A newsletter about Pop Culture, Software Studies, Business Strategy, Media Platforms, Algorithmic Management, Game Design, and everything in between.
Duality
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Welcome back.
Contradiction appears at every level in nature, down to its most fundamental cellular dynamics and without regard or compassion for human affairs. The paradoxical physics of reality is hard to grasp. For more than a century now, scientists have struggled to understand and to accept how the world is built, from the ground up, on seemingly impossible and spooky quantum dichotomies. Both here and there, alive and dead, deeply interwoven and radically autonomous: atoms and bits do not conform to our ever-pressing need for simplicity and reassurance.
Most contemporary chat bots are a product of these pervasive paradoxes. They are nondeterministic systems, able to navigate the laws of statistics to deliver their impressive calculations with novelty and fresh insight. When asked about Ernest Gaston Solvay, the bots will probably tell you about his grit and resolve, about how he was able to become a successful practitioner and an affluent patron of science despite his modest background and lack of formal training. Solvay would later host some of the most important conferences of the 20th century. The first, held in Brussels in 1911 and dedicated to the problems and contradictions in classical physics regarding radiation and energy, changed science forever. The official group picture is endearing: Marie Curie, the only woman, pouring over some notes and ignoring the camera while a young Albert Einstein stands in the back row, looking shy but determined. They had not yet seen the horrors of a global war. In 1927, the luxurious Hotel Metropole would once again host a group of influential minds for the fifth Solvay conference, arguably the most famous and controversial. The mood had clearly shifted. The group photograph this time around is somber and haunting, featuring most of the leading proponents of breakthrough quantum theories against the backdrop of a changed, turbulent and increasingly dangerous world.
The Millennium book series is a collection of crime novels and the subject of multiple visual adaptations. In the 2011 film version of The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, directed by David Fincher, there is a remarkable scene where Henrik Vanger — a wealthy Swedish industrialist played by the great Christopher Plummer — tries to convince a talented and rebellious journalist to investigate his family, in order to solve the mysterious disappearance of a child. They drink warm afternoon tea and look at photographs of Vanger’s brothers and nephews, most of them Nazis. Outside, a snowstorm is brewing, the journalist will probably have to spend the night. And then the old man says: “Isn’t it interesting how fascists always steal the word freedom?”
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The greatest trick the office ever pulled was convincing people it doesn’t exist. Even before Covid, offices were trying hard to pretend they were homes or social spaces — and corporations were trying to pretend they were families or communities.
These trends will intensify. Remote work makes the office even less visible. And flexible work makes the boundaries of the corporation less distinct.
To sum it up, we’re heading to a world in which work is increasingly indistinguishable from leisure, corporations indistinguishable from communities (or group chats), production indistinguishable from consumption, and every person is both an investor and an investment.
Packy and Julia have spent the first five episodes of Age of Miracles diving into the past and present of nuclear fission—before jumping from the yin to the yang and covering nuclear fusion in the second half of this season, today we wanted to take a step back and talk about all the non-nuclear energy sources out there.
We ask this icebreaker question to every guest we bring onto the show: “What does the pie chart of energy sources look like in the US in the year 2050?” From advocating for the widely accused fossil fuels like oil and gas, to the widely celebrated renewables like geothermal, solar, and wind, each guest brings a new perspective to the mix. In this episode, Packy and Julia hear out their cases, and afterwards, answer the infamous question themselves.
As world leaders meet in Dubai for COP 28, Tom and Helen turn to one of the most important political issues of our age – Net Zero, and ask where Europe’s ambition to be the first carbon dioxide free continent comes from, and whether it can possibly succeed?
“A middle-aged electrician is murdered in a quiet Amsterdam suburb. The case leads to a web of drugs, money laundering and state-sponsored assassinations that stretches from Dublin to Dubai. At the center is a cocaine super cartel that is revolutionising the global drugs market. Financial Times investigative reporter Miles Johnson exposes the ever-fuzzier line between criminals and legitimate business people and between governments and gangsters.”
When Financial Times reporter Patricia Nilsson started digging into the porn industry, she made a shocking discovery: Nobody knew who controlled the biggest porn company in the world. Now, Nilsson and her editor, Alex Barker, have figured out who the guy was, and much more. Their reporting reveals a shadowy power structure that includes billionaires, tech geniuses and the most powerful finance companies in the world.
It feeds one of the Earth’s rarest species. It was the writing surface for some of the earliest books. It could prove essential in reducing vast amounts of carbon emissions – and China has more of it than anywhere else.
Bamboo, the tall, thick grass perhaps most popularly known as the chief component of the giant panda’s diet, has a number of uses even in the present day. The sturdy stalks can be fashioned into scaffolding or roofing, and the pulp can be woven into a variety of fabrics. This versatility has China, in the midst of a long-term effort to meet carbon peaking and neutrality goals, considering the substance as a replacement for petroleum-based plastics.
The idea makes environmental and economic sense, but there will be challenges along the way to universal adoption, including technological bottlenecks and poor public awareness, experts and industry insiders said.
When Renaissance dropped last summer, it was perfect timing. The masses were ready to shake off that last bit of ennui wrought by pandemic isolation, and Beyoncé exhorted us to celebrate that we were alive en masse, and to do so in the face of all that was scary: crowds, evil bosses, legislators, haters, the Supreme Court. “Break My Soul,” the single indebted to ’90s vocal house, was a jubilant, defiant protest. Its arrival on June 20, 2022, just four days before SCOTUS overturned Roe v. Wade, meant that it soundtracked furious pro-choice rallies across the country. It also lent itself to a larger landscape: a perfect lip-sync song in the era of state-level drag bans, a song of strength devoted to Black women and LGBTQ people in the ongoing fight for justice.
