Retribution

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José Ortega y Gasset was a Spanish philosopher and essayist, published one of his major works in 1929 as a series of articles in a newspaper, then as book in 1930. He wrote about a new kind of emerging power, about the undifferentiated masses “advancing to the foreground of social life, to occupy the places, to use the instruments and to enjoy the pleasures hitherto reserved to the few.” This advance was an unexpected rebellion in the early 20th century, an urban and bitter insurgence against what Ortega y Gasset called the educated and intellectual minorities. He clearly saw what was coming.

Seven years earlier, Albert Einstein visited Spain for a round of speaking engagements and social calls, his notoriety at a glowing peak after the eclipse of 1919 provided the first empirical confirmation of his theory of general relativity. The impact of his work was felt in Spain as much as in the rest of the world, and is well illustrated by his schedule: Einstein gave lectures in Barcelona and Zaragoza, was hosted by the King, visited museums and attended meetings at the Society of Mathematics and Physics. He is said to have met with anarchists and revolutionaries, who like everyone else at the time were eager to apply the new scientific theories as a lens to explain contemporary social and political upheaval. On March 9th, 1923, Einstein is introduced at a conference in Madrid by Ortega y Gasset, who would also translate the session from German. The following day, the two men will visit the Spanish city of Toledo, a cradle of knowledge and understanding between Islamic and Christian philosophy, once a major hub of translation of scientific works from Classical Arabic into Medieval Latin. Einstein will later note in his journal that it had been one of the most beautiful days of his life.

Economic and social inequality fueled the fire that consumed much of the world in the last century, but some of the flames had a distinct character. They produced a cruel and vengeful heat, vibrant and scary, colored by shame and what we do to hide it. This violent resentful energy aimed at the elites was not in spite of reason, but beyond it. It did not care about politics but was enamored with scandal. It welcomed the judges and cheered on the executioners, but it was not thirsty for justice, only for payback.  This revolt of the masses would not end well, and maybe it did not end at all. 


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The great carbon divide

Climate-heating greenhouse gas emissions are so heavily concentrated among a rich minority that the image resembles one of those old-fashioned broad-bowled, saucer-shaped glasses beloved of the gilded age: a champagne coupe.

At the top is the wide, flat, very shallow bowl of the richest 10% of humanity, whose carbon appetite – through personal consumption, investment portfolios, and share of government subsidies and infrastructure benefits – accounts for about 50% of all emissions. Just below is the epicure, that narrowing joint of the glass where the dregs collect. This is made up of the middle 40%, whose carbon habit is roughly proportionate to its number but still double the average carbon budget that everyone would need to stick to if the world is to have any chance of avoiding more dangerous levels of climate breakdown.

Going further down is the long, slim, fragile stem comprising the remaining 50% of the world’s population, whose carbon use tapers away along with incomes. At the bottom are the hundreds of millions who live in extreme poverty and barely register in terms of greenhouse gases.

https://www.theguardian.com/environment/ng-interactive/2023/nov/20/the-great-carbon-divide-climate-chasm-rich-poor

The Honor System

The real point of magic, Teller said during those lectures, is “telling a beautiful lie. It lets you see what the world would be like if cause and effect weren’t bound by physics.” It’s the collision between what you know and what you see that provides magic’s greatest spark.

https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/interviews/a15810/teller-magician-interview-1012/

They Cloned Blaxploitation: Exploring Blaxperimentation and Black Futures in Film

Primarily, the film brought me back to an article by Professor Ruha Benjamin titled “Racial fictions, biological facts: Expanding the Sociological Imagination through speculative methods.” in which Benjamin makes the statement that “Social scientists, for our part, are often in the business of documenting dystopias, which offer a starting point for imagining alternatives” (Benjamin 19). And she references the sociologist and writer W.E.B. DuBois, whose science fiction story “The Comet” is considered the first example of African-American speculative fiction. And for Benjamin and many others, DuBois is also the first example of using social science research to inform speculative imagining by bridging the gap between science and storytelling, or what Benjamin describes as biological facts and racial fiction.

https://faitheday.medium.com/from-blaxploitation-to-blaxperimentation-exploring-black-futures-through-the-medium-of-film-a0bc1e5d1f20

Broken: Part 2 – Social Discovery is Broken

OK, so it might be the case that social media platforms weren’t the best foundation to build a digital news brand or a baby care company. But people still love them, right? We’re all still spending time pulling refresh on our mobile phones for hours a day, aren’t we? Well, this might be true, but a more fundamental shift in social media is changing our relationship with it. In the last few years, we’ve seen social platforms shift the focus of their content feeds from the social graph – networks we build ourselves by making choices about who we follow – to discovery engines – algorithmically driven feeds that choose what we see based on our previous engagement.

