What lies beneath the Labour ‘landslide’ election predictions?

John Harris visits my city as part of his years-long series of travelling the country talking to people who are not usually talked to about politics. It’s sobering stuff, of course, and I think in the future this whole body of work will be seen as a vital document of the (hopefully) last gasps of a cruel era.

I Will Fucking Piledrive You If You Mention AI Again

Deliciously long but firmly hinged rant about the AI bubble the tech industry is tragically trapped in, the implications of which the rest of us are just going to have to deal with, written by someone who knows how it all works. Invaluable.

(via)

UbuWeb’s Conceptual Comics collection

If you’re the kind of nerd who finds how comics work as interesting as the comics themselves, this is a motherlode of experimental gems.

Conceptual comics is an archive of works that are unaffiliated with the commonly accepted history of the comics medium. It is a resonating chamber for conceptual works and unconventional practices that are little known outside of our community but also a springboard for establishing the conditions for an affective lineage between similarly minded practitioners. The variety of the collected material expresses the curator’s choice for a non uniform consistency and claim instead for a perpetual becoming of the medium. Nevertheless, these works share with each other many common issues and urgencies, alternating between material self-reflexivity and critical exhaustion. They operate on the margins of distribution and reception and their unlocatedness in the medium’s spectrum is more than an abstraction: artists uncomfortable with the entrenched roles invite readers, in the absence of critical discourse, to engage with the works in non-specified, at times forensic, ways of examination.

PDFs of all publications available to download.

Protect the Network

Noah Kalina has collected photos of trees that have been pruned around power and communication cables and made a magazine and exhibition of them.

“Debilitating a Generation”: Expert Warns That Long COVID May Eventually Affect Most Americans

I’m nearly at the end of my second year of Covid-related health bullshit and it’s really depressing how no-one in any position of power is talking about how a decent chunk of the working population have been mentally and physically compromised. Here’s some scary stats and speculations from across the pond.

LP: That’s a really alarming possibility — that most Americans could potentially have Long COVID in as little as four years? PA: That’s what I’m saying. And we know that somewhere between five and eight percent of those people will be so debilitated that they will no longer be able to work.

And while correlation does not imply causation, this is an eyeopener:

There are all kinds of weird things going on that could be related to COVID’s cognitive effects. I’ll give you an example. We’ve noticed since the start of the pandemic that accidents are increasing. A report published by TRIP, a transportation research nonprofit, found that traffic fatalities in California increased by 22% from 2019 to 2022. They also found the likelihood of being killed in a traffic crash increased by 28% over that period.

Money, Magic and the Imagination

I find ritual money burners fascinating because even though I get the reasoning behind setting fire to banknotes it still sparks a revulsion in me, and that’s interesting. I suppose it speaks to the power of money and how it’s programmed my brain to respect it.

Anyway, here’s an account of visiting the Bank of England in London and burning the new King Charles notes on their first official day of issue, which also serves as a handy introduction to the value of “magic” in the 21st century.

I’ll add a disclaimer. You aren’t required to believe any of this. There’s a difference between magic and religion. Religion’s a set of beliefs that are seen as sacrosanct, eternal, beyond question, while magic is playful and imaginative. Magic is experimental spirituality. You take on a belief, act upon it, and then see if it makes any difference to the world or not. That was the motivation behind our actions. We were performing them, not out of dogma, not out of certainty, but out of playful engagement with the spirit of ritual, as an experiment, to see where it might lead.

(via)

How to Copy a File From a 30-year-old Laptop

Chap has some audio files stuck on an old MacBook, so he does the logical thing: convert them to hexadecimal text and fax them to a less ancient computer, then reconstruct the files using OCR. And it works!

(via)

The Purpose of a System is What It Does

The first of what is hopefully an in-depth guide from Anil Dash on how to think about the systems we’d like to change.

A potential negative aspect of understanding that the purpose of a system is what it does, is that we are then burdened with the horrible but hopefully galvanizing knowledge of this reality. For example, when our carceral system causes innocent people to be held in torturous or even deadly conditions because they could not afford bail, we must understand that this is the system working correctly. It is doing the thing it is designed to do. When we shout about the effect that this system is having, we are not filing a bug report, we are giving a systems update, and in fact we are reporting back to those with agency over the system that it is working properly.

