It builds alliances as it travels, provokes translation or mistranslation, and creates new publics and debates. By losing its visual substance it recovers some of its political punch and creates a new aura around it.

an “empowering game” aimed at 8-14 year old children to support behavioural change leading to achieve energy reduction in social housing

the institutional response to smart innovation is based on an evaluative mechanism which is driven by metrics of efficiency and a rationale of technocratic and post-political governance

While claiming to increase meaningful forms of direct participation, neoliberal governance works within structuring bureaucratic and ideological path dependencies and often hinges on computational forms of participation which are set already within circumscribed software environments and solution

“As neoliberal citizenship sets loose the individual to take care of itself, it also discursively binds the individual to the well-being of the whole”

ather than fostering subversive ideals of experimentation, city hacking or beta-version infrastructures, smart innovation appears more an exercise of replication via short-term and risk-averse finance

“smartpolitics”

here are concerns as to the extent to which smart city practices in regeneration programmes, such as Living Labs and hackathons, might

By linking imagi-nations and anticipations of future behavior(s) to categorical renderings from com-puterized memory, it may be that digital urbanists today “risk delegating whole sets of decisions and, along with that, the ethics and politics of those decisions, to invis-ible and sentient systems.”

To Jacobs “the city” was not a plan, a grid, or a highway network, it was a disorganized collection of haphazard incidents and acci-dental encounters between strangers

Is maintenance a privilege?

everybody who submits a change to code should be given commit access, in order to reduce the bottleneck of a single maintainer reviewing and approving those changes

I don't think [crowdfunding] meshes entirely well with general open source development; not only is it just a one-time payment, but the idea of rewards often doesn't match well and it requires something you can entirely bound and describe up front.

The goal should not be to move back towards a closed software society, where progress and creativity are constrained, but to sustainably support a public ecosystem in which software can be freely created and distributed.

These newer developers borrow shared code to write what they need, but they are less capable of making substantial contributions back to those projects. Many are also accustomed to thinking of themselves as “users” of open source projects, rather than members of a community.

This shift in values, while inspiring on a macro level, could lead to legal complications for individuals as their projects grow in popularity or are used for commercial purposes.

writers to gain full ownership of their work, have a say in its governance (considered co-owners)

When music fans knew they couldn’t host their own music, link-only websites emerged.

Decades of copyright law were built around the assumption that someone like Bram Cohen didn’t exist.

As Joanne McNeil wrote in Lurking, her excellent people’s history of the internet, “librarians are what the internet is aching for—people on task to care about the past, with respect to the past and also to what it shall bequeath to the future.” Can we reimagine libraries for the digital age?

In the forest, lowered biodiversity doesn’t give high-value crops an advantage: it ultimately reduces productivity, invites rot, pests, and disease, and amplifies the risk and spread of wildfire.

AI-powered “virtual playground,” where curation and discovery, regardless of form, is handled by an algorithm.

Chinese roots

Shanghai-based pseudonymous social network

free of the pressure that often comes with the complex and delicate social relations in the physical world.

platforms like Facebook are ultimately limited by the very physical connections they seek to transcend

spaces to celebrate individuality and build collective identity. Public parks, he argued, could help weave a greater, more egalitarian “we.”

a concept from Simondon: not identity but the differentiation process that makes it possible for me to become an individual. This is what he calls individuation.

neoliberal unconscious

The social production of loneliness, competitive behavior, and aggression are as real as economic exploitation.

Over the past twenty years there has been a transfer of embodied social time into a disembodied empty time.

In 2019 I had the impression that the various protests diverged and lacked a common motive and language.

final acceleration of already existing psychological and economic tendencies

There is a sharp increase in suicide among the young population, a rise of 39 percent in Italy.

the famous words of a Canadian doctor that warned against sexual intercourse during the Covid period. At that moment I became aware of the transformation of proximity, meaning the relations of bodies in space, meaning the characterization of the body of the other as a sanitary danger. If you are seventy, like me, this may be an intellectual object of study, but when you’re sixteen this may change your perception of the future.

biopolitics

alternative paradigm to the state of the art of “intelligent buildings”, which rely heavily on technical infrastructures

many architectural approaches follow a modular logic of bricks or panels of mycelial composites

After the exhibition, the bricks were shredded and dispersed on soil. 60 days later they were degraded

architects can explore the ‘growth algorithms’ of such structures and translate or simulate them with the use of digital tools into intelligent designs and resilient urban infrastructures

In contemporary urban discourses, where “data” rhetoric is often frothy and fetishistic, we seem to have lost critical perspective on how urban data become meaningful spatial information or translate into place-based knowledge.

urban intelligence comes in multiple forms, that it is produced within environmental as well as cultural contexts, that it is reshaped over the longue durée by elemental exposure and urban development, that it can be lost or forgotten.

whose interests it serves

As Mumford understood, there is more than information processing going on here. Urban information is made, commodified, accessed, secreted, politicized, and operationalized.

