Indeed, attention is probably the scarcest resource there is—at least by our own estimation, as we absolutely rush, harried through our daily routines, ushered by those gadgets designed to be more fleet of foot and to help us help ourselves—but surely it’s a cultural quirk, a weakness or vanity that can be appealed to like any insecurity.
Saturday 14 March 2015
jam tomorrow and jam yesterday
catagories: ๐ง , labour, lifestyle, networking and blogging, philosophy, technology and innovation
five-by-five
that dress: the original brunt of cyber-bullying, Monica Lewinsky, stops off in Norway on her way to present a seminar on the phenomenon
strangers have the best candy: annual roundup for oddest book titles
intermission: a loving collection of vintage theatre lobby carpets
pukebox: a subjective playlist of music most vile
afturkรถllun
The Foreign Ministry has informed the European Union that it will no longer be pursuing its bid of accession into the supranational monetary and trade pact.
catagories: ๐ฎ๐ธ, ๐, ๐ฑ, foreign policy, labour, revolution
Friday 13 March 2015
five-by-five
drunk and disorderly: a supercharged tonic wine produced by monks in an abbey in Devonshire is a subject of controversy
rubber banding: some absolutely brilliantly illustrated brochures for the British video game awards
proud as a peacock: new species of spiders discovered in Australia
inked: an interactive exhibition allows people to tell a story with magical conducting ink
chatty-cathy: new fashion doll will forward children’s conversations along to corporate HQ and snitch to their parents
print-lab
Reports are emerging that organic chemists from the Howard Hughes Medical Institute have collaborated with engineers to produce their discipline’s own version of the 3D printer, which can transcribe small molecules and building-blocks for study and discovery. An established line of known chemicals can of course be synthesised in laboratories but usually at a great cost and with limited access which makes experimentation and distributed research prohibitively expense.
livery and latchkey
I wonder if there is a public shame-registry of unmarked white vans. Should we make such a thing? Suspiciously—though probably only in truth relegated to the wilds of my imagination, this one “delivery” vehicle has been parked opposite my apartment’s balcony for almost a week already and I can detect no sign of activity—other than the interior lights were on the other night and one could see the rear windows illuminated through the plastic tinting.
I tried to stare it down last night but nothing came of that standoff. Rather than building a registry, I suppose, snapping a picture probably is more likely to tattle on the observed with hidden, backmasked Q-R codes, camouflaged in the white to off-white of the van’s paint (which is a pretty scary concept, that one’s scanning in invisible data with a digital sweep of one’s surroundings). I guess, however—thinking back to a funny, chance separate incident—there are other ways to have one’s cover blown.
catagories: ๐ฅธ, ๐ง , Hessen, technology and innovation
Thursday 12 March 2015
blue-collar or the golgafrinchans
Though I am never one to be surprised that I managed to miss an item of depth and scope and am usually very pleased for the serendipity of discovering it later—since after all there’s too much emphasis put on the new and novel (even if often it’s little more than a repackaged footnote), I was really floored when I was introduced anthropology professor David Graeber’s wiltingly vivid critique of the labour force as a reflection of the values of those who bind the purse strings. As predicted by economist John Maynard Keyes back in 1930, by the end of the century, mankind had harnessed technologies sufficient to allow us to fulfill our productivity quotas with a fifteen hour workweek and enjoy more leisure time without stint.
There is for me little room for doubt that that came about for us globally but we are not able to accept it and kept our current caste-system. In a perfectly engineered jobs market, however, the growing bulk of which are in administration and management, are distastefully unfulfilling and we’ll plug away well beyond those first few break-even hours to whittle away at redundancy, said technology even stealing more of the balance of free-time. We’re committed to this for the sake of appearances and stability, rigged also for us to harbor resentment for those who we suspect not putting in their fair share of drudgery, that’s yet pointless and the invention of some corporate constabularies to keep us safely occupied. Naturally, those in power fear the tide of social unrest that characterised the 1960s and 1970s and don’t want to see it return—certainly accounting for why the Occupy-Movements were disdained. Discord is also sewn, deviously well, among those tethered to their petty bailiwicks and those who perform actual work, a class maligned of teachers, sanitation workers and nurses and assailed with selfish questions of minimum wage, social security—and that intervening service-sector that’s been created to cater to that overwhelming sea of middling-management, also expected to work the customary workweek, though time must fly for them.
And of course, there is a corollary envy for the wealthy, privileged and talented who got all the breaks and whom give us off course something to aspire to and a reason to play along. Still, it does psychological violence to our morale. Even with the amount of manufacturing jobs swept out of sight—in order to build and sustain this dystopian state of affairs, it’s not as if there are legions of assemblers and welders nor wild crews of labourers under the whip of a single floor bosses—and a disproportionate number of meaningless, imaginary jobs are held in the world’s workshops too. If this article is new to you as well, I highly recommend reading it, as I think my humble abstract has turned out to be nearly as long, and be sure to staff it through your aggrieved colleagues and co-workers.