This week, I found a lot of articles about media, culture, and power and their influence on one another. Important subjects since a big aspect of climate action and sustainable design is figuring out how to make the dog wag the tail instead of the other way around.

This week
🍄 How can people take a more active role in media?
🔮 Visions
👀 Finds we made along the way

🍄 How can people take a more active role in media?

This article helps tease out the answer to the question, "What is the role of media in the climate crisis?"

Rather than media being a tug-o-war between public and private sectors, Gaggio proposes creating a "public-private-plural" tripod to return balance and 'biodiversity' to our media ecosystems and give a voice back to citizens.

This transition is, in some way, starting to happen with the growth of ActivityPub and BlueSky's AT Protocol; these promising but as-of-yet-unproven decentralized protocols could help break down the walled gardens of social media. At the very least, they could help clear room for community spaces that resist commodification.

Read the article below 👇🏽

The mechanistic model of the world produced a global economy in which actions are constantly taken in the name of growth, regardless of their long-term impact on living systems. [Media literacy expert Antonio] Lopez reminds us that in order to address the ecological crisis, it is necessary "to transform our mental models from mechanism to something related to systems thinking and ecological intelligence." [...]

The remit of a public service is to grow cultural capital, but today economic capital is the only universally recognised value in the globalised world. [...]

There is a pattern. Companies break through by innovating, in content, technology, or service. They acquire a critical mass by creating value for customers, then shift their focus to delivering audiences to advertisers, and finally — if and when they reach a dominant position — turn to capture most of the value for their shareholders. Cory Doctorow memorably defined this process in the digital domain as "Enshittification".

For Mintzberg, restoring balance in society requires moving past two-sided politics and giving equal weight to three sectors: Public (political), Private (economic), and Plural (social), representing governments, businesses, and communities. The plural sector is not a middle way between the other two. It is made of communities, associations, cooperatives, NGOs, religious groups, movements and social initiatives. The critical difference is that none of it is owned by private companies or controlled by the government.

Read → Media Ecology by Federico Gaggio

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

We need to face the deep degenerative roots and entanglements in the causes of the Earth crisis. Without this, our efforts will just be ‘busy work’, or strategies for coping that achieve little. We will be always forcing a false balance between economy and society, or between nature and human needs. The media, campaign groups and institutions will be obsessing on one sub-crisis after another and pursuing token measures for them, ignoring the others. Moreover, they will continue to ignore the root causes rather than identifying leverage points to stop the harm.

→ Bridget McKenzie in The Roles of Culture in Response to the Earth Crisis

[W]hile conventional efforts in energy efficiency and renewable energy are important parts of the sustainability puzzle, they will never be truly effective if we ignore the other half of the puzzle, which is our own hunger for physical power over the environment. [...] Until such time that we have the collective self-control to know when enough is actually enough, developing more powerful energy technologies will likely just feed our addiction to energy consumption and its corresponding environmental destruction.

→ Tom Greenwood in How much power do we actually need?

For businesses, the attraction of establishing abundance as a social and personal goal is that the goal can never be achieved. Human desire cannot be sated. No matter how much we get, it’s not going to be enough.

→ Nicholas Carr in All What Is Delicious to Man

👀 Finds we made along the way

Not quite the wheat, but not quite the chaff

Sublime is a collaborative mashup of are.na, obsidian, and notion
Seven core principles for intentional culture change
Designing Desirability: Making Sustainability Aspirational

This week is about questioning the promises AI advocates sell us—hyper-productivity, unlimited creativity, and...text message summarization, to name a few. While some of these solutions might be useful, what are we willing to give up in return? And is the return even worth it in the first place?

Is uncertainty such a bad thing?

We live in a unique time where the powers that be in Silicon Valley—and, by proxy, the design industry—implore us to believe that any content is better than slow or no content. Even if that content is both made and consumed by machines. They push us to ignore the unproductive, questioning, and inefficient side of creativity.

But what kind of world do we get when we continually scratch this itch for ROI? What's the point of using AI to make a thoughtful and hard thing thoughtless and easy?

This week's main article is about what technologies like AI (and social media and web 2.0) give their inventors and what they take away from the rest of us.

Read below 👇🏽

In his book Non-things, the philosopher Byung-Chul Han draws a distinction between two styles of reading: the pornographic and the erotic. The pornographic reader “is looking for something to be uncovered.” He wants to get to the point, as expeditiously as possible. The erotic reader takes pleasure in the act of reading itself. He “lingers” with the words. “The words are the skin, and the skin does not enclose a meaning.” I would broaden Han’s distinction to describe perception in general. The pornographic mind is concerned only with what can be made explicit, what can be turned into information. It seeks to pierce the obscuring veils of mystery and wonder, beauty and ambiguity, to get to the gist of the matter. The erotic mind likes the veils. It sees them not as obscuring but as pleasurable and even revelatory.

The mind of the LLM is purely pornographic. It excels at the shallow, formulaic crafts of summary and mimicry. The tactile and the sensual are beyond its ken. The only meaning it knows is that which can be rendered explicitly. For a machine, such narrow-mindedness is a strength, essential to the efficient production of practical outputs. One looks to an LLM to pierce the veils, not linger on them. But when we substitute the LLM’s dead speech for our own living speech, we also adopt its point of view. Our mind becomes pornographic in its desire for naked information.

Read → Dead Labor, Dead Speech by Nicholas Carr

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

Why are we assuming that people want more, faster? Has anyone ever said, “if only I could make unlimited presentations”?

What if we want to craft one presentation, but do it beautifully?

What if we actually, genuinely, love the in-between moments when we return to a draft after days have passed, sharpening one word here, adding a better verb there.

Great software products aren’t simply a collection of buttons, icons, and menus. They shape how we think and who we aspire to be.

The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.

→ Sari Azout in What does slow AI look like?

[The idea that “AI will solve climate change”] is not merely foolish but dangerous—it’s another means of persuading otherwise smart people that immediate action isn’t necessary, that technological advancements are a trump card, that an all hands on deck effort to slash emissions and transition to proven renewable technologies isn’t necessary right now. It’s techno-utopianism of the worst kind; the kind that saps the will to act.

→ Brian Merchant in AI will never solve this

AI-produced things “sort of suck” not merely because they are inherently derivative and often erroneous; they suck because AI is only ever a simulation of care, and it improves by allowing people to be more careless. AI is fundamentally “artificial intentionality” rather than “artificial intelligence.”

Tech companies seem to hope that they can make a brute-force case that “having intention” is inconvenient, just as they continually try to persuade users that interacting with other people is inconvenient (rather than the point of life).

→ Rob Horning in Artificial intentionality

This week, I wanted to share some articles examining existing power structures and why it's so hard to change them. From mindsets to technology to protests to mapmaking, these articles might help you separate the real from the unreal.

Culture is key to climate action

An insightful exploration of why it's so hard to change minds and actions, where everyone can be useful in the climate crisis, and what being "untethered" means for respecting nature.

While I don't think staying in your hometown automatically means you have a closer connection with the nature surrounding it or necessarily use it as a "prism [to] bend all decisions through," I do think Scott is on to something when he says we often move to new cities for economic opportunities, and that rational relationship lets us more readily disconnect from climate harms that may visit us.

Read more about that below:

One of the larger projects of our modern society and economy is a project of dislocation and disconnection. The more we can untether people into individual units, the easier it is to mobilize them for maximal utility to the market. Most of us are not people of place, we are people of a market. Many move away from our hometowns, we follow opportunity to college or for a job to maximize our economic/career opportunities. Most people do not use their place-based identity as the prism they bend all decisions through, and most people do not integrate into the places they inhabit.

That’s no one’s fault, it was the logic of the system that pushed us into a stream laid out before us. The untethered, after all, are often the “winners” of our economic system, mobilizing to capture value anywhere it can be found regardless of invisible expense to others or the planet. However, the untethered are the losers of the next system, the system that will emerge from the logic of climate change. This new system that will require resilience, which like a spider’s web only claims it’s strength through an interwoven network of strong relationships.

The untethered have a harder time seeing and feeling the harm climate change causes, and abandon any pain that does surface more readily. The untethered will minimize their personal discomfort, moving or shielding themselves from harm, doing little to reduce global risks in the process. In contrast, the place-based can feel the pain but also the benefits of digging in for something they love.

Read → Emergencies, Frameshifts and What They Tell Us About Our Place In The World by Spencer R. Scott

🔮 Visions

Three small ideas to help challenge your thinking:

[T]echnology is intrinsically political. So what might look like a perfect technological solution to an environmental problem is *always* something messier, more imperfect. Every such solution creates winners and losers, even if they’re not immediately obvious. So whether or not “tech will save us” really depends on which “tech” and which “us.”

→ Jo Lindsay Walton in Pause

We deceive ourselves that our online paltry protests are effective because it allows us to believe we’ve done the work; because the *real work*, as the subconscious believes, comes at a cost we’re not willing to pay if we don’t have to. This level of self-deception is what billion dollar tech companies know how to exploit, because we largely are appeased by the type of symbolic feedback we can receive on these platforms, and it allows us to avoid the real work, and stay on their platforms. ... The power structure of our world doesn't care much what you’re posting online. It cares what you are spending your entire life force on, how your job and total behavior align in opposition to the oppression.

→ Spencer R. Scott in Once You Get the Message, Hang Up the Phone

Brandon Letsinger believes that one of the most important things that bioregionalists can do is to create new types of maps. “Maps are not neutral,” said Letsinger. “They are created with agenda and purpose. Quite often, they are created by national governments or economic entities that have their own interests. The ultimate purpose of the map will be to make money for the company or to express its [political] interests.”

Bioregional mapping depicts “everything that's left off of Google Maps and other traditional maps,” said Letsinger. The idea is to create maps that give the land a voice by charting the presence of wildlife, migratory patterns, water flows, and other notable ecological phenomena as they intersect with human communities and their cultures.

→ David Bollier in Cascadia and the Global Resurgence of Bioregional Activism

This week, I want to share some stories about the design industry's pursuit of perfection and why it may be time to transition to imperfection as a goal.

Is flawlessness falling out of fashion?

There’s been a vibe shift the past couple of years where genie-in-a-bottle design solutions aren’t sought after like they were in the 2010s. People are actively seeking out imperfection and limitations: apps that make it hard to access other apps and phones that do little more than call and text.

This article by Thorsten Jonas helps connect this trend—if you can call it that—to a sustainable mindset and helps us imagine an “ecosystemic” design process that looks beyond designing for hyperspecific users without accounting for broader systemic effects.

Here's a snippet of the full article, which includes some design process changes that Thorsten recommends:

By seeking perfection for somebody or something, we always take from somebody else. Perfection is not an absolute state. It is just one perspective in a complex, bigger system. The perfect solution always comes with negative impacts on other elements / players in the system. Seeking perfection creates injustice by default. [...]

A perfect delivery app might build up a great UX and convenience for the user. But at the same time the delivery rides are not paid well or small grocery stores have to close because they cannot match the business model of the delivery service. [...]

When building and designing digital products, we try to build the best product for our users. We need to change this [and] design from the beginning for a solution that is balanced with its surrounding ecosystem and on purpose, not just perfect to the user. [...]

Once we have dismantled negative impacts to the ecosystem we can seek for connections with the user- and business-needs we want to fulfil. Which of these needs are very harmful? This is an additional information layer to the classic user- and business-needs to help us understand and evaluate the negative impacts of each of them.

Read → Imperfect design for a better future by Thorsten Jonas

🏗️ Reconstructions

Three bite-sized ideas to help challenge your thinking:

With friction we don’t mean malfunctioning technology. If you don’t find the help-button, that is not the sort of friction we talk about. Friction is resistance that stems from movement, actions and engagement. It is desire, it is boredom. Friction is meeting people physically. Shutting down the site intentionally after some time in order to go out could be intentional friction. Friction can be much more fun than seamlessness.

