Rambunctiously anti-disciplinary ⊗ After crypto ⊗ The perils of smashing the past

This week →{.caps} Rambunctiously anti-disciplinary ⊗ After crypto ⊗ The perils of smashing the past ⊗ Mini forests ⊗ Small groups

A year ago →{.caps} A favourite in issue No.179 was How to think beyond ourselves by James Cartwright.

Rambunctiously anti-disciplinary, an interview with Shannon Mattern

Superb interview with Shannon Mattern, who has not only done a lot of super interesting thinking on a variety of topic, not only reinvents how she teaches those things, but also speaks in a jealousy-inducing clear and erudite fashion.

In terms of topics covered, if this newsletter didn’t exist, I might declare this transcript as a founding document. The interview covers virtually every topic I write about here, or aim to better understand, all in super clear, fascinating, and generative ways. Design, computing, trees, epistemology, cities, urban intelligences, librairies (“librairies as statements of what matters”), worldbuilding, creation of knowledge, anti-disciplinarity, metaphors, technosolutionism, “‘grafting,’ and ‘patching’ as poiesis, as method,” “living in a world of many worlds,” a university of the future. A must listen if there’s ever been one.

There’s too much in the interview to summarize here, but one point I’ve taken particular note of and will likely come back to in a post is where Mattern talks about the city as a home for her thinking, a place to zoom in and out from. I include cities often in the newsletter and have been asked why on a couple of occasions, and this will now be my revisionary history reason why. She says, “==the city is a really productive and ripe area where a lot of different disciplines are converging in their thinking, it’s already a very interdisciplinary field of study. I wanted to take advantage of that, but then use the city as my starting point to think, to scale down, to think about the media objects, the information infrastructures, the architectures within them, and then scale up and think about these larger systemic things==.” The next day I read this by Drew Austin (which would have been featured on its own but is paywalled), where he goes in the same direction: “One of the reasons I like saying that I write about cities is that they’re a pretext for writing about almost any cultural phenomenon (this is increasingly true of technology too, along with many other topics). ==Cities are simply dense assemblages of all the things that humans do, so if something involves people, it usually involves cities as well.==”

As trees become data points, they are all too readily cast as easy fixes for profound problems, trees as tools of carbon capture, tall timber as an instrument for sustainable construction, green barriers as sound buffers along roadways, sylvan solutions to systemic snafus. ==The media scholar, Jennifer Gabrys argues that such approaches are efforts to frame and tame hard problems, wicked problems, in computational terms. In other words, these technological tools promote technosolutionist responses to problems that are simultaneously ecological, cultural, social, economic, and political.”== […]

They are spaces of intergenerational learning, they’re spaces of kind of civic engagement. And also where other social services fall short because of neglect and underfunding. Public libraries often have to pick up the slack there. That’s not something we’re typically going to ask an archive to do. So just the fact that there is so much that they’re expected to do and that they manage it for the most part. […]

I’m trying to look at how cities are to some degree kind of computational, they’re kind of information processing activities happening there, but they’re also spaces of kind of serendipity and arts and poiesis. And grafting proved a really useful metaphor and method to think about not only the combination of the art and the engineering, the art and the science, but also a mode of writing too.

After crypto

For the bulk of this piece by Yancey Strickler, we are quite aligned. I think he provides a pretty even-handed and healthily sceptical overview of crypto v currencies v blockchains v Web3 and makes a good case for why he jumped in. There are intriguing use cases for this type of technology if it were being used differently (+ the energy issue, which he doesn’t mention). Here are his “three changes made possible by blockchains that I couldn’t unsee,” each followed by my own short take.

“The decline of platform lock-in,” aspirational at this point, despite the possibilities of the technology, centralisation is still here or just around the corner, so are gate keepers, just different one. The potential is there though for a blockchain to allow this. “Distributing ownership and influence outside an organization,” that one is almost closer than escaping platform lock-in, remains to be seen at which scale that can work. A few very involved people can definitely work, but can it with thousands of “owners” who mostly just use an organisation? For example, can a group à la Bandcamp scale when … 30 people run the thing but thousands have a share/say without it becoming just team vs shareholders? “Permanent agnostic archiving,” this is where I’m most dubious, because the use case Strickler presents is good, but there are soooo many other cases where you are completely in your right to want something to be taken down and this permanent version can’t. He talks about a “catalog of things creator have made” which might imply pointers instead of the actual content, but then aren’t you back to servers that can be taken offline? It’s nice to have the possibility of greater permanence for some things, but I don’t think the use cases are as numerous as some seem to think.

Overall, a useful read where I’m very aligned with his vision, but still see so many places where things can (have been) go wrong, that I’m still largely sceptical of the space. Which is why he’s starting an organisation and I’m just writing about it, I guess!

