Topological fetishism in Greenland ⊗ Everything is in-between ⊗ No longer “a machine with feathers”

The network state and topological fetishism in Greenland

Zane Griffin Talley Cooper’s (now that, my friends, is a name!) essay presents a clear-eyed critique of Silicon Valley’s “Network State” fantasies, particularly Dryden Brown’s Praxis Nation “project” in Greenland. Cooper juxtaposes the lived agricultural reality of South Greenland—with its research stations, sheep farms, and potato fields—against Brown’s disconnected vision of a libertarian techno-utopia. The author effectively dismantles Brown’s characterization of Greenland as a “hardcore frontier” ripe for “terraformation experiments,” while promoting AI-generated fantasies of building “an urban development for pioneers.” Cooper’s perspective on Greenland’s actual inhabitants and their relationship with the land is evident, particularly when describing Upernaviarsuk’s agricultural research station as representative of “an actually existing and actively evolving technological future” responsive to real local needs.

Cooper traces a historical pattern of European topological fetishism toward Greenland, connecting Brown’s Praxis Nation to Renaissance-era myths like the fictional city of Alba (which I’d never heard of). The author draws a compelling distinction between topology (flat, binary imaginaries) and topography (the lived, physical reality of landscapes), arguing that land “can never be code.” This parallel allows Cooper to critique not just Brown but the entire tech industry’s disconnected approach to place, which treats land as exploitable and disposable rather than relational. He concludes with a call for technologies that “fit the topography” and “complement the social and ecological contours of place”—a vision that respects Greenland’s people and land rather than imposing fantasies of digital sovereignty that serve only venture capitalists and techno-libertarians.

More → Also on nation states and crazy billionaires, The rise of end times fascism by Astra Taylor starts great but was too strong on the bleak for me to feature this week. If you’re well rested, it’s a good read.

On this small island, rolling hills of low grasses and blossoming shrubbery are peppered with tilled fields and greenhouses; dozens of sheep graze in the distance. In these fields, agricultural researchers breed Arctic-hardened varieties of lettuce, cabbage, potatoes; and in the greenhouses, tomatoes, berries, and other vegetables. […]

AI and its associated imaginaries (Web3/crypto, the TESCREAL bundle, the Network State, etc.) are all topological fetishes inherently antithetical to the topographical realities of our lived environment. Land is both a physical and affective thing — an embodied experience built through ongoing relations with environments. […]

It is a financialized state, able to rapidly ravage, exploit, and exit any geography that might resist its strange, feudal forms. Buttressed by “techno-colonial imaginaries…frontier self-determinism, and digital nomadism,” the politics of exit are at the conceptual core of the Network State. […]

But we know the truth, even if we don’t always want to see it. Just futures for all require interventions and technologies that fit the topography, that build on and complement the social and ecological contours of place. The real tech future isn’t in the cloud, but on land.

Everything is in-between

Douglas Rushkoff reflects on his struggle to follow current events in a time when news cycles move at unprecedented speed. What begins as frustration with the relentless pace of headlines—from the Felon’s election to Carter’s death, from Gaza conflicts to AI developments—evolves into a profound realization about where we should focus our attention. Rather than fixating on the discrete “things” happening in the news, Rushkoff advocates for attending to care, to what exists “in-between”: the connections, relationships, and ground-level realities that form the true fabric of our lives.

Through a personal story about his daughter’s diagnosis with endometriosis—a condition that exists in the “in-between” spaces of organs and is often overlooked by medical specialists focused on specific body parts—Rushkoff creates a powerful metaphor for our cultural moment. He describes his own evolution from an “agent of change” to an “agent of care,” suggesting that mutual aid, compassion, and direct human connection might be more effective paths to meaningful social transformation than traditional activism alone. Without dismissing the importance of staying informed, Rushkoff proposes that limiting our news consumption and redirecting that energy toward immediate communal needs could help us build resilience against upheaval while reducing our dependence on failing institutions.

More → “In-between” organs reminded me of the interstitium explained in Invisible Landscapes, featured in No.292. The “in-between” the “things” reminded me of Dan Hill’s Dark Matter and Trojan Horses.

As for making sense of the world and what’s happening, I don’t think it’s a matter of focusing on those things, but trying to get a sense of what is in between those things. Less attention to the individual pictures on the TV set, and more attention to what is happening on the ground. […]

Anything like true social justice, mutual aid, or “team human” as I’ve come to call it, happens in that mycelial, connected, doula space where compassion resides and domination has no place: there are no subjects and objects, just relationships. […]

I’m not talking about socialism so much as the social. Together, we can retrieve and rebuild the social reality: the inter-human and ideally inter-species connections that actually define living existence, and serve as the culture in which everything else grows.

When that chickadee is no longer “a machine with feathers”

New research on animal intelligence is reshaping our understanding of animals as sentient beings deserving of ethical consideration, challenging long-held views that regard them merely as “machines in fur and feathers.” This shift in perspective has implications for how we approach conservation and wildlife management, as empathy for individual animals becomes more prominent in discussions about their treatment. While attitudes towards domestic animals have evolved to some extent, wild animals are still often overlooked in terms of moral consideration and representation in policy-making.

