Friday Thinking is a humble curation of my foraging in the digital environment. Choices are based on my own curiosity and that suggest we are in the midst of a change in the conditions of change - a phase-transition. That tomorrow will be radically unlike yesterday.
Many thanks to those who enjoy this. ☺
In the 21st Century curiosity is what skills the cat -
for life of skillful means .
Jobs are dying - Work is just beginning.
Work that engages our whole self becomes play that works.
The emerging world-of-connected-everything - digital environment -
computational ecology -
may still require humans as the consciousness of its own existence.
To see red - is to know other colors - without the ground of others - there is no figure - differences that make a defference.
‘There are times, ‘when I catch myself believing there is something which is separate from something else.’
“I'm not failing - I'm Learning"
Quellcrist Falconer - Altered Carbon
Content
Quotes:
THE GARDEN OF FORKING MEMES: HOW DIGITAL MEDIA DISTORTS OUR SENSE OF TIME
The Analog City and the Digital City
Gandalf Speaking to Galadriel about Bilbo
Articles:
A New Business Model Emerges: Meet the Digital News Co-op
The Mathematics of How Connections Become Global
Discovery identifies non-DNA mechanism involved in transmitting paternal experience to offspring
Feeding cattle seaweed reduces their greenhouse gas emissions 82 percent
*By the way, when you're a futurist and you "speculate" about something and it already exists, that's good news. No analyst can ever know everything, and it's a strong sign that you're onto something real, that your imaginary "trend" is an actual trend
Bruce Sterling - Tweet
Like Louisa Banks in the 2016 film Arrival, we are all trying to figure out how the “alien language” of digital tech has transformed our psyches and warped our sense of time. How did the internet disrupt 20th century timekeeping systems and spark an insurgence of alternative historical narratives? How do old media institutions try (and fail) to keep up with the narratives of online subcultures? How does the immediate accessibility of so many alt histories undermine our ability to create shared visions of the future? And how might a more ecological awareness of the internet help us adapt to our disorienting digital time machines?
The de-centralization of timekeeping brought about by digital media harkens back to a much older style of measuring time. Before the invention of the telegraph, there was no way to instantaneously synchronize timekeeping devices across long distances. No time zones, no universal standard against which clock towers could be evaluated for accuracy. Timekeeping was more an art than a science. Each village emitted its own time zone. Much like the townships of old, every internet community has its own “subjective time zone”.
Unlike the clocks of Old Media, the subjective time zones of internet subcultures are a de-centralized creative expression that reflect the idiosyncrasies of many different reality tunnels. Whereas geographic time zones sit next to each other in a very orderly fashion, internet time zones are kaleidoscopic and multi-layered — they allow you to look back at the same time line through many different lenses. There are as many versions of history as there are subcultures.
The conversations of internet subcultures often feel substantive and expansive compared to the shallow discourse of presidential debates, op-ed pages, and cable TV shows. Mainstream news cycles rarely last more than a few hours, and their narratives are constantly shifting. They don’t tend to give a big-picture sense of where we came from or where we’re going. Internet subcultures, by contrast, are building grand narratives and meme worlds that help people feel their way through the chaos that’s currently unfolding. These stories cut deep, down to the most foundational questions of race and religion and destiny. We shouldn’t be too surprised that complex conspiracy theories, intergenerational trauma, and age-old religious fervor are coming to the fore — in a contest of narrative memes, deep history is a serious competitive advantage.
Digital media has re-shuffled the balance of power by making it easy for people to create historical narratives that attract lots of followers. The “time zones” of Old Media and internet subcultures are getting increasingly out of sync, despite attempts by the former to get out ahead of the latter. And the clocks and narratives of 20th century institutions lose influence in a media environment where everyday people can have the kind of reach that was once reserved for elites.
In a 1970 interview, Marshall McLuhan foreshadowed this situation and described what it might do to our minds: “We live in post-history in the sense that all pasts that ever were are now present to our consciousness and all futures that will be are here now. In that sense, we are post-history and timeless. Instant awareness of the varieties of human expression re-constitutes the mythic type of consciousness, of once-upon-a-time-ness, which means all-time, out of time.”
Our systems of governance were built for a world of extreme information asymmetry. Educated elites controlled the flow of information and kept old ghosts at bay. Now, the floodgates have been opened, and the Big Mood is one of temporal confusion and disorientation — we no longer feel like we’re marching steadily forward from the past into the future. There’s a massive subreddit devoted to documenting “glitches in the Matrix”; a new science of Progress Studies that’s trying to cure our End-of-History malaise; a whole entire subculture of Doomers who don’t believe there will be such a thing as history in the future.
We’re transitioning from a world of linear narratives and time lines to a garden of forking memes that we’re free to explore and tend to. The gardening games with the richest soil, the deepest roots, and the most interesting characters will attract the most people.
