September 23, 2024
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 23rd 2024 Edition
- The Art of Taking It Slow. I don't agree with all of this—index gears are much better than friction levers, and I never got on with adjusting side-pull brakes—but cycling is definitely about comfort, enjoyment and fun.
- Coming home.
there’s all this hype about making everything easier and faster, about how we can eliminate all the work involved in the making of words and images. But no one arguing for this seems to have asked what’s left when the work is gone. What is the experience of asking for something to appear and then instantly receiving it? What changes between the thought and the manifestation? I fear that nothing changes, that nothing is changed in such a making, least of all ourselves.
- (1970) Huey P. Newton, “The Women’s Liberation and Gay Liberation Movements”. Excellent speech looking to build solidarity between the black liberation, gay and feminist movements. We need more of this sort of approach today.
September 09, 2024
Interesting Things on the Internet: September 9th 2024 Edition
- Signal Is More Than Encrypted Messaging. Under Meredith Whittaker, It’s Out to Prove Surveillance Capitalism Wrong. Excellent interview covering lots of what's wrong with surveillance capitalism and what we need (more folk) to do in order to build a better alternative.
- Solar will get too cheap to connect to the power grid.
In the UK in 2024, I can go online and buy a solar panel with the same dimensions as a fence panel, for only double the cost. In five years, the cost of solar will have halved again.
We need to electrify more things. We need more manufacturing that takes advantage of spiky energy gluts; making things when the sun shines, or overnight when the wind blows. - Some bullet-points about regulation.
In Britain now, for instance, the actual government of the sixth largest economy on earth – a nuclear power, a permanent member of the UN security council – has no mechanism to stop executives from pumping shit into rivers while routing profits off-shore.
I have a half-theory that larger organisations are plausible deniability generators, which allow blame to be avoided and dissipated; this feels like a related structure.
August 20, 2024
Blog All Dog-eared Pages: Christopher Frayling on Craftsmanship towards a new Bauhaus
When I read On Craftsmanship Towards A New Bauhaus (OpenLibrary link) by Christopher Frayling it didn't really connect with me. However, reading through my dog-eared notes here a few months after finishing it I find myself nodding along and reacting favourably to them.
The agility of small firms staffed with skilled workers mated with CNC tools chimes with some of the flexibility the workers of the Lucas Plan were advocating. And the calls for more focus on the Bauhaus' interfacing with industry/industrial methods and encouraging more production over manifestos is reassuring, given my—and the collective our—areas of exploration in DoES Liverpool.
Page 58
The central thesis helps to explain why we are so much better at setting up quangos and professional organisations, than we are at remedying the historical and contemporary mismatch between design and (what's left of) manufacturing industry.
Page 68
However, I believe that sensible arguments in support of the crafts in education and society - arguments for the benefit of educators, civil servants, grant-givers of all descriptions, sponsors, and society at large - are in danger of being confused with less sensible arguments, based as they are on a mixture of sentiment, bad history, and a misunderstanding of the lessons of the Arts and Crafts Movement. And it is of crucial importance to separate the two. There are hard-edged arguments, but it's not always easy to dismiss the popular connotations of the crafts. We have to live with them: the crafts as folksy, alternative, rural occupations associated with a homecoming vision of the future, and also with a nostalgia masquerading as history.
Page 80
It was not necessarily a matter of protecting skills, as Morris thought, but rather of protecting the measure of control the craftspeople exercised over their work - in their own time, ,to their own pace, perhaps with their own machinery.
Page 81
Here in 'the middle Italy', in small workshop-based activities, there are craft industries as diverse as shoes, ceramic tiles, textiles, and furniture. In these a huge variety of craft goods is produced through the cooperation of networks of small firms each employing around ten craftsmen. The thing that has made this possible is the development of numerically controlled machine tools or robots - but robots harnessed to the ever-changing needs of small batch or short-run production. These small interconnected firms have proved themselves relatively immune to economic crises of over-production at a time when large, inflexible, highly-automated, deskilled firms are going to the wall. By any definition this success is related to skilled craftsmanship; so it may not be a question in the near future of 'industry versus craft' but of 'craft with industry', of a product hand-built with just a little assistance from robots. Industries of a few people, creating local networks with new kinds of tools, maybe linking with larger networks...
