This city roars in the summertime. You hear the generators on every street, shaking and shuddering to keep electric fans whirring as the air seems to shimmer in the heat.
Iraq isn’t just hot. It’s punishingly hot. Record-breakingly hot. When one of us returned here last week, the air outside felt like an oven. The suitcase crackled as it was unzipped. It turned out that the synthetic fibers of a headscarf had melted crispy and were now stuck to the top of the case. A cold bottle of water was suddenly warm to the lips. At our office, the door handle was so hot it left blisters at the touch.
Baghdad hit 125.2 degrees on July 28, blowing past the previous record of 123.8 degrees — which was set here five years ago — and topping 120 degrees for four days in a row. Sitting in one of the fastest warming parts of the globe, the city offers a troubling snapshot of the future that climate change might one day bring other parts of the world.
“It’s getting hotter every year,” said Jos Lelieveld, an expert on the climate of the Middle East and Mediterranean at the Max Planck Institute in Germany. “And when you are starting to get above 50 degrees Celsius [122 degrees Fahrenheit] it becomes life threatening.”
This situation—a single company controlling web standards—is what everyone freaked out about in the Windows 95 era, but the emergence of Google as de facto regulatory authority for the web doesn’t seem to rankle people as much as it should. https://t.co/X2tkFuToLl
Mapping Antarctica’s Hidden Melt. Much of Antarctica’s ice loss is happening underneath the surface–where ice that hangs off the edge of the continent touches ocean water. The more these ice shelves shrink, the faster ice on land can travel out to sea, increasing the potential for sea level rise. Notes: Ice sheet data from 2010–2018; temperature data mostly from 1990s-present
Sources: Susheel Adusumilli, Scripps Institution of Oceanography; Matthew R. Siegfried, Colorado School of Mines; Nature Geoscience
Excerpt from this story from the
Wall Street Journal:
The ice that hangs off the edge of Antarctica and floats on the ocean is melting faster than it is being replenished, even in pockets of East Antarctica typically thought to be less vulnerable to climate change, according to a study published Monday.
These structures, known as ice shelves, shed nearly 4,000 gigatons of their mass between 1994 and 2018, according to the new research, which leveraged nearly 25 years of satellite measurements of ice thickness. It echoes findings of numerous previous studies reporting the retreat and destabilization of Antarctic ice shelves but goes further, helping scientists understand the processes driving the melt around the entire continent over longer time periods and with high spatial resolution.
The study, published in the journal Nature Geoscience, is part of a relatively new scientific discipline that aims to understand how the ocean interacts with ice sheets. Ice sheets are massive swaths of ice that cover Antarctica and Greenland. The edges of ice sheets can spill over onto the ocean, forming ice shelves.
Ice-shelf meltwater doesn’t directly contribute to sea-level rise. Instead, the structures slow down the movement of ice flowing from the interior of the continent out to sea. The smaller they are, the less they hold back the flow and the faster ice on land can reach the ocean. That extra ice is what drives increases in sea levels.
States across the US have enacted cruel, unconstitutional abortion laws that require doctors to sexually assault women seeking abortions and lie to them about the health impacts of abortion. Some laws require funerals for foetal remains.
These laws were pushed by ALEC, the corporate-backed “legislative exchange” that pushes “model legislation” through a network of slick lobbyists in state-houses across the country. ALEC purports to be in favor of “liberty” and “small government.”
Enter the Satanic Temple, a federally recognized religion whose members do not believe in Satan or supernatural phenomena. They believe “that religion can, and should, be divorced from superstition.”
The Temple has a fantastic schtick. They go to places where christofascists have gotten laws passed that shove their weird, apostate version of “Christianity” down everyone else’s throats and point out that the First Amendment requires nondiscrimination among faiths.
Wanna put a giant stone Ten Commandments in front of your courthouse? Sure. But they’re gonna put a giant statue of Baphomet right next to it. The court challenges they mount aren’t cheap, but they’re slam dunks. The US Constitution is pretty clear on this.
Now, in 1993, Chuck Schumer sponsored the “Religious Freedom Restoration Act” which lets Americans sue governments over laws that “substantially burdens a person’s exercise of religion.”
Religious maniacs LOVE the RFRA and its progeny, like SCOTUS’s Hobby Lobby decision, which broadened the RFRA’s provisions and allowed corporations to claim exemptions from Rendering Unto Caesar where that interfered with the owners’ faith.
