Technology Is Tearing Us Apart
A reference to a former Facebook executive.
Chamath Palihapitiya, who joined Facebook in 2007 and became its vice president for user growth, said he feels “tremendous guilt” about the company he helped make. “I think we have created tools that are ripping apart the social fabric of how society works,” he told an audience at Stanford Graduate School of Business, before recommending people take a “hard break” from social media.
ripping apart society
“The short-term, dopamine-driven feedback loops we’ve created are destroying how society works,” he said, referring to online interactions driven by “hearts, likes, thumbs-up.” “No civil discourse, no cooperation; misinformation, mistruth. And it’s not an American problem — this is not about Russians ads. This is a global problem.”
More communication can mean less understanding.
Here is the key idea: “More communication can mean less understanding.” There is a reason why the strategy of the authoritarian coup of the U.S. is to “flood the zone.” Because this is how oligarchs maintain control: sow hatred and fear to divide and conquer. This is how the few are able to wield power over the many.
anti-constitutional coup
The handing over of the keys to the American Republic by a mendacious president to a megalomaniacal oligarch. Elon Musk is a wealthy private citizen who, relatively late in the game, happened to become a Trump supporter when he saw which way the wind was blowing. Now he has burrowed his way into the bowels of the federal government and is waging what can only be called an anti-constitutional coup.
an anti-constitutional coup by billionare oligarchs
The handing over of the keys to the American Republic by a mendacious president to a megalomaniacal oligarch. Elon Musk is a wealthy private citizen who, relatively late in the game, happened to become a Trump supporter when he saw which way the wind was blowing. Now he has burrowed his way into the bowels of the federal government and is waging what can only be called an anti-constitutional coup.
But fight or flight is only part of a bigger picture, according to Shelley Taylor, Ph.D., a psychology professor at the University of California, Los Angeles, and her colleagues. In the Psychological Review, the researchers describe how stress can elicit another behavioral pattern they call "tend and befriend"--especially in females. Their new theories may have profound implications for understanding the differences between how men and women react to stress.
First, although the National Institutes of Health (NIH) now emphasizes the need to include women and female animals in clinical research [e.g., 57], decades of research on the topics reviewed herein have been conducted using only men and male animals.
The term was coined in 2000 by Shelley Taylor, a psychology professor at the University of California.
The tend and befriend theory says that when faced with a perceived threat, humans will tend to their young and rely on others for connection and support.
Why Coltrane is Like Einstein
Stephon Alexander, author of The Jazz of Physics, on John Coltrane, Giant Steps, and the Circle of Fifths.
The Brutalist
Viewed the film on Thursday evening. The story of an architect who studied at the Bauhaus involved the themes of Art, God, Money, and Sex.
The Dymaxion World Map
We are creating a whole new curriculum.
QED: The Strange Theory of Light and Matter
Mentioned in Trimtab Book Club
human experience makes science possible
I introduced this book to affirm the views we were exploring by R. Buckminster Fuller in his book, Education Automation: Comprehensive Learning and Emergent Humanity.
Talking Circles
This topic came up during Trimtab Book Club today, 1 February 2025.
Development in Progress
Mentioned by Alex Randall, co-founder of The Consilience Project, on the Denizen podcast episode, “Redefining Progress”.
Indigenous Peoples Knowledge
Nicola Campbell has modified this program name in her syllabus for IPK 102 to make “Knowledge” plural: “Indigenous Peoples Knowledges.”
One of the most important subjects that we wanted to address on Consilience was the idea of progress.
Why am I interested in this topic? Because in IPK 102 Introduction to Indigenous Peoples Knowledges, I have chosen to make a presentation on Chapter 13: “The Myth of Progress” of Indigenous Writes: A Guide to First Nations, Métis, & Inuit Issues in Canada by Chelsea Vowel.
The featured resource for this podcast episode is the article by The Consilience Project, “Development in Progress”.
During one-third of a century of experimental work, I have been operating on the philosophic premise that all thoughts and all experiences can be translated much farther than just into words and abstract thought patterns.
projectionsby
Edit: add space, “projections by”
This experiment is a digital research library for R. Buckminster Fuller and his ideas.
Created by Brett Elmendorf, a member of the Trimtab Book Club, as an extension of the group’s affinity for R. Buckminster Fuller, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and Design Science Studio.
This experiment is a digital research library for R. Buckminster Fuller and his ideas.
Created by Brett Elmendorf, a member of the Trimtab Book Club, as an extension of the group’s affinity for R. Buckminster Fuller, the Buckminster Fuller Institute, and Design Science Studio.
Shared by Richard Struppi Pohl
Trans Mountain said there have not been any oil leaks due to the flooding, which has triggered an emergency shutdown of the pipeline lasting longer than any previous stoppage in its nearly 70-year-history.
Homeboy Industries is the largest gang rehabilitation and re-entry program in the world. For over 30 years, we have stood as a beacon of hope in Los Angeles to provide training and support to formerly gang-involved and previously incarcerated people, allowing them to redirect their lives and become contributing members of our community.
