Cassandrafreude (n). the bitter pleasure of things going wrong in exactly the way you predicted, but no one believed you when it could have made a difference.
I’ve finally discovered the word that describes how nearly every climate scientist feels, h/t @fretmistress.
Thanks to Scott Smith from @changeist for his talk for the #ArtScienceAtHome online conference, Feeling The Future. In it he introduced practical tools for mapping possible futures in a crisis.
two months of direct, viral instruction in the illusory unreality of the autonomous, self-contained, independent western individual. no wonder americans are losing their minds.
hey ‘being open to uncertainty’ is not a motivational quote or a meme but an actual rigorous, and quite exhausting practice that requires holding multiple possibilities simultaneously and being able to see connections between these possibilities and not retreating from the ache
I suppose one of the things this makes obvious is a collective inability to conceptualise, or narrate, the reality of a chronic, durational, massively distributed and avoidable catastrophic death event.
You know what would be worse. A weird anticorona virus that forced us to always be in tight huddles always with 6 people less than 6 feet away. In crowds of minimum 50. Except to go to the bathroom. Social closening. That sounds horrifying.
Good time to be a futurist. Since all old futures have been trashed there’s demand for building up a whole new set of futures. Most futurists will fail though since they were trained in adjacent possible variational futures, not blank-modes futures.
— Venkatesh “sergeant mode” Rao (@vgr) May 2, 2020
This is almost as bad as the class I ran a decade ago when one student wrote a custom particle filter from scratch and another one submitted a HASKELL COMPILER. How the hell am I supposed to assign numbers to these things?
The Creation of the Humanoids and the Sins of the Fleshapoids in a Still Life avec le péché dans la riviere For Whom Mind is Outer Space and Eternity is a Long Time. pic.twitter.com/RAdycIcdFB
How could administration become a site for action and intervention, radical histories, dark arts, wild experiments, new collectivities and meaningful work?
Everybody is sure their predicted future has arrived.
So you now live in a socialist libertarian authoritarian statist ancap monarchist democracy with high-tech Stone Age apocalyptic dysto-utopian Chinese characteristics.
All you need to do is create a polar coordinate system that places 1 pole in say palembang. Then project that to Cartesian and voila. I don’t know why cartographers chose north and south poles to base their maps.
Great Britain has ~60 million inhabitants and four native languages (English, Gàidhlig, Scots, and Welsh).
Sumatra’s muuuuuch bigger in area, has almost as many people (~58 million), and somewhere around 50 native languages (Malay, Minang, Acehnese, Gayo, Lampung, Rejang…).
‘The village [of Kepuh] on Java island has deployed a cast of “ghosts” to patrol the streets, hoping that age-old superstition will keep people indoors and safely away from the coronavirus.’ https://t.co/JHgeDCjTPapic.twitter.com/umP1kn7WbZ
Yes, I know Rome is burning. I feel a coward for ducking away from the topic in public speech, but I find myself still with nothing to say. Is there solidarity in sharing the same, self-evident truths as everyone else, or is it a hollow posture?
NEW: It took four years but I just got some newly declassified CIA reports studying the Soviet Union’s use of “black magic”, telepathic mind control and “psychotronic generators” – devices they said turned people into psychics and let them move objects with their minds. #FOIApic.twitter.com/MU7ogeaCGJ
— Emma Best 🏳️🌈 🏴 (Mx. Yzptlk) (@NatSecGeek) April 13, 2020
#COVID19#RIPConway John Conway was a cross between Archimedes, Jagger and Salvador Dalí. For many years, he worried that his obsession with playing silly games was ruining his career – until he realised that it could lead to extraordinary discoveries.https://t.co/2oPsRIrVompic.twitter.com/lw4521AWqo
“The difference between technology and magic is that technology works regardless of whether you believe in it or not.”
“So computers are magic?”
“Computers are magic.”
If you own a rice cooker, Taiwan’s FDA made a PSA stating that you can put your disposable PPE or mask in your rice cooker (with no water) and set it to steam for three minutes to sterilize it and re-use.
“Funnily enough, it’s not comforting to be told that you have to go into battle with your disease, like some kind of medieval knight on a romantic quest… The idea that illness is a character test, with recovery as a reward for the valiant, is glib to the point of insult.”
Word of the Day: “glisk"––sunlight glimpsed through a break in the clouds; a fleeting glance at a glittering sight; a brief glow of warmth from a fire that’s burned low; a sudden flash of hope in the heart. (Scots)
Photograph by Michael Held pic.twitter.com/0w6Jl7YFCz
“… like a modern lab technician ensconced within a biohazard suit, the basilisk maker should never undertake this experiment without first donning a protective suit of mirrors.”
Arundhati Roy: “The pandemic is a portal … we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it”
This pandemic rly highlights how we’re globally dependent but locally loyal. Whereas I’d prefer if we were locally dependent & globally loyal. Now, more urgently than ever, we need to act as a planet, as a whole.
— MΞMO (isolated. as usual. but washing hands more) (@memotv) April 4, 2020
I’ve hardly left the flat for weeks but days are a series of staggered, overlapping meetings. like being haunted by a large cohort of polite, well-organised ghosts.
