“All is shadow mixed with dust, and there’s no voice but in the sounds made by what the wind lifts up or sweeps forward, nor silence except from what the wind abandons.”
We’re already seeing alarm over bizarre YouTube channels that attempt to monetize children’s TV brands by scraping the video content off legitimate channels and adding their own advertising and keywords. Many of these channels are shaped by paperclip-maximizer advertising AIs that are simply trying to maximize their search ranking on YouTube. Add neural network driven tools for inserting Character A into Video B to click-maximizing bots and things are going to get very weird (and nasty). And they’re only going to get weirder when these tools are deployed for political gain.
We tend to evaluate the inputs from our eyes and ears much less critically than what random strangers on the internet tell us—and we’re already too vulnerable to fake news as it is. Soon they’ll come for us, armed with believable video evidence. The smart money says that by 2027 you won’t be able to believe anything you see in video unless there are cryptographic signatures on it, linking it back to the device that shot the raw feed—and you know how good most people are at using encryption? The dumb money is on total chaos.
Dutch sociologist and Holocaust survivor Frederik Lodewijk Polak’s massive future studies text The Image of the Future makes a bold statement about optimism and pessimism, creating four categories of belief about the future, divided on two axes: things are improving/worsening; and people can/can’t do something about the future.
From this taxonomy, Peter Hayward from Swinburne University created the “Polak Game,” played in workshops to help participants clarify their views about the future and where those views stem from, and what those points of view erases, and what they elevate. The game was picked up by CMU’s Stuart Candy, and spread to many other contexts, mutating as it went, becoming a favorite at places like the Institute for the Future (Jane McGonigal and Mark wrote about it in this IFTF report).
In a joint paper for the Journal of Future Studies, Hayward and Candy describe the game’s inception, uses, history and lessons.
I definitely belong in the bottom right quadrant: things are getting worse, but it is in our power to do something about them. That’s basically the premise of my novel Walkaway.
Tesla’s massive lithium-ion battery storage facility, which was designed to feed South Australia’s unstable power grid, is already proving itself by responding to power outages within milliseconds.
The system—the largest of its kind on planet Earth—was tested twice just this month. According to CleanTechnica, on Dec. 14, the Loy Yang coal power plant in the neighboring state of Victoria suddenly went offline. Remarkably, the Hornsdale Power Reserve battery system (the Tesla system’s official name) kicked in within 140 milliseconds and injected 100 megawatts of power into the grid.
Two weeks later, another unit of the Loy Yang plant unexpectedly went offline. Tesla battery’s also responded within milliseconds to send 16 megawatts to the grid.
“That’s a record and the national operators were shocked at how quickly and efficiently the battery was able to deliver this type of energy into the market,“ State energy minister Tom Koutsantonis commented after the Dec. 14 outage. “Until now, if we got a call to turn on our emergency generators it would take us 10 to 15 minutes to get them fired up and operating which is a record time compared to other generators.”
The 100-megawatt Powerpack system, which charges using renewable energy from Neoen’s Hornsdale wind farm near Jamestown, is designed to hold enough power for 8,000 homes for 24 hours, or more than 30,000 houses for an hour during a blackout.
While code studies is just burgeoning as a field, poets, digital artists, and hacker/hobbyists have long used the textual and performative qualities of code together as a means of expression. Here are some thoughts on code art and esolangs. For further discussion on what makes something a computer or a programming language, I wrote this piece.
0. Computers are logical systems that arise as often by accident as by design.
1. Their core materiality is logic, not pixels or circuits or bits or other features of their physical implementation. Otherimplementations are possible.
2. Our engagement with logic is irrational because we are irrational beings. We are incapable of fully asserting our agency through a system that forces us to translate our intentions into logical steps.
3. This central drama of human / computer interaction is experienced most directly at the code level.
4. Bugs are the primary progeny of programmers. We write broken software.
5. Although the machine presents a world of our own making, it rebukes us by not doing what we want, leading to a compulsive cycle of “fixing” and augmenting code (as says Joseph Weizenbaum). We are all “computer bums”.
6. For any definition of the term “programming language,” there is a language that sits on its border.
7. Programmability is not a requirement for programming languages. Theoretical programming languages existed before practical ones. We can create valid languages whose programs are physically unconstructable or whose executors are logically impossible.
8. The ambiguity of human language is present in code, which never fully escapes its status as human writing, even when machine-generated. We bring to code our excesses of language, and an ambiguity of semantics, as discerned by the human reader.
9. We don’t need an irrational idea to follow logically; our irrationality will pollute any attempt at rigor.
A. Banal ideas can be rescued by carrying them out with precision, or even through increased repetition, as it is hard for us to understand even relatively immediate repercussions of our actions in the logical space, bringing us again and again to unexpected places.
Trump was taught to say these things [climate denial] on climate by Heartland, the Competitive Enterprise Institute and other think tanks. They maintained this denial space in public policy dialogue,“ said Kert Davies, director of the Climate Investigations Center, a watchdog group. “And you can definitely credit Exxon and Koch brothers’ money for giving the think tanks the megaphone to keep climate science denial in the world.”
