February 21, 2022

Anger as compost for your garden

Cambodian artist Sreymao Sao explores the lived experiences of communities displaced by the Lower Sesan 2 Dam project —some 5,000 indigenous and ethnic-minority people from four villages. (Image ID: The art shows villagers moving their wooden house by carrying them in a communal effort, from one place to another in the Srae Kor village. Their bodies are outlined in red. A woman has a bundle of belongings on her head, while carrying a child on her back. According to the artist, "[...] represents resettlement from Srae Kor. Villagers here were forced to move to a new place and many were unwilling. I used red here to represent their bloodline, to show that they not only move their physical house, but they are also uprooting themselves from their ancestors, their memories, and their childhoods; this is an emotional loss as well as a physical one. It represents everything that they wanted to take and hold close during their unwilling resettlement.")

READING IN MY TABS

• Wordle is a love story, why we can't resist it, and the reasons why Wordle is so good, according to UX perspectives.
• As Wordle takes off globally, players are making their own versions in Portuguese, Turkish, and even Tamil. Here's a Malay version called Katapat, a portmanteau of kata (words) and tepat (accurate), built by Malaysian Eugene Low.
• I really love this article from Rest of World (I actually love ALL the articles in the entire website!) on using AI to help translate this ancient Indus script. “A machine understands one, two, three very well… But that this sunset here looks like a beautiful flame — well, it is this sort of abstraction that holds the key to this script.” Related: what do we lose when we lose a language? (soft paywall).
• “Why is the design industry suddenly interested in care? Is “care” the new buzzword on the cusp of becoming a metaphor, like “decolonisation?” Are we contorting design into this new shape because capitalism has found a way to monetise care?”
• This piece on rethinking data as a way to enact belonging and personhood, rather than a technology for individuating and targeting, with a particular reference to how Ethiopians recognise their ‘selves’ and lineages in their full names. Malaysians, always being asked “ini anak siapa?” (whose kid are you?) when introducing ourselves to the elderlies, could relate to this notion so well. Related: digital IDs rooted in justice.
• Also, data about us is no longer just content — it is a manifestation of our relationship with our bodies, an extension of our will, personhood and agency.
• “Planetary politics should be connected to a politics of life, to a politics of the Earth. That includes all creation: all the people of the world; the creations or works of humanity; the mass of things we have invented; animals, plants, microbes, minerals; and mixed bodies (which is what we all are). In other words, the whole physical universe, all of reality, including (since I’m drawing from the African pre-colonial archive) spiritual and biological energies consistent with the definition of the living world.”
• As governments around the globe crack down on journalistic freedom and censor their national press, Reporters Without Borders is working to deliver uncensored news to the public through an unlikely channel: an enormous library housed inside the popular block-building video game Minecraft.
• This lovely gender and language article from Reuters, designing for trans users and designing gender inclusive fields in your product,.
• TIL dancing plague of 1518. These days we only get regular plague, I guess.
• “[…] jika kami bunga, engkau adalah tembok, tapi di tubuh tembok itu telah kami sebar biji-biji, suatu saat kami akan tumbuh bersama, dengan keyakinan: engkau harus hancur! dalam keyakinan kami di mana pun - tirani harus tumbang!" (With English translation)

RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS

• DigitalReach’s annual report on digital rights in Southeast Asia reviews the digital rights situation in Southeast Asia over a calendar year. The latest report seeks to understand the influence of technology on the development of human rights between January and December 2021.
• This edition of DING magazine on the relationships between people and systems, and towards a more equal and just digital futures, featuring articles from writers, artists, and activists such as Jac sm Kee, Kate Crawford, and Tinashe Mushakavanhu.
• Every digital service or environment is the product of a series of design decisions that shape the experiences of young people. Risky By Design examines common design features that pose risks to young people.

STATUS BOARD

• Reading: Derecka Purnell’s Becoming Abolitionists: Police, Protests, and the Pursuit to Freedom.
• Listening: Dengue Fever ’s Gendjer Gendjer. The song is a folk song from East Java, Indonesia, written and composed by musician Muhammad Arief. The song was written as a description of the condition of the people of Banyuwangi during the Japanese occupation period. The song focuses on the struggle of the peasants, who were forced to eat the genjer plant (Limnocharis flava) — a plant initially considered a pest — to survive. This version is sung by an American band in Khmer.
• Watching: bell hooks meeting Thich Nhat Hanh, in which she said, “I am so angry!" The Buddhist monk replied, "Hold on to your anger and use it as compost for your garden.”