Abolish the cop inside your head
In the installation In Event of Moon Disaster (2019), Francesca Panetta, creative director of MIT’s Center for Advanced Virtuality, in partnership with Halsey Burgund of the Open Documentary Lab at the same university, created a video in which President Richard Nixon reports the Apollo 11 disaster directly from the White House Oval Office. His speech was written by Bill Saphire and would be read in the event of an accident with the lunar mission which, as we know, did not happen. The motivation of this project, according to its authors, is to warn about the risks that deepfakes generate not only for present events, but also in that of historical revisionism (via Affecting Technologies).
READING IN MY TABS
- Imagining a principle for a feminist Internet focusing on environmental justice.
- Just as police reform cannot change the fundamental goals of policing, tech reform cannot change the fundamental goals of large technology companies. What would it look like to apply an abolitionist approach to big tech? Related: Abolish the cop inside your designer's head and prison abolition is a Muslim issue.
- An essay on toolkits – kind of meta, something my fellow nerd Liy would love – grouped in four categories: basic survival; toolkits as means of inclusion and structures of social relations; toolkits that facilitate material pedagogy; and toolkitting as a design method.
- "The ability to participate in activism is a privilege. Many simply do not have the time, money, or emotional bandwidth to take on a global cause. Climate activism also has an unfortunate history of regressive finger-wagging, blaming relatively powerless individuals for not making ‘better’ environmental choices. The climate activism that is needed today is not that type of activism ... What’s needed today is sustained outrage at the powerful, by those with the time and resources to express it. “ If you have ever thought of becoming more involved in the fight for climate justice, it’s time to stop thinking, and start doing.
- How to write and think about a warming planet as it is not an event, but an era.
- “I think virtue contains anger – in fact, I think it must. Identifying goodness requires standing witness to its absence, and this is useful: the pilot light is brighter in the dark, and you’re more inclined to find it. […] So anger is the virtuous response to the sight of a government absenting itself from its sole duty – that is: to govern – and burdening a bewildered and grieving population with personal responsibility for this disease."
- If fantasy functions as a commentary on the real, then how should we read its food?
- Why is this someone I know – TIL Mariko Aoki phenomenon, "a Japanese expression referring to an urge to defecate that is suddenly felt after entering bookstores.”
- "And many died in the city of plague, and many of drouth In Sicilian quarries, and many by the spear and arrow. And many more who told their lies too late, caught in the eternal factions and reactions of the city state."
RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS
- Technologies of Hope, a showcase of 100 data-driven, machine learning and AI enabled technologies around the world: developed, marketed and implemented to mitigate the pandemic and to help societies ‘get back to normal’, but also poses this question – do techno-solutions succeed in controlling the virus, or only the host?
- “Working with rural communities in Karnataka, India, Decentralising Digital is an ongoing research project seeking to co-create new narratives for decentralised digital futures. We are exploring how developments in emerging technologies such as the Internet of Things, the voice enabled Internet, machine learning and artificial intelligence might be harnessed to meaningfully support rural communities in India.”
- Digital Rights are Women's Rights – A resource guide supporting feminist and women's rights organisation to get involved in digital rights movements.
- “This is a comic adaption of the ‘Discourses of Climate Delay’ study by the Mercator Research Institute on Global Commons and Climate Change (MCC). I used the quotes from their supplementary materials and added some extra examples with context information gathered mostly from the fantastic Climate Disinformation Database at Desmog.”
- The Starting Block's master post on media, disinformation, and democracy.
STATUS BOARD
- Reading: Octavia Butler's Parable of the Sower. “The weak can overcome the strong if the weak persist. Persisting isn’t always safe, but it’s often necessary.”
- Listening: What the space sounds like.
- Watching: Started watching this South African series, Blood and Water.
- Food & Drink: Waiting for my nasi lemak daun pisang delivery this morning.
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