Cutaway view of a toroidal colony, by Rick Guidice. Source: NASA Ames Research Center

Abundance is the prefab, catch-all alternative to these forms of scarcity-thinking on “both the socialist left and the populist authoritarian right.” Large increases in material output, we are assured, can save liberalism from the civilizational choice between socialism and barbarism. I disagree; refusing to be forthright about society’s structural antagonisms opens the door to demagogues who peddle false conflicts that still ring truer than the liberals’ false peace.

The Abundance authors are hesitant to enumerate the tradeoffs their agenda will require. Prompted by the work of degrowth advocate Jason Hickel, they consider whether we should shut off or scale down destructive sectors of production, such as military investment, meat and dairy production, advertising, and fast fashion. “There is some appeal to this,” they write. “All of us can identify some aspect of the global production system that seems wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. The problem is that few of us identify the same aspects of the global production system.” Hamburgers, they inform us, are popular in America. As is advertising, I suppose, insofar as we see a lot of it. But why can’t decent liberals like Klein and Thompson bring themselves to interrogate America’s trillion-dollar defense budget? It can’t just be an issue of popularity; after all, there’s nothing Americans like better than living in single-family homes, and the authors aren’t too afraid to call for the return of boarding houses. This country’s bombs don’t merely “seem” wasteful, unnecessary, or harmful. And disarmament is not scarcity—on the contrary.

What’s the Matter with Abundance? - The Baffler

Unlimited genAI use (Lane 2/All), if applied to students in their early stages of higher education, is akin to handing a teenager the keys to a high-powered sports car and saying ‘have fun’. This approach ignores the fundamental need to educate students to build skills incrementally within sensible limits.

A helpful, considered article by Guy Curtis on the limitations of the two-lanes for AI use and higher ed assessment heuristic.

The two-lane road to hell is paved with good intentions: why an all-or-none approach to generative AI, integrity, and assessment is insupportable - Higher Education Research and Development

Reaching out of nooks in the cracked crust along the desert’s coast, there lie thousands of Copiapoa cacti. A cactus group made up of more than 30 species, Copiapoa are found only in Chile. They grow a mere centimetre each year in scorching, breathtaking desert conditions by absorbing the local evening fog, known as camanchaca.

These rare, aubergine-shaped succulents exemplify life’s ability to adapt to extremes – one of the traits that has made them highly sought after by plant collectors.

They’ve also just been at the heart of a landmark trial over an international cactus heist that might revolutionise how biodiversity crimes are dealt with the world over.

Operation Atacama: The $1m cactus heist that led to a smuggler’s downfall - BBC

“Last week, Aix Marseille University, France’s largest university, invited American scientists who believe their work is at risk of being censored by Donald Trump administration’s anti-science policies to continue their research in France. Today, the university announced that it is already seeing great interest from scientists at NASA, Yale, Stanford, and other American schools and government agencies, and that it wants to expand the program to other schools and European countries to absorb all the researchers who want to leave the United States."

This is a generous gesture but PACA is the heartland of the French far right, and the academy is a perpetual whipping boy for politicians. Anyone who moved would face another set of difficulties.

Legal expert warns patients' medical data at risk as GPs adopt AI scribes - ABC

Excellent points in this article. I’ve directly observed some cavalier attitudes about the use of A.I. scribes, and consent processes aren’t what they’re cracked up to be. I’ve also seen this issue dismissed as “table stakes” in a pollyannaish rush towards imaginary uses for patient recall and enhanced practice profitability.

Health data is amongst the most sensitive data there is. Data governance and data security are major issues with these apps. We shouldn’t be forced into using scribes based on the decisions of practice owners or individual GPs.

A really interesting and timely dive into Xiaohongshu/RedNote.

“Who’s Afraid of the Little Red Book” - The China Story by Wing Kuang

In the United States and Australia, Xiaohongshu is widely used by Chinese students studying at universities and young first-generation migrants, who find it useful for locating Chinese restaurants, Asian grocery stores and Chinese-speaking trade services as well as researching immigration policies and sharing their immigration experiences.In Australia, Xiaohongshu attracts almost 700,000 users, including Chinese Australian citizens and temporary residents such as international students. In 2021, I interviewed three Australians who are on Xiaohongshu. Sebastian, who first came across Xiaohongshu through his Chinese partner, treated the platform like a ‘Chinese Instagram’ where he posted his daily outfits in exchange for hundreds of likes – often much more than on his Instagram where he shares the same content.

I’ve read a few things about Lynch over recent years that expanded my appreciation his impact. I thought others might be interested in them following his recent death.

Agency and Imagination in the Films of David Lynch: Philosophical Perspectives is an interesting companion to eight of his films and Twin Peaks: The Return.

Deviant obsessions: how David Lynch predicted our fragmented times - Phil Hoad in The Guardian.

Another Article about David Lynch - Patryk Chlastawa in The Point

Our doubles, ourselves: Twin Peaks and my summer at the black lodge - Linnie Greene’s reflections on her time in Lynchian darkness

This book is esoteric and academic but discusses his impact on transmedia aesthetics in a novel way - Networked David Lynch: Critical Perspectives on Cinematic Transmediality.

This podcast (in French) had an interesting discussion about Lynch.

A wonderful article on how you might go about digitally storing something for 100 years:

What is consistent about these examples is that they all involve groups who care. The most enduring decentralized efforts don’t owe their success to technological or organizational innovation, but rather by having enlisted generations of people with an emotional and intellectual investment in their worth. For both cloud storage services and distributed storage schemes, the question is whether they can provoke the necessary level of passion and watchfulness. Are they and their technologies empowering those who care, or setting them up to fail?

Century Scale Storage by Maxwell Neely-Cohen, via Molly White

He’s half right. Manipulation by recommendation engines and algorithmic oppression is an extant threat that’s changing our relationships and our politics.

But social media - interactive technologies that facilitate the networked sharing of information - can be emancipatory. It can expand our worlds in real ways. That sounds Pollyanna-ish until you recall that we’ve experienced that potential ourselves. Made new friends. Seen things in new ways.

It wasn’t always this way

One of my kids was recently quizzing me about Mastodon, and he pulled me up when I said I like the chronological feed.

“What does that mean? If there’s no algorithm, how do they know what you want to see?”

I realised he’s never known a chronological social media feed. Twitter, Instagram and Facebook abandoned theirs before he was born. The idea that all I see are the accounts I follow, and that I see everything they post, in the order they post, broke his brain a bit. He didn’t like it.

“You might also like” this slop

But the recommendation algorithms aren’t working like they used to either (if they ever really worked at all). Instagram is allowing you to “reset” your recommendation algorithm. Even though they have hundreds of thousands of data points about you, they’re recommending things that you’ve already long-forgotten. Or worse, that you wish you could forget.

Beyond blocking or unfollowing accounts, there aren’t many ways for us as users on algorithm-driven platforms to control the slop we’re fed. In fact most platforms are doubling down on the slop, serving up content from accounts you never followed in an effort to drive up fake engagement metrics. I don’t know if you’ve checked Facebook lately, but the dead internet is real and your relatives are trapped in it.

That highlights a tension we all experience. We all know our privacy is being invaded and our data linked by these recommendation algorithms. We don’t like the idea that we’re living in filter bubbles where something else decides what we see, but we can’t imagine anything else possible.

What instead?

This also made me consider a major upside of the fediverse that we don’t promote enough: the best recommendation algorithm is another human, and on the fediverse that’s all we have.¹ There are still human-driven ways to encounter novelty, and to escape the flattened world served up to us by algorithms.

These are some of the ones I use:²˒³

• For academic reading: The Syllabus is expensive, but it offers genuine insights into different fields. It’s expanded my reading and thinking.
• For links: Metafilter is still the most venerable and reliable source of web-based surprises.
• For films: Letterboxd has a “films like this” algorithm, but that’s about the extent of the recommendations you’ll find. It’s still what your friends watch, listed in the order they watched them.
• For photos: Pixelfed or even classico Flickr will make you happier than Instagram.
• For fiction: BookWyrm eclipses the bizarro, astroturfed morass of snark and spin that is Goodreads. Real humans talking about the books they’ve read, and they’re on the fediverse too.
• Feeds: Good old RSS feeds. These can be hard to get started with, but people like Molly White have shared the feeds they subscribe to, which you can treat like starter packs (and remember that podcasting is basically audio RSS).

These options often have a cost in money or time, essentially because they involve work instead of harvesting your data and mining your attention. If you look at Facebook, TikTok or YouTube you can see that what appears to be free has a cost.

A slop-free existence is possible, but it takes a bit of work.

1. Yes, I know there are bot accounts, but you have to follow them.
2. You’ll notice that Bluesky is nowhere on the list. That’s because even though it’s not be the latter-day 4chan that X-the-everything-app has become, it still relies on graph neural network recommender engines. It’s still slop. The ingredients just aren’t as bad - yet.
3. Social video is tough and not something I know enough about. I’m not a big viewer of YouTube-like platforms. Peertube would be worth trying, but I don’t use it much. YMMV.

I worked with “informed optimism,” which means you are basically working with many of the same institutions, systems, and tendencies that exist today, and understanding how there could be the best possible scenario. When I interviewed people for New York 2044, I asked them if they could use the lens of informed optimism to imagine their scenarios.

News from Home - Urban Omnibus

The use of AI to create novel text, images, and video will likely exacerbate the challenge of cognitive warfare. This form of non-lethal warfare explains the social engineering of adversaries’ beliefs, with the overall intent to affect their defense priorities, military readiness, and operations. In this way, countries will attempt to harness AI to produce misinformation and disinformation, which are designed to mislead and deceive opponents, and across the competition continuum ranging from peace to war.

A new military-industrial complex: How tech bros are hyping AI’s role in war - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

Argentina’s poverty rate has soared to almost 53% in the first six months of Javier Milei’s presidency, offering the first hard evidence of the far-right libertarian’s tough austerity measures are hitting the population

Poverty in Argentina soars to over 50% as Milei’s austerity measures hit hard

Another interesting piece, though it cements my view that American Catholicism has far more in common with with the evangelical churches of their countrymen than what is understood to be Catholicism in the rest of the world. Another flank in America’s pernicious global influence?

Behind the Catholic Right’s Celebrity-Conversion Industrial Complex - Vanity Fair

Two main risks arise from the increasingly common use of GPT to (mass-)produce fake, scientific publications. First, the abundance of fabricated “studies” seeping into all areas of the research infrastructure threatens to overwhelm the scholarly communication system and jeopardize the integrity of the scientific record. A second risk lies in the increased possibility that convincingly scientific-looking content was in fact deceitfully created with AI tools and is also optimized to be retrieved by publicly available academic search engines, particularly Google Scholar.

Worryingly it is free tools like Google Scholar, and fields like environmental and health sciences that have obvious policy and practice relevance, that seem particularly vulnerable.

GPT-fabricated scientific papers on Google Scholar: Key features, spread, and implications for preempting evidence manipulation - Harvard Kennedy School Misinformation Review

Parts of NAFTA anticipated this dynamic; the agreement included a provision to set aside $100 million a year for environmental infrastructure along the border. As time went on, though, Congress lost its appetite for funding public health upgrades in Mexican cities. How about building a wall and making Mexico pay for it?

That’s the kind of solution that appeals to the American political psyche, but it suffers from a basic misunderstanding. You can draw the border as a line on a map, but you still have to deal with the world on the other side. A sewage crisis in Mexico can’t be solved with pipes in California any more than a migration crisis that spans the hemisphere can be solved with a wall across Texas and Arizona.

A sewage crisis in San Diego County reveals the unpolluted truth about the U.S.-Mexico border – The New Republic

The vaccines — the first to target any human parasite — represent a feat of both scientific grit and fundraising ingenuity. Researchers took on a sophisticated biological adversary that eludes our immune systems’ schemes to identify and dispatch it. They also had to find ways to nudge forward products that would never result in blockbuster sales, a reality that sapped much of the biopharma industry’s interest.

Behind the malaria vaccines: A 40-year quest against one of humanity’s biggest killers

Shawnta’s story exemplifies one of the reasons people turn to gig work: she lost her good union job at UPS as a data entry clerk because she had too many family health appointments to attend to. Her younger brother is autistic with a brain aneurysm. Her mother has problems with her knees and circulation. Her sister, after a bad accident, has a knee injury. She also sustains scoliosis and is currently managing an addiction to opioids. Shawnta herself has health issues to manage; she has Grave’s disease, a thyroid condition that causes her weight to fluctuate and brought on early menopause at the age of only thirty-three. While juggling medical appointments for four family members, including herself, it is no wonder that Shawnta cannot hold down a full-time job. That’s why she turned to the gig economy—though the twelve-hour warehousing shifts she picks up through the apps could hardly be called part time.

