The hardest part is seeing how little sense we make, over and over and over.
Having folks not understand the basic concept of “the more layers of protection the better” through a pandemic that killed 600,000+ in a year in this country alone, is hard to grasp. It’s hard not to react to that.
It’s isolation and/or being nuked with nonsense and egoistical behavior. Weird and exhausting.
The smartphone is the most amazing piece of hardware proving how much the human world is one and only. I mean,
Lithium for batteries probably comes from Australia or Chile. Cobalt for batteries as well, probably from Congo.
LCD screens from Japan and Korea. Hardware engineering from China. Software Quality Assurance from India.
Some WiFi patents and chip from Finland. An obscure file converter necessary for your device and part of FOSS coming from Germany, Russia and Italy.
The camera needs lenses from Switzerland and plastic molding from Taiwan.
Design from the US west coast and marketing from the east.
And yet, those smartphones make us believe and emphasize that it’s us against everything and everyone.
The very thing made with the help of the entire planet, women men and children, all countries and communities, all minerals and clever processes combined, is polarizing us to extremes for the profit of a few individuals, through algorithmic addiction.
I suggest we use phones less rather than doing “strikes” on apps. John Lewis’ good trouble, get back on the open web you cowards, etc.
They make you believe that having trouble in your life is your fault rather than the ever expanding and greedy systems ruling our worlds. The conclusion is then that you can do it all by yourself. Except that, no.
Self-help book: here’s how to manage debt!
Me, really loud and distorted with the megaphone: DUDE CANCEL THE STUDENT LOANS RIGHT NOW YO
Nature. What can I say. Thank you? 5 stars? I love you boo.
An ode to June gloom and LA. Every year in the morning at the end of spring and start of summer, the sky is grey and moody. It usually clears out after 11am to give up to the immense Californian blue sky.
There’s an early in the day longing for the eternal sun to come back. Anyway, it made me want to be vulnerable and to compose a short electronic poem to this city, my neighborhood. I might add the instrumental.
Stay safe, there’s a Delta going on.
That’s a good article about the issues with building today.
He has a one-liner:
The combination of consumer tastes, low dollar value per volume building components, and the complexity of buildings inhibit efforts to scale.
The solution screams 3D printing. Consumer tastes and building complexity? You can print whatever shape you want AKA we can print your weirdest ideas, no problem. The issue here is local code and zoning (even in the 1940s FLW had issues with cities to build flat roofs because it was simply disliked; it hasn’t gotten much better since).
Low dollar value per volume building components? Sure, but in the case of a prefab, this is all combined. If a 3D printing factory scales up, it will incorporate those tiny savings and they will show up in a few % off the total price. It is an enormous issue otherwise, true.
Any complex attempt at prefab or modular, including by Toyota itself, has failed to reach any significant market share.
That’s mostly because it’s been very badly marketed out there. If you told people “buy a prefab house that fits your lifestyle, costs you $80-$100 a year to cool and heat, doesn’t need any specific maintenance ever and where you can go on your green roof to chill; you can move in in a month”, trust me, that shit would fly off the shelves. Put my broke ass on the waiting list, bro.
If prefab is used to build the usual classic, super not efficient house, then prefab is obviously useless. (for those who don’t know, the two massive advantages of prefab: almost no waste compared to a classic construction site; you can make an air-tight house, which allows extremely low needs in heating/cooling, which is crucial to sustain good housing)
The article is about single-family homes. I don’t think building cheap multi-family triplexes is great, as it calls for murders between folks and their thin “low-cost” walls. I do think that considering how societies are moving, we need the ability to build smaller houses for singles and couples without kids.
We need a way more modular way of building housing because we are way more modular in life too.
This store clerk this morning was coming down the aisle while I was grabbing a bag of cheese and as I was looking in his direction, he slapped a pack of water bottles like he was in the club.
Slapped, lowkey grabbed and had a little grin on his face. The Stripper Special.
I know man. It’s a lot of juicy packs of water around.
So, if this book tells the truth about how empathy is biologically mostly wired in us,
And that today we have almost 3,000 billionaires who can’t possibly spend the money they have in their entire lives, and are exploiting hundreds of millions of us to hoard said money, excuse me but,
The Fisheye lens never gets old.
I remember watching Insta clips of skateboarders back in the 2010s, wondering why I felt like some were not really exciting without knowing exactly why. Baby, they were missing the wide angle!
The fact that it shows as much as possible with the least distortion possible makes my minmaxing mind very happy.
It also constantly reminds me that the planet is round, open and goes in every direction. The Fisheye lens keeps screaming f r e e d o m everywhere it looks at. It’s exhilarating to me.
It’s also very dynamic with distances fluctuating rapidly through the frame from edges to center.
Horizontally,
Vertically,
It’s the bounce to me.
Now that decent wide angles and fisheye-ish lenses are built in phones, let’s see how long it takes for me to get sick of it.
Status hierarchies are, of course, designed to create inequalities. Status is about rankings and the claiming of authority over others. Every society establishes various boundaries of exclusion. A highly stratified society generally is low on empathetic consciousness because such societies are segmented between so many status categories that the ability to empathize beyond one’s own group, both up and down the hierarchy, is limited.
We are segmented as hell and it’s actually kind of “in” to segment life even more these days. Which means even less empathy and well, we directly see this every day: people show less and less compassion, it seems. Segmentation nurtures a lack of tolerance which reinforces segmentation.
Oral consciousness relies on hearing, while script consciousness relies on sight. This difference alone accounts for the profound change in human consciousness that distinguishes a written culture from an oral one. Hearing is the most internalizing of the senses. While touch, smell, and taste also penetrate the interior of one’s being, hearing is a more powerful experience as anyone who has ever enjoyed music knows so well. Hearing is a deeply participatory experience. It engulfs. One can immerse oneself in sound.
Vision, by comparison, is the least intimate and most abstract of all the senses. Sight isolates and dissects. As St. Louis University professor emeritus Walter Ong observes: “A typical visual idea is clarity and distinctness, a taking apart…. The auditory ideal, by contrast, is harmony, a putting together.”
I mean, wow. It makes so much sense. It makes one think about the hundreds of hours per month —and increasing— of us using our vision instead of listening to each other. Texting is conversational but it’s still vision. It’s still about dissecting instead of putting together, isn’t it? It’s not all bad, as sight allows for reading, which allows oneself to have thoughts and hear her/his/their own inner voice.
As usual, we need both in a balanced way but thanks to Big Tech, we super over-indulged with vision. The dance between all those actors (groups, societies, companies) and our primary senses fascinates me.
(The book is The Empathic Civilization by Jeremy Rifkin)