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?
Kind: Notes
Good sign for a book is when you go to bed actively looking forward to reading it – Perdido Street Station you are smashing it.
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.
I enjoyed the London Design Festival this weekend. Design informs everything that we make, it’s part of the fabric of society. While I can appreciate good design that’s simply functional or aesthetic (or better, both), I’m really most interested in that which is sociopolitical, raising awareness about a social or political issue, or even better, helping to solve it. There was a good number of pieces fitting that description – my favourites were probably the Institute of Patent Infringement, and the Anatomy of an AI. Also MultiPly and PlasticScene, which were discussing alternative and sustainable material usage. For aesthetics alone I still love the computational art and sculpture, whether it’s the geometric or the organic, but can’t help but want to know what problems it can solve.
3D printing, renewable energy, and free and open source software are creating the basis for a new type of economy.
https://soundcloud.com/upstreampodcast/robin-murray-interview [00:29:45]
Creation of multiple autonomous spaces that eventually join up. (This is also how capitalism took hold.)
https://soundcloud.com/upstreampodcast/robin-murray-interview [00:27:50]
New initiatives often have a tipping point where they start off more expensive, but eventually become the cheaper option. An example being recycling. A project starts, then diffuses into systemic chamce. Government is placed within a wider system of economic development.
https://soundcloud.com/upstreampodcast/robin-murray-interview [00:22:46]
And if we want to change how society works, then we need to know how to change the economy.
https://soundcloud.com/upstreampodcast/robin-murray-interview [00:17:22]