We’ve noted more times than I can count how in the modern era, you no longer really own the things you buy. Thanks to internet connectivity, hardware you own can be bricked or downgraded to the point where you lose essential features. Or, just as often, obnoxious DRM means you have to jump through all kinds of bizarre hoops to actually use the thing you thought you owned, whether that’s Keurig using DRM to prevent you from using competing coffee pods, to printer manufacturers using DRM to keep you from buying cheaper cartridges.
Now Home Depot is experimenting further with DRM at the point of sale. The company has started embedding chips in many of the major tool brands it sells (DeWalt, Milwaukee). And unless the tool is enabled by a Bluetooth-based system at the register, it simply won’t work when you take it home:
“Home Depot says their new anti-theft strategy is now being used in several stores nationwide to combat the thefts of their most popular power tools. A chip is inserted into power tools of major brands like DeWalt and Milwaukee brand tools, similar to how gift cards need to be scanned and paid for at a store to activate. Once the tools are paid for, the store will use Bluetooth technology to activate the tool.”
Yes, what could possibly go wrong. What if the system is buggy and doesn’t work? What if you then try to contact a manufacturer or retailer that no longer exists or supports the device and systems in question? Too bad….
Salt to Stars: The Environmental and Community Impacts of Lithium Mining.
A comic by the Center for Interdisciplinary Environmental Justice with art by Sophie Wang, text under the cut. This is part of
a toolkit to challenge greenwashing in the climate movement. Please share to support Indigenous water protectors and non-extractive decolonial solutions to climate change!
Lithium and other metals needed for various low emissions/renewable energy technologies, and their associated environmental impacts, are sort of the hidden piece of the picture when we talk about sustainability. One of the reasons I’m so intrigued by geothermal energy is the potential for associated cascade applications, like lithium co-production with geothermal fluids:
More experiments with CLIP+VQGAN image generation. Turns out I can give it the names of completely fictional painters and it’ll generate distinct styles for each of them.
“Cathedral of Giants by Carmine Nottyors”
ALT
“Cathedral of Giants by Picov Andropov”
ALT
“Cathedral of Giants by Janelle Shane”
ALT
Interesting to think about the factors it’s using in coming up with the painting styles. Similarity to the names of other artists? Similarity to other words? I wonder how (if at all) this space could be explored.
Nequam Sonitus is a performance noise act currently active in Tampa, Florida. The identity of the members remains unknown. Originally a studio act which released albums sporadically to the internet, the band has recently developed a live visual/audio performance. The few documented performances of Nequam Sonitus describe an unknown humanoid creature made of flesh and steel which has an unexplained symbiotic bond with audio equipment, causing the sounds that it makes to be amplified by nearby speakers. It appears to sustain itself on sound waves, seeming to require or desire a great variety of harsh noises. Upon its release, it seeks out any objects or surfaces that make unique or loud noise when scratched, beaten, or otherwise acted upon aggressively. The creature does not appear to be deliberately dangerous, although it is recommended that viewers keep a distance to avoid the risk of collateral injury. The second member of the act remains in the back during the performance, and doesn’t reveal their identity when spoken to.
“Blockchains automate away at the centre. Instead of putting the taxi driver out of a job, blockchain puts Uber out of a job and lets the taxi drivers work with the customer.”
“Grown-ups” may try to drill something into you. They might have meant well, but what they teach you is not always the truth. I’m not telling you to disrespect nor distrust them. Because they are also lost, living their life in delusions. But we gotta avoid to get caught in such delusion or anything that disturbs you from your accomplishment. And the answer is always in your own self.
This is also like a conversation with the “inner child” in myself. This “inner child”, still breathing inside me, must be what enables me to enjoy skateboarding even at my age.
As a child, I was suddenly put under the narrow and distorted value enforced by the educational establishment and had been quantified, compared and forced to compete. From that time, I found a glimmer of light shining deep inside myself and felt that I have to protect it no matter how. Although I didn’t know what that light was, I could not explain about it to anyone and was kinda stuck, didn’t know what to do with my life.
And then I met skateboarding with its culture and its attitude, yes, that “skateboarding”. It came from a land far away over the sea, but it fitted me. I could feel how I got hooked on it. I had an acute feeling that there was the way to protect my tiny light. But at the same time, I started to part ways with everyone around.
At the period everyone begin to feel the urge to satisfy their self-conscious, classmates would always go to Karaoke, bowling or video arcades. And of course alcohol and smoking would follow. It seemed like their most rebellious, determined act against the grown-ups, but from my view, they were just taking the easiest way prepared by the grown-ups. Just another “fake comfort”. They weren’t even enjoying it fully nor spontaneously. Thinking of them like that, there was no way to get along with them. I even hated myself for that, but I just couldn’t get along.
Because the skaters were always trying to create something new, skateboarding was exciting, filled with surprise and joy. They wouldn’t just accept the status quo, but overcome the discomfort they got from society in their own way. I believe they had a strong will to never ever get swallowed down by this faulty system created by the grown-ups.
But as the time goes by, even the skaters grew up. A “society” was constructed in the world of skateboarding and it looked like the “grown-ups” moral was taking the wheel.
I didn’t want to get swallowed down by it. I could not lose that skateboarding, which protected my tiny light inside me. In a quiet manner, I decided to fight against it.
During the time I got a father of a daughter. Being exposed to her boundless innocence and freedom, I could recognize little by little what that “tiny light” was. It is the “inner child”. People who saw my tricks would ask me how or where I got the idea of them, but that’s what this “inner child” does.
The inner child is free-spirited and whimsy, never get caught by any kind of rule. And what he or she creates contains an explosive energy. But that energy is very hard to handle. Physical factors will block you up when you try to put the energy into any kind of “shape”. It’s way too free and requires me to do things beyond my physical ability. Without thinking if it could be possible or not, the inner child would tell me “Wouldn’t it be funny if you could do that? You can do that for sure!” And yeah, it would be funny if I could make it. So the grown-up persona in myself would show up and try to find the way leading from impossible to the possible and takes the inner child along the path. The mix of both characters enables me to accomplish a trick. Which also means that I need hella time to actually make the trick.
Why I’m telling you such a super personal story is, because I realize that if you would push a subjective matter to the ultimate, you can discover something universal.
And the world of skateboarding nowadays, which tends to the grown-ups‘ conception looks like suffering and struggling to find the right balance.
I’m also feeling this distress as a grown-up after I got a parent of a child. But that is why I could rediscover the importance of this “inner child”. Both sides are essential and you should never lean only to one side. I believe that finding and enforcing the right balance will be my gratitude and repayment to skateboarding.
“Australia is a lucky country run mainly by second rate people who share its luck. It lives on other people’s ideas, and, although its ordinary people are adaptable, most of its leaders (in all fields) so lack curiosity about the events that surround them that they are often taken by surprise.”