A Satanic Abortion is a religious ritual that is totally indistinguishable from a normal, medical abortion, except that the participant says a few self-affirming words about her bodily autonomy.
Oh, also: the ritual absolutely forbids, as a bedrock matter of religous conviction, any waiting periods, the withholding of medically necessary advice, mandatory counseling, required readings, and unnecessary sonograms.
Also forbidden: mandatory fetal heartbeat listening sessions and compulsory fetal burials.
If you want an abortion and the doctor tries this bullshit, hand them one of these exemption letters explaining how the law doesn’t apply thanks to the RFRA.
Now, the religious right could fight this. But if they win…they overturn the RFRA, and Hobby Lobby has to provide its employees with contraception and all the other theocratic exemptions go poof, too.
The Temple is pretty amazing. Here’s some highlights of their previous campaigns:
“Publicly confronted hate groups, fought for the abolition of corporal punishment in public schools, applied for equal representation when religious installations are placed on public property, provided religious exemption and legal protection against laws that unscientifically restrict women’s reproductive autonomy, exposed harmful pseudo-scientific practitioners in mental health care, organized clubs alongside other religious after-school clubs in schools besieged by proselytizing organizations, and engaged in other advocacy in accordance with our tenets.”
It would also support the in-progress “interesting aircraft is about to fly over me” mobile app, small things like the tar1090 geojson/kml export extension, and maybe my dream project, “what if every aircraft posted to its own social media account?”
my usual cut and paste response to being asked to write for free. still have to wheel this one out at least twice a month sigh pic.twitter.com/KhRArI2n6F
“Great set” is far from the banal compliment it appears to be. Post-performance noise lifers are in fact mutually hailing “Great Set”, son of Geb (Earth) and Nut (sky), brother of Osiris, and god of the desert, foreign lands, thunderstorms, eclipses, and earthquakes.
“Time is the substance of which I am made. Time is a river that sweeps me along, but I am the river; it is a tiger that mangles me, but I am the tiger; it is a fire that consumes me, but I am the fire. The world, unfortunately, is real; I, unfortunately, am Borges.”
This photo was taken by the owner of the hive. The beekeeper forgot to put the frames in which the bees collect honey, and the bees built their own architecture from the honeycomb, which takes into account natural ventilation, so that the air can flow freely and maintain a stable temperature. This is the heart!💛
With the Atlas of Surveillance, EFF aggregates 5300 datapoints about US police forces’ use of surveillance technology and maps them, providing an at-a-glance/searchable data on everything from Ring partnerships to shotspotters to fusion centers to drones.
If your region is blank, that means no one has done the work to figure out how your local law enforcement is spying on you. You can fill that gap! Here’s how:
Gleeful white hyphic cables are shrivelled and fixated from moon silver to darkness through over-demanded extensions of bandwidth issued by the users who in turn describe this fixation and hardening which takes place over time as a set of symptoms.
Someone leaked internal Apple email exchanges about Right to Repair to Ifixit; they reveal “internal debate, rife with uncertainty” - employees who have deep misgivings about dooming their work-product to become e-waste.
Of particular interest is the internal debate after Apple (surprisingly) published two excellent service manuals, which an Ifixit writer queried them on, asking if it was intentional.
An Apple spox wrote to the internal PR team: “Iit’s pretty clear things are happening in a vacuum and there is not an overall strategy…
“Plus, with one hand we are making these changes and the other is actively fighting Right to Repair legislation moving in 20 states without real coordination for how updated policies could be used to leverage our position.”
It looks like the service manual release was motivated by a desire to attain EPEAT green certification. As Ifixit points out, “these manuals have been online for a year. Has any harm come from it? Have lawsuits sprung out of the woodwork? We certainly haven’t heard of any.”
Apple is publishing “environmental progress reports” that stress the company’s commitment to repair and say “reuse is our first choice” - entirely new messages from the company.
As Ifixit points out: “Apple has an opportunity to push—nay, lead—the entire industry in a better direction. Durable, repairable, long-lasting products could be the norm.”
In a major new paper, just released as a preprint, the eminent UK computer scientist and digital rights campaigner Ian Brown makes the case for “Interoperability as a tool for competition regulation.”