We said we were going to take ex-convicts and ex-addicts and teach them to be teachers, general contractors, and truck drivers. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to take 250 people who had never worked and had no skills and teach them to build a 400,000 square foot complex as our new home on the waterfront. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to partner with colleges and get people who started out functionally illiterate to achieve bachelor of arts degrees. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to run successful restaurants, moving companies, furniture making, and cafés and bookstores without any professional help. They said it couldn’t be done. We said we were going to do all this with no staff, no government funding, and no professionals. They laughed and said it couldn’t be done.
Shared by Curt McNamara with the Trimtab Book Club
Employing an evidence-based methodology, CitiIQ has created a comprehensive, objective measurement of a city.
The practices in this book were created to cultivate gratitude and the joy, kindness and well-being that gratitude brings. My wish for you is that your life is happier and better as you learn to practice living gratefully.
r3.0 promotes Redesign for Resilience and Regeneration. As a global common good not-for-profit platform, r3.0 crowdsources open recommendations for necessary transformations across diverse fields and sectors, in response to the ecological and social collapses humanity is experiencing, in order to achieve a thriving, regenerative and distributive economy and society.
Beyond the real, historical prisons of too much tidiness and those where anarchy engenders the hell of physical and moral chaos there lie yet other prisons, no less terrible for being fantastic and unembodied—the metaphysical prisons, whose seat is within the mind, whose walls are made of nightmare and incomprehension, whose chains are anxiety and their racks a sense of personal and even generic guilt.
An exit determined by how much public good has been created by the project rather than quarterly profit.
Yes! We could actually rehabilitate the concept of a corporation as a living body if compensation for public good was the foundation for economic currency.
Meanwhile, the basic terms of employment are undergoing a Great Reset.
the basic terms of employment are undergoing a Great Reset.
In that holistic state of authenticity and serenity, we become better geared towards collaboration and creativity.
Yesterday, I met Gil Agnew, who has been focusing on the Angel of Wholeness.
We may be now re-finding our value through our relationship to one another and to nature.
Some would go as far as to say and for at least the last twenty years, work is no longer a means to an end for us, it is our collective intellectual power that has driven the companies, societies, ecologies forward and it has come at the expense of our individual wellbeing.
a desire, a search and active discovery reach to enhance our collective experiences
A builders collective?
We have realized that we want more in our lives than to be the unwitting pawns in a game of global domination, genocide, slavery, and oppression called capitalism.
The Ouroboros is a Greek word meaning “tail devourer,” and is one of the oldest mystical symbols in the world. It can be perceived as enveloping itself, where the past (the tail) appears to disappear but really moves into an inner domain or reality, vanishing from view but still existing.
Mark Smith asked me if I was familiar with the term ouroboros. I replied, “No.” So he sent me this link.
This symbolizes the cyclic Nature of the Universe: creation out of destruction, Life out of Death.
Striketober
I am just realizing that I was not listening to The New York Times about the strikes spreading across the United States of America. Of course, the editors would not want to be causing this mass panic or a labour movement.
I was learning about this from Democracy Now!
Striketober is the labor strike wave in October 2021 by workers in the United States in the context of strikes during the COVID-19 pandemic. During the month, more than 100,000 workers in the United States either participated in or prepared for strikes in one of the largest increases of organized labor in the twenty-first century.
Perhaps people have finally had a chance to read Debt by David Graeber or Temp by Louis Hyman or Winners Take All by Anand Giridharadas.
This is the great disillusionment in capitalism that Forbes will not talk about. What have we been building this whole time? Colonization, slavery, and genocide on steroids enabled by big tech and big business? Maybe people just want their self-respect back.
I received an email from Emma Shimmens at Designlab referring to the Great Resignation.
Then I began to look up what this term meant. I had been listening to The Daily podcast from The New York Times about the strikes at John Deere and Kaiser Permanente. But I hadn’t realized that this movement had a name: Striketober.
Mark Smith: Stephen, are you familiar with “ouroboros”?
Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, Jayne, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.
While in the store, I was checking my email and noticed there was something from the Design Science Studio.
Tomorrow’s visiting Visionary, Catherine Connors will be speaking on New Narratives: Storytelling ARTchitecture!
As I was flipping through the book in the checkout line, I noticed the preface to the second edition:
“I’m not trying to copy Nature. I’m trying to find the principles she’s using”
— R. Buckminster Fuller
A book goes out like a wave rolling over the surface of the sea. Ideas radiate from the author’s mind and collide with other minds, triggering new waves that return to the author. These generate further thoughts and emanations, and so it goes. The concepts described in The Writer’s Journey have radiated and are now echoing back interesting challenges and criticisms as well as sympathetic vibrations. This is my report on the waves that have washed back over me from publication of the book, and on the new waves I send back in response.
On the back of the book, the description includes the following introduction.
Christopher Vogler explores the powerful relationship between mythology and storytelling in his clear, concise style that's made i this book required reading for movie executives, screenwriters, playwrights, fiction and non-fiction writers, scholars, and fans of pop culture all over the world.
Vogler based this work upon the writings of mythologist Joseph Campbell, particularly The Hero with a Thousand Faces, and holds that all successful films innately adhere to its principles.