“The distinction between licit and illicit drugs hinges on binaries: healing versus harm, relief of suffering versus desire for pleasure, medication versus recreation, obedience versus rebellion. These oppositions crumble under the slightest pressure. There are countless examples of harm caused by medical interventions. In the case of psychoactive medications, the most severe unwanted effects include addiction, psychosis, overdose, and suicide. Illicit psychoactive drugs, meanwhile, can heal. Ibogaine can help those addicted to heroin; psychedelics and MDMA can help relieve PTSD, depression, and anxiety in some people; opiates, stimulants, and sedatives can help people survive the aftermath of trauma or the suffering of unhappy everyday life. Relief is a kind of pleasure, engendering desire. Recreation relieves pain, and obedience can be a form of self-harm.”
— Sophie Pinkham at Portside, reviewing
White Market Drugs by David Herzberg.
However, arts practices differ from Enlightenment conceptions of intelligence and knowledge in the following way: They do not (usually, primarily)
mine the world for symbols. The historical emergence of the academy itself is a product of these Enlightenment values in the sense that it valorizes the distillation of abstract symbolic representations from the world. Art operates directly upon embodied, sensorial materiality, making physical, material, and temporal permutations that are invested with intelligence
unintelligible from a cognitivist perspective. These intelligences have been relegated to the realm of skill, the
merely artisanal because they engage materiality directly and do not traffic primarily in the symbolic notations that have become the lingua franca of our age.
Penny, Simon.Making Sense: Cognition, Computing, Art, and Embodiment.Cambridge, MA: The MIT Press, 2017.
When the Pegasus Project dropped last week, it was both an ordinary and exceptional moment. The report — from Amnesty, Citizenlab, Forbidden Stories, and 80 journalists in 10 countries — documented 50,000 uses of the NSO Group’s Pegasus malware.
The 50,000 targets of NSO’s cyberweapon include politicians, activists and journalists. The Israeli arms-dealer — controlled by Novalpina Capital and Francisco Partners — has gone into full spin mode.
NSO insists that the report is wrong, but also that it’s fine to spy on people, and also that terrorists will murder us all if they aren’t allowed to reap vast fortunes by helping the world’s most brutal dictators figure out whom to kidnap, imprison and murder.
As I say, all of this is rather ordinary. The NSO Group’s bloody hands, immoral practices and vicious retaliation against critics are well established.
It’s been four years since NSO’s assurances that it only sold spying tools to democratic states to hunt terrorists were revealed as lies, when Citizenlab revealed that its weapons targeted Mexican anti-sugar activists (and their children).
Then Citizenlab found 45 more countries where NSO’s Pegasus weapon had been used, and demonstrated that notorious human-rights abusers got help from NSO to target everyday citizens to neutralize justice struggles.
Outside of human rights and cybersecurity circles, the story drew little attention, but it did prick NSO’s notoriously thin skin — the company dispatched (inept) private spooks, late of the Mossad, to entrap Citizenlab’s researchers.
As far as we know, the company never managed to infiltrate any of Citizenlab’s systems — but their weapons were found on the devices of an Israeli lawyer suing them for their role in human rights abuses.
That had some consequences. The attack exploited a vulnerability in Whatsapp, owned by Facebook. FB retaliated by suing — and terminating NSO Group employees’ Facebook accounts. Judging from NSO’s outraged squeals, getting kicked of FB hurt far worse.
Through it all, the NSO Group insisted that its tools were vital anti-terror weapons — not the playthings of rich sociopaths with long enemies lists.
They continued these claims even after Pegasus was linked to the blackmail attempt against Jeff Bezos, in a bid by Saudi royals to end the Washington Post’s investigative reporting on the murder and dismemberment of the journalist Jamal Khashoggi.
Despite all this — attacks on the powerful and the powerless, grisly deaths and farce-comedy entrapment attempts — NSO Group plowed on, raking in millions while undermining the security of the devices that billions of us rely on for our own safety.
Until now.
Something about the Pegasus Project shifted the narrative. Maybe it’s the ransomware epidemic, shutting down hospitals, energy infrastructure, and governments — or maybe it’s the changing tide that has turned on elite profiteers. Whatever it is, people are pissed.
Finally.
I mean, when Edward Snowden calls for the owners of a cybercrime company to be arrested, people sit up and pay attention. But Snowden’s condemnation of NSO and its industry are just for openers.
Snowden describes NSO as part of an “Insecurity Industry” that owes its existence to critical vulnerabilities in digital devices in widespread use. They spend huge sums discovering these vulns — and then, rather than reporting them so they can be fixed, they weaponize them.
As Snowden points out, this is not merely a private sector pathology. Governments — notably the US government, through the NSA’s Tailor Access Operations Group — engage in the same conduct.
Indeed, as with all digital surveillance, there’s no meaningful difference between private and public spying. Governments rely on tech and telecoms giants for data (which they buy, commandeer, or steal, depending on circumstances).
This, in turn, creates powerful security/public safety advocates for unlimited commercial surveillance, to ensure low-cost, high-reliability access to our private data. Those agencies stand ready to quietly scuttle comprehensive commercial privacy legislation.
This private-public partnership from hell extends into the malware industry: the NSA and CIA can’t, on their own, create enough cyber-weapons to satisfy all government agencies’ demand, so they rely on (and thus protect) the Insecurity Industry.
But as Snowden points out, none of this would be possible were it not for the vast, looming, grotesque tech-security debt that the IT industry has created for us. Everything we use is insecure, and it’s built atop more insecure foundations.
We live in an information society with catastrophic information security. If our society was a house, the walls would all be made of flaking asbestos and the attic would be stuffed with oily rags.
It’s hard to overstate just how much risk we face right now, and while the Insecurity Industry didn’t create that risk, they’re actively trying to increase it — finding every weak spot and widening it as far as possible, rather than shoring it up.
It’s a cliche: “Security is a team sport.” But I like how Snowden puts it: security is a public health matter. “To protect anyone, we must protect everyone.”
Step one is “to ban the commercial trade in intrusion software” for the same reason we “do not permit a market in biological infections-as-a-service.”
We should punish the cyber-arms dealers — but also use international courts to target the state actors who pay them.
But this fight will be a tough one. The huge sums that governments funnel to cyber arms-dealers allows them to silence their critics — I’ve been forced to remove some of my own coverage thanks to baseless threats I couldn’t afford to fight.
Writing in today’s Guardian (who also removed unfavorable coverage of NSO Group following legal threats), Arundhati Roy demolishes the company’s claims of clean hands.
After all, NSO charges a 17% “system maintenance fee” that gives them oversight and insight into how their tools are being used by the demagogues and dictators who shower them with money.
“There has to be something treasonous about a foreign corporation servicing and maintaining a spy network that is monitoring a country’s private citizens on behalf of that country’s government.” -Roy
The NSO Group claims that the human rights abuses it abets are exceptions that slip through the cracks, but the reality is, it has no business model without state terror — without powerful thugs who demand weapons to help jail, torture and kill their critics.
NSO, more than anyone, should know this. But as Upton Sinclair wrote, “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it.”
“Carrion crows in the city of Sendai in Japan have discovered an ingenious way of cracking walnuts. They take the nuts and wait beside the road until the light turns red. Then they descend, place the nuts in front of the wheel of the car, and fly off. When the light turns green, they return and eat the pieces of the nut that a vehicle has crushed. (Sax, 2003:20)”
—
As the debate on culture continues, some ground is often given to primates who it can be agreed possess culture. Other animals are often overlooked. Human-animal anthropology merges with Actor Network Theory and the Gaia hypothesis. There are questionable boundaries.
