Apparently my site may be described as a bit of a “digital garden”:
Welcome to the world of “digital gardens.” These creative reimaginings of blogs have quietly taken nerdier corners of the internet by storm. A growing movement of people are tooling with back-end code to create sites that are more collage-like and artsy, in the vein of Myspace and Tumblr—less predictable and formatted than Facebook and Twitter. Digital gardens explore a wide variety of topics and are frequently adjusted and changed to show growth and learning, particularly among people with niche interests. Through them, people are creating an internet that is less about connections and feedback, and more about quiet spaces they can call their own.
An article from Kottke.org contrasts two examples infrastructural politics: the famous case of Robert Moses’s bridge to limit who can access a New York beach, and the recent controversies on the Trump administration trying to dismantle the US postal servervice ahead of the November elections:
The situation here is reversed — e.g. “it’s very hard to rebuild a bridge once it’s torn down” — but the lesson is the same. If you take mailboxes off the streets and junk sorting machines, it’s difficult to put them back, particularly when everyone’s baseline shifts over the next few months and the decreased capacity and delays are normalized (and then exploited for political advantage). Destroying the United States Post Office would be far easier and cheaper than rebuilding it.
Theirtube is brilliant project from designer and developer Tomo Kihara where you can discover how Youtube filter bubbles look for different people:
Theirtube is a Youtube filter bubble simulator that provides a look into how videos are recommended on other people’s YouTube. Users can experience how the YouTube home page would look for six different personas. Each persona simulates the viewing environment of real Youtube users who experienced being inside a recommendation bubble through recreating a Youtube account with a similar viewing history. TheirTube shows how YouTube’s recommendations can drastically shape someone’s experience on the platform and, as a result, shape their worldview.
I find the way skateboarders use the urban landscape as their playground just fascinating. Elements in the city which we take for granted or see as useless suddenly can get a completely different meaning by skateboarders. In the following video from Vox gives from great examples of the history of some “legendary spots.”
Via Open Culture.
The following two articles give some valuable insights on the history of epidemiology and public health:
An article from Open Culture describes why “A Rare Smile Captured in a 19th Century Photograph” is peculiar in the history of photography:
For one thing, we are not used to seeing them in old photographs, especially ones from the 19th century. When photography was first invented, exposures could take 45 minutes. Having a portrait taken meant sitting stock still for a very long time, so smiling was right out. It was only near the end of the 19th century that shutter speeds improved, as did emulsions, meaning that spontaneous moments could be captured. Still, smiling was not part of many cultures. It could be seen as unseemly or undignified, and many people rarely sat for photos anyway. Photographs were seen by many people as a “passage to immortality” and seriousness was seen as less ephemeral.
Due to the Covid-19 pandemic there has been a vast increase in conspiracy theories being spread. Tanya Basu at MIT Technology Review wrote an article titled How to talk to conspiracy theorists—and still be kind. The tips are based on insights from experts and r/ChangeMyView subreddit moderators.
In an interview with Bruno Latour by Nikolaj Schultz, Bruno Latour discusses why critical zone scientists have a different epistemology compared to other scientists:
Epistemologically, they are far from the other sciences that I have been following for many years. And since they underline the discrepancies between their observations and the chemical reactions, it means that they are redescribing and rematerializing the question of territory, which we simultaneously try to redescribe and rematerialize in political and social theory. This is also where there is a link between Lovelock’s discovery, the political question of geosocial classes and critical zones.
Read the full interview here.