But now, just like the Republican upstarts that threaten the party establishment, Heartland is taking climate denial farther than many fossil fuel companies can support. While ExxonMobil today publicly accepts the reality of human-caused climate change and the need to address the problem, Heartland argues for the benefits of a warming world. The group is pushing theEPA to overturn its official conclusion—known as the endangerment finding—that excessive carbon dioxide is a danger to human health and welfare. The finding, affirmed by the Supreme Court, is what empowers the agency to regulate carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases.
This rift was on display at a recent meeting of the American Legislative Exchange Council, a group that influences state governments to adopt conservative priorities. Heartland wanted ALEC to approve a resolution calling on the EPA to withdraw the endangerment finding. But ExxonMobil, once at the forefront of climate denial, was among several corporations and utilities that convinced ALEC to shelve a vote on the resolution.
ExxonMobil had become just another member of “the discredited and anti-energy global warming movement,” complained Heartland’s president, Tim Huelskamp, a former Republican congressman from Kansas. “They’ve put their profits and ‘green’ virtue signaling above sound science.”
ExxonMobil is among an early group of donors that slowed or ended its funding of climate denial. But the misinformation apparatus the corporations helped create is now so independent and robust, it no longer needs—or trusts—them.
“The most Gothic description of Capital is also the most accurate. Capital is an abstract parasite, an insatiable vampire and zombie-maker; but the living flesh it converts into dead labor is ours, and the zombies it makes are us.”
“What I am interested in is the “hinternet,” something more than the internet: a phenomenon that utilizes our tools of connectivity while participating in what is actually happening in real time and real space.”
I imagine a spectrum where at one pole we have an assembly line worker, and on the other we have a mathematician trying to prove a famous conjecture. The productivity of the former is constrained only by physics, and may glean a few percent here and there with better tools, methods, and discipline. The latter, by contrast, may have the best tools, methods, and discipline, spend an entire career working diligently, and still not succeed. We live somewhere in between.
what does it mean to be productive if what you are producing is bad? Or even if it is good for you, it may be bad for others, who may endeavour in turn to make it bad for you.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media. Palihapitiya’s criticisms were aimed not only at Facebook, but the wider online ecosystem. “The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
These are some thoughts about utopia and dystopia. The old, crude Good Places were compensatory visions of controlling what you couldn’t control and having what you didn’t have here and now — orderly, peaceful heaven; a paradise of hours; pie in the sky. The way to them was clear, but drastic. You died.
Thomas More’s secular and intellectual construct Utopia was still an expression of desire for something lacking here and now — rational human control of human life — but his Good Place was explicitly No Place. Only in the head. A blueprint without a building site.
Ever since, utopia has been located not in the afterlife but just off the map, across the ocean, over the mountains, in the future, on another planet, a livable yet unattainable elsewhere.
Rift/Fault is a study of the shifting land-based tectonic edges of the North American Continental Plate in California and Iceland. Rift refers to where the North American Plate meets the Eurasian Plate, along the Mid-Atlantic Rift in Iceland. Fault refers to the San Andreas Fault, where the North American and Pacific Plates meet. Tectonic plates slide along the mantle of our earth, underneath our oceans, our land, our homes. Tectonic plate edges are geologically active - they spread, move, erupt, and tremble. Their behavior is for the most part unpredictable, and wholly uncontainable. And while boundaries upon the land are often contested, politicized, and fought over, tectonic plate edges remain immune to any human efforts of control. In this series I looked for the visual traces (or not) of the tectonic plate edges upon the land, as well the structures and uses of the built landscape upon these edges. The pairing of images allows for a dialogue between the wild and the contained, the fertile and the barren, the geologic and the human. These dichotomies create a visual tension that questions the uneasy relationship between geologic force, and the limits of human intervention.
“In just a few months from now, at bitcoin’s current growth rate, the electricity demanded by the cryptocurrency network will start to outstrip what’s available, requiring new energy-generating plants. And with the climate conscious racing to replace fossil fuel-base plants with renewable energy sources, new stress on the grid means more facilities using dirty technologies. By July 2019, the bitcoin network will require more electricity than the entire United States currently uses. By February 2020, it will use as much electricity as the entire world does today.”
The list below summarizes the advice Donella Meadows was able to give after more than 30 years of working in the field of sustainability consultancy, research and education. It is an excellent set of guidelines that could help you to improve your own practice, particularly when you work in the kind of complex multi-stakeholder situations that are so commonly encountered as we try to support a systems transformation towards increased sustainability.
Leyla Acaroglu —
It’s an experimental knowledge lab that I set up three years ago to help overcome what I call the knowledge-action gap, the difference between people knowing that there are problems in the world, feeling that they want to address them, but not knowing how to take action. I really struggled a lot with the mainstream structural system of education, I did a lot of research in pedagogy and the way in which we teach and the way in which the brain works, how a lot of the experiences we have in life educate us, and how actually a lot of those experiences de-educate us.