Treehugger has long had an interest in rainwater harvesting, porous paving, and stormwater gardens. By rethinking our built environment, we can create opportunities for water to seep into the ground during extreme rainwater events—and often sequester carbon and promote biodiversity in the process too.
What the Depave Movement does, however, is it takes these individual water management strategies and deploys them through a lens of community building and social justice. Because just like air pollution, the urban heat island effect, and other environmental ills, the impact of flooding and toxic groundwater pollution is rarely shared equally.
Depave—one of the community groups that is pioneering this movement—is focused on reclaiming over-paved spaces in Portland, Oregon. Bringing together staff and volunteers for what it describes as “constructive destruction”, the organization partners with host sites each year to demolish un- or under-used pavement, and instead design, fund, and install a range of permeable community spaces that include play-scapes, parks, and community gardens.
According to their 2019 Impact Report, the group has depaved over 220,000 square feet over the past 12 years, collecting stormwater runoff from over 500,000 square feet of adjacent impervious areas. All together, their work has reduced annual stormwater runoff by a whopping 15,840,000 gallons. And while this group focuses its efforts in the Pacific Northwest, it has also published a free guidebook—called “How to Depave: The Guide to Freeing Your Soil“—which is intended to provide insights for others who are setting out on this journey.
“Coloniality, therefore, names the various colonial-like power relations existing today in those zones that experienced direct colonialism. The concept of coloniality was introduced by the Peruvian sociologist Aníbal Quijano and was further elaborated by the Argentinean decolonial semiotician Walter D. Mignolo and others such as Nelson Maldonado-Torres. In “Coloniality and Modernity/Rationality,” Quijano identified four key levers of coloniality: control of the economy, control of authority, control of gender and sexuality, and control of knowledge and subjectivity (173). Mignolo emphasized “colonial difference” as a central leitmotif of coloniality. Coloniality is a name for the “darker side” of modernity that needs to be unmasked because it exists as “an embedded logic that enforces control, domination, and exploitation disguised in the language of salvation, progress, modernization, and being good for everyone” (The Idea of Latin America 6).”
When Mitch Kapor articulated the principle that “architecture is politics” at the founding of EFF, he was charging technologists with the moral duty to contemplate the kinds of social interactions their technological decisions would facilitate — and prohibit.
At question was nothing less than the character of the networked society. Would the vast, pluripotent, general purpose, interconnected network serve as a glorified video-on-demand service, the world’s greatest pornography distribution system, a giant high-tech mall?
Or could it be a public square, and if so, who would have the loudest voices in that square, who would be excluded from it, who will set its rules, and how will they be enforced?
As with its technical architecture, the political architecture of the net is a stack, encompassing everything from antitrust enforcement to spectrum allocation, protocol design to search-and-seizure laws, standards to top-level domain governance.
Among those many considerations is the absolutely vital question of service delivery itself. What kinds of wires or radio waves will carry your packets, who will own them, and how will they be configured?
For decades, a quiet war has been fought on this front, with two sides: the side that sees internet users as “mouse potatoes,” destined to passively absorb information feeds compiled by their betters; and the “netizen” side that envisions a truly participatory network design.
This deep division has been with us since the internet’s prehistory, at least since the fight over Usenet’s alt.* hierarchy, flaring up again during the P2P wars, with ISPs insisting that users were violating their “agreements” by running “servers.”
Above all, this fight was waged in the deployment of home internet service. The decision turn the already-monopolistic cable and phone operators into ISPs cast a long shadow. Both of these industries think of their customers as passive information consumers, not participants.
As an entertainment exec in William Gibson’s 1992 novel Idoru describes her audience: “Best visualized as a vicious, lazy, profoundly ignorant, perpetually hungry organism craving the warm god-flesh of the anointed. Personally I like to imagine something the size of a baby hippo, the color of a week-old boiled potato, that lives by itself, in the dark, in a double-wide on the outskirts of Topeka. It’s covered with eyes and it sweats constantly. The sweat runs into those eyes and makes them sting. It has no mouth…no genitals, and can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote. Or by voting in presidential elections.”
Contrast this with the other cyberpunk archetype, the console cowboy who doesn’t merely surf the digital, but steers it — the active participant in the technological/media environment who is more than a recipient of others’ crafted messages.
For a long time, Big Tech and Big Telco tried to have it both ways. AT&T promoted teleconferencing and remote family life conducted by videophones in its 1993 “You Will” marketing campaign. Youtube exhorted you to “broadcast yourself.”
But AT&T also set data-caps, kicked users off for running servers, and engaged in every legal, semi-legal and outright illegal tactic imaginable to block high-speed fiber networks.
Youtube, meanwhile, blocked interoperability, leveraged vertical integration with Google search to exclude and starve competitors, and conspired with Big Content to create a “content moderation” system that’s two parts Kafka, one part Keystone Kops.
While the questions raised by broad participation in networked society are thorny and complex, one question actually has a very simple and factual answer: “How should we connect our homes to the internet?” The answer: “Fiber.”
There is no wireless that can substitute for fiber. Wireless — 5G, Starlink, whatever — shares the same spectrum. We can make spectrum use more efficient (by tightly transmitting the wireless signals so they don’t interfere), but physics sets hard limits on wireless speeds.
Each strand of wire in a wired network, by contrast, is its own pocket universe, insulated from the next wire, with its own smaller, but exclusive, electromagnetic spectrum to use without interfering with any other wire on the other side of its insulation.
But copper wire also has hard limits that are set by physics. The fastest theoretical copper data throughput is an infinitesimal fraction of the fastest fiber speeds. Fiber is millions-to-hundreds-of-millions times faster than copper.
We should never run copper under another city street or along another pole. Any savings from maintaining 20th century network infrastructure will be eradicated by the cost of having to do twice the work to replace it with 21st century fiber in the foreseeable future.
Trying to wring performance gains out of copper in the age of fiber is like trying to improve the design of whale-oil lamps to stave off the expense of electrification. Sure, you don’t want anyone sitting in the dark but even the very best whale-oil lamp is already obsolete.
But besides future-proofing, there’s another reason to demand fiber over copper or wireless: symmetry. Our copper and (especially) wireless infrastructure is optimized for sending data to end-points, not getting data back. It’s mouse-potato broadband.
(this is especially true of any satellite broadband, which typically relies upon copper lines for its “return path,” and even when it doesn’t, has much slower uplinks that downlinks)
By contrast, fiber tends to be symmetrical — providing the same download and upload speeds. It is participatory broadband, suited for a world of distance ed, remote work, telemedicine, and cultural and political participation for all.
Fiber is so obviously better than copper or wireless that America paltry fiber rollouts needed to be engineered — they never would have happened on their own. The most critical piece of anti-fiber engineering is US regulators’ definition of broadband itself.
Since the dawn FCC interest in universal broadband, it adopted a technical definition of broadband that is asymmetrical, with far lower upload than download speeds. Despite lockdown and broadband-only connections to the outside world, Congress is set to continue this.
