And because I have a whole bunch of applications and more than one email, I have now spent half a day logging in to different services, trying to get 2FA to work and requesting new passwords, migrating chats and files, cursing all the while. So many parking apps – I hate you with a burning passion!
I thought that Bank ID (Swedish national 2FA application) would be a hassle to renew, but it was as straightforward as you’d please. It’s the FAANG apps that are giving me a headache – there’s no standard way of migrating the stuff, each app has come up with it’s own authentication scheme requiring some particular set of hoops to be jumped. Some apps were difficult to get to work I’ve uninstalled them rather than deal with the hassle. It’s a culling criteria as good as any, I guess.
Even though some people love the Nothing 2.5 launcher, it looks like a half-finished Winamp skin so I installed Nova despite how slow it can be at times. I look forward to when I can forego a cellphone alltogether and manage all my digital interactions with a ring or something less attention-requiring, but until then I’ll go for a utalitarian approach – my phone is not my personality.
I’m occasionally surprised how utter shit the usability of both mobiles and computers still is though! I’m sure part of it is just nostalgia and selective memory on my part, but I honestly miss the days of MacOS 9 and Nokia phones. Todays UI consistency is poor, the information architecture is muddled, and some design choices are just baffling. The CoverOverflow animation on Android is nauseating and can’t be turned off? The menu for editing apps is ordered differently from one app to another (see screenshot)? Why are app names truncated?
Of course, as a budding UX:er I ought to be encouraged: Look how much there’s left to do! But on the other hand, I’m sure there are designers smarter than I – whole scores of them in fact! – who have tried to wrestle these things under control and failed. The digital world stands testament to their failed ambitions, cobbled together from tear-stained post-its and angry PM comments in a shared Figjam board.
]]>I sleep with a notebook next to my bed, and sometimes I wake up with an idea, more often a turn of phrase or a slogan, and write it down. This particular morning I wrote “I woke up rested, full of worthless energy”.
The type of energy I was thinking of was the kind that makes your head buzz with potential to solve problems – your mind is racing to apply itself to something. A problem to solve, a task to fulfill. A purpose, any purpose.
But if you don’t find a purpose, this energy, this pressure, dissapates – much like a kettle boiling over, the energy escapes as steam, as sighs and hot breath. I only keep as much energy as needed for the mundane tasks of the day, the rest leaks out.
]]>Tamsyn Muir: Gideon the Ninth. Odd science fantasy book taking place in a world where there are necromantic houses who rule whole planets in service to an emperor? We get to follow Gideon, an indentured servant to the Ninth house, when she along with her necromancer are summoned to perform a test with representatives of other houses. It’s the language which makes this stand apart – Gideon talks like a contemporary angry teenager, which clashes wonderfully with the gothic surroundings. The mood reminds me of the backdrops of the game Slay the Spire, if that makes any sense.
Alan Cooper: The inmates are running the asylum. A book often referenced in modern computer design litterature as an important contribution in bridging the divide between design and development. Well written by the “father of Visual Basic” and as pertinent today as it was thirty years ago.
Mark van Wageningen: Type and Color: How to design and use multicolored typefaces. More of a skim than a read – the author presents some experiments with typefaces made up of more than one colour. It’s not a subtle effect and using it for copy text would require a brave publisher, but some of the headers are eye-catching if they fit with the overall design.
Zach Barth: Zach-like. A chronological history of the games of Zach Barth and his companies. It’s not many persons who get a genre names after themselves (zach-like) so it’s intersting to browse the evolotion from paper sketches to finished computer games. Could have done with tighter editing of text and included materials, but I have a feeling I’m not the intended audience – a burgeoning game developer might spend days analysing the sketches I browse through.
Sjöwall Wahlöö: Den vedervärdige mannen från Säffle. The first book from the Beck series that I’ve read, and I can see how it became so genre-defining. It’s suspensful, has social pathos and a no-nonsense story – great read. (Oh, and the story is about a brutal murder of a police officer, which starts to look like the first of a string of revenge killings – and our protagonist Beck is on the list)
Seth Dickinson: The tyrant Baru Cormorant. Originally the final volume of the trilogy, but since extended to a planned forth book, we follow Baru Cormorant and her dealings in trying to exert vengenge upon the imperial Falcrest. Well written and deep characters; It’s Machiavellian economic warfare, and my only complaint is that the characters are too numerous and difficult for my poor brain to keep apart. Will preorder the forth book as soon as it’s possible though!
Frederik Pohl, The boy who would live forever. Continuing the stories in the Heechee saga, there’s a menagerie of vignettes and characters which tie together many of the storylines from the other Gateway novels. Pohl has original ideas like few others – what he uses as a throwaway tidbit or worldbuilding, lesser authors would use as their main contrivance. The books becomes somewhat disjointed because of this, but it’s always fun to visit in the universe. I particularly enjoy comparing the AI minds of Gateway to the Minds of Iain M. Banks Culture series – the Gateway minds seem much more beign and less cynical than their Culture counterparts.
Kate Swindler: Life and Death Design. Part of my UX reading, Swindler describes some considerations of designing for people under stress. The book is a good starting place with many references to original research, but it’s a bit thin on the design aspect. Knowing the physical and psychological consequences of a flight-fight-freeze respons is good, but I’d like to have seen more process specific examples. Still, it’s a good primer and I’d recomend it to others who (like I) have limited experience in thinking and working with this – if we consider stress responses as conditions similar to handicaps which we need to take into account when designing, it would be a benefit to all.
John le Carré: A murder of Quality. One of his early whodunnits featuring George Smiley, and a biting description of upper class private schools in England. A woman is found murdered and suspicion falls on her husband, Smiley investigates and Carré uses him as a foil onto which we can project the banal wickedness of seemly proper breeding and behaviour. A fun and short read.
Johann Hari: Stolen Focus. An urgent and timely book looking at what many of us feel – we’ve become more stupid and distracted with each passing year. Starting out with surveillance capitalism and attention economy – manufactured to milk our brains as much as possible – he moves on to pollutants, malnurishment and a sheltered and scripted childhood as possible culprits to your shrinking attention-span. Good read, altough some arguments are weaker than other (the Silicon Valley stuff is solid though).
Michael Luca, Max H Bazerman: The power of experiments. A great primer on how the field of experimentation and nudging has moved from academia into politics and business. The authors are hilariously naïve and reductive though – the only objections they can envision to being experimented upon is either being a luddite or fear of bad actors (which are considered an abboration rather than business as usual). Despite this it’s a worthwhile read – and their attitude is informative as well, since it explains the oblivious surprise organisations show when people object to being experimented upon.
Louise Boije af Gennäs: Blodloka. A Swedish whodunnit against a backdrop of political scandals and coverups from the last sixty years. Reasonably suspenseful, but reads like something the author has seen on tv and is retelling rather than a well written novel. But I became intrigued to read more about the real-world scandals that are referenced in clippings throughout the book, so that’s a plus.
Oliver Sacks: An anthropoligist on Mars. Seven short descriptions of people with neurodivergence – aquired colour blindness, tourettes, inability to create memories – all told in Sacks curious and frank voice. The title is a quote from autist savant Temple Grandin on how she feels when navigating human relations, but serves just as well to describe how the author approaches his subjects on their terms as far as possible, bring back stories to the rest of us.
Gina Spadafori: Dogs for dummies. I’m more or less come to terms that if I and Sara are to stay together, at some point we’ll get a dog. So I figured I’d take an interest and read up on the subject. This book was a good primer on how to approach the decision to get a dog, what to look for in a breader, house training, etc. Very practical, and she highlights the responsibility one has for not encouraging “puppy mills.” I’m still not comfortable with the idea of owning a dog, but at least I’m more informed!
Hugh C. Howey: Silo trilogy. A re-read after watching the mediocre tv-adaptation. Ten thousand people live underground in a giant silo, but noone remembers why. The only thing they know is what The Order commands them, and it commands them not to go outside. Nice dystopic scifi with some twists and turns.
Albert Camus: The Fall. Short and fantastic, a monologue seemingly adressing the reader in second person. Jean-Baptiste Clamence is judge-penitent in a bar in Amsterdam, sometime in the 1950s, and he’s telling his interlocutor of his fall from social and moral grace, and of the impossibility of being noble. Looking forwards to reading this again in a while!
Lev Manovich: AI Aesthetics. A short booklet which is part of the course AI & Design that I’m taking at Borås University fall of 23. It came out 2018 and there’s not much conceptually new here that hasn’t been covered elsewhere by now, but it’s a useful summery of cultural ontologies and where AI fits in the puzzle.
E. M. Forster: The Machine Stops. A fantastic short story from 1909 which seem so in time with our current age it’s bound to get a resurgence! “No one confessed the Machine was out of hand. Year by year it was served with increased efficiency and decreased intelligence.” Choc full of quotes and insights into a future world enslaved by the machine.
Malka Older: Infomocracy. A near future scifi where the world is mostly divided into administative areas comprised of a maximum of 100’000 citizens. Each such centenal can be ruled by completely different rules – be they communist, laizze faire, utalitarian – and we follow political fixers in the run-up to the coming contested election. It’s a mildly interesting setup, but poorly written and not paticularly interesting in the end. I read it on a recommendation from a co-worker at RISE, and would have abandoned it otherwise.
Hannes Råstam: Fallet Thomas Quick. A fascinating read about the formerly convicted serial killer Thomas Quick who confessed to 30-some murders, was convicted for eight of them. After twenty years in bin he was exonerated after Hannes Råstam starts digging into the cases and slowly uncovers that it’s all based on wishful thinking and willful ignorance on the part of the prosecution and lawyers, and false confessions by Quick. A riveting read and a testament to the need for research-heavy journalism.
Betty Gilpin: All the women in my brain. An autobiography by the actress written with more metaphors and allegories than I’ve seen anywhere. It tells of her struggles with imposter syndrome, angst, fear of failure and fear of success. Gilpin was great in The Hunt and the more recent Mrs Davis, and it was interesting to get a glimpse of her road there. Great read, even if you don’t usually read autobiographies. “I have spent my life lily-pad hopping from goddess to goddess, quietly plagiarizing their toe rings and credos, hoping that my mirroring would count as personhood”
Fredrik T Olsson: Slutet på kedjan. A Swedish sci-fi thriller about a world conspiracy, a battle against time and some really awkward speculation about junk DNA. Poorly written and completely unbelievable characters and worldbuilding, and a perfect schlock to read when you’re down with a cold and have little energy to spare. One blurb on the cover says “more intelligent and better written than Da Vinci Code” which is a hilariously low bar to clear, which I’m not sure that this novel actually manages. No surprise at all that it’s been optioned for a film by Warner Brothers.
Lauren Beriant: Cruel optimism. Gave up after 34 of 354 pages when I realised that I didn’t understand what the point of the book was.
Louise Penny: Glass Houses. It’s like turning on a show which you imagine has been going for twenty years and realising that you don’t care about the characters at all. I did read another book in the series on Saras recommendation, but it’s just not for me. Put it down after 22/330 pages.
V.E.Schwab: A darker shade of magic. Dimension-hopping between different Londons. The language just didn’t grip me, and there are better magic realism books out there. 23/345 pages.
Timothy Morton: Dark Ecology. My patience with philosophical books which claim to reinvent ontologies and discourse – preferably inventing clever words in the process – grows shorter with age. I got through 17/220 pages of this book.
Charles Stross: Halting State. In a near future someone commits a bank robbery in a virtual world, and it has real world repercussions as insurence adjusters get involved. Found the book abandoned at RISE, and I abandoned it half way through.
]]>“My personal worry is that for a long time, we sought to diversify the voices — you know, who is telling the stories? And we tried to give agency to people from different parts of the world,“ she said. “Now we’re giving a voice to machines.”
Rest of world, Victoria Turk: How AI reduces the world to stereotypesA fantastic comparison of how Midjourney renders five terms: a person, a woman, a house, a street, and a plate of food. It comes out as stereotyped as you can imagine, but the work they put in to do the comparison really shows it in stark light.
In that dismal moment I could feel that the systems meant to process us haven’t “gone wrong” when they embarrass us. They aren’t being refined toward some higher level of seamlessness, once the technology and the data sets improve. Rather they “improve” by relocating the frictions we inevitably feel and giving it no outlet. The indifference of these systems to us and our powerlessness in the face of them in that moment becomes the indifference of society and our powerlessness to change it. In a flash, the welling irritation conveys instantly, reflexively, that solidarity must be impossible in a world where all human relations are machine-mediated.
Rob Horning: Two riders were approaching
This sentence explains more peotically what I wrote a while back: “… it will not only be “the market” which will have decided that you can no longer afford your medicin, your education, or your vacation – it will be an AI which will have endless patience to listen to your litany, but no semblence of decency to react to it.”
Work has not disappeared from the restaurant floor, but the person doing the work has changed. Instead of an employee inputting orders dictated by the customer, customers now do it themselves for free. Fauxtomation strikes again. […] But while the gap between advertising copy and reality can be risible, fauxtomation also has a more nefarious purpose. It reinforces the perception that work has no value if it is unpaid and acclimates us to the idea that one day we won’t be needed.
Astra Taylor: The faux-bot revolution
We are so primed for a technologically advanced future that we’re bluepilling ourselves into accepting fake automation as real. There is a man behind the curtain, and it’s us?
The largest corporations on earth ripped off generations of artists without permission or compensation to produce programs meant to rip us off even more. I believe A.I. defenders know this is unethical, which is why they distract us with fan fiction about the future.
New Republic, Lincoln Michael: The year AI came for culture
A great essay that puts the AI wars into a power perspective – technology used to extract labour and gain regulatory capture. Haves against have-nots. As usual. A very down to earth summery for the year 2023.
]]>I came to think of this again the other day when I started my migration from many computers onto a home system built around a small M1 Macbook Air. It’s a humble machine which is more powerful than my sort-of-recent i9/1080Ti Windows abomination, and much more powerful than the 5.1 Mac Pro I’m still keeping around because of the RAID and I/O ports, and I’m consolidating all the storage onto a few external enclosures. Turns out, I have some fifteen drives of different capacity laying around, as well as a bunch of USB/Firewire enclosures, and just copying the stuff from one thing to another takes forever right now.
But anywho, my point being that the amount of storage I have no longer feels like a valuable metric of my productive capacity – rather the opposite since my data exists as conflicting versions in many places – and I’m satisfied with my screen real estate (well almost, I’d like a magic whiteboard covering 2×1 meters on the living room wall). So what qualities do I value in my personal computational space today?
I’m thinking that maybe it’s convenience. I’ve become older, crankier wiser, and neither my eyesight nor patience can take as much abuse as it was able to ten years ago. I want to be able to be productive rather than fiddle around with drivers in Windows and I’m more likely to take poor design as a personal affront than a technical challange.
There’s that William Morris quote that you should “have nothing in your house that you do not know to be useful, or believe to be beautiful.” and perhaps there’s something similar going on here, with a very wide definition of “beautiful” and “useful”. Along those lines, I caved in and bought an iPad to read books on since I tried one out and realised how much slicker the experience is than on any Android tablet I’ve tried.
It’s not that I want a frictionless life. Friction is important, it smooths out rough surfaces, gives us things to hang on to, and provides heat and sparks. But I’d like to choose my objects of friction with more consideration.
There are so many things worth doing in the world, small and grand, and there’s just so little value in putting up with stuff that doesn’t matter. Just write that stuff off and learn to live with the fomo; Smooth out all friction that doesn’t improve your grip on reality, and enjoy a better handle on life.
]]>My first internship at RISE is coming to an end, and with that I’m going back to school for two more courses this year – before heading out for a 16 week intership somewhere (Suggestions? Hit me up!). In additon to doing full time at ITHS, I’ve been doing a bunch of courses at IxDF, and studying AI and applied design at Borås Univeristy. While at the same time trying to have a life, which has proven to be a bit stressfull.
I’m thinking a lot about what my place is in the whole “design ecology” – what do I enjoy doing, and what can I reasonably get paid for? I know that I’d like to end up in a creative team where we help each other be awesome and solve difficult problems for real people and dazzle others with out brilliance, but I have a way to go before I’m there. So I end up reading stuff written by people more clever and experienced than I, and I try to figure out what it’s all about. And since I have Some Thoughts I figured I might as well post it here for others (and myself, later) to read.
It’s tempting to think that audiences are coming to our content with the basic skills needed to comprehend and interpret it. That may simply not be the case. Part of “consider[ing] your content from your user’s perspective” is understanding what reading skills the user brings to the equation and writing to accommodate them.
Contents Magazine, Angela Colter: The audience you didn’t know you had
According to Colters article above, around half of the population of the USA has low or very low literacy skills. I spent a couple minutes searching for Swedish statistics, but could only find trend-pieces on reading habits among kids.
Design takeaway: Make sure that text in your text is easy to scan and understand. If you have reasons to be more obscure, have a clear goal and be aware of that you’re potentially excluding users. Useful tool: LIX calculator (then again, readability calculators might not be all that reliable)
And them we have colour blindness as a visual design problem which in turn causes cognitive load.
In design, both in the digital and physical worlds, color should never be the sole indicator of meaning. A simple test: if your work was converted to grayscale, would it still be usable?
Andy Baio: Chasing rainbows
Try to imagine a vast field of one color in your mind. No other colors. No other words. No other thoughts. No connotations. No connections. No anything except for that one color. You can’t do it. You seriously CAN’T do it. The human brain does not allow you to do it. It does not work. It simply does not.
Hoot design company: Color Psychology is Bullsh*t
We’ve covered colour psychology very briefly at the UX Design course at ITHS, and the idea that certain colours have certain meaning irks me no end. It’s a reductionist view of how colours and perception works, and it’s just plain dumb. “Red means action” and “blue inspires confidence.” It’s like crystal therapy for the aesthetically challenged – “ooh, this mauve will inspire romance.”
The same goes for the ITHS classes we’ve had on typography, where we suddenly abandon concepts such as “testing legibility” in favour of “the golden ratio should decide line height.” I understand that you have to convince those paying you that the two days you spent fiddling with the typography weren’t wasted, but refering to some obscure magic incantation passed down from Gutenberg will bite on the ass once you’re asked “but why can’t we just get the AI to do it?”
