Kind: Notes

Listening to SF 10-33 station on Soma FM.  “Ambient music mixed with the sounds of San Francisco public safety radio traffic.”

Very enjoyable. They play a lot of Loscil so I’m down with that.

There seemed to be a protest or march taking place earlier in San Francisco.

https://somafm.com/sf1033/

Listened to a summary of The Origins of Totalitarianism by Hannah Arendt.  It’s from 1951, but relevant today.  (“how quickly a democratic society can turn against its people”.)

What I took from this digest is how atomisation, isolation and disenfranchisement are fertile grounds for totalitarianism.  Without community and society you lose your sense of self and become easy prey for messages of totalitarianism.  Someone will come along and claim to represent you, and give an outlet for diesenfranchisement.

Once in a totalitarian society, people disengage from analytical and political thought.  The only thing that matters is the leader’s vision for the future.  Challenges to that vision are twisted to be from an enemy trying to mislead the public.

I forgot to post about it but I really enjoyed the Restarters Tooting event from a couple of weeks back.   I helped Ernestine with various problems she was having on both her laptop and her tablet.  If you like helping people and fixing things, I definitely recommend finding or starting a repair group near you, it’s a lot of fun!

Some more photos here: https://twitter.com/tttooting/status/1147549448807047170

Listening to a thing about populism.  Interesting to delve into it.

In a nutshell: it’s a political strategy rather than an ideology, where the people’s interests are juxtaposed against a supposed elite.  It can have various host ideologies.  Personalist leaders claim to represent the people.  It’s hard to roll back populist attitudes once activated.

In honour of ORGCon:

Surveillance by A Frames.

Surveillance Camera,
I am in love with ya

Off to ORGCon today, my first time going.

https://orgcon.openrightsgroup.org/2019/

A conference with topics of data, democracy, privacy, censorship, algorithms and surveillance.

I will watch the keynote from Snowden of course, and then I think the debates on evoting and end-to-end encryption. Maybe IoT and data.

Had a great time at the Algorave at the Museum of Brands in Ladbroke Grove tonight.

I saw Digital Selves (with visuals from Rumblesan), Vou (+Rumblesan) and Miri Kat (with visuals from hellocatfood).  They all smashed it.

The Museum of Brands also had a display of old radios.  Check out this beauty:

Solid State, aw yeah.  We had a radio that looked like this when I was growing up (although I think it must have been newer than this one.)

Listening to Kicks’ Kicks Mix on Duxtape, his dat-based remix of muxtape (mp3 mixtapes).

The music’s good, the technology’s decentralized. Maxin and relaxin.

https://www.kickscondor.com/duxtape

kicks mix on dat

The curse of Western ‘productivity’.

"The Anishinaabe could gather more, said Jenks, “if they did not spend so much time feasting and dancing”—rather missing the point that at least some of that dancing was both for joy and an element of food production. "

https://newsocialist.org.uk/theres-more-life-argument-joy-against-economism/