Care at scale ⊗ How change happens ⊗ Your sci-fi future

This week →{.caps} Care at scale ⊗ How change happens ⊗ Your sci-fi future ⊗ A century of science fiction that changed how we think about the environment ⊗ Geofoam

A year ago →{.caps} The most clicked article in issue No.137 was How Not to Know Ourselves by Angela Xiao Wu.

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Welcome back to Sentiers. If you subscribed over the last three weeks and remember where you found the newsletter, please hit reply and tell me. There was a small surge in signups, I’d love to know where it came from.

With back to school and back to work for many, I’ll mention that I’ve got availability for work a couple of days of week and one-off projects. It’s also a good time to become a supporting member, the more people join, the more solid the weekly is and the more extra writing and projects I can share with everyone.

Care at scale

The infrastructure whisperer, Deb Chachra, with another excellent piece. She starts with water flowing down aqueducts, then how we use “exogenous energy every day to exceed the limits of what our bodies can do,” to lighting, cooking food, how homes are nodes to collective infrastructure, cyborgs, feudalism, and made up borders. We build our lives over these infrastructures, our possibilities extended by their existence, but access is usually restricted by national borders, and some of us are favoured over others by the luck of where we are born. The externalities of these constructions however, this access to energy and light, flow beyond borders. Flooded First Nations lands in Québec power lights in Boston, for example. But as Chachra writes, while “carbon dioxide in the atmosphere is allowed to go everywhere. *People* are not.” She never mentions it but here you have an excellent exposé of why Green New Deals are important, it is *impossible* to separate infrastructures, the climate crisis, and social justice. It’s also a beautiful example that wherever you start your reflection from, if you go up enough abstraction layers / systems / implications / externalities / impacts, you necessarily also move towards a more holistic view and realize, again, that everything and everyone is connected. >

Universal provision of water, sewage, electricity, access to transportation networks that allow for personal mobility, and broadband internet access creates a society where everyone—rich or poor, regardless of what you look like or believe—has access to at least a baseline level of agency and opportunity. […]

[A]nthropogenic climate change is teaching us that there are no others, no elsewhere. […]

To face anthropogenic climate change is to become a civilization that can respond to this shifting, unpredictable new world while maintaining these systems: if you benefit from them today, then any future in which they are compromised is recognizably a dystopia. […]

[T]he true promise of renewable energy is not that it doesn’t contribute to climate change. It’s that renewable energy is ubiquitous and abundant. […]

We need to have a conception of infrastructural citizenship that includes a responsibility to look after each other, in perpetuity. And with that, we can begin to transform our technological systems into systems of compassion, care, and resource-sharing at all scales, from the individual level, through the level of cities and nations, all the way up to the global.

How change happens

Daniel Rose from The Moment provides a quick overview of their use of the Berkana Institute’s “Two Loops” theory alongside Christopher Alexander’s *A Pattern Language*. Worth a read, although the loop is the part which drew my attention and this video is actually a more detailed explanation: Two Loops: How Systems Change. It’s a great way to understand some of today’s stalemates in politics: programs need be created to “hospice” workers from the old loop to the new, but politicians prefer simply keeping them on the first, which is much simpler for re-election campaigns. **Aside →**{.caps} Alexander’s lamp v room notion, which Rose mentions, seems to be inspired by Eliel Saarinen’s *”Always design a thing by considering it in its next larger context – a chair in a room, a room in a house, a house in an environment, an environment in a city plan.”* No?

The “2 Loops of Change” model suggests that at any given time in a society, there are “dominant” systems that drive the economy and culture, and there are “emergent” systems and trends that are less well known but making progress to eventually become the dominant system. […]

[A]s dominant systems fade, the people who rely on those dominant systems for income, purpose, and well-being become meaningful contributors to the new system […]

The organizations that will successfully transition from existing in a dominant system to thriving in a new system are the ones that have a culture of openness, learning, and possibility.

Your sci-fi future

Good newsletter issue by David Mattin on how sci-fi predicts the future… or does it? He looks at a couple of theories about these ‘predictions,’ is it a symbiotic relationship, or do we reach back after the fact to find “a language with which explain this emerging technology”? I’m drawing your attention to his reflection for the part where he argues that the connection between sci-fi and the present is so strong “because we lack other modes of explanation.” He argues that politics would normally offer those explanations of the moment we are living, provide stories of where we were and where we are going, but these stories are currently absent or unsatisfying, so we reach for other narratives which seem to explain the world to our satisfaction. I’d argue that even when explanations aren’t absent, a great number of people simply ignore them and create their own fictions (hello conspirators!), so it’s no surprise that so many also reach to fictions that seem to describe our present. Thoughts?

