#safe new world

[fettesans]

That is why information is tending to disappear, being replaced instead by alerts. The informer becomes a transmitter, an alert vector in a permanent and generalized system of alerts that is tied to the political, economic, social, and ecological state of the world, taken in its entirety. And the information itself is always more alarming, always more terrifying, and supported by data concerning the ongoing destruction of the world. Isn’t that inevitable when the viability of the world—and of the multiple worlds composing it and giving it its consistency—is everywhere under threat? We aren’t informed about parts of the world anymore but are on permanent alert about the general state of the world. The effect is debilitating. All the scenarios, all the simulations and hypotheses that result, whether catastrophic or not, force us to think in terms of worlds, to “globalize” even the most minute data. And that is where the junction between the actual world and SF occurs, independently of the fictional stories, as if the information concerning the present state of the world were nothing but a succession of stories anticipating its future state.

David Lapoujade, from the introduction to Worlds Built to Fall Apart: Versions of Philip K. Dick, translated by Erik Beranek, in e-flux, July, 2024.

[fettesans]

Screen captures from Anatomy of a Fall, directed by Justine Triet, 2023.

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Back in 1991 when the book (Mirror Worlds: or the Day Software Puts the Universe in a Shoebox...How It Will Happen and What It Will Mean) was first published, just over 1% of Americans were using the internet. But Gelernter claimed computing was about to revolutionize life on Earth. “This book describes an event that will happen someday soon,” he wrote in the opening line. “You will look into a computer screen and see reality. Some part of your world — the town you live in, the company you work for, your school system, the city hospital — will hang there in a sharp color image, abstract but recognizable, moving subtly in a thousand places.”

In essence, Gelernter believed that every aspect of life could soon be modeled in a parallel digital simulation. Everything happening in our lived reality would be tracked and monitored and fed into software “by a steady rush of new data pouring in through cables” to create a high-fidelity real-time digital representation of the world and all of its pulsing, swarming and sensuous qualities. This would be like Mark Zuckerberg’s metaverse on steroids: our exact world, our very lives, all digital. And you could view, manipulate, experience and interact with this mirror world, like a child with a dollhouse. A dashboard for reality.

These “high-tech voodoo dolls,” as Gelernter described them, “will mark a new era in mankind’s relationship to the man-made world. They change that relationship; for good.” It would be possible, he believed, to not just monitor what was happening around the world, but also to predict what could happen — endless simulations of possible future events would be running inside the mirror world. We could prepare ourselves for any outcome — any future — in the physical world because we would know what was coming. (...)

The dream of a digital twin is to bypass the averages and biases and develop a personalized and predictive form of healthcare that is built around a person’s specific physiology and pathology rather than vaguely representative historical data. “The idea [of the virtual human] starts from the premise that modern medicine isn’t really that modern in scientific terms,” Peter Coveney, a computer scientist and coauthor of “Virtual You” (2023), told me over Zoom. Coveney worked on a project to digitally twin the entire 60,000-mile-long circulatory system of a deceased South Korean woman named Yoon-Sun who had donated her body to science. Cross-sections were taken from her frozen cadaver to help trace the network of vessels, arteries, veins and capillaries. Once mapped, they created a digital simulation of how her blood flowed by feeding 200,000 lines of code into a supercomputer.

Joe Zadeh, from A Digital Twin Might Just Save Your Life - Digital twins offer humankind the ability to command virtual replicas of forests, oil fields, cities, supply chains — and even, maybe one day, our very bodies, for Noéma, March 21, 2024.

Anatomy of a Fall (2023)

[hussyknee]

Trying to explain what the fuck just happened in Lankan politics today.

The leftist party has won 159 seats out of 218 in the Parliamentary elections. The single biggest landslide win since we broke from the British and achieved universal franchise in 1948.

Any party achieving a super majority in the executive and legislative is, objectively speaking, bad. It disables checks and balances, which is a catastrophic thing for any democracy, and the only two other times it's happened for us has irrevocably eroded the fabric of civic rights and democratic freedom. Also, the reason the NPP won the North and East is that the colonized, genocided and subjugated people there have no faith in electoralism anymore. The way this government has engaged minority issues has been utterly abysmal and now they've been rewarded for it.