Page 88
It was, as Gropius later added, a question of the crafts shedding their 'traditional nature' and becoming instead 'research work for industrial production, speculative experiments in laboratory-workshops where the preparatory work of evolving and perfecting new type-forms will be done'. This was the 'turn' which so impressed Herbert Read in Art and Industry. And yet almost every British book about the Bauhaus still prefers to interpret the manifesto as a plea for the skills of yesterday [...]
Page 131
Another [problem with the Bauhaus] was that nearly all the workshop Masters were artists rather than designers, so they were much stronger on writing manifestos about industry and producing wonderful visual aids, especially Paul Klee's, than on practical results.
Page 133
The Bauhaus did indeed produce some iconic objects. But the real research, on which industry depended, was of course happening elsewhere - in engineering, and materials science and chemicals and technology, and in the research and development sections of big businesses.
Page 134
In this world of flux, the staff and students of our new Bauhaus will by definition have a strong belief in the future, just as their forbears did in their manifestos and slogans. Not as any kind of feel-good factor, on in an uncontroversial or unchallenging way, but they will believe that doing something about it, and making a difference, is a worthwhile thing to attempt.
August 18, 2024
Blog All Dog-eared Pages: The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective
The Care Manifesto by The Care Collective (on OpenLibrary)
Page 5
In this manifesto we therefore use the term 'care' to capaciously embrace familial care, the hands-on care that workers carry out in care homes and hospitals and that teachers do in schools, and the everyday services provided by other essential workers. But it means as well the care of activists in constructing libraries of things, co-operative alternatives and solidarity economies, and the political policies that keep housing costs down, slash fossil fuel use and expand green spaces. Care is our individual and common ability to provide the political, social, material and emotional conditions that allow the vast majority of people and living creatures on this planet to thrive — along with the planet itself.
Page 42
[...] if the neoliberal defunding and undermining of care has led to paranoid and chauvinist caring imaginaries — looking after 'our own' — adequate resources, time and labour would make people feel secure enough to care for, about and with strangers as much as kin.
Page 43
Promiscuous care argues that caring for migrants and refugees should carry the same significance that our culture places on caring for our own, and urges us to care about the fate of those children forcibly separated from their families at the US border and placed in detention centres, as if they were kin. It recognises that we all have the capacity to care, not just mothers and not just women, and that all our lives are improved when we care and are cared for, and when we care together.
Page 46
As we showed in the previous chapter, such forms of support are often spontaneous and generated from down to up, but they also require structural support to be consistent and survive over time. Second, caring communities need public space: space that is co-owned by everyone, is held in common and is not commandeered by private interests.
Page 52
We need both community spaces and shared resources.
Page 57
To be clear, what 'caring communities' does not mean is using people's spare time to plug the caring gaps left wide open by neoliberalism. It means ending neoliberalism in order to expand people's capacities to care. To be truly democratic will involve forms of municipal care that put an end to corporate abuse, generate co-operatives and replace outsourcing with insourcing.
Page 76
As the feminist economist Nancy Folbre puts it, we should be thinking of 'invisible hearts', not 'invisible hands', when it comes to how care often is, and indeed should be, organised.
August 12, 2024
Interesting Things on the Internet: August 12th 2024 Edition
- Do not adjust your reality: how slick Team GB played its part in dividing Britain.
Medals are key to this. Medals are public money, goodwill, merch, the maintaining of the illusion that this success represents something other than simply itself. This is the basic contradiction in a national high-performance culture.
Gold medals have been stockpiled. But these golds are the work of those involved in winning them. Victory without context means nothing more broadly. The only societal value in a medal is where it expresses a physical culture, is the final evidence of a working system, of public access, fertilising the soil, encouraging participation, seeing what grows.
- How Norway’s public broadcaster overhauled its climate coverage
But “the important societal debates now revolve around how to adapt to, or brake, global warming,” the guidelines declared. “Our coverage should primarily be about how action is being taken, not if action is necessary.”
July 29, 2024
Music for Mass (Bike Rides)
Russell has written about some of his recent ambient explorations and thoughts about performances of them.