The latest iteration of the Democrats’ broadband bill defines “broadband” as any connection that is 100mb up and 20mb down (“100/20”). Both of these speeds paltry to the point of uselessness, but the upload speed is genuinely terrible.
US broadband usage has grown 21%/year since the 1980s. 100/20 broadband is inadequate for today’s applications — let alone tomorrow’s (by contrast, fiber is fast enough to last through the entire 21st century’s projected broadband demand and beyond, well into the 2100s).
Any wireless applications will also depend on fiber — your 5G devices have to be connected to something, and if that something is copper, your wireless speeds will never exceed copper’s maximum speeds. Innovation in spectrum management requires fiber — it doesn’t obviate it.
Today, the highest growth in broadband demand is in uploads, not downloads. People need fast uploads speeds to videoconference, to stream their games, to do remote work. The only way a 100/20 copper network’s upload speeds can be improved is by connecting it with fiber.
Every dollar spent on copper rollout is a dollar we’ll forfeit in a few years. It’s true that cable monopolists will wring a few billions out of us if we keep making do with their old copper, but upgrading copper just makes the inevitable fiber transition costlier.
China is nearing its goal of connecting 1 billion people to fiber. In America, millions are stuck with copper infrastructure literally consisting of century-old wires wrapped in newspaper, dipped in tar, and draped over tree-banches.
Indeed, when it comes to America, monopoly carriers are slowing upload speeds — take Altice, the US’s fourth-largest ISP, which slashed its upload speeds by 89% “in line with competitors’ offerings.”
But it has a major blockage: the American right, who have conducted history’s greatest self-own by carrying water for telecoms monopolists, blocking municipal fiber:
It’s darkly funny to see the people who demanded that “government stay out of my internet” now rail against monopoly social media’s censorship, given that a government ISP would be bound by the First Amendment, unlike Facebook or Twitter.
Luckily, Congress isn’t the only place where this debate is taking place. In California, Governor Newsom has unveiled an ambitious plan to connect every city and town to blazing-fast fiber, then help cities and counties get it to every home.
In tech circles, we use the term “read-only” to refer to blowhards who won’t let you get a word-in edgewise (this being one of the more prominent and unfortunate technical archetypes).
The “consumer” envisioned by asymmetrical broadband futures is write*-only — someone designed to have other peoples’ ideas crammed into their eyeballs, for their passive absorption. A consumer, not a citizen.
As Gibson put it, it’s a person who “can only express its mute extremes of murderous rage and infantile desire by changing the channels on a universal remote.”
“Cyberspace, not so long ago, was a specific elsewhere, one we visited periodically, peering into it from the familiar physical world. Now cyberspace has everted. Turned itself inside out. Colonized the physical. Making Google a central and evolving structural unit not only of the architecture of cyberspace, but of the world. This is the sort of thing that empires and nation-states did, before. But empires and nation-states weren’t organs of global human perception. They had their many eyes, certainly, but they didn’t constitute a single multiplex eye for the entire human species.”
— William Gibson, Google’s Earth, The New York Times, August 31, 2010
i was reading about the myth of prometheus today when the phrase “new liver, same eagles” popped into my mind, so i’m keeping that in mind for the next time someone asks me how it’s going
Thank you to everyone who found the original for us! Here it is!
“Think of art and philosophy as long conversations in which participants come and go, some joining in at the end, others at the beginning, others coming late but insisting on learning what was said earlier, while others intervene without a good sense of whats going on. Or compare art and philosophy to martial arts: the unity of the field is the unity of the teaching lineage. It is real human relationships — student to teacher to teacher’s teacher to teacher’s teacher’s teacher, and so on.”
— Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015.
“Three taps, three times. This is part of professional skateboarder Andrew Reynolds’ ritual when trying to offset his anxiety before he performs a trick. He refers to this as ‘the madness…The madness might be best understood as a superstition, a tactic of edgework to assert some control over the chaos of attempting to jump a four-foot- high and 16-foot-wide set of stairs on a precariously wheeled wooden board. But in some ways rituals are superstitions, they must be performed at certain times and follow specific procedures in order for them to be valid. Rites are performed to allay our anxieties about specific life events both big and small.”
–
Ritualised Play, Skateboarding and Religion (2020, p.179)
I share this passage from my book in response toa thread unfolding on the SLAP message board right now. It is all about the curious superstitions that skateboarders have when they skate particular spots. A quick read of them points to some rather ritualised behaviour. It is far from the first thread on SLAP to deal with skateboarding superstitions, there are actually quite a few (here,and here, andhere) . This one grew out of a thread about anxieties inwearing red while skateboarding.
Partly this is superficial fun, but it is also curious to learn fo the range of superstitions that people attach to their skateboarding. These acts correspond to a type of significance many would not necessarily attribute to skateboarding. What they do highlight is that skateboarding is a type of serious play, and that play might simply be one of the most important things that we, as humans, do. More on this from my chapter…
The skateboard is like a divine object that can connect an individual to conceptions of existence greater than themselves. Borden develops this from the work of Henri Lefebvre (2008, p. 118), who claims that ‘toys and games are former magical objects and rituals.’ … In our final exploration of play we come to understand how skateboarders see themselves as having access to a special, magical realm of life. In performing ritual some skateboarders consider themselves enlightened, different from the blinkered ‘muggles’ ignorant of their toy, the true essence of the city, the nearness of freedom and fraternity, and of course the enduring rewards of play.
To close off this short post I include The Vice video in which Andrew Reynolds talks about his ‘Madness’ the superstitious-OCD like-ritual that permeates his skateboarding.
It is still better to speak only in riddles, allusions, hints, parables. Even if asked to clarify a few points. Even if people plead that they just don’t understand. After all, they never have understood. So why not double the misprision to the limits of exasperation? Until the ear tunes into another music, the voice starts to sing again, the very gaze stops squinting over the signs of auto-representation, and reproduction no longer inevitably amounts to the same and returns to the same forms, with minor variations.
Luce Irigaray, Speculum of the Other Woman (1985), p, 143
Rudolph Valentino. Douglas Fairbanks. Sessue Hayakawa. What do these men have in common? All reigned as dashing matinee idols during the silent era. But while Valentino and Fairbanks usually won the girl’s heart by the end, Hayakawa’s Japanese heritage almost always prevented him from doing the same; in fact, he became the first Asian actor to achieve stardom in Hollywood – and he did so while playing the villain.
I first witnessed Hayakawa’s star power in Cecil B. DeMille’s THE CHEAT (‘15). The ferocity of his actions on screen, and—I’ll admit it—his devastatingly good looks, stunned and entranced me. Not recognizing his name, I decided to investigate and was quickly intrigued by Hayakawa’s life and career in Hollywood.
Born in Japan in 1886, Hayakawa’s journey took him to the United States, where he made his film debut in 1914. (Though many sources—including Hayakawa himself—claim he moved to the U.S. to study at the University of Chicago, the school has no records showing he attended.) The following year, his role as a wealthy businessman in THE CHEAT propelled him to fame, albeit in an unusual way. In the movie, Hayakawa loans a socialite (Fannie Ward) $10,000… in exchange for sex. When she repays the money and tries to back out of the physical part of their deal, he refuses, and, in a shocking scene, literally brands her as his property.