On the other hand:

The winners. Are all. Grassroots. Candidates.¹

We have voted out every single career criminal that's been barnacled into the Lankan political arena since before I've been alive. The fascist party has only three seats.² The other fascists didn't win a single seat. The neoliberal legacy party won none. There are only forty people in Parliament that represent any sort of dynastic political legacy. After 76 solid years of nothing but political dynasties.

This is barely five years after the Rajapaksas swept in and absolutely glutted the Parliament with their family members and cronies end to end.

This is the illegitimate interim government we had for most of the last 18 months. We literally, physically, chased the Rajapaksas out of the country and this fucking demon set up a puppet government just so he could finally sit in that goddamn chair and be the despot he'd always dreamed of in exchange for letting them all come back. He's now gone. His entire circle is gone.

THEY ARE ALL FUCKING GONE.

In US terms, just imagine that, five years from now, when Trump's GOP has control of everything, the entire GOP and the worst of the Dems are all purged from Congress and Senate, the Green Party in control of all three branches of government under a pro-union left-wing President and an unmarried female LGBT rights activist Vice President, and the Dems reduced to barely 20% of the House.

This is my anthropology professor. She joined politics from the small nascent leftist coalition to help keep the government accountable. She's now the Prime Minister and the most popular Parliamentary candidate in the nation's history. (Edit: She was knocked off first place by a dude in the final result. Boo.)

(On the other hand— the woman who helped make me a radical anarchist and literally helped write a book on political dissent and resistance...now is the state. Uh.)

But there are so many women in Parliament! We had the lowest female representation in a South Asian Parliament and some of them were from the list of seats reserved for parties rather than elected ones. Most were either anti-feminist conservative embarrassments, widows and daughters of elite politicians and neoliberal shills. It's still only an increase of a few percentage points (Edit: from the previous 5% to 10% in the final result!) but now we have elected academics, feminist advocates, activists! There Is a representative for Malaiyaha Tamils in the Central Province for the first time in history and it's a young woman! (Edit: now it's two female Malaiyaha MPS!!) This is the plantation community that still live in conditions closest to the slavery the British forced upon them two hundred years ago!

I'm like. Completely mindfucked. To be very very clear, the NPP coalition formed around the nucleus of the JVP that used to be communist but haven't been in 30 years, they're now just social democrats who are left of places like the US and UK, whose "left" is now center-right. They're only threatening to the Western mainstream media for some reason who can't stop bleating about how we have a "Marxist" government now. In reality, the actual chances for radical reform are still quite low, and the opportunity for further erosion is quite high with a super majority government regardless of affiliation.

On the other hand:

What the fuck.

Sometimes living through historical events is really damn amazing.

---

¹ Well, nearly. There are a few career politicians and a nepo baby but they aren't so bad either.

² Goddamn it, Baby Rajapaksa and Sri Lanka's answer to JD Vance have wormed their way in using the list of Constitutionally reserved party seats for non-elected members. FUCK the National List.

[fluffylord]

Look how far I went, for fear of losing you.

[scoriarose]

Baby that is not an enrichment activity

Baby... Baby no you... Child...

I know you like to play with crinkly things but...

Aaaand into the messenger bag she goes.

[nelkcats]

Ghost Train

It was no secret that the trains in Gotham were damaged, whether it was from all the explosions that flooded the city on a daily basis or the fact that the rails were broken wasn't completely clear. At that point, what was once a train station was nothing more than an empty place used by some homeless people to sleep.

Or that's what it was supposed to be, because while the station was damaged and underneath the city, it was actually active. It just had another kind of train, a slightly more interesting one.

In Danny's defense, he was extremely bored and there was an abandoned train station he could use to play with. All it took was calling in a favor from Technus and a fully functional ghost train connected the Infinite Realms to Gotham.

The ghosts, of course, used this for fun. Fighting each other, chasing each other, celebrating, having concerts. It was a way to go to the human world without anyone causing trouble for them, not that anyone was paying attention anyway.

Or at least, no one was supposed to be paying attention, because Waylon was dumbfounded at the sight. He had escaped to the old rails when he had no other choice, his sewers were compromised and he needed a way out. He didn't expect to walk right into a party, or be offered a sandwich with a smile instead of a shout.

He could also observe a clearly glowing train and the fact that everyone there was glowing. They could be metas, or another completely new creature, but Waylon didn't care, they gave him food and he wasn't a snitch.

[poorly-drawn-mdzs]

best BEAST!!

