October 28, 2021

Less heroes, more movements

These fascinating images of the vast archives of the Smithsonian National Museum of Natural History were taken over a period of twenty years. “The Natural History museum’s collections are so large that despite the sprawling three levels of the building open to the public, less than one percent of them are on display at any given time.”

READING IN MY TABS

• The climate coloniser mentality.
• "In this environment, whistleblowing can’t save us, because the issue isn’t an absence of information but an absence of will. And what builds will, and shifts norms, doesn’t look like a single, isolated figure speaking truth, but mass movements of people setting new standards and making clear there are costs to regulators and companies for not attending to them."
• Listen here: "Resilience is a forced response to distress, not another nifty workplace skill. Instead of expecting resilience from workers, employers and society at large need to confront their own role in creating the very reasons of distress that demand resilience — inequality, discrimination, modern work’s productivity obsession."
• “TikTok was a canteen; Instagram is a café. But the canteen has better food, and the café serves costly coffee that not everyone drinks.” As social media spread in India, it replicated the class lines that divided wider society.
• "[...] Tinder is not itself responsible for the injustices of military occupation. Still, in not acknowledging the ways that existing political dynamics impact the scope of their service, the company effectively normalises occupation, treating de jure segregation (and the access differential it creates) as an acceptable condition under which a geolocation-based dating app can operate." Tinder believes love is borderless, even in the West Bank.
• “"I waste their time,” she explains, “and now they’re not stealing from someone’s grandma.”" Meet the people who scam the scammers. Sometimes not all heroes wear capes.
• Why James Bond does not use an iPhone.
• Just learned of the new existence of a planet orbiting three stars. “It suggests planet formation is more common than we think,” and that there is “much more to learn about the unexpected ways in which planets can form.”
• TIL 'the curse of knowledge' – a cognitive bias that causes people to fail to properly understand the perspective of those who do not have as much information as them, causing them to ineffectively explain what they know to others. But as it is a bias, it can always be squashed.
• A feminist Internet for everyone.
• The earth as a player piano tune and the incredible harmony of starling murmurations.
• "When grief sits with you, its tropical heat thickening the air, heavy as water more fit for gills than lungs; when grief weights you down like your own flesh only more of it, an obesity of grief, you think, how can a body withstand this?"

RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS

• 20 questions for disability-inclusive employers.
• Tech Worker Handbook is a new web site launched by Pinterest's former policy official Ifeoma Ozoma, aimed at providing resources and information for other potential tech whistleblowers 👀
• Feminist Data Set is a multi-year project that interrogates every step of the AI process that includes data collection, data labeling, data training, selecting an algorithm to use, the algorithmic model, and then designing how the model is then placed into a chat bot (and what the chatbot looks like). Every step exists to question and analyse the pipeline of creating using machine learning — is each step feminist, is it intersectional, does each step have bias and how can that bias be removed?
• Climate Designers provides the knowledge, skills, and professional network for designers to take climate action.
• Foundations of Humane Technology is a free online course designed for those who care about the role technology plays in shaping us, both individually and as a society.
• The Smart Forests project investigates the social-political impacts of digital technologies that monitor and govern forest environments.
• Wikipedia's list of lists of lists is my type of rabbit hole to fall into.

STATUS BOARD

• Reading: Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing's The Mushroom at the End of the World.
• Listening: Having to deal with a challenging project since the past 2 months that had taken up my weekends and rest days, my playlist is full of rage rock music of my late teens e.g. Linkin Park, System of a Down, Slipknot, Deftones, etc.
• Watching: Peaceful Cuisine YouTube channel – no talk, just cooking!
• Food & Drink: Pomegranate juice and baked chicken with basmati rice.