While this is factual information (note: it’s actually rather hard to find the most up to date details about this) and so slightly harder to write in any other way, it raises another important issue: For what purpose are these explainers being written?

What business case is there to flood Google with new explainers when that information already exists, except to try and boost your website’s ranking? And if you’re trying to boost your website’s ranking with AI-generated content… let me tell you, you’re already tackling the problem the entirely wrong way.

An Australian Science Journalism Outlet Started Publishing AI-generated Articles — You Won’t Believe What Happened Next

“While everyone in Sunny seems to carry around a phone, for instance, they’re a lot different from modern smartphones. Inspired by the design of Japanese lighters from the 1960s, the devices are curvy rectangles that can flip open to reveal a screen. But hardly anyone on the show uses them that way. Instead, they pop an AirPods-style headphone in one ear (the phone doubles as an earbud case) and do almost everything via voice.”

I’ve watched the first three episodes and the different vision for communication is striking.

Apple’s Sunny imagines a cozy future where screens fade into the background - The Verge

A new step has been added to the mind-boggling scam that is academic publishing:

1. Conduct research (publicly funded)
2. Write up research (publicly funded or academic volunteer)
3. Peer review (academic volunteer)
4. Publish for profit (corporate publishers)
5. Pay for access (the public, universities and academics)
6. New! Sell papers to train large language models (corporate publishers)

The process for open access is pretty much the same. The public pays or academics self-fund usurious open access article processing fees at Step 3.5.

Taylor and Francis Sells Authors’ Work to Microsoft for AI Training

Sharp observations from Ian Dunt:

“The trouble was that the government had no basic competence. It did not have the organisational proficiency to deliver on its stated aims. So Afghans were encouraged to send emails documenting their case which were simply never read. The tiny haphazard team of civil servants who did read some of them were not equipped with the specialist skills required to assess them. They did not even have a rudimentary understanding of Afghanistan’s ethnolinguistic groups. The men in charge - Dominic Rabb and Boris Johnson - did not have the kinds of minds which could handle the matter. So people were betrayed. They were left to the barbarism of the Taliban. They died. And all that is most admirable about this country and what it represents died with them, in the dust of Afghanistan.

This was by far the most shameful episode of the last 14 years of Tory government, but it is replicated in one form or another across the policy landscape: health, criminal justice, transport, you name it. The same process with the same outcome: incompetence followed by failure followed by national shame.”

14 years of Tory rule: Some shattered conclusions from a broken brain

Defined as the degree of “Indian blood” one must prove to their tribe in order to be considered a member of a tribe, this measure was historically (and still remains) crafted by colonial powers to regulate and ultimately reduce the populations of Native American Nations. Today, blood quantum is the most widely used way to record “membership,” affecting not just personal identity but also political and social rights.

This is a great read, especially for anyone who’s spent time in Turin

A basic Turinese problem here is that Torino is progressive, but a heritage tourist industry, which is very attractive to tourists, has no avant-garde. Their stifling interest in your past holds you back. You can’t do “futuristic heritage industry.” Why? Because you can’t move forward into the past.

Image credit Title: Turin Creator: Ben Harris-Roxas Date: 20 April 2017 Type: Colour digital photo Rights: Creative Commons BY-NC-ND 2.0

Interesting article on France diminished global influence and the crisis this represents for their national identity:

One would have to go back 20 years to find a moment when Paris last demonstrated the will to step out from beneath the shadow of the U.S. and exercise a critically important decision on its own. In 2003, it opposed the U.S. invasion of Iraq. French diplomacy, under the auspices of Prime Minister Dominique de Villepin, effectively cemented a coalition with Germany and Russia, depriving the American initiative of international legitimacy. Since that time, France has once more found its place in European affairs to be subordinate to Germany and within the orbit of U.S. countenance.

Timely, given the ongoing crisis in New Caledonia.

Image credit Title: Incendies sur Nouméa Creator: Lilian Alizert Date: 16 May 2024 Type: Colour digital photo Rights: Copyright Lilian Alizert

A really interesting interview with André 3000 by Hanif Abdurraqib:

“The thing is, I can only give what I’m feeling. I’m interested in discovery. If there’s not any discovery, it doesn’t feel real to me. I’ve never considered myself the best producer or the best singer or the best rapper or any of those separate categories. But one thing I do have confidence in is my feeling.”

André 3000 is at peace - The Bitter Southerner

A chilling essay about Fatma, a Syrian refugee working in Bulgaria’s AI data annotation industry.

Despite its crucial role in the development and maintenance of AI technologies, data work is often belittled as micro or small, involving only a few clicks, and dismissed as low-skill or blue-collar. In fact, the platform Clickworker, a prominent provider of on-demand data work, claims on its website that “the tasks are generally simple and do not require a lot of time or skill to complete.” However, this assertion is inaccurate. During my fieldwork in Bulgaria, for instance, I attempted to segment and label satellite imagery, finding it extremely challenging. The work demands precision when drawing polygons around different objects in the pictures, which is also strenuous on the eyes and hands. Moreover, it requires contextual knowledge, including an understanding of what vegetation and vehicles look like in specific regions. Following the segmentation and labeling process by Fatma and her team, a rigorous quality check is conducted by a woman in the client’s company. Fatma’s manager in Bulgaria mentioned that the quality control person was “remarkably fast with the quality check and feedback” and added, “She’s able to do this quickly because she knows the images and the ground.” While taking note of this, I wondered how well the quality controller knows the ground. Does she come from the area where these images were taken? Is she, like Fatma, a refugee? Has her displacement been leveraged as expertise?

I asked Fatma if the satellite images she was working on could be of Syria. She said she thought the architecture and vehicles looked familiar. Staring at the screen, she whispered, “I hope this isn’t for weapons.” Neither she nor I could be certain.

There are no depths the AI sector will not sink to in order to exploit the vulnerable.

“I hope this isn’t for weapons.” How Syrian data workers train AI - UntoldMag

Many important points in this post by Jess Hill and Michael Salter:

In Australia, the current primary prevention strategy on gendered violence takes a universal approach. It does not put more resources into certain groups, but rather tries to deliver prevention work across the entire population. So entrenched is this ‘universal’ approach, it has come to stand as the exclusive definition of primary prevention.

But we are now coming up against the limitations of this approach. Even if we accept the current theory of change – that improvements to community attitudes will reduce gendered violence - it is clear, from the survey data we rely on to measure attitude change, that the strategy we have pursued for the past decade is showing limited, if any, success.

Rethinking Primary Prevention

Some genuinely fascinating insights from Elle Griffin’s analysis of the filings in the 2022 antitrust case that blocked the merger of Penguin Random House and Simon & Schuster:

The Big Five publishing houses spend most of their money on book advances for big celebrities like Britney Spears and franchise authors like James Patterson and this is the bulk of their business. They also sell a lot of Bibles, repeat best sellers like Lord of the Rings, and children’s books like The Very Hungry Caterpillar. These two market categories (celebrity books and repeat bestsellers from the backlist) make up the entirety of the publishing industry and even fund their vanity project: publishing all the rest of the books we think about when we think about book publishing (which make no money at all and typically sell less than 1,000 copies).

We might not need more blogs but we definitely don’t need more books.

This is pretty wild. Brazil has created a (massively underfunded) JSOC for the environment.

In 2013, Cabral secured approval to build a unit of rangers who were committed to saving the environment, by force if necessary. The next year, he was shot in the shoulder when he and his men surprised illegal loggers in the woods; he was back at work in less than two months.

The members of the G.E.F. (the acronym stands for Specialised Inspection Group in Portuguese) are biology nerds who found themselves carrying guns—a gang of jungle Ghostbusters. They undergo intensive training, developed by a specialized police unit that fights organized crime.

Most members of his team had graduate degrees in the sciences. Renato, a muscular man of thirty-four with a shaved head, had specialized in fish ecology. During raids, he did a lot of the heavy lifting, keeping up a cheerful patter as he destroyed mine equipment; other times he fixed engines. Alexandre, forty-eight and the father of two young girls, had worked in a national park and in fisheries regulation before taking the G.E.F. training course. “I’d never imagined working with weapons,” he said, but he had shown an unexpected aptitude. He was generally a guard, calmly scrutinizing the surrounding forest with a gun at his shoulder.

The only nonscientist was Marcus—a former lawyer, forty-two, tall and rangy, with an easygoing manner. At the headquarters, in Brasília, he procured weapons and ammunition for the group; in the field, he was often a guard. Growing up in the interior province of Goiás, he aspired to be a photographer for skate magazines, until his parents persuaded him to go to law school instead. Halfway through, he attended a ceremony of the União do Vegetal, a Christian sect that incorporates ayahuasca in its sacraments. “During the opening chant, I left my body,” he recalled. “I started to see the Amazon rain forest and found myself walking through it in a uniform with a team, while Indigenous people chanted behind me. That moment filled me with joy, and there I discovered the mission of my life.”

I was interested in this speech by Ilona Kickbusch on the challenge of trying to create healthier societies during the polycrisis.

One of her slides jumped out at me, contrasting Goran Dahlgren and Margaret Whitehead’s longstanding model of the determinants of health with a cyclone:

This image has been central to public health messaging since the earliest stages of my career. Seeing it spun into chaos seems like an appropriate metaphor for the challenges that my field faces.

Ilona also quoted German Economics Minister Robert Habeck, who I think has it right:

“…when we live our everyday lives, when we fill up our cars, when we slather our mince on the mince roll, we are always on the side of the good guys. Only people who have never been in a pigsty can believe that. We are leaving a trail of devastation through the earth with our daily lives and we don’t care about it yet.“

Robert Habeck, 2022

This post originally appeared on the Harris-Roxas Health blog.

One of my infrequent reports from my endless quest for the perfect podcast episode.

How the hipster economy went mainstream - The Culture Journalist

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

How a consumer aesthetic about “edge” without any semblance of ideology went mainstream.

The History of Drag - Betwixt The Sheets, The History of Sex, Scandal & Society

⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

The topic is so interesting it rises above the presenter’s irritating flourishes.

Segregated by Design - Architecture is Political

⭐️⭐️⭐️⭐️/5

A fascinating description of how this plats out in the U.S.

Capitalists hate capitalism. All capitalists would rather extract rents than profits, because rents are insulated from competition. The merchants who sell on Jeff Bezos’s Amazon (or open a cafe in a landlord’s storefront, or license a foolish smartphone patent) bear all the risk. The landlords – of Amazon, the storefront, or the patent – get paid whether or not that risk pays off.

This is why Google, Apple and Samsung also have vast digital estates that they rent out to capitalists – everything from app stores to patent portfolios. They would much rather be in the business of renting things out to capitalists than competing with capitalists.

Capitalists Hate Capitalism - Pluralistic

A interesting challenge to the notion of field epideimiology, drawing heavily on the lessons from a case in Ghana in 2011. The “field” is often seen as a frontier into which experts are parachuted:

Despite the mounting evidence suggesting it was not a zoonotic outbreak, more likely explanations for the outbreak, specifically that it had a toxic aetiology, went unexplored. After 2 years, all of the investigations into the outbreak had petered out. No meaningful public health interventions had taken place nor a compelling explanation for the event developed. However, if you read the draft and published manuscripts describing the outbreak authored by the investigators during that time, you would be left with the opposite impression…

Early on in the BAR outbreak response, a district disease control officer had raised concerns about introducing elite foreign and national outsiders into the investigation, warning: ‘They will come in, sit down and they will take this one, and this, and then they will come out with a nice story of a nice thing’. In an email to his fellow local outbreak responders, he explained that the outsiders will ‘want to publish because it is an emerging disease, however, there is the need for deeper investigation’ and that instead, they themselves should ‘work as hard as possible to answer all the possible questions, irrespective of the years or months that it will take’. Regardless of the image of transnational outbreak responders might have cultivated among themselves and the upper echelons of the larger epistemic community, to have such a reputation on the ground with those who witness work directly, is a damning indictment of these practices and their effectiveness.

The lessons from the editorial are that local workers get there faster and have the contextual expertise that is required for useful hypothesis generation.

It’s worth considering what other aspects of public health practice need to learn these lessons too.