John Denver learned the biggest lesson of all, even if he only had a few seconds to appreciate it: Let the User Beware! And, indeed, the NTSB, as per its long history of setting aside findings, human factors or otherwise, that might conflict with a verdict of pilot error, ruled that the responsibility for this crash lay with the pilot. The interface was relegated to a mere “factor.” Had John Denver fueled his aircraft in spite of evidence indicating he had sufficient fuel, had he somehow managed to thoroughly familiarize himself with the idiosyncrasies of this uniquely-assembled experimental aircraft sans manual, he would be alive and well today.
Bruce Tognazzini: When Interfaces Kill: What Really Happened to John Denver
And these are the kind of stories that get retold by old-timers in the Human Computer Interface / User Centered Design / UX field. The stories that tell us that people are too often blamed for what should be blamed on poor design and the business practices that allow it.
Retold in a more modern way, the deaths caused by poor design are today more likely to be the result of dark patterns, uncaring machine learning or just general “death by a thousand cuts.”
Related book recommendation: Kate Swindler: Life and Death Design. Swindler describes some considerations of designing for people under stress. The book is a good starting place with many references to original research, but it’s a bit thin on the design aspect. Knowing the physical and psychological consequences of a flight-fight-freeze respons is good, but I’d like to have seen more process specific examples.
Despite that it’s a good primer and I’d recomend it to others who (like I) have limited experience in thinking and working with this. If we could consider stress responses as temporary handicaps which we need to take into account when designing, it would be a benefit to all.
Years in, “innovation theater”— checking a series of boxes without implementing meaningful shifts — had become endemic in corporate settings, while a number of social-impact initiatives highlighted in case studies struggled to get beyond pilot projects.
Rebecca Ackermann: Design thinking was supposed to fix the world. Where did it go wrong?
Ackermanns article is interesting as it’s taking to task the too-naive approach to all problems that IDEO et.al occasionally present. It struck me as I was listening to a conversation with Tim Brown the other day (one of the head honchos at IDEO), when he was somewhat contrite about having spent so many years of his professional life “designing and bringing about landfills” – and now he wants to make a better impact on the world (viz. environmental issues).
Much like Don Norman is now focusing on “design for a sustainable world,” to my ears they ignore that any ambition to take on these huge global issues will run afoul of realpolitik – it’s not because of poor design decitions that we have global warming; it’s because there are exceptionelly rich and vested interests in whose interest it is not to prioritize the public good. And I don’t know how to have a discussion about “making the world better” without at least acknowledging the power dynamics.
When the thing that propels a career, animates hobbies, and becomes a mode of communication are the all same, there are drawbacks. For one, my sense of worth and accomplishment is less diverse. When the market, the end users, my friends, or my family don’t appreciate or acknowledge when I show them I love them, it can hurt. I’ll admit it. It is easy to feel like I don’t matter. But then, I have always been sensitive. I am working on that. I am also getting a lot of opportunities to practice.
T. Robert Roeth: When you start to doubt yourself, design from the inside out
A well written essay on self-doubt and a creative career. It resonated quite a lot with how I think of myself as a human and artists, and I imagine that it’ll stay relevant now that I’m moving into UX Design. Robert writes about how he overcompensated in his work in order to increase both his financial worth and self-worth, but felt like he was faking it and failing at adulting.
Trying to identify what it is that makes you tick, and what parts of you that you should cultivate rather than prune, is a struggle for us neurotic types. I don’t expect that it’ll get easier once I start working in the design field, but I’m trying to prepare – and reading essays on similar issues is a comfort.
]]>In the fall of 2022 I began studying UX Design at IT-högskolan. The field was new to me and I did my best to navigate the concepts, methods and nomenclatures. I wished I could talk to people who were just a bit further along than I – ask them what I should focus on, what I shouldn’t stress about, and how their careers had turned out.
I did run into a whole bunch of nice people at school, at meetups and other professional forums, but I would have liked the info available in one place, and I wish I had a map of the terrain ahead. I don’t have a mentor in the field, so finding others who are ahead of me seemed like the next best thing.
This project was born out of a hope that perhaps those that come after me can benefit from the experience of myself and my classmates. I did an open call to my class of UX22 at ITHS and asked to interview as many as possible after our first year of school. My plan is to follow this up three years after our graduation, and then three years after that – in 2027 & 2030.
Out of my class of 30 odd people, I got 11 to volunteer, and I’d like to thank them all for entrusting me with their time and thoughts. The interviews are in Swedish, but the videos have English auto-translated subs (in addition to manually translated Swedish) so I hope that they can be useful for others outside of Sweden.
The questions I asked each one were the same, but I did edit the thing for brevity and omitted some of the answers. I’ve pasted all the questions below:
I hope these interviews provide some insights and encouragement to others who are just starting out on their UX design journey. It’s been interesting to speak with my classmates and document their thoughts and ambitions at this early stage of our careers. I look forward to continuing the conversation and documenting how our perspectives evolve over time.
I welcome any feedback on this project or suggestions for future iterations. Please feel free to leave a comment below or get in touch – I’d love to hear from you: email & linkedin
Thanks for joining me on this small attempt to map the unknown terrain ahead!
]]>Turns out there are whole books written on ethnography, design and usability, and they are rather interesting – who knew! Anyway, I quickly got bogged down with extra courses and books and podcasts and so on and so forth. I took to walking an hour and a half to school just to have time to speed-listen to at least some of the stuff that’s out there.
One of the podcasts that I stuck to was “What is wrong with UX,” hosted by Laura Klein and Kate Rutter. It’s now defunct, but the archive is still up at usersknow.com/podcast. Since I’ve listened to all 130 or so episodes I figured that I’d put together a selection most interesting to me as a beginner in the field. The show doesn’t rely much on callbacks, so skipping episodes isn’t that big of a deal.
An assumption about you: The selected episodes were useful as a complement to my full time UX Design studies – they gave a deeper understanding of the practicalities of what I was learning in school and reading about on the side. I’m assuming that this podcast isn’t your first exposure to the field of UX Design.
A note for us non-USA people: Americans love to talk and this podcast is no exception, but after an episode or two you’ll be able to look past the dad-jokes and forced geniality, and appreciate the content. Klein and Rutter are knowledgeble and passionate about their skills, and it’s worth sticking with the show to hear what they have to say. As a side note, I can recommend Laura Kleins book UX for lean startups as well as her course in Agile methods for UX Design over at IxDF [affiliate link].
The shows listed are in order of publication, and the descriptions are their own.
If you’ve listened to the podcast and would like to suggest another episode to add to the list – or one to take away – feel free to comment below of get in touch over at Linkedin or email. And if you know of other curated lists of podcast episodes, let me know! The amount of info that’s available online is massive, and with all search engines being choked with listicles written by drunk potato AI:s and content farms, finding the good stuff is time-consuming.
]]>My childhood friend Matilda visited us in Gothenburg over the weekend, chaperoning her son who had a ticket to the three-day festival Way out West, and we binged most of Curtis series “Can’t get you out of my mind.” I still have the last hour of the last episode to go (“brevity” isn’t a word in his vocabulary I think), but the overarching theme of the disappearance of progressive ideologies is depressing and on point. What we’re left with after the fall of the democratic middle class & militant romantics, are fandoms jockying for position and angry people longing for a past that never were.
This is a recurring theme in stuff I’m reading as well as in conversations. It’s not so much despair as resignation. Despair would imply that you have a goal but have failed to attain it. Resignation is when you realise that your goal doesn’t matter. And resignation seems to colour the zeitgeist quite thoroughly right now – the only remaining optimists are the religious fundamentalists and accelerationist of different stripes.
One of the ideas I floated to my friends after the last election (which saw a right-nationalist government take over from the previous centrists) was that we ought to start a political party which only focuses on one issue. This in itself isn’t new – there are populist parties and movements all the time – but I’m interested in what issue might give the biggest progressive leverage regardless of the political colour one has to collaborate with.
Worst case scenario: What single-issue would make such a disproportional progressive impact that it would be worth to collaborate even with the most toxic idiots of the far right? You’re sitting at the negotiating table with a bunch of wannabe nationalist socialist romatics from SD, and if they give in on one issue you’ll lend them your support. What would that issue be?
Depending on if we’re doing this locally, regionally or nationally, the issues will differ. Right now I only have two suggestions: A complete ban on private car use in the inner city of Gothenburg (a local issue) or a hard limit on the salary for public employees (with countermeasures in place for attempts to subvert this via bonuses, etc.). Both would have huge knock-on effects, which on the face of it would be progressive (citation needed).
Do you have any other suggestions for one law, policy, activity or ordinance that would have a disproportionally progressive effect regardless of which political coalition is in power? I’m all ears, let’s do this! There’s only three years left and we probably need to make some research and print some leaflets!
]]>I’m back from a short vacation to Side (Turkey) which I spent reading and drinking beer. Also, looking at ruins. Side is an odd place where a contemporary charter tourist village has sprung up literally built on top of 2000 year old ruins. As a result, you see ancient brickabrack all over the place – they use marble columns as doorstops – which in another context would be in a museum.
Anywho. Since I’m reading a lot (mostly related to my UX studies) I’m starting to feel mentally constipated. I need to put some of the stuff into practice, or I’m going to forget it, which seems a waste of my time. So: Going forward I’ll pursue some simple ideas/projects/experiments to implement what I learn from the books (as well as the IxDF courses I’m taking on the side), but with a rule not to turn them into huge projects or guilt-tripping obligations – I’m just doing it to experiment, learn and get feedback. Sounds like fun?
Speaking of which, I’m thinking of tidying this blog up a bit. Adding some “best of” posts in the left column and maybe even have categories of some sort. I know my readership here is in the single digits, but I ought to be able to use some material to inform a professional profile – my approach to work, research, thinking, etc. If you have opinions, get in touch through mail or on Linkedin.
]]>The economic downturn – combined with the class war waged by the tech sector on its workforce – has investment money salivating at the prospect of a new boom. Subsequently, there’s much said about the coming nerd rupture and ascendance of the machine.
Noam Chomsky et.al have some objections:
It is at once comic and tragic, as Borges might have noted, that so much money and attention should be concentrated on so little a thing — something so trivial when contrasted with the human mind, which by dint of language, in the words of Wilhelm von Humboldt, can make “infinite use of finite means,” creating ideas and theories with universal reach.
Noam Chomsky, Ian Roberts and Jeffrey Watumull: The false promise of ChatGPT [Archive.org mirror of NYT op-ed]
It’s not that I don’t enjoy playing around with the tools – I pay both for Midjourney and ChatGPT API – but it feels like intelligence pareidoila (seeing patterns in random data). You can have a really interesting discussion with ChatGPT, and you can be surprised by what seems like creative insights and suggestions. But I’ve had really interesting discussions with the birds on the poster over my bed, as well as with my drunk reflection in the mirror. I provided the meaning and the interpretation – and I did so because I played the game of “let’s pretend.”
I’m in school right now, retooling myself into a UX design & research person, and AI crops up in more and more omnious tones. I talked with a couple Javascript students who felt vaguely threatened by AI and uncertain of what their value proposition was. And to my ears they were basing their fear not on anything specific, but rather a general sense of the AI is coming for us all! Which is being fuelled by writers on Medium with fiften susbscribers who need to write hyperbolic articles in order to – oh irony! – impress the AI of Google Search.
We had a guest lecturer the other week who talked about AI tools as something which we’ll have to learn to use within UX, in particular graphic / UI generators. That’s definitely a use I can see and which doesn’t cause me much consternation – I’ve been using generative software the past thirty years in different capacities, this latest breed just happen to be easier to talk to – but when people start writing about using ChatGPT as personas for user research, that’s just difficult to take seriously. That’s really giving into pareidoila, and you’re better of doing astrology or divining from entrails.
I’m not sure where I’m going with all of this. Of course I’d like to have my cake and eat it – by which I mean I’d like to seem clever and reasonable without missing an opportunity to piss on the AI parade – but in the end I think I come down on the side that the current iteration of AI will lead society down a shitty path where the first line of contact with other humans will be through our mutual AI:s, and as usual those with more resources will be able to have better tailored tools (as usual) to make the most of the world (as usual) and ensconce themselves in bubbles where they can have plausible deniability even more than today.
Because it will not only be “the market” which will have decided that you can no longer afford your medicin, your education, or your vacation – it will be an AI which will have endless patience to listen to your litany, but no semblence of decency to react to it.
— update 15 March —
ChatGPT 4 has just been released, and the discussion on Hacker news is full of hot-takes on what it means and you don’t know what it means and ooh, shiny.
My goal is to have the tracts distributed by people in the street in at least five locations across the world, and get documentation from the events. I’ll send the tracts out for free to my missionaries, and might put them up for sale if others want them. Shipping will be the expensive part, since manufacturing is dirt cheap on the Risograph, and paper is more or less free.
The content of the tract will be made up of Jack Chick style comic panels generated by Midjourney, and I still have to put together a text and the gospel itself. It would be great if I could get my homepage up before doing this, but a link to this here blog, with some project background might serve just as well (and I’ll do a writeup for the portfolio later on).
The impetus for this is just a shitpost Insta I did a while back, but since that post got very little traction I’m thinking either using Reddit (maybe /r/cults?) or some rando Discord server. It’s all about finding other people who find this kind of stuff fun, and from my informal polling among classmates, not many people share my sense of humour.
Tracts are today tied to Christian evangelism, particularly in the USA, and even here in Sweden I’ve found Chick-tracts on subways and whatnot. But my point isn’t to make fun of religious evangelism, but to confuse recipients and allow participants to get some fresh air and entertainment. It’s not elaborate enough to be design fiction, so maybe it’s a cargo-culting event – a light social prank? Anywho, let’s see how it’ll all come together, and let’s be open for unexpected results.
]]>We just finished watching the first season of His dark materials – a great show based on a great adventure book – and I was struck of how the look reminded me of the moods created by some of the Midjourney prompts. And this feels new. The newness isn’t that an AI generated something in the style of a particular artist – the lawsuits for infringement have just begun – but that many scenes looked like part of the “prompt space.” My thought wasn’t that “ah, this looks like this artist/director,” but “ah, this looks like that bunch of stuff I’ve seen on Midjourney.”
This is unfair since HDM came our before Midjourney was a thing, but we’ll get more and more of this, and it will force artists not only to find something which is outside of the AI:s wheelhouse, but it will also force artists to work in secrecy to preempt trends. Imagine that you’re a director for a movie where you have a modicum of visual ambition, and you’d like to woo your audience with your cinematics. You might want to keep photos of your set & costumes a secret as long as possible, so that your superfans don’t swamp the net with AI generated fan-art. Otherwise, once your movie comes out, the look will feel old and overdone.
Of course, if you’re not relying on original visuals, this will play into part of your marketing instead; You can hold competitions for imagined scenes, most sexy action poses, or whatever. Regardless, there’s a whole new world of creative and business practices knocking on many doors, and they’re not knocking politely.
]]>There’s a hypothesis of the Cortical homunculus – that our brains map motor control and sensory input in different proportion to their size. In practice it means that your hands, one of our primary exploratory tools, have an outsized “mental space” in your brain. Along with parts of your face, genitals and feet, they are considered “primary interface”.
Perhaps this might have something to do with my dislike of the sensation of uncut fingernails. It’s not an æsthetic consideration, but rather a persistant feeling of my fingers being tight or constricted, where my nails start to grow into the lateral nail fold. It drives me bonkers and I find myself clicking my nails or otherwise fidgeting once a minute – even if I remind myself that I can’t do anything about it at the moment. It’s instinctual, and it makes me uncomfortable.
This seems tied to whether I’m sick, since I’m more aware of it if I have a flu or such. When you’re sick you can get hot, a bit swollen or more sensitive in general, and whatever slight pressure you’re feeling is increased – for example from your growing nails against your skin.
This also means that one of the best ways of feeling better is to cut your nails.
And this is where the cult comes in: Every religion, health fad or cult needs a few gimmicks. You can put a jade egg up your snatch, you can pray four times a day or you can avoid beans. In my case, I would make an edict that nails had to be trimmed. I already have a clergy class and/or profet class in the wings – those with anonychia, congenital or otherwise. We can work in cermonies and punishments related to nails, force heretics to smoke clippings, decorate them for coming-of-age ceremonies, etc. I can actually see people handing out pamphlets for this. I’m just lacking a name.
Pythagoras the vegetarian did not only abstain from meat, he didn’t eat beans either. This was because he believed that humans and beans were spawned from the same source, and he conducted a scientific experiment to prove it. He buried a quantity of beans in mud, let them remain there for a few weeks, and then retrieved them. He noted their resemblance to human fetuses, thus convincing himself of the intimate relationship between beans and humans. To eat a bean would therefore be akin to eating human flesh. Equally, to crush, smash, or dirty a bean would be to harm a human. Thus the very strict rule to abstain from beans.
Bruce Pennington: The death of Pythagoras
As long as you can convince others either by the strength of your own conviction, association to good outcomes or just plain placebo, you can get people on board all kinds of philosphical vehicles.
So hear ye, hear ye! For the nails of thine hands, and the nails of thine feet are the yellowing stiffened discharge of your otherwise Godly body. Lo! Cut them from you and cast them away – and let the healing power infuse you with calm!
]]>With that, let’s setup the headings and categories, and let’s see where I end up!
Ed. Michael E. Porter, James E. Heppelmann: HBR 10 must reads on AI, Analytics and the New Machine Age. It’s wise to follow Chomskys advice to read the business press to find out what is really going on in the world, and this anthology of ten pieces is an interesting example of this. I’m reading this while considering a change in career, and looking at AI as one possible field to get into. Seeing the topic from the business perspective is helpful in thinking through my decision. Also, the essays are short, written as they are for busy folk with little time for fluff.
Johan Fyrk: Svartjobbsfabriken. Based on a series of articles in the union magazine Byggnadsarbetaren, chronicling how organized crime is behind exploitation of foreign workers in Sweden, cooking the books and using illegal labour in both large governmental building projects, as well as projects for well-off Swedes looking to save on costs. Disturbing facts and interesting read, albeit not very surprising: Those who have, want more, and they don’t care how they get it, etc.
Michael Ely: Centauri dawn. A novelization based on one of the better Sid Meier games, Alpha Centauri. In the novel, just as in the game, seven fractions colonize a new planet, and their priorities bring conflicts to a head. Surprisingly fun read, and I do enjoy the worldbuilding that goes into computer games – I can create my own headcanon for each playthrough.