→ Luna Maurer and Roel Wouters in Embracing friction

If the science tells us we need a transition and change in behaviour, then the websites we visit should reflect that. If every job is a climate job then every website can be a climate website.

Think about the last recipe site you visited. What if the first recipes and all featured recipes you were served were part of a climate friendly diet? Travel sites could push stories and guides about low carbon travel and sustainable accommodation. Design and construction websites could prioritise content about alternative building materials and low carbon mobility projects.

→ Andy Davies in Reducing “Business as Usual” content on platforms

Every technology gives us a new power, but it also takes something away from us. With every new technology, we risk becoming a little less human, and this is never more true than with AI. [...] Paradoxically, while AI might seem to be dragging us into a less human future, it might just be the thing that wakes us up and prompts us to look deep within ourselves to ask what really makes us special and unique as human beings.

→ Tom Greenwood in What does it mean to be human?

This week, I want to talk about AI (yes, again). I'd love to stop, but it continues to be a hot-button topic in design—although Wall Street does seem to be cooling on it.

🙅🏽‍♂️ AI is incompatible with environmentalism

As much as designers love to be on the cutting edge of tech, this article made me come to a strong conclusion: any designer who cares about the climate should abandon AI. Or at least relegate it to a 'break in case of emergency' tool. It goes without saying that using it as a personal Google or calculator is a waste.

AI follows the same doublespeak pattern of other tech advancements of the past 15 years—from social media to the cloud—which we thought were innocuous but ended up being socially or environmentally detrimental. (The cloud, a euphemism for 'data center,' has a bigger carbon footprint than the airline industry.)

The difference between AI and those technologies is that AI is still nascent. There's still time to scuttle the ship.

The real question we need to ask ourselves is this: Is the upside (?) of summarizing emails, getting feedback without talking to another living person, having personalized stock imagery—or, god forbid, an imaginary Friend—worth the downside of running the planet further into the ground?

I don't think it is, and it's more apparent to me than ever that we have more to gain by developing a worldview centered around nature than one centered around technology.

Anyway, here's a bit from the article:

[I]nsatiable hunger for power is slowing the transition to green energy. When the owner of two coal-fired power plants in Maryland filed plans to close last year, PJM asked them to keep running till at least 2028 to ensure grid reliability. Meanwhile, AI is also being used to actively increase fossil fuel production. Shell, for example, has aggressively deployed AI to find and produce deep-sea oil. [...]

Even before Google’s AI integration this spring, the average internet user’s digital activity generated 229 kilograms of carbon dioxide a year. That means the world’s current internet use already accounts for about 40 percent of the per capita carbon budget needed to keep global warming under 1.5 degrees Celsius. [...]

“It’s difficult to reckon with the physical harms of AI, says Brian Chen, policy director at the nonprofit Data & Society, because “tech companies invisibilize the consequences of these systems, most people don’t have to think about it.”

Latin America, for example, is now seeing a surge in data center development, including near drought-stricken Mexico City, which is hurtling toward a day in the near future when its taps run dry. [...]

People don’t realize that when the groundwater is exhausted, there’s no alternative.

“They don’t live in the natural world,” Ward says. “They live in a world where there’s a pipe in the wall, and you get water, and they have no idea where it comes from.”

He adds, “But when it’s gone, it’s gone.”

Read → The Hidden Environmental Impact of AI by Lois Parshley

🏗️ Reconstructions

Three bite-sized ideas to help challenge your thinking:

It can sometimes feel as though we have given up on any bold ideas about how we might want to live in the future. All we hear is artificial intelligence, ‘AI’. At the same time, ‘sustainable’ design feels trapped in a narrow framework defined by concepts such as ‘net zero’. It is in shaving mode: shaving off some carbon here, some plastic there and some waste over there. This is all crucial work, but if we struggle to achieve net zero, it is partly because carbon counting feels like accountancy, not a compelling vision of the future.

→ Justin McGuirk in The Impact of Design: Symptoms, Systems and Stories

It can be easy to get lost in numbers, but what they point to is an obvious truth: generative AI is an environmental disaster that’s accelerating natural destruction and the climate crisis at the very moment alarms are sounding about the precious little time that remains to turn things around. Tech companies once pitched themselves as the purveyors of a more ethical form of capitalism. They wanted us to believe they would balance corporate profit with environmental sustainability, such that the digital future was marketed as inherently more sustainable than the analog past. It’s clearer than ever that was a lie.

→ Paris Marx in Generative AI is a climate disaster

I will reflexively convert a personal story into a lesson or metaphor—sometimes even as it's happening. I've learned to experience life as a series of content opportunities. And I know I'm not alone.

Kate Tyson once texted me a screenshot of a LinkedIn update that started with an eye-catching line about checking into the emergency room. After teasing that the experience got them thinking, the update pivoted to ask, "What can an emergency room visit teach you about running a better business?" For all I know, the rest of the post was thoughtful and well-considered. It’s not the content itself that’s at issue. The issue (or one of them) is what happens when our creative reflex becomes turning a personal story into valuable content.

Our stories cease to be our stories—and become instruments for attracting attention.

→ Tara McMullin in Unpacking the Attention Fetish

This week, I'm pretty much obliged to mention the new AI companion, Friend, and the narrative it encourages 🫠 If you haven't heard of it, you should really watch their launch video/ragebait before jumping into this week’s main article.

👯 Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships

L.M. Sacasas gives us an excellent dissection of Friend, the vision of the future it promotes, and why we might be tempted to use it out of necessity.

The always-listening Friend, and AI in general, mark a point where companies have, on top of commodifying our homes (Airbnb) and cars (Uber), started to commodify our memories, imagination, and relationships. Material resources are now largely spoken for, and the system is pushing people to mine society’s immaterial elements. Being designers, we might even be involved in beautifying and normalizing that mining.

Apart from the social element, Friend makes me think about the design culture that buttresses these absurd ideas. We see, once again, that technology and a vague idea of 'progress' can’t be the value system that drives what we do; technology itself isn’t a value but a carrier of the values you already have.

What does it say about our understanding of design when we, through our work, proudly and uncritically boost devices like Friend?

From the article:

It is good to be able to relate to the world in a manner that evokes and engages the various dimensions of our human personhood—embodied, imaginative, intellectual, emotional, moral, spiritual, etc.—particularly in relationship with others. But our techno-economic environment generates an experience of the world that is hostile to this ideal. It operates at a pace, scale, and intensity that undermines our capacity to relate to the world with the fulness of our presence, thought, and care. If affection is kindled by time and attention, the default settings of our techno-economic order undermine our capacity to give either. We are instead encouraged to live as machines rather than creatures, optimizing for all the wrong metrics.

And these same techno-economic structures instill in us a manufactured neediness so that we might be all the more beholden to the goods and services marketed with the promise of alleviating our plight and addressing the very neediness they cultivate. Social robots, AI assistants, VR, generative AI—each of these, as they are often marketed, can be usefully analyzed from this perspective. They are the system’s answers to the problems the system created and they serve the system not the person. [...]

Considered from a slightly more cynical perspective, we can see that there is a certain unfortunate logic at work: manufactured neediness prepares the ground for new commodities. The goal is not to alleviate loneliness or isolation by fostering vernacular human relationships, which, of course, cannot be readily monetized, but to insinuate, pejoratively, that such relationships are inefficient and full of friction. As Horning noted, “Chatbots are often marketed as though other people represent the main impediment to solving loneliness, and if you remove the threat of judgment and exclusion and rejection that other people represent, then no one will ever feel lonely again.”

Read → Embracing Sub-Optimal Relationships by L.M. Sacasas

🏗️ Reconstructions

Here are three bite-sized ideas to help challenge your thinking:

[M]ost crises – such as the 2008 financial meltdown or the recent droughts in Spain – are rarely in and of themselves sufficient to induce rapid and far-reaching policy change (unlike a war). Rather, the historical evidence suggests that a crisis is most likely to create substantive change if two other factors are simultaneously present: movements and ideas.

→ Roman Krznaric in The disruption nexus

[T]he best narratives and metaphors for thinking about how life works come not from our technologies (machines, computers) but from life itself. Some biologists now argue that we should think of all living systems, from single cells upwards, not as mechanical contraptions but as cognitive agents, capable of sifting and integrating information against the backdrop of their own internal states in order to achieve some self-determined goal. [...] The ‘organic technology’ of language, where meaning arises through context and cannot be atomised into component parts, is a constantly useful analogy. Life must be its own metaphor.

And shouldn’t we have seen that all along? For what, after all, is extraordinary – and challenging to scientific description – about living matter is not its molecules but its aliveness, its agency.

→ Philip Ball in We are not machines

[M]aking art is already a fundamentally democratic process. [...] It just takes time, effort, training, dedication, a development of craft. AI advocates have tried to argue that AI helps disabled people create art—but the already plenty vibrant disabled artist community shut that down extremely quickly. No, it’s making a living practicing art is the tricky part, the already deeply precarious part—and it’s that part to which the AI companies are taking a battering ram. [...]

The democratization pitch is aimed not at aspiring artists, but at tech enthusiasts who may or may not feel that largely abstracted gatekeepers have been unkind to them or derided their cultural contributions, who feel satisfaction at seeing slick-looking images produced from their prompting and eagerly share and promote the results, and industries who read the ‘democratize’ lingo as code for ‘cheap’, and would like to automate the production of images, text, or video.

→ Brian Merchant in AI is not "democratizing creativity." It's doing the opposite

I wanted to try something new this week: Instead of three long excerpts and even longer articles—which can be a bit overwhelming, especially on mobile—I want to share one main article and a few interesting thoughts I've picked up along the way.

👽 Would being aliens' descendants make us more life-centered?

This article tells the hypothetical origin story of Ǵenh, a microscopic traveler from a distant planet who landed on our own. Spencer R. Scott crafts this story as a contrast to Judeo-Christian and Ashininaabe origin stories and examines how the dynamics of those stories affect their relationship with nature and life as a whole.

There's no doubt that origin stories help us understand the world. With this in mind, how would our not being of this world—of it being a liferaft rather than an inheritance or damnation—change our appreciation of it?

History has shown us that origin stories deeply affect our search for purpose and how we behave on this Earth. In the face of climate change, the importance of origin stories has never been more pronounced. [...]

What if we had grown up with the origin story of Ǵenh? What culture would we create if we saw Earth as a miraculous celestial garden bed that seeds scattered to the cosmic winds found, against all odds, a home in?

We might start to wonder what kind of garden it is we’ve landed on. We might internalize how miraculous it is that a planet, so perfectly outfitted for life, received a seed. For what science can tell, Earth appears to be extremely special in its ability to foster life. [...]

The power in the story of Ǵenh is less in re-imaging where we come from, and more in what it says about which direction we might choose to head. If we are merely seeds planted in an unlikely bed of soil wondering if we will flower, we see there is no guarantee for us, no space gardener, “no hint that help will come from elsewhere”. Whether we thrive or die in our pot of soil will be determined by our ability to accept the responsibility of this position. As the newest Inheritors of Life.

Read → The Book of Ǵenh: Reimagining our Origin Story for a Life-Centric Reorientation by Spencer R. Scott

🏗️ Reconstructions

You are akin to a planet. Within your body are different climates that give rise to different types of ecosystems. Within these different environments live varying types of species that altogether make up your microbiome. The swampy atmosphere of your armpits and feet play host to an entirely different cadre of life than the caverns of your gut and the cold tundras of your hands. But even between similar habitats, there is diversity to be found; for example, the palm of your right hand shares only a sixth of the same microbial species as that of your left hand.
— Willow Defebaugh in Being Human

The French priest Pierre Teilhard de Chardin famously said that “We are not human beings having a spiritual experience. We are spiritual beings having a human experience”. In other words, our minds and souls are having a material experience here on Earth. You would imagine that a healthy society would therefore cherish both sides of this duality - the non-physical and the physical. The strange thing about our modern culture though is that we have rejected almost all concept of spirituality and, according to Watts, we have also forgotten the value of the material world, leaving us with nothing that we truly value. No wonder our society and environment are creaking at the seams.
— Tom Greenwood in Is materialism really such a bad thing?