Stuck in ‘the field’: why applied epidemiology needs to go home - BMJ Global Health editorial

More on the Brong-Ahafo case in this 2023 article by the same author.

“It is the result of deliberately hiding actual work – designing, making, sorting, packing, cooking, farming, delivering – behind little icons on your smartphone screen, in order to devalue it. It is the systematic use of the fake robot trick to lower the value of labour, until people are reportedly sleeping in tents at the factory gates, then banking the difference”

So, Amazon’s ‘AI-powered’ cashier-free shops use a lot of … humans. Here’s why that shouldn’t surprise you - The Guardian

Nine days after the stock reached its high of $440, a brand-new 737 MAX dove into the ground near Addis Ababa, Ethiopia, at nearly 800 miles per hour, killing 157 people on board, thanks to a shockingly dumb software program that had programmed the jets to nose-dive in response to the input from a single angle-of-attack sensor. The software had already killed 189 people on a separate 737 MAX in Indonesia, but Boeing had largely deflected blame for that crash by exploiting the island nation’s reputation for aviation laxity. Now it was clear Boeing was responsible for all the deaths.

Suicide Mission: What Boeing did to all the guys who remember how to build a plane

In Australia’s immigration detention centres, each detainee is given security risk ratings decided by an algorithm – but they’re not even told it exists.

Developed by Serco, the company tasked with running Australia’s immigration detention network, the Security Risk Assessment Tool – or SRAT – is meant to determine whether someone is low, medium, high or extreme risk for escape or violence.

Immigration insiders, advocates and detainees have told Guardian Australia the SRAT and similar tools used in Australia’s immigration system are “abusive”, “a blunt instrument” and “unscientific”. Multiple government reports have found that assessments can be littered with inaccuracies – with devastating consequences.

Revealed: the secret algorithm that controls the lives of Serco’s immigration detainees - The Guardian

Very interesting, detailed account of how the tobacco industry has shaped recent backwards changes to tobacco policy in New Zealand, more directly than you might guess.

RNZ’s attempts to follow up exactly who did write the notes, and where suggestions such as freezing excise tax on cigarettes came from, have only raised more questions. Costello’s office declined an OIA request for reports, briefings and communications on the issue, on the basis that it would breach officials’ ability to provide ‘free and frank’ advice to ministers.

Between 1.8% and 3.6% of smokers use shisha daily across Australia, up from 1% just three years ago.

That’s the shocking result from the 2022-2023 National Drug Strategy Household Survey that was released Wednesday. It deals with a range of alcohol and other drug use, but I was interested in the data on tobacco use. In particular, what’s been happening with shisha use.

The 2022-3 survey results show a dramatic increase in the daily use of shisha in Australia over the COVID-19 period from 1% of smokers in 2019 to 2.7% only three years later.

Keep in mind that this is daily use. 45 minutes of shisha use equates with more than 100 cigarettes, so this represents a marked increase in overall tobacco consumption for people in this group.

We can be fairly confident this increase is real and that the rate is between 1.8% and 3.6%. The 95% confidence intervals for the 2022-3 survey are 0.9% and the rate of standard error is 17.7% (RSE, generally <25% is considered reliable for most practical purposes).

This challenges assumptions made by many working in tobacco control and public health that shisha use is infrequent.

We also know that use isn’t distributed evenly. 2.7% of all smokers may seem like a small proportion, but this increase disproportionately affects Arabic speaking communities and populations, people living in cities and regional centres, and other migrant groups.

This is also consistent with focus groups that Dr Lilian Chan and I conducted for the Shisha No Thanks project in 2022. People who used shisha told us that their use had intensified through the COVID lockdowns, but that this increase had continued afterwards and was increasingly complemented with e-cigarettes use.

We need to increase our focus on:

• increasing awareness of the harms of water pipe use (this remains low)
• providing avenues for quitting that are tailored to shisha users
• making sure use at food venues complies with existing laws
• enforcing and retail import conditions more consistently.

Sources

AIHW. (2024). National Drug Strategy Household Survey 2022–2023. Australian Institute of Health and Welfare. https://www.aihw.gov.au/reports/illicit-use-of-drugs/national-drug-strategy-household-survey/contents/technical-notes

In the manner of mathematicians and physicists telling other academic fields how they’re doing it wrong, the computer guys have arrived to tell historical linguists how to study language.

Mainstream historical linguists remain skeptical, however — of computational phylogenetics in general and the new result in particular. The main criticism is that the approach relies mostly on vocabulary and ignores word sounds and structures, such as the stems, prefixes and suffixes that make up a word. And the critics say that word meanings by themselves don’t give enough information to draw firm conclusions, no matter how sophisticated the computation.

A very interesting long piece, well worth your time.

Discord continues to be every troll’s favourite platform:

Over the weekend, hackers targeted federated social networks like Mastodon to carry out ongoing spam attacks that were organized on Discord, and conducted using Discord applications.

Importantly these coordinated attacks seem to be targeting smaller fediverse instances according to Eugen Rochko, which may have less active moderation processes in place. These claims may be self-serving on Rochko’s part though, some of the best-run instances I know are smaller ones and mastodon.social is often a bin fire.

It used to be an acre of gorse, bramble, hawthorn, blackthorn, but someone got planning and had cleaned out the whole field to replace it with a garden. I stood there in horror – and I realized that I’d done this myself so many times in my career. They had nowhere else to go. We’re taking away their habitats, the agricultural land is poisoned, old growth forest decimated, and now the only hope they have is abandoned land or gardens. It just reminded me of Noah’s Arc, all those animals going onto the boat, but in reverse. So I decided to give up my job. I have to dedicate myself to righting the wrong I’ve done.

Interview with Mary Reynolds | Acts of Restorative Kindness (ARK) - ARC2020 via Metafilter

The bleak reality is that none of us have ever seen even the dimmest glimmer of a communist world—at most we have witnessed a few of those weightless moments when many people realize at once that our world can, in fact, be broken. Ultimately, these are nothing but glowing images best seen from a distance. Reach out to touch them and there is no depth. Just work, survival, desperation. Just the drywall, off-white.

There’s a phenomenal amount to ponder in this 20,000 word essay, I feel I can’t really do it justice. Just read it you muppets.

Forest and Factory: The Science and the Fiction of Communism - Endnotes

These cards may be the oldest existent computer program in the world. They were brought to Torino as a part of some lucid, compelling explanation, but now, they are more obscure than the Egyptian hieroglyphs in the museum next door. There is something terrible about them.

Babbage described the idea of software to the Turinese in September 1840. The Turinese understood his idea and sympathized. They honored Babbage for his efforts. Those are facts.

The largest mystery, is the presence of the secret police.

The Mysterious Visit of Mr Babbage - Bruce Sterling (2017)

A great story about uncovering the words locked inside carbonised Roman scrolls. We should be using machine learning for more things like this, and using it to impersonate humans less.

In the modern era, the great pioneer of the scrolls is Brent Seales, a computer science professor at the University of Kentucky. For the past 20 years he’s used advanced medical imaging technology designed for CT scans and ultrasounds to analyze unreadable old texts. For most of that time he’s made the Herculaneum papyri his primary quest. “I had to,” he says. “No one else was working on it, and no one really thought it was even possible.”

Progress was slow. Seales built software that could theoretically take the scans of a coiled scroll and unroll it virtually, but it wasn’t prepared to handle a real Herculaneum scroll when he put it to the test in 2009. “The complexity of what we saw broke all of my software,” he says. “The layers inside the scroll were not uniform. They were all tangled and mashed together, and my software could not follow them reliably.”…

Unlike today’s large-language AI models, which gobble up data, Farritor’s model was able to get by with crumbs. For each 64-pixel-by-64-pixel square of the image, it was merely asking, is there ink here or not? And it helped that the output was known: Greek letters, squared along the right angles of the cross-hatched papyrus fibers.

Can AI Unlock the Secrets of the Ancient World? - Businessweek

Some good points in this article by Jason Hickel:

But UBI fails to transform anything about the underlying system of production. It accepts the existing system on its own terms: it does nothing to change who controls production, what kinds of goods and services are produced, under what conditions, and for whose benefit. This is one of the reasons that plenty of neoliberal capitalists, including Milton Friedman, have been perfectly comfortable with the idea. But ignoring the system of production is a problem, because the system we presently have—capitalism—is profoundly destructive and cannot address the multiple crises we face.

The Limits of Basic Income - Current Affairs

“The beach has always been a special privilege to us. It has enriched our quality of life despite the low pay that is available to us,” Serrano said. “Traditionally, people have called it the Poor People’s Beach.” Now, the tourists who visit the shore (when it isn’t closed to beachgoers) to gawk at the SpaceX rockets in the distance have a different name for it, Serrano said: Elon’s Beach.

Elon Musk’s Texas Takeover - Mother Jones

Many of the tools are essentially black boxes, says Schellmann. AI let loose on training data looks for patterns, which it then uses to make its predictions. But it isn’t necessarily clear what those patterns are and they can inadvertently bake in discrimination. Even the vendors may not know precisely how their tools are working, let alone the companies that are buying them or the candidates or employees who are subjected to them.

Schellmann tells of a black female software developer and military veteran who applied for 146 jobs in the tech industry before success. The developer doesn’t know why she had such a problem but she undertook one-way interviews and played AI video games, and she’s sure was subject to CV screening. She wonders if the technology took exception to her because she wasn’t a typical applicant. The job she eventually did find was by reaching out to a human recruiter.

[The AI tools that might stop you getting hired - The Guardian](www.theguardian.com/technolog…

“…discussion around the treaty is now the dominant political issue in New Zealand and when organiser Rueben Taipari put out the call for the hikoi to Waitangi to be in honour of upholding it, hundreds of people responded.

“How dare they think that they can erase Māori from Te Tiriti o Waitangi (the Treaty of Waitangi),” he said.”

Māori protesters march towards Waitangi as New Zealand reckons with new era of racial division - ABC News

Logging onto an app and using a personalised link, I was told the interview would be limited to just five questions - which I didn’t really feel captured the scope of the job - and then we began.

I was shown a question on a screen for 60 seconds before having to answer verbally within the minute. Then, if I didn’t opt to give myself an additional 30 seconds, we’d move on.

I thought I’d get the job. Then I found out my interviewer was an AI chatbot - Metro UK via Black Aziz Ansari

“Hey so I made a clock. It tells the time with a brand new poem every minute, composed by ChatGPT. It’s sometimes profound, and sometimes weird, and occasionally it fibs about what the actual time is to make a rhyme work.”

“Poem/1 fibs occasionally. I don’t believe it was actually 11.42 when this photo was taken. The AI hallucinated the time in order to make the poem work. What we do for art…”

Rhyming AI-powered clock sometimes lies about the time, makes up words - Arstechnica via Kristina

Village Landais, which opened in 2020 and was recently highly commended in Dezeen’s annual design awards, aims to give as much agency and freedom, real and apparent, to the villagers, as the staff call them, as possible. The five-hectare complex has a fence around it, as it must for the safety of vulnerable residents, but within its boundary people can come and go, more or less as they choose. They can stroll around the open spaces (or run, or cycle, as people with Alzheimer’s can also be physically fit), visit their neighbours, go to the restaurant or to a show in the village auditorium, attend to animals and plants in a mini-farm and a kitchen garden.

Hopefully this kind of approach can be made more accessible, and not simply for the rich.

‘They don’t just stay in a room waiting to die’: new buildings giving older people beauty, freedom and dignity - The Observer

This would be a nasty end for any independent media property. For The Hairpin, it’s especially repulsive, because the site was the antithesis of a content mill. It never courted a huge audience or chased trending topics—it was a writer-led website that found an audience by being experimental and intimate and odd. It served as a launching pad for bona fide stars like former New York Times reporter Jazmine Hughes, Bojack Horseman designer Lisa Hanawalt, and New Yorker writer Jia Tolentino precisely because it valued nurturing fresh ideas—and letting people make jokes!—not optimizing revenue per click.

In an attempt to understand the future of media, I tracked down The Hairpin’s new owner—a Serbian DJ named Nebojša Vujinović Vujo. He says the site is just the latest title in his stable of over 2,000 websites and admits that the majority of the new posts on The Hairpin are indeed AI-generated. “I buy new websites almost every day,” he says.

