02025-08-29 | Uncategorized
Craig Mod walks through Shibuya, Tokyo
Something happened in this last decade the world over — in consumerism and politics and city planning, in education (smartphones in the classroom) and the way we consume news (smartphones everywhere), in how addicted we are to dopamine (smartphones always in hand) and how incapable so many of us are of standing in quiet thought for even a ten-second escalator ride, in how there is an irrepressible and ravenous hunger to reduce complexity (“Vaccines, BAD!”) to the ten-second sound bite — that has infused the masses with a kind of thinking that, to those of us who aren’t eternally online, who haven’t binged Fox News for twenty years or who don’t clock six hours a day of TikTok, feels utterly foreign and unknowable. Not even in the “you’re just getting old” sort of way (though I’m sure there’s that, too), but more cleaving, more incongruous. There’s a growing collection of us who feel eternally gaslit, like the whole of the world has shifted into a configuration that can’t possibly be true, and yet here it is. These are our leaders? These are our policies? This is how we develop a city?
02025-08-08 | Uncategorized
Evolutionary biologist David Sloan Wilson has found that competition makes sense only when we consider the unit of evolution to be the individual. When the focus shifts to the level of a group, cooperation is a better model, not only for surviving but for thriving. In a recent interview, author Richard Powers comments, “There is symbiosis at every single level of living things, and you cannot compete in a zero-sum game with creatures upon whom your existence depends.” Serviceberries discovered this long ago, and we humans need to catch up. And yet, we continue to operate from the foundation of competition.
The Serviceberry – Robin Wall Kimmerer
02025-07-22 | Uncategorized
“Spotify is publishing new, AI-generated songs on the official pages of artists who died years ago without the permission of their estates or record labels,” reports 404 Media.
This scandal came to light because of an AI song attributed to Blaze Foley, who died in 1989. The bogus track is accompanied by an AI-generated image of a man who bears no resemblance to the singer.
LINK
02025-04-26 | Uncategorized
I love elephantear from the album Rain Poems and created a longer version of the piece:
02025-04-24 | Uncategorized
Danial Lanois plays slide guitar:
sometimes the flow of melody feels like we can hear a person thinking and dreaming…
02025-04-21 | Uncategorized
We became reliant on the dream of social media as The Great Conversation and a giant real-time discovery engine, and lauded it as such, when in fact social media’s fated final form was as a user-generated supermarket tabloid.
Warren Ellis