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying.

In other words, the promise of liberation traps us within the tyranny of tiny tasks by convincing us to see the stuff of everyday life and ordinary relationships as obstacles in search of an elusive higher purpose—Creativity, Diversion, Wellness, Self-actualization, whatever. But in this way it turns out that we are only ever serving the demands of the system that wants nothing more than our ceaseless consumption and production.
— L.M. Sacasas in The Work of Art

This week is about (one of) the elephant(s) in the room: Convenience. There's lots to love and, on the surface, little to hate—but maybe we've just been looking at the topic with uncritical eyes. Today, I want to put some weight on the other side of the balance.

This week

🏁 What's a destination without a journey?
🐌 Do we need to de-ease life?
⛓️ Who does my convenience affect?

🏁 What's a destination without a journey?

Hyperfocusing on convenience can make us assume ease is always the best option, but by taking the difficulty out of everything, we also remove the experience, reducing life to a series of transactions rather than stories, relationships, or memories.

Maybe we should think twice about the things we want to make efficient. It doesn’t make sense to hurriedly finish something that fulfills us; for these activities, it's better to choose the long path than the short one.

Though understood and promoted as an instrument of liberation, convenience has a dark side. With its promise of smooth, effortless efficiency, it threatens to erase the sort of struggles and challenges that help give meaning to life. Created to free us, it can become a constraint on what we are willing to do, and thus in a subtle way it can enslave us. [...]

Today’s cult of convenience fails to acknowledge that difficulty is a constitutive feature of human experience. Convenience is all destination and no journey. But climbing a mountain is different from taking the tram to the top, even if you end up at the same place. We are becoming people who care mainly or only about outcomes. We are at risk of making most of our life experiences a series of trolley rides. [...]

Embracing inconvenience may sound odd, but we already do it without thinking of it as such. As if to mask the issue, we give other names to our inconvenient choices: We call them hobbies, avocations, callings, passions. These are the noninstrumental activities that help to define us. They reward us with character because they involve an encounter with meaningful resistance — with nature’s laws, with the limits of our own bodies — as in carving wood, melding raw ingredients, fixing a broken appliance, writing code, timing waves or facing the point when the runner’s legs and lungs begin to rebel against him.

Such activities take time, but they also give us time back. They expose us to the risk of frustration and failure, but they also can teach us something about the world and our place in it.

Read → The Tyranny of Convenience by Tim Wu

🐌 Do we need to de-ease life?

Although it's, at this point, cliché to mention we're all burnt out, this article does well to show that the burnout is coming from 'inside the house.' Well, inside our pockets at least.

The downside—whether intentional or not—of the 24-Hour On-Demand Ultra Convenient Lifestyle of the past 10-15 years has been an enclosure of the social commons. This enclosure acts like an antibiotic, wiping out both the bad and the good friction from relationships. This friction is seen by the tech and business community at large as a problem to solve rather than the normal functioning of human society.

So, to what extent can de-optimization be optimal for our mental health?

...as we all bumble along, burned out, isolated, and drowning in the demands of whatever life or career stage we’re at, we’re also expected to constantly consume and metabolize horrific world events in the background. This over-reliance on tech for every aspect of our lives “opens us up to new vectors of anxiety,” as this great post by Brett Scott put it, with “[our nervous systems] now plugged into a neurotic and hypersensitive globe-spanning information system that’s constantly pushing unnecessary things into your consciousness.”

So is it really any wonder that we might not be inclined to text our friend back about that plan four Thursdays from now, in between consuming images of genocide presented without any context or verifiable information, while trying to order dinner on our phone, and answer a Slack message after hours? [...]

I spent the first decade of my adulthood amassing a network of talented, connected friends all over the world, people who I could summon with a smartphone. Beyond that, I believed I needed to rely on no one but myself. So realizing all of this has been an identity-based shift for me, but it’s one I’m very grateful parenthood has given me. We’re in the process of figuring out how to re-orient our family’s life around this idea, and making those changes feels scary but good. As we do that, I’ve been comforted and energized by this idea — which I first heard in this interview with the novelist Zadie Smith — that caretaking is a kind of liberation.

It’s liberation from the idea that we can self-optimize ourselves to the point of not needing anyone else. That if we work hard enough to survive in a competitive economy, we’ll be able to buy, order, or summon anything we might need within 24 hours, and that is somehow progress. That instead of asking for help and support from the people and friends we know — they’re too burned out, don’t want to bother them, they live too far away — we should invest heavily in self care to inoculate ourselves from needing to ask anything of anyone.

These are all ideas that capitalism loves — more people living in their own atomized fiefdoms means selling more stuff and services and meal kits to keep up with the relentless pace of life — but are fundamentally antithetical to the ways that humans are designed to flourish.

Read → The friendship problem by Rosie Spinks

⛓️ Who does my convenience affect?

I thought this was a really interesting reflection on the effects of automation. Not the effects for the user, but the social effects: how does it change how we interact, what we believe, and ultimately what kind of work we do? In subtle ways, the convenience that comes with automation papers over its role as an aggravator of social division—a tool to dissipate social power.

Political scientist Robert D. Putnam, who has studied civic engagement since the 1960s, argues Americans are less engaged in politics than they used to be and are more isolated, spending less time with friends, family and neighbours.

Our social capital — which Putnam defines as the overarching belief about society that facilitates co-operation — diminishes when we lose opportunities to engage with people outside of our regular social networks.

This decline in social capital can be traced to changes in work and society more generally. Society, in other words, is becoming increasingly individualistic.

Public-facing automation may further diminish our social capital by decreasing our interactions with other people. As we pay for parking at parking machines, rent bowling shoes and lanes through an app, or order food from touchscreen kiosks, we interact less with the people who work these jobs.

Read → A rise in self-service technologies may cause a decline in our sense of community by Blake Lee-Whiting

Following last week's article about dualism, I thought it might be interesting to share some articles about how we separate—or "atomize"—the different parts of our daily lives and what effect that has on us. Hint: it's not a good one (but there is a way out).

This week

🤖 Atomization of Life
🍃 Atomization of Nature
🪓 OK, atomization isn't allll bad

🤖 Atomization of life

Are we over-reliant on efficiency? While atomized activities may allow us to concentrate and be productive, that same atomization can also create distance between us and the people in our lives, making us less happy, and, eventually, more polarized.

If we stress work/life balance, why does so much of life continue to feel like work? This article may have the answer 👇🏽

[A]tomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element:

Biking is about exercise, and scheduling with friends and planning a route and inflating your tires all get in the way of that.

Eating is about sustenance, and inviting friends and getting groceries and cooking all get in the way of that.

Relationships are about talking, and meeting up in person and leaving the house and scheduling are all inconveneiences.

Work is about checking off tasks, so spending time commuting to an office where you might goof off and socialize all get in the way of that.

Then when we feel lonely, painfully isolated by our atomized life, we schedule some atomized social time like going to a bar or coffee to see friends in between our lonely work and lonely dinner because we’ve removed most of the natural socializing elements from all of the other parts of life. Atomization turns an integrated day of socializing, eating, exercising, and working into discrete hurried chunks of trying to move from one thing to another, wondering why we never seem to have time for everything. [...]

The solution to the atomization curse that both gives us significantly more time back, and makes us much happier, is to seek to reintegrate these various foci of life as much as possible. How do you turn food back into a rich, multivariate experience with friends, fun, exploration, and relaxation? How do you blend socialization and exercise and community? How do you spend less time having shallower atomized relationships through a screen, and more time having rich in-person relationships where you get the full experience of other people? [...]

Instead of looking at some problem like “I don’t see enough friends,” or “I don’t work out enough,” or “I don’t have enough fun,” and then trying to find time to fit those priorities into, we should see how we can incorporate them into what we’re already doing. Could you make your workout less perfectly optimized so you can do it with friends? Can you loosen the reigns on your Super Duper Productive Routine to hang at a coffee shop with friends for a few hours a week? And for the love of God, can you please stop drinking fucking Huel or Soylent at your desk and talk to someone instead?

Read De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness by Nat Eliason

🍃 Atomization of Nature

The grammar we use impacts how we see and interact with the world. Kimmerer here explores using the singular “ki”—a word based on the Potawatomi word for land—and the plural “kin,” an existing English word, to refer to the living beings surrounding us.

In contrast to the distance created by saying “it,” could these words help us to respect and connect with nature?

We have a special grammar for personhood. We would never say of our late neighbor, “It is buried in Oakwood Cemetery.” Such language would be deeply disrespectful and would rob him of his humanity. We use instead a special grammar for humans: we distinguish them with the use of he or she, a grammar of personhood for both living and dead Homo sapiens. Yet we say of the oriole warbling comfort to mourners from the treetops or the oak tree herself beneath whom we stand, “It lives in Oakwood Cemetery.” In the English language, a human alone has distinction while all other living beings are lumped with the nonliving “its.” [...]

The language that my grandfather was forbidden to speak is composed primarily of verbs, ways to describe the vital beingness of the world. Both nouns and verbs come in two forms, the animate and the inanimate. You hear a blue jay with a different verb than you hear an airplane, distinguishing that which possesses the quality of life from that which is merely an object. Birds, bugs, and berries are spoken of with the same respectful grammar as humans are, as if we were all members of the same family. [...]

The language we speak is an affront to the ears of the colonist in every way, because it is a language that challenges the fundamental tenets of Western thinking—that humans alone are possessed of rights and all the rest of the living world exists for human use. Those whom my ancestors called relatives were renamed natural resources. In contrast to verb-based Potawatomi, the English language is made up primarily of nouns, somehow appropriate for a culture so obsessed with things. [...]

Replacing the aboriginal idea of land as a revered living being with the colonial understanding of land as a warehouse of natural resources was essential to Manifest Destiny, so languages that told a different story were an enemy. Indigenous languages and thought were as much an impediment to land-taking as were the vast herds of buffalo, and so were likewise targeted for extermination. [...]

English encodes human exceptionalism, which privileges the needs and wants of humans above all others and understands us as detached from the commonwealth of life. But I wonder if it was always that way. I can’t help but think that the land spoke clearly to early Anglo-Saxons, just as it did to the Potawatomi. Robert Macfarlane’s wonderful book Landmarks, about land and language, documents myriad place names of great particularity that illuminate an ancient Anglo-Saxon intimacy with the land and her beings. It is said that we are known by the company we keep, and I wonder if English sharpened its verbal ax and lost the companionship of oaks and primroses when it began to keep company with capitalism. [...]

Inspired by the grammar of animacy in Potawatomi that feels so right and true, I’ve been searching for a new expression that could be slipped into the English language in place of it when we are speaking of living beings. [...]

The grammar of animacy is an antidote to arrogance; it reminds us that we are not alone. [...]

Another student, Amanda, adds, “Having this word makes me regard the trees more as individuals. Before, I would just call them all ‘oak’ as if they were a species and not individuals. That’s how we learn it in dendrology, but using ki makes me think of them each, as not just ‘oak,’ but as that particular oak, the one with the broken branch and the brown leaves.”

Read Speaking of Nature by Robin Kimmerer

🪓 Atomization isn't allll bad

Maybe there are some cases where we should embrace atomization...?

Based on Apple's 'anti-creative' Crush ad from last month, L. M. Sacasas looks between the lines at the implications of all that creative destruction. Ultimately he leaves us with two paths forward, but I'll let you read the article to find out what those are. 😉

The ad conveyed the company’s incipient ideology with exquisite clarity: like the ring of Sauron, the iPad here appears as the one device to rule them all, chiefly by overthrowing and displacing them. Are you worried that digital devices will obsolesce the rich and multifaceted array of analog tools and instruments? Apple wants you to know that, yes, this is what it is aiming at. Are you concerned about the flattening of human experience under digital conditions? Boy does Apple have just the visual metaphor to confirm your suspicions. [...]

