park is not a wilderness…, it is a human artefact. It is a land constructed by us over tens of thousands of years through our ceremonies and ties of kinship, through fire and through hunting.” Clearly, for the Aboriginals, as for other hunting peoples, the opposition between wild and domesticated is not very meaningful, not only because of their lack of domesticated animals but above all because they inhabit the entire environment as a spacious and familiar dwelling place, rearranged to suit successive generations with such discretion that the touch of its inhabitants becomes almost imperceptible.”
We can think of the world as made up of
things. Of
substances. Of
entities. Of something that
is. Or we can think of it as made up of
events. Of
happenings. Of
processes. Of something that
occurs. Something that does not last, and that undergoes continual transformation, that is not permanent in time. The destruction of the notion of time in fundamental physics is the crumbling of the first of these two perspectives, not of the second. It is the realization of the ubiquity of impermanence, not of stasis in a motionless time.
Carlo Rovelli.
The Order of Time. London: Allen Lane, 2018.
“Sometimes to accept is also a gift. The anthropologist David Graeber points out that the explanation that we invented money because barter was too clumsy is false. It wasn’t that I was trying to trade sixty sweaters for the violin you’d made when you didn’t really need all that wooliness. Before money, Graeber wrote, people didn’t barter but gave and received as needs and goods ebbed and flowed. They thereby incurred the indebtedness that bound them together, and reciprocated slowly, incompletely, in the ongoing transaction that is a community. Money was invented as a way to sever the ties by completing the transactions that never needed to be completed in the older system, but existed like a circulatory system in a body. Money makes us separate bodies, and maybe it teaches us that we should be separate.”
— Rebecca Solnit, in The Faraway Nearby (via Kathie Adams)
we don’t necessarily have to make books work. We can make new forms instead. This doesn’t have to mean abandoning narrative prose; it doesn’t even necessarily mean abandoning paper—rather, we can free our thinking by abandoning our preconceptions of what a book is. Maybe once we’ve done all this, we’ll have arrived at something which does indeed look much like a book. We’ll have found a gentle path around the back of that intimidating slope. Or maybe we’ll end up in different terrain altogether. So let’s reframe the question. Rather than “how might we make books actually work reliably,” we can ask: How might we design mediums which do the job of a non-fiction book—but which actually work reliably?
A Canadian C-130 crew with radiation detecting equipment prepares to search the Canadian North for wreckage from Kosmos 954, Operation Morning Light, 1978
“… “I’m taking action because I feel desperate,” said U.S. climate scientist Peter Kalmus, who along with several others locked himself to the front door of a JPMorgan Chase building in Los Angeles. A recent report found that the financial giant is the biggest private funder of oil and gas initiatives in the world.
“It’s the 11th hour in terms of Earth breakdown, and I feel terrified for my kids, and terrified for humanity,” Kalmus continued. “World leaders are still expanding the fossil fuel industry as fast as they can, but this is insane. The science clearly indicates that everything we hold dear is at risk, including even civilization itself and the wonderful, beautiful, cosmically precious life on this planet. I actually don’t get how any scientist who understands this could possibly stay on the sidelines at this point.” …”
It follows that the notion of certain configurations being more particular than others (twenty-six red cards followed by twenty-six black, for example) makes sense only if I limit myself to noticing only certain aspects of the cards (in this case, the colours). If I distinguish between all the cards, the configurations are all equivalent: none of them is more or less particular than others. the notion of ‘particularity’ is born only at the moment we begin to see the universe in a blurred and approximate way.
Carlo Rovelli,
The Order of Time. London: Allen Lane, 2018.
But there are not just
twotimes. Times are legion a different one for every point in space. There is not one single time; there is a vast multiplicity of them.
Carlo Rovelli,
The Order of Time. London: Allen Lane, 2018.
Clouds cover the Atlantic Ocean in the waters off the coast of The Bahamas. Cumulus clouds like these usually occur on sunny days, usually no higher than 6,600 feet (2,000 m) above the ground. Normally, cumulus clouds produce little or no rain, but they can grow into precipitation-bearing cumulonimbus clouds.
The rewards of having a causal model that can answer counterfactual questions are immense. Finding out why a blunder occurred allows us to take the right corrective measures in the future.