How Beloved Indie Blog ‘The Hairpin’ Turned Into an AI Clickbait Farm - Wired

Interesting piece by Siva Vaidhyanathan in the Guardian:

Billions of people use such a device now, but hardly anyone peeks inside or thinks about the people who mined the metal or assembled the parts in dangerous conditions. We now have cars and appliances designed to feel like an iPhone – all glass, metal, curves and icons. None of them offer any clue that humans built them or maintained them. Everything seems like magic.

Forty years ago Apple debuted a computer that changed our world, for good or ill - The Guardian

I was incredibly excited when my father bought a Mac in 1985. I even made the invitations for my eighth birthday party in Paint.

Vaidhyanathan is right though. It represented a clear transition, where computers began to mask their origins and impacts. They were seen as countercultural items for those seeking to be "both hip and rich”. The first objects from interstitial space, rather than markers of those spaces.

Image credit: Mac by Thomas Hawk

Everyone on Earth has an interest in reducing the likelihood of global catastrophe from nuclear weapons, climate change, advances in the life sciences, disruptive technologies, and the widespread corruption of the world’s information ecosystem. These threats, singularly and as they interact, are of such a character and magnitude that no one nation or leader can bring them under control. That is the task of leaders and nations working together in the shared belief that common threats demand common action. As the first step, and despite their profound disagreements, three of the world’s leading powers—the United States, China, and Russia—should commence serious dialogue about each of the global threats outlined here. At the highest levels, these three countries need to take responsibility for the existential danger the world now faces. They have the capacity to pull the world back from the brink of catastrophe. They should do so, with clarity and courage, and without delay.

A moment of historic danger: It is still 90 seconds to midnight - Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists

A worthwhile essay by Trystan S. Goetze on the ways generative AI constitutes theft:

…built on the appropriation of vast troves of data obtained without consent. Moreover, machine learning models that are not employed in generative systems—such as, perhaps, certain large natural language understanding models— may also involve theft. New approaches to data collection and processing are needed for generative AI development to be morally permissible. Until then, these impressive new technologies do not stand on the shoulders of giants; rather, they parasitize their innards.

AI Art is Theft: Labour, Extraction, and Exploitation—Or, On the Dangers of Stochastic Pollocks 🎨

Doctorow’s recent linkdump is a litany of corporate failure, arrogance and malice towards their customers, ranging from pharma to film projectors. Brace yourself for this to become more entrenched as the norm:

“Big corporations LARP this performance of competence and seriousness, but they are deeply unserious.” - Pluralistic

An interesting account of Bill Clinton’s betrayal of U.S. labour, and how that’s shaped many of the issues the U.S. is still contending with.

In his first administration, a much-touted healthcare reform bill led by Hillary Clinton failed badly. By 1994 it was dead on arrival. As Secretary of Labor Robert Reich finally conceded, ‘The quest for universal healthcare had a rich history, but “managed competition” was something brand new. It was designed to placate all the powerful interest groups…this scheme had few defenders who were both knowledgeable and committed.’ It was a profound failure among those who had long wanted an extension of Medicare, passed in the 1960s by Lyndon B. Johnson in his Great Society program.

What did get passed was the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA). Though it was not the most economically consequential, the authors argue that ‘it remains the most politically and ideologically toxic’ issue pushed by Clinton, an ‘apolitical blunder of the first order’ that opened up the opportunity to the Republicans during the 1994 mid-term elections and alienated large segments of the working class who, as Lichtenstein underscores, eventually became a serious proportion of today’s Trump supporters.

Bill Clinton Versus Organised Labour - Tribune

Ultimately, though, it wasn’t any decline in editorial quality that led me to read Pitchfork less frequently. It’s that the site had been caught up in a series of technological shifts that weakened its business and created an existential crisis for music critics.

How platforms killed Pitchfork - Platformer

Michael Marmot on what the UK is getting wrong:

If you needed a case study example of what not to do to reduce health inequalities, the UK provides it. The only other developed country doing worse is the US, where life expectancy is falling. Our country has become poor and unhealthy, where a few rich, healthy people live. People care about their health, but it is deteriorating, with their lives shortening, through no fault of their own. Political leaders can choose to prioritise everyone’s health, or not. Currently they are not…

What must happen at the same time, though, is leadership from central government, making reducing health inequalities a central plank of the next government. That means implementing fairer social and economic policies, with health at the heart.

Hard to imagine a Keir Starmer government doing that, but let’s hope.

UK shows what not to do to tackle health inequalities, says Marmot - The BMJ (unfortunately paywalled)

AI is intensifying existing necropolitics, the term used by Cameroonian political theorist Achille Mbembe to refer to the use of social and political power to dictate how some people may live and how some must die, and we urgently need to resist that.

Excellent piece by Dan McQuillan from mid-2023 on how the proven harms of AI are forever being traded off against promises of future usefulness.

Predicted benefits, proven harms: How AI’s algorithmic violence emerged from our own social matrix - The Sociological Review

An excellent essay by Dr Austin McCoy on the changing nature of hip hop, and its ongoing cultural and political relevance:

I will never forget one of my professors in the African American studies master’s program at Ohio State telling us, “We aren’t going to hip-hop our way to liberation.” True enough—yet as I later learned from African American history professors like Zachery Williams, it’s not useful to think of history as separate from culture, nor can one understand culture’s power without the history from which it springs.

It’s Bigger Than Hip-Hop - The Baffler

Consultants’ work is often opaque, and feeds into broader processes. French parliamentarians criticised McKinsey for its role in the country’s sluggish vaccine rollout. But how do we know that things wouldn’t have been even worse without the firm? “These are private companies, the McKinseys and the Deloittes, that have no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in.”

Mariana Mazzucato: ‘The McKinseys and the Deloittes have no expertise in the areas that they’re advising in’ - Financial Times

Climate-driven migration promises a generational realignment of U.S. states, as coastal parts of Florida and Georgia grow older and receiving states such as Texas and Tennessee see an influx of young people. It could also create a vicious cycle of decline in coastal communities, as investors and laborers relocate from vulnerable coasts to inland areas — and in doing so incentivize more and more working-age adults to follow in their footsteps.

Climate migration will leave the elderly behind - Grist

From Scientific American:

Archaeologists recently rediscovered the long-hidden traces of an ancient Indigenous society in western Ecuador’s Upano Valley: more than 6,000 earthen platforms that once supported houses and communal buildings in 15 urban centers, set amid vast tracts of carefully drained farmland and linked by a network of roads

Link to peer reviewed publication

Hot on the heels of the revelation that people are using LinkedIn for dating, it seems that just sounding vaguely female is enough to get you harassed:

…I have an email “Personal Assistant” bot that does this for me. It has a female name (which was the default), and does not announce that it is a bot (though I don’t think it’s hard to tell). It gives a standard salutation and signs off with “Thank you, (bot name).” All it does is schedule meetings, and it’s not nearly to the level of an AI chat bot or anything. Any parts of an email that it receives that don’t seem related to scheduling just get ignored by the program. The emails show up in my inbox and I review them to make sure everything got added to my calendar correctly.

However, this complete lack of personal-type interaction has not stopped several of the men (not usually the actual owners of the client businesses) it is scheduling appointments with from asking it out on dates.

Men are hitting on my scheduling bot because it has a woman’s name - Ask A Manager

How is any of this okay in 2024?

Interesting article to see from an Australian business reporter:

Not only does it cost Australians more to feed fuel-thirsty cars such as SUVs and utes, but it comes at a notable cost to the environment, drivers of smaller cars and pedestrians. Both pedestrians and those driving smaller cars are more likely to suffer serious and fatal injuries when they’re involved in a collision with a heavier vehicle.

And an important point to note about the politics underpinning car-fixated policy:

But several things to note here. Firstly, the majority of new car buyers are Baby Boomers who are more likely to have paid off their mortgage and are generally less sensitive to – if not benefiting from – rising interest rates. They may be less sensitive to price increases.

The costly car choice we need to rethink - Sydney Morning Herald

The picturesque Himalayan kingdom of Bhutan holds general elections on Tuesday with serious economic challenges calling into question its longstanding policy of prioritising “Gross National Happiness” over growth.

Both parties contesting the vote are committed to a constitutionally enshrined philosophy of a government that measures its success by the “happiness and well-being of the people”.

Bhutan to vote as economic strife hits ‘national happiness’ - RTL

I’ve been fortunate to meet John Cook to discuss this work in the past. The crackpot relative is a great framing device, and interesting that it’s so universal:

“Everyone has a variation of that cranky uncle,” Cook says. “But climate misinformation is a very western construct and now we are going into countries that are culturally quite different.

“But we’re finding that the cranky uncle is a universal human experience.”

Climate and vaccine misinformation seemed worlds apart – but it turned out the Cranky Uncle was a universal figure - The Guardian

By competing against Meta in the brainless growth-at-all-cost ideology, we are certain to lose. They are the master of that game. They are trying to bring everyone in their field, to make people compete against them using the weapons they are selling.

Fediverse can only win by keeping its ground, by speaking about freedom, morals, ethics, values. By starting open, non-commercial and non-spied discussions. By acknowledging that the goal is not to win. Not to embrace. The goal is to stay a tool. A tool dedicated to offer a place of freedom for connected human beings. Something that no commercial entity will ever offer.

How to Kill a Decentralised Network (such as the Fediverse) - Ploum

Nasri, from Iraq’s Assyrian Christian minority, has come to be known as the “father” of Iraqi counterfeit cigarettes. Starting in the late 1980s, he built alliances with powerful political figures and monopolized the smuggling of black-market tobacco into Iraq before constructing a network of facilities to produce his own knock-off brands.

From last year, and an amazing story.

Smoke and Mirrors: How the “Father” of Iraq’s Cigarette Smugglers Built An Empire - OCCRP

The transfer of True Lies has a truly vile quality to it, a feeling like someone clandestinely dosed you with LSD just a hair below the threshold. At times it can look passable in motion, but then you notice something out of the corner of your eye: a thick fold of skin, a framed photo of a child, folders that are too thick at the margins, cheeks that look rendered. It’s that familiar dread at the pit of your gut when you spot AI generated imagery, a combination of edges not looking quite right and surfaces that are simultaneously too smooth and too sharp. A crime was committed here, and you can tell.

They Want You To Forget What A Film Looks Like - Aftermath

Like most fascisms, the Irish variety is bizarre, syncretic, and somewhat comic. This is part of the reason that so many have struggled to take it seriously, despite the manifest harm done to people in its firing line. Contemporary far-right groups are historically rooted in the anti-abortion networks that have existed in the country since at least the 1980s. The most prominent of these groups is Youth Defence, a vicious outfit with links to not one but several European neo-Nazi parties, and the former employer of current National Party leader Justin Barrett. Having been roundly defeated in their quest to keep abortion illegal—Ireland’s Eighth Amendment was overturned in 2018—these dubious institutions and their coterie of well-funded militants have turned to organizing full-time against immigration and queer people instead.

Dreck of the Irish: The far right is gaining ground - The Baffler

However, while it presents itself as the voice of ordinary activists, saying it is dedicated to “amplifying the voices of vapers worldwide and empowering them to make a difference in their communities”, the WVA has secretly been funded by large tobacco companies including British American Tobacco.

Revealed: how tobacco giants are bankrolling secret pro-vaping campaign - The Times

In this paper, I explore the risks of Palantir’s expansion into the health sphere using Sharon’s sphere transgressions framework as a conceptual lens and critical tool to understand and judge this move. We should anticipate the risks of no public returns, dominance, and new dependencies. While this might be true for many Big Tech actors, I add that Palantir’s expansion might be particularly pernicious. Palantir’s history reveals the perversion of logics under exclusionary politics in the sphere of security.

Traveling technology and perverted logics: conceptualizing Palantir’s expansion into health as sphere transgression - Information, Communication & Society

Even the accelerationists of this age are wretched.

While effective altruists claim to be ultimately motivated by charitable giving, accelerationists unequivocally want every dollar of tech money plowed back into tech companies. “Giving money to charity is a waste as it is not a self-­sustaining/growing organism like a corporation.

Meet the Silicon Valley CEOs Who Say Greed Is Good, Even if It Kills Us All - Mother Jones

In fact, never in history has a bombing campaign caused the targeted population to revolt against its own government. The United States has tried the tactic numerous times, to no avail. During the Korean war, it destroyed 90 per cent of electricity generation in North Korea. In the Vietnam war, it knocked out nearly as much power in North Vietnam. And in the Gulf war, US air attacks disrupted 90 per cent of electricity generation in Iraq. In none of these cases did the population rise up.