[Albert] Borgmann, who passed away just over a year ago, was a German-American philosopher of technology. [...]

Borgmann identified what he called the device paradigm. The logic of the device paradigm is pretty straightforward. It describes the tendency to hide the complex machinery of a technology below a slick, commodious surface that makes the output of a device available to the user with minimal effort. The goods a device offers its users are “rendered instantaneous, ubiquitous, safe, and easy.” “A commodity is truly available,” Borgmann writes, “when it can be enjoyed as a mere end, unencumbered by means.” Apple products have long been leading exemplars of the device paradigm.

But this is only part of the picture. Borgmann opposed devices to what he called focal things. Focal things demand something of us. They require a measure of care, practice, and engagement that devices do not. Our use of them induces our focus, which they invite by design. “The experience of a [focal] thing,” Borgmann also notes, “is always and also a bodily and social engagement with the thing’s world.” There are, in other words, embodied and communal dimensions to the use of a focal thing. They involve our bodies, and they involve us in relationships to a degree that devices do not. [...]

in relation to devices we tend to be relegated to the status of user, who may more often than not be the one being used. But no one would describe a musician as a user. Yes, they use the instrument, but their richness of the relationship between the musician and their instrument demands a different term, one that signals the degree to which a skill is cultivated in relation to the focal thing. We speak of musicians, not users of musical instruments because the musician is characterized by a set of skills they have cultivated in order to make something with the instrument. [...]

Read The Stuff of (a Well-Lived) Life by L. M. Sacasas

This week is all about division in tech: between values and actions, between ideas of its social role, and the gulf it creates between reality and entertainment. I think it's an interesting grouping of articles that illustrates of how drastically tech culture is shifting politically.

Enjoy!

This week

🗜️ Is it time to move slow and fix things?
🔮 Is tech for escaping or enchanting?
👀 Should we not be entertained?

🗜️ Is it time to move slow and fix things?

Among other things, compulsive action allows the tech industry to ignore society and follow its wild fantasies—which are increasingly fascist. This article helps lay out why moving fast and breaking things naturally leads to breaking people, norms, and society.

The new technocrats are ostentatious in their use of language that appeals to Enlightenment values—reason, progress, freedom—but in fact they are leading an antidemocratic, illiberal movement. Many of them profess unconditional support for free speech, but are vindictive toward those who say things that do not flatter them. They tend to hold eccentric beliefs: that technological progress of any kind is unreservedly and inherently good; that you should always build it, simply because you can; that frictionless information flow is the highest value regardless of the information’s quality; that privacy is an archaic concept; that we should welcome the day when machine intelligence surpasses our own. [...]

Comparisons between Silicon Valley and Wall Street or Washington, D.C., are commonplace, and you can see why—all are power centers, and all are magnets for people whose ambition too often outstrips their humanity. But Silicon Valley’s influence easily exceeds that of Wall Street and Washington. It is reengineering society more profoundly than any other power center in any other era since perhaps the days of the New Deal. [...]

Even the most deleterious companies have built some wonderful tools. But these tools, at scale, are also systems of manipulation and control. They promise community but sow division; claim to champion truth but spread lies; wrap themselves in concepts such as empowerment and liberty but surveil us relentlessly. The values that win out tend to be the ones that rob us of agency and keep us addicted to our feeds. [...]

None of this happens without the underlying technocratic philosophy of inevitability—that is, the idea that if you can build something new, you must. “In a properly functioning world, I think this should be a project of governments,” Altman told my colleague Ross Andersen last year, referring to OpenAI’s attempts to develop artificial general intelligence. But Altman was going to keep building it himself anyway. Or, as Zuckerberg put it to The New Yorker many years ago: “Isn’t it, like, inevitable that there would be a huge social network of people? … If we didn’t do this someone else would have done it.” [...]

The American poet Ezra Pound’s modernist slogan “Make it new” easily could have doubled as a mantra for the technocrats. A parallel movement was that of the Italian futurists, led by figures such as the poet F. T. Marinetti, who used maxims like “March, don’t molder” and “Creation, not contemplation.”The ethos for technocrats and futurists alike was action for its own sake. “We are not satisfied to roam in a garden closed in by dark cypresses, bending over ruins and mossy antiques,” Marinetti said in a 1929 speech. “We believe that Italy’s only worthy tradition is never to have had a tradition.” Prominent futurists took their zeal for technology, action, and speed and eventually transformed it into fascism. [...]

The evolution of futurism into fascism wasn’t inevitable—many of Pound’s friends grew to fear him, or thought he had lost his mind—but it does show how, during a time of social unrest, a cultural movement based on the radical rejection of tradition and history, and tinged with aggrievement, can become a political ideology. [...]

In October, the venture capitalist and technocrat Marc Andreessen published on his firm’s website a stream-of-consciousness document he called “The Techno-Optimist Manifesto,” a 5,000-word ideological cocktail that eerily recalls, and specifically credits, Italian futurists such as Marinetti. [...]

“Our enemy,” Andreessen writes, is “the know-it-all credentialed expert worldview, indulging in abstract theories, luxury beliefs, social engineering, disconnected from the real world, delusional, unelected, and unaccountable—playing God with everyone else’s lives, with total insulation from the consequences.” The irony is that this description very closely fits Andreessen and other Silicon Valley elites. The world that they have brought into being over the past two decades is unquestionably a world of reckless social engineering, without consequence for its architects, who foist their own abstract theories and luxury beliefs on all of us. [...]

No more “build it because we can.” No more algorithmic feedbags. No more infrastructure designed to make the people less powerful and the powerful more controlling. Every day we vote with our attention; it is precious, and desperately wanted by those who will use it against us for their own profit and political goals. Don’t let them.

Read → The Rise of Techno-authoritarianism by Adrienne LaFrance

🔮 Is tech for escaping or enchanting?

As illustrated here, there's a growing divide between two cultural camps: one using technology as a way to mask the world (e.g., Vision Pro), and the other using technology to reconnect with it (e.g., Light Phone, Daylight).

It feels like we're at an important point in tech development where the mainstream tech culture is floundering in its search for the next big thing while a new wave of 'alt-tech' elegantly does the minimum necessary instead of the maximum possible.

In his 2000 critique of sociobiology, Life is a Miracle, Berry wrote, “It is easy for me to imagine that the next great division of the world will be between people who wish to live as creatures and people who wish to live as machines.” [...]

In The Enchantment of Modern Life, political theorist Jane Bennett argued that “the contemporary world retains the power to enchant humans and that humans can cultivate themselves so as to experience more of that effect.” “To be enchanted,” she wrote, “is to be struck and shaken by the extraordinary that lives amid the familiar and everyday.” [...]

The allure of digital technologies such as Vision Pro can be usefully framed, in part, as the pursuit of an alternative (re-)enchantment: virtual projections overlapping and obscuring our shared world, summoned and manipulated by gesture, sight, and speech as if the user were a wizard in a world responsive their command. It presents as magical.

But what if, as Bennett suggests, the world is already enchanted and the real alchemy that summons the miracle of being is that fusion of time and care that we call attention?

When I learn to live as a machine—by choice or otherwise—I become increasingly incapable of attending to the world. This might be because I am simply moving through life at a pace that prevents me from properly attending to the world. Or because I am striving for efficiency or productivity in realms of experience where those aims are, in fact, counter-productive. Perhaps it’s because I’m unable to resist the temptation to always be elsewhere than where I stand. Maybe it’s because I’ve placed $3500 goggles on my face. “A headset is a pair of spectacles, but a headset is also a blindfold,” as Ian Bogost recently put it. I think Berry would say that these can all be ways of conforming to life as a machine rather than as a creature.

Read → Vision Con by L. M. Sacasas

👀 Should we not be entertained?

What's the effect of immersive media—whether VR, the metaverse, or social media—on how we experience the real world? The line is being blurred between entertainment and information, citizenry and audience. Which is good if you profit from those inventions, but bad if you're a user of them...like the vast majority of us are.

In 1992, Neal Stephenson’s sci-fi novel Snow Crash imagined a form of virtual entertainment so immersive that it would allow people, essentially, to live within it. He named it the metaverse.

In the years since, the metaverse has leaped from science fiction and into our lives. Microsoft, Alibaba, and ByteDance, the parent company of TikTok, have all made significant investments in virtual and augmented reality. Their approaches vary, but their goal is the same: to transform entertainment from something we choose, channel by channel or stream by stream or feed by feed, into something we inhabit. In the metaverse, the promise goes, we will finally be able to do what science fiction foretold: live within our illusions. [...]

Dwell in this environment long enough, and it becomes difficult to process the facts of the world through anything except entertainment. We’ve become so accustomed to its heightened atmosphere that the plain old real version of things starts to seem dull by comparison. A weather app recently sent me a push notification offering to tell me about “interesting storms.” I didn’t know I needed my storms to be interesting. Or consider an email I received from TurboTax. It informed me, cheerily, that “we’ve pulled together this year’s best tax moments and created your own personalized tax story.” Here was the entertainment imperative at its most absurd: Even my Form 1040 comes with a highlight reel.

Such examples may seem trivial, harmless—brands being brands. But each invitation to be entertained reinforces an impulse: to seek diversion whenever possible, to avoid tedium at all costs, to privilege the dramatized version of events over the actual one. To live in the metaverse is to expect that life should play out as it does on our screens. And the stakes are anything but trivial. In the metaverse, it is not shocking but entirely fitting that a game-show host and Twitter personality would become president of the United States. [...]

“Opinion: January 6 Hearings Could Be a Real-Life Summer Blockbuster,” read a CNN headline in May—the unstated corollary being that if the hearings failed at the box office, they would fail at their purpose. (“Lol no one is watching this,” the account of the Republican members of the House Judiciary Committee tweeted as the hearings were airing, attempting to suggest such a failure.)

The hearings did not fail, though; on the contrary, the first one was watched by some 20 million people—ratings similar to those earned by a Sunday Night Football broadcast. And the success came in part because the January 6 committee so ably turned its findings into compelling TV. The committee summoned well-spoken and, in many cases, telegenic witnesses. It made a point of transforming that day’s chaos into a comprehensive plot. Its production was so successful that The New York Times included the hearings on its list of 2022’s best TV shows.

The committee understood that for people to care about January 6—for people to take an interest in the greatest coup attempt in American history—the violence and treason had to be translated into that universal American language: a good show. [...]

In late 2022, The New York Times revealed that George Santos, a newly elected Republican representative from Long Island, had invented or wildly inflated not just his résumé (a familiar political sin) but his entire biography. Santos had, in essence, run as a fictional character and won. His lies and obfuscations—about his education, his employment history, his charitable work, even his religion—were shocking in their brazenness. They were also met, by many, with a collective shrug. “Everyone fabricates their résumé,” one of his constituents told the Times. Another vowed her continued support: “He was never untruthful with me,” she said. Their reactions are reminiscent of the Obama voter who explained to Politico, in 2016, why he would be switching his allegiances: “At least Trump is fun to watch.”

These are Postman’s fears in action. They are also Hannah Arendt’s. Studying societies held in the sway of totalitarian dictators—the very real dystopias of the mid-20th century—Arendt concluded that the ideal subjects of such rule are not the committed believers in the cause. They are instead the people who come to believe in everything and nothing at all: people for whom the distinction between fact and fiction no longer exists.

A republic requires citizens; entertainment requires only an audience. In 2020, a former health official worried aloud that “viewers will get tired of another season of coronavirus.” The concern, it turned out, was warranted: Americans have struggled to make sense of a pandemic that refuses to conform to a tidy narrative structure—digestible plots, cathartic conclusions.

Read → We've Lost the Plot by Megan Garber

This week, I've included articles that focus on reframing familiar concepts in unfamiliar ways, and as a result, help us to see how close change can actually be.

This week

💩 Sh*t as a resource
📍 Region as a verb
🦠 Humanity as an antibody

Sh*t as a resource

What if we saw circularity as a design opportunity—and took advantage of design as a chance to change cultural mindsets? That's what Tom Greenwood is really asking when he talks here about making tomatoes of his own poop. This is a fun read that reminds me that the gap between the present and the future is only a perspective shift away.