At the birth of Web 2.0, the argument of books like Clay Shirky’s Here Comes Everybody was that the new social networks gave us agency – they let us define the social and media networks we wanted to give our time and attention to. Before this, our media networks were organised by powerful gatekeepers like TV schedulers. The shift to discovery engines is almost like a shift back to schedulers, just this time with heavily personalised, algorithmic schedulers serving up billions of unique streams of content.

https://www.attentionmatters.uk/p/broken-part-2-social-discovery-is

Broken: Part 1 – Discovery is Broken

The idea was to dive into the cultural and social history of key digital metrics to understand what they were really measuring, and how we can use them in smarter ways to gauge the impact of our content. But by the time I wrote the last episode in the series, I realised I wasn’t writing a history, but a eulogy – the digital metrics I was discussing were becoming less important as the platforms and audience behaviours they measured changed.

Then, on our annual Storythings strategy retreat this October, we realised it is even more serious than we thought. It’s not just that the metrics aren’t working – content discovery is broken. If you’re a B2B or B2C content publisher trying to build an audience right now, you’ll have seen this yourself. We’d noticed it before, but in the year since our last retreat, it feels like we’ve reached a tipping point, with more and more publishers and commentators saying that algorithmic feeds and Google search are no longer viable ways of building a sustainable audience.

https://www.attentionmatters.uk/p/broken-part-1-discovery-is-broken

The networked shape of future audio

“Audio” is what we now call the broad category of music, podcasts, books, lectures and many more variations of digital content. Radio became all that, diluted and subsumed by the Californian tech wave of on-demand and streaming business models. Whatever is left of the traditional industry and its century-long rise is now being progressively dismantled by three megatrends that will play out over the course of the next decade. All of them computational in nature, networked to the core.

These trends will transform our perception and consumption of audio, in ways that can be traced to a combination of current technical innovations, artistic impulses, and corporate road maps. Like the ones before it, this paradigm shift in our relationship with recorded sound will disrupt norms and behaviors, politics and culture, business and pleasure.

https://yurilopespereira.medium.com/the-networked-shape-of-future-audio-d1dccd9c4d2a

What is Scarce When Quality is Abundant

In analyzing any industry, it’s critically important to understand which resources are abundant and which are scarce. That’s because value accrues to the scarce resource in a value chain and, accordingly, it shifts along the chain when the relative abundance/scarcity of resources changes.

AI is set to democratize high production values. At the same time, many consumers’ definitions of quality are shifting away from high production values — and therefore lowering the bar — at least some of the time. YouTube is already the most streamed service in the U.S. to TVs, equivalent to Hulu, Disney+, HBO Max, Peacock and Paramount+ combined. Or, consider that Mr. Beast’s last video, which is performing near his average, got enough viewing to be a top 10 series on Netflix globally.

https://dougshapiro.medium.com/what-is-scarce-when-quality-is-abundant-9e4b5529a07e

Why Is Medieval Art So Weird?

To today’s audiences, medieval art can look outright bizarre. Before the stylistic shifts that defined the Renaissance, medieval illustrations often featured flat, unrealistic figures and fantastical scenes. But the details that make these drawings so baffling are also uniquely endearing.

A lot of it is about showing characters, people or creatures in medieval art that jump out of the page and have their own personality,” Swarthout tells Artnet’s Min Chen. “Humor is a really big part of it. I think it’s what makes people connect with it—they want to be in on the joke.”

https://www.smithsonianmag.com/smart-news/medieval-art-can-be-weird-now-theres-a-book-all-about-it-180983269/

Criminal Leviathans

What happens when state repression strengthens the very criminal groups it aims to constrain? Under mass incarceration, sophisticated prison gangs have learned not only to organize inmate populations, but to project power onto the street, challenging state authority in both direct and oblique ways. From Brazil to El Salvador, prison gangs have transformed the state’s disciplinary institutions into headquarters for building drug empires, organizing street crime, and orchestrating terrorist attacks capable of bringing the state to heel. At the same time, they govern—providing order and physical safety for millions of low-income residents across vast informal peripheries neglected by governments.

The fruit of decades of resorting to repressive strategies to address underlying social problems, these criminal shadow-governments simultaneously defy and undergird the neoliberal state, in the process creating a stubborn specter of non-state authority and destabilizing the foundations of democratic politics. 

https://sites.google.com/view/criminal-leviathans/home

China: The world’s shopping cart

China is no longer just the world’s factory; now, it’s also the world’s mall. As online shopping slows within China, a new generation of e-commerce companies has emerged, with their sights set on foreign customers. Their rise has been meteoric: In the past few years, Shein has cornered the fast-fashion market and is now expanding to sell almost anything; Temu only launched at the end of 2022 and now has 130 million global users; and TikTok is converting its vast user base into online shoppers with TikTok Shop.

