At HWC London tonight, looking into why the content of my notes appear twice in Indigenous Reader. Using pin13.net to check the microformats, and cross-checking it in Monocle (where it seems to appear correctly – content only included once.)
Month: September 2018
Heading off to Homebrew Website Club London shortly. . and posting about it from Indigenous on Android, to my website, which syndicates to Mastodon! Good times. #indieweb
Chomsky makes a good point about a contradiction in neoclassical economics: if the market functions best on the principle of rational actors, why is so advertising so dedicated to triggering our irrational desires?
Good sign for a book is when you go to bed actively looking forward to reading it – Perdido Street Station you are smashing it.
The video was inspired by CURA’s Municipal Socialism in the 21st Century even in June 2018, and highlights the latest concepts in the movement, summarising why it is growing, and explains some of its main concerns.
Woop woop! Hacked together a target to syndicate posts to my Mastodon instance when posting via Micropub.
Interesting how things spiral. The narodniks bomb the tsar. The new tsar (son of the old) hangs narodniks. One is Lenin’s older brother. Lenin overthrows the tsar.
A really great long-form article (and accompanying visualisation) looking at the life of an Amazon Echo. In terms of extraction of resources, human labour, and data that goes into making, running, and disposing of such a device, and the social, environmental, economic and political consequences.
A few snippets from the article:
Put simply: each small moment of convenience – be it answering a question, turning on a light, or playing a song – requires a vast planetary network, fueled by the extraction of non-renewable materials, labor, and data
All these batteries have a limited lifespan, and once consumed they are thrown away as waste. Amazon reminds users that they cannot open up and repair their Echo, because this will void the warranty.
Vincent Mosco has shown how the ethereal metaphor of ‘the cloud’ for offsite data management and processing is in complete contradiction with the physical realities of the extraction of minerals from the Earth’s crust and dispossession of human populations that sustain its existence.
Looking from the perspective of deep time, we are extracting Earth’s history to serve a split second of technological time, in order to build devices than are often designed to be used for no more than a few years.
Final episode of Century of the Self. The culmination of psychoanalysis and public relations inserting themselves into politics, with Clinton and Blair basing most of their policies on feelings-based focus groups of swing voters. Selfish desires trumping feelings of altruism, denigration of welfare, individualism over society. The populace treated as needy consumers, not engaged citizens.
Really good documentary by Adam Curtis. Entertaining and informative.