“As technical solutions to social problems, information and communications technologies encapsulate the promise of order over disarray … as a path to an emancipatory politics of modernity.”

We’re transforming the idealized topology of the open web and Internet of Things into urban form.

infrastructural nodes (known as “Links”) that may someday exchange data with autonomous vehicles, public transit, and other urban systems.

how to defeat them

It is as if the house is waiting to stage a tragedy, but must find the right actors. As it searches for them, it enacts fragments of the action, as if rehearsing

Are we meant to infer from this that the house can only influence inhabitants with some kind of vulnerability, such as a couple in a dysfunctional relationship?

the house soon becomes sinister and threatening.

absolutely identical in every detail.

Although computers cannot be intrinsically “evil” (unless so programmed), they can still “go crazy,”—malfunction, that is, which is what often happens in speculative fiction narratives,9 which belong to the broader theme of “technology going awry” rather than to the supernatural.

It seems the tendency to anthropomorphize houses is ancient.

A truly sentient house is one that has some kind of will of its own. It may not have human sen-tience but nevertheless displays a capacity to react to events and act according to an agenda of its own.

Although each agreement was distinct, in recent years an important pattern has emerged of conservationists and Indigenous people working together by way of land transfers. The effect has been twofold: protecting ecologically vital spaces while helping to right historic injustices by returning properties to their original caretakers.

Talk of that military option led the CIA Director to predict that “we are on the way to a right-wing coup”.

that U.S. occupation might be clashing with Afghan identity and giving the Taliban a significant advantage was rarely considered

This thinking extends to ordinary Afghans as well, many of whom do not subscribe to the Taliban’s extremist political vision but are sympathetic to their invocation of Islamic principles against foreign occupiers.

Carmen Maria Machado

It’s a sense of passing

I paint them desert colors, compulsively.

sintered stone

harnessed and catheterized

casus belli

America names its helicopters for the people it destroyed.

As the digital has merged with our physical lives, there’s simply no longer a need to distinguish between the two in the way that people did just a couple of decades ago.

suggesting a renewed American exceptionalism

But in sacrificing a sense of utopian ambition to give its early users something closer to their physical surroundings, the site also enacted a spatial politics rooted in American history, bound to the nation’s history of settler colonialism and suburban sprawl.

Barlow believed that an intangible internet transcended the material differences between rich and poor, placing all on equal footing in a “civilization of the Mind” that reconfigured distinctions found in three-dimensional space.

“Doctors are supposed to be trusted authorities, a patient’s primary gateway to healing. But for fat people, they are a source of unique and persistent trauma”

It also doesn’t mention the attempt to pass sugar taxes to get people to curb sugar consumption.

Just 4 percent of agricultural subsidies go to fruits and vegetables.

how much attention and support they received while they were on it

BMI report cards

offering no further specifics

students receive an average of just 19 hours of nutrition education over four years of instruction

cultural differences

I had one egg for breakfast and I feel fine.

smoking is a behavior; being fat is not

the patients who were also classified as fat had a worse attitude and were less likely to follow their advice

the first thing you will be told is that it would all get better if you could just put down the Cheetos

Her period would come back.

Studies

Network nodes vary in weight

Internet adapts itself to suit the realities of each region

"Search engines are at the heart of the Internet edifice. They guarantee the “visibility” (access) of Internet space by controlling the hyperlinks."

But the borders between the groups will most likely be blurred, with individuals, groups, and families moving between social spheres.

We cannot, en masse, return to a pre-civilized way of life. And honestly, most of us don’t want to. We refuse a blanket rejection of everything that civilization has brought us. We need to look forward, not backwards.

My dictionary defines civilization as “the stage of human social development and organization that is considered most advanced.” Aside from being a sort of useless definition, this points out the prejudice inherent in civilization. It says: “We are advanced. You are primitive. What’s more, history and development is purely linear in nature, progress only moves forward, and any deviation from the course we are on is regressive.”

Many appropriate technology projects (though certainly not all) involve people from the Global North designing for rather than with recipient communities

But there is the attendant danger that the energy transition be treated as a given, a narrative necessity for the platforming of politics grounded in identity, while the actual rough politics required to make that transition happen in the first place fades into the background of the celebration.

The fact that there is no abject, no excrement, in Solarpunk belies a sinister omission. A different value system would likely change the abject rather than rid us of it.

To think about a renewable future we currently draw on fantastical modes that are at least partly entrenched in pre-modern aesthetics and structures — this mode of thinking is a “forward looking memory,” perhaps, but it is also problematic because of its pastoral or nostalgic nature.

Technologies of representation