I really love tomatoes. I love them in a sandwich, as a sauce or in a curry. I love them sundried, roasted, with a drizzle of olive oil, or just on their own as nature intended. I love them so much that my wife Vineeta sometimes calls me Tomo Tomato, or if we’re really getting into the Mediterranean vibe, Tomo Pomodoro.

It’s therefore one of the greatest joys in life for me that every year we have tomatoes growing in our garden that at the peak of summer (in a good year) can be picked from the vine. One year we counted a thousand cherry tomatoes. Heaven! What’s even better about these tomatoes is that we didn’t even plant them. I love offering a juicy red cherry tomato to a friend and just as they are popping it in their mouth telling them that “they just grew out of our poo!" ...

Just over a decade ago we ripped out the 1960’s toilet in our house and replaced it with a Separett Villa 9000, a fantastically ugly composting toilet. It seemed like a high risk strategy, especially as we only had one toilet, but looking back it was one of the best decisions we made. Despite it’s aesthetic inadequacies, which still bother me on a daily basis, it’s advantages have been enormous. Compared to our old toilet we save around 27,000 litres of clean drinking water per year, have a warmer house in winter because we aren’t flushing heat out of our bathroom several times a day, and we now have an abundance of nutritious compost that magically grows tomatoes for us. I’ve estimated that since we installed it, we’ve collected and deposited on our garden around 1.6 tonnes of human manure, also know as “Humanure”. ...

You might laugh but something strange happens when you live with a composting toilet. Your perspective shifts from seeing your own produce as a disgusting waste stream to a valuable resource. You start to see the end of one meal as the beginnings of a future meal. This happens to such an extent that after a while, it becomes hard to use normal toilets in other places. You start wondering whether you can hold it in until you get home so that you don’t have to throw it away. ...

The water and sewage industry itself seems to already promote itself as an example of a circular economy in action, and in some ways that is true. The problem is that the first step in the process is to create pollution. To quote DEFRA “Sewage treatment is essentially about removing polluting organic material from waste water". What they don’t mention is why the “polluting organic material", also known as poo, ended up mixed with waste water in the first place. The basic principle of modern sewage systems is to pollute water and then attempt to unpollute it.

It’s this mixing of solids with water and urine that is fundamental to the standard design of modern sewage systems and it’s hugely inefficient. The solids get mixed together with everything else that goes down drains, from cooking oil to bleach, to engine oil, to house paint, to microplastics and to Cillit Bang, creating a toxic sludge soup that releases greenhouse gases as it anaerobically digests and is incredibly difficult to separate back out. Doing so is expensive and requires significant amounts of energy, producing more greenhouse gases. The solid waste that is eventually recovered is contaminated with hazardous substances including heavy metals that are almost impossible to separate out. Increasingly, these solids are returned back to the land, but in a form that then contaminates the soil, the water table and the foods grown on that land. ...

Could we use modern design and technology to make composting human excrement safe, affordable and socially acceptable? Composting toilets from companies like Separett and Air Head are a great start and they can be retrofitted into any home that has a garden with a compost heap, but they are ugly, expensive and the user experience struggles to compete with the “flush and forget” appeal of a normal toilet.

Would it be possible to design a toilet that solves these issues and appeals to normal people? Just as Tesla shifted perceptions of electric vehicles from “eco cars for hippies” to “I want one of those“, could the same be possible for composting toilets? Could they actually be more desirable than those water guzzling Victorian models?

Read: When will we face our own sh*t? by Tom Greenwood

Region as a verb

We often think of the word 'region' as static, or rooted in tradition. But "bioregioning," a half-century-old idea renewed by ecologists over the past decade, is an active verb rooted in addressing the ecological issues that politicians seem unable to solve. Essentially, it's the combination of nature (geography, ecology) and culture (traditions, customs) into an integrated future-oriented concept.

That sounds super niche, and it kind of is. But maybe—as this issue of Future Observatory Journal lays out—it can help lead the design industry, and the myriad industries it touches, to different ways of imagining, prioritizing, planning, organizing, and producing.

Note: This article is part of a new design sustainability journal started by the Design Museum, geared toward developing the cultural narrative around sustainability. Highly suggest checking the link below to read more!

Since at least the 1960s, radical political ecologists have criticised shallow reform environmentalism, calling instead for deep ecological movements that believe in the intrinsic value of nature and for a human society organised along ecological lines. Among these attempts to reimagine our relationship with the Earth is a concept that brings us down to Earth: the bioregion. ...

Bioregionalism as an eco-philosophy took root in California in the 1970s. The back-to-the-land movement was in full swing and, in recognition of the disconnect between (particularly Western) livelihoods and the ecosystems supporting them, eco-anarchists were criticising the state as a spatial configuration that was too big, too centralised and too unresponsive to ecological issues. ...

[Bioregion] refers both to a geographical terrain and a terrain of consciousness to a place and the ideas that have developed about how to live in that place. ...

One of the most interesting reworkings of bioregionalism is the emerging language of bioregioning, the verb, being mobilised by activists and thinkers such as John Thackara, Isabel Carlisle and the UK Bioregional Learning Centre. Bioregioning maintains the key provocations of bioregionalism but transposes them into a new register. Rather than seeking to define and map bioregions, looking for their true essence, bioregions are understood as dynamic, continually and actively co-created by those (human and non-human) that live there. Their truest form can never be achieved, and thus the negotiation of our togetherness is always an open question. Bioregioning refuses to know the destination in advance, instead focusing on the process, rather than outcome, of change. This turns the bioregion into a political project with the possibility of a radical critique of power.

Bioregioning cracks open the world into a patchwork of place-based experiments, each unfolding in negotiation between those that live there. Such an image is hopeful yet filled with tension, simultaneously dizzyingly complex yet brimming with opportunity.

Read: Contested Terrain by Ella Hubbard

Humanity as an antibody

Through the lens of cancer growth, biologist Spencer R. Scott writes about the need for cultural myths, what happens when those myths reach their end-of-life, and our response if no alternative myth is available. On the positive side, he also speculates about some 'pathways to recovery,' using humans as antibodies.

One of the better "capitalism-is-cancer" metaphors that I've read!

I’m not the first to relate our current economic system to cancer, but my past research in oncological immunotherapy has shown me that the metaphor usually doesn’t go far enough. If capitalism is a tumor, what does the inside of a tumor tell us about who we are as actors in this story? And what does this metaphor tell us about our pathways toward recovery? ...

In their insatiable hunger, tumors create a space inside them rife with excess. Inside a tumor there is an excess of necrotic tissue for bacteria to feed on (yum!). In our analogy, that means the material excesses afforded (to some), in the long arc, by forced labor and colonialism, and in the short arc, continued extractivism.

Drawing the connection between cancer and capitalism wasn’t as profound to me as drawing the connection between the interior of a tumor and what it feels like to be living inside capitalism. There is a sense of unrealness that comes from being dislocated from reality (the body/the Earth). And there is a sense of unease as the immune-privileged gorge themselves on the necrotic bounty of once healthy living systems, unaware of where the bounty came from and what awaits them outside the tumorous fortress they take for granted. ...

It seems, when you give a bunch of people temporary excess and protection from the realities of the Earth System, you get a maddening cesspool of ideas and systems that can only survive at the center of a tumor. ...

Climate change, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch and microplastics in every crevice of the earth (including our organs and pristine mountaintops) are proving that if we won’t acknowledge reality, reality will acknowledge us. ...

At the center of all these unreal beliefs is the proliferation of ecological illiteracy. For almost all of human history, it was nearly impossible to be ecologically illiterate. You had no choice but to be in constant communication and relationship with the ecosystems around you. Being attuned to that relationship meant life or death. However, in this culture’s quest to dominate nature, and in its self-delusion that it has done so, ecosystems were abused and pushed aside. The people inside the system were largely protected from our ecosystem's potential wrath and therefore the need to build relationships with them. But that “dominance” was always tenuous and illusory, the abused ecosystems are breaking through the walls of capitalism to indiscriminately haunt us all. ...

The climate crisis has brought to our attention the dire need to regenerate and rewild our degraded ecosystems. We must also consider the human psyche to be a territory equally polluted by the same institutions and belief systems that polluted our world. ...

[W]e have reached an inflection point in the progress of the tumor, it is straining the body/Earth to the limit. We are being forced to consider what is next. If the denizens of capitalism are not provided with an alternative, they will continue to behave like a tumor: with no foresight. ...

My hope is to situate all individuals against the tumor, as capitalism will fail everyone in the end. While people currently exist along a spectrum ranging from extracted victim to beneficiary perpetrator even if we’re victims we have no choice but to strategize and implement the cure. With the cancer and immune system metaphors in mind I can see a few crucial paths to recovery.

Read: If capitalism is a cancer, what are we? by Spencer R. Scott

This week, I wanted to share some articles about models—of thriving, of creating, of socializing. Models, be they economic or LLMs, affect how we see reality and the actions we take, so noticing and, if necessary, changing how they work can be a significant leverage point for creating the world we want.

In this issue

🕸️ Pluralistic Wealth
🤳🏽 Reference of a Reference
🐑 Social Plantations

🕸️ Pluralistic Wealth

Although this article discusses wealth-building models, I see in the design industry parallels with many of the issues the author describes: hero narratives, high competition, and hierarchies. Could a more pluralistic vision of ownership, like the one outlined in this article, help us shake off the upward accumulation of credit and the hyper-individual focus that are so rampant in our industry?

Our current wealth-building system is based on individualism and therefore elitism. We’re totally focused on this idea of competition, on “beating” the opponents and gaining leverage against others to “win”. Those who outrun their competitors “lead” the race and therefore become the “leaders”. Society envies those who “made it”, who, through gaining competitive advantage, made a fortune and can now enjoy status, power, and independence points that seem almost unreachable for the ordinary person who feels stuck in the daily rat race. ...

“The dominant narrative around leadership in many areas of the world centers individualism over solidarity. It suggests that there is one kind of leadership and that a single person—one who intervenes to solve a problem or envision a bold new reality—embodies it. This “hero narrative” shows up in all spheres of life—in the lone TV show detective, for example, and in memoirs that credit Apple’s success primarily to Steve Jobs’ vision and relentless drive. It’s in remembrances of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s work, which often leave out the stories of the people and activists who guided him and who took their own risks and actions toward greater justice. ...

In contrast, a wealth-building system based on community and therefore pluralism would look quite different: First of all, such a system would be designed to strengthen characteristics of cooperation, solidarity, justice and togetherness (or interdependence) as opposed to competition and “getting ahead”. And those who help the marginalized and cultivate a community spirit aren’t really becoming “leaders” but rather guardians or caretakers. ...

“Community Wealth Building (CWB) is an economic development model that transforms local economies based on communities having direct ownership and control of their assets. It challenges the failing economic development approaches […] and addresses wealth inequality at its core. It is a method for making local economies more just, equal, and socially and ecologically sustainable.” ...

What if, in addition to shifting from an “individual economy” to a “community economy”, we also reframed our definition of “community”? What if community included not only humans but also nature (or other ecological systems)? Because, let’s be real, what is a community without its forest, water, soil, plants, animals, mountains, etc.?

Read Community Economies: Reframing Wealth Building by Thomas Klaffke

🤳🏽 Reference of a Reference

Douglas Rushkoff breaks down the danger of thinking we'll recreate reality 1:1 in the digital realm. In truth, it'll always be a reference, not an original. But because of the large data sets involved, he explains why the best benefit of AI might be spotting the truth when we believe social constructions more than what's in front of our eyes.

[T]hese models can yield terrific answers, new ways of framing and seeing and understanding systems, of farming, or running societies…but they’re still abstracted and disconnected from reality. They can model a metropolis with a complexity closer to Sim City than a board game like Monopoly. But they’re still just models.