“Truth is one casualty of systems for which, as Bridle put it, “human oversight is simply impossible.” Security is another. Next time we go searching for information about an election or distractions for our children, at least we can say we were warned.”
“Therefore, poets do not ‘fit’ into society, not because a place is denied them but because they do not take their‘places’ seriously. They openly see its roles as theatrical, its styles as poses, its clothing costumes, its rules conventional, its crises arranged, its conflicts performed and its metaphysics ideological.”
–James P. Carse, Finite and Infinite Games (viainthenoosphere)
South Australia officially activated the world’s biggest battery on Friday. The feat was achieved much to the credit of Elon Musk, who made a daring bet to “get the system installed and working 100 days from contract signature or it is free.“
Musk was responding to a challenge from Australian billionaire Mike Cannon-Brookes to help fix the Australian state’s electricity woes. Losing the bet would have cost the Tesla CEO ”probably $50 million or more.“
Not only did the Musk win the bet, his company built the football field-sized facility in Jamestown (about 125 miles north of Adelaide) about a month and a half ahead of schedule.
“The completion of the world’s largest lithium-ion battery in record time shows that a sustainable, effective energy solution is possible,” Tesla said in a statement Friday at the battery’s launch.
The 100-megawatt Powerpack system is designed to power 30,000 houses for an hour during a blackout. The Australian state was hit by a string of power outages last year.
“South Australia is now leading the world in dispatchable renewable energy. This is history in the making,” South Australia Premier Jay Weatherill said Friday of the Tesla battery.
“We may successfully upgrade our bodies and our brains, while losing our minds in the process. Indeed, techno-humanism may end up downgrading humans. The system may prefer downgraded humans not because they would possess any superhuman knacks, but because they would lack some really disturbing human qualities that hamper the system and slow it down. As any farmer knows, it’s usually the brightest goat in the herd that stirs up the greatest trouble, which is why the Agricultural Revolution involved downgrading animal mental abilities. The second cognitive revolution dreamed up by techno-humanists might do the same to us.”
–Harari, Yuval Noah.Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harper, 2016. (viacarvalhais)
This action, rarely monitored by the national media and even more rarely reported upon, can have a more significant action on cities (and other government bodies) moving forward to address climate change than any action or inaction by trump or any agency of the federal government. A credit downgrade by Moody’s can have a substantial effect on the rate of interest a city will pay on its bonds or other public debt. Considering that most of that debt is considered general obligation debt, or debt that you and I pay for with our property taxes or other taxes, politicians will be really careful to make sure interest rates are kept as low as possible. If they fail to do what Moody’s (or S&P or other rating agencies) suggest they do, then the debt will be downgraded, and interest rates likely increased.
Again, as I’ve said hundreds of time, money money money speaks louder than petitions and whining and politicians’ speeches.
Excerpt:
Coastal communities from Maine to California have been put on notice from one of the top credit rating agencies: Start preparing for climate change or risk losing access to cheap credit.
In a report to its clients Tuesday, Moody’s Investors Service Inc. explained how it incorporates climate change into its credit ratings for state and local bonds. If cities and states don’t deal with risks from surging seas or intense storms, they are at greater risk of default.
“What we want people to realize is: If you’re exposed, we know that. We’re going to ask questions about what you’re doing to mitigate that exposure,” Lenny Jones, a managing director at Moody’s, said in a phone interview. “That’s taken into your credit ratings.”
In its report, Moody’s lists six indicators it uses “to assess the exposure and overall susceptibility of U.S. states to the physical effects of climate change.” They include the share of economic activity that comes from coastal areas, hurricane and extreme-weather damage as a share of the economy, and the share of homes in a flood plain.
Based on those overall risks, Texas, Florida, Georgia and Mississippi are among the states most at risk from climate change. Moody’s didn’t identify which cities or municipalities were most exposed.
“To be clear, in their 1983 view, “if microprocessors create unemployment, instead of reducing everyone’s working-time, it’s because we live in a brutal society, and this is by no means a reason to destroy microprocessors.””
Wildlife is and should be useless in the same way art, music, poetry and even sports are useless. They are useless in the sense that they do nothing more than raise our spirits, make us laugh or cry, frighten, disturb and delight us. They connect us not just to what’s weird, different, other, but to a world where we humans do not matter nearly as much as we like to think. And that should be enough.
“The Critical Zone. Earth’s permeable near-surface layer… from the tops of the trees to the bottom of the groundwater. It is a living, breathing, constantly evolving boundary layer where rock, soil, water, air, and living organisms interact. These complex interactions regulate the natural habitat and determine the availability of life-sustaining resources, including our food production and water quality.”