Sit with it for a minute. If this makes you angry or uncomfortable, or repulses you, then you are understanding the concept correctly.

I remember when it was pointed out to me that poverty and homelessness were not the results of things going tragically wrong - they were signs things were working exactly as they were designed to work.

The green-energy revolution shows what real innovation looks like

Decorating some really interesting stuff about the massive leaps in harvesting and storing renewable energy, now it’s actually got some proper investment behind it, is a delightful teardown of the online tech* sector’s pitiful record on “innovation”. (via)

*It’s endlessly frustrating how “tech” now means Google and Amazon, when there is so much more to “tech” than having a warehouse full of computers.

Tramps!

As someone who came of age in the late 80s, early 90s, I sort of expected my young adulthood to be not dissimilar to that of, say, my older cousins, or at least something like The Young Ones. It seems Paul Raven (whose new-to-me blog is quite the gem) had a similar journey of post-Thatcher dream shattering.

The older I get, the more obvious it becomes that for all their (fully justified!) hatred of Thatcher and the state of the UK during her hegemony, the bohemians of the generations immediately prior to my own lived in a time of considerable opportunity—particularly those who made it to London, where squatting was still relatively easy (and pre-gentrification housing stock still plentiful), and where the concomitant reduction in one’s basic outgoings meant that the unemployment benefits of the time could support a combination of artistic practice and low-budget decadent hedonism.

The review is of Tramps!, a doc about the post-punk (but not really post, more a continuity of queer subculture) New Romantics which I’m very keen to check out. This stuff bled into the mainstream through people like Boy George and Leigh Bowery but obviously never in its pure form and I’ve found every exposure to the actual stories from the people that were there to be endlessly fascinating. (via)

What the Internet Was Like in 2004

I was perfectly primed for the 2004 Web 2.0 internet having been blogging in relative obscurity for a few years and with enough spare time to carve a niche on the nascent Birmingham blogging scene. It was a heady time that effectively birthed our current social media nightmare, so this is a useful snapshot of where it all began from someone who documented it at the time on the Read/Write/Web blog.

Something significant was happening on the internet in early 2004, but we didn’t yet have a term for it. Blogging and wikis were encouraging ordinary people to write more on the web — you didn’t necessarily need to have technical skills anymore. At the same time, new websites like Flickr and del.icio.us (a web-based bookmarking service) were enabling people to share things online.

(via)

For tech CEOs, the dystopia is the point

A concise explanation of why these billionaire weirdos keep trying to build the torment nexus from the classic sci-fi novel Don’t Create the Torment Nexus.

What’s the common denominator of Elon Musk’s cybertruck Blade Runner pitch/dystopia and Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse pitch/dystopia? That the presumed user or owner of the product is the protagonist! If you buy a cybertruck, you’ll keep yourself safe from a world on the brink, from replicants, whatever. If you’re in the metaverse, you can be like the guy from Ready Player One; a hero going on all kinds of adventures even if the world at large is collapsing outside the VR helmet — it’s a useful dystopia for marketing what is otherwise an antisocial and cumbersome technology.

(via)

Milky Way photographer of the year 2024

By now you’ve probably seen a fair few long exposure panoramic shots of Milky Way galaxy stretching across some desert sky and might expect to see more of the same here. You will not see more of the same. Incredible stuff. (via)

Plugin Beachball Success

While updating my art website I recalled seeing Jon Satrom’s “prepared desktop” performance in 2011, and it being quite the transformative moment for me as he takes a seemingly normal MacBook, tries to fix something on it, and descends into a surreal nightmare of glitch.

This is a recording and documentation of a performance at a keynote event a year later and it’s so very good.

20th Anniversary remasters of A Night At The Hip-Hopera and Yoshimi Battles The Hip-Hop Robots

If you were downloading mp3s during the height of the mashup boom you’ll know these albums, perfectly merging hip-hop vocals with Queen and The Flaming Lips. I love these albums so much they’re where my brain goes whenever I hear the intro to the originals. Modern masterpieces that you’ll never hear on fucking Spotify.

