Media ecology ⊗ Ways of flourishing ⊗ Cheap solar panels are changing the world

Media ecology

Quite an intriguing read, where Federico Gaggio explores the concept of media ecology—a term introduced by Neil Postman in 1968. Going from McLuhan who “used the terms media, technology and language more or less interchangeably,” to the origins of “ecology,” to interconnected thinking systems, to British anthropologist Gregory Bateson, and how media grows culture. The author then proposes that we are living in a monoculture, where we need permaculture.

According to Carlo Freccero, “globalisation flattened everything on the basis of what he calls mono-thought (neoliberal orthodoxy).” The cultural commons, much like the physical ones, have been captured by this monoculture of capitalism and then exploited by enshittification, à la Doctorow. To “restore balance in society,” away from this rule by a monolithic perspective, Gaggio cites Henry Minzberg: “restoring balance in society requires moving past two-sided politics and giving equal weight to three sectors: Public (political), Private (economic), and Plural (social), representing governments, businesses, and communities. The plural sector is not a middle way between the other two. It is made of communities, associations, cooperatives, NGOs, religious groups, movements and social initiatives. The critical difference is that none of it is owned by private companies or controlled by the government.” Pardon me but YES!

To me the highlighted part above is the crux of the piece, and the parallel with how it’s reflected in media is a bit secondary. Still, having shared multiple articles about a return to the old web, a renaissance of indie projects, Gaggio’s conclusion definitely resonates. “If we adopt this approach for media ecosystems, I see a clear and obvious symmetry between Public Service Media and Public Sector, Commercial Media and Private Sector and Organic Media and the Plural Sector.” Organic media being of course blogs, small online groups, and newsletters. He closes with this, which even connects us to all our* readings about inventing and claiming futures: “If media are an ecosystem that cultivates culture, we have both the right and the responsibility to ‘re-occupy our collective imagination.’” (Via Rabbit Holes 95.)

Over the years I have been considering the role media consumption plays in human affairs, particularly in relation to the climate crisis, the mental health crisis, and other crises of values, attention, meaning, democracy… How may it perpetuate causes, and how may it contribute to solutions? These are some of the questions that I want to investigate. […]

Instead of focusing on Man (individuals, households, clans), Bateson urges us to consider the system as a whole, including the environment and all interactions various organisms have within it. […]

Lopez calls for the "occupation and reclamation of public spaces and the cultural commons" as a form of resistance to the dominance of the monocultures of consumerism and mind control. […]

Instead of letting ourselves be driven to "compete, collect and consume our way to neurotic oblivion", he proposes a framework that includes a third actor which needs to be empowered to restore the balance: Civil Society.

* Does that work, “our readings”? Does it make sense to include readers in this way instead of just saying “I shared” or “I read”? I’ve had great discussions with readers over the past few weeks, “our readings” feels à propos.

Ways of flourishing

Steven Johnson received “the Pioneer Award in Positive Psychology from UPenn’s Positive Psychology Center” for his work “advancing the cause of human flourishing.” In this article version of his acceptance speech he covers a lot of ground and weaves together a number of ideas. One, humans now live much longer lives and this change happened over just a century. “Diversity of background, gender, intellectual fields of expertise and so on. But one element of that story that I think is underappreciated is generational diversity.” Quick aside here: I dislike when people talk about longer lifespans without mentioning quality of life and crumbling “sick care systems” in multiple countries.

Two, as we live longer, our “temporal horizons expand,” which encourages us to “project forward into that future.” While probably true, to me this is a bit like men who suddenly care about women because they have a daughter. One should not only care about other generations because they’ll meet them in person.

Three, Johnson then talks about the book Homo Prospectus. “The core idea behind that book was that a defining superpower of human beings is our ability to mentally time-travel to possible future states, and think about how we might organize our activities to arrive at those imagined future outcomes.” In his thinking, and I tend to agree, this capacity for projection, this “mental time-travel,” will become increasingly important in coming years as the potential for AI-enabled advancements in biology and medicine could compress a lot of advances in just a few decades.

A technologically advanced culture cannot flourish without getting better at anticipating the future. That’s why science fiction matters. That’s why scenario planning matters. That’s why complex software simulations that enable us to forecast things like climate change on the scale of decades matter. […]

What gave flight to the human mind and all its inventiveness may not have been the usual culprits of our opposable thumbs or our gift for language. It may, instead, have been freeing our minds from the tyranny of the present. […]

My basic prediction is that AI-enabled biology and medicine will allow us to compress the progress that human biologists would have achieved over the next 50-100 years into 5-10 years… a compressed 21st century. [Ed: Citing is not agreeing!]

Cheap solar panels are changing the world

Zoë Schlanger for The Atlantic (Archive.ph) on the exponential growth of installed solar panels, but also specifically on the largely unknown “invisible” capacity. Citing data from Sustainable Energy Africa in Cape Town, she explains that a lot of home installations are not declared. “In South Africa, for example, the total amount of energy produced from solar systems in 2019 was thought to be about 500 megawatts, Nana said. But in the first quarter of 2023, when researchers used satellite imagery to count all of the solar installations in the country, they estimated that solar was producing a combined 5,700 megawatts of energy, only 55 percent of which had been declared to the government.”

