Can climate fiction deliver climate justice? ⊗ Why community organisations need community tech ⊗ The digital jungle

This week →{.caps} Can climate fiction deliver climate justice? ⊗ Why community organisations need community tech ⊗ The digital jungle ⊗ The digital death of collecting ⊗ Avatars and identity ⊗ Burners, pollution, control & privacy by a thousand cuts

A year ago →{.caps} The most clicked link in issue No.143 was Degrowth and MMT: A thought experiment by Jason Hickel.

Can climate fiction deliver climate justice?

As careful readers might have spotted, I’m quite attracted to articles looking at the influence of fiction on how society and technology change, in part because it’s important to “talk, loudly and frequently and in detail, about the future we want{.internal}.” Fiction seems to be a useful lever to consider in the hopes of affecting change, whether it’s in understanding how science fiction has influenced Silicon Valley and how it might be used to influence them differently, or as a way of making the climate crisis more palpable and solutions more easily imagined, such as the examples in the above piece by Maddie Stone.

More →{.caps} The piece is at Fix in their climate fiction issue, which also includes the excellent definitive climate fiction reading list – 20 books to explore cli-fi.

[H]er genius lies in how clearly she illuminated the disproportionate impact a warming world would have on the poor, people of color, and women, a reality many Americans are just now waking up to. Butler, who died in 2006, crafted an essential work that is relevant not only for exploring the unfolding disaster of climate change, but for revealing the injustice at the heart of it. […]

“Fiction can transmit information really effectively in non-technical language,” says Patricia Valderrama, … it can “help people understand how an issue will affect them and be the catalyst to help them join an existing movement.”{.highlight} […]

The storytelling traditions of many Native cultures challenge Western conventions around linear narratives by treating people of the past, present, and future as being in “continuous dialogs,” as Kyle Whyte, an environmental justice scholar at University of Michigan, puts it. This mode of storytelling can be particularly well suited to grappling with intergenerational, historically rooted problems like climate change.

Why community organisations need community tech

First of a three part series of short articles by Rachel Coldicutt providing an overlook of the research her group has been doing. They were “tasked with understanding the challenges for community businesses, and whether they could be a catalyst for the wider adoption of community-owned technologies.” Through a literature review and a series of qualitative interviews with community businesses, they explored why community organizations decide to create their own solutions, how they collaborate, and some of the differences between what they create for themselves and the business-focused solutions the software market sells.

In brief: without the profit motive and with a focus on the needs of each community, software ends up quite different, more appropriate to the problems, and better aligned with values.

[W]hat if some community organisations need different kinds of technology to businesses or governments? What if the growing critique of the social and environmental impact of corporate platforms makes adopting those products a moral and ethical dilemma for community organisations? What if there’s no one way of getting it right? […]

[C]ommunity-to-community. Technology that is owned and/or managed by communities, that supports the delivery of their values and preferred ways of working.

What is Community Hardware and Software?

[I]f you can access digital services without the onerous terms dictated by big tech companies, then there’s a space to build digital services with different values embedded, where you do not expose people to harms and risks along the way that we have just accepted with the mainstream options.{.highlight} […]

Creating alternatives to big, shared data sets and holding a space outside of surveillance culture is an important role for community organisations, and this is an issue that deserves greater engagement from policy makers, finders and communities across the UK.

Community Tech in Action

This confidence and ‘just enough’ knowledge is also distributed across the organisations that are creating community tech; there isn’t just an IT person dreaming up solutions in a vacuum, the whole organisation grows together in appreciating the potential of creating their own products.{.highlight}

The digital jungle

Second time in as many weeks that I feature a piece by Claire L. Evans, this one from back in January, on Tom Ray’s quest to create artificial life and better understand evolution. Mixing some biography with some of the technical reasoning. Somewhat like last week’s [[word-for-web-is-forest|The Word for Web Is Forest]], we find ourselves at this strange metaphorical, yet also kind of real, overlap where our technology mirrors nature, and where some lessons can be gleaned.

[L]ife itself transcends biology, ALife researchers believe. As Langton writes, it’s “a property of form, not matter.” This form can be peeled away from matter and studied on its own in myriad ways: through hardware, by building robots, through wetware, in the pursuit of synthetic biology, and through software, as with Tom Ray’s Tierra. […]

“[A] true general purpose intelligence is much more likely to arise not from mimicking the structure of the core of the human cortex, or anything like that, but from actually taking seriously the computational principles that life has been applying since the very beginning.”{.highlight} […]

It’s this synthetic, rather than analytical, approach that may carry us through the [AI] winter and into the spring. It moves with the flow of life, rather than searching for the shape of a river in a molecule of water.

The digital death of collecting

Kyle Chayka considering the death of collections, how “the placelessness and self-erasure of digital platforms and the enforced passivity of the algorithmic feed have removed” some of the tactile and emotional experiences of assembling, owning, keeping, organizing, valuing and getting attached to collections.