Blake Crouch: Recursion. A great story about love, regret and time travel. Nicely written and an exiting story which leans on the people rather than the technology. The first third of the book is confusing in a good way, you don’t really understand what is happening but it’s compelling enough that you keep going. Well done!
Tim Maughan: Infinite Detail. A polemic against FAANG and capitalism in the shape of a post-catastrophy world where a young girl helps grieving people reconnect with their dead friends and relatives. Convincing setting and partially a call-to-arms against the technoutopianism we’re surrounded by.
Seth Dickinson: The Traitor Baru Cormorant. A young girl is plucked from her family by an expanding hegemony, taught their ways and customs, and put to work administering another province. She seeks vengeance for her ravaged homeland and plotting ensues. Well written and occasionally brutal – what and whom do we betray to reach our goals, and how does it change us?
Blake Crouch: Dark Matter. A man is kidnapped by an unknown assailant, drugged and showed into a box. He wakes up in a parallel universe which is similar to his own, and now has to manage his own sanity as well as a multiworld world. Interesting twist on a familiar story.
Arkady Martine: A desolation called place. A sequel to A Memory Called Empire and not as good but still good enough. The world building is great, but the characters have a bit too much plot armor and the empire is oddly lax in discipline for being an interstellar hegemony.
Jonathan Courthey: The Workshopper Playbook. A short read where the author (and CEO of AJ&Smart) gives a hypothetical example of a short workshop, as well as evangelizing the job of meeting facilitation – or workshopping. Clear and easy to follow, and inspires me to taking down notes on workshop exercises.
Ryan Holiday: Ego is the enemy. A modern take on the necessity of being honest and humble – a self-help book for the ambitious startup founder. It would benefit being cut by 80%, forcing stringent arguments instead of relying on cherry-picked anecdotes as filler, but there’s a kernel of usefulness in it all: our egos often become limiting factors of our fulfillment, and poison the wells of ambition and self-awareness.
N.K.Jamesin: Emergency Skin. A short story about a future human from a space colony going to Earth to bring back necessary cell samples. It’s a fun read in the context of how we exalt successful tech billionaires and the reductionist dog-eat-dog worldview.
Isabell fall: I sexually identify as an Apache helicopter. A short story about how sexual identity can be weaponised. Good read and an interesting premise (reminds me of a scifi story where people bonded with cats as battle-pilots, forgot where I read that one) which drew much attention due to the perceived mocking of trans-folks in the title (apache-helicopter is a shitpost meme-gender). The publisher removed the story and it later reappeared under a different title, and the author – herself a non-out MTF trans person writing under a pen-name – decided to stay in the closet due to the negative attention and attacks on her person…
Erika Hall: Just enough research. Part of my voluntary reading for the UX-design course I’m taking. Well written and to the point. I read the first edition, but ordered the updated second edition in order to do a closer read once I’m further along the studies.
John Lanchester: The Wall. In a bleak future there is the Wall and Defenders guarding the Wall against the Others, who will try to get from the sea over the Wall. Should that happen, the Defenders who failed to stop them will themselves be put to sea. A short novel about a late-anthropocene Britain where we follow one Defender as he does his tour of duty on the Wall. Bleak and well written (and very poignant in Sweden where the racist shitheals nationalist Swedish Democrats just became the second largest party in the country)
Don Norman: The desing of everyday things (2nd edition). A classic in the field of design and often referenced in other books I’m reading while studying. Some of the parts seem a bit speculative – as if the author is more concerned with the symmetry of his graphs than the arguments they present – but that might just be my ignorance showing. I’ve taken a bunch of notes, and will have to reread it once I’m further along my studies.
Harvard Business Review: The Year in Tech, 2022. The HBR antologies are useful primers on issues, and it’s especially useful in a meta way: If you’re working with reasonably ambitious managers, chances are that they try to stay ahead of trends, and they might have read the HBR guides to do so. And now so have you. So even if the topics aren’t that revolutionary, they provide a buisiness perspective on them, and might tell of things to come. The essay by Maëlle Gavet on the end of the Silicon Valley gold rush, as well as LeBron L. Bartons being Black in tech, are both worth a read on their own.
Abby Covert: How to make sense of any mess. Not so much a book as a thicker pamphlet with a step by step suggestions for how to navigate uncertain research and design situations – or any situation which requires you to make decisions – with practical lists and charts. I’m gonna copy some of the stuff onto a Miro board or something, cause I think they have a “tips från coachen” quality to them.
Peter Hollins: Mental Models. A short and useful book on different thinking patterns – mental models if you will – and how to apply them. I took notes and will try to use them more rigurously. The 30-70% rule is interesting, where you act when you have at least 30% of required information, but no more than 70%. Seems handy, let’s see if it’s actually useful! This whole mental models thing is interesting when I try to map what I’m already doing after many years of trial and error, and what I’m still struggling with.
Sara Wachter-Boettcher & Eric A. Meyer: Design for real life. Another A List Apart publication, this time about inclusive design. It’s well timed since we’re reading about doing user journeys and testing at school right now, and their suggestion to “design for crisis” is both practical and reasonable. Good read, can recommend!
Paul Tremblay: The Cabin at the End of the World. It wasn’t until I wanted to write this up that I saw that this book is more recent than the movie The Cabin in the Woods – the underlying themes are alike, and with such similar names, I had assumed that the book had inspired the movie. Which it didn’t, it seems. Anywho, the book is a short tense story of four people showing up by a cabin in the middle of nowhere, forcing the family which is renting the place to make a terrible choice, or face even more terrible consequences. It’s unsettling and tense.
Sam Ladner: Practical Ethnography. A great primer for ethnographers who are moving into the private sector. It’s full of hand-on suggestions for academics who might be fearful of what they will have to compromise when they move into the commercial arena. What’s interesting for my purposes though – since I’m not an academic – is that Ladner pairs down the ethnographical practice into what is useful for me as a UX Researcher with little regard for academic rigor. Well written as well, which is a boon!
Adam Wathan & Steve Schoger: Refactoring UI. If feel a bit silly to add this book to the reading list since it’s more of an illustrated guide to a very prescriptive design rule-set, but whatever. It’s short, to the point, and crystal clear – I think I’ll have great use of this once we start prototyping and doing UI:s at school this spring.
Tyler Hamilton: The secret race. A candid tell-it-all from a world class cyclist who doped for a bunch of years before he got caught. He was on the same team as Lance Armstrong, so he has plenty to say about Lance and his steadfast denials (until the Oprah interview in 2013), but there’s plenty of damning information on just about everyone in the cycling world. Fascinating read – I was unaware of how much goes into racing, especially the big tours, and with the complication of evading doping controls it makes for a worthwhile listen.
William Gibson: Neuromancer. Reading these as a teenager I was fascinated with the world Gibson painted, with more gobbledygook than you can shake a Tessier-Ashpool AI-Core Rastafarian Hitachi cyberdeck at. The story itself is a mess, and I’d forgotten that they end up in space – which feels like a dismantling of golden age scifi romanticism – but this book presaged and created so much of what now are cyberpunk tropes, that the mess is forgiven.
William Gibson: Count Zero. Seven years after Neuromancer, it’s one book told through three storylines which merge toward the end – a disposition which Gibson would keep to in most later books – and tells a tight story of AI’s and Voodoo gods in cyberspace, and the people entangled in their scheming. One story has a discgraced art dealer trying to find the creator of some fascinating art pieces, and it’s always difficult to describe something sublime only through the reaction of the character – she’s moved by the haunting beauty of the object – and my acceptance of the characters motivation can only go so far.
Samantha Downing: My lovely wife. Suspense novel about a serial killing married couple, told in first person by the husband. I’m not sure if the narrator is ment to be dumb or if the writing is poor, but imagine if Homer Simpson was Dexter. I’ve seen it recommended because the twist was supposed to be great, but I gave up halfway and checked out the twist on wikipedia, and it was as stupid as the characters.
Blake Crouch: Pines. Too poor writing to motivate me past the first few chapters.
Herman Melville: Moby Dick. It’s just to laborious to read. I’m an hour into this and really don’t care enough about Ishmael to continue – 200 years ago people were still romanticizing a frontier that no longer existed, increasing their appreciation of this book, perhaps? Nevertheless, it feels nice to cross a classic off my list – I’m done with Moby Dick in this lifetime, and it’s an odd feeling.
James Clear: Atomic Habits. The book came recommended from a friend when we were discussing ambition and goal-setting, but I gave up after thirty pages. The metaphors and anectodes are poorly strung together and counterarguments are strawmanned. I’d recommend the Bullet Journal by Ryder Carrol instead, which in passing makes better arguments concerning productivity than Atomic Habits.
Devora Zack: Networking for people who hate networking. It’s a book presenting itself as a “field guide for introverts” which would be super useful for me as I’m trying to get into a new field, but more than halfway through it still hasn’t offered more than assurances that “it’s ok to be an introvert” and self deprecating jokes. The dichotomy intro/extrovert is an alluring one, but it’s not useful enough to spin out to a book, apparently…
Samanta Schweblin: Little eyes. People buy robotic companions – Kentukis – which are linked up with random human operators, and the link is a one-time activation; if the operator loses interest, the Kentuki becomes useless. People across the world become fascinated by the experience and reach out for the limited but real human interaction it offers. Really unconvincing world building and flat characters – after a tense first chapter it all dissolves into random nonsensical vignettes.
]]>Ok, that’s not totally true. When I came down with Covid last year, I had a terrible cough and the only lozenges we had at home contained honey. I allowed myself to have three of those, but not without quite a lot of thought. And I once bought a pair of jeans with a leather patch on, but asked the store to remove it first – which Sara rightly brings up occasionally to mock me.
Obviously, over the years I’ve inadvertenly eaten animals in some form or another – restaurants fuck up orders, a friend offers something promising that it’s vegan, I misread a lable, etc – but I haven’t done so on purpose. Sometimes, I haven’t enquired as dilligently as a fifth level vegan would – if you’re pouring me red wine I’m not googling what kind of clarification was used, for example. But I’ve gone hungry when there’s nothing else to eat, and the issue of animal rights and not causing suffering serves as a daily guide when I go about my human buisiness.
Which takes us back to todays lunch expedition: I live a vegan life because I find it to be a practical solution – a mental model – of one aspect to a moral life. I believe that causing suffering is a bad thing, and since animals experience suffering (to a varying degree) we shouldn’t exploit them, and going full-vegan is the easiest shortshand for achieving this. Easy enough: If you believe we ought to minimize suffering, but you’re not some kind of vegan – you’re either consciously immoral, haven’t thought through the issue, or you’re an idiot.
But since oysters and mussels don’t seem to experience suffering, eating them doesn’t fall under the purview of a utalitarian argument. So to challange myself, or perhaps because it felt so transgressive, I decided to eat them. After all, if I want to make a convincing argument for a particular moral approach, I should be stringent in my application of it, no?
So we went to Luckans fisk & skaldjur in Majorna and had them prepair three different oysters for me, which I ate in the order they proposed. The last one had a very pronounced iron taste, but all three reminded me of canned mushrooms in brine. I ate them mostly without condiments to get a feel for their taste, so I’ll give them another chance when they’re prepared differently. According to wikipedia, oysters were a popular working class food 200 years ago, which is difficult to reconcile with how expensive they are now.
We continued on to Hasselsons where we had steamed mussels with chips and (vegan) mayo. This was more palatable – easier when the food is warm and served with dill and mayo – but the mussels were less slimy and less challenging to eat. It was tasty and I can see myself making steamed mussels or perhaps a spaghetti Vongole at home.
I feel a different person this evening than I was when I woke up, but I’m not sure what has changed. The feeling of transgression is strong – I can understand the point of those who would abstain all animal-based food because it’s either a simpler argument to make, or a more practical way of living – but I can’t point to what my transgression consists of. Perhaps it’s just that habits die hard.
For all intents and purposes I’ll still present myself as a vegan. Even though it’s technically no longer true, I don’t feel that my values have changed. And saying “vegan” is just so much handier than saying “I won’t consume anything which has caused an unacceptable amount of suffering, please refer to this pamphlet for more information.” But I can understand that others might have other opinions on the matter, and breaking moral rules is never without consequences.
]]>The transcranial magnetic stimulation treatment currently approved by the Food and Drug Administration requires six weeks of once-daily sessions. Only about half of patients who undergo the treatment improve, and only about a third experience remission from depression.
Stanford Medicin: Experimental depression treatment is nearly 80% effective in controlled study
So by pulsing magnetic fields through that fatty blob you carry around in your head, you can potentially remedy the debilitating depression you’ve had your whole life. How is that for a discovery? It just feels so random – like percussive engineering. Then again, there’s plenty of research and DIY folks doing tDCS which uses current rather than fields – but it just feels so blackboxy. The subreddit tDCS is full of hopeful folks doing self-experimentation should you be into that.
All of this leads to something kind of strange. I’ve talked to other people about it, and a few bartenders have even brought it up to me. After a while, you start to develop a contempt for your customers, even the ones you like. It’s a tough thing, helping people make the same mistakes over and over again. I don’t juggle bottles for pretty people. I get working stiffs, many of them very lonely, very drunk.
Datasecretslox.com: Ask a bartender a question
Many in the healthcare sector came to the same conclusion. Even before Bill C-7 was enacted, reports of abuse were rife. A man with a neurodegenerative disease testified to Parliament that nurses and a medical ethicist at a hospital tried to coerce him into killing himself by threatening to bankrupt him with extra costs or by kicking him out of the hospital, and by withholding water from him for 20 days. Virtually every disability rights group in the country opposed the new law.
Spectator: Why is Canada Euthanising the poor?
Yeah, so as much as I’m in favour of the right to die, it should go without saying that every avenue of support should be offered to the person considering it. This is some dystopian shit right here, and even though the history of senicide and mercy killings isn’t anything new, this is truly a THX1138 take on it.
Our AI:s are being taught on the corpus of tagged images, and the world being what it is it’s impossible to completely avoid biad – and for many it’s even expected. Do a search for “two men” in any image search engine, and you’re likely to find caucasian middle aged men, and the problem of representation carries over into AI generators. It doesn’t stop the generators from being useful – you can just refine your prompts or nudge the image selection along whatever path you’re interested in – but the default bias is there, and it’s damaging since it cements what we ought to consider “the norm”.
Within this universe, characters can experience “omegapause,” a menopause-like end to their fertility, and “rut leave,” a personal leave from work or school to go off and fulfill their insatiable desire to mate. Some fics will include “heat suppressants,” birth control-like medications that prevent characters from experiencing the need to mate or emanating a scent. Again, it’s a lot.
Morgan Sung: What the hell is the Omegaverse, and why is it all over TikTok?
The kids do the darnest things, are all right, are species-fluid furry-adjecents with rape-fetisch.
Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, the social critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complex technological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange for compliance. He called it a “bribe.” […] What is good for the growth of the technological system is presented as also being good for the individual, and as proof of this, here is something new and shiny. […] For a bribe to be accepted it needs to promise something truly enticing, and Mumford, in his essay “Authoritarian and Democratic Technics,” acknowledged that “the bargain we are being asked to ratify takes the form of a magnificent bribe.” The danger, however, was that “once one opts for the system no further choice remains.”
Real life mag, Zachary Loeb: The Magnificent BribeI hadn’t heard of Mumford previously, and the themes that Loeb presents in his Real Life Mag (RIP 2022) essay are fascinating. There’s a convergence between the arguments presented and the Adam Curtis Hypernormality: human agency has receeded in favour of the an ever-more inhuman capitalist system – in Mumfords work embodied in the megamachine – and we can’t reason our way out of it.
This is the kind of stuff which is playing at the back of my mind when I’m reading about the design world. The hypernormality which Curtis speaks about is alive and well online – but instead of being manifested in a Soviet society, it’s the stories we tell ourselves on our Linkedin or Instagram feeds. The story being this: My opinion of the world matters, your opinion matters, and we are all the skippers of our ship of destiny.
I reached out to Zachary Loeb and he recommended two other essays on Mumford that he wrote (as well as the suggestion that I start with Mumfords Art and Technics as being the more accessible book):
In the twenty-first century, after the digital turn, it is easy to find examples of entities that fit the bill of the megamachine. It may, in fact, be easier to do this today than it was during Mumford’s lifetime. For one no longer needs to engage in speculative thinking to find examples of technologies that ensure that “no action” goes unnoticed. The handful of massive tech conglomerates that dominate the digital world today—companies like Google, Facebook, and Amazon—seem almost scarily apt manifestations of the megamachine. […] And as these companies compete for data they work to ensure that nothing is missed by their “relentless eye[s].” Furthermore, though these companies may be technology firms they are like the classic megamachines insofar as they bring together the “political and economic, military, bureaucratic and royal.” Granted, today’s “royal” are not those who have inherited their thrones but those who owe their thrones to the tech empires at the heads of which they sit. […] And yet, Google, Facebook, and Amazon are not the megamachine, but rather examples of megatechnics; the megamachine is the broader system of which all of those companies are merely parts.
b2o, Zachary Loeb: From Megatechnic Bribe to Megatechnic Blackmail: Mumford’s ‘Megamachine’ After the Digital Turn
And all of this comes back to me studying UX. Because what much of the UX Design is focused on is making (digital) systems easier to use.
]]>The geeky version of crystal healing might be the nootropic stack – mixes of different pills and powders you take to effect cognition & memory. I’m enthusiastic about it since at least in theory there ought to be a bunch of chemicals which can pass the blood-brain barrier and make us more interesting. One established family of chemicals are the Racetams, which some people swear by – so I ordered a sample from Nootropics Depot and have chewed my way through the bottles.
In general, I can sympathise with people who don’t want to take any drugs or medication – be it painkillers or antidepressants or cognitive enhancers – but unless you’re actively feeling worse for taking the stuff, I see little harm in it (on an individual level). I’ve been on and off antidepressants for a bunch of years, and right now I’m on a new (for me) SNRI and can spend my energy on being creative and productive rather than awfully sad, which is a nice change of pace.