Few words are as divisive as “crypto.” Say it and half the room walks away out of principle, a smaller group hisses in disgust, and a last group leans in, some closer than feels comfortable if you’re honest. […]

[I]n all previous incarnations of the Internet, it was rare to see platforms directly reward community members and creators in any real way, at least beyond tote bags and form letters. […]

Blindly dismissing any project that touches a blockchain because it shares the same plumbing as crypto is like missing the forest for the logging industry. ==So long as everything that touches a public ledger is vilified as a scam and part of some dystopian future, the number of responsible people and teams who feel inspired to thoughtfully explore projects that see beyond the constraints of our Web2 systems will be limited.==

The perils of smashing the past

Nathan Gardels makes a parallel between today’s radical technologists and Filippo Tommaso Marinetti and his fellow Italian Futurists. Their 1909 manifesto “glorified the velocity of all things industrially muscular, from cars to airplanes, that disrupted the time and space of stodgy old traditional societies.” It’s nothing new per se, but clearly framed, portraying quite well our current moment, and the implications of widespread disruption.

==In their enthusiasm to smash the past, what the futurists didn’t see was how the broken social pieces would seek shelter from the storm by re-forming through identity politics that ended up in the fascist movements that fomented world war. That is something to ponder in our own fraught time of fragmentation.== […]

Novelists like Jonathan Franzen see a “perpetual anxiety” gripping society. Similarly, Turkish novelist Orhan Pamuk, citing William Wordsworth, speaks of “a strangeness in my mind,” the sense that “I am not of this hour nor of this place.” […]

==We live either on the cusp of an entirely new era, or on the brink of a return to an all-too-familiar, regressive and darker past. How to reconcile these opposite movements is the daunting summons for governance in the decades ahead.== […]

Thus, getting governance right by moving deliberatively and fixing things is the first order of business if we are to escape the fate that befell a disrupted world in the last century.

Shorts

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Planting trees isn’t enough. Here’s why we need tiny man-made forests →{.caps} “They were planting 200-square-foot dense native forests as a response to a road expansion near their home. It clicked with me because they're not just planting trees, they're actually planting a native ecosystem. One small group of people can restore an ecosystem.”

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The small group →{.caps} “Around a dozen members is the sweet spot of social motivation: small enough to know everyone, yet large enough that the group won’t collapse if one or two members’ enthusiasm wanes; small enough that you are not daunted by competing with the whole world, yet large enough that you still need to be on your toes to keep up.”

Futures, foresights, forecasts & fabulations

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Futures, foresights, forecasts & fabulations →{.caps} The End of the Cow: And Other Emerging Issues (2022) by Sohail Inayatullah and Ivana Milojević ⊗ Kevin Kelly on How to Future  “[T]here is an art to believing in impossible things well. It’s more like being open to possibilities, to listening to what is possible. So it technically not about believing what is impossible as it is in expanding what we believe is possible.” ⊗ Not just for technologists, quite a few good reads in this list of 25 Books Every Technologist Should Read.

Asides

• 🫧 🚀 🤯 🇺🇸 Is it geoengineering if it’s in space? Either way, I quite like this one! MIT researchers propose using Space Bubble-shield to reflect the sun. “The Space Bubbles research project proposes floating a ‘raft’ made of frozen bubbles at the L1 Lagrangian Point.”
• 🤩 🇲🇽 Gorgeous longscroll. A Visual Guide to the Aztec Pantheon. “Through these illustrations, I hope to commemorate the complexity of the Aztec Pantheon, make the academic research more accessible, and show how this civilization is still alive in our global culture.”
• 🎈 🤩 🇪🇸 Air Nostrum orders fleet of Airlander 10 airships. “Held aloft by helium and powered electricity, they will seat 100 passengers, and typically fly 300-400 kilometers (186-249 miles), according to the manufacturer. Don't expect a lightning-fast flight, however – the maximum speed will be 80 mph (129 kph).”
• 😍 🏝 🇫🇲 Nan Madol: “In the space between things”. “[C]lose to 100 artificial rectilinear islets spread over 200 acres that are thought to have housed up to 1000 people.” (This one and the next two via Surjan Singh for The Prepared.)
• 🤯 🇵🇪 💧 💨 The ancient Peruvian mystery solved from space. “A series of canals brought the water, trapped underground, to the areas where it was needed; anything left was stored in surface reservoirs. To help keep it moving, chimneys were excavated above the canals in the shape of corkscrewing funnels. These funnels let wind into the canals, which forced the water through the system.”
• 🤯 🇧🇯 🇳🇬 Story of cities #5: Benin City, the mighty medieval capital now lost without trace. “With its mathematical layout and earthworks longer than the Great Wall of China, Benin City was one of the best planned cities in the world when London was a place of ‘thievery and murder.’”
• ☀️ 🇺🇸 US Army deploys its first floating solar array. “It’s part of a growing current of support in the US for ‘floatovoltaics.’”
• 🦈 🇺🇸 The new wildlife in town: Sharks. “Certain kinds of wildlife are notorious for thriving in urban settings. Think rats, rock pigeons and even the occasional coyote. Now, Florida scientists have added another creature to the list: sharks.”

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