–Critical Zone Observatories, http://criticalzone.org/ (viainthenoosphere)
“Becoming human in the right ways is central to surviving as a dog in Ávila […] Dogs, however, are not just animals-becoming-people. They can also acquire qualities of jaguars, the quintessential predators.”
The Copenhagen Interpretation of Ethics says that when you observe or interact with a problem in any way, you can be blamed for it. At the very least, you are to blame for not doing more. Even if you don’t make the problem worse, even if you make it slightly better, the ethical burden of the problem falls on you as soon as you observe it. In particular, if you interact with a problem and benefit from it, you are a complete monster.
Two weeks after Hurricane Maria hit, aid remained a bureaucratic quagmire, mismanaged by FEMA, the FBI, the US military, the laughably corrupt local government. The island looked as if it were stuck somewhere between the nineteenth century and the apocalypse. But leftists, nationalists, socialists—Louisa Capetillo’s sons and daughters—were stepping up to rebuild their communities. Natural disasters have a way of clarifying things. They sweep away once-sturdy delusions, to reveal old treasures and scars. Over the next month, Luis, Christine, and ARECMA, took over the group’s storm-ravaged hilltop center and set up the Proyecto de Apoyo Mutuo (Project for Mutual Aid). I flew back home to New York before I could see it open. They began by feeding hundreds of people a day, with rice, pork and beans, rather than the MREs and tropical-flavored skittles provided by FEMA and the military. Then they added a weekly health clinic. Classes in chess and bomba dance for bored kids (the vast majority of schools remain closed). A free meal delivery service for the elderly. Potable water. Even Wi-Fi. Their Proyecto is one of a rapidly growing network of autonomous, self-managed Centros de Apoyo Mutuos (CAMs), which now also exist in Caguas, Río Piedras, La Perla, Mayagüez, Utuado, Lares, Naranjito, and Yabucoa. Each offers a communal dining room, with delicious free food. They distribute goods donated both by locals and those abroad, and they organize brigades to clear roads with machetes and axes. The CAMs are established by and for their communities, and in the course of providing aid, they create spaces for discussion and political organization. In theory and in practice, they resemble the solidarity networks that left-wing Greek activists used to survive their country’s financial crisis. In the words of AgitArte, a radical San Juan art collective deeply involved in the CAMs, they don’t exist just to address urgent needs, but “to combat the onslaught of disaster capitalism and its henchmen.”
Disaster capitalism depends on the idea that “There is No Alternative” and that the populace can only sit by passively while their infrastructure, government, homes and schools are hijacked and sold off to low-bidder corporations to financially engineer and then extract rent from.
That’s certainly the model that started to play out after Hurricane Maria, when Trumpist cronies were handed sweetheart deals and the people were left to die in droves while captains of industry carved up the loot.
But the populace need not be a flock of sheep waiting passively for the shear: instead, they can rise up and take care of themselves, through systems of solidarity and mutual aid, and that’s what’s happening in Puerto Rico, where Molly Crabapple reports on the smashing success of anarchists and socialists whose collectives are filling in the humanitarian relief that has been denied to them by Trump’s incompetent state and the shareholder firms who are more interested in their bottom lines than the human lives they are being paid to ease.
So you’ve got the radical black feminists of Taller Salud, rebuilding homes in Loíza; Colectiva Feminista en Construcción, handing out “food, supplies, and money for tarps”; there’s the punks of Santurce’s El Local, feeding 600 people a day from a community kitchen; and many others – often these groups date back to the incompetent bungling of the Hurricane Irma relief, and have gone from strength to strength, forging ties with the diaspora in Miami and New York, showing people that there is an alternative.
Climate change divides Americans, but in an unlikely way: The more education that Democrats and Republicans have, the more their beliefs in climate change diverge.
About one in four Republicans with only a high school education said they worried about climate change a great deal. But among college-educated Republicans, that figure decreases,sharply, to 8 percent.
This relationship persists even when pollsters pose different kinds of questions about climate change – when Republicans are asked if they believe global warming “will never happen,” if they think it poses “a serious threat to way of life in your lifetime” or if it is caused by “natural changes in the environment.”This may seem counterintuitive, because better-educated Republicans are more likely to be aware of the scientific consensus that human activity is contributing to climate change. But in the realm of public opinion, climate change isn’t really a scientific issue. It’s a political one.
40% of Detroiters have no internet access. The Detroit Community Technology Project and similar projects across the city are skipping over the telcos altogether and wiring up their own mesh broadband networks, where gigabit connections are transmitted by line-of-site wireless across neighborhoods from the tops of tall buildings; it’s called the Equitable Internet Initiative.
This is possible in part because of the ubiquitous abandoned dark fiber, which runs under the streets of Detroit, as it does across many US cities, unused and dormant. The project relies on “digital stewards” who undergo a 20-week training program that teaches them to pull fiber, configure routers, and install and service microwave antennas, as well as teaching their communities to use the services delivered over the internet.
Each local mesh is designed to wire together a neighborhood on an intranet that would continue to function even in the event of internet outages, providing a resilient hub for organizing responses to extreme weather, natural disasters, and other crises.