Millions of people have been enthralled by Beyoncé’s live imagination of Renaissance since it hit the road this May in Stockholm. When I saw her perform for a crowd of 82,000 at New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium this summer, it was impossible not to think of this timing.
That concert was one day after one of her fans, a 28-year-old Black dancer named O’Shae Sibley, was murdered in a racist and homophobic hate crime at a gas station in Brooklyn, simply for voguing to Renaissance. (The chant that followed at a memorial in Los Angeles, one of several across the country, went: “O-O-O-Shae. He was voguing to Beyoncé.”) Balenciaga took time off to join mourners in Brooklyn, and Beyoncé paid her respects. O’Shae Sibley’s death underscored the importance of her speaking directly to her queer fans, using her massive power as a place for others to reflect themselves back and, one hopes, teach everyone else respect and tolerance. The devil is working hard, but Beyoncé works harder.
In the current war in Gaza, ‘Israel’s Central Institute for Intelligence and Special Operations’ – or ‘Mossad’ – is destined to play a critical role, particularly, in light of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu’s declaration, in a press conference, that he has instructed Mossad ‘to target the heads of Hamas wherever they may be’. To ‘target’ means to kill them. ‘Wherever they may be’ is a reference to those Hamas leaders who reside and operate outside of the Gaza Strip, mainly in Qatar, Lebanon, and Turkey.
Netanyahu’s bold words were reinforced by his defence minister, Yoav Gallant, who stated that all Hamas leaders are ‘walking dead…. they are living on borrowed time’, and that: ‘The struggle is worldwide: From gunman in the field [in Gaza] to those living abroad.’ To be sure, it is unlikely that Hamas leaders in Qatar and elsewhere, were even consulted ahead of the brutal 7 October Hamas attack on Israel, but Israel regards them as part of the Hamas machine and, as such, considers them legitimate targets. The body that will turn Netanyahu’s words into an action plan is Mossad, Israel’s national intelligence agency, responsible for intelligence collection, analysis, and covert operations, notably assassinations.
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What happens next is straight out of a scene of your favorite detective movie as he went about procuring the gear to build a phone that would protect my privacy. Just picture him in a cloak.
If I’ve learned anything from this, it’s that cash is king. And, I need a trench coat.
COP — Conference of the Parties to the U.N. Framework Convention on Climate Change — used to be an obscure, highly technical conference attended by a handful of scientists and diplomats. In the years since the 2015 Paris Agreement, it’s become more of a sprawling trade show.
Ultimately, there will be one document, unanimously accepted by all countries, that spells out the state of global climate action and the next steps countries commit to take. And to that end, a few voices matter more than others. These are the ones I’ll be following most closely.
These folk ballads also defined a new type of protagonist, now known as the antihero—a familiar figure in film and pop culture, but also an invention of traditional singers. There are many antiheroes today, but before the rise of mass media, the most influential example in British culture was Robin Hood—who is a recurring character in the 305 canonic Child Ballads, playing a key role in 38 of them.
Without Robin Hood, there is no brooding Clint Eastwood in a spaghetti western or ironic Humphrey Bogart running a nightclub in Casablanca. Once again, a powerful cultural trope originates as a musical tradition.
New technology may also complement a specific task – for instance, improvements in AI may provide diagnostic support to doctors and radiologists, enhancing their ability to perform the task.
Automation is technology in substitute mode.
Augmentation is a result of technology working as a complement.
First order thinking suggests that technology-as-substitute (automation) is bad, and that technology-as-complement (augmentation) is good.
However, this reasoning ignores the effects of feedback loops and their compounding effects over time.
Recently, the range of dishes available to Ceder’s robots has grown exponentially, thanks to an AI program developed by Google DeepMind. Called GNoME, the software was trained using data from the Materials Project, a free-to-use database of 150,000 known materials overseen by Persson. Using that information, the AI system came up with designs for 2.2 million new crystals, of which 380,000 were predicted to be stable—not likely to decompose or explode, and thus the most plausible candidates for synthesis in a lab—expanding the range of known stable materials nearly 10-fold. In a paper published today in Nature, the authors write that the next solid-state electrolyte, or solar cell materials, or high-temperature superconductor, could hide within this expanded database.
The thinkers, activists, and scholars working on solutions to today’s (and tomorrow’s) biggest problems. At Future Perfect, we’re primarily concerned with ideas — ideas that can change the world, ideas that can make it a better place, ideas that might seem utopian but are actually doable.
This year, news outlets started reporting that people who had gone to see Taylor Swift’s Eras tour live were coming away with a strange, localised amnesia: after the concert, they’d suddenly realise that they couldn’t remember any specific thing that had happened. Very creepy! The BBC dragged out some psychologist to explain that this amnesia is caused by too much overwhelming stimulus, in too short a time for the brain to properly process it into memory, which is obvious pop-psych just-so-story drivel from a person who has no idea how a brain actually works. No: you don’t remember any specific events from the concert because there were no specific events. Just a vibrating slab of rich dark nothing.
The Blind Machine is a publication about Pop Culture, Software Studies, Business Strategy, Media Platforms, Algorithmic Management, Game Design, and everything in between.