Yesterday, I was at a thrift store with my wife, and as I usually do, I went straight to the books section. I happened upon a couple books. One was entitled Elephant Reflections and included high praise from Jane Goodall. Another was The Writer’s Journey: Mythic Structure for Writers.
The RCMP says it arrested 14 people and cleared a forest service road in northern British Columbia that was barricaded by a crushed van and another vehicle that was set on fire by Wet'suwet'en and Haudenosaunee members opposing construction of a multi-billion dollar natural gas pipeline.
“Because physicists started out with the imaginary, unstable cube as their model instead of the real-world stable tetrahedron, they got into all these imaginary numbers and other complicated and completely unnecessary mathematics. It would be so much simpler if they started out with the tetrahedron, which is nature’s best structure, the simplest structural system in Universe.
(Just as an aside, to remember later when you’re studying physics in school, I want to point out that the tetrahedron is also equivalent to the quantum unit of physics, and to the electron.)”
A Theory of Change and Systems Thinking
I mean, you know, if you want to look at it from the broader economic perspective, I think I’m quite persuaded by the idea that this is when the great resignation happens at union workplaces, right? You don’t just quit.
Take this job and shove it.
these unions that have not flexed this muscle, and they have decided that now’s the time to do it.
But Buckminster Fuller does not believe that the cube is the model of reality. The tetrahedron is the smallest unit of volume in spacetime, which Struppi and I have been attempting to name. We are leaning toward a quant.
Sure, you could just use thousands of cubes, but you'd probably run into speed problems. And storing them individually requires a lot of redundant information.
Build once, deploy anywhere, captivate everyone.
I had no idea that this idea was as ubiquitous as this. I would love to know how this phrase was inspired by NPR, COPE, and Karen McGrane.
A Moving Performance
“The future is dark. What if this is not the darkness of the tomb – but the darkness of the womb? What if this is our greatest transition?”
The punk movement is anti-establishment, with long ties to political activism and resistance, anti-consumerist, anti-corporate, anti-authoritarian, with a strong ethic of visibility and in-your-face active expression of these sentiments.
Perfectly expresses my orientation and my love of XTC.
All I needed to know about COP26. It is actually the living embodiment of a racist, fascist, capitalist police state.
whose lifelong work integrates the core insights of the great wisdom traditions and mysticism with the discoveries of science.
What is the word to describe how unseen, gradual processes come together to form life, vitality, healing, and ongoing learning?
From the question arises the need to coin a new term, aphanipoiesis. The question is the definition.
When change is sought through adaptation to existing systems, that change is sourced from the system itself. In this case, perpetuation is more likely than change.
People are trying to change something that they cannot perceive. Therefore, the only changes that are apparent are incremental changes to the existing system. It is a catch-22.
In our Design Science Studio session today, Niki Selken suggested that we purchase Tezos to experiment with NFTs.
A Human hour (HUR), denoted as ħ, here is defined as population-weighted all-countries average price of an hour (3600 SI seconds) of human labor in all economic sectors.
Niki Selken, Gray Area, shared Kukai with the Design Science Studio today as an easy way to get some crypto, using a single sign on with Google.
This is the zombie stance of the technological idiot.
Respect, Trust, and Equity
How does this correspond with the social, economic, and political as it relates to the qualities of love and the unified quantum field of consciousness: connection, energy, and power?
There’s a tendency to refer to people, or a person, as “diverse.” Even with the best intentions, referring to people this way feels a lot like euphemism for “outside the majority,” or “different from the dominant group.”
Diversity
What terms can we use that are not comparisons or relationships to the dominant frame?
with attention to the nuances of issues like diversity and feminism where he has previously faltered in his own writers’ room
How do we intentionally and proactively work to avoid the problem with Jon Stewart by addressing diversity, equity, and inclusion in the writers’ room?
Lowering these risks and adapting to those we can no longer avoid will require a mobilisation of resources on the scale of a war economy.
We did it for the Second World War. We can do it again.
Beware: Gaia may destroy humans before we destroy the Earth
Hmmm. I have been thinking about Earth having a fever in response to a pathogen. Foreign bodies, viruses, known as corporations have infected the minds of their host organisms, using legal systems to reprogram their syntropic nature as living organisms with a compulsion to replace themselves with entropy machines. By assuming personhood, corporations are consuming and monopolizing the time, energy, and resources of their hosts so that they have achieved a level of control and domination over nature such that they can change the climate and reversing the process of biological and cultural evolution.
“I think I can feel the future.”
This division is as much of a mistake as the error made by universities when they teach chemistry in a different class from biology and physics.
The inability to think holistically is the problem.
It is difficult to know what to believe when human cognition can easily misrepresent reality.
White finds reason for optimism: the end of protest inaugurates a new era of social change.
Micah White wrote of the end: The End of Protest.
Micah White is the award-winning activist who co-created Occupy Wall Street, a global social movement, while an editor of Adbusters magazine.