Pynchon should be known as one of the very few foreign (white) writers who wrote responsibly about an African country, and actually improved the world by doing so. He was conscious of his privilege as a white, male author, and used this privilege in order to tell a story buried by white history: the Herero people’s genocide by German colonial forces, the first, “forgotten” genocide of the 20th century.The massacre is integral to two of Pynchon’s most famous novels, V. and Gravity’s Rainbow.
The world needs to act fast: if humans continue to emit greenhouse gases at current rates, the remaining carbon budget to reduce risk of exceeding the 2°C target will be exhausted in around 20 years. Emissions should peak by 2020 and approach zero by around 2050 if the world is serious about reducing risk. As a simple rule of thumb, this means halving global emissions every decade, which can act as a golden rule. This golden rule is a road-map to prosperity. A fossil-fuel free society is economically attractive: renewable energy sources increasingly compete with fossil fuels, even when these are priced at historic lows. Moreover, the estimated costs of inaction range from 2–10% of GDP by 2100 by some estimates, to a final invoice equivalent to a 23% collapse in global productivity.
Before the internet, publishing had been a distinction, with a limited number of people lucky, talented or wealthy enough to share ideas or images with a wide audience. After the rise of social media, publishing became a default, with non-participation the exception. There’s a problem with this rise in shared self-expression: we’ve all still got a constant and limited amount of attention available. For those creating content, this means the challenge now is not publishing your work, but finding an audience. The problem for those of us in the audience — i.e., all of us — is filtering through the information constantly coming at us.
The scientifically recognized personality categories closest to “jerk” are the “dark triad” of narcissism, Machiavellianism, and psychopathic personality. Narcissists regard themselves as more important than the people around them, which jerks also implicitly or explicitly do. And yet narcissism is not quite jerkitude, since it also involves a desire to be the center of attention, a desire that jerks don’t always have. Machiavellian personalities tend to treat people as tools they can exploit for their own ends, which jerks also do. And yet this too is not quite jerkitude, since Machivellianism involves self-conscious cynicism, while jerks can often be ignorant of their self-serving tendencies. People with psychopathic personalities are selfish and callous, as is the jerk, but they also incline toward impulsive risk-taking, while jerks can be calculating and risk-averse.
“The greatest scientific discovery was the discovery of ignorance. Once humans realised how little they knew about the world, they suddenly had a very good reason to seek new knowledge, which opened up the scientific road to progress.”
–Harari, Yuval Noah.Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow. London: Harper, 2016. (viacarvalhais)
It’s a bot that creates, owns and sells the digital art it creates without relying on humans. We are only there to help it succeed. This bot’s soul will come to live in a smart contract on Ethereum. With us guiding it, it will create a new unique artwork every week, put it up for auction and sell it: creating a unique digital, transferable edition of the art. If we do our job right, it will make better and better art over time. The humans that help it will be rewarded in turn for doing so.
Medieval Icelandic crime victims would sell the right to pursue a perpetrator to the highest bidder. 18th century English justice replaced fines with criminals bribing prosecutors to drop cases. Somali judges compete on the free market; those who give bad verdicts get a reputation that drives away future customers. “Anarcho-capitalism” evokes a dystopian cyberpunk future. But maybe that’s wrong. Maybe we’ve always been anarcho-capitalist. Maybe a state-run legal system isn’t a fact of nature, but a historical oddity as contingent as collectivized farming or nationalized railroads. Legal Systems Very Different From Ours, by anarcho-capitalist/legal scholar/medieval history buff David Friedman, successfully combines the author’s three special interests into a whirlwind tour of exotic law.
Earth’s 2016 surface temperatures were the warmest since modern record-keeping began in 1880, according to independent analyses by NASA and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).
Excerpt:
More than 15,000 scientists have signed a chilling article titled “World Scientists’ Warning to Humanity: A Second Notice,“ urging global leaders to save the planet from environmental catastrophe.
The plea, published Monday in the
international journal BioScience, is likely the largest-ever formal support by scientists for a journal article with 15,372 total signatories, Motherboard noted. The scientists represent 184 countries and have a range of scientific backgrounds. Prominent signatories include Jane Goodall, E.O. Wilson and James Hansen.
The “Second Notice"—an update to the original version published 25 years ago by the Union of Concerned Scientists and signed by 1,700 scientists then—underscores the lack of progress from the original document.
The first notice started with this statement: “Human beings and the natural world are on a collision course.” It described trends such as the growing hole in the ozone layer, pollution and depletion of freshwater sources, overfishing, deforestation, plummeting wildlife populations, as well as unsustainable rises in greenhouse gas emissions, global temperatures and human population levels.
Unfortunately, the authors of the current article said that humanity has failed to progress on most of the measures.
They ominously warned, “time is running out.“
“Especially troubling is the current trajectory of potentially catastrophic climate change” from the burning of fossil fuels and other human activities, the paper stated.
