Welcome to 5 Quick Things that I saw since last month that I thought were interesting enough to share with you. None of them are particularly timely so feel free to just enjoy 🙂
>Number One<
GITS (Positive)
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This is such an interesting website because it’s amazing how narrow we think of what the internet can do, or what the internet is for these days. As a person who straddles two generations (the pre-internet and the post-internet) I still believe in the promise of the internet and I still marvel at the way that connects people of all places into one shared space but sites like this one, wherein your cursor shows up on other peoples screens, map that type of interconnected space in a way that chat rooms don’t by transposing you at the same time instead of turn taking OR worse, only appearing when you are making “noise.”
>Number Two<
Body as a Cite of Repair
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Why yes, I am intimately concerned about the way that tech and medicine are intertwined, how could you tell? I’m not sure that I am 100% in favor of letting people compound and hack together their own medical solutions without any guard rails but I recognize that the system we have now doesn’t work well for most people and the barrier in place make in impossible for us to know that we’re in control of systems so intimate as what we put in our bodies. I have so many caveats to these things but I find it almost as deeply fascinating as I do the latest in-body monitoring devices (and I find those endlessly interesting). This article about a hacker medical collective seeking to make easily compounded medicine available at cost is certainty food for thought on many level of our medical systems.
>Number Three<
Different Worlds Are Possible
I really appreciate this video from Unlearning Economic about how we can actually change for the better, especially knowing what we know now. I feel like we learned so much during the pandemic on how to keep each other safe, how to distribute money better, how to work better within the supply chains we had and so on but we haven’t applied these ideas since 2021 and our systems and our air remain a danger to all of us without these changes. It’s just honestly refreshing to see someone else talking about it.
>Number Four<
Yelling at AI
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Money is the major concern for Facebook and as such, they don’t spend a whole lot of time policing the type of ads they list. I know most of the people in my life have walked away from Facebook, often because of the hate speech and other allowances on the site, but it’s gotten impressively worse of the years and I imagine with AI now taking the place of some of these ads, it will continue to spiral.
>Number Five<
The Imagined Future
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I have absolutely no idea how to explain this to you or how to sell it. Again, this is the promise of interactive, 3D computing that things like TV shows and sci fi have sold you on but being used less for day to day things and more as a creative, explorative medium. It’s really only explainable through the videos on the site but it’s like 1/2 installation, 1/2 futuristic ideal. It’s just nice to see people out there exploring ideas still.
That’s all for this month and hopefully I’ll see you back again next month with some more exciting and cool things!