And we keep forgetting this. Every time computers move up a notch, or do something seemingly more complex, we begin to think “this time it really is going to do it.” The web seemed as complex as reality until the dotcom boom reminded us it was just a series of business plans. Then web 2.0 and social media were supposed to do it. Then ultra-fast trading, derivatives, and algorithms. Then it was the blockchain that would finally be able to record and instrumentalize every single aspect of reality. 

Today, it’s Artificial Intelligence. These Large Language Models. These are compositional techniques for rhetoric, yet many people think we’re creating life itself. We are not. We are really just creating another layer of abstraction: a way of mining all the rhetoric we’ve put out there and then synthesizing it into forms that simulate language without using any knowledge or thought. Real thinking is to an AI like waves are to a lattidue line. ...

The truly killer app for AI’s in our current civilization may be to serve as digital narcs. They can inform on each other, revealing when something supposedly real is just one of their fellow AI’s creations. But more importantly, they can help remind us when something is just a map, a model, a social construction rather than a given circumstance of nature. That’s the first big obstacle I’ve been harping about for the past year two - the thing standing in the way of our reaching coherence or functioning as a society. We are walking around mistaking too many things and institutions as given circumstances or conditions of nature that are really just social constructions. From the money in our pockets to the fact that we need a car to get to work or that we need to be employed at all or that we need to pay rent to some landlord in order to be allowed to sleep in an apartment.

When we’re born into such a world, of course we accept such conventions at face value. It’s how things are. But the trick to moving beyond them is to alienate ourselves from them, and recognize their inventedness so we can “program” them differently.

Read The Model Isn't the Territory, Either by Douglas Rushkoff

🐑 Social Plantations

The authors here make a great case for restoring the complexity that the internet has lost over the past couple of decades, comparing major platforms to plantations rather than ecosystems. Hyper-efficiency—such as having billions of people on the same website—can create bottlenecks for technical failure and cultural diversity alike. What would our experience of the internet be like if the model it referenced were a field of wildflowers rather than a manicured lawn?

In the late 18th century, officials in Prussia and Saxony began to rearrange their complex, diverse forests into straight rows of single-species trees. Forests had been sources of food, grazing, shelter, medicine, bedding and more for the people who lived in and around them, but to the early modern state, they were simply a source of timber.

So-called “scientific forestry,” was that century’s growth hacking: it made timber yields easier to count, predict and harvest, and meant owners no longer relied on skilled local foresters to manage forests. ...

It was a disaster so bad that a new word, Waldsterben, or “forest death,” was minted to describe the result. All the same species and age, the trees were flattened in storms, ravaged by insects and disease — even the survivors were spindly and weak. Forests were now so tidy and bare they were all but dead. The first magnificent bounty had not been the beginning of endless riches, but a one-off harvesting of millennia of soil wealth built up by biodiversity and symbiosis. Complexity was the goose that laid golden eggs, and she had been slaughtered. ...

When we simplify complex systems, we destroy them, and the devastating consequences sometimes aren’t obvious until it’s too late.

That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” ...

The internet’s 2010s, its boom years, may have been the first glorious harvest that exhausted a one-time bonanza of diversity. The complex web of human interactions that thrived on the internet’s initial technological diversity is now corralled into globe-spanning data-extraction engines making huge fortunes for a tiny few.

Our online spaces are not ecosystems, though tech firms love that word. They’re plantations; highly concentrated and controlled environments, closer kin to the industrial farming of the cattle feedlot or battery chicken farms that madden the creatures trapped within. ...

Up close, internet concentration seems too intricate to untangle; from far away, it seems too difficult to deal with. But what if we thought of the internet not as a doomsday “hyperobject,” but as a damaged and struggling ecosystem facing destruction? What if we looked at it not with helpless horror at the eldritch encroachment of its current controllers, but with compassion, constructiveness and hope?

Technologists are great at incremental fixes, but to regenerate entire habitats we need to learn from ecologists who take a whole-systems view. Ecologists know something just as important, too; how to keep going when others first ignore you and then say it’s too late, how to mobilize and work collectively, and how to build pockets of diversity and resilience that will outlast them, creating possibilities for an abundant future they can imagine but never control. We don’t need to repair the internet’s infrastructure. We need to rewild it. ...

[O]ur internet took off because it was designed as a general-purpose network, built to connect anyone. Our internet was built to be complex and unbiddable, to do things we cannot yet imagine. When we interviewed Clark for rewilding project, he told us that “‘complex’ implies a system in which you have emergent behavior, a system in which you can’t model the outcomes. Your intuitions may be wrong. But a system that’s too simple means lost opportunities.” Or, as Daigle wrote in that 2019 policy brief, “simplicity is not always the best outcome.” Everything worthwhile we collectively make is complex or, honestly, messy. The cracks are where new people and ideas get in.

Read We Need To Rewild The Internet by Maria Farrell and Robin Berjon

This week, I want to share some articles exploring how we perceive ourselves and the rest of life that surrounds us.

This week

🧠 Widespread Consciousness
🥀 Missed Connections
👬🏽 Human Brethren

🧠 Widespread Consciousness

The idea presented in this article that animals like squid, lobster, and bees might have consciousness—that they might experience feelings like pain and pleasure—continues a long trend of discoveries that give credence to an animistic world. But this doesn't diminish anything about us. It means humanity is less alone than we make ourselves believe.

It also makes me rethink my eating habits. I already wasn't a fan of eating crab; the idea of breaking their bodies apart myself and sucking out their insides makes me feel uneasy. Maybe now I know why. 🥲

The study on playful bees is part of a body of research that a group of prominent scholars of animal minds cited earlier this month, buttressing a new declaration that extends scientific support for consciousness to a wider suite of animals than has been formally acknowledged before. For decades, there’s been a broad agreement among scientists that animals similar to us—the great apes, for example—may well have conscious experience, even if their consciousness differs from our own. In recent years, however, researchers have begun to acknowledge that consciousness may also be widespread among animals that are very different from us, including invertebrates with completely different and far simpler nervous systems.

The new declaration, signed by biologists and philosophers, formally embraces that view. It reads, in part: “The empirical evidence indicates at least a realistic possibility of conscious experience in all vertebrates (including all reptiles, amphibians, and fishes) and many invertebrates (including, at minimum, cephalopod mollusks, decapod crustaceans, and insects).” Inspired by recent research findings that describe complex cognitive behaviors in these and other animals, the document could represent the beginnings of a new consensus and suggests that researchers may have overestimated the degree of neural complexity required for consciousness. ...

The declaration focuses on the most basic kind of consciousness, known as phenomenal consciousness. Roughly put, if a creature has phenomenal consciousness, then it is “like something” to be that creature. ...

If a creature is phenomenally conscious, it may have the capacity to experience feelings such as pain, pleasure, and hunger, but not necessarily more complex mental states such as self-awareness.

“I hope the declaration [draws] greater attention to the issues of nonhuman consciousness, and to the ethical challenges that accompany the possibility of conscious experiences far beyond the human,” Seth, a neuroscientist at the University of Sussex, wrote in an email. “I hope it sparks discussion, informs policy and practice in animal welfare, and galvanizes an understanding and appreciation that we have much more in common with other animals than we do with things like ChatGPT.” ...

There was a big debate about whether fish are conscious, and a lot of that had to do with them lacking the brain structures that we see in mammals,” she says. “But when you look at birds and reptiles and amphibians, they have very different brain structures and different evolutionary pressures—and yet some of those brain structures, we’re finding, are doing the same kind of work that a cerebral cortex does in humans.”

Read: A New Declaration of Animal Consciousness by Dan Falk

🥀 Missed Connections

While we currently see a binary between the human and animal worlds, the relationship has historically been more integrated and immediate. Much like the political polarization that social isolation creates, how does our distance from both nature (i.e., from ourselves) and our more animalistic qualities help create our current ecological situation?

It is a uniquely precarious moment to be an animal of any kind. All around us, other species are disappearing some 10,000 times faster than base extinction levels, causing the ecologist Stephan Harding to write in the book Gaia in Turmoil (2009) that we are ‘hemorrhaging species’. And yet the blood loss is often invisible. We do not mourn the beings we never learned to see. This is Earth’s sixth mass extinction event, but it is the first precipitated by one species: ourselves. ...

The evolutionary biologist E O Wilson coined the term ‘Eremocene’ to describe a contemporary era defined by both literal and existential isolation. He was referring to extinctions, but the phrase captures a particular paradox of modern life. On the one hand, we live in an anthropocentric society where human life is privileged to devastating ecological effect. On the other, as we play out increasingly online existences – lubricated by instant deliveries or the way we work and stream at home, alone – misanthropic solitude has also become increasingly normalised (just look at the memes). Not only are we failing to consider other species, we are flailing in our connection with one another. ...

Popular discourse tends to silo these two issues, imagining that the breakdown in intra-species connection has nothing to do with the inter-species one, and vice versa. Looking at the moments where we visualise ourselves as nonhuman, though, suggests that in examining our own experiences of ‘being animal’ we can learn to live and connect better in our human bodies, too. ...

The rapid technologising of modern life has separated all of us from our bodies, but rather than view ourselves in union with our nonhuman neighbours, we tend to get defensive. Hungry for our own dignity, we dig deeper into the myth of our exceptionalism. ...

Slippages between human and nonhuman forms have, across history and cultures, been far more fluid. ‘[I]ndigenous peoples have never forgotten that nonhumans are agential beings engaged in social relations that profoundly shape human lives,’ writes the Native studies scholar Kim TallBear. The very idea of a binary between human and nonhuman stymies a logic whereby ‘objects’ and ‘forces’ such as stones and thunder contain sentience too. During the Upper Palaeolithic period, now considered to have been the seedbed of human consciousness, cave drawings depicted men with hooves, and beasts with hands and spears. Indigenous creation stories tell of humans descending from animals, marrying them, and morphing between forms. Zeus was said to transform into a swan, a bull, a snake; Ganesh, one of the most worshipped Hindu deities, has an elephant head and four human arms. It was not just gods and shamans who took on animal traits, it was humans themselves, often to summon strength in wars and hunts. ...

Today, there is perhaps no animal we are more unmoored from than ourselves. ‘The world is now dominated by an animal that doesn’t think it’s an animal,’ writes the natural philosopher Melanie Challenger in How to Be Animal (2021). ‘And the future is being imagined by an animal that doesn’t want to be an animal.’ It is shame that drives us to evade our animality, contends philosopher Martha Nussbaum in the book Hiding from Humanity (2004), so uncomfortable are we with our own ‘propensity to decay and to become waste products ourselves’. The more we confront the degradation of our oceans and lands, however, the more we must face that it’s not just animal habitat under threat – it’s our habitat, too. Faced with this mounting unliveability, we look to the nonhuman for ideas of survival.

Read: An Animal Myself by Erica Berry

👬🏽 Human Brethren

The idea that we're above nature is buttressed by the fact that all other human species, which once existed alongside us, are now extinct. Understanding that we mated and raised children with other species like Neanderthals should make us reevaluate what it means to be 'human,' as this article argues.

Where is the cutoff? For example, there's as much genetic difference between us and gorillas, as there is between gorillas and chimpanzees. Not having a clear definition begs us to question what is also the barrier between us and the rest of nature.

[T]he distinction between us and other animals is, arguably, artificial. Animals are more like humans than we might think—or like to think. Almost all behaviors we once considered unique to ourselves are seen in animals, even if they’re less well-developed.

That’s especially true of the great apes. Chimps, for example, have simple gestural and verbal communication. They make crude tools, even weapons, and different groups have different suites of tools—distinct cultures. Chimps also have complex social lives and cooperate with one another. ...

[I]n the past, some species were far more like us than other apes—Ardipithecus, Australopithecus, Homo erectus, and Neanderthals. H. sapiens is the only survivor of a once diverse group of humans and human-like apes, the hominins, which includes around 20 known species and probably dozens of unknown species.