According to the AP, the researchers document a number of alarming trends from 1992 to 2016, such as a 28.9 percent reduction of vertebrate wildlife, a 62.1 percent increase in CO2 emissions, a 167.6 percent rise in global average annual temperature change and a 35.5 percent increase in the global population (about 2 billion people).
One of the few positive trends over the past 25 years is the recovery of the ozone layer thanks to the 1987 Montreal Protocol, which sharply cut the use of chlorofluorocarbons. Reductions in extreme poverty and hunger, a slowdown in deforestation in some parts of the world, the rapid growth of the renewable energy sector and a sharp drop in birth rates in certain regions due to women and girls having greater access to education were also identified as positive trends, the AP reported.
Joe Moore’s
Meaning in Mistakes is a collection of ambiguously misspelled words: each has two sets of adjacent letters that can be swapped to form correctly spelled (US) English words. The word “saets,” for instance, could resolve to “sates” a desire or “seats” someone at the table.
Beginning as a list posted to his website, later iterations of this project present the list acid-etched in a mirror, or a television set with the single example
infiedls etched into its screen. Version 3, however, presents the work to an unsuspecting audience: a wifi router, which has lived in various parts of the city, serves the words to anyone who connects to it, regardless of what site they try to access.
An excerpt from version 3
>> When someone connects to your wifi network, does any url resolve to your list of ambiguous words, or how do they find the site?
Version 3 of “Meaning in Mistakes” runs off of a cheap travel wifi router with openwrt (a variant of linux) loaded as the operating system and an antenna soldered to the board to extend the reach of its radio. I set the router up as a captive portal running a webserver, dns, etc. When someone connects to the network, it’s self contained, any URL they try to connect to is going to resolve back to an HTML document on the device that contains “Meaning in Mistakes.” Additionally, the name of the wifi network changes every 10 minutes to one of the 88 sets, which sets up another potential for context to effect the text. Looking at available networks a user would see a set from the work along with other networks names in their vicinity. People connect either purposefully (they are looking for open wifi) or they may just have their phone set to connect to any open wifi network. This creates yet another context, attempting to visit Amazon.com and seeing the list in its place could create some interesting associations for the viewer.
>> Where have you had it set up in the city?
From around 2013-2016 version 3 ran from my apartment window in Bushwick, Brooklyn. I can also power it with a small cell phone battery, so I would throw it into a bag and take it around New York with me on public transit. It has also lived in my office at The City College of New York, where I teach. It’s a kind of situated net art, only available within the device’s limited wifi range. This joins place to the reading of the work, unlike most net art which can be seen from anywhere with a connection to the internet. Each situation alters and extends the activity of perception. For me perception is not an apolitical activity or a passive position, but an activity culturally constituted and directed.
The “Meaning in Mistakes” router (version 3)
>> How did you draw up the list of words?
A few years back the artist Heather Dewey-Hagborg sent me an abstract from an academic paper on an experiment with word recognition and reading speed. As I remember it the experiment described was this, take a paragraph and randomly sort every letter in every word with the exception of the first and last letter of each word. The researchers found that there was very little speed difference between those reading the sorted and unsorted versions of the paragraph, meaning that we read by looking at shape rather than individual characters. The nice thing about this abstract was that someone performed the described manipulation to it, so all the “inner” letters of every word had been randomly sorted. I thought about the study and how the surrounding words help reduce ambiguity since surely there were words in the paragraph that could be “corrected” multiple ways if taken out of context. This led me to write a program to find character sets that could become more than one word from a very large word list with a single character transposition. Another rule is that the potential words also had to share the same first and last letter.
>> Are you adding to it regularly?
In one sense I don’t add to it, but the materials, distribution, etc, change in some way with each version, so in another way I do. I’ve also created versions of the work where only a selection of the initial 88 are used. For example version 2 is a selection of 10 from the first list, each acid etched into a mirror. There’s a philosophical aspect to your question, concerning what constitutes a new or different work, and that is one of the reasons I often work in series and use appropriation and translation between materials as part of my process. Questions around copies and originals or similarity and difference aren’t new, but remain interesting and compelling for me.
>> Tell me a bit about who you look at
William Burroughs and Brion Gysin are an early and important influence and one that’s easy to see in this work. Artist/Poets associated with concrete poetry, language poetry, and early net.art. My practice also includes photography and video and so there’s quite a bit of image based work that’s important to me. Structuralist and experimental films by Michael Snow, Ernie Gehr, Hollis Frampton, Chantal Akerman, Paul Sharits, and Peter Kubelka to name a few. Video art by Steina and Woody Vasulka, Garry Hill, etc. Photography by Étienne-Jules Marey, Anna Atkins, Broomberg and Chanarin, Martha Rosler, Peter Piller, the list goes on. Some of this work I’ve been looking at for a long time and some of it doesn’t look much like the work I make. Reading and talking with people is an important part of my practice. Version 3 of the project wouldn’t have happened if Dan Phiffer didn’t create his wifi based project occupy.here and turn me on to working with cheap routers and openwrt. Things I’ve read recently include Mel Y. Chen’s book “Animacies,” Nichole Shukin’s “Animal Capital,” and Rob Nixon’s “Slow Violence.” Historians like Aby Warburg and Didi-Huberman have influenced a number of my works. Roma Publications puts out some amazing photographic/conceptual editions with numerous artists I’ve been looking at. Kelly Jazvac’s recent show using Plastiglomerates at Fierman Gallery in NYC was great. You can’t go wrong with Hans Holbein’s 1533 painting “The Ambassadors.”
