translating things, building chill software for my friends, playing ttrpgs, making procedural vector art, learning piano, writing unhinged Utena fanfics, and just vibing



sudocurse
@sudocurse

I don't have one simple take away, one magic idea. That's kind of the point. I will say that if and when the key problems facing our species were to be solved, then perhaps many of us in this room would be out of work (and perhaps in jail).

But it's not as though there is a shortage of topics for serious discussion. We need a deeper conversation about the difference between digital cosmopolitanism and cloud feudalism (and toward that, a queer history of computer science and Alan Turing's birthday as holiday!)

I would like new maps of the world, ones not based on settler colonialism, legacy genomes and bronze age myths, but instead on something more … scalable.

and

One TED speaker said recently, "If you remove this boundary ... the only boundary left is our imagination". Wrong.

If we really want transformation, we have to slog through the hard stuff (history, economics, philosophy, art, ambiguities, contradictions). Bracketing it off to the side to focus just on technology, or just on innovation, actually prevents transformation.

benjamin bratton. [text version] - (https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2013/dec/30/we-need-to-talk-about-ted)


sudocurse
@sudocurse

Revenge of the Real

its a little jargony, but has a lot to say about the framing of social/political problems:

“If nothing else, this book is a call for a new realist form of planetary politics as an antidote to the populist incoherency of recent years that is clearly not up to the task. “Populism” is herein defined not as the political and/or cultural project of the working class, but by its more specific connotations of demagoguery, folksy scapegoating, simplistic emotional appeals, fearmongering and boundary policing, empty theatrics and sham symbolism, charisma-driven grifts, and so on.

This mode of populism, which has successfully led candidates into executive and legislative power over the past several years, despises expertise and fetishizes metaphors. To address the pandemic, however, people require competence. ... the pandemic is a ... complex biological reality of the planet with which we are entangled, and that underlying reality is apathetic to the plotlines and mythic lessons we may try to project upon it.”

pdfs are on the internet, happy to direct u to them


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