Of course, there’s the whole messed up situation we’re in now where doctors are prescribing massive amounts of antidepressants just to keep people functioning enough to keep the economy going, which might be political reason enough to avoid the stuff (similar arguments can be made for vaccines, opiates, blood pressure meds, etc), but on an individual level, if you feel better for taking something, why the hell not. Some notes on Ricetams below.
Day 1: 20mg – Transient headache
Day 2: 40mg – No noticeable effect
Day 3: 60mg – same as above
Day 4: 60mg – same as above
Day 5: 60mg – same as above
Day 1: 750mg – Depressed mood
Day 2: 1.5g – No noticeable effect
2 day break
Day 3: 2.25g – No noticeable effect
Day 4: 3g – same as above
Day 5: 3.75g – same as above
Day 1: 20mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 40mg – Maybe better mood?
1 day break
Day 3: 80mg – Mood still improved. Slightly better long term recall?
Day 4: 120mg – same as above
Day 5: 60mg – same as above
Day 1: 300mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 900mg – Maybe a bit more focused?
5 day break
Day 3: 900mg – Noticeably more focused and calm
Day 4: 1.2g – same as above
1 day break
Day 5: 1.5g – slightly more focused
Day 1: 750mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 1.5g – No noticeable effect
3 day break
Day 3: 1.5g – No noticeable effect
1 day break
Day 4: 1.5g – Maybe a bit more focused? (Didn’t sleep much, groggy morning)
Day 5: 2.25g – No noticeable effect
3 day break
Day 6: 3g – No noticeable effect
Day 1: 100mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 200mg – No noticeable effect
Day 3: 300mg – Sligthly manic / frantic? Might have been too much caffeine
5 day break
Day 4: 200mg – Elevated focus and drive
Day 5: 100mg – Elevated focus
Day 1: 30mg – No noticeable effect
Day 2: 30mg – same as above
Day 3: 60mg – same as above
7 day break
Day 4: 60mg – same as above
Day 5: 90mg – same as above
So, Pramiracetam and Phenylpiracetam might be worth experimenting with a bit more. Unfortunately, Nootropics Depot seems to have discontinued the stuff, so I’ll have to look elsewhere. Also, when I was trying the Ricetams I wasn’t on SNRI’s, and I don’t know how those might interact.
But I’ve been having a blast! It’s so much fun just sitting and prompting and poking and playing around – it’s a fantastic toy and whoever markets a fast upscale + printing service targeting this is going ot make a mint.
The technology & scene is changing at a breakneck pace, and hanging out in the MidJourney Discord is great, as is the Unstable Diffusion Discord with it’s abundance of digital horror erotica monstrosities being prompted into existence.
So I’m writing this post just to mark a moment in time. There are so many clever things being written about the latest wave of AI that just keeping up feels like a full time job – but Jon Stokes primer below is a good start.
What if I told you that every configuration of bits that can possibly exist — every abstract concept or idea, every work of art, every piece of music, everything we can put into a digital file for display or playback on a computer or in a VR headset — is already out there on the number line and that the act of turning any given chunk of information into a readable file involves first locating that thing in the eternal, pre-existing space of numbers and then reversing enough local entropy to give that number a physical form?
Jon Stokes: AI Content Generation, Part 1: Machine Learning Basics
The span of what these models can create is breathtaking – there’s literally no visual expression that they haven’t encountered. As per Jons article, all the images are already out there. Which is equally true of all pencil drawings being encased in every pencil lead, each marble statue in each block, etc, but never have the potential forms been so accessible. Indeed: Expecto Patronum JarJar Wang!
]]>People receiving meals from prisons, schools, and charities have little control over the ingredients they eat, and low-income individuals are the most likely to be recipients of these meals., In effect, government treats the poor and captive populations as wastebaskets for its excess cheese.
Brown Political Review, Allison Arnold: Let them eat cheese
As the comments on the piece point out, as well as the original mefi thread where I found the article, the author seems to bang a bit hard on the we’re-poisoning-minorities-with-lactose drum. But the image of bunkers full of cheese and cheese-adjacent products, and the political decisions leading up to the situation, is fascinating.
Beneath the good that CCHR has inarguably done, there is plenty of harm. Positioning themselves as reasonable skeptics who are just asking questions, their ulterior motive is to sow seeds of doubt about the whole concept of psychology. Not that the Church of Scientology has a sterling reputation for helping members who are suffering from mental illness itself.
The Baffler, Jess McAllen: The anti-antidepressant syndicate
Scientology is a perenniall boogyman – not without reason mind – and disentangling legitimate critique of mental health practices from the self serving agenda of that cult isn’t easy. McAllen has put together an interesting piece on the subject, and I imagine of the saying “the enemy of my enemy is my friend” which here could be addended with “unless they’re Scientologists cause that makes me look like a nutter as well”.
These gifs come from Giphy, which has been integrated with Instagram for years. They’re lo-res, imperfect, and entirely decontextualized. These disembodied ghosts—ancient in computer years—blink back at me because tech companies know that, based on my age, I like them. And I do like them. I miss where they came from—it’s a place I’ve found is no longer there. […] Still, the visual remnants of vaporwave have long outlasted its radical ideological underpinnings. Almost immediately, its pastel, geometric, softcore aesthetics were gobbled up by media platforms, in particular the image-driven platforms Tumblr and Instagram. The pastiche compositions of Arizona Iced Tea cans and old Windows desktops were very quickly made available on all these commercial interfaces, which were not only feeding on a countercultural art movement—they were likewise consuming the ghosts of an internet they had long since murdered.
The Baffler, Kate Wangler: 404 page not found
I’ve felt the nostalgia of what Internet was supposed to be, and what it partially was, and Kate captures the feeling well. I dislike the online world that we have today and wish someone would strike an unknown underground well which would burst forth with new possibilities to connect, to create and to feel at home. The genre of waporwave had completely passed me by, but it’s late retro futurism is alluring. (As a side-note, Wangler mentions the Consumer Aesthetics Research Institite in that article, and their are.na site is a fantastic resource of design language.)
algorithmic radicalization is presumably a simpler problem to solve than the fact that there are people who deliberately seek out vile content. “These are the three stories—echo chambers, foreign influence campaigns, and radicalizing recommendation algorithms—but, when you look at the literature, they’ve all been overstated.” He thought that these findings were crucial for us to assimilate, if only to help us understand that our problems may lie beyond technocratic tinkering.
The Atlantic, Gideon Lewis-Kraus: How Harmful Is Social Media?
We can’t blame technology alone for the ills of society, and the algos might not be the sole culprit of the curent societal malaise.
The failure of the Peruvian anchovy catch in 1972 led to a significant decline in the availability of high-protein feedstocks and increased demand for soybean meal. As a result, soybean prices soared in 1973 and 1974.
USDA: Agricultural Commodity Price Spikes in the 1970s and 1990s: Valuable Lessons for Today
An overview of two historical price hikes in world agro markets, it’s a fascinating insight into how huge the trade systems are, and how dependent we still are on the good graces of our planet to support us.
]]>With that in mind, I’m trying to read up on some UX literature and listen to a bunch of podcasts, and will try to keep a tally here on the blog – if for no other reason than to have something to look back on and fondly recall my naïveté. I’ll be adding to the list below until I post something new that pushes this post down.
One of the podcasts I stumbled across was the now defunct Product Breakfast Club Jake and Jonathan, which was run by the author of Sprint, and the CEO of AJ&Smart, a design/workshop company in Berlin. The podcasts are chatty and not particularly informative per se, but they do provide a feeling for the ambiance of how design folks might talk, which feels useful somehow. Book recommendations abound, and even though many of them are of the American self-help variety, I’m trying to set my prejudice aside and read them with an open mind.
Jonathan Courtney of AJ&Smart has also been evangelizing Workshopping as a next stepping stone for people doing design/research work, and he’s published a book called “The Workshopper Playbook” – a short read where he gives an example of a hypothetical workshop. It’s fun to imagine that facilitators and workshoppers have their own little secret book of exercise recipes, ready to pull out the perfect workshop for a “3 hour workshop for automotive investors in North Africa” or somesuch.
Whenever I’ve tried to do right by web standards, or understand some nuance of code or semantics, I’ve ended up on A list apart – a blog which looks and reads great – and they’re also publishing a bunch of books. One of them is Just Enough Research by Erika Hall, and I just finished it. It’s a pragmatic breakdown of the reasearch part of design work, and it’s a great primer for someone who’s just starting out. Like I. We’re actually doing research & survey stuff right now at school, so this is very timely. Easy to read, well explained, good stuff. (Hall also works at Mule Design, and their blog is worth a read)
]]>I’m typing this in the stillness between the stabs of acute lumbago. Most likely it’s a delayed bill for overdoing it at the gym a week ago, and in combination with a cold the past week has been so-so; I’m fearful of sneezing because it throws my back out and is really painful.
Summer is in full swing with 35°C – scorching heatwave by Swedish standards – and I’m in front of a screen, gently flexing my spine and sweating. Sara is on a road trip to Malmö with Tura so my plan was to catch up on some work. Which is somewhat hampered by having to take a break every half hour to do stretching exercises or just lie down for a bit. Whine whine, whinge whinge.
In a weeks time I’m going back to work for a short spell, and then I’m on leave for two years to go to school! It’s a vocational course in UX design, and my hope is to find a new line of work where I can combine my analytical and pedagogical skills.
I’m looking forwards to focusing full time on studies and finding my own space within the field. Most of all I’m looking forwards to reevaluating what I actually enjoy doing. I have 40-odd years left before I expire, and I’d like firmer steerage of the sloop of my destiny, instead of drifting along the shores of placability.
]]>It’s that time of year again. Birds shake pollen from trees, young men rev their cars by the waterfront, and I change the blog theme for no apparent reason. Or, supposedly, the reason being that my old theme relied on plugins which weren’t compliant with php8, but whatevs, here we are and I’m running a modified Twenty Fifteen. I tried making it ugly-fun, but maybe it’s just ugly, time will tell.
Speaking of ugly, I’m also finally redoing my homepage at monocultured.com, which has been living in a decrepit Koken CMS for years without updates. I’ve written about this before, and I’ve spent too much time just trying to decide between a simple html/css system, a static site builder, a minimal CMS, or another WordPress install. Like, I’ve literally spent at least a hundred hours trying different solutions out without being happy with any.
I thought I’d found a friend in Automad CMS but it was slow as molassess. This could be due to my cheap shared hosting, but after five minutes of looking into migrating to a dedicated server I luckily saw the procrastination for what it was and abandoned the task. I almost bit the bulled and got a cargo.site but I don’t want recurring fees. the mmm.page which I used for the WITP project isn’t responsive and creates a bit too much bloat to be used for a whole site, so that’s out.
So fuck it, I’m just relearning html/css for the n:th time and am making an ugly-fun site all of my own, and I’m doing it live. What will take the most time – as it should – is deciding what to include and doing the writeup for each project/set. We’ll see, but since I’m hoping to take unpaid leave from work soon, I’m going to need a portfolio site of some sort. (Also, I still have pozar.se for a more proper contact surface)
One headache for the site development is hosting video. I’ve used Vimeo previously, but can’t motivate the cost any longer, and migrating my stuff to Youtube is depressive as all hell – I’d rather not feed content to Google if I can avoid it – so once I get the website up and running I might as well copy/paste some javascript as well. Who knows, maybe I’ll learn something!
]]>In the tv series Lost, Jack gives a pep talk to a frightened survivor along the lines of “I allow myself to feel panic and fear for three breaths, and then I do what needs to be done” – and that is all well and fine, but you need to somehow know what needs to be done. And if you believe that there’s a risk of end-of-the-world nuclear all-out fuckupery, it’s difficult to know what you ought to do.
To mitigate my anxiety I’m trying to read up on international releations, and I thought the 2015 lecture by John Mearsheimer was a clearly presented case of how “offensive realism” has played out in the Ukraine example:
My argument is: When security considerations are at stake. When core strategic interests are at stake, and there’s no question, ladies and gentlemen, in Russia’s case this is a core strategic interest. Countries will suffer enormously before they throw their hands up. So you can inflict a lot of pain on the Russians and they’re not going to quit. And they’re not going to quit because Ukraine matters to them. And by the way, Ukraine doesn’t matter to us. You understand there is nobody calling for us to fight in Ukraine. Even John McCain, who up until recently has never seen a war he didn’t want to fight, is not calling for using military force in Ukraine. What even John McCain is saying is Ukraine is not a vital strategic interest for the West.
RealClear Politics, John Mearsheimer: Why is Ukrain the West’s fault
What’s compelling about his analysis is that the ideologies of the actors are secondary to security considerations. Countries are basically single cell organisms looking to expand their resource base as much as possible, acting aggressively to defend real or perceived threats. For those of us playing computer games it’s the most rudimentary behaviour of AI opponents in a 4X game: if you’re closing in on our borders I will perceive it as a threat, and if you don’t repell my encroachment of your borders I will see it as a weakness to exploit.
It’s also a very depressing view of how human society functions. Then again, perhaps we won’t be functioning that much longer:
]]>There is no denying that China is a rising superpower confronting the U.S. Reporting a study of Harvard’s Belfer Center of International Affairs, Graham Allison argued further that the so-called Thucydides Trap is likely to lead to a U.S.-China war. That cannot happen. U.S.-China war means simply: game over. There are critical global issues on which the U.S. and China must cooperate. They will either work together, or collapse together, bringing the world down with them.
Noam Chomsky: US Push to “Reign Supreme” Stokes the Ukraine Conflict
The post is started January 2021. It’s the last week of the Trump presidency, Sweden is hitting record mortality to Covid-19 and I’m working from home most of the time. Here are the books I’ve read, listened to or abandoned in 2021, as well as a comment or two.
Michael Lewis: Flash boys. It’s a hard sell evoking sympathy for Wall Street, but Lewis does his best when he’s writing about the plucky team behind a new stock exchange [IEX] which is trying to combat predatory skullduggery perpetrated by banks, brokers and especially high frequency traders. I’ve read about HFT and flash crashes before, but just had no idea of all the different ways brokers had found to fuck each other – and everyone else – out of billions of dollars. The book is well written, but I could have done without the personal portraits – there are only so many ways you can come up with non-negative ways of “moneygrubber,” and I really don’t care for descriptions which call leaving a $600k job for a $200k job “brave.”
Steve Burns, Nicolas Darvas: How I made $2000000 in the Stock Market. I’ve come across Darvas Box as a technical analysis tool for doing swing trading, so thought I’d read his book. The book was originally published 1960 and is worth reading – he’s candid about his shortcomings and the pitfalls of arrogance, and the descriptions of how he worries and overinterprets markets is genuinly fun to read. This edition has comments by Burns at the end of each chapter where he restates what Darvas has written – it seems more of a cheap moneygrab rather than adding anything of value to the original.
Paolo Bacigalupi & Tobias Buckell: The Tangled Lands. In a world where magic use has the unwanted side effect of creating a bramble which chokes everything else, and on top of it has nettles which cause a eternal cinderella sleep, we get four intertwined stories of ordinary people dealing with extraordinary circumstances. The parallell between the magic/bramble and civilization/anthropocene is a bit on the nose sometimes, but it’s a well written book and worth reading – just like about everything by Bacigalupi I’ve read (Water knives, Windup girl, Pump 6).
Oyinkan Braithwaite: My Sister, the Serial Killer. A short novel about a two sisters; one a conscientious nurse who can’t do good enough in her mothers eyes, the other a beautiful aloof narcissist who is most likely a serial killer of men who fall for her. Well written and the frustrations of the good daughter Korede are never written for laughs, even if the story is morbidly humouros.
Frederik Pohl: The Gateway Trip. A colletion of vignettes from the Heechee universe, recommended by way of a thread I started in ask.metafilter. I think I’ve read this before, but Pohl has clever enough ideas that he’s worth a revisit. I like reading a story which is just a bit more clever than I am – that way I’m surprised, but can still see the reasoning. It’s a good fit.
Paolo Bacigalupi: Tool of War. A YA version of the world presented in Windup Girl. People and animals are genetically modified and created for the purposes of global corporations and fiefdoms. The creations are conditioned to total obedience and loyalty, but through an experiment-gone-wrong scenario the chickens come home to roost, etc. A romp but some nice world building.
Sayaka Murata: Convenience Store Woman. A fantastic short story about a woman trying to fit in between social expectations and her own free will. Great read, not a word wasted.
Sarah Pinsker: We Are Satellites. In a near future where there’s pressure on kids and adults alike to get a brain implant which allows functional multitasking, a few holdouts suspect that all is not as it should be. Nothing wrong with the premise, but the ideas are thin on the ground and there’s enough for a ten page story, not a novel. (the colophon mentions that some chapters have been published as short stories) There’s a parallell between the anti-implant folks in the book and our current anti-wax movement, and reading them as the good guys is an interesting take.
Jan Chipchase: Hidden in Plain Sight. A guide/handbook for how to analyse your surroundings when doing design research. I heard an interview with Chipchase on the podcast On Margin and his job and life seems enviable – not that I would be able to do what he does, but the way he describes being so aware of his surroundings, travelling the world trying to understand people, sound fantastic. It’s like a career in targeted mindfulness or something. I’m going to reread this book in a years time or so; it’s a very practical book and I’d need to have something practical to apply it to.
Jo Walton: The Just City. The Greek pantheon is real, and Pallas Athene gathers people from different moments in time – our past, present and future – to enact Platons ideal city – the just city. We follow the recruitment and/or kidnapping of the people who will become the masters, as well as the first children of the city, and the story is told from multiple perspectives. I haven’t read Platos Republic, nor many of the other references the book makes, but it’s Walton doesn’t let the references get in the way of telling the story. The novel peters out after a while, and ends with a literal godly intervention – but it’s still worth a read.
Brandon Sanderson: The Mistborn Trilogy. A coming-of-age rags-to-riches story about Vin, a gutter-kid who is found to have rare powers, gets involved in overthrowing the government and discovers Power of Friendship along the way. The main idea of some people being able to use metals to temporarily gain superpowers is interesting, but not enough to carry the story which has to drip-feed epistolary exposition to keep going.
Adrian Tchaikovsky: Children of Ruin. Followup on the interesting Children of Time, but this time it’s squids evolving instead of spiders. Still an interesting story, and interspecies communication is interesting and well done.