Listening to some of the work reminds me of the music we had to one of the JoyRides a while back. The ethereal soundtrack to a night ride through the woods in Croxteth, adding to the other-worldly experience of cycling through the woods with just the lights from the bikes.
It's something that Danny (who organises the JoyRides) has experimented with more too. There was the time we added a projector to put crazy patterns onto the trees as we rode the Loop Line; and he and I have also talked about the overlapping soundscapes when, once or twice, we've had two soundsystems running at the same time at the front and back of a ride, and how they blend (or interfere) in the middle.
We're also always wondering about having lots of small speakers on many bikes, rather than one or two big soundsystems trying to cover the whole ride. What if we leant into that more, and gave each speaker something different to play? That would solve the perennial problem of trying to wirelessly sync so many speakers, and the "piece" would morph and adapt as riders moved around the pack.
So if you ever fancy coming for a ride Russell...
June 24, 2024
Interesting Things on the Internet: June 24th 2024 Edition
- A Transcender Manifesto – for a world beyond Capitalism. A seed. Dil, who wrote this, is a regular visitor to DoES Liverpool. It echoes lots of my thinking.
- I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again. Wondering how I could get all the local innovation and regeneration folk to read, and more importantly understand, this before the grifters move onto it.
April 22, 2024
Interesting Things on the Internet: April 22nd 2024 Edition
- Dance Dance Revolution? Music isn't activism on its own, but activism needs a fun soundtrack.
- We Need To Rewild The Internet.
- The free software commons. "To be perfectly clear, I am not arguing against paying maintainers. I'm arguing that paying maintainers is a narrow response that will have detrimental side effects unless it goes hand-in-hand with other measures. The most critical of those is governance. I view this as the next step that the Free Software movement needed to take years ago. That didn't happen, and I would mostly be speculating if I tried to give reasons why not. But that's in the past and we're in the present. It still needs to be done, and the second best time is now."
April 08, 2024
Interesting Things on the Internet: April 8th 2024 Edition
- What Have Fourteen Years of Conservative Rule Done to Britain?. The Tories are not qualified to run a country. The Conservative Party, whose history goes back some three hundred and fifty years, aids this theory by not having anything as vulgar as an ideology. “They’re not on a mission to do X, Y, or Z,” as a former senior adviser explained. “You win and you govern because we are better at it, right?”. Narrator: they were not.
- Rebecca Solnit: Slow Change Can Be Radical Change. We need stories in which getting where you’re going—individually or as a society—mostly happens step by step with maybe some backsliding, muddle, and stalling, not via one great leap. Reminding myself that DoES Liverpool is a long-term project, and that's okay.
- Searchable transcripts of the Post Office Horizon IT Inquiry hearings. At some point (hah!) there'll be enough digital literacy in Government that this sort of things won't be needed; until then, folk like Matthew Somerville will continue making important information more accessible.
- ‘Lavender’: The AI machine directing Israel’s bombing spree in Gaza. This is the risk with so-called AI. Not that the machine will become sentient and take over, but that evil people will use it as cover for committing atrocities.
- Jon Stewart on the false promises of AI. Facebook's "AI" assistant: "your toast is ready" [...] Jon Stewart: "why don't you get to work on curing the diseases and the climate change and we'll hold down the fort on toast"
March 18, 2024
Interesting Things on the Internet: March 18th 2024 Edition
- Pivot to AI: Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. What do you do if there's a surplus of computing power from mining bitcoin? Find a new grift that needs lots of computing power...
- Software Has Eaten The Media "all to show the world that they're "innovative" and "pushing boundaries" without being able to explain how."
- Post Office Scandal - Ian Hislop on Peston -10th Jan 2024. Ian Hislop on superb form about the travesty of Horizon.
- Notes: trust and cultural angles on AI; internet stuff; climate response. Excellent set of notes and jumping off points from Laura.
- “When Is Inequality Taken Seriously And When Is It Dismissed As A Trick Of The Light?”: What Diane Abbott’s Treatment Reveals About The State Of British Politics. "none of this parliamentary rhetoric about extremism and MP safety has been mobilised to protect Diane Abbott after the Conservative’s biggest donor said he wanted to shoot her. Quite the opposite". The increasingly authoritarian and rightward acceleration of the Tory party is worrying. The sooner their power ends, the better.