The “experiment” of humanity is entering its most critical phase (+ the sugar-collapse connect)
Bits, quirks, paradoxes and my analysis. PLUS Octavia Butler knew stuff...
Someone asked me yesterday how and why I go about selecting the content for these “round-up” posts that I do from time to time. I mean, there is so much going on, and it all says so much our crumbling era. Everything is self-referring now. The whole lot is meta.
I do have a technique, as it turns out. It’s this: I pull out moments that I think disrupt us from everydayness, that grate in just the right way to trigger a visceral response - either from our brains, our hearts, our nervous systems. They might not be the most extreme or fascinating version of a phenomenon (the most click-baity); more often than not, they, instead, trigger an approachable, more metabolisable amount of outrage, sadness or joy that still allows us to engage, and to expand beyond the issue…into vaster, better, more growth-orientated thinking.
I also throw in things that beg questions that I don’t have answer for (but am hoping some of you might).
I might be over-egging this pudding….to this week’s metabolisables…
Up next: Podcast slop all the way down
It’s like when you tell a lie as a kid and the more you deny the lie to the adults, the more ridiculously committed to the lie you must become. Same with the Tech Bros. The more they alienate themselves from the rest of us, the more depressing their efforts must become. Take this: The former head of podcasts at Amazon (in this case a woman) is now flooding the zone with AI podcasts that cost $US1 to make. As a reference point, one Wild episode would cost me $US400, before paying myself. The company, Inception, churns out 3000 episodes a week using “created” hosts that (not who) are a creepy pisstake of a central casting trope. “We believe that in the near future half the people on the planet will be AI, and we are the company that’s bringing those people to life.”
I’m embarrassed for us.
Hey kids, new growing industry: insurance for when you shoot someone
The fact that this is actually a thing in America and that this is actually a headline in the New Yorker and that the line of question in the subhead is not something to the effect of, “Has America officially lost it?” says so-so much.
Once were women
Photographer Ebrahim Noroozi took a bunch of portraits of Afghan women posing with the sports equipment that once symbolised their freedom. I saw these and spent quite some time reflecting on how men globally project their fear of their own fuckups and increasing redundancy on to women. I mean, it’s just so comically1 obvious.