The paper pulls together many of the recent interventions on the subject into a single, readable, brief summary that makes for an excellent overview - I’m not saying you shouldn’t read the CMA’s magesterial 450 page report, but realistically…
Brown starts by describing interop - an often slippery topic - in concrete terms, giving familiar examples from existing tech (eg SMS) and then describing how interop could open Big Tech’s silos up.
He summarizes leading economists’ views on the effects of interop on competition, presenting both pro- and con- arguments (the pro arguments are MUCH better, but then reality has a well-known leftist bias).
He then presents a taxonomy of types of platforms:
Gatekeepers: “control access between businesses and potential customers”
Conglomerates: “companies with a broad range of sometimes weakly-related businesses”
Ecosystems: “collections of services connected via privileged channels not fully available to competitors”
This is a jumping-off point for concepts from competition scholarship: “complementary innovation,” “homogenization,” “static vs dynamic effects” - the ways that companies interpenetrate each others’ products/services for good and ill.
Having covered the economic dimension, Brown turns to the social consequences of interop: as covid showed us, platform dominance has a profound effect on our social lives, with choices made by tech giants redounding to every facet of our digitally mediated, locked down lives.
Competition economists since Thatcher and Reagan have largely dismissed these consequences, focusing solely on short-term price increases as the only reliable barometer of whether monopolistic conduct is good or bad.
But tech concentration has profound impacts on our civil society - the BBC can’t get Amazon or Google to put its coronavirus coverage on their smart speakers, so “tech companies with their executives in the US have a monopoly in British people’s kitchens and living rooms.”
Other media orgs also complain that tech acts as a rent-seeker and gate-keeper, holding their audiences hostage (though those who succeed rarely complain on behalf of smaller, new entrants who can’t afford to pay tech’s tolls and thus do not compete with Big Content).
Next is privacy and data protection, citing some of the work I’ve done with my EFF colleague Bennett Cyphers:
This is a severely undertheorized area, and there are severe potential pitfalls if we get it wrong. One thing we know, though, is that the status quo is NOT good for privacy, and lack of competition doesn’t incentivize tech monopolists to do better.
Next, Brown turns to content moderation, an area of growing concern that regulators have primarily addressed by creating impossibly expensive mandates to prevent harmful speech, at costs that preclude new market entrants, strengthening Big Tech’s dominance.
Brown cites federated platforms like Mastodon, which allow for partial interconnetion between autonomously maintained servers, where communities can make their own policies and block/filter those with policies they disagree with.
These offer the possibility of having fine-grained locally responsive rules - enforced by the community itself, not by traumatized subcontractors in the Philippines tasked with moderating all of Facebook’s 2.6B users’ contributions.
Brown takes on “digital sovereignty” and the uneasy fact that most of the west’s online media is controlled by a handful of US-based companies with “GDP"s larger than most countries’.
Interop lets domestic competitors arise that can benefit from these US giants’ users, while returning control to local firms and regulators.
Brown ends with an appendix that enumerates types of interop and scenarios for how they could be applied to existing Big Tech firms’ services, bringing the whole thing into focus with concrete examples and proposals.
As the US Congress showed us yesterday, we’re at a turning point with our relationship to Big Tech. Smaller tech companies are experiencing a mass die-off thanks to covid, and Big Tech has huge war-chests it can use to snap them up.
When these US giants buy all their nascent competitors, they will present themselves as rescuers, saviors of businesses drowning in debt. But unless we intervene, they will emerge from the crisis with levels of dominance we can hardly dream of.
“True literacy in systems consists of much more than simple understanding, and might be understood and practised in multiple ways. It goes beyond a system’s functional use to comprehend its context and consequences. It refuses to see the application of any one system as a cure-all, insisting upon the interrelationships of systems and the inherent limitations of any single solution. It is fluent not only in the language of a system, but in its metalanguage — the language it uses to talk about itself and to interact with other systems — and is sensitive to the limitations and the potential uses and abuses of that metalanguage. It is, crucially, capable of both performing and responding to critique.”
— James Bridle, New Dark Age: Technology and the End of the Future
The underlying reason people dismiss climate science, it turns out, has more to do with political identity than logic. In fact, the more intelligent people are, the more polarized they tend to be on climate change. When they’re challenged, Democrats and Republicans alike simply use their smarts to justify their beliefs. Confirmation bias is a powerful thing.
