Happy Friday and almost-weekend. Not sure about you, but the beginning of February always feels like winter straining to try to squeeze in the last bits of capacity for miserable cold out of my bones. Everyone is sick of the frost, sick of sitting at home. I’m frustrated, crabby, a silly little misanthrope in my silly little castle. Research is slow but the days go too fast. It’s existential! It’s a little lonely! It’s all in the way the setting sun settles in the pockets of snow left behind by runner’s footprints as you try to make your way around the track without twisting your ankle. Mostly cold oranges and blues.
If you’re new here, on Fridays I send out my week in fragments. I catalog them halfway for my own documenting and halfway as seedlets to start conversations, so please talk to me about them.
Also, Substack has released a new footnotes feature, which means it is officially over for my legibility1.
1. Good tweet (click through for thread)
2. But a nice week for music, couldn’t pick just one for you this time, sorry
You want low-cognitive-load garage?
Isles by Bicep (2021)
You want post-?
[untitled] by mewithoutYou (2018) especially track 2,“Julia [. . .]”
You want gothgaze?
Created in the Image of Suffering by King Woman (2017) especially track 5, “Hierophant”
You want noise drone metal power electronics?
I’ve Seen All I Need to See by The Body (2021)
You want something else?
Maybe next week.
3. Inside the Digital Sensorium
Digitally networked publics are made of a different stuff than the public commons our meaty bodies are used to reasoning about. Aaron Lewis illustrates this difference using a series of synthetic “case studies” about digital users existing in the superbodily space of the online connective tissue.
My phone keeps on telling me “you have a new memory.” Snapchat and Facebook are constantly reminding me of “this day in history” — every day, a new arbitrary anniversary. I mean, it’s one thing to open up an old diary by my own choosing. It’s way different when the past is getting push-notificationed down my throat. My biological memory is designed to resurface information from the past that’s relevant to my current situation. But my digitally augmented memory is a dumb nostalgia machine that dispenses pellets of my past to boost engagement numbers.
You already know this kind of writing is at the top of Nataliya’s Most Addictive Stuff. If you read last week’s post about grocery stores, you know that I actively subscribe to the idea that “interface design is organ design”2. Lewis is now soliciting first-person reports of digital existence:
If you want to help, click here to submit your digital psychology story to the sensorium hotline or leave a voicemail at 224-324-4539. I’ll put together a collection of the stories I receive, and together we can start to regenerate publics in a way that’s rooted in a deep, nuanced understanding of what it means to be a self in the digital age.
4. The first teleoperation interface from Ray Goertz at Argonne National Lab
Goertz built this teleoperation master-slave device as a way for workers to manipulate radioactive materials, which laid the foundation for the huge field of teleoperation as we know it now! I love seeing old inventions like these. It was first a purely mechanical coupling, made up of cables and pulleys, and could do cute things like light cigarettes for pretty ladies.
5. I finished reading The Shock Doctrine
I started reading Naomi Klein’s most infamous book last year in April, after I decided I was done pretending to had read it back when it was trendy (it came out in 2007, so somewhere around 2010). I read it every morning for a month straight, then got distracted with 5% of the book remaining. So I can’t give as thorough a review as I would if the entirety of the book was in my recent memory. And I’m not an economist, which doesn’t help.
The book as I read it focuses on the underside of free-market policies and the laissez-faire Friedmanism that enabled predatory corporate behavior, irresponsible profits, bloodsucking privatization. Mainly, how big business takes advantage of global crises. It felt fitting to read as COVID was picking up, and we can use Klein’s lens to find fault with the exploitative policies of COVID’s winners (example from this week: Amazon threatens to fire workers unless they commit to a 10-hour shift called a “megacycle”) who ride the profit wave of our newly remote and distanced economy.
“On Fire: The Case for the Green New Deal” is the next Klein I want to read; GND is still controversial and maybe this time I’ll read the book while it’s still fresh.
6. Some great news: for the first time in 20 years, no rhinos were poached in Kenya in 2020
Also, this year the Kenya Wildlife Service started implanting every black rhino in their national park with microchips, to help monitor them and prevent poaching and trafficking. A little technology-for-good update for your week.
7. Find of the week: turns out I am generally superior in every way
This week, CMU’s Digital Health Seminar Series hosted Dr. Euan Ashley, a doctor of cardiology and professor of medicine and genetics at Stanford. I was delighted to see myself represented in his presentation, finally, accurately, as “generally superior” and with a significant chance of having a greater life satisfaction than anyone else. I will continue feeling justified going to bed at 10pm, now armed with insights based on data from like 20,000 people.
Yours lost in the footnotes3,
N
I was doing footnotes since 2013 before I ever read my first David Foster Wallace, in case you were wondering and/or a hater
Unfortunately nested footnotes are not yet allowed. For good reason. I would abuse them