Posts
Have a look at this video on Youtube from The Nerdwriter. A great video essay on how photographer Dorothea Lange made her photogrpah “Dorothea Lange”.
Sad to learn that the American poet Mary Oliver has passed away. I always enjoy her keen obervational poems that show her high attentiveness to the natural world. Read some of her poetry on the Poetry Foundation.
When it's over, I don't want to wonder
if I have made of my life something particular, and real.
I don't want to find myself sighing and frightened,
or full of argument.
I don't want to end up simply having visited this world
From “When Death Comes” - Mary Oliver
The photography project "Wasteland" by Kadir van Lohuizen contains some very powerful images of large cities and how they manage their waste. I think that the waste managment and recycling process has been going on too much in the background, and the only way out is to reduce our trash. See also this article in the Financial Times on why the recycling system became more visible. In the word of Kadir: “If the world is not prepared to think about waste reduction and actually treat waste as a resource, next generations will drown in their own waste.”
This is an interesting use of a so-called Sankey diagram (a type of flow chart) to visualise spelling mistakes, by Collin Morris.
The following stop motion animation movie “In a Nutshell” is absolutely mesmerising. It tries to capture the world in a nutshell: “From a seed to war, from meat to love, from indifference to apocalypse”.
In response to the protests of the gillets-jaunes the President Emmanuel Macron has started a “grand débat national” to discuss the grievances. In an opinion piece for AOC-media, Bruno Latour discusses how for the general public describing their problems may difficult however as we are between different visions for civilisation:
La situation créée par les « gilets jaunes » est une occasion rêvée pour rebondir politiquement : c’est en effet la première fois qu’il devient clair pour tout le monde qu’il existe un lien direct entre transition écologique et justice sociale. Inutile de continuer à opposer économie et écologie : il faut les conjoindre, tout en reconnaissant que c’est ouvrir la boite de Pandore. (…) La tension actuelle vient de ce que la société civile n’est pas plus capable que l’État de s’organiser vers ce nouveau régime comme on le voit par l’irréalisme des demandes. Il n’est donc pas facile de passer de la plainte à la doléance (terme entendu au sens ancien des Cahiers de doléance qui décrivaient des territoires en fonction des injustices commises et des moyens d’y remédier par une autre organisation de la fiscalité et du droit). La désorientation est donc générale, d’autant que ce qui reste des anciens partis continue à organiser la dispute selon l’ancien vecteur — identité nationale ou ethnique d’un côté, mondialisation et progrès de l’autre, sans oublier la révolution en costume d’époque enfin, si l’on voulait compléter le désespérant tableau de « l’offre politique ».
The following really well video from the German channel Kurzgesagt provides a very balanced view, using lots of sources, to answer if organic vegetables and fruits are really better. The overall recommendation that I can extract from their message would simple and seems quite logical: eat more fruits and veggies that are produced locally and in season.
As an author from Wired tried to sell his personal data and found out it isn’t worth much, some economists made the following valid remark.
Yet data can be worth a good deal in the aggregate — just ask some of the major tech companies. The economics here are a bit like the economics of voting. If it were legal, and you tried to sell your vote and your vote alone, you might not get much more than 0.3 cents. That vote is unlikely to prove decisive. Yet average and marginal value do not coincide. If someone could buy a whole block of votes, which in turn could swing an election, the price could be much higher.
An interesting interview with Professor Mark Blyth on the “crisis of globalisation”. His view on commodification of our personal data seems a bit unsophisticated though: how would we actually be able to put a price on the use of our data, and wouldn’t this still leave all the power with the big companies to buy them off from us? But I agree that there is a general problem in governance.
[…] get people to individually license the use of their data to these firms. We auction off the digital spectrum to telephone companies. Why don’t we auction off our personal data? Basically give the data on a ten-year lease that’s revocable.
Another interesting point he made is about global international labour and its effect on wage inequality:
[…] labour’s ability to command its share of the surplus declines to zero. The strike becomes a meaningless weapon. Strikes decline to function—like to zero—in the western world. And you get prolonged wage stagnation, because essentially all the surplus goes to capital. There’s no reason for it not to. So labour’s ability to push up wages goes to zero.
An opnion piece on The New York Times discusses why deleting your Facebook account may not be an effective way to drive the company to change and may cause harm by “recasting a political issue as a willpower issue”.
But it would also seem to be the case that if millions of angry individuals were going to save us from the worst excesses of the tech industry, we would have been saved from them by now. Collective action is difficult against a global behemoth like Facebook. Even were such action to succeed, the company also owns WhatsApp and Instagram. With a couple of billion users on Facebook alone, it is hard to fathom how many deleted accounts it would take to drive genuine change.