It’s not just that Democrats and Republicans in Congress have different priorities when it comes to the climate crisis — they also use different styles of persuasion. A study published in the journal Environmental Politics earlier this month breaks down the differences along partisan lines. With the help of machine learning, Guber and her colleagues analyzed millions upon millions of words from Congressional floor speeches from 1996 until 2015.
They found that Democrats tend to make arguments about climate change backed up by facts and evidence, while Republicans tend to tell stories, using imagery, emotional appeals, and humor to sway people to their side. According to Guber, Republicans are “communicating in ways that may ultimately be more effective.”
Some research suggests that liberals and conservatives react differently when confronted with new evidence that contradicts their beliefs. A working paper by four Canadian psychologists argues that many liberals are more willing to change their minds (associated with the value liberals tend to place on science and skepticism), while conservatives are more likely to stick to their guns (linked with a respect for tradition and religious beliefs).
Democrats have long been criticized for overlooking emotional appeals, Guber said, but they seem to be moving in a direction that would appeal to a broader swath of the public, framing the climate crisis as a threat to public health and national security, invoking religious stewardship, and explaining that taking on climate change creates jobs.
“The hope is if Democrats can find a way of being emotionally engaging on climate change while avoiding some of the triggers that speak to partisanship, then they’ll do well,” Guber said.
…in these difficult times, these trying, confounding, demanding times, extraordinary, excessive, these dangerous, overwhelming, vertiginous, abject, transcendent, these, immanent, epochal, catastrophic, times, these difficult, in these trying times.
“I no longer claim to know anything
But I still have persistent suspicions.
My greatest suspicion holds that
All my suspicions may prove wrong.
Intelligence recognizes
That nothing now seems impossible.
Have a good hearty laugh
And do not dare to mourn me.”
“Scientists come in two varieties, hedgehogs and foxes. I borrow this terminology from Isaiah Berlin (1953), who borrowed it from the ancient Greek poet Archilochus. Archilochus told us that foxes know many tricks, hedgehogs only one. Foxes are broad, hedgehogs are deep. Foxes are interested in everything and move easily from one problem to another. Hedgehogs are only interested in a few problems that they consider fundamental, and stick with the same problems for years or decades. Most of the great discoveries are made by hedgehogs, most of the little discoveries by foxes. Science needs both hedgehogs and foxes for its healthy growth, hedgehogs to dig deep into the nature of things, foxes to explore the complicated details of our marvelous universe. Albert Einstein and Edwin Hubble were hedgehogs. Charley Townes, who invented the laser, and Enrico Fermi, who built the first nuclear reactor in Chicago, were foxes. It often happens that foxes are as creative as hedgehogs. The laser was a big discovery made by a fox. The general public is misled by the media into believing that great scientists are all hedgehogs. Some periods in the history of science are good times for hedgehogs, other periods are good times for foxes. The beginning of the twentieth century was good for hedgehogs. The hedgehogs—Einstein and his followers in Europe, Hubble and his followers in America—dug deep and found new foundations for physics and astronomy. When Fermi and Townes came onto the scene in the middle of the century, the foundations were firm and the universe was wide open for foxes to explore. Most of the progress in physics and astronomy since the 1920s was made by foxes.”
— Freeman J. Dyson, A Many-Colored Glass: Reflections on the Place of Life in the Universe
A new quarterly glossy magazine Die Kehre (The Turning), published this month, which describes itself as a “magazine for natural protection”. It draws its title from the writings of anti-modernist philosopher Martin Heidegger and tries to reclaim environmental concern as a reactionary cause. In its editorial, the magazine describes ecology as the “crown jewels” of the right “robbed” by the leftwing green movement in the 1970s, and argues for redefining the subject away from Klimaschutz (climate protection) towards Heimatschutz (homeland protection). Several articles warn of the danger to Germany’s “native” bird species and “fairytale forests” posed by windfarms. Another column cites a manifesto by far-right thinktank Recherche Dresden, “Seven theses for a conservative-ecological turn”, written in the wake of the German Green party’s triumph at the 2019 European elections
I’m working on a systems project rn and when I want to freak out the people I’m sprinting with I show them my 666 tattoo and gets them pretty upset. pic.twitter.com/EFJqrgKXRw
“The deployment of unidentified federal officers is particularly dangerous in a situation like that in Portland and elsewhere in America, because it could easily lead to right-wing militias’ impersonating legal authorities and kidnapping citizens. As former CIA counterintelligence analyst Aki Peritz notes, “All it takes is one of these similar-kitted out militiamen groups to start grabbing folks off the street as well, but then having their way with them, for there to be huge, possibly violent pushback for these tactics. This hurts the police, and the citizenry.” Peritz argues, “We’re quickly entering secret police territory now. DHS is becoming Trump’s Mukhābarāt” (mukhābarāt being the Arabic word for intelligence agency, used colloquially to refer, for example, to the Egyptian or Iraqi or Libyan secret police).”