THE GARDEN OF FORKING MEMES: HOW DIGITAL MEDIA DISTORTS OUR SENSE OF TIME
The transition to what was dubbed Web 2.0, which made participation more widely accessible, and connected what we then quaintly thought of as our “in real life” identity more closely to our online presence, began just over fifteen years ago. The transition to smartphones and tablets, which made digital media a constant presence in our lives and our default media environment, has occurred only over the last decade. In other words, only recently has the Digital City begun to manifest itself in the public spaces that have been hitherto ordered by the priorities and sensibilities of the Analog City. Before then, the consequences of digital media, although much discussed, remained superficial, which allowed us to believe that the future would be business as usual, only faster and better and more inclusive.
The anodyne insistence on fact-checking to bridge chasms in worldview misunderstands the nature of our new media environment; it fails to see the difference between the economics of information scarcity and the economics of information abundance. Information scarcity may lend itself to a measure of credulity: When facts are few, persuading the ignorant is relatively easy. But information abundance, already characteristic of early modern societies, engenders a degree of skepticism
Whatever view you want to validate, you’ll find facts to support it. All information is also now potentially disinformation. Fact-checking, however well-intentioned, does not solve the problem; paradoxically, it may in some cases make it worse. It is an Analog City solution insufficient to the problems of the Digital City.
The human self, as philosophers have long noted, emerges in relation to others, or to the Other, if you like. The character of the self develops under the gaze of this Other, and is shaped by it. In the Digital City, we are under the gaze of an algorithmically constituted, collective Other. This audience, composed of friends, strangers, and non-human actors, is unlike anything we might have encountered in the Analog City. Like the gaze of God, it is a ubiquitous face looking down upon us, whose smile we dearly desire. We seek its approval, or, failing that, at least its notice, and we subtly bend our self-presentation to fit our expectations of what this audience desires of us.
In his account of the nature of secular society, Charles Taylor argues that an important part of the emergence of the modern age was the disenchantment of the world and the rise of what he describes as the “buffered self.” Unlike the old “porous self,” the new buffered self no longer perceives and believes in sources of meaning outside the human mind. This new self feels unperturbed by powers beyond its control. We might say that in the Digital City the self becomes in some ways “porous” once again. It is subject to powers that we perceive as impinging on us, powers now algorithmic rather than spiritual.
As embodied creatures, our experience is structured by time and place. Time and place are also critical dimensions of our political identities. Where and when are the people with whom I must relate, or to whom I feel a measure of loyalty? Identifying the communities to which we belong has traditionally been a matter of knowing our place. A characteristic of the modern nation is that it defines citizenship not along familial or tribal lines but along geographic lines. Our orientation to time likewise shapes our social and political lives, as do the form and content of our memories. Communities have always drawn on shared stories and memories. Our experience of place and time is not always direct, however, but is often mediated by technology. When technological change reorders our relationship to place and time, it also reorders our social and political sensibilities.
Like the City of God, the Digital City exists in no particular place and abides by its own rules of time. Digital communities emerge in shared time rather than in shared space; simultaneity is the coin of the realm. The Digital City orders the lives of its citizens in keeping with a perpetual present disassociated from both past and future, heightening a tendency already present in electronic mass media like television. Mass media audiences shared time, while smaller groups also shared spaces, gathering in front of the television, or by the radio, or in the theater. Mobile digital technology, however, has strained the link between presence and place, making it optional. We may now be in multiple places at once, here in my body, but there in speech or vision. The community to which I find myself most drawn may not exist in any one place, composed as it is of scattered kindred spirits brought together through digital technology.
The triumph of shared time and the demise of shared place in the Digital City changes the experience of social belonging. While the modern state is not going anywhere anytime soon, the relationship of citizens to the nation is evolving. Loyalty to the community that is the nation state, already detached to some degree from local communities, yields to the shifting loyalties of digital attachments.
The databases of memory, the revealed traces of social life, a view of the self not as a thing to be disclosed but rather marketed: together they generate an intolerable ironic load. They lend all social interactions the quality of a self-interested and inescapable game in which all participants are to some degree acting in bad faith. Under these conditions, to credit the Other’s appeals to public-spiritedness as genuine rather than a guise for self-interest, to believe that he truly has the common good in view, requires a great leap of faith.
The Analog City and the Digital City
I found it is the small everyday deeds of ordinary folk that keep the darkness at bay... small acts of kindness and love.
Gandalf Speaking to Galadriel about Bilbo
The cooperative and the non-profit-cooperative as a business model have been willingly overlooked by many MBA-type business schools and by governments - despite numerous examples of how they have transformed our world and are perhaps the most viable and sustainable and just business models in a political-economy that aspires to be ‘of-by-for’ the people.
A New Business Model Emerges: Meet the Digital News Co-op
Community news co-op advocates see this distinct new model as having a high chance for success in places where existing approaches to digital sites might struggle or fail.
It’s the nation’s first cooperatively owned local online news site, trying out a new business model in Akron, Ohio. The Devil Strip — whose eye-catching name it adopted from Akron’s distinctive term for the grass berm between street and sidewalk — is celebrating its first birthday as a co-op, having enrolled nearly 1,000 member-owners and, according to publisher Chris Horne, beating its one-year revenue goal. Might this be a signal that co-op sites will not only thrive but spread; that more communities will be nurtured by the informed citizenries crucial to healthy local civic life?