He’s talking specifically of media, like music albums, photos, and books, which are now largely digitized and, more problematically, turned into services. Once again, the model of many internet companies transforms ownership into larger access for us and more control for them through making things simple and frictionless.

It doesn’t take away from his points but I would have liked his take on how the same internet has also enabled the collection of so many different physical objects through a global market instead of just running around a few local flea-markets.

It’s very difficult to be responsible for what we collect on the internet; we can’t be stewards of the culture we appreciate in the same way. We very literally don’t own it. […]

[O]ur era of algorithmic feeds might herald the actual death of the collector, because the algorithm itself is the collector, curator, and arbiter of culture. Not only does that represent a loss of agency and control, it’s also a loss of feeling.{.highlight}

Avatars and identity

If, like me, your attention with regards to NFTs is mostly peripheral and from a distance, this post by Sean Bonner should be a useful lens on the construction of identities in online communities, avatars, and the role provenly unique NFT avatars can play. I’m also noting his thoughts because, although he’s well versed in the technical side, it’s an opinion coming from decades of wading through many subcultures, not from technical dreams.

offline I can I look at you and know who you are, know if I know you or not. Online, I look at your avatar. And your avatar can be anything. And if your avatar can be anything then you can be anyone, right? Right. That’s equal parts liberating and terrifying. If you can be anyone, how do you know who anyone is? Or maybe more importantly, does that even matter? […]

His identity is connected to his Avatar. His Avatar shows his connection to this community, and unlocks special membership privileges. His Avatar is also a unique digital object that he owns, because it’s an NFT.{.highlight} […]

People already spend a lot of time, effort and money crafting and curating their online persona – the dismissal that they wouldn’t buy an Avatar to signify their connection to a community or social standing is silly. That’s so obviously where this is all heading. And the natural extension of this is if your identity is tied to an Avatar, and you have many different Avatars then you natively have the potential for many different identities.

Burners, pollution, control & privacy by a thousand cuts

Anil Dash argues that with the current wave of burner emails (one-time emails to create users on platforms), for a rare time we have a good tool to fight back against surveillance and tracking. Includes a look back at 2002 when some were already worried about controlling our identities.

Technically they didn't sell your data attached directly to your email, it's just that anyone else who already has your email address can buy access to the data. And everyone has your email address.{.highlight} […]

[Quote from 2002!] We’re all celebrities now, in a sense. Everything that we say or do is on the record. ... Do we have to permanently filter our thoughts and expressions, lest they be thrown back at us at some inopportune moment in the future? What do we do until people are used to seeking out context, until meta is intrinsic?{.highlight} Well, you have to own your name. I own my name. I am the first, and definitive, source of information on me.

Asides

• 🔗 ⚓️ 🕵🏼 The supply-chain mystery. “[S]evere weather events are a reminder that the pandemic supply-chain ruptures may pale compared with those which will be associated with the climate crisis in coming years.”
• 🤔 🌳 Smart Forests. “How are forests becoming digital environments? The Smart Forests project investigates the social-political impacts of digital technologies that monitor and govern forest environments.”
• 🎥 🦀 🐚 🤖 HERMITS: Mechanical Shells for Reconfigurable Robots. “Inspired by hermit crabs, we designed a modular system for table-top wheeled robots to dock to passive attachment modules, defined as ‘mechanical shells.’ Different types of mechanical shells can uniquely extend and convert the motion of robots with embedded mechanisms, so that, as a whole architecture, the system can offer a variety of interactive functionality by self-reconfiguration.”
• 📚 Glad someone else noticed this. Behold, the Book Blob. “There’s no discernible pattern, but the blobs still feel intentionally placed—if you squint hard enough, a few of them may converge into the implied shape of a braid, or an eye, or the side of a woman’s face. On top of the canvas, a blocky but refined sans serif spells the title and the author’s name, while much smaller text in a handwritten script reads ‘a novel,’ or, ‘a memoir,’ or, perhaps, ‘a New York Times bestseller.’”
• 🤯 🌌 🔭This May Be the First Planet Found Orbiting 3 Stars at Once. “GW Ori is a star system 1,300 light years from Earth in the constellation of Orion. It is surrounded by a huge disk of dust and gas, a common feature of young star systems that are forming planets. But fascinatingly, it is a system with not one star, but three.”
• 🤓 🧫 📸 Disgustingly Beautiful Mold Art. “Artist Dasha Plesen combines molds, bacteria, spores, and other objects in petri dishes to create these colorful abstract photographs.”
• ☄️ 🔭 Largest known comet is heading close enough to us to become visible. “The giant comet, also known as C/2014 UN271, is from the outskirts of our solar system and has been making its way toward our sun for millions of years. This is also the most distant comet to be discovered on its inbound journey, which will provide scientists a chance to observe and study it for years to come.”
• 🎶 💃🏼 Turn your Movements into Sound by instruments of things. “SOMI-1 is a highly precise sensor technology that measures movement and transforms it into sound in real-time. The Bluetooth sensors can be worn as wearables on the wrists and ankles, turning the user into an instrument.”

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