100 gecs is kero kero bonito for girls who’s aphex twin is sophie they’re basically the hatsune miku of the girls who post chloë sevigny the same way ecco2k is the yves tumor for girls who’s arca is ayesha erotica it’s not very hard to understand tbh
““Every particle in the universe,” continued Dirk, warming to his subject and beginning to stare a bit, “affects every other particle, however faintly or obliquely. Everything interconnects with everything. The beating of a butterfly’s wings in China can affect the course of an Atlantic hurricane. If I could interrogate this table leg in a way that made sense to me, or to the table leg, then it could provide me with the answer to any question about the universe. I could ask anybody I liked, chosen entirely by chance, any random question I cared to think of, and their answer, or lack of it, would in some way bear upon the problem to which I am seeking a solution. It is only a question of knowing how to interpret it. Even you, whom I have met entirely by chance, probably know things that are vital to my investigation, if only I knew what to ask you, which I don’t, and if only I could be bothered to, which I can’t.””
— Douglas Adams, The Long Dark Tea-Time of the Soul
What 2020 has taught us is that a realistic zombie movie would show most people carrying on as normal, ignoring the shamblers in their offices and homes, while a large minority accuse the zombies of being crisis actors and a leftwing conspiracy to polute their bodily fluids.
So many questions! Great (re)generative discussions were had. Thanks again to all the participants for your inputs. Looking forward to further developing this format and these ideas, and seeing what gets made of all this by the researchers involved from @CreaturesEuhttps://t.co/fZuiJgC2FU
I have a essay in the current issue of #Reliquiae - Journal of Landscape, Nature & Mythology published by the wonderful @Corbel_Stone | ‘Scholar’s Rocks - The Inter-Animating Spirit of Mind & Matter’ - a lithic meditation into miniaturism, apohenia, hylozoism & geoaesthetics pic.twitter.com/QVElcE4s66
n many ways, we’ve been overdue for such a shift. In our feelings, we’ve been lagging behind the times in which we live. The Anthropocene, the Great Acceleration, the age of climate change—whatever you want to call it, we’ve been out of synch with the biosphere, wasting our children’s hopes for a normal life, burning our ecological capital as if it were disposable income, wrecking our one and only home in ways that soon will be beyond our descendants’ ability to repair. And yet we’ve been acting as though it were 2000, or 1990—as though the neoliberal arrangements built back then still made sense. We’ve been paralyzed, living in the world without feeling it. Now, all of a sudden, we’re acting fast as a civilization. We’re trying, despite many obstacles, to flatten the curve—to avoid mass death. Doing this, we know that we’re living in a moment of historic importance. We realize that what we do now, well or badly, will be remembered later on. This sense of enacting history matters. For some of us, it partly compensates for the disruption of our lives. Actually, we’ve already been living in a historic moment. For the past few decades, we’ve been called upon to act, and have been acting in a way that will be scrutinized by our descendants. Now we feel it.
Because the corona crisis has allowed us to experience a very different time, it will be interesting to see whether parts of this new normality, such as home offices and reduced mobility, will remain. But even if it is just an involuntary pause from capitalist times, we should reconsider neoliberalism’s temporal regimes of growth, decline and acceleration that have shaped life on Earth. Our experiences of corona time has given us a training in temporal thought and flexibility. Humanity will weather this crisis, but there are others ahead. Perhaps then, it will be comforting to know that we can, and must, trick time and plan for the future – even when we feel stuck in the present.
MESS is people, electricity and sound. Centred on a unique collection of working electronic instruments, MESS is dedicated to supporting the creation of all forms of electronic sound and music. An independent not-for-profit organisation, MESS offers two program seasons a year commencing in Autumn & Spring.