The extinction of those other hominins wiped out all the species that were intermediate between us and other apes, creating the impression that some vast, unbridgeable gulf separates us from the rest of life on Earth. But the division would be far less clear if those species still existed. What looks like a bright, sharp dividing line is really an artifact of extinction. ...

I admit this sounds speculative but for one detail. The DNA of Neanderthals, Denisovans, and other hominins is found in us. We met them, and we had children together. That says a lot about how human they were.

It’s not impossible that H. sapiens took Neanderthal women captive, or vice versa. But for Neanderthal genes to enter our populations, we had to not only mate but successfully raise children, who grew up to raise children of their own. That’s more likely to happen if these pairings resulted from voluntary intermarriage. ...

We could define humanity in terms of higher cognitive abilities—art, math, music, language. This creates a curious problem because humans vary in how well we do all these things. I’m less mathematically inclined than Steven Hawking, less literary than Jane Austen, less inventive than Steve Jobs, less musical than Taylor Swift, less articulate than Martin Luther King Jr. In these respects, am I less human than they are or were?

If we can’t even define it, how can we really say where it starts and where it ends—or that we’re unique? Why do we insist on treating other species as inherently inferior if we’re not exactly sure what makes us, us?

Read: How Human Are We? by Nicholas R. Longrich

This week

🐝 Biodiversity Loss Goes Mainstream
🤖 The Emperor's New Clothes
🫧 Degenerative AI

🐝 Biodiversity Loss Goes Mainstream

You know shit is hitting the fan when the Financial Times is commenting on biodiversity. I loved reading this article because it reveals our dependence on nature in normative, "Homo Economicus" terms.

The TL;DR is that if companies included environmental damage in their costs of doing business, it would wipe out the majority of profits. Not only that, the complexity of nature makes it hard to undo the damage. Sobering stuff.

According to the US Department of Agriculture, pollinators underpin one in every three bites of food eaten on the planet, while the World Economic Forum has estimated that, through everything from water retention to carbon sequestration, $44tn of economic value (more than half global gross domestic product) is “moderately” or “highly” dependent on nature.

Given the accelerating rate of nature loss, the WEF’s figure is alarming. Scientists say that, unless measures are taken to slow the drivers of biodiversity loss, many of the roughly 1mn animal and plant species currently threatened by extinction will disappear within decades. [...]

[B]ecause nature’s costs are not currently being accounted for, companies have a false sense of security, says Paula DiPerna, author of Pricing the Priceless. She compares it with staff costs. “If you could get away with not paying any of your workers, your books would look a lot better,” she says. “We’re getting away with not paying nature, the ultimate worker.” [...]

[W]hile nature’s complexity may leave some feeling overwhelmed, scientists, economists, sustainability experts and others argue that companies and investors must push nature and biodiversity up their list of strategic priorities.

“This is not a corporate social responsibility issue for business and finance,” says Tony Goldner, [the executive director of the Taskforce on Nature-related Financial Disclosures]. “It’s a central strategic risk management issue because the future cash flows of business are dependent on the flow of nature’s services.” [...]

In 2011, the sportswear business Puma did something unusual: by imposing internal accounting measures such as a price per tonne of carbon and per cubic metre of water, it added up the cost of its use of ecosystem services. The resulting “environmental profit-and-loss” account statement was striking. Against that net earnings for 2010 of €202mn, it estimated aggregate environmental costs of some €145mn.

Mandatory environmental profit-and-loss accounting might be some way off, but the risks to business are not. “Every single company is in that situation,” says DiPerna. “People keep investing in companies based on a false sense of their investability.”

Some blame can be assigned to traditional measures of success such as gross domestic product, wrote the University of Cambridge’s Sir Partha Dasgupta in an influential 2021 review of the economics of biodiversity commissioned by the UK government. GDP, he wrote, is “wholly unsuitable” for measuring sustainable development, particularly since “eroding natural capital” is how most nations have achieved economic growth. [...]

As Dasgupta highlights in his review, the degradation or collapse of ecosystems would disrupt the supply chains of many companies, denting their ability to service their debt and increasing their likelihood of default. [...]

[W]hile carbon can be traded globally, nature cannot, says Thomas Crowther, a professor of ecology at ETH Zurich who studies the connections between biodiversity and climate change. “You can’t destroy a tropical forest in Brazil and plant some trees in Scotland,” he says. “With climate change, you suck a ton of carbon out anywhere on the planet and it has a global benefit.”

“It’s a very different case with nature,” agrees Leslie Cordes, who oversees the climate and energy, water, and food and forest teams at Ceres, a sustainable investing network. “Investors are also facing challenges in assessing the nature-related risk in their portfolios because it is so localised.” [...]

Critchlow, the former NatureMetrics chief executive, warns of the dangers of replicating one mechanism used to tackle climate change: carbon credits. While she likes the idea of biodiversity credits generating finance for the restoration of nature, Critchlow worries they could come with the same credibility problems that have dogged carbon markets. “We need much better governance before everyone races ahead,” she says.

Nature’s complexity and regional variation mean biodiversity credit markets cannot operate in the same way as their carbon equivalents, she adds. “There’s no one fundamental price for nature as there is for carbon,” Critchlow says. “And you can’t kill a hippo in one place and save a rhino in another.”

Read: Why nature's future underpins the future of business by Sarah Murray

🤖 The Emperor's New Clothes

Various questions bubble up with the revelation, outlined in this short article, that Amazon grocery stores' ‘automated’ Just Walk Out feature was actually outsourced Indian workers.

What does the design industry risk by diving headfirst into AI, or for that matter, operating with the idea that we need to immediately start experimenting with every new technology? Are we really benefiting from that habit, or is it just an attempt to position ourselves as “forward thinking” to our clients? What do we forego by abandoning criticality and restraint in exchange for efficiency?

The promise of AI, for corporations and investors, is that companies can increase profits and productivity by slashing their reliance upon a skilled human workforce. But as this story and many others show, AI is just today’s buzzword for “outsourcing,” and it comes with the same problems that have plagued outsourced companies and workforces for decades. [...]

The creative accounting techniques that brought us “fast fashion,” off-shore call centers, and even the ill-fated Boeing MAX-C are the very same ones that inspired Amazon to install empty checkout stands fueled by Indian workers whom they expected could do the same work for less. But studies show how outsourcing adds inter-organizational complexity and communication challenges, driving up inefficiencies and decreasing consumer quality. Meanwhile, studies of automation show resulting increases in labor needs and inequalities, requiring both new skilled laborers to supervise the machines and more workers to take up lower-skill roles. As anthropologist Lilly Irani observes, labor is not replaced by machines, it’s merely displaced. While stocks surge upon restructuring, few companies achieve this promise of savings and profitability, and “bullshit jobs” soar. [...]

[T]he future of work is not a technology: it’s an arrangement. An arrangement of people, capital, and workers that moves jobs from where they are expensive and highly-paid, to where they can be cheap and menial. “AI” is a powerful decoy, lest we start thinking about where those jobs have already gone – offshore – and who moved them there in the first place. Because robots aren’t “taking our jobs” – people are.

Read: Don't Be Fooled: Much "AI" is Just Outsourcing, Redux by Janet Vertesi

🫧 Degenerative AI

While the article above talks about the outsourcing problem of AI, the one below talks about its data problem: there's just not enough of it. I see strong parallels between this and the general rule of capitalism, which always needs an exploited party. And because it always needs to grow, it always needs to exploit more.

With AI, this means creating synthetic data to train models on, despite that data's 'degenerative' properties.

As Ed Zitron explains, this—along with market valuations growing like a hockey stick—smells like a bubble waiting to burst. While the hype around AI may be immense, we have to ask if it will end up like the “sharing economy,” which rapidly concentrated wealth and then died quietly.

While the internet may feel limitless, Villalobos told the Journal that only a tenth of the most-commonly-used web dataset (the Common Crawl) is actually "high quality" enough data for models. Yet I can find no clear definition of what "high-quality" even means, or proof that any of these companies are being picky with what they train their data on, only that they have an insatiable hunger for more data, relying instead on thousands of underpaid contractors (with some abroad making less than $2 an hour, a growing human rights crisis in and of itself) to teach their models how to say and do the right thing when asked. In essence, the AI boom requires more high-quality data than currently exists to progress past the point we're currently at, which is one where the outputs of generative AI are deeply unreliable. [...]

One (very) funny idea posed by the Journal's piece is that AI companies are creating their own "synthetic" data to train their models, a "computer-science version of inbreeding" that Jathan Sadowski calls Habsburg AI. [...]

AI models, when fed content from other AI models (or their own), begin to forget (for lack of a better word) the meaning and information derived from the original content, which two of the paper's authors describe as "absorbing the misunderstanding of the models that generated the data before them." [...]

As generative AI does not "know" anything, when fed reams of content generated by other models, they begin learning rules based on content generated by a machine guessing at what it should be writing rather than communicating meaning, making it somewhere between useless and actively harmful as training data. [...]

[G]enerative AI models are prone to hallucinations when using human data. How does synthetic data, created by the very models that need to improve, improve the situation? What happens when the majority of a dataset is synthetic, and what if that synthetic data has within it some sort of unseen bias, or problem, or outright falsehood? [...]

While sources talking to Business Insider claim that GPT-5, OpenAI's next model, is coming "mid-summer" and will be "materially better," there is a growing consensus that GPT -3.5 and GPT-4 have gotten worse over time, and the nagging question of profitability, both for companies like OpenAI and customers integrating models like ChatGPT, lingers. The only companies currently profiting from the AI gold rush are those selling shovels. Nvidia's Q1 2024 earnings were astounding, with revenues increasing more than 300% and profits more than 580% year-over-year thanks to its AI-focused chips, with its next-generation "Blackwell" chips sold out through the middle of 2025. Although Nvidia is yet to announce pricing for the Blackwell generation of GPUs, company CEO Jensen Huang has suggested they may cost between $30,000 and $40,000. [...]

The companies benefitting from AI aren't the ones integrating it or even selling it, but those powering the means to use it — and while "demand" is allegedly up for cloud-based AI services, every major cloud provider is building out massive data center efforts to capture further demand for a technology yet to prove its necessity, all while saying that AI isn't actually contributing much revenue at all. Amazon is spending nearly $150 billion in the next 15 years on data centers to, and I quote Bloomberg, "handle an expected explosion in demand for artificial intelligence applications" as it tells its salespeople to temper their expectations of what AI can actually do. [...]

If businesses don't adopt AI at scale — not experimentally, but at the core of their operations — the revenue is simply not there to sustain the hype, and once the market turns, it will turn hard, demanding efficiency and cutbacks that will lead to tens of thousands of job cuts. [...]

Read: Bubble Trouble by Ed Zitron

This week, I want to share a few articles about different types of connections:
☁️ The Physical Burden of The Cloud
⛓️‍💥 Missed Connections
👨🏽‍💼Redefining How We Do Business

☁️ The Physical Burden of The Cloud

This article asks us to consider the cloud's macro- and micro-environmental impacts. Just because we may often forget about its physicality—servers, wires, cooling systems—doesn’t mean those elements cease to exist. How can we use our awareness to make design decisions that reduce or eliminate data burdens?

While some of the most advanced, “hyperscale” data centers, like those maintained by Google, Facebook, and Amazon, have pledged to transition their sites to carbon-neutral via carbon offsetting and investment in renewable energy infrastructures like wind and solar, many of the smaller-scale data centers that I observed lack the resources and capital to pursue similar sustainability initiatives. Smaller-scale, traditional data centers have often been set up within older buildings that are not optimized for ever-changing power, cooling, and data storage capacity needs. Since the emergence of hyperscale facilities, many companies, universities, and others who operate their own small-scale data centers have begun to transfer their data to hyperscalers or cloud colocation facilities, citing energy cost reductions.