Mike Monteiro: Ruined by Design. “It is difficult to get a man to understand something when his salary depends upon his not understanding it” is a quote from Upton Sinclair which appears multiple times in this collection of essays on the role end responsibility of designers. The author is pounding his morally indignant chest a bit too hard at times, but there are valid points made mixed in with the hyperbole and repetitions. The blurbs present it as a contemporary version of Victor Papaneks books, but it doesn’t hold a candle to Papaneks clarity of though – although perhaps the sense of urgency.
James S.A. Corey: Leviathan Falls. The ninth and concluding book in the Expanse series. I had looked forward to see how they would wrap up the Chtuluisch corner they’d written themselves into, and the result is a serviceable book which sees the main characters play out the consequences of their personalities.
Louise Penny: Still Life. The first in a long series of detective novels, and came highly recommended by Sara. Not much of a whodunnit, but the jumping between perspectives – going from third person to second person omniscient in the same paragraph – is interesting. It’s either a good technique for showing the mulitplicity of social life, or used to gloss over where the writing falters, but regardless I can imagine picking the series up again.
Arkady Martine: A mamory called empire. Mehit, a new ambassador to the galaxy spanning empire Teixcalaan, is immediately embroiled in court intrigue while trying to solve the murder or her predecessor (with a mind-copy of him implanted in her own brain). A story about indetifying with your conqueror, and finding your own place as an other.
Kameron Hurley: The Light Brigade. As many reviews point out, the book is a revisiting of Heinleins Starship Troopers as many of the arguments made in the original appear here – albeit handled differently and with more nuance. Well paced story but occasionally hard to follow – time travel makes it tough to keep track of characters, and I had a hard time understanding why protagonist Dietz cared for some people more than others; their names just hadn’t registered. Fun all around thought!
Max Brooks: Devolution. It’s a zombie book by a zombie author but instead of zombies it’s Bigfoot. An epistoraly novel with few likable characters, even fewer interesting ones, and some sort of point being made about humans getting their comeuppance? Written as if for a movie, boring as all hell. Listened to it mostly to practice slow jog on the threadmill without having to be paced by music.
Andy Weir: Project Hail Mary. Following on his success with The Martian, here’s an even more engineery story about a clever guy solving stuff in space. It reads like a science teachers attempt at making physics interesting, and I’m only barely interested in the story – the stakes are high but I don’t really care. Some interesting ideas, but otherwise meh. Well produced solution with an alien who speaks in tones though – the audiobook format really lends itself to that kind of stuff.
C.J. Box – The Disappeared. Murder, corruption, an old lady who’s a concentration camp survivor witnesses a murder? Abandoned 20 pages in.
Peter F. Hamilton: Salvation. There are only so many grizzled Russians talking to musclebound mexican mercenaries in the company of a dandy Scot I can take. Abandoned the audiobook an hour or two in.
]]>Back in 2016 I set out to start a biohacking lab in Gothenburg. I had read about biohacking for a couple of years, seen the interesting stuff that labs such as Genspace in Brooklyn were doing, and wanted to take part.
Biohacking as a term means different things to different people:
The field of biohacking – if it’s coherent enough to be called that – is wide, and the lowest common denominator is that those involved are predominantly amateurs interested in biological systems of some sort. They might be specialists in other fields (data informatics lends itself to synthetic biology, hardware hacking to DIY medicine, etc) but they come to biohacking with agendas and interests different from a professional lab technician or university researcher.
This goes doubly for me: I’m not specialized in any field applicable to biohacking, and I most certainly don’t have any experience with lab work apart from dissecting a frog in seventh grade. But I do have a broad knowledge of all kinds of stuff, an unyielding fascination with how the world works, and experience with setting up a maker space and learning stuff as I go along. I figured that even though I wasn’t knowledgeable enough to do original research or design, I would be able to cobble together from what others had done, well enough that it would be worth the effort.
I scoured the net for similar groups in Sweden and/or Gothenburg, and reached out on mailing-lists and Facebooks and whatnots to see if there was interest, and over a course of a few months I had a newsletter, a homepage, and a couple of recurring faces at meetings. We founded Laborator, a non-profit association with a charter registered with Skatteverket, and – most importantly – I drew a logo and printed a bunch of calling cards. After six months we had five members and ten times as many on lists and in groups.
(Our meetings were open to anyone, which also attracted some interesting individuals with their own peculiar takes on what we ought to do and a tenuous grasp on social etiquette or reality)
The other members were all biologists of one stripe or another. We had a post-doc, a researcher, a synth-bio dropout and an undergrad. I was the only one without any formal training, and I thought the combination would be great – we’d complement each other and create an open platform for biohacking: The main goal of the association was to get a permanent lab going, equipped to run small workshops and lectures.
Around this time I’d attended the first biohacking conference in Sweden (writeup here), participated in a workshop at Bionyfiken in Stockholm (at the time the only lab in Sweden, since defunct) and started collecting consumables and equipment. I’d also started to build some equipment required for basic experiments (mainly thermocyclers for PCR and gel-plating for barcoding) – and I got in touch with labs around the world to see what they did to get off the ground, hoping to build on their experience, and compiled it all in a communal document. I interviewed the Bionyfiken folks as well as a few artists who work with BioArt, with the ambition to create a podcast which would serve as a platform for Laborator outreach (those recordings are still unrealeased).
Summer of 2017 we talked about doing a first workshop in the fall. It felt as make-or-break time; there are only so many meetings you can have before you run out of steam, and we needed to do something public which would give us a concrete goal as well as garner public interest (and potential investment or grants). We didn’t have a lab of our own, but if we could borrow and equip a space, we’d be able to run some simple workshops. After some discussion we decided that we’d do a simple DNA-barcoding workshop, identifying the fish in sushi (the idea taken from high-school students who’d done exactly this back in 2008 – although they outsourced the labwork) – as it checked most boxes: it’s relatively simple and cheap to do; it shows the applicability of biohacking; it concerns food, which people have strong opinions about; finally, should we discover mislabeled fish we’d have instant media attention.
But then we hit a bunch of stumbling blocks, as one does. Someone got a new job, someone moved – one planning meeting was cancelled and then another, and pretty soon the energy had drained out of the enterprise. As long as there’s a critical mass of people on a project it can survive a few dips. But if the project becomes a metaphorical empty room, stepping inside and sitting down at the table requires a lot of will and energy – it’s easier to turn at the threshold and move on to a more interesting discussion down the hall.
As project instigator, the responsibility and the outcome is all on me. I focused too much on minutiae and side projects, at the expense of keeping the group pulling towards a common goal. In my mind, the lab was already a given and I was eager to move on to the next stage of the project. And so we became spread thin and lost focus. Any communal project is a marathon rather than a sprint: It’s important to be able to step back and trust your collaborators to follow the plans you’ve agreed upon, but when stuff falls through you need to be there to pick up the slack – and plans always shift, since life happens – regardless if it’s you or someone else who dropped the ball.
I managed to inspire a bunch of folks to get together to start a lab. Even though we had different ideas, everyone was willing to pitch in to make a permanent physical lab a reality. The IT-infrastructure (Slack/homepage/mailing list) as well as coordination with other labs made it all feel as a serious and “real” organisation. We quickly pivoted to organizing a workshop and had clear goals both in the short and medium term, and there was interest and enthusiasm both from members and mailing lists / groups.
What I underestimated was the amount of energy it takes to keep everything going and to motivate people. I abandoned the motivational part too early because I assumed that we all had the same drive, so I stepped back into “process support” before there were processes in place. The big picture of the project was important – thinking about lab space, financing, marketing, collaborations – but at the start all my energy should have been on getting a public workshop or two off the ground, letting the team feel proud of the accomplishment, and build upon that.
Today I would have begun by organizing a workshop or lecture myself, rather than creating an organisation first. This would have limited me to events which I actually could’ve pull off, and it might not have been more than a lecture on “state of DIY biohacking” or “biohacking and the law” or some such – but it could have attracted more people and also gauged the level of public interest. This would also allow a future organisation to be shaped by the events and participants, rather than fiat by charter, as well as provided the motivation for an organisation to be created.
Before writing this up, I looked through the blog to see what I’ve published previously. The topic of biohacking has loomed large in my mind for a while, so I was surprised by the dearth of posts (I might have missed some, my tagging isn’t consistent). The first time I posted on the topic here was in 2009, with just a link-dump: Pasting is the new writing. DNA wants to be free! (some of the links have rotted since). There’s some loose thoughts and a link-dump in 2016 – Biohacking and the things humans do – the 2016 biohack conference linked above, and finally just a brief mention in 2017 when things were petering out.
]]>The last couple of months I’ve been reconsidering what I’m doing with my life. One concrete evidence of my confusion is that I have too many tabs open in my browsers and compulsively download too many books – I do this in lieu of actually reading or acting on the stuff, and then I berate myself when I fail to do so. It’s my old mental companion “knowing about what I could do is the same as actually doing it” – which means that as soon as I get an idea, it feels “done” and I move on to the next thing. On top of this, I’m lacking compatriots to do stuff with; I don’t have a network of people who seem interested in what I’m interested in, which adds to me desperately striking out into the void of the Internet to find something to attach myself to.
This is of course completely unproductive and sure-fire way of burning myself out. You don’t get full by reading a recipe book, you actually need to assemble the ingredients and cook and eat the food. I don’t know why I’m falling into this trap again and again, but I do.
The bikeshedding is real though. As an example, I just now spent half an hour learning how to change the look and colour of my zsh terminal prompt because the default look annoyed me when I tried downloading the Hugo theme “Creative portfolio” to try it out as the main page of monocultured.com. It’s a nested doll of procrastination, since I’m uncertain what I ought to put on the homepage to begin with, let alone what kind of homepage I want, etc. Why on earth do I feel that I need a portfolio homepage when I’m doing very little freelance or artistic work, other than for my own amusement?
Depressed people do need human company. For some reason, human company helps. In fact, it is the single thing that helps the most. But not the kind of company a sad person needs. What a depressed person needs is simply to talk to people, not about their problems or their negative thoughts or their depression, but about anything else – music, animals, science.
Noah Smith: A few thoughts on depression
Anywho. One of the avenues of changing shit up that I’m thinking about is going back to school and getting a doctorate. And then I remember all the complaints my academic friends make about being overworked, under-funded and forced to publish, and realise that perhaps I’m not cut out for that millieu.
The sad result is that, as a community, we have developed a collective blind-spot around a depressing reality: even at top conferences, the median published paper contains no truth or insight. Any attempts to highlight or remedy the situation are met with harsh resistance from those who benefit from the current state of affairs. The devil himself could not have designed a better impediment to humanity’s progression.
Jacob Buckman: Please commit more blatant academic fraud
This speaks to the weird incentives that appear whenever there’s a scarcity of resources, and even just my experiences as a guest tutor at Chalmers arkitektur & UMA gave me enough insight into the backstabbing skullduggery required for academic success that it scared me off. I know my limits, and I’m not Machiavellian enough to succeed in highly competetive settings.
But perhaps I should study something which might play to my strengths, instead of my ambitions? Design research seems to be an interesting field where you can actually make a living while doing stuff on the border of journalism and academia.
But even if I find something which seems like a good idea – let’s say that I get it into my head that Cultural Geography is a fine thing to study and master – I’ll need to keep at it, lest I again get distracted by my distracted stupid brain. Observe how good people are at fooling themselves into thinking a goal is achieved by using something else as a proxy:
I know it’s meaningless, but I see those rings every time I lift my wrist and it’s dagger to heart to see them incomplete. Most of the time it’s easy to fill them, but when I’m on a four hour train, there are fewer opportunities to stand. So here’s what I do: at one minute before the hour, I stand up for two minutes so I get “standing” credit for both hours. I can then sit easy for another 118 minutes before rousing myself once more.
Buttondown.com, Adrian: If You Can’t Win, Cheat
In the post above Adrian lists non-obvious activities as “gamification”, and in my case I’d list “downloading massive amounts of books” and “keeping track of the latest memes” as at least tangentially related – both allow me to demonstrate (superficial) knowledge, or appearance of knowledge, to my friends and family, accruing kudos and cementing my position on some demented “keeping-up-with-shit” scoreboard.
Life should contain novelty – experiences you haven’t encountered before, preferably teaching you something you didn’t already know. If there isn’t a sufficient supply of novelty (relative to the speed at which you generalize), you’ll get bored.
Lesswrong.org, Eliezer Yudkowsky: 31 Laws of Fun
I think the above listicle is supposed to be applied to games – or challenges for characters more broadly – but to me it reads in parts as an outline of a philosophy for an enjoyable life.
The pandemic made me realize that I do not care about working anymore. The software I build is useless. Time flies real fast and I have to focus on my passions (which are not monetizable). Unfortunately, I require shelter, calories and hobby materials. Thus the need for some kind of job.
Hacker News, lmueongoqx: What tech job would let me get away with the least real work possible?
Contrary to what I expected on a US-centric highly competetive venture capital message board, many of the comments on the post above were sympathetic to the poster. I don’t think I’m qualified enough to find a job and lifestyle which would allow me to have this approach – at heart, I still feel poor even though I’m not, really – but the clarity with which the poster pursues an answer is inspiring. A similar thought struck me the other day as we started to rewatch the 2013 series Hannibal: The reason why the titular character is so impressive is in part because he’s so clear on his objectives (reprehensible as they are) and acts controlled and rationallly to achieve them. I’m sure there are better role-models than cannibalistic serial killers, but still. Let’s consider Raos writing on The Loser as a category to aspire to:
]]>The Losers like to feel good about their lives. They are the happiness seekers, rather than will-to-power players, and enter and exit reactively, in response to the meta-Darwinian trends in the economy. But they have no more loyalty to the firm than the Sociopaths. They do have a loyalty to individual people, and a commitment to finding fulfillment through work when they can, and coasting when they cannot. […]They mortgage their lives away, and hope to die before their money runs out. The good news is that Losers have two ways out, which we’ll get to later: turning Sociopath or turning into bare-minimum performers. The Losers destined for cluelessness do not have a choice.
Venkatesh Rao: The Gervais Principle, Or The Office According to “The Office”
Thanks to Ana Betancour and Carl-Johan Vesterlund I got to participate in a roundtable at the Venice Biennale, through the Korean Pavilion & Future School. The topic for our roundtable group was An Atlas of Global and Local Imaginaries and our common denominator was different kinds of mapping, mostly geared towards socially responsible architecture and planning.
The discussion was streamed to the pavilion in Venice – we had initially talked about doing it live on site, but, well, Corona – and it was curious to see the pictures afterwards of my remote face talking at people. Of course, I would have loved to participate in person, but the benefit of sitting in front of a camera at home is that I’m more relaxed when I’m not blinded by stage lights or can hear people shuffling in their seats.
I presented my ongoing project What is this place / This is the place and the others were kind with their comments. The project is a mapping of a site in Gothenburg, and it’s at times like these that my proclivity towards obscure knowledge shines, and it was interesting to hear the others take on it – especially since they’re all practicing architects. I might be on to something with WITP/TITP and wonder how else to present the project in addition to the project page at mmm.page/monocultured.
]]>Asher, however, is not part of a typical influencer collective. He is one of many members of a 29-person “system,” all of whom share a single body, brain, and life. Each person, or “alter,” in the system is a distinct form of consciousness. This group of identities live together in the body of a 31-year-old man diagnosed with dissociative identity disorder (DID), previously known as multiple personality disorder. The A System’s account — by far the biggest in the DID TikTok community — has amassed 1.1 million followers since February 2021.
Input: Inside TikTok’s booming dissociative identity disorder community
There’s a character in Doom Patrol with 64 personas / alters – Jane – and although her experience is partially supernational, the origins of her alters are in respons to trauma, which is the popular understanding of the phenomena. But is this something which instead might be cultivated or implanted, and how would that work socially? How would your family react if “you” decided to branch off an alter just for dealing with familial relations, along parameters that “you” have some initial control over – more caring, less truculent, prouder? The book A Memory called Empire touches on this, with lineages of implanted personas who inhabit sequential persons, providing knowledge and experience, but also forcing “the main” to come to terms with the voices in her head.
Over time, groups that drank together would have cohered and flourished, dominating smaller groups—much like the ones that prayed together. Moments of slightly buzzed creativity and subsequent innovation might have given them further advantage still. In the end, the theory goes, the drunk tribes beat the sober ones.But this rosy story about how alcohol made more friendships and advanced civilization comes with two enormous asterisks: All of that was before the advent of liquor, and before humans started regularly drinking alone.
The Atlantic, Kate Julian: America Has a Drinking Problem
As a teenager alcohol was not so much a door of perception as a a second story window you had to climb through to act in forbitten ways, but as an adult it’s clear that for many it’s the only legal way to selfmedicate out of a depression – SSRI:s and the like notwithstanding. I’m not sure what the movie Druk / Another Round was trying to make about alcohol – it’s about four middle-aged men who experiment with being constantly buzzed to bring joy back into their lives – but getting stuck with addiction or bad habits because you’ve confused the means to happiness with happiness itself is a real thing; be it laziness or full blown substance abuse.
I was surprised to learn that Neville hadn’t attempted to interview Argento for the film. The lead-up to Bourdain’s suicide, he explained, is “like narrative quicksand. People think they want to know more, but you tell them one thing more, and they want to know ten more.
The New Yorker, Helen Rosner: A Haunting New Documentary About Anthony Bourdain
I only vaguely know of Bourdain as a darling media figure, but I didn’t know that he became famous at the same age that I’m at right now. Somehow famous people show up fully formed in my field of view, and I don’t reflect on where they came from or who they are beyond their public persona. I guess I’ll have to watch the documentary now.
This is a shorter summary of the Fun Theory Sequence with all the background theory left out – just the compressed advice to the would-be author or futurist who wishes to imagine a world where people might actually want to live: […] People should get smarter at a rate sufficient to integrate their old experiences, but not so much smarter so fast that they can’t integrate their new intelligence. Being smarter means you get bored faster, but you can also tackle new challenges you couldn’t understand before.
Lesswrong.org, Eliezer Yudkowsky: 31 Ways of fun
I guess this is a list of questions you might ask yourself if you’re imagining the future – you’re writing a book say, or world building a computer game – but I found the questions existentially useful as well: how important is this point to me and what should I do to reach it? At the time of writing this, I’m fundamentally uncertain of where I’m heading in life, and questions such as these help me meditate on what I want vs what I think I ought to want.