There’s a story I tell in my book because it’s a great illustration of how AI gets the wrong idea about what problem we’re asking it to solve:
Researchers at the University of Tuebingen trained a neural net to recognize images, and then had it point out which parts of the images were the most important for its decision. When they asked it to highlight the most important pixels for the category “tench” (a kind of fish), this is what it highlighted:
Human fingers against a green background!
Why was it looking for human fingers when it was supposed to be looking for a fish? It turns out that most of the tench pictures the neural net had seen were of people holding the fish as a trophy. It doesn’t have any context for what a tench actually is, so it assumes the fingers are part of the fish.
The image-generating neural net in ArtBreeder (called BigGAN) was also trained on the same dataset, called ImageNet, and when you ask it to generate tenches, this is what it does:
The humans are much more distinct than the fish, and I’m fascinated by the highly exaggerated human fingers.
There are other categories in ImageNet that have similar problems. Here’s “microphone”.
It’s figured out about dramatic stage lighting and human forms, but many of its images don’t contain anything that remotely resembles a microphone. In so many of its training pictures the microphone is a tiny part of the image, easy to overlook. There are similar problems with small instruments like “flute” and “oboe”.
In other cases, there might be evidence of pictures being mislabeled. In these generated images of “football helmet”, some of them are clearly of people NOT wearing helmets, and a few even look suspiciously like baseball helmets.
ImageNet is a really messy dataset. It has a category for agama, but none for giraffe. Rather than horse as a category, it has sorrel (a specific color of horse). “Bicycle built for two” is a category, but not skateboard.
A huge reason for ImageNet’s messiness is that it was automatically scraped from images on the internet. The images were supposed to have been filtered by the crowdsourced workers who labeled them, but plenty of weirdness slipped through. And horribleness - many images and labels that definitely shouldn’t have appeared in a general-purpose research dataset, and images that looked like they had gotten there without the consent of the people pictured. After several years of widespread use by the AI community, the ImageNet team has reportedly been removing some of that content. Other problematic datasets - like those scraped from online images without permission, or from surveillance footage - have been removed recently. (Others, like Clearview AI’s, are still in use.)
This week Vinay Prabhu and Abeba Birhane pointed out major problems with another dataset, 80 Million Tiny Images, which scraped images and automatically assigned tags to them with the help of another neural net trained on internet text. The internet text, you may be shocked to hear, had some pretty offensive stuff in it. MIT CSAIL removed that dataset permanently rather than manually filter all 80 million images.
This is not just a problem with bad data, but with a system where major research groups can release datasets with such huge issues with offensive language and lack of consent. As tech ethicist Shannon Vallor put it, ”For any institution that does machine learning today, ‘we didn’t know’ isn’t an excuse, it’s a confession”. Like the algorithm that upscaled Obama into a white man, ImageNet is the product of a machine learning community where there’s a huge lack of diversity. (Did you notice that most of the generated humans in this blog post are white? If you didn’t notice, that might be because so much of Western culture treats white as default).
It takes a lot of work to create a better dataset - and to be more aware of which datasets should never be created. But it’s work worth doing.
Bonus material this week: a few of my favorite BigGAN image categories. Enter your email here for a gallery!
“I must program as inefficiently as possible. I must program as inefficiently as possible.” Today I’m chanting Joe Armstrong’s famous mantra for writing code to solve a problem that you don’t understand yet. The instinct to optimize is extremely counter-productive at these times.
“The word‘good’ has many meanings. For example, if a man were to shoot his grandmother at a range of five hundred yards, I should call him a good shot, but not necessarily a good man.”
From September on I’ll be starting a residency over @LYL_Radio Did my first show last thursday, so here’s a taster.. full tracklisting on the page.. perfect way to start off the week, enjoy!
“The single quantity ‘time’ melts into a spiderweb of times. We do not describe how the world evolves in time: we describe how things evolve in local time, and how local times evolve relative to each other. The world is not like a platoon advancing at the pace of a single commander. It’s a network of events affecting each other.”
I was looking at a complex schedule with multiple time zones and suddenly remembered Swatch Internet Time. And, what do you know, it’s still around… https://t.co/kFXUeBIrIb
At Walkaway’s climax, prisoners who’ve taken over their prison face off against an army of militarized police who lay siege to the occupied prison complex.
