Lifting your eyes from your daily problems, you might see the edifices of human power stuctures outlined among the clouds, so all-encompassing that you don’t reflect on them most of the time. Networks of power, resources, influence and all around, oh my. And cheese:
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.