Robert Lowell once said that if humans had access to a button that would kill us instantly and painlessly, we would all press it sooner or later. If there were a switch to flip—“some little switch in the arm”—we would inevitably flip it. At a moment of weakness or a moment of strength, depending on your understanding of the act, we would all make the decision to die, if it were convenient enough.
Harpers, Will Stephenson: The Undiscovered Country
The state of research on the topic of suicide, 2021. From Swedish machines which can predict if you’re going to kill yourself, to the problem with reductionist analysis. My therapist was of the opinion that suicidal idolation was always a negative, while for me it’s been a constant companion – mind, those two suggestions don’t contradict each other – but recurring thoughts of suicide just feels like a social faux pas; like mentioning an infected boil at dinner table. The latter might actually be more constructive since your dinner guests can suggest a topical cream, but what the hell can they do about the former except expressing concern?
Our sessions on the topic reminded me of the awkward monkey meme.
Foreman and her colleagues at the American Association of Suicidology look forward to seeing the dialogue expand around suicide memes, however inelegantly. “I’ve never known a single problem that got better by not talking about it,” Foreman says. “Not a single public-health problem has gotten better by reducing conversation.”
The Atlantic, Elizabeth Anne Brown: Suicide Memes Might Actually Be Therapeutic
They were ‘always happy’, he says. And what did their happiness consist in? An endless round of feasting, drinking, hunting and love-making. Who would not sicken of such an existence after a few weeks? […] The inability of mankind to imagine happiness except in the form of relief, either from effort or pain, presents Socialists with a serious problem.
George Orwell: Why socialists don’t believe in fun
And here we’re back to what “31 laws of fun” touches upon – A Utopia, or a good place isn’t static. It’s not a set of stuff or things or events – it might be about relationships between persons, allowing an unending combination of ambitions and passions to be expressed with a minimal framework safeguarding “personal rights” – but regardless, it’s more difficult to point out what is good than what is bad. Avoiding bad stuff isn’t happiness but relief, or Utopia would be a place where bad things constantly happen just so that you then can mitigate them. Then again – that’s one of the 31 laws listed above: present challenges difficult enough that solving them feels rewarding.
]]>Although capitalism could provide us with used laptops for decades to come, the strategy outlined above should be considered a hack, not an economical model. It’s a way to deal with or escape from an economic system that tries to force you and me to consume as much as possible. It’s an attempt to break that system, but it’s not a solution in itself. We need another economical model, in which we build all laptops like pre-2011 Thinkpads.
Low Tech Magazine, Kris de Decker: How and why I stopped buying new laptops
And although I’m just now writing a post about using my tech until it breaks or really can’t fulfill a necessary function, I just now opened up a new tab to see if I ought to buy a new tablet. Even though I already own a Sony tablet which works. Granted, it’s slow, and I’d like to get something which allows me to use a pressure sensitive stylus – but still, I’ll mostly use it for reading PDF:s so I can actually live with the shortcomings and there’s no reasonable reason for me to look at new ones right now, only unreasonable reasons and procrastination.
To my surprise, a young western couple was sitting on the edge of the roof with their legs dangling. I told them it was unsafe because a sniper could pick them off and they also brought attention to Kirk and me. The two ignored us and kept swinging their legs. In the hazy distance, I could see dozens of tanks and support vehicles, but the scene was too far away even for a 400mm lens.
Jeff Widener: Tank man
The back story of the most iconic photograph from the Tianamen square massacre is sobering, but also an inspiring take on what technology allows us to do. Much of what was dangerous to Widener when he took the photo and delivered it to AP and then the world, is today a non-issue (assuming that you have a working cellphone with Internet connection); but at the same time we are nowhere near the same level of control of our technology as he was then, as determined state and private actors can intercept everything digital that you do. (How the NSO group enables state terror) Also, there’s just something impressive with people who know their shit – I mean, I can’t set camera exposure by eye, so am impressed that he did.
]]>Yesterday, after weeks and months of waiting, I finally got my chance to get vaccinated against Covid-19. One of the side effects unfortunately turned out to be blistered feet, who would have though! Mind, the blisters were most likely caused by me being late and having to run a couple of kilometers in slippery sneakers, but still!
Today I have a sore arm and a light headache with photophobia – much like the first stages of a cold. Sara had similar symptoms, and if I follow her trajectory I’ll be fine in a day or so. But today I’m spending in bed, catching up on reading.
I came down with Corona a couple of months ago, and it left me really ill for two weeks. I’ve been in worse pain before – nothing matches the agony of a proper stomach bug – but never as prolonged as this. My O2 levels never dipped below 90% but my fever was spiking terribly – at one point I got to 39.5°C and then dropped to 35.5°C in less than an hour, a whirlwind tour of cold sweat and violent shivering, an interesting albeit freightening experience. My breathing was laboured and I got winded just by standing up, not to mention the general fatigue, racking cough and all the other small miseries. Even after the acute symptoms subsided, my lungs felt broken for months afterwards – as if covered in sticky goop – and my sense of smell is still weak and limited in range (the other day I sniffed turpentine – nothing).
I’ll rather suffer any side effects of the vaccine than risk that again, and given that most people seem to tolerate it well I take comfort in the statistics and use this occasion to stay in bed, reading and closing down some of the 150+ browser tabs that I’ve been promising myself I’ll get to shortly…
]]>This could be regulated by government oversight – which is fraught with it’s own problems – or perhaps internationally traded like a carbon credit, with exponential cost increase per user once you reach a limit. I’m sure there are existing systems and ideas out there which could be used, and the deliniation is tricky: Should email be included in such a limit, to curb gmail? How about the iPhone with the iOS / icloud walled garden – is that garden a “social media space” in itself, and should Apple be forced to open up their phone for other app stores, or should there be a limit on phone market share per territory?
There’s an ongoing discussion about the human / ecological costs of large scale farming practices and factory farming – zoonotic diseases, single point-of-failure monocultured crops – so the analogy to societal ills maybe is useful here: If we’re all a bunch of cloned sheeple, reared for our wool and meat by Facefarm, we’re more vulnerable to a coordinated campaign which will give us political worms. The way forward isn’t then to replace one giant farm with another, but rather encourage small farms to flourish by regulating/outlawing the large ones. You’d have to keep a watchful eye on efforts to subvert this – large holders maskerading as small actors – but it will always be the case the people will try to work around either the letter or the spirit of the law.
I was listening to The Vox discussion with Steven Feldstein, author of The Rise of Digital Repression, and the topic was to what extent social media is a net boon or bane for liberal societies, looking at the examples of how Duterte used Facebook to come to power in the Phillipines, Trump in the US etc. Not having read the book I’m uncertain if I share the participants optimism that social media in the end will prove to be a net good – the argument being that with an an accelerated and more all encompassing Internet it will become too difficult for repressive regimes to find a balance between giving people access to communication and restricting the sedicious activity. (I imagine a hand on a throttle, constantly trying to keep the train of technological progress within a narrow band of acceleration.)
But as it’s presented in the podcast, the argument seems a bit naive and the conclusion not at all obvious: People and companies seldom have qualms about making money off of immoral activities, often by equating legality with morality – “if it’s immoral, make it illegal.” There no necessary connection between democratic ideals and social media companies – Apple blocking apps used in Hong Kong demos come to mind – and there’s no mechanism which automatically leads the companies down a democratic path; as the successful dictatorial capitalism of China (and the bustle of Western companies to establish a foothold) should prove.
The argument for a laissez-faire approach to software and social media is that by allowing unfettered access to the public, services are created which then battle it out in the marketplace, and once a platform reaches a critical mass of users the network effect comes into play and their success is self-fulfilling; You are on Instagram because everyone is on Instagram. For the company, what follows is a re-evaluation of what your business model is, and since the only thing you can sell is your audience it’s only natural that what you are developing is ways to package and sell your audience in as many ways possible. You’re not in the business to offer your users new functions – that’s just part of your costs – you are in the business of selling your members to your customers, who can be advertisers, politicians or governments (repressive or otherwise). As long as the social media space is unregulated, this will alway be the outcome because it will always be more profiteable to make more money than making less money, and if you’re making the most money, you win.
So I’m thinking about how the damage could be limited, without curbing the possibilty of actual innovation and making a living off of online social stuff. How about setting a hard limit on how big services are allowed to become, while at the same time enforcing interoperability to allow people to move their data? We can look at the history of how monopolies were broken up (when governments still cared about that) but the point of breaking up companies here would not be because they’re stifling innovation or (unavoidably) use unfair tacticts to keep competitors down, but that they’re bad for societies and bad for people. We don’t want to replace a hegemonic system with another, we don’t want them to appear in the first place.
My assumption is that social media, and in extension any free online services, are overall detrimental to society the more users they have. I’m unsure where to draw the line of which services should be included, and I certainly don’t have any pat suggestions for how to regulate them, but it seems a better approach to have a discussion on “what in society is worth preserving and promoting, and how would a framework look that regulates companies based on that?” rather than “Lets ask Facebook to be nicer”.
]]>Unemployed and making $300 per month on Twitch, she could no longer afford her apartment. But just before Miko was forced to pack it in, she had a breakthrough: Viewers, she discovered after three months of slow progress, would happily pay to murder her.
Kotaku, Nathan Grayson: CodeMiko Is The Future Of Streaming, Unless Twitch Bans Her First
It’s fitting that the post title is a Gibson quote: My first memory – outside of comics and such – of someone doing a real-time video conferencing face replacement is from Johnny Mnemonic. Perhaps peak “even distribution” was reached by cat lawyer and we’re not as easily impressed anymore, but the article shows that you can’t automate talent and how much work is required to get by if you want to innovate.
He wasn’t prepared to name what the experience pointed to: that he had been visited by my sister’s ghost. Like other secular North Americans, he is aware that we must uphold a certain paradigm and say “this cannot be.” After all, Doug considers himself a rationalist: the son of an engineer, himself an amateur astronomer. Nevertheless, the sensed presence mattered deeply to him. “It was,” he said, “a remarkable, indelible experience.”
The Walrus, Patricia Pearson: Why do we see dead people?
I’m very much of the “this cannot be” persuasion, but there’s something to be said of accepting your experiences as meaningful even if they’re not “real” in a measured sense. I’m not sure if I can mention any examples that I myself follow, but I wish that I’d be more open-minded and see what the consequences of an experience are, rather than get stuck on a notion of “this is imaginary.” This comes up when I and Sara discuss supernaturan stuff, since she’s much more open to those notions than I – I’m fine with not knowing why something is happening, while Sara is closer to taking something as read, so it ends up as a stalemate if all we’re concerned with what something is, rather than what it can mean or how it effects us.
It’s a lovely thought, but the problem is that if a fact checker had a go at this book and removed all the howlers, there would be absolutely nothing left. As I said in the beginning, Wolfe’s goal in this book was to smash one or two of our intellectual icons, and an icon did end up smashed to pieces. The problem is that Wolfe is that icon.
3:AM Magazine, E.J Spode: Tom Wolfe’s Reflections on Language
Spodes review of Wolfe’s book The Kingdom of speech is a fantastic breakdown of an apparently poorly researched critique of Chomsky’s theory of language. It’s rejuvenating to read a text where the reviewer actually has put time into tracking down faults and fact checking statements, not taking them on authority.
The review also struck a chord with me more intimately: Occasionally when I write about things or discuss them with my friends, I have a tendency to view the discussion as a posturing more than an exchange of ideas. There are always ways of talking within a group which has more to do with positioning yourself socially and reinforcing a communal behaviour or belief than with anything else – and that is fine and good and how discourse works – but when there’s too much of that, when banter is not just the mortar but also the bricks and beams and windows of our metaphorical communal house, it makes for a crappy house.
Or to put it another way: I get tired of myself when I realise that I’m talking shit, and have to remind myself to stop.
]]>I’m trying to map it from as many different perspectives as possible – as an art project, since I don’t have the qualifications to call it cultural geography – and I threw up a project site here: mmm.page/monocultured. So far I’ve done some drone video with Hendrik Zeitler and some tracing / photography work at the site. It’s fun, but the project keeps branching and now I’m looking into getting police heli footage and orienteering maps of ths site. I’m not sure where it’ll end up, but right now I’m just collecting materials. As always, my work veers towards a book of some sort, but this time around I’m actually tempted to do an exhibition. I made a timelapse of this site a couple of years ago, and whenever I’m up here I keep thinking of how to make the place justice
As a side note I can really recommend mmm.page as a DIY pagebuilder – I haven’t had this much fun doing a homepage for years. Compared to the pained existence of the portfolio part of this domain – monocultured.com – the mmm pages take seconds to update and the playful process is so far removed from doing UX sketches and flowcharts as can be. Great fun!
]]>I used some free time this evening to wash all the windows in our apartment, and I once again cursed our shitty squeegees – twice a year we complain that we have to get a proper one – while soaping the glass and doing my best not to fall out. We only have six medium windows, and what with clearing the plants and stuff off the sills it took maybe two hours.
So imagine this: I’ve walked around the house with a bucket and stuff, cleaned the windows – one pair I did twice because the streaks bothered me – and once I’m done, I’ve put everything away, and I’ve put all the plants back on the sills, and literally the last thing I put back on the sill in our bedroom is a spray bottle we use for soaping the plants when they get bugs, and I put it back so hard that I spray soapy water on the window, where it starts to dribble, leaving streaks.
I actually laughed out loud. Isn’t that just the funniest thing?
]]>There’s a post on a UFO book where the reviewer discusses the uses of belief in the paranormal, cryptids & conspiracies.
By treating the iconography of the weird as an equal-opportunity bin of elements to be combined with postmodern abandon, the artist of the weird rebels against what passes for expertise in cryptid and UFO research. What results is a collage that cheerfully announces the meaninglessness of its subject. Sontag’s response to Greenberg was that he missed the fact that, well, kitsch can be fun, especially when rendered as camp. True enough, but we should nonetheless be careful: all bumper stickers purport to offer equivalent truth claims.
Benjamin Aldes Wurgaft: Why look at flying saucers
In the end, the camp eats itself and is presented as non-camp. At some point you’ll start to actually enjoy italy-disco, the initial irony forgotten. It doesn’t take more than to read the comments to the above post.
It’s like a Darwinian fiction lab, where the best stories and the most engaging and satisfying misinterpretations rise to the top and are then elaborated upon for the next version. […] The theories that didn’t work, disappeared while others got up-voted. It’s ingenious. It’s AI with a group-think engine. The group, led by the puppet masters, decide what is the most entertaining and gripping explanation, and that is amplified. It’s a Slenderman board gone amok.
Reed Berkowitz: A Game Designer’s Analysis Of QAnon
The analysis of how Q is similar to an ARG, and the process by which ideas are generated and used/discarded rings true, and it makes a compelling case for why it’s easier to drive a conspiracy forward than dispelling it – the driving force is a stream which will simply flow around any objections you put in its way.
In the hours following the Arizona call, a paranoid conspiracy theory spread rapidly on Parler and in other right-wing online forums: Voters in conservative counties had been given felt-tip pens that supposedly made vote-counting machines reject the ballots that they marked for Trump. The following night, Trump supporters protesting what came to be called #SharpieGate gathered outside the Maricopa County ballot-counting facility in Phoenix. In a development previously unthinkable to liberals who have long dismissed Fox as state media for the Trump administration, the Arizona protesters began chanting, “Fox News sucks!”
Renée DiResta: Right-Wing Social Media Finalizes Its Divorce From Reality
The worlds fascination with the Trump government and US elections is odd. Granted, Trump is a walking insult to humanity and the intellectual trainwreck that is US politics has reached new lows, but I’m uncertain what the takeaway is. A warning of things to come? A sliding into authoritarianism or even fascist world politics? The balkanization of discourse?
The fallout of Wednesday’s events will continue to echo for months, perhaps years to come. For all their seeming partisan difference, the center-left and center-right of US politics have a shared response for dealing with the crisis: it is to demand a greater number of cops and the removal of the social media accounts of the worst perpetrators. But neither strategy is in the interests of the majority of Americans or in particular of the US left.
[…]
In the face of a growing far-right, these are going to be the issues that will dominate the next four years: whether to depend on the state and social media platforms to take on Trump’s supporters, or whether we as anti-fascists need to build our own strength.
David Renton: More cops, fewer platforms: the risky fallout of the Capitol riot
Back when I was living in London, collaborating on the periphery with Indymedia, there was a guy who’d made a name for himself by using his personal wealth to travel the world helping progressives/revolutionary orgs setting up online infrastructure. Back then most homepages were cobbled together by people in the movements – there was no social media beyond bulletin boards and such – but once we got smartphones, the mobile ecology lowered the threshold to connect and we got complacent: If I’m tossed from Facebook I’ll just sockpuppet myself back, no biggie. But what to do when most of your movement is banned? How do you get in touch with folks when your address book is full of nonexistent street names?
I’m more and more coming down in a tech negative camp, where I’m unsure if the past 15 years of Internet developement is a net good or not. Sean Carrol had Cory Doctorow on his podcast a while back, and while Doctorow is partial to purple hyperbole, he is knowledgeable and makes good points – the episode is worth listening to if you’re thinking about the world as envisioned by monopolistic tech and the rise of authoritarian states as functioning alternatives to democratic rule.
1. (THREAD) So, it seems like the deplatforming debate is once again kicking off, so I thought I would introduce some of the earlier work that was done in this area back when ISIS was buck wild on social media. What have we learned over the last six years might be useful today:
Amarnath Amarasingam Twitter thread
Amarasingams thread is a good resource on the discussion on deplatforming in general, with how it affected ISIS efforts. But deplatforming isn’t necessarily a good practice in itself, even if the effects in this case are good – it basically changes the progressive struggle to be one of wielding the Twitter TOS as a banhammer; but that hammer is only as useful as Twitter chooses to make it, and the step from banning extreme right-wing speech to extreme speech in general doesn’t seem very large nor difficult; just look at the chilling effect of Patriot Act on radical environmental groups which suddenly are bunched together.
Deplatforming might be a good thing, but for the wrong reasons: The act of being thrown out of polite society might radicalize you. From my point of view it might be good for creating more militant progressive movements; but that goes both ways and will radicalize fascists and religious nuts as well.