Judea Pearl and Dana Mackenzie.
The Book of Why: The New Science of Cause and Effect. London: Penguin Books, 2018.
Sound is made of the most ephemeral stuff on Earth, insubstantial tremors of air. Yet sound is also the great connector and revealer. Because sound waves pass through and around obstacles, they link living beings into sonic information networks. Some of these networks are communicative—songs, music, and speech—and some amount to eavesdropping—predators and competitors listening to one another as they breathe, move, and eat. Listening, then, can reveal the unseen dynamics of the living world. In a time of crisis and rapid change, listening offers us a powerful way to connect and understand.
But what we hear is often sonic loss. Some of this loss is erasure through species extinction. The song of the Kauaʻi ʻōʻō, a honeyeater bird from Hawaii, or the Rabbs’ fringe-limbed treefrog from central Panama will never again ring through forests. Another form of loss is the diminished sonic diversity of habitats: a reduction in the variety of melodies, the richness of layers of different sound frequencies, the range of different tempos, and the temporal variability of sonic expression through daily and seasonal cycles.
Tree plantations or row crops are acoustically bland and anemic compared to the vigor and lush sonic variegations of a forest abounding in diverse life. Excess engine and industrial noise also causes loss of sonic diversity by smothering other sounds and fragmenting the acoustic links that formerly linked populations and communities. And then there is the loss caused by our inattention. When we cease to listen, the richness of human sensory experience, a necessary foundation for right action, is eroded.
Every habitat on Earth has its own sonic signature, made of the thousands of voices present at each place. It took a long time for this sonic diversity to emerge. Predation likely kept a lid on sonic communication for hundreds of millions of years. The first animals in the oceans and on land could hear, especially in the low frequencies. To sing or cry out was therefore to invite death. To this day, vocal creatures are those that can quickly escape or defend themselves. The frog, cricket, and bird owe their songs, in part, to their jumping legs or wings.
“We have to be very alert and careful here. For we tend to try to fix the essential content of our discussion in a particular concept or image, and talk about this as if it were a separate ‘thing’ that would be independent of our thought about it. We fail to notice that in fact this ‘thing’ has by now become only an image, a form in the overall process of thought i.e. response of memory, which is a residue of past perception through the mind (either someone else’s or one’s own). And so, in a very subtle way, we may once again be trapped in a movement in which we treat something originating in our own thought as if it were a reality originating independently of this thought. We can keep out of this trap by being aware that the actuality of knowledge is a living process that is taking place right now (e.g. in this room). In such an actual process, we are not just talking about the movement of knowledge, as if looking at it from the outside. We are actually taking part in this movement, and are aware that this is indeed what it is happening. That is to say, it is a genuine reality for all of us, a reality which we can observe and to which we can give our attention. The key question is then: “Can we be aware of the ever-changing and flowing reality of this actual process of knowledge?” If we can think from such awareness, we will not be led to mistake what originates in thought with what originates in reality that is independent of thought. And thus, the art of metaphysics may develop in a way that is free of the confusion inherent in those forms of thought which try to define, once and for all, what 'the whole of reality is’, and which therefore lead us to mistake the content of such thought for the overall order of a total reality that would be independent of thought.”
— David Bohm, Reality and Knowledge Considered as Process, Birkbeck College, University of London, May 1974
In the weeks since Putin invaded Ukraine, investors have ditched stakes in Russian oil and gas with unprecedented speed.
The financial sector is finally acting on the calls campaigners have been making for years. Banks, pension funds and investors are unshackling themselves from problematic investments in companies and states complicit in destruction in Ukraine – and they’re doing it fast.
This transformation happened within weeks – and demonstrates that divesting from fossil fuels can be a bold political move that raises the standard for corporate behaviour in those companies.
This was evident in the actions of Russia’s second largest oil company, Lukoil. Days after investors raced to divest from the energy giant, it became the first major Russian company to break ranks with Putin, calling for the “soonest termination of the armed conflict”.
If the financial world can divest this rapidly from companies linked to Russia’s imperial war – with dramatic political consequences – it can also part ways with the other companies fueling the climate fire. For a safe and prosperous future for us all, this must be a reckoning for the financial world.