Caucasian women went wild over Hayakawa’s performance. Stephen Gong, Executive Director of the Center for Asian American Media, noted the widely-cited reasoning for that in a 2008 interview: “The idea of the rape fantasy, forbidden fruit, all those taboos of race and sex – it made him a movie star.” However, THE CHEAT and the striking reaction Hayakawa’s understated style and brazen brutality elicited was fraught with the racial prejudices and sexual mores of the time, and the film didn’t fare well with everyone. Japanese moviegoers and publications in America decried Hayakawa for taking on a villainous role that adversely affected how they were viewed and treated. Indeed, in his 1960 book
Zen Showed Me the Way, Hayakawa recalled, “I was indignantly accused of casting a slur on my nationality,” something other Asian actors, like Anna May Wong, were charged with too, even though Hollywood rarely offered them non-stereotypical parts.
The actor’s star ascended quickly; in fact, a 1917 theater advertisement marketed a “mammoth triple feature program,” placing Hayakawa on the same level of stardom as Charlie Chaplin and Western icon William S. Hart. After Hayakawa’s contract with Jesse Lasky ended in 1918, he formed Haworth Pictures Corporation, which gave him more power over his career and enabled him to undertake a wider variety of roles. Haworth churned out almost 20 films from 1918-1922, and at the helm, Hayakawa could funnel his creative talents through the entire filmmaking process; in addition to acting, he produced and wrote select features, and he’s also said to have contributed to Haworth productions’ design, editing and directing. Hayakawa often appeared alongside Caucasian actresses in these pictures, but even when he played the hero, miscegenation laws basically barred him from a blissful finale. A rare happy ending during this period came in THE DRAGON PAINTER (‘19), which Hayakawa co-starred in with his wife, Japanese actress Tsuru Aoki. Hayakawa’s studio proved so successful that he commanded an astounding $7,500 a week in 1920, the equivalent of almost $100,000 a century later.
But at the top of his game, Hayakawa left Hollywood. The reasons for his 1922 exit remain murky, but different sources credit business issues, mounting xenophobia/discrimination and more. In an odd statement from a 1957
Los Angeles Times interview, Hayakawa plainly stated he relocated because, “I met a treacherous man. He took out a $1,000,000 policy on my life. And I believe he tried to kill me to collect.”
Mysteries aside, the actor spent the next few decades working on stage and screen across Europe and Japan, settling for a while in France, where he resided during WWII. Though Hayakawa mostly remained abroad the rest of his life, he occasionally returned to America, including in 1931 to act in his first Hollywood talkie, DAUGHTER OF THE DRAGON, and the late 1950s. During the latter period, he appeared in his most famous film, THE BRIDGE ON THE RIVER KWAI (‘57), resulting in a Best Supporting Actor Oscar nomination.
While researching Hayakawa’s life, I uncovered a good amount of conflicting and/or unverified information, some even proliferated by the actor himself. Indeed,
Sessue Hayakawa: Silent Cinema and Transnational Stardom author Daisuke Miyao has said, “I think the life of Hayakawa as a star was always a process of creating his own myth.” But a little bit of confabulation probably serves the enduring enigma of an enchanting matinee idol well, does it not?
he wasn’t even there to be a contestant he joined the crew as a CHINESE TEACHER but the directors noticed his good looks and begged him to compete. poor guy made it to the finals and if he had been one of the winners he would have been contractually forced to be in a boy band whether he wanted to or not
this is the closest any human being has ever come to actually being sold to One Direction
In 2008, I traveled to the world’s largest scientific data-centers for a Nature story. No matter whether the labs were devoted to internet archiving, the human genome, or the Higgs boson, they had two things in common: vast server farms, and XKCD.
Randall Munroe’s webcomic is so unabashedly geeky, so unafraid to be obscure or format-breaking, so affectionate and knowing about the triumphs and pitfalls of science that it is absolute catnip for scientists.
Last week, Munroe published strip #2456, “Types of scientific paper,” a 3x4 grid of thumbnails of journal articles with titles like, “We put a camera somewhere new” and “My colleague is wrong and I can finally prove it.”
Even by XKCD standards, this is heavy scientist-bait. The research community has risen to the challenge, flooding the net with remixes that are, if anything, even better than the original: works of microfictional genius to rival Hemingway’s “For sale: baby shoes, never worn.”
Many of these have been collected on @bruces’ Tumblr blogs, and, taken as a body, they constitute an act of wry, insightful auto-ethnography - self-criticism wrapped in humor that tells a story.
“Types of Paper in Epidemiology and Public Health”
We counted how many people have a disease, here are maps with poor countries in red
We found that if you call your research ‘genetic epidemiology,’ then people are surprisingly OK with eugenics
“To understand art, I propose, we need to look at it against the background of technology. Artists make stuff, after all: pictures, sculptures, performances, songs. And art has always been bound up with manufacture and craft, with tinkering and artifice. Art, however, is not itself one of our technologies; art presupposes technology in something like the way irony presupposes straight talk. Technology — practices of making, the harnessing of knowledge for this purpose — is no contribution to art; it is its precondition.”
— Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015.
“Or, as the psychologist James J. Gibson claims, seeing doesn’t happen in the eye-brain system, it happens in the eye-brain-head-body-ground-environment system. It is something we do, not something that happens inside us. And like everything we do, it depends on more than just what is going on at a time inside the skull.”
— Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015.
2.5b people in Earth’s 130 poorest countries have not been vaccinated. The 85 poorest countries won’t be vaccinated until 2023. The humanitarian cost is unforgivable - and self-defeating, as each infected person is a potential source of new strains.
What happened to the early pledges by governments, the WHO, public health experts and leading research institutions to create global cooperation in vaccine development, eschewing patents and secrecy so that we could rescue our species?
That dream was smashed.
Many people helped create our vaccine apartheid, the single individual who did the most to get us here is Bill Gates, through his highly ideological “philanthropic” foundation, which exists to push his pitiless doctrine of unfettered monopoly.
It was Gates who sabotaged the WHO Covid-19 Technology Access Pool (C-TAP), replacing it with his failed ACT-Accelerator, a system of patents and secrecy and vast profits for the pharma industry, ornamented with nonbinding, failed promises of access for poor nations.
It was Gates who convinced Oxford to renege on its promise of patent-free access to its publicly funded vaccine research for the global south in favor of exclusive patent access for Astrazeneca.
When we hear ghoul sellouts like Howard Dean pushing the racist, genocidal lie that “patents don’t matter” because brown people in poor countries can’t make vaccines, we’re hearing Gates’s talking points:
Gates’s role in vaccine apartheid is laid out in exquisite detail in Alexander Zaitchik’s outstanding New Republic feature, which delves into Gates’s longstanding project to sideline democratic governments and cooperation in favor of monopoly tyranny.
This goes way, way back. I mean, *waaaay* back, all the way to 1976, when Gates wrote his infamous “Open Letter to Hobbyists,” decrying the dominant, cooperative mode of software development and calling its practitioners thieves.
Gates’s fortune depended on creating a software monopoly, and that monopoly required “intellectual property” protection. Gates has always been a monopolist, and so naturally, he loves IP (before “IP” was a common term, copyrights and patents were called “monopolies”).