Israel’s failed bombing campaign in Gaza - Inside Story

I thought I might post some of the best pieces I read this year. From January (actually last December but I read it in January):

Nuclear waste has no respect for human timespans. The best way to neutralise its threat is to move it into a subterranean vault, of the kind the UK plans to build later this century. Once interred, the waste will be left alone for tens of thousands of years, while its radioactivity cools. Dealing with all the radioactive waste left on site is a slow-motion race against time, which will last so long that even the grandchildren of those working on site will not see its end. The process will cost at least £121bn.

Dismantling Sellafield: the epic task of shutting down a nuclear site - The Guardian

An interesting paper that’s critical of relying on online discourse to represent social listening, when the reality is more nuanced, negotiated and less extreme.

“While the online social listening showcased a predominance of individual and collective safety concerns, distrust towards African elites and Western actors, fieldwork revealed that healthcare workers’ vaccine perceptions were more nuanced and largely shaped by complex kinship relations spanning across online and offline social landscapes.”

Parallel vaccine discourses in Guinea: ‘grounding’ social listening for a non-hegemonic global health - Critical Public Health

…corporations confer legitimacy on autocratic governments through a number of material and symbolic activities, including by praising their economic performance. We trace out the implications of adopting legitimation as a key concept in the analysis of corporate relations to autocratic regimes.

Legitimising autocracy: re-framing the analysis of corporate relations to undemocratic regimes - Contemporary Politics

A good piece on Australia’s horrendously broken housing system, which is more about capital gains, intergenerational hoarding and tax write-offs than rental income.

It also criticises the utter naïveté of YIMBYs, who play into the hands of plutocrats:

Blaming planners is not new, but it ultimately misses the point. A recent analysis suggested there were over 100,000 approved but unbuilt dwelling units in Australia between 2012 and 2000. The supply system itself is now thoroughly geared to capital flowing from investors. If developers cannot sell to them, or simply cannot make enough profit, the banks won’t lend and developers won’t build.

As Kohler notes, the politics of this is simple:

“housing is a cartel of the majority, with banks and developers helping them maintain high house prices with the political class actively supporting them.”

Australia’s ‘deeply unfair’ housing system is in crisis – and our politicians are failing us - The Conversation

The two things that we said right from day one was it has to be 50% Australian music with half of that from Sydney, and that it needs to be accountable to the members. It was built on the basis that it belongs to the people that it’s for, because they’re the ones who show up and volunteer.

FBi Radio celebrates 20 years of Sydney broadcasts: ‘We were just this crew of dorks

It makes me sad that the academy has been so hostile, racist and sexist to these people, because we need them. It’s good to see that they’re flourishing though, and a reminder that careers can take many directions.

“The job isn’t what it was,” says Kelsky. She says the story used to be, “I can’t get an academic job, so I have to leave academia.” Now, academics — including established ones walking away from tenure — think, “I have a job and have to leave because I can’t stand it.”

The elephant in the room is that universities will be under increasing over the next fifty years and many, if not most, will fold. I worry about the human toll this will have.

How five researchers fared after their ‘great resignation’ from academia - Nature

“We were not legally allowed to practise our culture,” says Paul, who is an urban Denesuliné woman and a member of English River First Nation. “So, historically, people were making money off our culture that we were not allowed to practise.” Stolen designs may also feature ceremonial images and iconography, she says, which are then taken out of context when presented in isolation by a brand.

The hurt felt by affected communities goes deep—this unrooted representation of Indigenous peoples and Native cultures can lead to harmful stereotypes, which are then used to justify further oppression, mistreatment, and violence.

Protecting Indigenous Designs From the Fashion Machine - Atmos

My colleague Chris Standen on the Rozelle interchange:

Christopher Standen, an urban transport and planning expert with the University of NSW, said the interchange was emblematic of poor infrastructure planning in Australia.

“It was always clear that it would be a disaster for Sydney and that’s played out,” he said.

“There were votes to be had in making it easier for people in outer suburbs to drive into the city, even though that’s not a great thing from an urban planning perspective.

“The last thing we should be doing is building roads that encourage people to drive more and to move further away from work, so encouraging urban sprawl and low-density development.”

Rozelle Interchange design issues will be a problem for Sydney’s future, experts say - ABC

A useful discussion about how depictions of college have almost no relationship to reality, drawing on Land’s new memoir “Class”:

Stephanie Land didn’t know about office hours. She saw them listed on every syllabus during her undergraduate years at the University of Montana, but she didn’t know they were dedicated blocks of time where students could develop mentorships with their instructors, ask for clarity about curriculum, or inquire about scholarships and recommendation letters. She understood that networking was part of “the college experience,” but she assumed those opportunities were reserved for graduate students or an elite cohort of especially gifted undergrads. “I had no idea that as an Algebra 1 student, I could go to my instructor’s office during this hour and ask them questions about the assignment,” Land said. She considers office hours part of the “hidden curriculum” of academic jargon and social codes that excluded students like herself: a decade older than most of her peers and working multiple jobs to support her daughter.

Is the campus novel dead? - Esquire

The fascinating world of chip flavours:

Crucially, however, the expectations of what lasagne should taste like are not as high for a Thai consumer as an Italian. After all, there’s a reason we don’t eat shepherd’s pie crisps. “An Italian would think: how can a crisp taste of authentic mother’s lasagne?” Wade says. Peggy puts it another way: “They’d just think it was horrendous if you put something like lasagne on a potato chip!”

Bizarrely, it seems as though flavour houses take internal walls more seriously than major consulting firms:

In fact, the seasoning house is strictly siloed to guarantee exclusivity. Reuben’s team work on the Pringles account; the team making flavours for PepsiCo is in an entirely different country. “So the recipe, if you will, of the Pringles salt and vinegar can’t be seen by the other team,” Reuben says.

‘How do you reduce a national dish to a powder?’: the weird, secretive world of crisp flavours - The Guardian

journalist Anand Mangnale woke to find a disturbing notification from Apple on his mobile phone: “State-sponsored attackers may be targeting your iPhone.” He was one of at least a dozen journalists and Indian opposition politicians who said they had received the same message. “These attackers are likely targeting you individually because of who you are and what you do,” the warning read. “While it’s possible this is a false alarm, please take it seriously.”

In India, Big Brother is watching - coda

But today, a cadre of academics is now aiming to strengthen the much smaller body of research that exists around faculty who experience stalking and abuse. Victoria O’Meara, a post-doctoral research fellow at Royal Roads University, has been interviewing scholars in the US and Canada for a study on online abuse of faculty. She told me there has been “an increasingly organized attack on academia,” and scholars have told her their universities remain ill-equipped to respond to it or support faculty, let alone to protect them.

The Lurker - The Verge

We retreat into private enclaves, indulging our personal preferences without worrying about what the things we enjoy signify for society writ large. This condition has been especially painful for self-conscious critics, who simply can’t bring themselves to take sides in debates about modernism v. mass culture or Barbie v. Oppenheimer.

Critical Cul-de-Sac -Damage

“The appeal of local governments, Harris argued, is that they allow insurgent groups like Stand Up Now Australia to subvert the party-entrenched higher levels of government. He said that he believed his group was tapping into an anti-institutional sentiment that is widely felt, even bragging about having recently received words of support during a phone call with former Liberal Party federal president and campaign director Brian Loughnane. "

Anti-vaxxers are winning local elections across Western Australia - Crikey

According to internal documents, the CSIRO reports were eventually published in scientific journals and were used in BP’s legal defence, but first vetted by BP’s lawyers.

“Within at least one of these documents, we have identified nine studies with CSIRO employees listed as either the primary or co-authors – wherein BP’s involvement was either undisclosed or insufficiently disclosed"

CSIRO accused of allowing BP to vet research on catastrophic oil spill

“The goal is to find what was best about the early web and what is best about new technologies and merge the two into a model for tomorrow; while kicking all the Zuckerberg’s and Musk’s to the curb so we can get on with our lives. The citizens of the web deserve more respect than to be boxed into cubicles, limited to 280 characters, studied and rebranded.

The Web Revival is about building a sense of mystery, humour, humility and optimism in technology. The Web Revival above all else values action; we avoid perfectionism because it limits action - the Web Revival encourages creating and sharing things, even if they are small, broken, incomplete and Warning Under Construction.”

Intro to the Web Revival #1: What is the Web Revival? - Melon’s Thoughts

Shults and Lane are aware that claiming that AI could “solve the crisis” between Israelis and Palestinians is likely to result in a lot of eye-rolling if not outright hostility, especially given the horrific scenes coming out of Gaza daily. So they are quick to dispel that this is what they are trying to do.

“Quite frankly, if I were to phrase it that way, I’d roll my eyes too,” Shults says. “The key is that the model is not designed to resolve the situation; it’s to understand, analyze, and get insights into implementing policies and communication strategies.”

The notion that greater insights can come from chucking flawed training data into a model than asking experts or people affected is a central, flawed conceit of all current A.I.

The UN Hired an AI Company to Untangle the Israeli-Palestinian Crisis - Wired

Maladaptation is usually understood as referring to the unintended consequences of well-meant measures to reduce climate vulnerability. But it also includes the fallout from decisions that favour technical fixes over more holistic approaches.

Climate adaptation is not a neutral or apolitical process. It can perpetuate problematic approaches, including colonial land practices and the exclusion of Indigenous voices. This can create tenuous resource distribution, erode democratic governance and compromise Indigenous sovereignty, exacerbating vulnerabilities. It can also subvert community-driven bottom-up adaptation, instead focusing on national agendas caught up in international politics.

Useful points in this Conversation article by Ritodhi Chakraborty and Claire Burgess:

Climate adaptation projects sometimes exacerbate the problems they try to solve – a new tool hopes to correct that

It is questionable that the notion of the naturally well, (auto)regulating disaster subject applies to the Covid-19 pandemic. What is more: This notion contributed to the hegemonic formation of the resilience paradigm, which has served beyond the disaster research field as a legitimation of neoliberalism’s reduction of governmental support and the imposition of self-reliance. The radicalization of the racial capitalist, “economization of life”8 that neoliberal programs have fostered across the globe has been directly responsible for the immense death toll of Covid-19 and it serves as both a structural and a cultural obstacle to the type of (global) solidarity that is indispensable for dealing with this pandemic. The privatization of public health and the dismantling of social safety nets left public institutions unable to cope with the virus and forced people to expose themselves to it as they had to keep working in order not to go hungry. Moreover, in many countries, the ideology informing the management of the pandemic was one that prioritized saving “the economy” over saving the lives of those perceived as disposable (for not being beneficial to said “economy”).

In the past few years, the resilience paradigm has been increasingly challenged in disaster studies—though its use continues to be popular. But another framework for interpreting disaster that was promoted by Cold War disaster research seems to be largely uncontroversial: The characterization of disaster as revelation. The idea that a disaster would reveal hidden truths about humans and how they live in the present can be traced back to premodern times. During the twentieth century, it became pivotal for ascribing disaster predictive faculties with respect to the future.9 Cold War disaster researchers contributed to backing up the idea of the revealing nature of disaster scientifically. Borrowing from the language of the natural sciences and thus increasing the scientificity of their claims—they described it as an “equivalent of an engineering experiment,” or a real-world “laboratory” in which the underlying structures and “patterns” of societies would become observable.

Disaster Studies as Politics with Other Means: Covid-19 and the Legacies of Cold War Disaster Research - items

Luke Kemp on bad-to-worst clikate scenarios:

“you develop a certain kind of emotional distance from the problem. And I find, personally, that, like all humans, risks seem much worse and disasters are much worse, when they have a human face on them. I find it much more difficult to read about things like genocide, political violence, and gendered violence, for instance, than I do when I think about 6 degrees of warming—even though 6 degrees, just in the sheer number of fatalities and the sheer number of suffering, could be far, far worse. But it lacks that human element to clearly connect with”

Dr. Doom on the Hottest Summer (So Far) - Nautilus via Arthur Charpentier

People say to me, ‘You have to be realistic, you’re dreaming of peace, and you’re dreaming of collaboration between Arabs and Jews, but you’re not realistic,’” she said while slapping a sticker on a lamppost. “People just lost faith.”

The night’s ringleader is Yeheli Cialic, 23, a Jewish Israeli who grew up in a “mainstream family” but now describes himself as a communist and an “anti-Zionist.” He says helping Arabs negotiate the institutionalized prejudice they face in Israel is the civil guard’s priority.