Experience is interconnected and entangled. Unpredictable. It can never be fully explained. There is always something that slips beyond words. A description or a model of an interconnected world does not encompass all the complex processes of making connections.
While the sense of the moment may be one of accelerated change, there is simultaneously drag, weight and the inevitable delays of change that takes too long. Injustices perpetuated. We find ourselves in situations without an escape velocity.
Is the uncertainty we’re experiencing just a series of erratic oscillations or are we in the free fall toward something more massive? Things are collapsing, and sometimes the best thing to do is let them. Accept the gritty reality of it all.
To borrow an old joke about Chomsky: Curtis Yarvin the neoreactionary theorist (aka Mencius Moldbug) should not be confused with the computer programmer of the same name. Yet the latter has been dropped from at least one conference based on the former’s writings. I don’t take any strong position against this, any more than I do against William Shockley being sanctioned for his eugenics activism. Neither Shockley then nor Yarvin now are entitled to any particular peer forum.
Yarvin has created an operating system called Urbit, coded in a language he also created that resembles glitch art, or perhaps fragments of a grimoire. Yarvin and another Urbit developer propose that an operating system should be developed toward a state of absolute perfection, and then frozen for all time.
Urbit’s typed functional language, Hoon … is defined in about 5,000 lines of Hoon, or 10,000 if you count the deep standard library.… Above Hoon, the stack rapidly gets much warmer. Arvo is an event-driven microkernel that’s 1,000 lines of Hoon. Above this are another 5,000 lines of system library, then 12,000 lines of Arvo modules.… The actual status of Urbit is that in 2017, we hope to make our last discontinuous update.
Yarvin defines “operating system” here differently from typical usage. Urbit doesn’t issue commands directly to hardware. It issues them to an underlying operating system that does so. But like an OS kernel, Urbit’s access to the hardware is exclusive and airtight. Although Yarvin routinely brings political metaphors into technical discussions, this is not an essay where he does so. “Freezing” is instead justified in terms of Urbit’s ultimate purpose, which is said to include permanent, distributed data storage.
There is nothing inherently political about wanting to finish a program, but programmers don’t usually protest it at length. In doing so, Yarvin suggests a parallel to his politics. The essential belief of a reactionary is that society should be purged of its decay since some prior moment, so that something like the prior order can be established — forever! Moldbug has written elsewhere:
Perhaps the principal error of modern libertarians is their failure to distinguish between weak government and small government. My ideal government is extremely small, extremely efficient, and extremely strong - its authority cannot be challenged. It does not repress its citizens not because it is physically incapable of repression, but because repression is, far from being in its interests, directly opposed to them.
Likewise, Urbit’s kernel is small, efficient and eternally supreme. How Moldbug’s ideal government expresses its strength is glossed over. For a computer kernel, absolute authority is ensured by having it when the computer turns on and taking care not to fumble it. If only, the reactionary wishes, the same were possible for human beings!
Software 2.0 is written in neural network weights. No human is involved in writing this code because there are a lot of weights (typical networks might have millions), and coding directly in weights is kind of hard (I tried). Instead, we specify some constraints on the behavior of a desirable program (e.g., a dataset of input output pairs of examples) and use the computational resources at our disposal to search the program space for a program that satisfies the constraints. In the case of neural networks, we restrict the search to a continuous subset of the program space where the search process can be made (somewhat surprisingly) efficient with backpropagation and stochastic gradient descent. It turns out that a large portion of real-world problems have the property that it is significantly easier to collect the data than to explicitly write the program. A large portion of programmers of tomorrow do not maintain complex software repositories, write intricate programs, or analyze their running times. They collect, clean, manipulate, label, analyze and visualize data that feeds neural networks.
A team of biologists and computer scientists plan to map a global “safety net” for planet Earth.
The mapping effort, to be led by Washington, DC-based non-profit research organization RESOLVE together with Globaïa, an NGO based in Quebec, Canada, and Brazil’s Universidade Federal de Viçosa, aims to identify the most critical terrestrial regions to protect as we work towards the goal of conserving 50 percent of the world’s land area.
Scientists and conservationists have argued for years that setting aside at least half of the world’s land mass as off-limits to human enterprise is necessary if we are to conserve our planet’s biodiversity. Renowned biologist E.O. Wilson is, of course, one of the chief proponents of this conservation target, as detailed in his 2016 book Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life.