Intellectual property is a very important part of the inequality story, the story of how we got to a world where billions of people are denied vaccines and where all people face new, more virulent strains as a result.
As UNCTAD chief economist Richard Kozul-Wright told Lynn Fries for GPE: “[IP allows companies] to grab a larger share of what has already been produced in the economy.”
It’s a means of extracting rents, not for doing things, but for OWNING things.
IP is key to tax avoidance: companies like Ikea transfer “IP” (the Ikea trademark) to a numbered company in a tax haven; each national Ikea subsidiary pays “licensing fees” for the trademark equal to 100% of their in-country profits, so they never earn a (taxable) cent.
The transformation of the world into a monopolized system of IP-heavy, rent-extracting, tax-dodging companies really kicked into gear after 1999, with the signing of the WTO agreement and its IP adjunct, the TRIPPS, and as Zaitchik details, Gates was instrumental there.
For this part of the story, Zaitchik talks to Jamie Love, who was at the UN when NGOs like his were pushing to create vaccine and other pharma pools for the global south, while pharma companies handed out pamphlets bearing the Gates Foundation logo, smearing the plan.
Though the US delegation struggled for credibility, the combination of the Gates Foundation, and former US trade officials fronting for the global pharma industry managed to sideline the project, which was being driven by the demand for equitable access to AIDS drugs.
With Gates’s help, the WTO emerged as an IP enforcement powerhouse. Zaitchik cites Dylan Mohan Gray: “it took Washington 40 years to threaten apartheid South Africa with sanctions and less than four to threaten the post-apartheid Mandela government over AIDS drugs.”
Incredibly, the Gates Foundation used this to burnish its humanitarian image: they solicited donations from pharma companies and used them to subsidize AIDS drugs in the global south, a maneuver that let them seem like philanthropists.
When in reality, they had overseen a program to systematically deny the world’s poorest and most threatened people the right to make their own drugs, making them dependent on the whims of multinational corporate charity instead.
Sound familiar? Today, Gates runs around repeating the lie that poor people can’t make their own medicine, saying that patent exemptions won’t make a difference now - to the extent he’s right, the world *now* is the crucial one.
Having sabotaged the efforts by poor countries to engage in the kind of production ramp-up the rich world saw as vaccines were being developed, it may *now* be too late. “Because of my bad ideas *then*, it’s too late *now*.”
The connection between IP and elite philanthropy is deep and important. IP’s rent-seeking and tax-dodging has made poor countries beholden to offshore monopolists in health, agriculture and IT, and then starved them of taxes to build up domestic alternatives.
This, in turn, makes them dependent on “gifts” from the billionaires who arm-twisted them into IP treaties, forced them to pay rent on all domestic production, and then profit-shifted the funds out of the reach of their tax-collectors.
As Anand Giridharadas reminded us in his seminal “Winners Take All,” the core purpose of elite philanthropy has been the same since the robber-baron era: to burnish the reputations of monsters who take everything and give back crumbs.
Reading Jamie Love’s quotes in Zaitchik’s article reminded me of my own time working with Jamie and Knowledge Ecology International at WIPO in Geneva, when I was an NGO delegate to a global DRM treaty.
You see, at WIPO, the vast majority of NGOs aren’t human rights organizations or other public interest groups - they’re industry associations representing tech, entertainment, broadcast and pharma monopolists.
These guys - almost all guys - were just aghast when real NGOs started showing up for these meetings and were absolutely shameless in their sabotage of our efforts to balance their corporate lies (absolutely bald-faced lies were routinely entered into the debates).
How petty? Well, they had been accustomed to writing up “fact-sheets” for the day’s debate and handing them off to WIPO staffers working for the secretariat, who would photocopy them and set them out on literature tables for the national delegates.
So we started doing this too: we’d take careful notes on the day’s debates, convene with global experts to debunk industry association lies, get our Indymedia friends to translate them into six languages, and hand them off to the secretariat in the morning for copying.
So they got the secretariat - a former US textiles negotiator who made her bones helping create the conditions for slave labor in places like Bangladesh - to end the practice of photocopying papers for all NGOs.
Of course the industry bodies had cushy offices in Geneva, whereas we stayed in flophouses and youth hostels. They could ask their underlings to come in early and do their copying for them, whereas we had to take a bus to the all-night copy-shop to get our handouts copied.
Here’s where it gets super-weird: our handouts started to go missing. We’d set out our stacks of paper on the literature tables before the morning session and an hour later, they’d all be gone, but none of the delegates had managed to get a copy.
We found those missing handouts…in the garbage, behind potted plants and in the *toilets*.
No, seriously.
And here’s the kicker: during the ensuing furore, the main response from the pharma lobbyists was to object to us calling ourselves “public interest NGOs.”
I’ll never forget this smarmy sociopath in his expensive suit, with his shit-eating grin, standing there saying, “Phamaceuticals serve the public interest, and our industry association is a nonprofit. We are a non-profit, public-interest NGO.”
It was a remarkable sight. 20 years later, their version of the public interest - the doctrine of Gates - has produced a multi-billion-person reservoir of the sick and vulnerable who are doomed to serve as factories for highly virulent variants.
This is a literally genocidal doctrine, and it threatens our very civilization. It’s a funny kind of non-profit, public interest move for an industry and its billionaire ideologue funders to have made.
But hey, at least no one’s “intellectual property” took a hit.
“In this way we appreciate that technology extends not only what we can do. It also extends what we are. Our minds bleed out of our heads, onto the paper, into the world. The philosophers Andy Clark and David Chalmers (of the University of Edinburgh and New York University, respectively) frame the issue this way: Where do you stop and where does the rest of the world begin? There doesn’t seem to be any principled reason to think the stuff going on inside our heads is privileged in comparison with the stuff we write on paper. Both are necessary for the kinds of thoughts we have, for the kinds of thinking and problems that interest us.”
— Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015.
“Here’s the short and partial answer. There is an intimate link between technology and organized activities. Roughly, a tool (such as a hammer or a computer) is the hub of an organized activity. Technology is not mere stuff. It is the equipment with which we carry on our organized activities. Technologies organize us; properly understood, they are evolving patterns of organization.”
— Noë, Alva. Strange Tools: Art and Human Nature. New York, NY: Hill and Wang, 2015.
The plummeting price of electricity from solar panels is one of the driving forces aiding the transition to clean energy.
Government policies and scientific innovation around the world have helped to reduce the average cost of utility-scale solar power by more than 80 percent since 2010, making it the least expensive power source in many, if not most, places.
Now the Department of Energy has set a target of reducing the cost by more than half again by 2030, to an unsubsidized average of 2 cents per kilowatt-hour. That cost, which takes into account the price of construction and operation, would have seemed like a fantasy not long ago.
By taking the least expensive power source and making it much cheaper, the government would shake the foundation of many energy debates and help to hasten the transition away from fossil fuels.
The computer science maxim “garbage in, garbage out,” (GIGO) dates back at least as far as 1957. It’s an iron law of computing: no matter how powerful your data-processing system is, if you feed it low-quality data, you’ll get low-quality conclusions.