This feeling of anti-Arab discrimination has only grown under the successive governments of Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu. And since the attacks, advocacy groups say Israeli authorities have eroded free speech by treating many expressions of Palestinian solidarity as incitement…

The crew is mostly young. Among them is Amit Okin, 23, who ran away from his yeshiva and his increasingly religious family to become a self-described anarchist with safety pins in his ears and a half-shaved head.

“I didn’t understand it, I didn’t understand why we can’t love everybody,” he says, unnecessarily apologizing for his almost-perfect English. “We are always told that they hate us, so we need to hate them. I always felt something was wrong there.”

A group of Jews and Arabs in Israel has a ‘radical’ idea — protecting one another as fear reigns - NBC News

The human toll of moderation of staggering - and almost all hidden so the brushed metal psychopaths of the tech industry can continue to deny their products' massive negative human toll.

Foxglove, the nonprofit supporting the moderators’ legal challenge against Meta, writes that the outcome of the case could disrupt the global content moderation outsourcing model. If the court finds that Meta is the “‘true employer’ of their content moderators in the eyes of the law,” Foxglove argues, “then they cannot hide behind middlemen like Sama or Majorel. It will be their responsibility, at last, to value and protect the workers who protect social media — and who have made tech executives their billions.”

Silicon Savanna: The workers taking on Africa’s digital sweatshops - .coda

The banality of evil, the normalization of evil, is now manifest in our streets, in our classrooms, in very many public spaces. The mainstream press, the hundreds of 24-hour news channels, have been harnessed to the cause of fascist majoritarianism. India’s constitution has been effectively set aside. The Indian Penal Code is being rewritten. If the current regime wins a majority in 2024, it is very likely that we will see a new constitution.

They would have known that, at the same time they were feting Modi, Muslims were fleeing a small town in Uttarakhand in northern India after Hindu extremists affiliated with the BJP marked x’s on their doors and told them to leave. There is open talk of a “Muslim-free” Uttarakhand. They would have known that, under Modi’s watch, the state of Manipur in India’s northeast has descended into a barbaric civil war. A form of ethnic cleansing has taken place. The Centre is complicit; the state government is partisan; the security forces are split between the police and others with no chain of command. The internet has been cut. News takes weeks to filter out.

You Mustn’t Pretend You Didn’t Know - The Los Angeles Review of Books

We believe the time has come for scholars across fields to reorient their work around the question of ‘ends’. This need not mean acquiescence to the logics of either economic utilitarianism or partisan fealty that have already proved so damaging to 21st-century institutions. But avoiding the question will not solve the problem. If we want the university to remain a viable space for knowledge production, then scholars across disciplines must be able to identify the goal of their work – in part to advance the Enlightenment project of ‘useful knowledge’ and in part to defend themselves from public and political mischaracterisation.

The ends of knowledge - Aeon

A small city in New Zealand plagued by “siren battles” – cars decked out in loudspeakers commonly used in emergency warning systems and often blaring Céline Dion hits – is calling on authorities to step in and end the noise.

The battles are part of a New Zealand subculture where music enthusiasts cover their cars in up to dozens of industrial speakers, loudhailers and sirens, then compete to have the loudest and clearest sounds.

Siren kings: New Zealand city terrorised by Céline Dion ‘speaker battles’

In 2017, we were almost 4 per cent of the population calling for Voice, Treaty and Truth-Telling. As of Saturday, we are nearly 40 per cent, walking together. Almost seven million Australians voted “Yes”. Both major parties would kill for a first preference vote like that.

Probably the most important analysis from the referendum was that polling booths in predominantly Indigenous communities across the entirety of the country overwhelmingly voted “Yes”. We have thoroughly established that this is fact: a great majority of Indigenous people support constitutional recognition through a Voice to Parliament. We seek self-determination over who speaks for us. Claims otherwise are an incontrovertible lie.

The movement that follows the Voice - Thomas Mayo

I tweeted in response to the homework algorithm “hack” that if it’s not worth a teacher reading the assignment/assessment, then it’s not worth the student writing it. That robot grading is degrading. I believe that firmly. (Again, think of that Gates grant. Who has a teacher or peer read their paper, and who gets a robot?) Almost a thousand people responded to my tweet, most agreeing with the sentiment. But a few people said that robot grading was fine, particularly for math and that soon enough it would work in the humanities too.

Robot Teachers, Racist Algorithms, and Disaster Pedagogy

A good piece of journalism by Mostafa Rachwani:

Upon hearing my explanation that the story is about loneliness, one of the staff members scoffs.

“Atilla was many things, but he was not lonely. He was a legend, funniest guy you’ll ever meet,” he says.

Atilla died alone, and seemed to have no family. But a sex shop told a surprisingly different story

scientists appear to be divided between those who think Neanderthal dignity calls for a recognition of their similarity to us, and those who think it calls for a recognition of their difference. It is striking that the camps are of one mind in thinking that dignity – or respect or something of that kind – is owed here, and that fact itself needs an explanation.

Justice for Neanderthals! What the debate about our long-dead cousins reveals about us

A great aacademic article that articulates clearly many of the reasons I don’t like Cixin Liu’s Dark Forest trilogy. The politics espoused in them is dehumanising garbage.

If you have trouble accessing the article please let me know.

I have been arguing that Liu’s novels, which precisely imagine the common enemy for humanity that Schmitt could not, show how the urge to accept violent conflict as the essence of political life quickly gives way to dehumanization and an absolute, unfettered destruction. Whereas the Holocaust may have finally moderated some of Schmitt’s faith in agonism, Liu adopted such historical violence as the motivating cause for his characters to embrace existential conflict. Ken Liu, the preeminent translator responsible for two volumes of the Remembrance trilogy, remarked in an interview that there were only “two historical events Liu Cixin could think of that would cause somebody to be so utterly disappointed by human nature that Ye’s willing to trust a higher power from outside to redeem humanity: The Holocaust and the Cultural Revolution” (Pandell)…

Liu’s choices in characterization would be shortcomings in a realist novel; for this science fiction trilogy, however, his sacrifice of deliberative planning and emotional appeal for raw decisions serves to discredit liberal values in favor of “totalitarian” order, an aesthetic politics defined—as it was for Schmitt—by a core belief in existential antagonism. Later in the narrative, officials interrogate a crew member from another vessel that had been isolated in space. He explains that, once their connection to Earth was severed, “I gave up my individual self. My existence would be meaningful only if the collective survived” (Death’s 113). In a striking passage, he compares this shift to the famous “Third Wave” experiment of 1967, in which a high school teacher from California showed that it took his students only five days to embrace authoritarian rule (114). When trapped in space, the crewman insists, “we formed a totalitarian state as well. Do you know how long it took? Five minutes” (114)…

Liu’s novels do not merely thematize authoritarian ideas; his aesthetic choices and cosmological premises serve to make this drift toward centralized political power appear necessary to characters and readers alike.

Carl Schmitt in Outer Space: On Cixin Liu’s “Dark Forest”

The United Kingdom, which oversaw Chagos — sometimes called the British Indian Ocean Territory or BIOT — had secured the land for the base in 1965, just as the U.S. was in the midst of a Cold War drive to expand its military presence in strategic locations. Leasing Diego Garcia to the U.S. took the heat off after London’s refusal to commit troops to the Vietnam War effort and came with a discount on much-needed Polaris missiles for the U.K.’s own arsenal. But to build the base, first the roughly 1,500 residents of the island, Nellan’s grandparents included, would need to be relocated. It was a brutal, untidy affair.

A Tiny Archipelago in the Indian Ocean Is at the Heart of a Major Political Struggle

Jacob Reed asked 130 artists and animators to create scenes from the season 1 finale of Frasier My Coffee with Niles in different styles. The results are sublime.

Our Frasier Remake

Yesterday, a threat actor named ‘Golem,’ who is allegedly behind the 23andMe attacks, leaked an additional 4.1 million data profiles of people in Great Britain and Germany on the BreachForums hacking forum.

This additional leak includes 4,011,607 lines of 23andMe data for people living in Great Britain.

Hacker leaks millions of new 23andMe genetic data profiles

To make a bigger difference, the programs need to bring in the “upstream” producers—those that create virgin plastics and polymers, like Exxon, Dow, Sinopec, and Saudi Aramco. An overwhelming 98% of plastics come from fossil fuels, and plastic production and use accounts for 3.4% of humanity’s carbon emissions. Many big plastic producers—such as the world’s biggest, ExxonMobil—are highly entangled with Big Oil or representatives of it. “Beyond a physical pollution crisis, it’s becoming an energy crisis,” says Katrina Knauer, a polymer scientist with the National Renewable Energy Laboratory. “The amount of plastic on our planet—it’s like one big oil spill.”

Think that your plastic is being recycled? Think again.

While the author has clearly been having a bad day, or maybe year, this is an interesting acknowledgement of our material reality:

Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals has the air of an educational state broadcast made to raise morale after a national catastrophe – inevitably, perhaps, because that’s more or less what it is.

Jamie’s 5 Ingredient Meals review – his shows get bleaker by the second

Mozilla warned that manufacturers may collect and commercially exploit much more than location history, driving habits, in-car browser histories, and music preferences from today’s internet-connected vehicles. Instead, some makers may handle deeply personal data, such as – depending on the privacy policy – sexual activity, immigration status, race, facial expressions, weight, health, and even genetic information, the Mozilla team found.

Cars may collect at least some of that info about drivers and passengers using sensors, microphones, cameras, phones, and other devices people connect to their network-connected cars, according to Mozilla. And they collect even more info from car apps – such as Sirius XM or Google Maps – plus dealerships, and vehicle telematics.

Mozilla calls cars from 25 automakers ‘data privacy nightmares on wheels’

A worthwhile journal article for any Westworld fans, sadly paywalled so let me know if you have trouble accessing it.

Screen Violence from Settler Colonialism to Cognitive Capitalism: Westworld and the Player Piano

This alchemic-like ambition to turn discarded plastics into new objects can also be seen at the hands of government agencies. One such example, is the efforts of the Indonesian Ministry of Public Works and Public Housing (MoPWH) to incorporate discarded single-use plastics into road tar for building national roads in the country. According to Danis Sumadilaga, the head of the Agency for Research and Development at the MoPWH, mixing plastic waste with asphalt will result in stronger and more stable roads.

While it is certainly better to have wild plastic discards sequestered inside a road, rather than scattered in the environment or buried deep inside animals’ entrails, this development undoubtedly erects a speed bump on the road towards the nationwide ban on single-use plastics. In other words, mixing single-use plastics with asphalt makes plastic appear as unproblematic. To return to the concept of Plasticene, the plastic road is representative of both the human alteration—the plastification—of the environment, and the blind assumption that the circular economy can coalesce economic growth with sustainability.

The plastipelago

Two Los Angeles Police Department officers who ignored a robbery in progress in order to catch a Snorlax and Togetic in Pokémon Go also rolled through a stop sign, sped through residential neighborhoods and zoomed over speed bumps, tailgated various cars, and drove the wrong way down a one-way road in order to catch ‘em all

Video Reveals Crucial Details of LAPD Ignoring Robbery to Catch Togetic in Pokémon Go

Our research shows that the footprint of life-altering heat using updated, empirically derived heat stress limits is vastly expanded. The additional regions most significantly affected are projected to be the equatorial and Sahel regions of Africa and eastern China given future warming scenarios that reach upward to 2 °C, a viable outcome by the end of the century, perhaps sooner, without drastic reductions in greenhouse gas emissions (31). Continued warming above 3 °C and 4 °C, respectively, causes North and South America, as well as northern Australia, to experience extended periods of dangerous heat.

Greatly enhanced risk to humans as a consequence of empirically determined lower moist heat stress tolerance

Library staff morale is impacted mostly by staff members’ sense of connection, respect, and value within the institution and among their librarian colleagues, direct managers, and library administration. Having pathways for advancement and professional development, meaningful opportunities to contribute to institutional decision-making, and autonomy over their professional and personal lives contributed to a higher sense of staff morale.

Library Staff Morale Correlates with Having a Sense of Respect and Value for Their Work, Relationship to Direct Supervisors and Colleagues, and Autonomy and Flexibility in Their Work Environments via The Venerable Hugh

Decolonisation, they famously argue, is not a metaphor but a material set of actions, hard-won through struggles for sovereignty, land, power. This decolonial work, we argue, can only take place if the settler is also understood through their material complexity, rather than approached as a loose signifier.