Pay-what-you-like.

(Bandcamp)

The Lunacy of Artemis

A deep-dive into the clusterfuck that appears to be NASA’s plans to put people on the moon again.

But where Apollo 17 launched on a single rocket and cost $3.3 billion (in 2023 dollars), the first Artemis landing involves a dozen or two heavy rocket launches and costs so much that NASA refuses to give a figure. The single-use lander for the mission will be the heaviest spacecraft ever flown, and yet the mission’s scientific return — a small box of rocks — is less than what came home on Apollo 17. And the whole plan hinges on technologies that haven’t been invented yet becoming reliable and practical within the next eighteen months.

The most jaw-dropping part was the earth-orbit refuelling plan which requires sending fuel up in up to 20 separate heavy rocket launches and storing it there (not easy) before transferring it to the actual lunar vehicle.

I say this as a massive fan of Apollo, but we really shouldn’t be bothering with this stuff. Robots in space are doing a perfectly good job. See also Kelly and Zach Weinersmith’s magnificent teardown of the billionaires’ space dreams, A City on Mars.

(idlewords.com)

It rained on the Sunday: a career interview with Roger Corman

Loads of good stuff. I particularly liked this observation.

Motion pictures are the most important contemporary art form, because they are the modern art form. For two reasons. One, they deal with movement – the motion picture camera opened up the possibilities of capturing movement, and I think it is the art form of modern times because of that. But also for another reason. A writer can sit down and write a novel or a play and a painter can buy the materials and paint, but a filmmaker needs a crew, and he needs to pay that crew, so it’s really part art form, part business. It’s a compromised art form, which is another symbol of our time.

(bfi.org.uk) via

Ghost’s development of ActivityPub is going well.

Our initial work has largely revolved around a combination of laying technical foundations, reading the ActivityPub spec, trying to implement the smallest possible thing, and spending a disproportionate amount of time asking deep, profound engineering questions such as “why in the literal fuck isn’t this working?”

Expectations tempered, good luck chaps.

(Ghost.org)

On Wishcycling

A deep-dive into the origins and various interpretations of the term “wishcycling” on the Discard Studies website (which sound like something a Don DeLillo character would write for, but I digress).

Initially, the term emerged from within the recycling and waste industry as a response to the influx of non-recyclables “contaminating” the recycling stream. In this sense, wishcycling is a charge levied against individuals and, as part of public education campaigns, intends to shift “poor” recycling habits. But increasingly, it is used as part of a structural critique by recyclers, one that shifts the focus onto infrastructure or the plastics industry, who have long promoted recycling as the primary solution to the mounting scale and complexity of contemporary waste. In this case, putting non-recyclables in the bin is likely an act carried out because it feels necessary, but also knowingly incommensurate with and potentially irrelevant to the problem of disposable plastics.

The Atlantic article she mentions this being research for is The World Has One Big Chance to Fix Plastics.

Via Andrew Curry’s equally enraging The rise and rise of the plastic bag which reminds us that there didn’t used to be quite so much of this shit in our lives and it didn’t happen by accident.

Plastics were, effectively a product of World War 2, produced for the war effort. By the 1960s, a Swedish company had patented the single stamp plastic bag. Food buying habits changed, which created a market for a range of plastic packaging. Consumers had to be trained not to kill themselves with plastic bags, and then to treat them as disposable.

Plenty of damning links there about the petrochemical industry’s lobying if you fancy getting really pissed off.

(Discard Studies / Just Two Things)

Some mad genius has combined Beryl Cook and Tom of Finland in one exhibition.

15 May–25 August, 2024 Studio Voltaire, London

At Studio Voltaire, fleshly excesses are explored in pairings that underscore their works as playful and political. In pairing their work, including archival materials which have never been seen by the public, this two-person presentation will provide a significant refocus and reveal interconnected ideas surrounding gender, sexuality, taste and class.

A nice overview of the show and the rationale behind it is in This Guardian piece gives a nice overview of the show and the reasoning behind bringing these two seemingly very different artists together. Turns out they have a lot in common.