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Nadia Lee~~~
Derivative from old English ‘gelang’, ‘belong’ meant at hand, together with. Perhaps by considering where and how we belong we might question ownership, to be held by, and instead look to inclusion, to belong with →←
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Teredo navalis
As Agamben makes clear, communication has detached itself from political ideals of belonging and connection to function today as a primarily economic form. Differently put, communicative exchanges, rather than being fundamental to democratic politics, are the basic elements of capitalist production. /// Jodi Dean, Communicative Capitalism: Circulation and the Foreclosure of Politics ○
Neoliberalism's never the brainchild of a single person - its an amazinglly, efficiently distributed thought collective. It took an intellectual and social organisation [Mont Pelerin Society] more than half a century to pull-off what they did - the largest bank robbery of all-time, from public to private hands. /// Philip Mirowski 'Where Do Neoliberals Go After Market?'
What Michel Foucault had worked out way ahead of anyone else, about the progressive cultural phenomenon of neoliberalism, about being the entrepreneur of oneself, is explored by Ilana Gershon. She sights Facebook as training wheels to teach people how to be neoliberal agents. This model takes your information and time for free and sells it to others for a profit.
-- I AM THE BEGGAR OF THE WORLD -- Landays are an oral form of folk poetry created traditionally by illiterate people - mostly women - denied of education for being female. Landay means ‘short, poisonous snake’ in Pashto, a language spoken on both sides of the Afghanistan-Pakistan border, and also refers to two-line folk poems. Pashtun poetry has long been a form of rebellion for Afghan women, belying the notion that they are submissive or defeated. Landay are safe because they are collective. No single person writes a landay; a woman repeats one, shares one. It is hers and not hers. 'Landays survive because they belong to no one.' /// Eliza Griswold ○
… The silicon chip is a surface for writing; it is etched in molecular scales disturbed only by atomic noise, the ultimate interference for nuclear scores. Writing, power, and technology are old partners in Western stories of the origin of civilization, but miniaturization has changed our experience of mechanism. Miniaturization has turned out to be about power; small is not so much beautiful as pre-eminently dangerous, as in cruise missiles… Our best machines are made of sunshine; they are all light and clean because they are nothing but signals, electromagnetic waves, a section of a spectrum, and these machines are eminently portable, mobile — a matter of immense human pain... People are nowhere near so fluid, being both material and opaque...
Donna Haraway "A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century"
This open letter was announced at the opening of the International Joint Conferences on Artificial Intelligence (IJCAI) conference on July 28 2015.
Autonomous Weapons: an Open Letter from AI & Robotics Researchers
Autonomous weapons select and engage targets without human intervention. They might include, for example, armed quadcopters that can search for and eliminate people meeting certain pre-defined criteria, but do not include cruise missiles or remotely piloted drones for which humans make all targeting decisions. Artificial Intelligence (AI) technology has reached a point where the deployment of such systems is — practically if not legally — feasible within years, not decades, and the stakes are high: autonomous weapons have been described as the third revolution in warfare, after gunpowder and nuclear arms.
Many arguments have been made for and against autonomous weapons, for example that replacing human soldiers by machines is good by reducing casualties for the owner but bad by thereby lowering the threshold for going to battle. The key question for humanity today is whether to start a global AI arms race or to prevent it from starting. If any major military power pushes ahead with AI weapon development, a global arms race is virtually inevitable, and the endpoint of this technological trajectory is obvious: autonomous weapons will become the Kalashnikovs of tomorrow. Unlike nuclear weapons, they require no costly or hard-to-obtain raw materials, so they will become ubiquitous and cheap for all significant military powers to mass-produce. It will only be a matter of time until they appear on the black market and in the hands of terrorists, dictators wishing to better control their populace, warlords wishing to perpetrate ethnic cleansing, etc. Autonomous weapons are ideal for tasks such as assassinations, destabilizing nations, subduing populations and selectively killing a particular ethnic group. We therefore believe that a military AI arms race would not be beneficial for humanity. There are many ways in which AI can make battlefields safer for humans, especially civilians, without creating new tools for killing people.