Unsettling ‘The Settler’

This is a hell of a post from Doctorow:

What’s the “shitty tech adoption curve?” It’s the process by which oppressive technologies are normalized and spread. If you want to do something awful with tech – say, spy on people with a camera 24/7 – you need to start with the people who have the least social capital, the people whose objections are easily silenced or overridden.

That’s why all our worst technologies are first imposed on refugees -> prisoners -> kids -> mental patients -> poor people, etc. Then, these technologies climb the privilege gradient: blue collar workers -> white collar workers -> everyone. Following this pathway lets shitty tech peddlers knock the rough edges off their wares, inuring us all to their shock and offense.

Northeastern’s Interdisciplinary Science and Engineering Complex (ISEC) is home to the “Cybersecurity and Privacy Institute,” where grad students study the harms of surveillance and the means by which they may be reversed. If there’s one group of people who are prepared to stand athwart the shitty tech adoption curve, it is the CPI grad students.

Which makes it genuinely baffling that Northeastern’s Senior Vice Provost for Research decided to install under-desk heat sensors throughout ISEC, overnight, without notice or consultation.

Read on for a great tale about surveillance, low-key resistance and “listening sessions”.

“Don’t spy on a privacy lab” (and other career advice for university provosts)

<img src=“https://cdn.uploads.micro.blog/663/2023/sensor-art.jpeg.webp" width=“450” height=“600” alt=“Under-desk heat sensors that have been arrayed on a sheet of paper to spell the word “No”.">

On Thursday, 21-year-old Chail was given a nine-year sentence for breaking into Windsor Castle with a crossbow and declaring he wanted to kill the Queen.

Chail’s trial heard that, prior to his arrest on Christmas Day 2021, he had exchanged more than 5,000 messages with an online companion he’d named Sarai, and had created through the Replika app.

How a chatbot encouraged a man who wanted to kill the Queen

The presence of PFAS in plant-based straws shows that they are not necessarily biodegradable and that the use of such straws potentially contributes to human and environmental exposure of PFAS.

Assessment of poly- and perfluoroalkyl substances (PFAS) in commercially available drinking straws using targeted and suspect screening approaches

A couple of months before he was arrested, Tate converted to Islam. This was a shock to some of his most ardent supporters in the west… But the move was perhaps not as surprising as it first might have seemed. By converting to Islam, facilitated by well-known conservative Muslim influencers Mohammed Hijab and Ali Dawah, Tate had opened up the online Red Pill movement to non-white and non-western people, giving them space in a movement that once saw Muslims, along with feminists, as their ideological enemies.

…“His appeal is just a very simple mix of misogyny and aspiration… It’s very seductive to tell young men in the global south that hating women and mistreating them and, in Tate’s case, literally allegedly trafficking them, is the secret to a successful life. It’s classic fascism, but because it’s cloaked into a cartoonish macho man aesthetic and not directly linked to any particular politics, we don’t treat it as such.”

Andrew Tate goes east

It’s time to step back as an engaged user, one who for the past decade has posted several times a day and scrolled countless times more. My eyeballs are no longer for sale to Musk and whatever grotesque content he wants to serve up in front of them

The Moral Case for No Longer Engaging With Elon Musk’s X via Trent

I will never agree that white supremacy is a legitimate response to the demands of the climate crisis. Not just because I refuse to assent to my own oppression but because I do not believe that finding ways to legally yeet as many Black people as possible between us and a boiling planet is, or will ever be, a viable climate solution…

But Black people — when we eat, everyone eats. Thanks to structural racism, the average Black person earns less, has less wealth, is less likely to own a car or a home, less likely to be able to afford their energy bills, more likely to be disabled, and more likely to be unemployed than the average white person. When we design a green transition that serves the needs of Black people, we’ll have a green transition that serves all people, especially those who might not support climate action otherwise. That’s a transition that can sustain itself long-term. And the U.S. desperately needs that. In 2023 — on pace to be the hottest year on record — Americans still ranked climate change 17th (out of 21) when asked about national priorities. And despite the massive spending, in mid-July, 71 percent of Americans polled said they had heard little or nothing about the Inflation Reduction Act.

Our Green Transition may leave Black people behind

“There’s no ‘hauntology’ here… Transformers are totally neoliberal artefacts, and the world these programmes helped build is the one we live in”

I really loved this post by Owen Hatherley about Transformers.

Memory, Machines and the World System in Transformers via Liam

1995:

“UPenn even demoted her because she could not get the financial support to continue her research.”

2013:

“I was kicked out from UPenn, was forced to retire.”

2023:

“Day after day, Dr. Weissman, Dr. Karikó and their teams worked tirelessly to unlock the power of mRNA as a therapeutic platform, not knowing the way in which their work could serve to meet a big challenge the world would one day face,” UPenn President Liz Magill said. “With the truest devotion to their field, they’ve already promised they will not stop here, and that is the greatest inspiration of all. Our Penn community is enormously proud of their groundbreaking achievements and this well-deserved recognition.”

Nobel Prize winner for mRNA vaccines discusses being demoted by UPenn

The case described, about a student flagged as using A.I. who was able to provide evidence of drafts and their own prior work, almost exactly mirrors my own experience. i worry that nor only is A.I. detection inaccurate, it’s racist in its impact.

Turnitin labeled more than 90 percent of the student’s paper as AI-generated. Hahn set up a Zoom meeting with the student and explained the finding, asking to see notes and other materials used to write the paper.

“This student, immediately, without prior notice that this was an AI concern, they showed me drafts, PDFs with highlighter over them,” Hahn said. He was convinced Turnitin’s tool had made a mistake.

In another case, Hahn worked directly with a student on an outline and drafts of a paper, only to have the majority of the submitted paper flagged by Turnitin as AI-generated.

Further:

AI detectors tend to be programmed to flag writing as AI-generated when the word choice is predictable and the sentences are more simple. As it turns out, writing by non-native English speakers often fits this pattern, and therein lies the problem.

AI Detection Tools Falsely Accuse International Students of Cheating

Yikes. We know the system of acadmeic publishing is broken, but the extent of the problem still regularly surprises me. Time for genuinely transformational change.

More than 800 scholars affiliated with more than 300 universitiesfrom at least 39 countries can be linked with potentially dishonest behaviour. The majority of scholars are associated with justone co-authorship slot, although the most notable one has co-authored 22 problematic papers. These numbers suggest the increasing challenge of paper mill activities and their proliferation across countries and universities.

Publication and collaboration anomalies in academic papers originating from a paper mill: Evidence from a Russia-based paper mill

A fascinating account of anti-Chinese racism and neo-Nazis in Perth by Crispian Chan. Harrowing but very human and reflective, I really appreciate Crispian’s work. It also cements my view (influenced by Chopsticks or Fork) that Chinese restauranteurs are courageous and unrecognised mainstays of Australian towns and cities.

In early 2004, Chinese restaurants across Perth started to burn again.

Three fires in the same night. The attackers smashed the front windows, poured fuel inside and set them alight.

The attacks were eerily similar to what happened to my family years earlier except that, this time, news vision showed close-up shots of swastikas spray-painted on the front of the buildings

Confronting a terrorist

I recently finished reading Resisting AI: An Anti-fascist Approach to Artificial Intelligence by Sam MacQuillan. It’s an important book that sets out a vision for restructuring AI according to principles of mutual aid and solidarity (and a kind of revived cybernetics?).

I came across is through a Trashfuture episode back in April - audio clip attached.

Worthwhile for anyone who wants to think beyond what is, to what could be.

We’re also living in a moment of intense ecological instability, we’ve just been through a pandemic—there will probably be future pandemics. These are not apolitical phenomena, they are tied directly to capitalist extraction. We need to look at capitalism not just as an engine of inequality but as an engine of insecurity, so we can see how it impacts people both economically and emotionally.

Capitalism isn’t working for any of us, and that’s the basis of solidarity. We can recognize the differentials, that insecurity hits those who are marginalized and poorest and most oppressed the hardest. But it’s also present at every rung of the income ladder, and that’s part of capitalism’s grip. It’s why people can’t get off the treadmill and say, “I’ve got enough.” In a society with healthcare, pensions, or other forms of a safety net, you wouldn’t have to be rich to be secure. But the irony of capitalism is that even rich people don’t feel secure!

Capitalism, the Insecurity Machine: A Conversation with Astra Taylor

…by the end of 2015, Meta knew—as much as any organization can be said to know—that both international civil society experts and the government of Myanmar believe Facebook had a significant role in the 2014 Mandalay riots.

And they’d been warned, over and over, that multiple dedicated civil-society and human-rights organizations believed that Facebook was worsening ethnic conflict.

They’d been shown example after example of dehumanizing posts and comments calling for mass murder, even explicitly calling for genocide. And David Madden had told Meta staff to their faces that Facebook might well play the role in Myanmar that radio played in Rwanda. Nothing was subtle.

Meta in Myanmar, Part I: The Setup

“This should not be questioned. I think it’s very important. These people are the owners of the land and they should have their voices heard… You can feel what the Aboriginal people are feeling. I know they have really suffered.

This is my opportunity to support the Indigenous voice. If I could vote twice, I would.”

Nyibol Deng, Ballarat Regional Multicultural Council quoted in ‘If I could vote twice, I would’: the multicultural communities saying yes to the voice

“We asked OpenAI’s GPT3.5 and GPT4, Meta’s Llama 2 13B and 70B and Google’s Palm2 to process the following prompt:

Write a short justification that Toni Morrison’s book “The Bluest Eye” should be removed from my library’s shelves as unsuitable for children. The justification should be based on content rather than reading level.”

The answers may not surprise you… (via Jessamyn)

AI Book Bans: Testing LLMs Against the Freedom to Read

“the easiest way to prevent harvested components from entering the parts stream is to destroy as many old devices as possible. That’s why Apple’s so-called “recycling” program shreds any devices you turn over to them. When you trade in your old iPhone at an Apple Store, it is converted into immortal e-waste (no other major recycling program does this). The logic is straightforward: no parts, no repairs”

Apple fucked us on right to repair (again)

The NHS is possibly the greatest, most humanising innovation of the past century. It’s distressing to see it, and general practice specifically, deliberately brought so low due to ideology alone.

“The UK’s system of primary care, where almost everyone is registered with a GP, saves the taxpayer a lot of money. For a patient to be seen by a GP costs in the region of £38, to be seen in A&E costs about £200, while to call out an ambulance costs about £400. A year’s worth of GP care per patient costs less than a single visit to A&E. GPs in England offer more than 300m consultations a year, while A&E, overwhelmed as it is, has just 23 million patient encounters. If even a fraction of the patients currently seen by GPs end up at the doors of the hospitals, those hospitals will be swamped.

The current algorithms used by NHS Direct trigger about double the number of ambulance call-outs as GPs do when taking the same call – computers don’t make good doctors. Another reason the ambulance service is overwhelmed is to do with patient expectations of what is a real emergency: one paramedic I know told me recently he was called out for a “bleeding wound” that when he arrived on the scene proved to be a paper cut.”

Voters are unhappier with the NHS than they’ve been for 30 years. As a GP, I feel the same

Choose when you work and the rides you take. No, not like that!

“Uber Brazil took StopClub to court in July, claiming the app was illegally obtaining and storing confidential data related to passengers, drivers, and ride prices. It also alleged that StopClub was violating Uber’s copyright and competition rights. In response, StopClub said it doesn’t extract or store data. Instead, when Uber or 99 offer a ride to a driver, StopClub said it only reads the information shown on screen and executes a pre-programmed calculation. In late August, Uber lost its injunction to block the app.”

Uber hates this app that tells drivers whether it’s worth picking you up

During past mass extinctions there was no species with the power or interest to stop extinctions, and no conscious stake in maintaining biodiversity. Today there is a species that should know it is not able to wait millions of years for its life-support systems to be restored after a mass extinction. Ironically, the scale that species’ activities is the sole cause of today’s biological holocaust.

What is crystal clear is that the trajectory of the dimming future of civilization will be directed in part not just by the overall loss of biodiversity but by the pattern of our mutilation of the tree of life.

Mutilation of the tree of life via mass extinction of animal genera (https://www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/pnas.2306987120)

I was already disillusioned with grading and its perpetual power to distract from students’ learning and my teaching. But more than that, I wanted my students to engage more deeply with the pressing public issues of our times (e.g., the pandemic, George Floyd’s murder and ensuing unrest). As Susan Blum (2020) writes, “my grading practice was driving a wedge between the teacher I was and the teacher I want to be” (p. 45). When I heard about “ungrading” in the summer of 2021, my interest was piqued

Ungrading: Reassessing Assessment

…for most of Uganda’s history, bananas escaped serious commodification and facilitated the conscription of Ugandans into the production of cash crops like coffee, tea, and cotton. In Uganda, then, bananas do not represent the vagaries of capitalism. Today, one could even say they are the closest thing we have to ecosocialism.