Putin used revenues from oil and gas to build Russian military power in the run-up to the war on Ukraine. Forty percent of Russia’s federal budget comes from oil and gas. Russian oil, gas and mining companies paid the Russian state £39 billion in taxes in 2020. This is just shy of the £41.7 billion Russia spent on its military in 2019.
But this is just one example in a devastating pattern of the fossil fuel economy financing violence – a pattern repeated around the world. Whether it is the execution of Ken Saro Wiwa in the Niger Delta or Saudi Arabia’s war in Yemen, the murders of indigenous environmental protectors in the Amazon or conflict in the Cabo Delgado – fossil fuel economies play an instrumental role in perpetuating violence around the world.
Francis Crick called it “the Astonishing Hypothesis”: that consciousness, also known as Mind, is an emergent property of matter, which if true, indicates that all intelligence is machine intelligence. What distinguishes natural from artificial intelligence is not what it is, but only how it is made.
Frank Wilczek, “The Unity of Intelligence.” In
Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, edited by John Brockman. 64-75. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2019.
Consistent with Marx, the modern mental health system evolved alongside capitalism as it emerged in Europe and the United States, and it is useful to consider how it arose, and also what predated it.
In England from the 16th century, a series of laws called the Poor Laws enabled local officials to manage various social problems linked to poverty, including the problems posed by people who would nowadays be labelled as having a mental disorder. Looking at material from the Poor Law records suggests the Poor Law fulfilled two main functions in this respect: it enabled the provision of care for those people who could not look after themselves (and for their families if it was the bread winner who was incapacitated) and it allowed for the control of behaviour that put the peace, harmony and safety of the community at risk, but was not amenable to the usual forms of community punishment or formal legal sanctions. The Poor Laws catered only for families who were not wealthy enough to make their own arrangements and they took over some of the functions of the monasteries that were destroyed under Henry VIII, particularly provision of care for the sick and disabled. They also formalised pre-existing local, informal arrangements of social control.
The rise of capitalism and industrialisation in England in the 18th and 19th centuries threw more and more people into poverty, and these local arrangements started to become increasingly burdensome, bringing the idea of institutional solutions into vogue. Following the Poor Law Amendment Act of 1834, those who were unable to provide for themselves were forced to enter the forbidding Victorian Workhouse to obtain public assistance. The regime in these institutions was deliberately designed to be harsh and punitive so that people would endure low paid work in terrible conditions to avoid having to resort to them. When people did turn to the Workhouse, in desperation, they would be motivated to leave as soon as possible.
The public mental asylums arose in this context and were designed to provide a pleasanter, more therapeutic space for those residents or potential residents of the Workhouse who were mentally disturbed. Right back in the Elizabethan Poor Law a distinction was made between the deserving and undeserving poor, with the idea that the undeserving poor were the lazy and unmotivated who could be forced back to work, while the deserving poor were the sick and incapable who could not. The asylum arose to cater for a section of the deserving poor and it was believed that the gentle, but structured regime (as it was intended) would help restore the mad to sanity and thereby render them fit to work.
In other words, the capitalist system made it necessary to separate the deserving and undeserving poor, so as not to undermine efforts to make the majority fit for exploitation in the exacting environment of early capitalism. Asylums provided a place for the care of the unproductive and for the containment of disruptive behaviour that might threaten social harmony and make other people less willing or able to be exploited.
In recent decades, the functions of the public asylum have been privatised and re-distributed among a network of private providers of secure facilities, residential homes, home care teams and, of course, families. This was designed to reduce costs to the public sector through the provision of less intensive care by a lower paid, less skilled workforce, and to increase opportunities for the generation of profit.
When he wrote
The Human Use of Human Beings, Wiener was straddling the end of the era of understanding machines and animals simply as physical processes and the beginning of our current era of understanding machines and animals as computational processes.
Rodney Brooks, “The Inhuman Mess Our Machines Have Gotten Us Into.” In
Possible Minds: Twenty-Five Ways of Looking at AI, edited by John Brockman. 54-63. New York, NY: Penguin Press, 2019.
Excerpt from this story from the
Africa Wildlife Foundation:
In recent years, camera traps — discreet motion-triggered or time-lapse cameras — have transformed wildlife research and conservation, especially for scientists and conservationists mapping wildlife in remote areas. These cameras enable researchers to collect photographic evidence of rarely spotted and globally endangered species with ease and minimal disturbance to the wildlife or environment.