Ever more people understand animals—not only dogs and cats and other companions, but wild creatures too—as thinking, feeling beings to whom humans have ethical obligations; whose interests merit consideration not only in terms of species and populations, but as individuals. […]

Knowing that you are you is a capacity so fundamental to human experience that it’s practically impossible to imagine notbeing self-aware. But until recently, this was thought to be exceptionally rare among other animals, possessed only by other great apes, elephants, bottlenose dolphins, magpies, manta rays, and perhaps cleaner wrasse fish. […]

Not only do they describe the emotional richness of species in which one would expect to find it, such as stressed-out dolphins or parrots for whom joy is contagious, but in unexpected creatures: starlings who feel better after bathing, lake sturgeon who are less stressed by extreme heat when in the company of their kin, even bumblebees who enjoy playing.

§ Clara Lin Hawking on the recent TED talk between Chris Anderson and OpenAI’s Sam Altman. I didn’t submit myself to the 47 minutes talk, but the quote she highlights in her post is real, and her opinion worth reading. “There is a line where technological optimism turns into absolute cultural nihilism; a worldview in which human experience, creativity, suffering, beauty, and moral responsibility are no longer flawed and precious, but considered obsolete, rendered irrelevant or inferior. This wasn’t a slip of the tongue or overreach. This was the moment Altman showed his hand. His once-visionary ambition has given way to a grim view of the future, one where our limitations are no longer seen as human, but as inconvenient.”

Futures, Fictions & Fabulations

• Design fiction worksheet. Julian calls it a worksheet, I’d call it a syllabus, great list of resources to learn everything about design fiction, from the co-coiner himself. “A cousin of the more prose-based form of imagining we’re calling Science Fiction — is a strategic tool. With it, we create artifacts that are like material cultural allusions/implications meant to provoke thoughtful reflections that can inspire innovation and strategy.”
• The Otherworld Times. “Started on the simplest of conceits – if films invent worlds what are the investigative journalists in those worlds writing? The hope is that this will open up films we know well to a new way of looking – what does Jurassic Park say about unchecked corporate power?” (Via the same Julian’s Near Future Laboratory Discord.)

Algorithms, Automations & Augmentations

• Anthropic just analyzed 700,000 Claude conversations — and found its AI has a moral code of its own. “Claude largely upholds the company’s ‘helpful, honest, harmless’ framework while adapting its values to different contexts — from relationship advice to historical analysis. This represents one of the most ambitious attempts to empirically evaluate whether an AI system’s behavior in the wild matches its intended design.”
• 8 principles for the future of AI. “With the publication of the first three interviews in the Newsweek AI Impact series, it is a good time to reflect and distill the essence of what we have learned to date. The remarkable thing for me is the level of coherence and alignment among the views of the first three interviewees, despite their different backgrounds and focus areas: roboticist Rodney Brooks; neuroscientist David Eagleman; and AI innovator Yann LeCun.”
• New Huawei AI chip ships to Chinese customers as soon as May. “The chip fills a gap in the market for China’s booming AI industry, since the US has repeatedly banned Nvidia from selling its chips without an export license.”

Built, Biosphere & Breakthroughs

• Sadly for China, rare Earth elements aren’t actually all that rare. “The export controls China announced earlier this month cover samarium, gadolinium, terbium, dysprosium, lutetium, scandium, and yttrium—seven elements that belong to what is known as the rare earth family. They are called ‘rare’ not because of their scarcity but because they often are mixed with other mineral resources and can be hard to separate out.”
• Two fusion firms unveil stellarator blueprints. Companies promise commercial reactors in the 2030s. “Stellarators, while theoretically simpler to operate, are notoriously difficult to design and build. Recent advances in computational power, high-temperature superconducting (HTS) magnets, and AI-enhanced optimization of magnet geometries are changing the game, helping researchers to uncover patterns that lead to simpler, faster, and cheaper stellarator designs.”
• China’s EV tech leaps forward: CATL unveils battery with 932-mile range. “The battery system balances multiple different chemistries, including familiar formulas like Nickel Cobalt Manganese (NCM) chemistry and Lithium Iron Phosphate (LFP). It also contains CATL’s ‘self-forming anode’ technology, which increases energy density by 60%.”

Asides

• I really love this Silicon Valley crosswalk buttons apparently hacked to imitate Musk, Zuckerberg voices and this Seattle crosswalk signals hacked to imitate Jeff Bezos’ voice! “A voice claiming to be Zuckerberg says that ‘it’s normal to feel uncomfortable or even violated as we forcefully insert AI into every facet of your conscious experience. And I just want to assure you, you don’t need to worry because there’s absolutely nothing you can do to stop it.’”
• A graphene biosensor could monitor blood pressure and more. “In search of thinner wearable sensors, Deji Akinwande and Nanshu Lu, professors at the University of Texas at Austin, created graphene electronic tattoos (GETs) in 2017. Their first GETs, about 500 nanometers thick, were applied just like the playful temporary tattoos that kids wear: The user simply wets a piece of paper to transfer the graphene, supported by a polymer, onto the skin.”
• What’s going on inside Io, Jupiter’s volcanic moon?. “A leading theory has been that just below the moon’s crust hides a global magma ocean, a vast contiguous cache of liquid rock. This theory dovetails neatly with several observations, including ones showing a roughly uniform distribution of Io’s volcanoes, which seem to be tapping the same omnipresent, hellish source of melt.”