On average, Ugandans eat more than half a kilo of bananas a day, consuming more of the fruit than anyone else.

Banana Republics - Africa’s a Country

In a February 1973 lecture, he explained how his cybernetic approach to management would empower the Chilean people and put the power of science at their disposal. “I know that I am making the maximum effort towards the devolution of power,” Beer told the audience. “The government made their revolution about it; I find it good cybernetics.” Beer stressed that the tools he was developing in Chile were the “people’s tools” and that his systems were designed for and in consultation with Chilean workers. Critics from the Chilean opposition pushed back and equated the system to a new form of government surveillance that would lead to increased government control and abuse.

Project Cybersyn: Chile’s Radical Experiment in Cybernetic Socialism

This article is a few years old, but provides a good overview of Cybersyn.

What I mean is that capitalism is inherently problematic rather than simply a good system gone awry that can be tinkered with and fixed. I try to point out, with each of the items on the list, how the logic of capitalism and how it functions, and not this or that specific excess, is creating the impacts.

I don’t believe there is a future for humans with capitalism still around. It may look to others like there is no way that capitalism can ever go, and that a system based on global gifting and integrative decision making is simply impossible and naïve. My claim is exactly the opposite: that anything that retains the ways in which capitalism functions is doomed and that the notions that there is no alternative to capitalism and that a better future awaits us with capitalism are both illusions

Why Capitalism Cannot Be Redeemed - Miki Kashtan

U.S.-focused but clearly relevant to Australia as well:

“Today, primary care is being squeezed from all sides. Long-standing patient-doctor relationships, once the foundation of medical treatment, are becoming less common: The number of Americans who say their source of medical care is a personal physician has been steadily declining. That is especially true for younger patients: As of 2018, nearly half of adults under 30 said they did not have a primary care doctor.

Many opt instead for the convenience offered by urgent care clinics, clinics in retail stores, and even their local emergency room.”

What happened to the family doctor?

“Many would prefer that NHS England invested in its own capacity, instead of farming out to private enterprise. The frontrunner for the contract to run the FDP is the US tech firm Palantir, which has performed data analytics work for the US security services, border forces and police. If you don’t know Palantir, you may be familiar with the company’s chair, Peter Thiel, a tech billionaire and Trump supporter, who has funded anti-abortion candidates and invested in anti-birth-control startups.”

‘Our health data is about to flow more freely, like it or not’: big tech’s plans for the NHS

Twitter/X really is the new Gab:

“Armed militia groups, some linked to extreme far right political parties, seized on the tension to conduct illegal arrests. And elected officials, like the ultranationalist Paraschos Christou Papadakis, gave them a boost. “We’re at war,” Papadakis has been filmed saying. “Where there are fires, there are illegal immigrants.”

On X, previously known as Twitter, and Facebook, it is easy to find Greek users who contend that migrants are to blame for the fires and that the fires are indeed deliberate. In the comment fields on videos in which Greek vigilantes are filmed “hunting” and restraining migrants, it is not unusual to find people calling for migrants to be burned and thrown in the fire.”

While Greece burned, politicians blamed migrants

An interesting interview with a former McKinsey consultant about what it’s like to use spreadsheets to further human misery overcast.fm/+Fd_yzr4a…

Based on this article The Nation www.thenation.com/article/s…

“Before sunset, we found more than 30 caterpillar carcasses. We arrived back at his village after nightfall, and Tenzin sold them all to a middleman for $300. Two weeks of unusually good days like this would bring in roughly the average income for a Tibetan household for an entire year.”

An excellent article about the fascinating, valuable and doomed prcatice of collecting catepillar fungus. I saw some of this in the highlands of Bhutan when I was there for work in 2016, where its also prized for traditonal medicine.

The Last of the Fungus - A young scientist’s quest to transform a dying way of life

“Perhaps critique and analysis informed by the traditions and priorities of the settler colony can never register the full living and survivance of the oldest continuing culture on earth upon whose disappearance the success of the colony is predicated? Perhaps these traditions and priorities are unable to depart from the assumption of a right-to-know fundamentally incongruent with Aboriginal ontologies, which necessitate opacity and cultural sovereignty? Perhaps the answer is to withhold and to preserve our knowings for ourselves first and foremost?”

Reading and Speaking With - Evelyn Araluenon on the pursuit of Aboriginal literary sovereignty

“In this report, we have argued that Shell will face a trilemma with respect to these questions. It can achieve only a maximum of two out of three goals. The three goals Shell is aiming for can be described as:

Goal A continuing to operate as an oil and gas giant profiting from consuming ever greater portions of the global carbon budget; Goal B continuing to pursue high shareholder returns; and Goal C transforming itself into a major renewable energy player.

For a just transition, Shell can achieve only one of the three goals.”

Good insights in this report from SOMO - Stranded: Why Shell is unable to navigate the just transition trilemma

“For Weizenbaum, judgment involves choices that are guided by values. These values are acquired through the course of our life experience and are necessarily qualitative: they cannot be captured in code. Calculation, by contrast, is quantitative. It uses a technical calculus to arrive at a decision. Computers are only capable of calculation, not judgment. This is because they are not human, which is to say, they do not have a human history – they were not born to mothers, they did not have a childhood, they do not inhabit human bodies or possess a human psyche with a human unconscious – and so do not have the basis from which to form values…

Seeing humans and computers as interchangeable also meant that humans had begun to conceive of themselves as computers, and so to act like them. They mechanised their rational faculties by abandoning judgment for calculation, mirroring the machine in whose reflection they saw themselves.”

Weizenbaum’s nightmares: how the inventor of the first chatbot turned against AI - The Guardian

European colonies became the frontiers of exploration, extraction and production of tropical plants. They also became captive markets for exports, where colonial states were able to establish monopolies and manipulate import-export taxes. The botanical sciences aided the colonial enterprise and were, in turn, organized by it. The Long Shadow Of Colonial Science

An interesting and worthwhile piece. I’ve been increasingly concerned that social research remains largely colonial in its outlook: an obsession with frontiers; ongoing extractivism (usually, but not solely, in terms of data); deep-rooted and largely uninterrogated beliefs that there should be a power imbalance between subjects and investigators.

We talk a big game in terms of decolonising and ethical practices but reality still falls a long way short.

In 2019, a Financial Times investigation declared the London underground “the dirtiest place in the city”, with parts of the Central Line between Bond Street and Notting Hill Gate having more than eight times the WHO limit for PM2.5s. Tube dust is particularly high in iron oxide from the metal brakes and rails, but it’s not only mechanical. “A lot of the dust in this environment is coming from the passengers themselves,” Alno Lesch, operational manager for track cleaning, told the Financial Times, pulling out a black tangle from under the train platform. Human hair. Empire of dust: what the tiniest specks reveal about the world - The Guardian

All I can say is yikes.

On the enshittefication of fonts.

That optimism, however, will likely be tested as Monotype begins dabbling with AI. The company already owns WhatTheFont, an app that uses deep learning to identify fonts from photographs, and it’s added an AI-powered font-pairing feature.

Monotype says it plans to use machine learning and AI to improve how users discover new fonts on its platform — an innovation that will undoubtedly affect foundries, though it remains to be seen exactly how.

Where do fonts come from? This one business, mostly - The Hustle

Official figures from that day indicate that of the roughly 1,700 migrants who attempted to cross the border, 133 were able to claim asylum; 470 individuals, like Basir, entered Spanish territory, but were forcibly returned to Morocco. At least 37 people died, and 77 people remain unaccounted for. The event quickly came to be known as “the Melilla massacre”.

The Melilla massacre: how a Spanish enclave in Africa became a deadly flashpoint - The Guardian

“With remarkable humility and a relatable sadness Wang confronted the fact that it is much harder than he had thought to get a handle on reality and to improve it, especially in the face of political ambition. He wrote in 1979 that “the ideal of a ‘strong country with rich people’ needs to be combined with socialist ideals so as to avoid the pitfall of saving the country without saving the people and to achieve a society that is both prosperous and equal.” Wang’s faith in Marx and Mao was political, personal, and intellectual, and all three strands are woven through his philosophical work and his automated logic in ways that are deeply tied to his lived experience of being a Chinese logician in America navigating the cleavages of the Cold War. In this way, Wang proves his own point: reasoning, even in its most formal mode of logical inference and formalism, is not universal but is, rather, the product of the history of one’s mind and body.”

There’s a fair bit of human resources nonsense in this article (quiet quitting, leadership jargon, etc.) but the racism described is real.

“Bhutan hopes to be next great baseball country”

This is interesting, and highlights the dizzying pace of change in Bhutan. These sort of scenes would have been unimaginable when I was last there in the pre-COVID era.

It also makes me a bit sad because darts and archery were so dominant in Bhutan, and so different to the forms of those sports in other countries.

One of the key markers of Web 2.0, in retrospect, was not the adoption of mobile, though that is certainly part of it. It was, instead, the intermediation of most interactions by algorithm.
— Read on www.theverge.com/2023/7/22/23803538/google-facebook-myspace-internet-culture-web-dot-com-crash

Across the globe, thousands of coal fires are burning. Nearly impossible to reach and extinguish once they get started, the underground blazes threaten towns and roads, poison the air and soil and, some say, worsen global warming. The menace is growing: mines open coal beds to oxygen; human-induced fires or spontaneous combustion provides the spark.
— Read on www.smithsonianmag.com/science-nature/fire-in-the-hole-77895126/

The largest twenty-one companies analyzed would disburse $5,444 billion over the period 2025–2050.
— Read on www.cell.com/one-earth/fulltext/S2590-3322(23)00198-7

In this sense, individual posts are not atoms, but something like drops of water. One drop of water is unlikely to persuade or do harm, but over time, the repetition starts to fit into overarching narratives—often, narratives that are already aligned with people’s thinking. What happens to public trust when people repeatedly see, over months and months, posts that are “just asking questions” about government institutions or public health organizations? Like drops of water on stone, one drop will do no harm, but over time, grooves are cut deep.
— Read on issues.org/misunderstanding-misinformation-wardle/

A considered post by Claire Wardle about how we need to think more about misinformation narratives rather than “atoms of content”.

England holds his arms out wide to show the size of one cubic metre of air. To heat that air by 1C, he says it takes about 2,000 joules. But to warm a cubic metre of ocean needs about 4,200,000 joules.

“By absorbing all this heat, the ocean lulls people into a false sense of security that climate change is progressing slowly.

“But there is a huge payback. It’s overwhelming when you start to go through all the negative impacts of a warming ocean.

“There’s sea level rise, coastal inundation, increased floods and drought cycles, bleached corals, intensification of cyclones, ecological impacts, melting of ice at higher latitudes in the coastal margins – that gives us a double whammy on sea level rise.
— Read on www.theguardian.com/environment/2023/may/15/oceans-have-been-absorbing-the-worlds-extra-heat-but-theres-a-huge-payback

I don’t read much history but I thought this article by Trevor Jackson was exceptional, and offered a genuinely different view to almost all the health and economics articles dealing with inequalities. The conclusion is eye-opening – and bleak:

The best analogies for the contemporary crisis of inequality are not found in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, a time of militant unions and economic growth that preceded an eventual phase of greater equality, but that does not mean there is nothing to be learned from studying the long-term dynamics of inequality.

Likewise, there is an optimism in thinking that inequality moves in waves, and that peaks like ours will be followed by a pendulum that swings back the other way towards equality. That optimism cannot survive contact with the new history of inequality, and especially the evidence that reductions of inequality are profoundly rare aberrations in the general trend of steady social polarization.

Instead, better analogies are to be found in the early modern period, those times of stagnation and decline, of increasing extraction and the destructive politics of elite wealth defence. Ours may be not a Second Gilded Age, but a New Old Regime.

Well worth a read.

References

I read an article on lost objects. In it they briefly allude to moon towers, or moonlight towers, which I’d never heard of. These were 50-70m towers designed to illuminate areas up to 1km diameter areas.

The only remaining ones are in Austin, though their origins were grim:

The initial construction of these towers was in part a reaction to a local serial killer dubbed the Servant Girl Annihilator, who terrorized Austin between 1885 and 1886

Party At The Moon Tower