Getting suspended is also an important way for members of the Baqiya community to know that you are trustworthy, that you have paid your dues. “There was a time when everybody wanted to get suspended. Even I thought, ‘ah must be cool to get suspended and receive all that support from friends,’” Umm Hafida tells me. “When I got suspended, lots of people were saying, ‘welcome to the Baqiya family!’” She went on: “It is considered as a kind of shahada [martyrdom]. That’s why we say, my Twitter account just got shahada, Alhamdulillah! Suspensions show others that we are on the right path, and spreading the truth.”
Amarnath Amarasingam: What Twitter Really Means for Islamic State Supporters
It’s not the main point of the article, but in the quote above the Twitter TOS has become the arbitrer of what is fought against. “If Twitter banned me I must be right” as a substitution of “If voting changed anything it’d be illegal.”
]]>Facebook has shut down the accounts of one of the biggest left wing organisations in Britain, the Socialist Workers Party (SWP) (1). The Socialist Workers Party Facebook page – as well as account of local pages – have been removed from Facebook with no explanation given. Those targeted say it amounts to a silencing of political activists.
swp.org.uk press release | Hackernews discussion
Just like most other people I’ve done my best to keep my distance to others, wash my hands and refrain from licking doorknobs, but yesterday I got a positive PCR-test for Covid19 so I’ve officially lost the game. Like one of those “whoever keeps their hand on the car the longes wins it” competitions, I accidentally wiped my nose and was disqualified.
As for symptoms, it’s like a shitty flu so far. My body aches, I’m caughing and sneezing, I get winded easily – it’s shit. But O2 levels are Ok and my lips aren’t blue, so I just have to suck it up for a week or however long it’ll take. I’m hoping long-Covid will pass me by, but it’s scary to listen to TWIV and hearing how diverse and unpredicteable the consequences can be for some. Statistics are on my side, but I still occasionally buy a lottery ticket so that’s only partially comforting.
When I was hurting the most the other day, a comparison struck me: That feeling of all muscles aching, of all joints complaining, of laboured breathing and brainfog – it’s basically how I feel after I’ve done a couple heavy squat or deadlift sets: All wrung out, confused and achey. But to reach that level of exhaustion I need to try hard and here I am, getting the same feeling from a teensy-weensy virus.
It’s possible that others in my household have got it – so it’s throat swabs all around, and schedules thrown into dissarray. Should it prove that we all have it, assuming that we get through it alright, one upshot would be that we have a certain level of immunity and thereby lower risk of passing it on.
But more than the disease itself it’s the sensation of being contagious and dirty that’s different – I feel polluted in a way I don’t when I have a run-of-the-mill flu. We’ve been huddling at home, protective runes inscribed in alco-gel on hands and foreheads, but we forgot to burn the correct amount of sage or whatever and now it’s like everyone knows I’ve been deepthroating lepers.
]]>This here blog is the most active part of my online stuff. I occasionally buy domains thinking that I’ll use them for something awesome but I never get it off the ground. The reasons are as multitudinous as the faces of God in an oilspill, but there’s a regression of realisations each time: I have an idea, I need to draw the idea, I need to design the homepage of the idea, I need to code the site for the idea, I haven’t done any coding since before CSS hit puberty and the www has become frightening and I feel inadequate.
But I have a small project gearing up, and once again here I am. Looking at static site generators (Hugo, 11ty, Jekyll) on the one hand, and website builders on the other (Nicepage, Coffeecup, Sparkle) and I’m like that starving ass stuck between two haystacks. The SSG:s seem nice because they offer an analogue to what I remember of the web – fast code, no fluff, all content in a folder structure I can keep in my head – but my ageing brain doesn’t like Markup, and the smallest snag in the command line makes me sigh heavily. The website builders look nice, but me still remembers the bad old days of Frontpage and Dreamweaver and the resulting abominations which worked differently in different browsers; and of course I harbor a snobbish resentment towards anything WYSIWYG, because what part of my personality indicates I wouldn’t?
The upside of website designers is that I could focus on the actual design and get stuff done. Going the SSG route would force me to dip–the–tip into html/css/JS again and learn something new, perhaps giving me some ideas and useful skills. Haystack 1, haystack 2.
Currently, monocultured.com uses Koken which is a lightweight CMS for photography portfolios, but it hasn’t been updated in four years and I’ve had some trouble with image caching and slow loading – so instead of fondling the current site into shape I’m thinking of redoing it from scratch. Is that a stupid approach? Should I by now realise that the thought “this time I’ll get it right” is an excuse for bike-shedding?
Another step in my lets-get-started regression is that I don’t know where to find info on this kind of stuff. I can find occasional reviews or best-practice articles on Hacker News, or more in depth stuff on A list apart, but I’ve spent two–three hours searching for evaluations of site builders but all I find are posts & videos by annoying shits comparing features in order to earn affiliate kickbacks. I’m sure the information is out there somewhere, but it’s just become too darn difficult for me to find; Google has been SEO’d to shit and is unhelpful, and I don’t know where else to start. Reddit? Mefi?
]]>When I was a kid I was so sure of my literary merits that when I began writing a Stephen King style novel I started with the acknowledgement page. Then I gave up on the novel twenty pages in, because – obviously – I found out that writing can be a slog, requiring revisions and research and thought and knowledge that I only pretended to possess. With time I left messy piles of chewed sour grapes on the floor, and moved on to ambitions which were more directly rewarding.
With that preamble out of the way, hopefully properly presenting myself as a chastised adult with realistic expectations, etc etc, here’s a short announcement that I’ve signed up on a course of “creative writing” at Umeå University, and it’s bloody terrifying. I’ve become so used to being the teacher – or collegue – discussing the texts of others, that I’m really uncomfortable for putting my own writing – nay, the draft of my typing – on display for group discussion. This will be an interesting experience. We will be writing poetry, for goodness sake, and I can already hear the avoidance cogs of my mind shuffle into gear – “I’ll do a cut-up experiment” or “let’s paraphrase a famous poem” – anything but something which might bruise my fragile ego…
I have a clear goal with the powerlifting I’m doing. I’m hoping to deadlift 200kg at some point, and with the wind at my back and a nosebleed I might be able to do 155kg right now. But that’s Ok, I don’t have anything to prove to anyone else, I just want to reach that round number, and in the meantime I’m training (sometimes just exercising) because it feels good. But what are the criteria for succeeding with my writing? How do you weight 200kg in writing, and who will judge whether the lift was well executed?
]]>Sofia Åkerman: Zebraflickan. Autobiographical about Sofia who’s been suffering from eating disorders & depression, and her experience of Swedish psychiatric care. Harsch descriptions of suicide attempts and what’s going on in your head as you try hide the extent of your illness – puking in hidden containers and whatnot.
Wille Sundqvist & Bengt Gustafsson: Träsvarvning enligt skärmetoden. The book to get if you’re into turning wood. I’m still not sure what the main difference is between scrubbing and cutting – it seems to be difference of degree rather than principle – but the book has a lot of info on how to think when turning.
Hilary Mantel: The Mirror and the light. The last book in the Wolf Hall trilogy, and the language is just as vibrant and gripping as the previous books. Tells the bookend of Thomas Cromwells’ life, and I even though I know that parts of the story are fabricated — all of the internal monologue for a start — it paints a believable portrait.
Maria Ganci: Familjebaserad behandling. A brief introduction to family based theraphy targeting families where the kid has an eating disorder. Practical, but a bit lacking in inspiration beyond “talk to the therapist.”
Johanna Bäckström Lerneby: Familjen. A report on the Ali Khan family in Angered – big traditional family or criminal clan, take your pick. Fascinating read, especially since the story is evolving in real-time – with the Khan lawyer just today being written about because some DA’s want him disbarred.
Allie Brosh: Solutions and other problems. A thick follow–up on the brilliant Hyperbole and a half and a result of six years of introspection, the cartoons get a more prominent role and carry a bit more of the load than previously. It’s a melancholy and sad book, but since it doesn’t rule out the possibility of random happiness there’s a small ray of hope for us all.
Madeline Miller: Kirke. A book chronicling the life of Kirke, daughter of Perse and Helios, in a story parallell to the one in the Illiad. Entertaining enough read, and Millers take on Odysseus is far from the hagiography we’re used to.
Johan Croneman: Jag är olycklig här. An autobiographical account of a famous-in-Sweden cultural critic. Alcoholism, despair and brushes with death, told in spread-long chapters, interspersed with poetry.
Stephen Hawking: Brief answers to the big questions. Even though this is the dumbed down version of his thoughts, some of it still flew well over my head. The topics of the essays have been covered before – both by him as well as others – but since he was such a part of the zeitgeist it’s a worthwhile read.
Albert Camus: The stranger. Hit home more than I’d like – the arbitrary nature of human values and judgements resonates with me, and Meursaults bafflement at how others react and how he thinks they ought to is gut-wrenching.
James S. A. Corey: Leviathan Wakes | Calibans War | Abbadons Gate | Cobola Burn | Nemesis Games | Babylons Ashes | Persepolis Rising | Tiamats Wrath. Having binged the Expanse TV-series I figured I’d get out ahead of the show and read the books. Well enough written and each book only takes two days to read – And since I’m a sucker for space opera this was up my alley. The class struggles and realpolitik make for an interesting narrative, reminding me of C. J. Cherryh and Downbelow station.
China Miéville: The city and the city. Came highly recommended by Petter, and it’s an interesting enough read about two cities superimposed on top of each other, where living in one city requires you to unsee the other one, on punishment of Breach. It’s a novel idea, but it’s not really necessary for the story and serves only as a magical backdrop. Scifi-Noir stuff, but fun to read.
Chester Brown: Paying for it. I hadn’t read Brown in a long time and had forgotten how brutally honest he is. This graphic novel chronicles how he became a john – only having sex he’s paying for. He’s an extreme libertarian, and although I’m certain that he gives an honest account of his thinking, the pages come over as a tract and his detractors as made of straw more often than not. Interesting for the raw exhibitionism more than for the arguments made, although the topic is important and unresolved.
Matthew Hongoltz-Hetling: A libertarian walks into a bear. In New Hampshire there’s an attempt of libertarians to take over a city to launch-pin a libertarian revolution. Written mostly for laughs it’s light on political analysis and heavy on human foibles and roaming bears. It’s unclear what the writer want to accomplish, but it’s entertaining enough.
Keiko Furukura: Convenience store woman. Keiko Furukura is a 30-something woman with no socially acceptable ambitions or priorities. Her family and few friends despair over her inability to get a better job than that in a convenience store, and her disinterest in starting a family is a source of worry for everyone but her. A lovingly told short novel.
Sally Rooney: Conversations with Friends. Two young adults and a married hetro couple get involved and there are complications and drama. Not the most interesting story or characters, but the dialogue is well written.
Ramez Naan: Nexus. Sean Carrol had Naan on his podcast so I picked up the book. In a near future where a drug – Nexus – gives you the ability of connecting wirelessly with other people, exchanging thoughts, senses, creating a hivemind, there’s a battle between governments stemming the flood of post–/transhumans and activist scientists and others who’d like to either release it to the world or use it for nefarious ends. A techno-thriller worth reading for the collection of arguments, if not for the literary qualities.
Iain M. Banks: State of the Art. Short story collection, including at least one canonical Culture novelette set in the 70’s which seems to have the authors alter-ego pouring bile on the shortcomings of humanity. A great cannibalistic dinner offering cloned-dictator.
Iain M. Banks: Excession. This might be the forth or fifth time I’ve read/listened to this one, but it’s the first time I recall that I’m bothered by the female characters in the book – even though they have agency they come off as too one-dimensional. The introduction of the Affront and the machinations of the minds are great fun though.
Iain M. Banks: Inversion. Fun medieval court intrigue – but my main occupation was to try to spot details which gave away the Culture origin of the two characters.
Iain M. Banks: Look to Windward. The internal dialogue between Quilan and his admiral hitchhiker, and the banter of Ziller & Kabe, is enjoyable and the emotional tone fits the characters – one of the more intimate stories apart from Use of Weapons.
Iain M. Banks: Matter. Ferbin and Holse – master and servant – remind me of Wooster and Jeeves (PG Wodehouse characters) as they try to escape regicide and get help from Ferbins self-exiled sister Anaplian. The involved backstory is mostly confusing – unless the bickering politicking is all there is – but the the shell worlds and the the way the primitive societies have adapted to them is view them is a fun read.
Iain M. Banks: Surface Detail. Rape & revenge story, and an unrelated tying together of the Zakalwe storyline. A bubbly and joyful “only slightly psychopatic” ship mind – Falling Outside The Normal Moral Constraints – provides comic relief and is probably the most interesting part. The hells read more sadistic than necessary, but since they are supposed to be the ultimate evil I guess they’d have to be.
Iain M. Banks: The Hydrogen Sonata. Well crafted story and some fun scenes, but the Gzilt backstory is mostly confusing – I can’t see why the Book of Truth would matter all that much. It seems more of a screen on to which Banks could project contemporary human politicking. Some of the sillyness – how many dicks can you craft onto your body? – is a bit detracting, but it’s still Culture and as such still worth a read.
Michael Chrichton: The Andromeda Strain. Well paced techno thriller, striking a nerve in these here Corona times. The exposition isn’t too annoying, and there’s a matter-of-fact tension which is nice. The ending feels deus-ex-deadline though.
]]>I first read Catch 22 when I was studying in Karlstad, and remember laughing a lot. Watching the movie movie (adapted by Buck Henry) was less amusing – the absurdist and dark moments were few and too much humour was attempted through gags and goofiness. Watching pre-CGI movies is inspiring though, all the effects are done on camera or through mattes, and it gives a different sense of solidity to it. An explosion isn’t as in-your-face and overdone (or the actors might get blown up for real) and the planes dissolving into the horizon through a heat haze is an artifact of a really long lens. Is this what sentimentality feels like?
Three Days of the Condor (Lorenzo Semple Jr.) is a CIA within the CIA story – compared to modern spook stories (Tinker, tailor, soldier spy) the pacing is much different, and except a jarring Stockholm syndrome love scene the movie is placid, in contrast to the murders and drama depicted.
The decline of Western Civilization part I (Penelope Spheeris) is a raw look at the 1980 LA punk scene. Interviews with punks, bands and hangers-on are mixed with both good and awful performances – more than half the movie are performances, which serves as a time capsule for the music but drags the documentary down.
I’m also trying to immerse myself more in the movie-making lingo, gobbling up books and blogs and podcasts. It seems that North Americans get self-promotion at the teet, so it’s no wonder that the most vocal and easy-to-find publications are from the States. The often fake joviality and peppy demeanour rubs me the wrong way though and distracts from the content – whoever taught people to smile when talking into a microphone has much to answer for.
Noam Kroll has some good essays and listicles on his site which ring true. 126 lessons on independent film directing is one such list, and it’s worthwhile to revisit and think on some of the points when you’re stuck somewhere. The takeaway is “always keep working” which is pretty much in line with what I’ve seen of my peers who’ve gone on to become successful. I like his “work with what you have” approach, and I need to be reminded of it now that I’ve spent too much time and money on lenses for my Nikon: Until I’ve shot two more shorts I’m prohibiting myself from buying any more camera gear – just yesterday I caught myself just before clicking “order” on a discounted MF macro, so “shopping as procrastination” is a trap for me.
]]>I became so upset about playing a game on my Win10 station that I couldn’t continue playing but rather wrote this screed while drinking whisky and listening to angry music. Why the flying fuck can’t I get the keyboard to work as it ought? I press a key and the predicteably corresponding action doesn’t happen because maybe my fucking keyboard needs some fucking drivers which I can’t find any way of updating so that it behaves with a minimun of keyboard decorum?
I won’t pretend that this isn’t a I-hate-Windows rant, because that’s what it is. But let’s prepend this by saying that my hatred is justly spread across all platforms, distributed in equal amount based on how well they succeed on being user friendly vs. how user friendly they say they are. So GNU/Linux apps don’t get my hackles up as they’re often a messy piece of unfriendly software to begin with, so I know going in that I’m gonna spend a couple of hours reading -man pages and forums.
Here’s my point: I’ve been using computers since the Mac Plus. I remember when friends made fun of me because the Mac wasn’t a real computer because you didn’t have to load mouse drivers off of floppies before you could use the mouse. I remember that the Macintosh GUI was the assumed abstraction of what the computer was doing, rather than a CLI.
I know this is arbitrary, but the thing is that Apple made sure that they were consistent in their arbitrariness, and to some extent more or less tried to stay true to it, while MS (and GNU/Linux, BSD, etc) have the philosophy of the GUI metaphor tacked on (“to help the idiots” as it seems) and it just doesn’t work the way I think it ought. (Of course, OSX is far removed from the origins of Macintosh System. The reason I know my way around it is because it’s similar enough to what I’m used to)
I know that each computer system has its own idiosyncrasies, that nothing is as straightforward as it says it is, and that we (computer folk) have devolved into trench warfare fan-groups who don’t care about a productive way forward, only that the other team looks a bigger fool than we when it comes down to which platform we enjoy working on (or dislike the least, as it were).
Back in the day I remember reading the introduction to AppleTalk which began with a chapter understandable to teenage me. There was a genuine attempt at presenting a reason for why stuff was organized the way it was, and why there was a hierarchy of organization: These are the rules because of these reasons. There might be reasons why you as a developer might want to do this differently, and yours might be a more efficient way of doing it, but we’re not going to allow it because it’ll break too much stuff for everyone else.
Here’s the thing: Using MS Windows isn’t beyond anyones ken, it works for the most part; If you are of the mentality that “shit happens, computers are computas brah!” then yeah, I feel you, my beef isn’t with you. My beef is with all the shits at all the fucking support forums, Reddit, and every-fucking-other-forum who insist that “well you should have downloaded this particular driver to get this particular update option, and then disable that utility and check this box in that property setting” and treat such suggestions as those of a sane person. This approach isn’t a reasonable solution to anything but learning by rote. And learning by rote is for fucking idiots or for people stuck in a maze constructed by a vengeful Greek God!
I used Macintosh since 6.0.4. It wasn’t a simple system to learn by a long-shot, but it was sort of consistent. If this doesn’t work, check settings. If that doesn’t work, you might reset PRAM. If that doesn’t work, you’re out of luck until the next update. Once I started using ResEdit and playing with MacsBug I knew I was on my own and wasn’t annoyed with anyone but myself when I crashed the computer.
