No.176 Asides

🇺🇸 Highly recommended by a couple of reliable sources but I haven’t read it yet, not feeling the 34min read about US politics this week. Keeping it for later though. Are We Entering a New Political Era? “The neoliberal order seems to be collapsing. A generation of young activists is trying to insure that it’s replaced by progressive populism, not by the fascist right.”
👀 💭 🇮🇹 These locations may look eerily familiar, but none actually exist. “And in an auteurial twist, this AI wasn’t trained on all the images of the world to be able to dream anything at all. Instead, think of the AI more like a child that was raised on the streets of Italy. So its entire point of reference are canals and porticoes, cobblestones and sea. It’s an AI model that’s limited by design, built to have a specifically Italian point of view, to capture the nostalgic sensation of visiting a specific place.”
🇨🇳 📚 Sinofuturism and Chinese Science Fiction: An Introduction to the Alternative Sinofuturisms (中华未来主义) Special Issue. “the very label of “Sinofuturism” developed out of the same Orientalizing impulses that previously relegated China to a space of backwardness and barbarism (Niu, Huang, Roh 2015) and which now attribute to it a projected futurity. Yet this Western label is one that Chinese authors and artists have appropriated and weaponized for their own creative ends, without necessarily sharing unified goals.”
🌳 Spoiler: it’s trees! Great 🧵 with a number of examples. What if I told you there was a single intervention we could deliver in our cities that would cool them during heatwaves, reduce flooding, scrub pollutants from the air, boost biodiversity, improve public health, and even reduce crime? You wouldn’t believe me. But it’s true.
🇬🇧 🗓 Dooooo iiiiiitt!! Four-day working week would slash UK carbon footprint, report says. “Advocates say reducing working hours would create jobs, improve people’s mental and physical health and strengthen families and communities. A recent report found the change could prevent a steep rise in unemployment post-Covid pandemic and that most larger companies would be able to cope with the change through higher productivity or by raising prices.”
🇺🇸 🚗 🌳 Yes!! Can Removing Highways Fix America’s Cities? ”Highways radically reshaped cities, destroying dense downtown neighborhoods, dividing many Black communities and increasing car dependence. Now, some cities are looking to take them out. But reconnecting neighborhoods is more complicated than breaking them apart.”
🤬 Warmongers gonna war. Drone Autonomously ‘Hunted Down’ Human Target, UN Experts Say. “A “lethal” weaponized drone “hunted down” and “remotely engaged” human targets without its handlers’ say-so during a conflict in Libya last year, according to a United Nations report first covered byNew Scientist this week. Whether there were any casualties remains unclear, but if confirmed, it would likely be the first recorded death carried out by an autonomous killer robot.”