And of course, machine learning (AKA “AI”) (ugh) does not repeal GIGO. Far from it. ML systems that operate on garbage data produce garbage predictive models, which produce garbage conclusions at vast scale, coated with a veneer of algorithmic objectivity facewash.
The scale and credeibility of ML-derived GIGO presents huge risks to our society in domains as varied as the credit system, criminal justice, hiring, education - even whether your kids will be taken away by Child Protective Services.
To make this all worse, the vast data-sets used to train ML systems are in scarce supply, which leads multiple ML models to be trained on the same data, enshrining the defects of that data in all kinds of systems.
One of the most significant training datasets is Imagenet, a collection of 14m labeled images that jumpstarted the ML revolution in 2012. As Will Knight writes for Wired, Imagenet’s labels came from low-waged, undersupervised workers.
Imagenet is one of the data-sets examined in new research from MIT’s Curtis Northcutt,, who found that Imagenet and other comparable datasets have a typical error rate of about 6%.
This small margin of error has big consequences: first, because the errors aren’t evenly distributed, and instead cluster around the kinds of biases that labelers have (for example, labeling images of woman medical professionals with “nurse” and men with “doctor”).
And second, because the incorrect labels obscure relative performance differences between models. When one model does better than another, you can’t know if that’s because it is a better model, or because it’s less sensitive to incorrect labels.
The opioid epidemic is a corporate murder spree that killed more Americans than the Vietnam war, and its deaths carry on, accelerating during the pandemic. The enrichment to its principal architects outstrips the Rockefeller fortune, and they stand to retain that wealth.
The Sacklers owned Purdue Pharma, whose Oxycontin was ground zero of the epidemic. Purdue pushed deliberate lies about the safety of its product and aggressively marketed through doctors and distributors, under the direction of the family patriarch Richard Sackler.
The Sacklers were determined to come through the crisis both rich and well-loved. They laundered the family reputation with gifts to arts institutions that saw their names on galleries and museums around the world. That was the carrot.
The stick was litigiousness - their lawyers threatened me for writing about them - that let them convert blood money to legal force, burying Richard Sackler’s bizarre deposition, which only came to widespread attention thanks to John Oliver.
That was just the tip of the iceberg. Lawyers for the company and the family used the law to suppress court proceedings that revealed the deliberate strategy to addict their customers to Oxy:
The courts were so complicit in the Sacklers’ campaign to suppress evidence of their complicity that they became, effectively, co-conspirators in the opioid crisis:
The Sacklers didn’t invent corporate crime playbook, but their contributions are significant. For example, their PR ninjas at Dezenhall Resources - late of Enron - did very will with a victim-blaming strategy that smeared the dead as reckless junkies.
Eventually, the survivors of Sacklers’ opioids caught up with them. Purdue was sloughed off into a bankruptcy proceeding, and the Sacklers themselves began to cry poor, offering what they claimed were their last $4b to survivors.
But they conspicuously failed to mention the $8-9 billion they’d moved offshore:
(the Sacklers dismissed this story as “nothing newsworthy”).
It looks like they’ll get to keep that blood money, too, thanks to another act of solidarity from the US legal system. A bankruptcy judge is poised to roll the Sacklers’ personal liabilities into the bankruptcy restructuring of Purdue Pharma.
As Libby Lewis explains in The American Prospect, this is a bizarre metastasis of US bankruptcy law, which, in many cases, has swallowed the entire criminal justice system.
Under the Purdue/Sackler proposal, the rights of victims will be transformed into property, owed by the Sacklers, and which the bankruptcy court claims jurisdiction over. So the bankruptcy court can decide what that asset is worth and what percentage of that the victims get.
That means that the legal claims of the victims are being nonconsensually settled without a trial. Worse, the bankruptcy judge making this settlement isn’t even a federal judge with Senate confirmation, qualified to hear a criminal matter - he’s just an administrative judge.
It’s a twisted process. The Sacklers aren’t in bankruptcy court, so they aren’t obliged to disclose all those billions stashed offshore. But they’ve asked the judge to turn the their legal liabilities into property that he can dispose of in *Purdue’s* bankruptcy.
So Jenny Scully, who gave birth to an opioid-addicted child six years ago, because her doctors prescribed her dangerous painkillers whose risk had been downplayed by Purdue and the Sacklers, will have no more recourse.
None of this is in the Bankruptcy Code, but the courts (especially the Second Circuit, which covers the finance sector in NYC), follow a case from the asbestos settlement era that created this weird precedent.
The exception has swallowed the rule, and now bankruptcy is the go-to way for the beneficiaries of corporate crimes - even mass deaths - to walk away with more wealth than the Rockefellers.
(Honestly just turn this place into Ever Given content only; a massive distributed learning platform focused on complex systems, supply chains and maritime infrastructure through Very Online Discourse)
U.S. coal, natural gas and motor fuel producers get implicit benefits worth tens of billion of dollars a year by not having to pay for the damage their products do to the climate and human health, a study said on Monday.
As the world begins to transition to technologies that emit less pollution to generate electricity and fuel vehicles, economists are attempting to estimate the cost to society of burning fossil fuels.
In a study published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Science, Yale University economist Matthew Kotchen calculated that U.S. fossil fuel companies get direct benefits of $62 billion a year in implicit subsidies due to what he calls “inefficient pricing”.
The overall health, climate and transportation costs to society are about $568 billion, the study, titled “The producer benefits of implicit fossil fuel subsidies in the United States”, said.
i would love to read a book about the psychology or sociology of environmental awareness. like bonilla-silvas “racism without racists” but for the environment. just tons of interviews, and a dissection and naming of attitudes and behaviors.
The Blackjewel coal mining company can walk away from cleaning up and reclaiming coal mines covered by more than 30 permits in Kentucky under a liquidation agreement that was reached Friday in federal bankruptcy court in Charleston, West Virginia, attorneys participating in the case said.
About 170 other Blackjewel permits in Kentucky, Tennessee, Virginia and West Virginia will be placed into legal limbo for six months while Blackjewel attempts to sell them to other coal mining companies, the attorneys said. Any permits that are unable to be transferred can then also be abandoned by the company, once the nation’s sixth-largest coal producer.
The ruling will go into effect after bankruptcy court Judge Benjamin Kahn signs a final order.
The Kentucky Energy and Environment Cabinet was preparing a written statement on the decision late Friday but a spokesman said it was not immediately available and declined to comment.
Thousands of acres of mountainous land in Kentucky alone have been disturbed by strip mining allowed by the permits that were before the judge. Both the state and the companies that issued bonds guaranteeing clean-up and reclamation of the dynamite-blasted landscapes had warned in court proceedings that there might not be enough money to do all the required work.
With other U.S. coal-mining companies in similar financial straits and demand for coal plummeting, Blackjewel’s situation is a harbinger of the trouble ahead in coal country, Inside Climate News reported earlier this month.
“Unfortunately, this is likely the start of a trend where bankrupt coal companies dump their coal mine cleanup obligations onto communities and taxpayers who simply don’t have the money to pick up the tab,” said Peter Morgan, a senior attorney at the Sierra Club, who was participating in the case. “This should be a wake-up call to state regulators across the country to immediately hold coal mining companies accountable and to put miners to work cleaning up coal mines before all the burden falls on taxpayers and underfunded surety bonds.”