Occupy Wall Street was a constructive failure but not a total failure. Occupy demonstrated the efficacy of using social memes to quickly spread a movement, shifted the political debate on the fair distribution of wealth, trained a new generation of activists who went on to be the base for movements ranging from campus fossil fuel divestment to Black Lives Matter protests. Occupy launched many local projects that will have lasting small-scale impact. Occupy buoyed many institutional activist organizations that were able to materially profit from the renewed interest in protest. All of these are signs that our movement was culturally influential. It may be comforting to believe that Occupy splintered into a thousand shards of light. However, an honest assessment reveals that Occupy Wall Street failed to live up to its revolutionary potential: we did not bring an end to the influence of money on democracy, overthrow the corporatocracy of the 1 percent or solve income inequality. If our movement did achieve successes, they were not the ones we’d intended. When victory eluded Occupy, a world of activist certainties fell apart.
I call Occupy Wall Street a constructive failure because the movement revealed underlying flaws in dominant, and still prevalent, theories of how to achieve social change through collective action. Occupy set out to “get money out of politics,” and we succeeded in catalyzing a global social movement that tested all of our hypotheses. The failure of our efforts reveals a truth that will hasten the next successful revolution: the assumptions underlying contemporary protest are false. Change won’t happen through the old models of activism. Western democracies will not be swayed by public spectacles and mast frenzy. Protests have become an accepted, and therefore ignored, by-product of politics-as-usual. Western governments are not susceptible to international pressure to heed the protests of their citizens. Occupy’s failure was constructive because it demonstrated the limitations of contemporary ideas of Protest. I capitalize p to emphasize that the limitation was not in a particular tactic but ratter in our concept of Protest, or our theory of social change, which determined the overall script. Occupy revealed that activists need to revolutionize their approach to revolution.
Failure can be liberating. Defeat detaches us from a theory of revolution that is no longer effective, reopening the possibility of true change. “For a revolutionary,” writes Régis Debray, professor of philosophy and associate of Che Guevara, “failure is a springboard. As a course of theory it is richer than victory: it accumulates experience and knowledge.”
(Pages 26-27)
social evolution
How did we get here?
Yesterday (October 26, 2021), I picked up David Graeber’s book, The Dawn of Everything: a New History of Humanity, written with David Wengrow, at Coles in Abbotsford.
It is interesting to note that David Graeber was interested in the origins, the beginnings.
Renowned for his biting and incisive writing about bureaucracy, politics and capitalism, Graeber was a leading figure in the Occupy Wall Street movement and professor of anthropology at the London School of Economics (LSE) at the time of his death.
Drawing on path-breaking research in archaeology and anthropology, the authors show how history becomes a far more interesting place once we learn to throw off our conceptual shackles and perceive what's really there.
Reimagining our social architecture might begin with rethinking our past and origins as a species.
All We Can Save is a bestselling anthology of writings by 60 women at the forefront of the climate movement who are harnessing truth, courage, and solutions to lead humanity forward.
You must use separate Stripe accounts for projects, websites, or businesses that operate independently from one another.
This may account for the problem with signups on one Ghost site showing up in the Stripe account of another.
How we interpret and experience the world depends on whether those two brains are working in balance, or whether one is dominant or damaged. That, in turn, shapes the world we live in.
I wrote it because I believe everyone can contribute to the radical transformations we need today.
Have we been underestimating our collective capacity for social change?
Recommended by Mark Wagnon
A new way of ‘World Building (Manifesting through Quantum Social Science)
iA Writer + Ghost
This is the integration that I am using to connect my daily writing practice with the process of publishing. iA Writer and Ghost have enabled me to share my ideas and project intentions into the world in such a way that they have become indispensable tools for community building.
What does it mean to have governments now calling for these huge tree-planting programs, without talking about Land Back, without foregrounding Indigenous land rights and Indigenous knowledge, and so thinking about what that would mean, what it would mean to look at an entirely new lens for conservation that is not about creating tree museums for carbon sequestration, but really, about returning land.
I mean, I think Trudeau has shown us who he is, which is somebody who likes campaigning more than governing and is better at giving the speech than enacting the policies.
Public relations for a colonial, corporate governance system dependent on the theft of land and resources and the disempowerment of the population through the mechanism of money.
there’s a group of us who are figuring out what this Centre for Climate Justice is going to be and what its scope is going to be.
COP26
The native Members feature in Ghost makes it possible to launch a membership business from any Ghost publication, with member signup, paid subscriptions and email newsletters built-in.
land acknowledgments
Shared by Russ Diabo on Twitter.
Let's Encrypt + Ghost
Self-Hosting on DigitalOcean means setting up Let’s Encrypt to configure SSL.
ghost setup ssl
ALTER USER 'root'@'localhost' IDENTIFIED WITH mysql_native_password BY 'password'
This fixed MySQL issues when installing Ghost on Ubuntu 20.04 on DigitalOcean.
Upgrading from Ghost 3.x to 4.x on Digital Ocean
sync with Google Drive
Why do I have to set up Mailgun?
Style Tiles
The most important piece of configuration once the installation is complete is to setup mail.
Time, energy, and matter
This article refers to the site I created to document the design process for the builders collective: time, energy, and matter, which redirects to timeenergyresources.com.
time as the new currency
Women tend to be excluded from the national economy because their work is not paid and therefore not value or factored into the Gross Domestic Product of a nation. Money, then, is a mechanism for disempowerment.
THE SUNDAY THING
The love of money is the root of all evil
This week, Michael Gungor asked us to discuss money in our breakout groups.