Just as most chemists and biologists have no interest in building chemical or biological weapons, most AI researchers have no interest in building AI weapons — and do not want others to tarnish their field by doing so, potentially creating a major public backlash against AI that curtails its future societal benefits. Indeed, chemists and biologists have broadly supported international agreements that have successfully prohibited chemical and biological weapons, just as most physicists supported the treaties banning space-based nuclear weapons and blinding laser weapons.
In summary, we believe that AI has great potential to benefit humanity in many ways, and that the goal of the field should be to do so. Starting a military AI arms race is a bad idea, and should be prevented by a ban on offensive autonomous weapons beyond meaningful human control.
The sphere is one surface, no corners, infinitely symmetrical, of all the shapes a bubble could be the sphere is the one with the smallest surface area, which makes it the most efficient shape possible. And it is because nature loves to use her resources effectively that we can see spheres everywhere we look. The earth is round because gravity pulls the planets bulk into a ball around its core. Water forms into spherical droplets - the shape minimizes the amount of surface tension needed to hold the droplet together. And a spherical shape gives simple life forms, like volvox plankton, optimal contact with their surrounding environment. BBC The Code - Episode 2
The systemic in systemic oppression is not an accident. The prison complex is not just black and hispanic men being locked up in prison, it is black and brown children being criminalised by teachers starting in pre-school, pushed out of eduction and into juvenile detention by high school, locked out of legal employment, sent to for-profit prisons with no focus on education or rehabilitation, sent back into society with even bleaker prospects, then re-arrested and denied the vote...
These systems also interact with and feed off each other. Racism will strengthen gender oppression against women of colour. Classism will strengthen racism against poor people of colour and sexism against poor women, and so on.
Systemic oppression is built throughout all of our most important systems - our education system, our workplaces, our government, our arts and entertainment. It is in the air that we breathe and it is upheld with almost every action we take. That is how it has lasted so long...
What we have today is a very complex and enduring system of multiple oppressions designed to reinforce and interact with each other in a way that makes it impossible to address one and not the other. We need to start treating our social justice efforts with the respect that we treat other large endeavours in our society. This is not just the realm of knoble dreams. This is the realm of complex systems... /// Ijeoma Oluo O
In a word, we are now fully in collapse, and it is very unlikely to be avoided. Actions that would have taken us down a different course were needed decades ago. Historians, if they exist in the future, will write about the tragic failures of leadership... The principle ideology is laissez-faire neoliberal economics that treats the environment as external to market forces and gives it a value of zero in its accountings books... Stated plainly, the religious cult of modern economics is destroying our civilisation. /// Joe Brewer O
No matter how emphatically we scientists claim to be rational seekers of truth, we're as prone as anyone to human foibles such as prejudice, peer pressure and herd mentality. Max Tegmark 2014
Flash crash of 2010 was a trillion dollar stock market crash that lasted 36 minutes. A sell was instigated by a US mutual using 'spoofing algorithms', an automated algorithm trading contract to sell e-minis. What followed was described as a 'hot potato' effect, where other traders embarked on panic selling.
In the final stages of dehydration the body shrinks, robbing youth from the young as the skin puckers, eyes recede into orbits, and the tongue swells and cracks. Brain cells shrivel and muscles seize. The kidneys shut down. Blood volume drops, triggering hypovolemic shock, with its attendant respiratory and cardiac failures. These combined assaults disrupt the chemical and electrical pathways of the body until all systems cascade toward death.
Such is also the path of a dying species. Beyond a critical point, the collective body of a unique kind of mammal or bird or amphibian or tree cannot be salvaged, no matter the first aid rendered. Too few individuals spread too far apart, or too genetically weakened, are susceptible to even small natural disasters: a passing thunderstorm; an unexpected freeze; drought. At fewer than 50 members, populations experience increasingly random fluctuations until a kind of fatal arrhythmia takes hold. Eventually, an entire genetic legacy, born in the beginnings of life on earth, is removed from the future...
