Alan Jacobs unpacking some of Hartmut Rosa’s book, Social Acceleration. Interesting view of a phenomenon of acceleration along three dimensions but I’m including it here for this Virilio quote.
Rosa often uses in the book a phrase by the cultural theorist Paul Virilio: “frenetic standstill” — the widespread sense that the world around us is in constant flux and yet nothing essential is happening — nothing essential can happen. (There’s a fascinating section of the book on the ways that depression is a natural response to this and therefore the characteristic disease of late modernity.)
- 💀🇬🇷 Apidima 1 Is the Oldest Human Fossil Outside Africa. “‘It suggests that early Homo sapiens groups got farther than we may have previously thought, occasionally occupying territories that later became that of Neanderthals.’ … A similar cycle of competition, where Neanderthals and humans repeatedly replaced each other, seems to have happened in the Levant, the Middle Eastern region that includes Israel and Syria.”
- 🌚 SpaceIL’s Crashed Spacecraft Spilled Tardigrades on the Moon. Related, I think Ito’s use of “cosmos” is too … broad? But he’s definitely on to an important line of thinking here: Space Exploration and the Age of the Anthropocosmos.
- 🛰 Imaging the entire Earth, every day. Great animated visual of the various satellite constellations operated by Planet. There’s also a companion piece with more details and great pictures.
- 🇸🇬 These insects are helping Singapore save the planet. The city’s “first urban insect farm, where black soldier fly larvae are bred for a very special purpose: to recycle Singapore’s food waste… Each month, they convert about 6.5 tonnes of food waste into 2,700 litres of organic fertiliser – and, sometimes, become food themselves” [Bad title.]
- 🤣🎭🏰 Shakespeare geek meets Dungeons & Dragons geek in this Delaney King 🧵 on Twitter: Macbeth: Is this a dagger I see before me? DM: Roll for perception.
- 🕵🏼♂️ Excellent biometric privacy 🧵 by Natasha Singer on Twitter 1/ In a landmark decision that must be sending shivers down the spine of Silicon Valley, the Ninth Circuit today ruled that Facebook must face a class action suit claiming that its facial recognition practices violated an Illinois biometric privacy law.
- 🚰 A Quarter of Humanity Faces Looming Water Crises. “Today, among cities with more than 3 million people, World Resources Institute researchers concluded that 33 of them, with a combined population of over 255 million, face extremely high water stress, with repercussions for public health and social unrest… By 2030, the number of cities in the extremely high stress category is expected to rise to 45 and include nearly 470 million people.”
- Schoolchildren in China work overnight to produce Amazon Alexa devices “The teenagers – drafted in from schools and technical colleges in and around the central southern city of Hengyang – are classified as “interns”, and their teachers are paid by the factory to accompany them. Teachers are asked to encourage uncooperative pupils to accept overtime work on top of regular shifts.”