The rise of these Chinese shopping platforms has reshaped online shopping for buyers and sellers. Their ultra-low prices have enticed customers and beaten back the competition but also invited scrutiny. Governments are starting to question the impact on local business and the integrity of supply chains — in some cases changing import rules or even banning platforms outright.

https://restofworld.org/series/china-shopping-cart/

Holly Herndon’s Infinite Art

Around this time, Herndon and Dryhurst, who is also her primary collaborator, had been experimenting with the embedding of “Holly Herndon” in the data used to “train” text-to-image generators such as Dall-E and Stable Diffusion. Herndon, who is forty-three, has sea-glass-blue eyes, a round, pale face, and persimmon-colored hair; she tends to style it with bangs, a short bob in front, and a long braid in the back. The embedding of the Virgin Mary might be reduced to something involving her posture, gaze, and infant son; Herndon’s embedding is tied to her distinctive look.

In 2021, she and Dryhurst began working on a series of computer-generated images, grouped under the title “classified,” that explored her embedding in an artificial neural network created by OpenAI. Though some of the art works are unsettling portraits of Herndonesque women rendered in the style of an oil painting, many are more playful: “x | o 40,” which used the prompt “A building that looks like Holly Herndon,” shows a stately white structure with brick-red bangs, two porthole windows, and pursed pink lips; “x | o 41” depicts a figure with buggy blue eyes and a red braid which could be fan art for “The Simpsons.” “My identity in models is determined by aggregate cliches scraped from the web,” Herndon recently tweeted. “I’m mostly a haircut!”

https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/11/20/holly-herndons-infinite-art

Pessimists Archive

Pessimists Archive is a project to educate people on and archive the history of technophobia and moral panics. We believe the best antidote to fear of the new is looking back at fear of the old.

Only by looking back at fears of old things when they were new, can we have rational constructive debates about emerging technologies today that avoids the pitfalls of moral panic and incumbent protectionism.

https://pessimistsarchive.org/

‘Violent colonialist’ Magellan is unfit to keep his place in the night sky, say astronomers

For centuries Ferdinand Magellan has been accorded a rare privilege. The explorer’s name has been written in the stars. Two satellite galaxies of our own Milky Way, which sparkle conspicuously over the southern hemisphere, are labelled the Large and Small Magellanic Clouds.

Now astronomers want to erase this celestial distinction. They say that Magellan, the 16th century Portuguese sailor, was a murderer who enslaved and burned down the homes of Indigenous peoples during his leadership of the first expedition to circumnavigate the globe. They insist his name should no longer be honoured by being associated with the clouds.

“Magellan committed horrific acts. In what became Guam and the Philippines, he and his men burned villages and killed their inhabitants,” says the astronomer Mia de los Reyes, of Amherst College in Massachusetts. Magellan led the 1519 Spanish expedition that achieved the first European navigation to Asia via the Pacific, but died in a battle, in 1521, with Indigenous people in the present-day Philippines.

https://www.theguardian.com/science/2023/nov/12/violent-colonialist-magellan-is-unfit-to-keep-his-place-in-the-night-sky-say-astronomers

Design Fiction as Pedagogic Practice

This observation is nothing new. But it’s essential to understand my continued interest in speculation and fiction. My challenge is how to construct and design an educational curriculum that develops the wide range of skills and knowledge it takes to be a designer, whilst opening up a space for our students to push the boundaries of our discipline. By focussing on the speculative and fictional, design is no longer constrained by the practical reality of todays material and economic restrictions. The part of our curriculum that concentrates on the fictional, pulls important parts of design practice into focus; narrative construction, user interactions, representations of affect, communication and contextualisation. We train designers to become fluent in the operational mechanics of their practice.

https://medium.com/@matthewward/design-fiction-as-pedagogic-practice-9b1fbba7ae2b

Resisting Audience Capture: How to Maintain Your Integrity & Sanity Online

What’s possible when we consider that the recipient is in control?

This inverse dynamic is just as established and increasingly deserving of our attention as its prevalence is growing, and its gravitational pull now dramatic.

‍The term used to describe this phenomenon is called “Audience Capture” — an audience has hypnotized or captured a creator.

There’s never been a moment in history where more people have been putting themselves on display in public for judgment by creating works of art (or “content”): podcasts, newsletters, original music, novels, and videos, both long and short — including our everyday Instagram Stories.

‍The more we publish, the more opportunities there are to contemplate what an audience thinks about our performances.

This is happening at every. single. waking. moment.

https://zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/resisting-audience-capture-how-to