Don't let defeat defeat you
Illustration by anarchist artist N.O. Bonzo. Image description: the all-black line illustration is against a baby blue backdrop. The illustration shows a child and two teenagers or young adults picking apples from a tree. A flowering grass can be seen behind the said tree. The child is climbing a ladder to reach the top of the tree. The teenager in the middle is standing, their height almost reaches the tree and they are handing over an apple to the second teenager, who is sitting on a tree stump. They are both smiling. A banner envelops the leaves of the tree. It reads in Spanish, "para todos todo" and underneath in English, "everything for everyone".
Happy New Year, folks. It might take me a while to warm up to these many episodes of 2020, so I am going to walk into the year with a huge nazar bead hanging over my head. My hope for 2022 is that it will be gentler (both from our inner and external critics, and the crushes of capitalism and neolib, though this does need lots of work), it will become absolutely slightly more boring (seriously the mutations have to stop), non-dramatic, non-threatening, and rejuvenates us in all the ways we could never imagine before. In the meantime, to borrow the words of Samuel Beckett, may we find the ways to "find the form that could accommodate all the mess".
READING IN MY TABS
- Ten ways to confront the climate crisis without losing hope.
- My heart swells reading this interview between bell hooks and Maya Angelou on making your writing accessible, reading widely, on failure, and on forgiveness and compassion, among others. "[...] it may be imperative that you encounter defeat so you can know who you are. I mean, what can you take? How can you rely on yourself? In my work I constantly say, this is how I fell and this is how I was able to rise. It may be important that you fall. Life is not over. Just don’t let defeat defeat you. See where you are, and then forgive yourself, and get up." If you want to read bell hooks' work, here's a free online library.
- Imagining a principle for a feminist internet focusing on environmental justice.
- "The most anti-capitalist protest is to care for another and to care for yourself. To take on the historically feminized and therefore invisible practice of nursing, nurturing, caring. To take seriously each other’s vulnerability and fragility and precarity, and to support it, honor it, empower it. To protect each other, to enact and practice community. A radical kinship, an interdependent sociality, a politics of care."
- "Since 2018, the youth climate movement has reminded the world what people fighting for their lives looks like. It’s not well-mannered, nor should it be. Did gracious requests get rid of Jim Crow? Is there any justice movement in history that has succeeded on account of its proper etiquette? As Frederick Douglass said, “Power concedes nothing without a demand. It never did, and it never will. [...] If you’re more concerned about manners than survival, understand that that is a luxury. If you are fighting for a livable future, isn’t that worth a little discomfort? [...] Compromise and civility are the comforts of the rich and powerful. If we want elites to act, we’re going to have to make their complacency uncomfortable, and it’s going to require some incivility." Niceness isn't going to save the planet.
- Singapore is yet another cautionary tale of tech-utopia dream turning into a surveillance state nightmare.
- "[...] we sent 306 billion emails every day last year, for starters. We uploaded over 350 million photos every day to Facebook alone. We Tweeted over 500 million times every day. I’m not sure we can even comprehend these numbers. But we can understand that they are a lot and that they are why the number of data centers is increasing and why resource-consumption and depletion is exponential." Everything digital costs something physical.
- "Nostalgia, then, is no longer just a matter of being “homesick” for the past but is actively abetted in modified forms today by the intervention of algorithms. Not only does this new nostalgia stem from a world rendered as data; it becomes bait to keep producing data."
- Artworks and devices that engage our attention in this attention economy, e.g. Erik Satie's composition "Vexations" requires it to be played 840 times in a row, a task that took eighteen hours the first time it was performed.
- TIL Betteridge's law of headlines is an adage that states: "Any headline that ends in a question mark can be answered by the word no."
- “There’s an umbrella by the door, not for yesterday but for the weather that’s here. I say weather but I mean a form of governing that deals out death and names it living. I say weather but I mean a November that won’t be held off. This time nothing, no one forgotten. We are here for the storm that’s storming because what’s taken matters.”
RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS
- The Manifest-No is a declaration of refusal and commitment. It refuses harmful data regimes and commits to new data futures.
- Why Do We Interface? “In this micro-book I take a historical look at interfaces to build an understanding of how they allow us to utilize information in such powerful ways that they can fundamentally change what it means to be human. ”
- Came across this collaborative Google Doc on a list of resources to decolonise the design narrative. The first suggestion links to Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's 2009 TEDtalk though (why we're no longer fans of hers) – but feel free to pick through the rest of the list....
- Fake AI is a new book (and free e-book) from Meatspace Press that brings together a range of researchers, reporters, and artists to skeptically examine the rise of AI, asking, “Why are there so many pointless, and even dangerously flawed, AI systems? (via Rest of World).
STATUS BOARD
- Reading: Malinda Lo’s Last Night at the Telegraph Club, and Data Justice and COVID-19: Global Perspectives (I experimented with a new format of book notetaking with Kinokopio with this book, you can see it here.)
- Listening: Haven’t been listening to anything new lately!
- Watching: Also haven’t been watching anything new lately! When I said I was going to do non-work work on my work break, I lied, I RESTED! I rested my arse off and I am proud of it.
- Food & Drink: Ordered Nando’s. Secretly (not so secret now) been pining for Nepali momo for months.