RE: https://assemblag.es/@inquiline/116834857234643996

Boy howdy this is good.

Ugh. I really don’t enjoy having to say this, but:

It’s become necessary for me to emphasize that the group operating in the UK as Lifehouse – Collapse Preparing Communities continues to do so despite my explicit request that they find another name.

While I stake no claim to ownership over the Lifehouse concept, I do not believe this group operates according to the principles of autonomy and horizontality I enunciated in the 2024 book of that name, and therefore find their embrace of the term misleading.

I would especially ask anyone curious about this mode of organization to remember always that Lifehouses have no leaders or named representatives. Thanks, as ever, for your interest in this work.

RE: https://mstdn.social/@Bellingcat/116833210859783383

The work Bellingcat does is one of the few remaining bulwarks we have against impunity. I’m enormously proud to support that work, and encourage you to do so as well, if you’re able to.

Is it time to read “Stand on Zanzibar” again? It’s time to read “Stand on Zanzibar” again.

OK, bottom line? I cannot in good conscience recommend the “Slow Technology Reader,” primarily because its fuzziness of conception undercuts the premise of the title, but also because the curatorial selection overindexes decoloniality.

Please, please do not misunderstand me to be saying that the aim of decolonizing thought is unimportant, or that the ways in which the tools we use propagate the thought of Empire is somehow not a vital topic for inquiry. But “slow” to me suggests something more and broader than that emphasis. There are other slownesses – nonhuman slownesses, for example, only glancingly invoked here – and other ways of constructing toolness, and I’d wanted and expected to learn a good deal more about those from a collection with this title.

Also, look, there’s just a lot of filler. A lot of filler, and a lot of framing business that neither aids in interpretation of the content nor adds any other value. Pass this one by.

The idea of a prediction market, per se, is not new to me. I’ve been thinking about the concept since I first read “The Shockwave Rider” in 1982 or so, and looked on with some interest as it was partially implemented in one stream of Admiral Poindexter’s Total Information Awareness program. I still find the basic notion fascinating.

What the idea supposes is that the wagers of sufficiently incentivized actors route around ideology and posturing, and tend to converge on *what they actually believe will (or in some cases ought to) take place*. What I should have foreseen, though, and what the TIA example already makes plain, is that neither the RAND-style Delphi technique nor the very-large-pool fictional prediction market Brunner stole its name for, are in any way immune to cultural capture. A prediction market whose pool consists largely or exclusively of a single type of actor loses much of its ability to converge on “truth,” and is capable of generating only dressed-up groupthink.

And no, my reason for not wanting to see it has nothing to do with the casting. It’s that it looks terrible.

I will thank Christopher Nolan for this much: I am now reading “The Odyssey” for the first time ever, really (shh), in Emily Wilson’s limpid translation.

Not planning on seeing the film, though. Maybe on a long-haul flight sometime.

The Silvia Federici piece in this volume – ugh. After four pages of nodding along in agreement, I have to say she lost me for good when I got to her characterization of “colonoscopy [and] mammography” as being among “assaults on [the body] with all the weapons that medicine can offer.”

As someone who’s lost friends to both colon and breast cancer, this Illichian or Agambenian hostility to medicine strikes me as sentimental, reactionary and childishly contrarian. How does someone otherwise so insightful paint themselves in a corner like that, where they wind up arguing against techniques that extend life with dignity for millions?

I’m sorry if it feels like I’ve been dumping on things these past few days – the Fungi show in Rotterdam, the “Slow Technology Reader” and so on. I guess I’m looking for insight and resonance and terror and beauty, and finding only bromides. I should probably just recalibrate my expectations.

Money quote: “It is important here to remind ourselves of the temporality of the vortex, which shows us how the world as artifice is inseparable from the destruction of life, and that the artifice and climate collapse belong to the disjointed temporalities of the vortex in which the centripetal movement produces the empty now of the artifice while its centrifugal movement lays waste to life on Earth.”

As so often with this kind of prose, there is no sense that can be retrieved from this sentence that isn’t trivial, and capable of being expressed in far fewer words.

And in any event, a “vortex,” by definition, does not produce both “centripetal” and “centrifugal” forces. Its centripetality *is what makes it a vortex*. If you’re going to use terminology from the hard sciences to dress up your shallow thought, metaphorically or analogically, at least make sure you know what you’re talking about. Gah.

This essay, very much like the book in which it’s embedded – the “Slow Technology Reader” – offers some genuine insights and helpful observations, but it buries them in such a sea of absolute nonsense that I struggle to say whether their retrieval is worth the effort. The frustration, in other words, is fractal.

Sounds like it’s a good thing I was too lazy to get my shit together and switch to Mullvad, huh?

A few weeks ago a friend mentioned that now that the perimeter path around Manhattan is complete, it’s almost exactly thirty-two and a half miles around – meaning that people have started to knock it down all at once, as kind of an impromptu baby-#ultra challenge.

I haven’t been able to get the thought out of my head since.

If this all sounds inside-baseball and kinda personal to you, well, I guess that’s because it is. And like me, all the individuals in question are so long in the tooth now, remnants of the starchitect-adjacent era of Jasper Morrison, Ross Lovegrove, Karim Rashid, the Bourellecs and so on.

This raises a much more interesting question, though: who are the best-known designers to have emerged in the past fifteen years or so? No particular names are coming to mind.

I always forget what a cringe-makingly soft spot the Times has for MIT – how easily they’re taken in by the cult thereof, to the point that they’d elevated Media Lab honcho/close Jeffrey Epstein associate Joi Ito as some Future-Seein’ Guy & given him a seat on their board. It’s so gross.

Not sure I understand why this fash-tickling lox is allowed to keep bloviating in the way he does.

Also: no, dude, Jony Ive didn’t “need Steve Jobs” to succeed as a designer. What he needed was Dieter Rams designs to rip off, and where there was no such precedent available (cars, clothing) his work has been distinctly underwhelming. That Ferrari is 7/10ths a Marc Newson 021C anyway.

https://www.nytimes.com/2026/06/27/opinion/ferrari-electric-vehicle.html

(Pictured: AG, 2028.)

Approaching the juncture in life where the wisest course of action remaining available to me is to embrace irrelevance & recommit *hard* to the daily and microlocal.

Having a reeeeal Berenstain moment: neither the version of “Dead Man’s Curve” I (thought I)’ve been listening to for the past forty-odd years, nor any other version I’ve been able to find, sound right to my ear. (They’re all, to a one, a tad slower, the orchestration in the intro isn’t quite right, and “You’re on buddy” is punched out all wrong.)