Also known as game cameras or trail cameras, camera traps are devices used to record wildlife activity. These digital monitoring tools capture images at particular intervals or by sensing movement. In addition, some cameras have video capabilities. They work day and night, allowing scientists to observe animals behaving naturally in their habitats when not under people’s viewing. While camera traps get plenty of unusable data, such as images of wind-swept grasses, they also record important images that can help scientists, researchers, and conservationists.
The prevalence of elephant calves in camera trap images, for instance, could mean elephants are breeding, and over time conservationists can use this information to model the species’ population dynamics in that particular area. In addition, during the dry season, camera traps can help determine whether wildlife is thriving or not, or even identify diseases or signs of health issues in animals.
For instance, in 2019, when researchers recorded a mystery skin condition in 13 giraffes at Tanzania’s Serengeti and Ruaha National Parks, they used camera trap images to quantify the severity of the disease.
After multiple combat tours as a Navy SEAL, Marcus Capone tried talk therapy. Brain-injury clinics. Prescription drugs. Nothing worked to ease his crippling depression and anxiety.
Then he smoked the venom of the Sonoran desert toad.
“I saw why they call this the ‘God molecule’ after I got a full central nervous system reset,” said Mr. Capone, 45, who now runs a nonprofit with his wife helping hundreds of other Special Operations veterans access toad medicine.
Riding the wave of greater mainstream acceptance of psychedelics for treating mental disorders and addiction, a fast-growing retreat industry is touting the potential of the toad’s secretions. People pay anywhere from $250 for a ceremony in the East Texas woods to $8,500 for a more gilded beachfront setting in Tulum, Mexico, to consume the venom.
But in a sign of the unintended consequences of the psychedelic resurgence, scientists are warning that the scramble by users to obtain the toads — involving poaching, over-harvesting and illegal trafficking in arid expanses straddling the border with Mexico — could trigger a collapse in Sonoran desert toad populations.
Toad medicine apostles are now increasingly split between those like Mr. Capone, who support using synthetic versions that are easy to produce, and purists who say they will never stop using venom collected from the toads themselves. As retreat operators tailor experiences for therapeutic, recreational or spiritual purposes, the discussions over threats to the toad are growing more contentious.
The toad itself, found primarily in the Sonoran desert, which straddles parts of the southwestern United States and northwestern Mexico, is already thought to have been extirpated in California, where it hasn’t been found in the wild in decades. Authorities in New Mexico list it as threatened, citing excessive collection among factors.
The Sonoran desert toad can still be found in parts of Arizona and Sonora in northwest Mexico. One of the largest toads native to North America and remarkably long-lived with a life span reaching 20 years, it hibernates underground for most of the year, resurfacing to breed around the summer monsoon rains.
When the toad is threatened, it excretes toxins strong enough to kill full-grown dogs. A substance found in these toxins, 5-MeO-DMT, can be dried into crystals and smoked in a pipe, producing an intense experience generally lasting 15 to 30 minutes, in contrast to other psychedelic substances that can involve hours of hallucinating and vomiting.
Personalities, organizations, goals, and means can all be thought of in terms of the Magic colors they typify, allowing you to draw interesting connections, make surprisingly useful predictions, identify deficits and growth areas, and increase empathy. I claim that the Magic system, which was designed to be resonant and trope-y and archetypal, does a lot of the same good work that naming things does, and is a richer intuition pump than other popular wrong-but-usefuls like Enneagram or MBTI or chakras or the integral theory colors.
Sans Forgetica is more difficult to read than most typefaces – and that’s by design. The ‘desirable difficulty’ you experience when reading information formatted in Sans Forgetica prompts your brain to engage in deeper processing.
ForgeFed is an upcoming federation protocol for enabling interoperability between version control services. It’s built as an extension to the ActivityPub protocol, allowing users of any ForgeFed-compliant service to interact with the repositories hosted on other instances. The goal of the project is to support all of the major activities connected to project management, including bug reports, merge requests, and notifications across instances.
Most of the world is divided neatly into distinct nations with clearly defined borders. This map is about the locations that do not fit that model, those territories that are claimed by more than one country / occupying force. The conflicts range from major wars whose impacts are felt around world (e.g. Islamic State) to minor disagreements over remote, uninhabited rocks (e.g. Rockall Island).