There was an overall decline of 58 percent in wildlife population sizes between the years 1970 and 2012, the World Wildlife Fund reported earlier this year in its annual Living Planet Report. If current trends continue, the group added, population abundance of amphibians, birds, fish, mammals and reptiles will have declined, on average, by some 67 percent by 2020.
It’s not just flora and fauna species at risk if we don’t find a way to preserve intact ecosystems, however. Mankind also relies on the services provided by nature, including clean water for drinking and crop irrigation, for instance, while the sequestration of massive amounts of carbon in the world’s forests helps regulate the global climate cycle.
The “safety net” that RESOLVE and its partner institutions plan to map out will consist of a network of wildlife corridors that connect every protected area on Earth and link them up with other high-priority landscapes, as well, even those that are unprotected. These corridors are necessary for migratory species and wide-ranging species like big cats to thrive. They also provide a means for species to shift their ranges as temperatures continue to rise due to global warming and their current habitat becomes inhospitable.
“Thinking is not enough. Nothing is. There is no final enough of wisdom, experience - any fucking thing. No Holy Grail, No Final Satori, no final solution. Just conflict.”
William Burroughs, Last words: The Final Journal of William Burroughs
Significantly more ice in Greenland’s glaciers may be exposed to warming ocean waters than previously thought, new research suggests. Indeed, more than half the ice sheet may be subject to the melting influence of the sea.
These are the latest conclusions of a detailed mapping project exploring the topography of the seafloor and bedrock around and beneath Greenland’s glaciers.
Published in their final form last week in the journal Geophysical Research Letters, the maps draw on a variety of data sources, including satellite radar and aerial imagery, as well as special sonar data collected on ship expeditions to the front of the ice sheet. (An earlier, although nearly identical, version of the paper was published online in September.)
Included in the new paper are some of the most detailed data yet on the depths of the canyons and fjords scarring the Greenland coast, which carry water in from the sea to lap against the ice. The results suggest that the western and northern regions of Greenland are most exposed to the influence of ocean water. Out of 139 ocean-touching glaciers the team identified, they also found that 67 rest in waters 200 meters (about 650 feet) or more below sea level, where warm water is typically found—at least twice as many as previously thought.
And, worryingly, the research suggests that as these glaciers melt and retreat backward, the shape of the seabed will continue to expose many of them to warm ocean water for hundreds of miles as the ice moves inland.
The study also finds that the Greenland ice sheet may contain more ice, with a greater potential to raise global sea levels, than previous research has suggested—about 2.75 inches more, to be exact. Altogether, the new study suggests that the ice sheet has the potential to raise global sea levels by about 24.3 feet, should it melt entirely.
(a) BedMachine v3 bed topography (m), color coded between −1500 m and +1500 m with respect to mean sea level, with areas below sea level in blue and (b) regions below sea level (light pink) that are connected to the ocean and maintain a depth below 200 m (dark pink) and that are continuously deeper than 300 m below sea level (dark red). The thin white line shows the current ice sheet extent.
“After nearly 2,000 years of using capes, oiled cloaks, and mantles for protection against the rain, this new-fangled contraption was viewed with something approaching disbelief. Who did people think they were, to defy the very skies? To parade their frugality on the streets? Or, to take a slightly different view of it, to pretend to a luxury–sheltered transport–only available to the wealthy?”
Automated reward systems like YouTube algorithms necessitate exploitation in the same way that capitalism necessitates exploitation, and if you’re someone who bristles at the second half of that equation then maybe this should be what convinces you of its truth. Exploitation is encoded into the systems we are building, making it harder to see, harder to think and explain, harder to counter and defend against. Not in a future of AI overlords and robots in the factories, but right here, now, on your screen, in your living room and in your pocket.
Many of these latest examples confound any attempt to argue that nobody is actually watching these videos, that these are all bots. There are humans in the loop here, even if only on the production side, and I’m pretty worried about them too.
This is a deeply dark time, in which the structures we have built to sustain ourselves are being used against us — all of us — in systematic and automated ways. It is hard to keep faith with the network when it produces horrors such as these. While it is tempting to dismiss the wilder examples as trolling, of which a significant number certainly are, that fails to account for the sheer volume of content weighted in a particularly grotesque direction. It presents many and complexly entangled dangers, including that, just as with the increasing focus on alleged Russian interference in social media, such events will be used as justification for increased control over the internet, increasing censorship, and so on. This is not what many of us want.
Organizations learn from experience. Sometimes, however, history is not generous with experience. We explore how organizations convert infrequent events into interpretations of history, and how they balance the need to achieve agreement on interpretations with the need to interpret history correctly. We ask what methods are used, what problems are involved, and what improvements might be made. Although the methods we observe are not guaranteed to lead to consistent agreement on interpretations, valid knowledge, improved organizational performance, or organizational survival, they provide possible insights into the possibilities for and problems of learning from fragments of history.