McFilter

Interesting Things on the Internet: January 3rd 2022 Edition

• last-month Notes: voting, health and tech, ruggedising. An excellent (as ever) set of links from Laura. I'm hoping (as in, I've stopped reading it because in an ideal world I'd find tine to blog about it, but don't quite have the appetite for the work right now) that at least one of the links will make it into something bigger, but there are a whole bunch just on the edge of that...
• Same Old. This is superb. "Such recycled futures masquerade as innovation to suck the life out of other possibilities. Space colonies and voice-controlled kitchens take on an air of inevitability despite their many postponements and disappointments, while critical refusal of these futures, or truly alternative visions, are cast as implausible." I'm not interested in tech for how it can give us the same old, I'm interested in how we can use it to take power from those who currently have it and spread it more equally to everyone else.
• Brian Eno on NFTs & Automaticism. "‘Worth making’ for me implies bringing something into existence that adds value to the world, not just to a bank account. If I had primarily wanted to make money I would have had a different career as a different kind of person."
• The speculative fiction novel I want to read this year. An excellent post on open-source governance.