Exploratory efforts are also under way in Northern California; Maryland; Hartford, Connecticut; Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania; Boston, Massachusetts; Springfield Massachusetts; rural Maine; and beyond. The Banyan Project, which I founded, was first to develop a model for digital community news co-ops. All told, over 40 communities nationwide have approached us. Each project is different: for example, in Boston, the goal is to create a trusted information source for the metro area’s large Black community.
This is an interesting exploration of the phase transition that can occur when a particular number of unconnected nodes become connected - enabling viable meshnetworks. This may be related to the 6 degrees of freedom - issue that enables anyone to generally find a connection to anyone else.
The Mathematics of How Connections Become Global
Percolation theory illuminates the behavior of many kinds of networks, from cell-phone connections to disease transmission
For fear of state surveillance or interference, tech-savvy protesters in Hong Kong avoided the Internet by using software such as FireChat and Bridgefy to send messages directly between nearby phones.
These apps let a missive hop silently from one phone to the next, eventually connecting the sender to the receiver—the only users capable of viewing the message. The collections of linked phones, known as mesh networks or mobile ad hoc networks, enable a flexible and decentralized mode of communication. But for any two phones to communicate, they need to be linked via a chain of other phones. How many people scattered throughout Hong Kong need to be connected via the same mesh network before we can be confident that crosstown communication is possible?
A branch of mathematics called percolation theory offers a surprising answer: just a few people can make all the difference. As users join a new network, isolated pockets of connected phones slowly emerge. But full east-to-west or north-to-south communication appears all of a sudden as the density of users passes a critical and sharp threshold. Scientists describe such a rapid change in a network's connectivity as a phase transition—the same concept used to explain abrupt changes in the state of a material such as the melting of ice or the boiling of water.
It’s not just nature vs nurture - the question of acquired characteristics in a parent are transmitted to offspring - this is an interesting signal of our advancing knowledge of heredity and evolution.
"The big breakthrough with this study is that it has identified a non-DNA based means by which sperm remember a father's environment (diet) and transmit that information to the embryo,"
Discovery identifies non-DNA mechanism involved in transmitting paternal experience to offspring
It has long been understood that a parent's DNA is the principal determinant of health and disease in offspring. Yet inheritance via DNA is only part of the story; a father's lifestyle such as diet, being overweight and stress levels have been linked to health consequences for his offspring. This occurs through the epigenome—heritable biochemical marks associated with the DNA and proteins that bind it. But how the information is transmitted at fertilization along with the exact mechanisms and molecules in sperm that are involved in this process has been unclear until now.
A new study from McGill, published recently in Developmental Cell, has made a significant advance in the field by identifying how environmental information is transmitted by non-DNA molecules in the sperm. It is a discovery that advances scientific understanding of the heredity of paternal life experiences and potentially opens new avenues for studying disease transmission and prevention.
This is an interesting signal of the benefits of seafood in controlling greenhouse gases. :)
Agriculture is responsible for 10 percent of greenhouse gas emissions in the U.S., and half of those come from cows and other ruminant animals that belch methane and other gases throughout the day as they digest forages like grass and hay.
Results from a taste-test panel found no differences in the flavor of the beef from seaweed-fed steers compared with a control group. Similar tests with dairy cattle showed that seaweed had no impact on the taste of milk.
Feeding cattle seaweed reduces their greenhouse gas emissions 82 percent
A bit of seaweed in cattle feed could reduce methane emissions from beef cattle as much as 82 percent, according to new findings from researchers at the University of California, Davis. The results, published today in the journal PLOS ONE, could pave the way for the sustainable production of livestock throughout the world.
"We now have sound evidence that seaweed in cattle diet is effective at reducing greenhouse gases and that the efficacy does not diminish over time," said Ermias Kebreab, professor and Sesnon Endowed Chair of the Department of Animal Science and director of the World Food Center. Kebreab conducted the study along with his Ph.D. graduate student Breanna Roque.
Over the course of five months last summer, Kebreab and Roque added scant amounts of seaweed to the diet of 21 beef cattle and tracked their weight gain and methane emissions. Cattle that consumed doses of about 80 grams (3 ounces) of seaweed gained as much weight as their herd mates while burping out 82 percent less methane into the atmosphere. Kebreab and Roque are building on their earlier work with dairy cattle, which was the world's first experiment reported that used seaweed in cattle.
#Micropoem
neoliberalism at best -
is scientism -
framing an ideological-moral narrative -
sleight-of-handing -
as a science -
just like Western psychology -
began as a phrenology of racism-sexism -
sleight-of-handing -
as science of universal human -
it is -
really hard -
to have good faith conversation -
especially with -
the humor of afford-dancing -
mhm -
how do we sense the ‘general will of the people’?
- polls are 20th century -
who does the poll? -
who funds the poll? -
why is the poll done? -
what are the choice -
frames-narratives-paradigms -
enacting the logic of the polls? -