Just as the prisoners’ defenses are about to fail, their network of supporters watching from a livestream all over the world leap into the fray, doxing the cops on the line and waking their relatives and talking them into broadcasting pleas on the prison’s PA system.
As the cops hear their loved ones’ pleas, their morale breaks. One at a time, then in bunches, they set down their weapons, shuck body armor, and walk away down the highway. As they trickle away, their commanders are enraged, then terrified, sensing the turn. They retreat.
Yesterday, visual journalist Tyler LaRiviere posted a stunning series of images and clips from a protest in Chicago where protesters faced a standoff with the CPD at a barricade near Mayor Lori Lightfoot’s home.
“To clarify these aren’t random officers they are getting information on but the officers blocking off the intersection on Kimball and Wrightwood. Two of the officers who had their infomation publicized left the line and walked away.”
The final update from Al Baydha Project Co-founder Neal Spackman, 9 years in. How desertification resulted from the loss of an indigenous land management system, and how the land has changed since all inputs to the project were ceased in 2016. Neal moved on from Al Baydha in 2018 and can now be contacted at regenerativeresources.co
Al Baydah is a project we’ve been following for a long time here it Solarpunks. This final update from one of the projects co-founders is equally as incredible as it is inspirational.
Solarpunk does not rely on huge technological leaps into the future, nor does it take wistful glances at the past. Instead it looks laterally at what’s already in the world and projects it forward. Projects like Al Baydha and others provide a rich soil of ideas and action from which our struggles to an on-route to a better world can grow.
I’ve attend a few online lectures and courses hosted by Al Baydah’s cofounder. The results of this project are just … incredible.
“A footprint is something we should want to leave on the earth” - Ben Falk
We’ve been working on an intense critical sensemaking activity, charting threads of nested trends and signals across technology, civic infrastructure and governance to explore multiple futures. Hope to share the findings + report soon. pic.twitter.com/qwClLbj7A9
CBP: “Our Predator drone flying over U.S. cities and monitoring protests is causing confusion and raising questions that are mostly answered by the name of the drone.”
Elite modernism is the only way to the future: if you don’t have manifestos printed with sleek fonts, if you don’t have engineering blueprints of moon gulags and actual recipes to dethrone god, then most probably you found job in a wrong ministry of propaganda.
Radical Curiosity, the show revisiting the legacy of Buckminster Fuller I’ve curated with @rosapera, opens in september at @EspacioFTef Madrid. Here’s an interview going into the whys of the project, and how we are still living under Bucky’s shadowhttps://t.co/KiSx6MIsxH
— Jose Luis de Vicente (@Macroscopist) June 19, 2020
“It is well known that intracranial lesions can be associated with psychiatric symptomatology. But this is he first and only instance I have come across in which hallucinatory voices sought to reassure the patient of their genuine interest in her welfare, offered her a specific diagnosis (there were no clinical signs that would have alerted anyone to the tumour), directed her to the type of hospital best equipped to deal with her problem, expressed pleasure that she had at last received the treatment they desired for her, bid her farewell, and thereafter disappeared.”
Last weekend, Nnedi Okarafor and I did a really fun, wide-ranging panel on politics and sf for Tor Books’ TorCon, moderated by Kayti Burt; it was the closing panel, and Tor has transcribed some of the highlights.
Nnedi talked about how her writing process always starts with characters: “I’ve been writing about this particular character for a pretty long time, and she’s kind of existed in different ways and stories, but writing about her—it started with her.”
And we discussed how sf can present “challenging issues and diverse world views for conversation and change.”
Nnedi talked about how genre is a “skewed lens” to see painful issues with new eyes, “and when you see it with new eyes, you can see more.”
I talked about how sf can give you a (possibly false and sometimes harmful) story to reach for when you need to understand what’s going to happen in moments of crisis or extremis:
“As pulp writers, science fiction writers don’t want to confine themselves to man-against-man or man-against nature, we like the plot-forward twofer, where it’s man-against-nature-against-man, where the tsunami blows your house over and your neighbors come over to eat you. That kind of story of the foundational beastiality of humans does make for great storytelling, but it’s not true. That’s not actually what happens in crises.
“In crises, the refrigerator hum of petty grievance stops and leaves behind the silence to make you realize that you have more in common with your neighbors. It’s when people are are their best.”