Rotor Deconstruction facilitates the reuse of construction materials. Rotor Deconstruction is a young actor in the field of salvaged building components. Besides running a store in the Brussels Region, we provide assistance to building owners, contractors and architects.
most technical discussions are terrible. Not in a sense that people can’t make good points and progress through it, but rather that there is no structure to a discussion, and it’s too hard to follow. What I see in reality is a lot of focus from a very few dedicated people, and delegation by the other ones to those focused. Many views get misrepresented, and many perspectives never heard, because the flow of comments quickly filters out most potential participants.
The Borderlands Archive is an institution dedicated to documenting connections across territorial divide through the collection of contributed artifacts, photographs, maps and research. Despite the numerous monumental attempts to divide the space between the U.S. and Mexico, the Borderlands Archive makes material and mental cross-border connections, physically present.
As Alexa, Google Home, Siri, and other voice assistants have become fixtures in millions of homes, privacy advocates have grown concerned that their near-constant listening to nearby conversations could pose more risk than benefit to users. New research suggests the privacy threat may be greater than previously thought. The findings demonstrate how common it is for dialog in TV shows and other sources to produce false triggers that cause the devices to turn on, sometimes sending nearby sounds to Amazon, Apple, Google, or other manufacturers. In all, researchers uncovered more than 1,000 word sequences—including those from Game of Thrones, Modern Family, House of Cards, and news broadcasts—that incorrectly trigger the devices. “The devices are intentionally programmed in a somewhat forgiving manner, because they are supposed to be able to understand their humans,” one of the researchers, Dorothea Kolossa, said. “Therefore, they are more likely to start up once too often rather than not at all.” That which must not be said Examples of words or word sequences that provide false triggers include Alexa: “unacceptable,” “election,” and “a letter” Google Home: “OK, cool,” and “Okay, who is reading” Siri: “a city” and “hey jerry” Microsoft Cortana: “Montana”
Our setup was able to identify more than 1,000 sequences that incorrectly trigger smart speakers. For example, we found that depending on the pronunciation, «Alexa» reacts to the words “unacceptable” and “election,” while «Google» often triggers to “OK, cool.” «Siri» can be fooled by “a city,” «Cortana» by “Montana,” «Computer» by “Peter,” «Amazon» by “and the zone,” and «Echo» by “tobacco.” In our paper, we analyze a diverse set of audio sources, explore gender and language biases, and measure the reproducibility of the identified triggers.
We stayed up all night, my friends and I … So begins the preamble to that ur-manifesto of the avant-garde, F. T. Marinetti’s “The Founding and Manifesto of Futurism” (1909). The manifesto appeared as a paid advertisement on the front page of Le Figaro; the next morning it was birdcage liner for most of its readers. Yet it has become more familiar than any single work of art the Futurists produced in the decades of activity that followed. More manifestos followed, too: hundreds of them, on subjects ranging from painting and sculpture to cinema and photography, from clothing and feminism to cooking and lust. Futurist manifestos were ephemeral, hurled off balconies and out of speeding automobiles, but they have since been carefully archived, translated, anthologized, and reproduced in textbooks of art history, literature, political science, and rhetoric.
Coeio is probably one of the most famous tech startups in the funeral business. Remember when former Beverly Hills 90210 actor Luke Perry died last year? Shortly thereafter, his daughter revealed that the actor was buried in a biodegradable mushroom suit from Coeio. The ‘infinity burial suit’, although suit might not be the best way to describe the strange-looking black bodysuit, is made entirely of mushrooms and other small organisms, and was designed to help decompose remains into nutrients that return to the earth. Coeio’s mission is simple: to reduce dead people’s environmental impact by cleansing the body of toxins that would otherwise have seeped into the ground by feeding them to fungi, all this with a $1,500 (£1,140) suit. For many, the price for an eco-friendly decomposition might seem over the top, but the fungi suit seems to be one of the cheapest options the funeral market has to offer.
thesis “robotic self-exploration and acquisition of sensorimotor skills” - available from @UBHumboldtUni on or via @ResearchGate - minimal publishable version #minpub #smp #pilingup
ALT