... as harmful as our forebears may have been, nothing compares to what's under way today. Throughout the 20th century the causes of extinction - habitat degradation, overexploitation, agricultural monocultures, human-borne invasive species, human-induced climate-change - increased exponentially, until now in the 21st century the rate is nothing short of explosive. The World Conservation Union's Red List - a database measuring the global status of Earth's 1.5 million scientifically named species - tells a haunting tale of unchecked, unaddressed, and accelerating biocide...
In a staggering forecast, Wilson predicts that our present course will lead to the extinction of half of all plant and animal species by 2100.
You probably had no idea. Few do. A poll by the American Museum of Natural History finds that seven in 10 biologists believe that mass extinction poses a colossal threat to human existence, a more serious environmental problem than even its contributor, global warming; and that the dangers of mass extinction are woefully underestimated by almost everyone outside science. In the 200 years since French naturalist Georges Cuvier first floated the concept of extinction, after examining fossil bones and concluding "the existence of a world previous to ours, destroyed by some sort of catastrophe", we have only slowly recognised and attempted to correct our own catastrophic behaviour.
Julia Whitty | Animal Extinction - The Greatest Threat to Mankind O
… when our sun eventually dies in about 5 billion years, it will end its days as a so-called white dwarf, which is a giant ball that - like a diamond - is made mostly of carbon atoms. Our Universe is teeming with white dwarfs today, created by stars past. Many of them are continually gaining weight by gobbling up gas from dying companion stars that they're orbiting. Once they become officially overweight they suffer the stellar equivalent of a heart attack: they become unstable and detonate in a gigantic thermonuclear explosion - a Type Ia supernova. Max Tegmark, 2014
Multiple 16mm film loop installation by Rose Kallal. Sound by Rose Kallal and Mark O Pilkington using modular synthesizers.
In the beginning was a world
Man said: Let there be more light
Electric scenes a maze of beams
Neon brights to light our boring nights
On the second day he said: Let's have a gas
Hydrogen and CO are of the past
Let's make some germs, we'll poison the worms
Man will never be surpassed
And he said: Behold what I have done
I've made a better world for everyone
Nobody laughs, nobody cries
World without end, forever and ever
Amen, amen, amen
On the third we get green and blue pill pie
On the fourth we send rockets to the sky
On the fifth metal beasts and submarines
On the sixth man prepares his final dream:
In our image, let's make robots for our slaves
Imagine all the time that we can save
Computers, machines, the silicon dream
Seventh he retired from the scene
And he said: Behold what I have done
I've made a better world for everyone
Nobody laughs, nobody cries
World without end, forever and ever
Amen (amen), amen (amen), amen (amen)
On the eighth day machine just got upset
A problem man had not foreseen as yet
No time for flight, a blinding light
Then nothing but a void, forever night
He said: Behold what man has done
There's not a world for anyone
Nobody laughs, nobody cries
World's at an end, everyone has died
Forever amen (amen), amen (amen), amen (amen)
He said: Behold what man has done
There's not a world for anyone
Nobody laughes, nobody cries
World's at an end, everyone has died
Forever amen (amen), amen (amen), amen (amen)
(Amen)
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Screen shots from Google Image search term: within the event horizon
The Anthropocene, the geological epoch driven by vaguely generalizing “human activities,” fails to capture the divisions and antagonism at play here. Instead we might consider adopting a term like the “Capitalocene,” which appears more exacting. Proposed by Donna Haraway, the latter refers to the geological epoch created by neoliberal corporate globalization, and has the advantage of naming the culprit beyond climate change, thereby gathering political traction around itself. It is not native peoples, or impoverished communities, or underdeveloped countries who are subsidizing fossil fuel companies to a degree of $10 million per minute ($5.3 trillion a year) worldwide so that they can run their Capitalocenic enterprises, driving us all toward climate catastrophe, but rather the governments of over-developed nations, as reported recently by the IMF. Or, as Naomi Klein puts it in This Changes Everything, “We are stuck because the actions that would give us the best chance of averting catastrophe—and would benefit the vast majority—are extremely threatening to an elite minority that has a stranglehold over our economy, our political process, and most of our major media outlets.” It’s not that most of us are not implicated in one way or another—many of us, for instance, drive cars and live in energy-consuming homes. Rather, it’s the agents of the Capitalocene who are doing everything possible—including using their tremendous financial resources to manipulate governments through corporate lobbying—to remove sustainable energy options from even entering the discussion. “Ours is the geological epoch not of humanity, but of capital,” as Andreas Malm cogently argues. FOTOMUSEUM Still Searching, III. Against the Anthropocene
They talk about freedom of choice, very limited in fact, we have two political parties, essentially two. Big media companies five/six; oil companies down to three now, I think; the big banks, brokerage houses, all the things that are important – reduced in choice. Newspapers in this city - two, that are owned by the same people and they also own a radio station and a TV station, but jelly beans - 32 flavours! All the things that don’t matter... [despairing laughter]
... You know what your freedom of choice is in America?
