May 12, 2021

Maybe dormant, not languishing

A Palestinian boy recalling a story about the death of his cousins by the sea, murdered by the Israeli missile attack. The physical wounds of these children might have healed, but they live with enduring psychological trauma throughout their lives. Photo thanks to s.vbr’s Instagram.

READING IN MY TABS:

• Permission to narrate.
• If tech can be abused, it will be.
• "Vaccine passports will be nothing but a marker of privilege unless we mitigate vaccine inequities at home through alternative networks of health care and seriously commit to a global vaccination effort. Instead of resigning ourselves to the prospect of unequal vaccination and vaccine passports for the few, we can push for actions that will keep all of us safe in the long term."
• This story on how WhatsApp became a tool for Indian police to fight harassment is an example that sometimes the best solution is a low tech solution. And in a majority of cases, the solution is far from tech or programming based (I definitely am always wary about the idea of hackathons to solve 'real world issues'— read this chapter from Design Justice, "...some of the most frequent problems with hackathons: they’re often dominated by white, cisgender men with software-development skills; they tend to be exclusive, normative, and solutionist; they often don’t respect the experiential knowledge and tacit expertise of people who deal with the issue area of the hackathon on a regular basis; they nearly always focus on problems and rarely build on existing community assets; and people think hackathons can do things that they usually can’t, such as solve big or even little problems, create new products overnight, or ‘level the playing field’ of innovation through meritocracy." Not to mention, it can also be used for something clearly insidious.
• Mads Mikkelsen has something to say about his work ethics and honestly I am all for it. "My approach to what I do in my job—and it might even be the approach to my life—is that everything I do is the most important thing I do. Whether it’s a play or the next film. It is the most important thing. I know it’s not going to be the most important thing, and it might not be close to being the best, but I have to make it the most important thing. That means I will be ambitious with my job and not with my career. That’s a very big difference, because if I’m ambitious with my career, everything I do now is just stepping-stones leading to something—a goal I might never reach, and so everything will be disappointing. But if I make everything important, then eventually it will become a career. Big or small, we don’t know. But at least everything was important ."
• Maybe we are not languishing. Maybe we are dormant, waiting to be activated when the time comes.
• TIL 'lipogram', a literary piece in which one letter of the alphabet is intentionally avoided e.g. Ernest Vincent Wright’s novel Gadsby, which has 50,000 words but not a single ‘E’ to be found. (Thanks Dense Discovery!)
• Questions to ask when you are outraged by injustice.
• “In the dark times. Will there also be singing? Yes, there will also be singing. About the dark time.”

RESOURCES AND TOOLKITS

• Abolish the cop inside your (designer’s) head.
• The Organiser’s Activity Book is a collection of playful exercises for organisers within civil society who work with the personal data of human rights defenders, investigators, campaigners, and others who are taking part in social or political action.
• A lookbook for emotion-centred design.
• Positionality Worksheet to help one gaining a greater self-awareness by understanding personal biases and where they stem from.

STATUS BOARD

• Reading: Mariame Kaba's We Do This 'Til We Free Us, and Elliot Higgins' We Are Bellingcat.
• Listening: Honestly, not much at the moment. Recommend some good music please? Non-English, preferably.
• Watching: If you have 3 hours to spare, watch this YouTube video with historian Ali A Olomi speaking about Queen Buran of Baghdad, the first known female astrologer. Professor Ali also posts weekly threads on astrology and esotericism through his Twitter.
• Food & Drink: It’s the last day of Ramadan, and I am already thinking to break my fast with watermelon juice and some good soup.