According to a Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory report, if the entire Cloud shifted to hyperscale facilities, energy usage might drop as much as 25 percent. Without any regulatory body or agency to incentivize or enforce such a shift in our infrastructural configuration, there are other solutions that have been proposed to curb the Cloud’s carbon problem. Some have proposed relocating data centers to Nordic countries like Iceland or Sweden, in a bid to utilize ambient, cool air to minimize carbon footprint, a technique called “free cooling.” However, network signal latency issues make this dream of a haven for green data centers largely untenable to meet the computing and data storage demands of the wider world. [...]

Beyond cooling, the energy requirements of data centers are vast. To meet the pledge to customers that their data and cloud services will be available anytime, anywhere, data centers are designed to be hyper-redundant: If one system fails, another is ready to take its place at a moment’s notice, to prevent a disruption in user experiences. Like Tom’s air conditioners idling in a low-power state, ready to rev up when things get too hot, the data center is a Russian doll of redundancies: redundant power systems like diesel generators, redundant servers ready to take over computational processes should others become unexpectedly unavailable, and so forth. In some cases, only 6 to 12 percent of energy consumed is devoted to active computational processes. The remainder is allocated to cooling and maintaining chains upon chains of redundant fail-safes to prevent costly downtime. [...]

The ecological dynamics we find ourselves in are not entirely a consequence of design limits, but of human practices and choices — among individuals, communities, corporations, and governments — combined with a deficit of will and imagination to bring about a sustainable Cloud. The Cloud is both cultural and technological. Like any aspect of culture, the Cloud’s trajectory — and its ecological impacts — are not predetermined or unchangeable. Like any aspect of culture, they are mutable.

Read: The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud by Steven Gonzalez Monserrate

⛓️‍💥 Missed Connections

Biologist and author David G. Haskell talks in this interview about the environmental connection that is missing from design and society at large. The focus on ‘embodied senses’ is particularly interesting; as I talked about last week in the main Otherwise newsletter, disconnection from our emotions and senses is one way the current system survives. How would the value of the design industry shift if we were more connected, both with ourselves and the non-human world?

Trees are rooted in the Earth in what we call soil but what is really the dust of the ancestors. And so the trees drew my imagination back into the past: Where did all this amazing, diverse sound come from? What stories are buried down there in the soil? And how do they intersect with the everyday human experience of sound—of listening to music and talking? [...]

The rainforest is an ecosystem that in many ways is self-sustaining. It builds soil, it holds nutrients within itself, it’s a crucible for innovation, for new species and new adaptations. Despite the complications, great triumphs of creativity and cooperation and productivity and fruitfulness arise from the forest. Imagine if we could be that way. And I think in our better moments humans are indeed that way—we’re a species that can be incredibly cooperative and negotiate lots of complicated tangles; but often, and particularly in relation to the rest of life, we tend to literally bulldoze our way through, imposing one narrative rather than creating spaces where a multiplicity of stories can be present at once. [...]

Without connection, every living being withers and dies. And what does that connection entail? It involves the senses. How do we get food into our bodies? Through the sense of smell and taste and through tactile senses. How do we connect to one another as humans? Through spoken language, through music. How do we learn about the rest of the world? Through being embodied creatures. And so the fact that many of the sensory modalities that we use, and other creatures use, are being cut and fragmented now is a crisis on the same level as the crises of chemistry, of pollution, and of species loss. In fact, to speak of them as separate things is a lie, because climate change and species loss and the loss of sensory connection between creatures and sensory diversity are intersecting and tangled with one another. [...]

We need to teach ourselves that the senses are essential, not just for the thriving of life, but for us to be good neighbors and kin. If we’re not listening, how can we possibly attempt to be a good neighbor to brother and sister wolf, to the whales in the ocean, to the birds in the forests? If we’re not paying attention through our own senses, we have disengaged from the primary mode in which every creature since the origin of life has connected to its environment. And if we’re not listening, we’ve got no stories to tell the future.

Read: Listening and the Crisis of Inattention, an interview with David G. Haskell

👨🏽‍💼 Redefining How We Do Business

This food-for-thought article by digital sustainability expert Tom Greenwood questions how our business activities are influenced by the words we use to describe them and whether defining those activities in other ways could lead us to value other metrics.

In challenging our modern assumptions, it’s helpful to look back at whether a more sustainable, less busy economy has ever existed. According to anthropologist Marshall Sahlins, it did. In 1972 he published the book Stone Age Economics in which he proposed that our modern culture has greatly misunderstood indigenous cultures and early human societies. He highlighted we are prejudiced to see these societies as poor because we measure wealth in money and not in time and wellbeing. Turning this on it’s head, he described these cultures as “the original affluent society” who worked just 15-20 hours per week to meet their needs and wants, with the rest of their time free to talk, dance, sing, make arts and crafts, and ponder the mysteries of life. [...]

Of course, these early cultures had their fair share of problems, such as high infant mortality and tribal warfare, but they also had adult life expectancy similar to western societies today, lots of free time, close knit communities and true sustainability within their natural environments. I’m not suggesting that we should go back to that, but when forming visions for the future that we want to create, we would serve ourselves well to remember that much of what we want is not fundamentally difficult to achieve. [...]

Maybe sustainable business seems difficult precisely because it is an oxymoron. What if we reframed our ambitions and perspectives in a way that challenged the narrative of being constantly busy? We might adapt to talking about sustainable companies, organisations, communities, careers or lifestyles. We might describe what we do through impact models and service models instead of business models. We might no longer make business plans and instead make progress plans or achievement plans, defining success by the difference we make in the world rather than the amount of activity generated. We might even finally make the shift to thinking of our organisations and their role in society as systems.

Read: Should we abolish busyness? by Tom Greenwood

This week: Linguistic Biodiversity, Plastic and Apolitical Design, and What a Weird Internet Gives the World

Linguistic Biodiversity

This is a brief but enlightening introduction to the ways language can affect your experience of reality and relationship with nature—and what is being lost with the growth of global languages.

If you grow up in a literate society, you automatically believe that literacy is a superior state of human development, and people who are non-literate are deficient in some way. This gives us a considerable blind spot to the cognitive advantages of an oral society in its ability to transmit vast bodies of information without writing. It’s like weightlifting for the brain. [...]

[T]he preferred way to say “go” in Tuvan refers to the direction of the current in the nearest river and your trajectory relative to the current. They keep track of that information as they’re moving around the landscape. When I once hosted a Tuvan friend in Manhattan, he asked me, “Where’s the river?” So I took him to the west side of Manhattan and showed him one of the rivers. And he took note of it, so he could use the Tuvan topographic verbs properly in New York City. [...]

I was initially not all that interested in the natural world. But if the majority of conversations happening around you are about the environment, you start caring about that. For example, Tuvans have a word, ий, pronounced “ee,” which means the short side of a hill. This is a very important concept, because you want to avoid the steep side of the hill if you’re walking, riding a horse, or herding your flock of goats. Once I learned the name for it, I began to look for it. But until the language provides you with this concept, you’re just oblivious to it. Learning these nature-centric concepts in the language makes you see the environment differently. [...]

To protect biodiversity, first we have to know how much biodiversity exists and where it exists. There are quite a few recent scientific papers debating this question of how you even measure biodiversity. Indigenous people are much closer than we are to knowing the richness of different species in their environments, how to use them for food or medicine and how they interact and behave.

For example, there’s a 2016 paper by David Fleck and Robert Voss that shows that many of the facts the Matses people of Amazonia know about armadillo behavior are unknown to Western scientists. This kind of knowledge can help us learn about biodiversity. We have to overcome our bias that Western science is superior to Indigenous ways of thinking.

Read: Indigenous languages are founts of environmental knowledge

Plastic and Apolitical Design

Arielle Samuelson from HEATED succinctly lays out the damning research done by the plastics industry and their PR campaign (read: cover-up) to make the problem go away.

In reading this, I thought a lot about the role of the design/advertising industry and the harm our negligence has enabled—for example, this statement from Chermayeff & Geismar: 'When we create a great logo for an environmental organization, we do not see ourselves as saving the planet. In the same way, we cannot take responsibility for the "evil" actions of corporations we brand'.

It's important to think about who this apolitical design stance serves.

The plastics industry has known that recycling doesn’t work for decades. A new report from the Center for Climate Integrity details the deception, showing that the plastics industry has privately admitted in internal communication since the 1960s that the process is not effective.Still, despite knowing that recycling can’t solve the plastic crisis, the industry has spent millions on ads trying to convince the public otherwise. Because when your primary objective is profit, you’d rather see world covered in your product than a world that simply uses less. [...]

[T]he industry group the American Chemical Society came to a similar conclusion, noting that the plastics industry would never truly embrace recycling on a massive scale unless it became profitable. [...]

Even the recycling symbols found on the bottom of plastic bottles and containers are a greenwashing tactic by the industry, according to state government officials. At the time of their adoption in 1990, the Connecticut Department of Environmental Conservation pointed out the truth: “The recycling symbol suggests that the plastic containers are made of recycled material or that they are recyclable. This is, in practice, generally not the case.” [...]

[P]etrochemical companies have consistently claimed in ads, op-eds, and political advocacy that the plastic waste crisis can be solved by recycling.The reason they’ve done this is not because they actually believe in the miracle of recycling. It’s because they fear the real solution to the plastic waste crisis: regulation on the production and disposal of plastic. [...]

[I]n the last few years, plastic lobby groups have sold lawmakers on a new solution to plastic waste: “advanced recycling”, also known as chemical recycling. Chemical recycling is meant to tackle the difficulties of recycling different materials by using extreme heat or chemicals to break plastic into chemical elements. But this type of “recycling” rarely produces new plastic; instead, the vast majority produce either an oil byproduct or hazardous waste.

Read: Plastic recycling is a scam

What a Weird Internet Gives the World

Anil Dash perfectly sums up the cultural homogenization I talked about last week—specifically in social media—and, with concrete examples, gives us some hope of potential change being around the corner.

Across today’s internet, the stores that deliver all the apps on our phones are cracking open, the walls between social media platforms are coming down as the old networks fail, the headlong rush towards AI is making our search engines and work apps weirder (and often worse!). But amidst it all, the human web, the one made by regular people, is resurgent. We are about to see the biggest reshuffling of power on the internet in 25 years, in a way that most of the internet’s current users have never seen before. And while some of the drivers of this change have been hyped up, or even over-hyped, a few of the most important changes haven’t gotten any discussion at all. [...]

The first thing to understand about this new era of the internet is that power is, undoubtedly, shifting. For example, regulators are now part of the story — an ironic shift for anyone who was around in the dot com days. In the E.U., tech giants like Apple are being forced to hold their noses and embrace mandated changes like opening up their devices to allow alternate app stores to provide apps to consumers. This could be good news, increasing consumer choice and possibly enabling different business models — how about mobile games that aren’t constantly pestering gamers for in-app purchases? Back in the U.S., a shocking judgment in Epic Games’ (that’s the Fortnite folks’) lawsuit against Google leaves us with the promise that Android phones might open up in a similar way. [...]

A generation ago, we saw early social networks like LiveJournal and Xanga and Black Planet and Friendster and many others come and go, each finding their own specific audience and focus. For those who remember a time in the last century when things were less homogenous, and different geographic regions might have their own distinct music scenes or culinary traditions, it’s easy to understand the appeal of an online equivalent to different, connected neighborhoods that each have their own vibe. While this new, more diffuse set of social networks sometimes requires a little more tinkering to get started, they epitomize the complexity and multiplicity of the weirder and more open web that’s flourishing today. [...]

I’m not a pollyanna about the fact that there are still going to be lots of horrible things on the internet, and that too many of the tycoons who rule the tech industry are trying to make the bad things worse. (After all, look what the last wild era online lead to.) There’s not going to be some new killer app that displaces Google or Facebook or Twitter with a love-powered alternative. But that’s because there shouldn’t be. There should be lots of different, human-scale alternative experiences on the internet that offer up home-cooked, locally-grown, ethically-sourced, code-to-table alternatives to the factory-farmed junk food of the internet. And they should be weird.

Read: The Internet Is About to Get Weird Again