Paper or plastic. Cash or card. Isle or window.
George Carlin, on America
Osborne announced massive tax breaks and subsidies for North Sea oil companies. A new £1.3 billion in subsidies will be handed to oil companies, with the burden transferred to the public. £1.3 billion could cover the costs of employing another 20,000 nurses in the NHS. 18 March 2015 Budget | Platform London blog written with Greg Muttitt Link
David Bohm Seminars 1990 - Part 1
Q. Why is it so important to be coherent?
A. If you’re incoherent one thing is that you do not produce the intended results. That’s one sign of incoherence, another one is that you’re contradicting yourself. Or a third is that you’re deceiving yourself… See, nobody intends to destroy the planet, nobody intended that, they merely intended to get rich, comfortable, rich, whatever it was. Now, I’m not blaming anybody, all of us were in it, right. We did not see that this was dangerous, right. It was incoherent. If our intention had been to destroy the planet we would have been coherent.
These meetings have been concerned with the question of thought... by way of review we all know that the world is in a difficult situation and has been for a long time... now we have many crises, in addition to the Middle East one that has been for some time, economic crises developing.. and inability to .. everything is interdependent... There's always this danger for destruction... It's sort of endemic... it's in the whole situation.
Hard/drive: Pairing systems so that they have to behave
Brad Troemel
The Collective Intelligence of Women Could Save the World
Neil deGrasse Tyson was once asked about his thoughts on the cosmos. In a slow, gloomy voice, he intoned, “The universe is a deadly place. At every opportunity, it’s trying to kill us. And so is Earth. From sinkholes to tornadoes, hurricanes, volcanoes, tsunamis.” Tyson humorously described a very real problem: the universe is a vast obstacle course of catastrophic dangers. Asteroid impacts, supervolcanic eruptions, and global pandemics represent existential risks that could annihilate our species or irreversibly catapult us back into the Stone Age.
But nature is the least of our worries. Today’s greatest existential risks stem from advanced technologies like nuclear weapons, biotechnology, synthetic biology, nanotechnology, and even artificial superintelligence. These tools could trigger a disaster of unprecedented proportions. Exacerbating this situation are “threat multipliers” — issues like climate change and biodiveristy loss, which, while devastating in their own right, can also lead to an escalation of terrorism, pandemics, famines, and potentially even the use of WTDs (weapons of total destruction)...
Why do women make groups smarter? The authors suggest that it’s because women are, generally speaking, more socially sensitive than men, and the link between social sensitivity and collective intelligence is statistically significant.
As Sir Martin Rees writes in Our Final Hour, “what happens here on Earth, in this century, could conceivably make the difference between a near eternity filled with ever more complex and subtle forms of life and one filled with nothing but base matter.” Future generations may very well thank us for taking the link between collective intelligence and female participation seriously. /// Phil Torres O
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Nadia Lee~~~
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