Quote from the book “Soul Mountain” by Gao Xingjian. The protagonist is trying to find ancient forests and follows some biologists who are tracking and studying pandas. He asks what scientific value there is in trying to save the giant panda:
The video series “Dissolving Realities” by digital artist Ruben Fro are disturbing, yet fascinating. Via @Kottke.
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AT Spui25 in Amsterdam for the book launch of “Secrecy and Methods in Security Research”. The pannelists gave presentations about their chapters in the book and discussed how they deal with secrecy in research. One common idea that the authors in this book tackle is to see secrecy not as an obstancle, but as a way to understand an organisation. In this way secrecy becomes productive or a research object of itself.
As a long time ago player of the online role-playing game World of Warcraft I found this video about “5 Ways Classic WoW Has Changed” quite interesting. The game is quite old but has been recently re-released. The maker of this video goes into some of aspects on how even though it is mostly the same game, it is played in a drastically different form. The main difference I understand that there is a lot more knowledge sharing of how the game should be “played optimally”. Which has been made possible through the rise of for example live streaming, Youtube, etc.
Philosophy Overdose published this short clip of Michel Foucault discussing power in an interview with André Berten from 1981.
The “Institute of Human Obscolescence” is creating thought provoking speculative fiction artwork about changes in labour from advances in artificial intelligence and possible “human obscolescence”.
One project is called “biological labour” and envisages how bodies may produce elecricity for mining cryptocurrency:
Abacus, a unit of the South China Morning Post, published an article on how facial recognition technology is causing issues in China as people wear masks as a preventive measure against the new corona virus:
Facebook made available a new tool this week which allows users to see which businesses have shared information from these users with Facebook. Although lucklily only one, I was suprised to see that one company shared a purchase with Facebook without me being aware. The Verge reported on the release.
Politico Europe reports on a controversy surrounding the use of food labels in Europe. A method developed in France that uses a “traffic light scheme” is being questioned by the Italian government. This “Nutri-Score” uses an algorithm to produce a score based on the types of nutrients. The coding scheme is gaining traction in several Member States. But according to the Italian government it gives some Italian gourmet food a bad score, and they are therefore proposing their own alternative which “resembles a charging light-blue battery” to classify food. Great example of standards in the making and ontological politics.
Anthrpology News posted an article in relation to a call for papers on research about the 200th anniversary of the Monroe doctrine, a United States policy which opposed European colonialism in the Americas.