The purpose of crisis prep is not to see you through any imaginable crisis but to buy you time. Applies to both resources (financial and non) and intellectual (scenarios, contingency plans). The stockpile running out is fine. Wasting the time it bought you is not.
Shout out to all the partners of lab researchers who have endured the recent exasperated crash course on antiviral biosecurity! Thread with pointers follows if you haven’t been so lucky. 1/12
— Dave Griffiths (FoAM Kernow) (@nebogeo) April 2, 2020
Taiwan did not beat coronavirus because of Confucianism. Full stop. They are doing well because their Vice President is an epidemiologist with previous experience with SARS and they have a strong public health sector with an emergency command centre.
I got my paper “Algorithmic Pattern” accepted for the mighty @NIME2020! The conference will be online only, which is great - hopefully that’ll set a trend beyond pandemic. Here’s the submitted draft, feedback welcome. https://t.co/O9elX1Lu74
Speechless every time someone says that this was totally unexpected & nobody saw this coming. See chapter 3: ‘Preparing for the Worst: A Rapidly Spreading, Lethal Respiratory Pathogen’ published by the @WHO Sept 2019. https://t.co/23qTrz7dN9
Polish composer Krzysztof Penderecki passed away today at the age of 86. His ‘Threnody for the Victims of Hiroshima’ was used in Part 8 of Twin Peaks. pic.twitter.com/UwKOPko9lc
The best Zoom alternative is fewer virtual meetings and more considered, long-form write-ups. It won’t replace them all, but if your remote day is nothing but a long series of Zoom meetings with small breaks in between, you’re probably doing it wrong.
All this and no in-home quarantine units. No pandemic isolation shed. More desks just means packing more potentially ill people into a house, working to exhaustion. https://t.co/appzAwlsn0
“It is when the machine begins to break down that you begin to see how it works. Likewise it is when authority is challenged that you begin to see the otherwise concealed workings of the power structure. This we could call… *preemptively apocalyptic knowledge*…” -Mick Taussig
“It is time to acknowledge the limits of anthropocentric capitalism and embrace the burden of a world that is precarious and challenging. To use our deep resourcefulness and imagination to stay with the trouble, and keep the revolt alive.” @anabjainhttps://t.co/UBUc2177WPpic.twitter.com/GiVoy5zNBD
great! and yes very good question, didn’t quite expect the response… thinking maybe bunch of calls in smaller groups rather than one big one - feral futuring as a public service😬
Three centuries earlier Zhao Rukuo tells us of a Javanese vassal called “Dānróngwǔluō” (丹戎武囉), presumably a Chinese phonetic transliteration of Tanjungpura (Middle Chinese: “tan-nyuwng-mjuX-la”, ’Phags-pa [tan-ryuŋ-ʋu-lɔ]). He says the people there prefer piracy to trade.
A patrician describing the arguments against Florence’s general quarantine in 1630: “It was thought it would give the poor the opportunity to be lazy … others were astonished that it would be possible to feed an entire city daily” pic.twitter.com/vT0zQb8Bxr
A condensed remix of some our thinking around care and uncertainty. Dedicated to all the carers near and far. To all those providing essential services and all those in isolation or lockdown. To all who care. To all… https://t.co/e57RI2E7pIpic.twitter.com/TXvzyseoUj
A short essay where I argue that we should commandeer the toolkit of surveillance advertising to create an invasive, nonconsensual public health tracking system to help us control this pandemic https://t.co/k9dETPhyLB
This is your free trial apocalypse. If you do not wish to renew your subscription at the end of the trial period, you must cancel your carbon emissions by 2030. Otherwise your apocalypse will automatically renew for the next million years.
“Okay, here’s the scenario. You are a crew member on a starship.”
“Cool.”
“Space travel is slow, you’ll be stuck with your crewmates a long time.”
“So we must get along.”
“Yes. Communicate, listen, share limited resources.”
“I can do that. What’s the starship called?”
“Earth.”
Beneath the dense noise of humanity, countless tiny critters. Intensifying densities and distances. “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” —F. Pessoa https://t.co/7RLhzbX961
With so many museums, galleries & art centres gradually closing, or reducing activities, this feels like an important & opportune moment to revisit @_foam’s pioneering work on fallow periods.
As always, @deziluzija& @zzkt were 5 years ahead of everyone:https://t.co/opKFe8AM7r
For data scientists, quants, ML folks looking for ways to help with the pandemic:
- Wash your hands often with soap for at 20 seconds.
- Avoid touching your face.
- Do not go to where there will be lots of people.
- Encourage others to do the same.
I’m sorry to say this but boomer critical theorists from Italy questioning the “authoritarian biopolitics” of the corona lockdown are really just the academic equivalent of GOP Senators going to their packed ribs restaurant the night of the travel ban.
This is not unique to coronavirus, but it feels like the people who know the *most* about something often express more uncertainty and doubt than people who have some adjacent knowledge but fall short of being subject-matter experts.