We outsource our power and authority to those who claim to have greater access to capital, because we underestimate and undervalue our own social influence, economic capacity, and political agency. The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism). https://hypothes.is/a/667dOC0bEeyV6Itx3ySxmw
Indigenous cultures in Canada were disempowered by outlawing the cultural practice of generosity (potlatch) and replacing the practice with centralized power over the medium of exchange: money. Money is a mechanism of disempowerment.
Money is a shared story we tell ourselves about what has value. https://www.npr.org/transcripts/795246685
We translated “ekklesia” as church. It is the deliberative body of the experiment in democracy in Athens, Greece. The people who are figuring out how to live together in the commons. The work of the people. The Liturgists.
In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.
On the Media: Full Faith & Credit
People were also discussing Squid Game.
Squid Game was on my mind today before the call. “The reality of the history of Canada’s mining industry makes #SquidGame look like child’s play.” https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449726452098682881?s=20
The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.
However, we know that money is a fiction, a story that we tell ourselves. Money is a story about what and who has value. This scale of human value that we call money is fake. But if enough people believe it, that idea of money becomes our reality.
In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.
In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.
Ten autumns ago came two watershed moments in the history of money. In September 2008, the bankruptcy of Lehman Brothers triggered a financial meltdown from which the world has yet to fully recover. The following month, someone using the name Satoshi Nakamoto introduced BitCoin, the first cryptocurrency. Before our eyes, the very architecture of money was evolving — potentially changing the world in the process. In this hour, On the Media looks at the story of money, from its uncertain origins to its digital reinvention in the form of cryptocurrency.
So the story that emerges about the origins of money is very different than the way we usually think about it. In this model embraced by Bill and other anthropologists, money is partly a mechanism of social obligation and partly a mechanism to keep track of who owes what to whom. It's also a mechanism that cements the relationship between ordinary people and authorities who maintain records. In other words, it's a story about power.
Ghost CLI
A command line interface for Ghost
How To Install Node.js on Ubuntu 20.04
In this guide, we will show you three different ways of getting Node.js installed on an Ubuntu 20.04 server…
How to Install the DigitalOcean Metrics Agent
DigitalOcean Monitoring is a free, opt-in service that gathers metrics about Droplet-level resource utilization. It provides additional Droplet graphs and supports configurable metrics alert policies with integrated email Slack notifications to help you track the operational health of your infrastructure.
How to update Ghost
How to install Ghost on Digital Ocean
Psst! Now you can securely share 1Password items with anyone
I use this app every day.
This feature makes this app even more valuable. Awesome!
In the film, Lost in Translation, Bob and Charlotte begin their conversation learning what each of them is doing in Tokyo.
Bob: What do you do?
Charlotte: I’m not sure yet, actually. I just graduated last spring.”
Bob: What did you study?
Charlotte: Philosophy.
Bob: Yeah, there’s a good buck in that racket.
Charlotte: (Laughs.) Yeah. Well, so far it’s pro bono.
(33:45)
In ecology, edge effects are changes in population or community structures that occur at the boundary of two or more habitats. Areas with small habitat fragments exhibit especially pronounced edge effects that may extend throughout the range. As the edge effects increase, the boundary habitat allows for greater biodiversity.
The reality of the history of Canada’s mining industry makes #SquidGame look like child’s play.
“The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of the Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.”
“That land was stolen by the Canadian state and that gold was whisked away by private interests. The Federal Government only signed land claims with Indigenous peoples in the Yukon in the 1990s, but by that point, almost all the gold had been mined out of the ground.”
“The Klondike gold rush was a rolling disaster that captured tens of thousands of people. When the first European explorers came to the Americas, they came here looking for gold. In the 1890s, that lust for precious metals eventually led men to the farthest reaches of this continent.”
“Today, instead of 100,000 people descending on a small patch of land, you have large corporations digging treasures out of the ground. But the legacies these mining operations leave behind are just like what happened in the Klondike: workers with broken bodies, environmental destruction, the dispossession of Indigenous land, sexual violence. The gold rushes never stopped. They just morphed into something different.”
When gold was discovered in the Yukon, 100,000 people desperately tried to make it to a small patch of land in one of the most remote environments on the continent. Few made it all the way. The Klondike Gold Rush was many things: a media conspiracy, a ponzi scheme, a land grab. But above all, it was a humanitarian disaster that stretched over much of the Pacific Northwest.
“The truth is that all of the gold that was mined out of the Klondike was under Indigenous land. There was no treaty with any of the Indigenous peoples in the Yukon.”
“That land was stolen by the Canadian state and that gold was whisked away by private interests. The Federal Government only signed land claims with Indigenous peoples in the Yukon in the 1990s, but by that point, almost all the gold had been mined out of the ground.”
“The Klondike gold rush was a rolling disaster that captured tens of thousands of people. When the first European explorers came to the Americas, they came here looking for gold. In the 1890s, that lust for precious metals eventually led men to the farthest reaches of this continent.”
“Today, instead of 100,000 people descending on a small patch of land, you have large corporations digging treasures out of the ground. But the legacies these mining operations leave behind are just like what happened in the Klondike: workers with broken bodies, environmental destruction, the dispossession of Indigenous land, sexual violence. The gold rushes never stopped. They just morphed into something different.”
“Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”
This pattern lies at the heart of the shell corporation we call “Canada,” and forms the logic of both domestic and international policy. The mining industry is the most egregious example. Over 75 percent of the world’s mining companies are based in Canada.
Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.
“Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”
“Canada is not an accident or a work in progress or a thought experiment. I mean that Canada is a scam — a pyramid scheme, a ruse, a heist. Canada is a front. And it’s a front for a massive network of resource extraction companies, oil barons, and mining magnates.”
https://twitter.com/bauhouse/status/1449737672407150595
“Eventually they spread their land grab all the way to the Pacific Ocean and the northern coastlines in pursuit of gold, silver, iron, copper, nickel, and diamond reserves.… ‘Canada’ came about in the late 1800s for nakedly economic reasons…”
Failure is a part of the process of learning.
The Doctrine of Discovery established a spiritual, political, and legal justification for colonization and seizure of land not inhabited by Christians.
Verena Huber-Dyson
trailblazing physicist David Bohm and Indian spiritual philosopher Jiddu Krishnamurti sat down for a mind-bending, soul-stretching series of conversations about some of the most abiding human concerns: time, transcendence, compassion, death, the nature of reality, and the meaning of existence.
What came up for me in exploring the parallels between writing and mathematics.
Out of a belief that women were naturally good at nurturing children, Froebel had cultivated a network of female teachers who would champion his ideas and emigrate with their knowledge to other countries.
Specifically, Froebel wanted children to play with educational toys, which was a fairly unusual notion in the early 1800s.
Curved origami dates to late 1920s Bauhaus; a classic specimen starts as a circular piece of paper, which, when folded along concentric circles, automatically twists into a saddle curve.
We are meeting Siobhan Roberts in our Trimtab Book Club today.
Lean Canvas in JavaScript
See my Coding Challenges.
Lean Canvas
For myself, Symphony was a proving ground for the COPE approach to content strategy and content management championed by Karen McGrane: create once publish everywhere.
Symphony CMS
❯ Created in-house by expert educators.❯ 100% original course materials.❯ Free for everyone, forever.
Andrew Wilshere
Andrew Wilshere was working on content at Designlab when he asked me to write an article about the Bauhaus.
I ended up writing something that never got published with Designlab. Instead, it was shared by the Bauhaus Movement to their Facebook followers.
The Bauhaus began with the metaphor of a church and the Lyonel Feininger depiction of a modern cathedral as a symbol for a new faith in the synthesis of art and technology.
The fusion of art, technology, and spirituality has been the foundation of my thinking as a designer as I have explored design practice, design education, and design philosophy.
We mistakenly focused on physical artifacts without fully realizing—and questioning—the values that were being embodied in architecture, built to reinforce our habits and behaviours into social, economic, and political systems. Technology has enabled us to scale, accelerate, and amplify these systems to envelope the globe.
We have been engaged in social architecture, a form of metaphysical design. It has been a form of colonization that has been built on individualism, specialization, and authoritarianism.
The spiritual vision of the Bauhaus was a faith in people’s ability to transform society for good by breaking down divisions and working together toward a common purpose.
Originally published on Medium on August 29, 2019.
Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward Heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
Let us then create a new guild of craftsmen without the class distinctions that raise an arrogant barrier between craftsman and artist! Together let us desire, conceive, and create the new structure of the future, which will embrace architecture and sculpture and painting in one unity and which will one day rise toward heaven from the hands of a million workers like the crystal symbol of a new faith.
When I first read this manifesto, I had immediate associations with the Tower of Babel. The cathedral project of global neoliberal capitalism began as a socialist utopian project in the Weimar Republic as Germany’s first experiment in democracy. The democratic experiment failed when the Nazis shut down the Bauhaus in 1933.
The experiment continued in the United States of America as the Bauhaus diaspora spread the ideas of modernism to the art, design and architecture academies around the world.
The World Trade Center in New York City embodied the vision of modern architecture that Walter Gropius had been exploring at the Bauhaus, defining the trinity of building materials of the modern world: steel, glass, and concrete.
When the twin towers collapsed on 9/11, the modernism movement came to an abrupt end. Ever since, we have been living in a distinctly postmodern world.
I wrote about the Bauhaus for Designlab, but they did not publish my article, so I connected with the Bauhaus Movement, shared the article with their followers on Facebook, and continued my exploration of Cultural Evolution, Social Physics, and Metaphysical Design.
Germany is celebrating 100 years since the beginnings of the Bauhaus in 1919.
I wrote this article as a survey of articles about the Bauhaus.
Art 126 Prof. S. M. Williams April 2, 1993
This is a paper I wrote for ART 126 at Trinity Western University while I was studying Communications and Fine Arts in the early 90s.
For the builders collective, I created some tools that are open source and useful for design and social architecture. Other projects are coding challenges to experiment with what is possible on the web.
This experiment is based on the Lean Canvas, based on the Business Model Canvas from the book Business Model Generation.
Type in the grey box at the top of the page. Click or tap in the boxes to add the text as a box in each section of the Lean Canvas. Click on the box to delete.
