Ben Harris-Roxas

“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.