[T]he genre as a whole has no magical prescience. Rather, a selection bias is in operation. We inhabitants of 2021 relentlessly hunt down the sci-fi ideas, such as Stephenson’s metaverse, that best help us describe what we’re seeing, and ignore the rest. […]

It looks as though science-fiction is inventing the very world we find ourselves in. But that effect is manufactured by our obsessive mining of the genre for stories that help us navigate disorienting change. Bereft of real-world narratives, we turn to fictional ones. […]

That means letting go, finally, of an obsolete conservative vs progressive framework that no longer makes sense in the context of planetary ecological collapse. And developing new thinking on how to conserve what is human amid the emergence of new and non-human ways of seeing the world.

A century of science fiction that changed how we think about the environment

A bit of an up and down piece for me, and the author lists a number of books already mentioned here in the past, but interesting for the parallel between environmental rhetoric and speculative design, and to be read in relation to the piece above.

Environmental rhetoric, like speculative design, an approach that encourages thinking about and designing possible futures in a meaningful way, is one of the main places we see sf become a discursive way to grasp the present. […]

Whereas documents such as the Department of Defense 2014 Climate Change Adaptation Roadmap, cited by Thomas, cultivate feelings of neutral detachment and automated response to already anticipated scenarios, sf about climate change enables readers to experience multiple temporalities beyond the individual human life.

On Geofoam

The first time I saw this product, I was kind of flabbergasted, who the heck buries huge blocks of foam under roads?? Anna and Kelly Pendergrast explain why, how, and look at the environmental implications which are, as always, not that simple. Also included for the last quote below, because I’m a sucker for useful lenses on the world.

Geofoam appears at first glance like a hypermodern product: Minecraft made physical, an architectural model in the flesh. It can come as a shock to realize that giant bricks of polystyrene are stuffed below the turf, like silicone implants under the skin of a city. All is not as it seems — below the dirt is not always more dirt. […]

“EPS blocks exhumed from a construction site in Norway after more than 20 years of burial were found to be in good condition and were re-used.”[…]

Geofoam’s artificiality is in no way unique. It’s just visually striking, and thus a useful lens for thinking about the built environment. For something so lightweight, it’s laden with meaning and contradiction.

Asides

• 🤯 🚀 🧶 Software woven into wire: Core rope and the Apollo Guidance Computer. “Much of the core rope wiring (address inhibit wires, set, reset, etc.) was the same for all core rope modules. Two women passed a needle back and forth through the cores to create this wiring. The needle was hollow and contained the necessary length of wire.”
• 🤩 🛵 🚲 🇯🇵 Small vehicles of Tokyo. “A slim cataloguing of the rich diversity of small vehicles that help shape street life in the world’s largest city”
• Good 🧵 by manvir singh on the pre-colonial Tlaxcallan republic. People often assume that the only states of pre-colonial Mesoamerica were despotic kingdoms. What’s rarely appreciated, however, is that one of the main rivals of the Aztec Empire—a city-state called Tlaxcallan—was a republic ruled by an assembly of commoners & nobles.
• 🐦 🐵 🐝 🦑 🧠 Animals Count and Use Zero. How Far Does Their Number Sense Go? “The intelligence of corvids like ravens and crows is well known. Recently, crows were even shown to have a numerical ability seen in few other species so far: a grasp of the concept of the empty set — the numerosity zero.”
• 😬 🌎 ∿ Jet stream 🧵 by Jeff Berardelli. You often hear us talk about the wavy jet stream. Here’s a good illustration of how this manifests in extreme weather, connecting the Europe flooding to the Heat Dome in the US West. Some scientists have found a connection between climate change and a more amp’d - wavy jet.
• Nice 🧵 explaining Markov 🔗 In this thread, I’ll help you understand Markov Chains. In life, and in investing, we often come across situations where luck/chance plays a major role. And Markov Chains are often a great way to model and analyze such situations. (Via Some anders.)
• 🔴 Inside Mars, NASA’s InSight Mission Mapped Surprises Down to the Core. “Like Earth’s, Mars’s mantle is far thicker than its crust. But the rigid part of the upper mantle, which on Earth forms the base of ever-shifting tectonic plates, is perhaps twice as thick on Mars, maybe more. ”
• 🇻🇪 🗺 How the World’s Slums Can Get Back on the Map. “More than 1 billion people live in these areas of the world’s cities, according to the United Nations, and their numbers have been growing as urbanization trends continue. But severe information gaps keep much of this landscape hidden: Unlike formal areas, slums might not have their streets, services and buildings mapped on platforms such as Google Maps.”

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