There is no save functionality, so be sure to take a screenshot. Or roll your own by using the code on Codepen and GitHub.
Visualize and communicate a simple story of your business model.
Lean Canvas is a 1-page business plan template created by Ash Maurya that helps you deconstruct your idea into its key assumptions. It is adapted from Alex Osterwalder's Business Model Canvas and optimized for Lean Startups. It replaces elaborate business plans with a single page business model.
The lean canvas is an adaption of Alex Osterwalder’s “Business Model Canvas” which he describes in his book: “Business Model Generation”
Lean Canvas has been adapted by Ash Maurya from the very popular Business Model Canvas by Alexander Osterwalder
Today it comes to life in the form a new section called Future Perfect. As Klein describes it, the coverage is “inspired by the idea of what’s important.”
The power of editorial is its ability to focus attention on what the editors deem to be important.
Using evidence and reason to find the most promising causes to work on. Taking action, by using our time and money to do the most good we can.
I think I learned about effective altruism through Ezra Klein and the Future Perfect podcast.
human beings started to take control of human evolution; that we stood on the brink of eliminating immeasurable levels of suffering on factory farms; and that for the first time the average American might become financially comfortable and unemployed simultaneously
Free upload and storage. It’s the simplest way to get started with podcasting.
DIYJam Podcast
Stackbit’s new Podcaster theme
Podcaster
Stackbit has added a Podcaster theme
This love for the ocean grew over the years, so much so that when she saw photographs by Canadian artist Benjamin Von Wong – showing a mermaid swimming in an ocean of plastic bottles – it impacted her deeply.
The annotation functionality is enabled by Hypothes.is.
Gien Wong mentioned a tool that Gyuri is using to annotate videos. Is this it?
Design for Resilience is not a podcast just for professional designers. This a podcast for human beings, who may have forgotten that they are creative. We build our personal resilience by first remembering that we are all designers.
I just published my first podcast episode.
Create an Apple Podcasts Connect account
Submitting your podcast to Apple Podcasts for distribution
Social: learned helplessness (individuality)Economic: trained incapacities (specialization)Political: bureaucratic intransigence (authoritarianism)
The neoliberal world order is designed to serve a colonial system of capitalist extraction that only benefits the 1%.
A podcast about resilience inspired Caleb Chan to compose this theme music, incorporating a heartbeat and a world music influence.
Exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.
Exploring how we imagine, design, and build the future together.
A podcast about resilience inspired Caleb Chan to compose this theme music, incorporating a heartbeat and a world music influence.
Food Artist. Experience designer. Storyteller
Solarpunk Art Contest 2021
via Nicolás Alcalá in the Design Science Studio
A (r)Evolutionary incubator for ART inspiring a regenerative future that works for 100% of life
Brainwriting, like brainstorming, is a technique for generating a lot of ideas in a little bit of time. Unlike brainstorming, brainwriting relies on the written, not the spoken, word.
How to record and edit audio in Ableton Live
Academia: All the Lies: What Went Wrong in the University Model and What Will Come in its Place
“Students are graduating into a brutal job market.”
The entreprecariat is designed for learned helplessness (social: individualism), trained incapacities (economic: specialization), and bureaucratic intransigence (political: authoritarianism).
Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.
(Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)
The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.
Education and job hiring should be integrated.
The problem is systemic. How do you deal with the problem when the system is off the table when it comes to the design problem?
Victor Papanek’s Design Problem, 1975.
Three diagrams will explain the lack of social engagement in design. If (in Figure 1) we equate the triangle with a design problem, we readily see that industry and its designers are concerned only with the tiny top portion, without addressing themselves to real needs.
(Design for the Real World, 2019. Page 57.)
The other two figures merely change the caption for the figure.
Adobe Audition: Digital audio workstation software.
I already have Creative Cloud. I might as well use Adobe Audition.
n this video we set up the Montage to work (audio/MIDI) with Ableton Live through one USB cable. We also set up recording audio, MIDI and MIDI arp in Live as well.
This video helped me get the audio and MIDI settings set up on Ableton Live 11 and Yamaha MODX8. There are slight differences in the Ableton Live interface, as the video uses an earlier version. But the setup is basically the same.
Yamaha MODX and Ableton Set up
Days by A.Fruit as featured on the Ableton site.
For a demonstration of Anna's skills, we can look back to the live challenge she took part in at Loop Create.
I downloaded and installed Ableton Live 11. The 90-day free trial has expired. The install recognized that I had already tried out version 10.
Today, I am learning about podcasting. Where to start? How about Apple?
First, sign up as an individual, Stephen Bau, under the company name, Builders Collective.
We're setting up your account.
This could take up to a day, so check back later. When we're finished, you can start adding shows.
I wonder why people use foot marks rather than apostrophes in their typography. Apple, you should know better.
You haven't added any shows yet. Click Add Show to get started.
You can publish a show on Apple Podcasts with or without an RSS feed, so the first step is to pick the type of show you want to distribute. Note that you’ll be able to add paid subscriber audio to either kind of show.
Your show will be available on Apple Podcasts or anywhere you distribute your RSS feed. This is the best option if you want to manage episodes through your podcast hosting provider.