You should have a read for other encouraging solar numbers. However, I’d like to draw your attention to this habit of talking about batteries for “when the sun doesn’t shine,” always assuming by default that renewables need to cover the same power demands as we have now. It’s a different situation for people in the global south, but in over-consuming countries in the north, we should notice this assumption and wonder how we can also curb our energy consumption as we switch more of it to electricity. New imaginaries and all that.

“The really interesting debate now,” Bond said, “is actually: When do we push fossil fuels off the plateau? And from our numbers, if solar keeps on growing this way, it's going to be off the plateau by the end of this decade.” […]

As the journalist Bill McKibben has reported, some homeowners in African countries who have never been connected to the grid are getting electricity for the very first time via solar-panel kits, skipping over a fossil-fuel phase entirely. […]

Already, in countries including Brazil, Morocco, Mexico, and Uruguay, solar and wind make up a bigger share of electricity generation than it does in global-North countries. By 2030, RMI predicts, the global South will have quadrupled its solar and wind capacity.

§ Very much looking forward to this! Da Vinci documentary dispels common myths about Leonardo. “He was, on the contrary, an extremely rational man whose boundless curiosity enabled him to draw conclusions others overlooked. Da Vinci also wasn’t a polymath — a jack-of-all-trades — so much as he was an interdisciplinarian, someone who saw the fields of art, mathematics, geology, physics, and chemistry not as separate but complementary, each contributing to a more complete understanding of reality.”

§ The 3 AI use cases: Gods, interns, and cogs. Drew Breunig with some useful buckets/categorisations for types of AI, although I dislike the use of “gods” and would have gone with something like Aliens (or entities), Assistants, and Automations. “Because they are tools for specific types of experts, Interns are limited to specific domains. They don’t have to be generalists. Their model sizes are large, but not massive. One could build new interns – starting from scratch – for millions. If you use an open model, the costs are dramatically lower.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Risks on the horizon. “Decision makers are faced with a world characterised by increasing turbulence, uncertainty, novelty, and ambiguity. These conditions make it more difficult to assess risks when making strategic decisions or planning for the long-term. This study presents a foresight approach to increase preparedness for unexpected developments and the risks they could create.”
• Shared food preparation as a participatory futures methodology. “Developed to address the inherent complexities of participatory processes, TRANSFORM leverages the unifying power of food to hold horizontal spaces for collaboration with and within communities. It champions a departure from conventional approaches, replacing post-its and flipcharts with the intimacy of preparing and sharing a meal.”
• Bryan Alexander’s list of ‘climate-fiction’ books. Lots of great titles in there, in case you need more books for your anti-library.

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• AI transcription tool used in hospitals invents things no one ever said. “But Whisper has a major flaw: It is prone to making up chunks of text or even entire sentences, according to interviews with more than a dozen software engineers, developers and academic researchers. Those experts said some of the invented text — known in the industry as hallucinations — can include racial commentary, violent rhetoric and even imagined medical treatments.”
• Robert Downey Jr: ‘I will sue all future executives who make AI replicas of me’. “Speaking on the On With Kara Swisher podcast, he said: ‘I would like to here state that I intend to sue all future executives just on spec.’ Swisher suggested he’d be dead by then, to which Downey Jr replied: ‘But my law firm will still be very active.’” Also I missed this but he’ll “be returning to the MCU after his long-running stint as Tony Stark, this time playing Doctor Doom, one of Marvel’s biggest villains, in the forthcoming Avengers: Doomsday.” Whaaaa??
• DeepMind and Hugging Face release SynthID to watermark LLM-generated text. “SynthID Text encodes a watermark into AI-generated text in a way that helps determine if a specific LLM produced it. More importantly, it does so without modifying how the underlying LLM works or reducing the quality of the generated text.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Tiny Forests: Australia’s green revolution in urban spaces. “As Australian cities turn into heat islands due to rising temperatures and urban development, a quiet green revolution is happening in the suburbs. Neighbourhoods across the country are planting tiny forests - dense patches of plants that replicate naturally occurring native forests.”
• A radical approach to flooding in the UK: give land back to the sea. “Tidal waters were allowed to flood the Steart Peninsula in 2014 for the first time in centuries. Rather than attempting to resist the sea, the land was given back to it. It was, in the words of Alys Laver, the conservationist who oversees the site, a ‘giant science experiment.’ A decade on, its results might offer a blueprint for how some parts of Britain — and the rest of the world — might adapt to the reality of climate change.” (Via Linkfest 26)
• How climate change exacts a hidden toll on buildings. “It’s not just storms and floods: Wild temperature swings, severe heat and drought are exacting an invisible toll on the built environment.”

Asides

• A brutalist aquarium in Mexico imagines the future after climate change. “The Mexico City-based architect designed an aquarium for the city of Mazatlan from the vantage point of the distant future. For the Sea of Cortez Research Center, her studio imagined a structure rediscovered by people in the year 2289, centuries after it had been overtaken by rising seawaters as a result of climate change. Bilbao designed the aquarium to be reclaimed by the sea.”
• An enormous photo of the Moon zooms in on the cratered lunar topography in incredible detail. “The self-taught Kurdish astrophotographer amassed 81,000 images, which he stitched into a 708-gigabyte composite revealing the intricacies of the lunar topography in stunningly high resolution.”
• A Neuralink rival says its eye implant restored vision in blind people. “After receiving an experimental eye implant as part of a clinical trial, some study participants can now see well enough to read from a book, play cards, and fill in a crossword puzzle despite being legally blind.”