[caitlinjohns77]

[fettesans]

Nada, Amore Disperato, 1983

--

The capacitive touchscreen is a mystifying veil over the rational kernel of the computer. To touch a touchscreen is an oxymoron: you believe you are tapping a button but you are feeling nothing at all. What is feeling is the screen, abrim with energy and sensors. In fact, the screen touches you.  The human body is electrically conductive because we are filled with fluid, and our cells filled with conductive ions. So a layer of conductive material is placed upon a screen, which generates an electrical field. When your finger approaches, this electrical field is drawn upward to touch your own. The screen’s highly sensitive capacitors read this disruption in its own field: capacitive coupling. The device’s processor analyzes the location of your gesture on the screen. It then decides how to react to you.

Touchscreens proliferated with the introduction of the Apple iPhone in 2007. The iPhone revolutionized the technology industry and subsequently the world, as Marx predicted. People now spend more time than they ever have before engaging in labor and economic exchange through smartphone apps. Such apps are designed to supercharge any person’s ability to participate in the economy, operate as a small business, purchase and sell commodities, or labor to produce data, content, and attention. This quantitative leap causes qualitative transformations in the social fabric, dialectically rippling outwards from Silicon Valley to the far reaches of wireless networks. The smartphone reorganizes social relations, disrupts and re-creates new modes of production, and exploits and dehumanizes “users” across the globe. Flusser says it best: “the hands have become redundant and can atrophy. This is not true, however, of the fingertips. On the contrary: They have become the most important organs of the body”.

Kat Kitay, from The Dialectic of Doomscrolling, June 24, 2024.

Nada - Amore Disperato

[destielmemenews]

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[fettesans]

Top, page from Raymond Buckland, Solitary Seance: How You Can Talk with Spirits on Your Own, 2011. Via. Bottom, photograph via NASA, Toroid inflatable station concept during testing, 1961. Via. More.

Using the pendulum is known as radiesthesia—also rhabdomancy, or cleidomancy. One of the best-known uses of the pendulum is in dowsing, in finding where to drill for water. But it is also used for many other things, not least of all for communicating with spirit.

Unlike many other early space station concepts, this design actually made it out of the concept phase and into production, though no models were ever flown. This particular station was 30-feet and expandable. It was designed to be taken to outer space in a small package and then inflate in orbit. The station could, in theory, have been big enough for 1 to 2 people to use for a long period of time. A similar 24 foot station was built by the Goodyear Aircraft Corporation for NASA test use. The concept of space inflatables was revived in the 1990s. Via Wikipedia.

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‘If an artist who conceived a work says that it is unfinished and should not be exhibited, it isn’t – and shouldn’t be.’ The court felt differently: ‘When an artist makes a decision to begin work on a piece of art and handles the process of creation long-distance via e-mail, using someone else’s property, someone else’s materials, someone else’s money, someone else’s staff, and, to a significant extent, someone else’s suggestions regarding the details of fabrication – with no enforceable written or oral contract defining the parties’ relationship – and that artist becomes unhappy part-way through the project and abandons it,’ wrote the presiding judge, Michael Ponsor, ‘then nothing in the Visual Artists Rights Act or elsewhere in the Copyright Act gives that artist the right to dictate what that “someone else” does with what he has left behind, so long as the remnant is not explicitly labeled as the artist’s work.’ (...)

Essentially a horrific readymade, Barca Nostra sunk in April 2015 between Libya and Lampedusa with an estimated 1,000 migrants onboard, of whom 28 survived. The Italian government recovered the wreck in 2016 and moved it to a base in Sicily before it was placed under the care of the Augusta municipality, a landing site for Operation Mare Nostrum, Italy’s response to the Mediterranean migrant crisis. Mare Nostrum, or ‘Our Sea’, cost the Italian government a reported £7 million per month, and ensured safe passage for over 100,000 people within a year of its launch in October 2013. But after Italy appealed for assistance, EU states criticised the operation for encouraging people to risk the sea crossing, so EU agency Frontex replaced Mare Nostrum with Operation Triton in 2014, with a slashed budget and focus on border security.