Your show will only be available on Apple Podcasts. This is the best option if you want to manage episodes in Apple Podcasts Connect and offer a subscription.
At the beginning of this episode, Sandy Hudson tells Nora Loreto about a podcast on NPR, Invisibilia.
The episodes that I listened to were about an anti-news news website in Stockton, California. How news has shifted and changed.
The Invisibilia episode is entitled, The Chaos Machine: An Endless Hole.
I ended up following this rabbit hole all the way to The View from Somewhere podcast episode featuring a discussion of Hallin’s spheres. Truly fascinating!
Yowei gets a tip about Russian trolls in Stockton, California and falls down a hole of swirling conspiracy theories.
journalism historian David Mindich
At 11 minutes into this podcast episode, David Mindich provides an overview of Hallin’s spheres.
Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.
I learned about this podcast from Sandy and Nora in their episode, Canada’s democratic deficit.
three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance
Hallin divides the world of political discourse into three concentric spheres: consensus, legitimate controversy, and deviance. In the sphere of consensus, journalists assume everyone agrees. The sphere of legitimate controversy includes the standard political debates, and journalists are expected to remain neutral. The sphere of deviance falls outside the bounds of legitimate debate, and journalists can ignore it. These boundaries shift, as public opinion shifts.
A podcast about journalism with a purpose.
The podcast focuses on the troubled history of “objectivity” and how it has been used to gatekeep and exclude people of color, queer and trans people, and people organizing for their labor rights and communities.
I learned about this podcast through Sandy and Nora.
Where philosophy meets tech.
This seems to be the space that I occupy on the edges of design education and practice.
Maria Selting of Unbox Your World podcast has just shared the raw audio of our conversation to get feedback before she publishes the episode, Redesigning Design: Applying UX Principles to Design a Better Future.
The empathy map, one of Gamestorming’s methods for understanding audiences, including users, customers, and other players in any business ecosystem, has gotten some press lately because it was featured in Alex Osterwalder‘s excellent book, Business Model Generation as a tool for discovering insights about customers.
The original idea for the empathy map comes from Dave Gray, author of Gamestorming.
Group Flow StateWorld Builders and Collective Consciousness
Material is a design system – backed by open-source code – that helps teams build high-quality digital experiences.
unintended consequences
Dissuasion Engine (DE) attacks the wicked problem of excessive mass online consumption, and the social and environmental costs it produces for future humans, species and the earth itself.
I learned about COPE from Karen McGrane.
COPE
So when I talk about adaptive content, I popularized a case study from NPR in which they outlined their catchily-named approach to publishing web content, which they called COPE. It stands for Create Once, Publish Everywhere. And in NPR’s model, they maintain a single content model for their article form. So in this content structure, they would have for an article a title, a short title, a teaser, a short teaser, several images attached to the article, an audio file, the body text, whatever metadata was attached to the article, and they could serve up a different combination of that more granular content based on the type of device someone was using.
Adaptive: Content, Context, and Controversy
More than ever, the growth and evolution of the Symphony platform is being driven by you—our brilliant and multi-talented (not to mention physically statuesque and uncommonly pleasant-smelling) community members.
I finally get a chance to work on a redesign for our own site, so you're helping to make the exploration phase a lot of fun.
I think I was talking about working on the Domain7 website and building it in Symphony. As soon as I had a working site, the team shut down the project and rebuilt the site on WordPress.
At that point, I realized that Domain7 didn’t care about building the capacity of the team. They didn’t care about collaboration. They didn’t care about me as a contributor to the team.
a Standard to Unite Communities
How do we co-operate on spaceship earth?
How long have I been thinking about this? Well, at least since April 10, 2013.
Adaptive Content
COPE: Create Once, Publish Everywhere
With the growing need and ability to be portable comes tremendous opportunity for content providers. But it also requires substantial changes to their thinking and their systems.
Type Brigade is Vancouver’s type meetup.
When I was looking for a way to build small, maintainable websites as an independent contractor, I found a local Vancouver company, Chloi, that was working on a static site generator called Harp. It was a plus that Kenneth Ormandy of Type Brigade had been involved in the project. (See his contributions on GitHub)
What if this was a Jamstack site? See A Modest Proposal.
Better Developer Experience
I like the enhanced developer experience in particular, but it also helps that Jamstack sites have all of these benefits.
The legacy version of the Run for Water site designed by Stephen Bau. Featured on Behance.
This version is built with Jamstack, using Harp and DatoCMS.
A similar approach could be used for the Co-Operating Manual for Spaceship Earth.
Since the Buckminster Fuller Institute is using Airtable, it would be possible to follow the CSS-Tricks article on Going Jamstack with React, Serverless, and Airtable.
We did most of the heavy lifting for you to provide a default stylings that incorporate our custom components.
(The English here sounds awkward.)
Gyuri Lajos, in the Stop Reset Go team, recommended using Materialize CSS.
If it is based on Google’s Material Design, there are a lot of resources available to explore the possibilities. If I was building a Progressive Web App, this might be the place to start.
The project appears to be at an early stage of development, with a 1.0.0 release.
Created and designed by Google, Material Design is a design language that combines the classic principles of successful design along with innovation and technology.