“I’m on a 500-year clock right now. I’m right here knowing that we’ve got a hell of a long time before we’re going to see the end. Right now, all we’re doing is building the conditions that will allow the thing to happen.”
recur to enjoy this album, one of the first documented cases making use of rla open licensing. keep pushing it, no limit. been recently accused of autopoeisis by third party with great joy #autopoesis https://t.co/WLAHyCx3j9 @internetarchive #recentlivearchive
Reddit investors have found a way to meme for good.
The amateur investors on subreddit WallStreetBets often refer to themselves as apes and use the phrase “Apes Together Strong,” BBC News reported. Now, some subreddit members have started to take this saying literally. Within days, Redditors have raised $350,000 for the Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund by adopting more than 3,500 gorillas, The Guardian reported.
“It’s safe to say that the#investor community on@reddit is not traditionally who we think of as our supporter base. But they definitely surprised and overwhelmed us over the weekend,” the conservation group tweeted.
The trend began last Friday when Reddit user Pakistani_in_MURICA posted an adoption certificate for a mountain gorilla named Urungano. The post received a 92 percent upvote rate and prompted many other users to follow suit.
The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund works with mountain gorillas in Rwanda and Grauer’s gorillas in the Democratic Republic of Congo, according to BBC News. On Twitter, the group said that the new funds would support their work studying and monitoring gorillas, and supporting the people who live near them.
The organization told The Guardian that it usually receives 20 new gorilla adoptions a weekend, a far cry from the thousands that the Redditors initiated.
More often than not, when I encounter a proposal to address monopoly power, I return to that old Irish joke: “If you wanted to get there, I wouldn’t start from here.” 1/ https://t.co/eueCdNbCJB
What causes neurotypicality? Research is ongoing but some of the likely culprits include: - egg whites - parenting - jet fuel - anything delicious - women probably - you let them keep their teddy bear too long - attention
Ask yourself: Could this meeting be a zoom? Could this zoom be a phone call? Could this phone call be an email? Could this email be a text? Could this text be unsent? Could we in silence retreat to the forest? Could we, by game trails & forgotten paths, vanish into the trees?
“Brain tissue can only be laid down at a constant rate during development, so if you want a bigger brain, you have to take longer to produce it. There are no shortcuts. This means that, at least in mammals, you have to have longer periods of gestation and lactation if you want to evolve a larger brain. And since a computer is no use without software, you also have to have a longer period of socialization (essentially the time between weaning and the start of reproduction) in order to allow the brain to fine tune its ability to deal with all the subtleties of the dynamic, constantly shifting social world. Neuroimaging studies of humans suggest that it takes a surprisingly long time (around 20-25 years) for the brain to figure out how to handle the complexities of our social world.”
“On one hand, a photo makes everything it represents exist on a strictly ‘equal footing’. Form and ground, recto and verso, past and future, foreground and distance, foreground and horizon, etc. — all this now exists fully outside horizontality-without-horizon. This ‘flattening’, this horizontality-without-horizon, is the contrary of a levelling of hierarchy and a fusion of differences: the suspension of differences proceeds here as a liberation and an exacerbation of ‘singularities’ and ‘materialities’.”
–Laruelle, François.The Concept of Non-Photography / Le Concept De Non-Photographie. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth& New York, NY: Urbanomic& Sequence Press, 2011. (viacarvalhais)
With Robinhood, “you’re able to put it on your homescreen and flip between Instagram and Snapchat; it doesn’t feel as serious as it used to,” he said. “It’s just an app you open up on your phone, there’s graphs, and numbers, and it’s easy to understand and learn really quickly.”
Many young users on the WallStreetBets forums have complained that no matter what they do, the deck is always stacked against them. Many say they seek to expose the entire financial system for the game that it is. Meme stocks are part of that. Some will hype up a novelty stock or trade it as a stunt.
“Non-photography is thus neither an extension of photography with some variation, difference or decision; nor its negation. It is a use of photography in view of a non-photographic activity which is the true element of the photo, its meaning and its truth.”
— Laruelle, François.The Concept of Non-Photography / Le Concept De Non-Photographie. Translated by Robin Mackay. Falmouth & New York, NY: Urbanomic & Sequence Press, 2011.
“Zhen Xian Bao or Chinese thread book is a yarn collection box made using paperfolding techniques developed from a fascinating tradition from remote South West China. Boxes are basically everywhere in it”
.. a realization of the enormous educational task which must be successfully accomplished right now in a hurry in order to convert man’s spin-dive toward oblivion into an intellectually mastered power pullout into safe and level flight of physical and metaphysical success [bucky]
would go for a generator straight. i’ve got one that loads an svg as a starting point and deforms that by taking a random walk with the vertices. @LabJetpack logo hardcoded no quests https://t.co/l9F7l8XWFJhttps://t.co/7Y0vBsVRde
I learned about ResEdit at roughly the same time I learned how to use computers with GUIs. To me, the idea of a computer with an “operating system” is 1:1 linked with “you should be able to customize this infinitely and without effort”. Every computer since has dissatisfied me. https://t.co/oQ8jvyH152
hey all, today i’m going for a ride around Sol on the planet ship. anyone wanna join? it’ll take about a year and can drop you off again right here. beautiful vistas, nice food and music
📸 Explore ‘FoAM in 02020’ on Flickr, an album that weaves together FoAM trajectories through the volatility, uncertainty, complexity and ambiguity of 02020 ➡️ https://t.co/YkpAJtcL7Ihttps://t.co/nqAnIfMA2H
I say again: i am so tired of people whose art means something to me turning out to be pieces of shit, & i am equally if not even more exhausted of being told that my desire to not support the art of anyone who can’t just be goddam decent is somehow a personal failing on my part.
—Damien P. Williams, MA, MSc, Werewolf, Revenant (@Wolven)
The confluence between the dematerialisation of art and the materialisation of music happened in 1968, when John Cage played chess against Marcel (and Teeny) Duchamp on a sound-generating chessboard. https://t.co/SKbBxL3m8O
LA has temporarily suspended air quality restrictions due to the surge in cremations but yes let’s hurry back to Buca di Beppo patio seating and get a mani
Technically speaking, nothing. Werner has no background in skating. But I believe he is one of us.
This suspicion started a couple of years ago when I stumbled upon Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed. Not knowing much about him I skimmed the back cover, which eerily read like a skater’s manifesto. Werner preaches maxims like getting the shot by any means necessary, carrying bolt cutters everywhere, and thwarting institutional cowardice with guerrilla tactics. His film school teaches lock picking, forgery, and his entire career has been built on a DIY approach to life, his craft banged into existence through decades of trial and failure.
Because Werner’s approach to life and filmmaking mirrors the ethos of skating in so many ways, I decided to track him down to chat about the similarities and differences between our two worlds.
In all seriousness, there’s a temptation to see disciplines as communities that have simply made different choices about specialization. But this is wrong. Disciplines are divisions created by deep ideological and moral differences that are often in direct conflict.
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