Effectively a policy of nonassistance, as Forensic Oceanography concluded in their 2016 report Death by Rescue: The Lethal Effects of Non-Assistance at Sea, Triton created a situation where commercial ships were increasingly called into rescue missions they weren’t suited to conduct – such was the case with the sinking of Barca Nostra in 2015, they found. That year, European Parliament president Martin Schulz called for ‘burden sharing’ based on the fact that five out of 28 EU member states were taking in 50 percent of refugees to Europe at the time. Yet no effective cooperation manifested. Neither in creating humanitarian responses to a global crisis, nor in mediating the ultraright sentiments and movements that rose as a result – as demonstrated in 2018, when Italy’s far-right interior minister, Matteo Salvini, launched a campaign to block search-and-rescue vessels from docking in Italian ports, and drafted a hardline anti-migrant bill adopted by the Italian government.

It was within this desperate context that Barca Nostra was brought to the Venice Biennale – in cooperation with Augusta’s municipal council and Comitato 18 Aprile, which lobbied against government plans to scrap the ship – with Büchel covering transportation costs. Presented with little information – not for the lulz, it seems, but out of contempt for a wilful ignorance – the vessel’s arrival was lambasted as ‘tasteless’ by those at the vernissage, seemingly more concerned with the insult of its presence – and those taking selfies with it, like a Martha Rosler collage come to life – than discussing the exclusionary policies that brought it into being. (Granted, as curator Alexandra Stock wrote in a scathing takedown, ‘The optics [were] bad because Büchel set it up that way’.) While the stunt drew international attention – including responses from Salvini himself, countering the idea that the Venice Biennale is an ineffective stage for protest – it also revealed the limits of internationalism, whether in the artworld or the world at large.

Stephanie Bailey, from Christoph Büchel: Fear and Loathing in Venice, for Art Review, April 14, 2024.

[ciaomarie]

GIF by lousolversons

What do you do when the person who has unknowingly shaped your dreams and then made you part of his dreams disappears? And he's two feet away? I'd fade, too. I'd scream my grievances in a dumpster and wonder if I simply expected too much of someone. People die and leave you. People find a girlfriend and leave you. People are dealing with issues and leave you. And... maybe they were never really with you in the first place?

[phonification]

weird hsbc adjacent ii au doodles ,,

[eternity-death]

Had the thought/realization that regardless of if the Dream Master approved or disapproved of Sunday pursuing you, Sunday would still choose not to.

There are just too many factors that prevent him from doing so. A lack of time, for one. Sunday’s duties keep him on his toes constantly; he can’t find a moment of rest even in his sleep. He foresees his negligence of your relationship, and though unintentional, it still wouldn’t be fair to you.

His status as Oak Family Head would be another problem. How would you fare under the overbearing pressures that come with being his lover? Penacony is a planet of lights, glamour, and gossip. All eyes will be on you as soon as your relationship is publicized. You will be held at standards far higher than ever before, and the other Family Heads will be expecting nothing less. Sunday couldn’t possibly bring himself to burden you with all of this.

And of course, there’s his grand plan for Penacony.

I think that he’s been anticipating his sacrifice for a loooong time. Sunday acknowledges that he’ll be hurting you by leaving, and if you were in a relationship, then he would be hurting you even more.

You will be furious with him, surely. You’ve always chastised him for his self-destructive work habits.

But the image of you eternally safe and sound within Ena’s dream is enough to lay any rueful feelings to rest. He hopes that one day you’ll find it within yourself to forgive him.

[aman1taverna]

I honestly hadn't known before that the Philippines had such strict laws on divorce but I'm so glad that they're taking this step towards amending it. This is such a win for Filipino women and everyone in harmful or abusive situations

[sh1-n0bu]

i fucking knew americans were dumb

edit: i have found out thru tiktok that books such as ‘great gatsby’ ‘handmaidens tale’ ‘to kill a mockingbird’ ‘lord of the flies’ and such are going to be banned in the us and the white house is demanding a recount/revote. those of you who are in usa, do what you can do, stock up on your medications if you can, engage in community that you’re a part of, create a safe space for yourself and those you know. learn about legal issues and ways to protect yourself if the project 2025 does end up happening, educate yourselves on legal rights and your human basic rights and which law protects it in which way. this may have disappeared in the tags but if you support trump or have voted for that thing get THE FUCK off of my blog

second edit: those of you who gave your votes thru an email or online voting, CHECK YOUR EMAIL AND MAKE SURE YOUR EMAIL IS TRACEABLE. there has been news of emails being unable to be found, identified or traced back to yourself. check and check again. if there are any issues, file a complaint