So Mac OS was more limiting than a more ‘allowing’ system, which might seem like a bad thing, which in the short term it is, but if you think further than your stupid idiot nose you realize that once you open up for developers to circumvent your layers of abstraction, every fucking developer will do so because well now we can have drivers for fucking RGB keyboards with their own shortcuts and I’m stuck here with an expensive fucking keyboard which lags and there’s no simple way for me to troubleshoot it because the Logitech forums are assfucked to shit, and Google doesn’t have enough hands for each SEO dick relevant to the issue and I’m stuck!
I’d much rather be tenfold limited in my selection of OS & peripherals customization than having to deal with this absolute abhorrent clusterfuck presented as progress. When I want to be on a bleeding edge of customization I use a *nix distro. Those can be a horrible pain in the butt and the support forums are full of holier-than-thou well why not just read the -man pages you moran people on Stackoverflow or whatever, but at least they don’t carry the same pretense of being simple to understand and “user friendly.” I can deal with annoying fanboys. What I can’t deal with is Logitech, Microsoft, Adobe, whoeverthefuck, which presents a glossy surface and pays lip service to “user friendliness” while punting me sideways as soon as something throws up an error – ooh, must not be us, please check these n things in your system first.
Do you realize how many really small applications or system additions recommend that you reformat your drive and reinstall your system if you’re having trouble? That should not a realistic recommendation for anyone but the bleeding edge folks – unless of course the OS ecology isn’t as stable as the marketers would like you to believe. But then that would make liars out of them, wouldn’t it?
At this point, I’d actually rather have the Fallout 4 computer network for intermittent email, and use analogue systems for everything else. Seriously, let’s redo this whole “digitization” thing. One more time from the top – erasing Jobs, Gates and Stallman, let’s rethink how all these “computers” are supposed to work, why don’t we?
]]>David Greabers essay On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs is a good read, and now he has a book out on the same topic. Going back to the anti-globalisation movement of twenty years hence, one strand of the movement was the anti-commercialisation of public space in the form of advertising, and coming from that I still find advertising to be one of the most wasteful activities a professional creative could engage in. It’s a zero-sum game (you’re competing for consumer resources) and the amount of brain-time it takes from those creating it and us being exposed to it is staggering. Much of Internet today is ad-driven, as are traditional media, but if you view the cost of advertising as a regressive tax on consumers, we’re still the ones paying for it. (of course, on a global scale that tax is shifted onto western markets, so might be construed as being strategically progressive – it would be intersting to see those numbers)
I’m going through all the open tabs on my phone and dumping some relevant articles here for myself and posterity. Let’s see if the Article 13 passes within the EU and if I’ll get a bill for linking them. The Cracked Labs article in particular is extensive and worth a read if you want to get a sense the scale of pervasive surveillance online. If GDPR did nothing else, it gave a sense of how much of traffic is one form of tracking or other.
As Internet has become ubiquituous in my life, I’m becoming more and more resentful of it. I’m not sure it it’s just cause I missed the gravy train and am not one of the people pushing cyber-blockchain-mccuffins for millions of moneys, or if I’m just bitter that the net isn’t the online playground I remember from aeons yore – nostalgia is a powerful drug, and I miss having my own shacks and corners online, and I miss the feeling that if I wanted to I could probbaly read up on how all of it works in a couple of days.
The Gibsonian view of cyberspace as an all-encompassing anarchic network of free agents has become reality, except that most of those agents are acting on behalf of old/new money and what room there is for actualisation of human potential has cameras and microphones mounted on the wall.
Canadian researchers have even successfully calculated emotional states such as confidence, nervousness, sadness, and tiredness by analyzing typing patterns on a computer keyboard.
Cracked Labs: Wolfie Cristl: Corporate Surveillance in Everyday Life
]]>What Ganon does is pick suppliers he’ll never know to ship products he’ll never touch. All his effort goes into creating ads to capture prospective customers, and then optimizing a digital environment that encourages them to buy whatever piece of crap he’s put in front of them.
The Atlantic: Alexis Madrigal: The Strange Brands in Your Instagram Feed
By even the least charitable interpretation, no laws were broken. Legally speaking, he seems to be in the clear. Even West has said: this wasn’t them being abusive, it was a man abusing his power. But the fact that it was legal doesn’t mean that harm wasn’t done. It doesn’t mean that people weren’t taken advantage of, had their trust abused by someone they respected or — in many cases — idolized and who leveraged their trust against them.
Dr. Nerdlove: On Finding Out Your Heroes are Monsters (Or: Detoxifying A Culture)
Goddammit Warren.
He then utters his infamous words. The interlocutors go on to kibitz about Huey Long and barbecue. Then Atwater, apparently satisfied that he’d absolved the Southern Republican Party of racism once and for all, follows up with a prediction based on a study he claims demonstrates that Strom Thurmond won 38 percent of South Carolina’s middle-class black vote in his 1978 Senate campaign (run by Atwater).
The Nation, Rick Perlstein: Lee Atwater’s Infamous 1981 Interview on the Southern Strategy
Marclay “had the spark,” as he put it, but he was daunted: how many clips would be required to fill up twenty-four hours? In most film sequences, the camera lingers on a clock for a few seconds. “I didn’t have the courage to get started, because I knew it would be an endless struggle,” he said. But now, in London, he decided to see if he could build the defining monument of the remix age.
New Yorker, Daniel Zalewski: The Hours – How Christian Marclay created the ultimate digital mosaic.
At its core are lurid claims that an elite cabal of child-trafficking paedophiles, comprising, among others, Hollywood A-listers, leading philanthropists, Jewish financiers and Democrat politicians, covertly rule the world. Only President Trump can bring them to justice with his secret plan that will deliver what QAnon’s disciples refer to as “The Storm” or “The Great Awakening”.
The Guardian, Jamie Doward: ‘Quite frankly terrifying’: How the QAnon conspiracy theory is taking root in the UK
The idea that “at first they ignore you, then they laugh at you…” etc goes both ways, and pretty soon the conspiracies might be even less amusing. I remember laughing nervously when an aquaintance at work was talking about chemtrails a while back – I couldn’t believe that what I’d previously only seen as ironic memes actually popped up in real life.
]]>These days most people with an apartment are milionaires here in Sweden. They don’t have the money mind, but they can borrow against their house and so drive themselves further into dept hoping that the housing balloon won’t pop while they’re tethered to it. But we were talking of becoming rich for reals – i.e. having proper money in the bank – and doing it legaly. (no smuggling, murder or robbery).
Scalping is one way forward. Not illegal per se but the hallmark of a douchbag. It’s not that I necessarity want to add value to whatever process I’m using to get rich – but there feels like there’s a difference between “buy low sell hi” and “corner the market of whatever the kids want for Christmas.”
I make no illusions regarding my ability to spot an upcoming trend and investing in time. Just because something feels like an original idea to me doesn’t mean that others haven’t tried it out – only that I haven’t. An example of many people feeling clever might be the rush for limited edition Lidl sneakers which were available only for a day or so. You were only allowed to buy three pairs and according to Göteborgsposten people were behaving poorly in order to secure theirs. I don’t believe that everyone is intending to wear the shoes, but rather sell them on – as maybe evidenced by the many listings on auction site Tradera. Some of the prices were rather optimistic – the store price was 149kr and the “buy-now” price was set to more than ten times the amount.
So unless I stumble upon a really lucrative deal, or want to earn money by doing penny auctions for stock inventory, I need to come up with something else.
Occasionally when I’m on town this image pops into my head, of streams and rivers and trickles of richness moving through the air. Like a gold-rush fever dream I imagine that one ought to be able to just dip the pan into one of those streams and siphon off a percentage. Mind, I can’t tell you the shape of the flow, or what it is made of – I just know that it’s in reach but out of sight.
One avenue to riches which is well travelled in both directions – the direction towards being the hopeful one, the destitute return journey the other – is investment and speculation in stocks and other markets. I have nothing but contempt for the phenomena of day/swing trading, and being able to short stuff is of no value to the world, but it’s a legal way of trying to make money.
Might the stock market be worthwhile as a limited attempt at making money? I don’t have the time nor temper nor budget for daytrading, but in addition to doing some fundamental analysis and going long on some stocks (that’s fancy talk of buying stocks in companies and then keeping the stocks for the long haul) I’ll set aside a small amount and try my hand at swing trading – the goofy cousin of daytrading. When you’re into swing trading you’re doing something called “technical analysis” as opposed to fundamental ditto; you’re trying to discern patterns in how stocks fluctuate in value, and make money of your predictions.
Thing is, it basically reads like numerology. The author of the “for dummies” book on the subject lists patterns such as “head and shoulders” and “cup and handle” and then finds patterns where his models seem to predict something. But those stocks and patterns are picked after the fact. Just like in a gold rush where the real money is in selling shovels, I imagine that the real money swingtrading is made i writing books and consulting – not the actual trading.
There are some academic studies which find that some swing trading techniques can work some of the time in some markets – now I just have to read up a bit more on the subject, as well as fundamental analysis, and then dip a toe in the stream and see if it glimmers once I pull it out or if a gator will bite it off.
]]>Nevertheless, sometimes the selection is a bit too cryptic – I want to be be able to recall my train of thoughts a year later, so perhaps I ought to write some of my thoughts down? Let’s try that, why don’t we?
This is the first part of a six-part (II, III, IV, V, VI) series I expect to roll out taking a historian’s look at the Siege of Gondor in Peter Jackson’s Return of the King. We’re going to discuss how historically plausible the sequence of events is and, in the process, talk a fair bit about how pre-gunpowder siege warfare works.
Bret Devereaux: The Siege of Gondor, Part I: Professionals Talk Logistics
I found Brets blog via the distruntled people over att r/freefolk who linked his analysis of the preposterous logistics of the loot train battle which is a hilarious take on the Game of Thrones episode. The Siege of Gondor article – the first of six – is some 20’000 characters long and it’s a great read.
The proposed terrorist content filters will go further than Article 13 in the sense that they require services to remove reported content within one hour. In addition, services will have to prevent this content from reappearing on their platforms.
Torrentfreak: EU Members Approve Upload Filters for “Terrorist Content”
Ten years ago there were demonstrations all over against online surveillance – in Sweden it was FRA – but alongside emerging Pirate Parties there was a social movement concerned with online integrity. Today the social movement is focused on BLM and to some extent the environment, so a proposed “terrorist content” law merits barely a ripple in the news.
The more we ask the big, shifty questions about power and privilege and truth, the more our foundation must be rock solid. Editors must insist on fact checking budgets for their authors, and authors must keep insisting for them such that we can all pay fact checkers fairly.
Emma Copley Eisenberg: Fact Checking Is the Core of Nonfiction Writing. Why Do So Many Publishers Refuse to Do It?
Having read this about the state of American non-fiction fact checking, I’m curious to how it works here in Sweden. There are occasional flairups in the media about an author being caught in a supposed lie, but most often those are memoirs, not reporting books. Also, the piece tickled my research-&journo bone, which has shrivelled up but occasionally gives me phantom itch.
For two decades now, I have been interested in sleep research due to my professional involvement in memory and learning. This e-book attempts to produce a synthesis of what is known about sleep with a view to practical applications, esp. in people who need top-quality sleep for their learning or creative achievements.
Piotr Wozniak: Good sleep, good learning, good life.
I remember reading a feature on Piotr a bunch of years ago, focusing on his Supermemo spaced-repetition software. Browsing through his wiki-book on sleeping gives the similar impression of rigoruous self-experimentation with a cohort of 1. Of course, there’s hyperbole spread throughout and he mixes details with grand sweeping statements – he’d be well served by an editor – but it’s fascinating to read things which you can apply yourself. Suddenly you get a key to a previously unknown space in your brain.
Print magazines are no longer about information; the ones that are have become a commodity easily replicated online. Today’s print magazines are lifestyle products. The question is not “What does my audience want to read?” but “What does my audience want to buy?”
Steve Daniels: How to start a print magazine
Holy hell, the above quote is one of a handful of shimmering nuggets in the short article. Since I’ve been working on getting my own magazine off the ground for the better part of two years, there are some really good insights here that I’ll take with me. And hopefully finally publish the goddamn first four issues.
]]>This reasoning – and the behaviour which follows it – is more or less automatic, and I think it’s basically sound. But somehow I haven’t been able to present it in a way which doesn’t make me sound like an amoral automatone. My shrink has suggested that the tendency to systematize my behaviour might be a poorly veiled attempt at shielding myself from emotional engagement and exposure. Which sounds like a reasonable assumption on how the system came to be, even though it doesn’t invalidate the basic assumptions: If something bad is happening you have to help if you can.
Problem is, if you don’t wan’t to help but you don’t want to deal with the guilty conscience that follows inaction, a moral solution is to not learn of the bad things happening. So as we grow older, we grow tired of feeling bad and our eyes and ears reflexively ignore what’s around us; A moral noise-cancellation.
]]>Fast forwards another couple of years and I’ve given up on powerlifting as well as jogging – it got boring once I plateaued and couldn’t motivate myself to shift the training around, and my knees where as annoying as ever. Biking became the only excercise I did, and once we got a car even that was relegated to short excursions, where before I used any excuse to bike for an hour.
Last summer I had an ambition to use my 10 week vacation to get into powerlifting again. I’d just set a personal best deadlift of 150kg, and had a long term goal of at some point pulling 200kg. For some reason the summer turned out to consist mostly of beer though, and I didn’t visit the gym once in that whole time, so spent fall 2019 trying to catch up to where I’d been.
Spring 2020 has been a mixed bag – mostly because of real life and sickness in the immediate family which has taken time and a mental toll – but the last two months or so I’m back on track, hitting the gym at least three times a week with some running and/or squash in between. So far I’m free of injuries, and am seeing some progress – although I’m not following a powerlifting program this time around, but a hypertrophic upper/lower split setup from Styrkelabbet. If I keep this up I might shift the training more towards a deadlift focus in fall – but let’s see if I can keep this up.
Going through a bunch of “read later” tabs I’ve had open for a while, I finally started reading the exrx.net texts on training, and the no-bro information is a great resource:
It is plausible that overall progress may be greater on a generally lower volume training regimen by keeping training more consistent over many years through greater long term program adherence and lower incidents of layoffs due to overuse injury. Any small increases that might be gained with continuous high volume training are potentially lost, soon after the first incidence of an overuse injury, if not the attrition due to burnout.
ExRx.net: Most common weight training mistakes
I would like to find an app (or printed training diary) which allows for randomized volumes & intensities – trying to keep the body confused and avoid the Repeated Bout Effect. Althought it might be bro science, it seems a good idea to vary the volume/intervals/tempo for exercises, as well as including variations on the themes every once in a while. (Not doing silly crossfit wearing-oneself-out stuff, but measured changes building on previous skills). Even if I try to change the volume & intensities up a bit, as long as I’m not following a program I know I’m liable to cheat – picking exercises which I like rather than those I ought to force myself to improve in.
And as for my goal of deadlifting 200kg – I’m the first to acknowledge that it’s a completely arbitrary number to aspire towards. I might as well have lift 50kg 100 times in ten minutes or do 10 x 2 x bodyweight pullups. But deadlifts have two things going for them:
So let’s see where I am next spring. Hopefully I’m able to run 10k non-stop without dying as well as be above 150kg deadlift again, closing in on that 200kg goal.
]]>Take efficiency, for example: It is common for new technologies in games to increase efficiency, which is almost always presented as unambiguously good. But while increased efficiency tends to either increase production or require less work, the practical downside is rarely modelled in games: the former increases the consumption of resources, the latter depresses wages.
Vice – Gabriel Soares: ‘Civilization’ and Strategy Games’ Progress DelusionI want to see progress. I want change. I want state-of-the-art in software engineering to improve, not just stand still. I don’t want to reinvent the same stuff over and over, less performant and more bloated each time. I want something to believe in, a worthy end goal, a future better than what we have today, and I want a community of engineers who share that vision.
Nikina Tonsky: Software Disenchantment
Write a chapter of a book by hand – you know that’s not what will get published. Start designing a poster with a sharpie, instead of the latest high-tech illustrating program. Create a working prototype for your first product that you’d never ship to anyone else. When you know that you don’t have to make the greatest thing ever right from the start, it’s easier to start. And then it’s easier to continue.
deprocrastination.co: 3 tricks to start working despite not feeling like it
Next, you might ask yourself how the other side perceives your demands. What is standing in the way of them agreeing with you? Do they know your underlying interests? Do you know what your own underlying interests are? If you can figure out their interests as well as your own, you will be much more likely to find a solution that benefits both sides.
Jace Grebski: The Art of Bargaining, Positional vs Interest-Based Negotiation
Now, in addition to the perennial challenge, we face an immediate crisis. In the past week, COVID-19 has started to behave a lot like the once-in-a-century pathogen we’ve been worried about. I hope it’s not that bad, but we should assume that it will be until we know otherwise.
Bill Gates: How to respond to COVID-19
Morale is down. We are making plenty of money, but the office is teeming with salespeople: well-groomed social animals with good posture and dress shoes, men who chuckle and smooth their hair back when they can’t connect to our VPN.
Anna Wiener: Uncanny Valley
For more than a decade now, people have been spending fortunes building platforms and algorithms that rely on ever-increasing user ‘engagement’, often without really knowing what that is. As it turns out, conflict is the most engaging kind of engagement.
Hacker News: The Internet of Beefs
Kristin hopes she has designed the perfect environment. Most FTD patients aren’t so fortunate, if you can call it that, to wind down their lives on a personalized estate with a staff dedicated to keeping them safe and calm. Their families don’t always have a choice in how involved they want to be. Still, all the money in the world can’t answer the question of who, really, is living in that house.
Wired.com – Sandra Upson: What happened to Lee?
]]>Rest assured that we only collected metadata on these people, and no actual conversations were recorded or meetings transcribed. All I know is whether someone was a member of an organization or not. Surely this is but a small encroachment on the freedom of the Crown’s subjects. I have been asked, on the basis of this poor information, to present some names for our field agents in the Colonies to work with.
Kieranhealy.org: Using Metadata to find Paul Revere