Alt, Anarchy

The Ants Have Not Read Kant: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid – Areo

[He is] that beautiful white Christ which seems to be coming out of Russia … [One] of the most perfect lives I have come across in my own experience.—Oscar Wilde…View Post

Source: The Ants Have Not Read Kant: Pëtr Kropotkin and Mutual Aid – Areo

Kropotkin’s observations in Siberia had drawn him to a startling and dramatic conclusion: mutual aid was not only common, but “of the greatest importance for the maintenance of life, the preservation of each species, and its further evolution.” Soon, he would be describing mutual aid as a biological law, particularily after he read a lecture on mutual aid that Karl Kessler, dean of the University of Saint Petersburg, had presented to the Congress of Naturalists.
Kropotkin’s time in Siberia turned him into not only an evolutionary biologist but also a full-fledged anarchist. “I lost in Siberia,” he would write, “whatever faith in state discipline I had cherished before. I was prepared to become an anarchist.” Kropotkin’s anarchist philosophy developed naturally from his work on evolution and mutual aid in animals. Anarchism argues that no centralized government is necessary for people to lead happy, just and equitable lives. The mutual aid that Kropotkin saw among the animals of Siberia led him to that same conclusion. He came to believe that mutual aid had deep biological roots because animals engaged in it despite the absence of anything remotely like a government. The process of natural selection had favoured mutual aid in animal populations: anarchy, Kropotkin writes, was “a mere summing-up of … the next phase of evolution. It is no longer a matter of faith; it is a matter for scientific discussion.” And since animals cooperated in the absence of government, it seemed to Kropotkin impossible that humans could not find a way to break free of government shackles.
Art

Lee Bontacou–RIP at age 91

Lee Bontecou, Untitled, 1966, welded steel, canvas, epoxy, leather, and wire and light, © MCA Chicago, © Lee Bontecou

I fell in love with Bontacou’s work in 2004 when I saw a retrospective at MOMA. She died yesterday at age 91. What a life she had. Some quotes from a couple of nice articles about her below.

And though, Bontecou’s art may have directly referenced the world as she saw it around her, she never wanted to strictly define what it was about. That was up to the viewer. As she told the Chicago Reader when asked, “Do people ever ask you, ‘What does this mean?’ What do you say?”, she coolly replied, “I don’t answer at all. It’s what you see in it. What I see in it is something else. I don’t get caught up in that.”
Although Bontecou generally avoided discussing the meaning of her images, in a rare statement for the catalogue of the Museum of Modern Art exhibition “Americans 1963,” she suggested that her goal was to “build things that express our relation to this country—to other coun­tries—to this world-to other worlds-in terms of myself.”5 The precise meaning of this relationship was explained only years later when Bontecou admitted that the iconography of these early projects was in part political, a response to the menacing specter of war and global destruction that she felt in the early ’60s.6
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Crows able to understand the concept of recursion

Crows are smart.

 

Source: Crows able to understand the concept of recursion

 

In this new effort, the research team conducted similar experiments with crows that show that they, too, have the cognitive ability to understand recursion.

The experiments by both teams involved training test subjects to choose bracket pairs in a sentence made of symbols—choosing the parentheses in the sentence {()}, for example. Once the crows got the idea, the researchers then created longer sentences to see if the test subjects could still pick out the ones that were embedded. As with the monkeys, the researchers found that the test subjects could pick out the embedded characters in numbers that were greater than chance would allow.

They are also assholes.

https://youtu.be/Au3HKbMSgeg
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Tech futurism’s blind spot – by Dave Karpf

What metaverse, web3, and artificial intelligence evangelists collectively ignore.

Source: Tech futurism’s blind spot – by Dave Karpf

What if the future isn’t Artificial General Intelligence and 100x increases in computing power? What if it’s cheap-and-flexible mesh networks? What if the future isn’t replacing untrustworthy institutions with blockchain governance? What if it’s replacing untrustworthy global and national institutions with revitalized local trust? What if the metaverse isn’t the future because, in the future, people commit themselves to improving and monitoring their vulnerable surroundings?
Open Source, Tech

Maintenance Is Sorely Needed In The Fight Against Global Warming

The noble but undervalued craft of maintenance could help preserve modernity’s finest achievements, from public transit systems to power grids, and serve as a useful framework for addressing climate change and other pressing planetary constraints.

Source: Maintenance Is Sorely Needed In The Fight Against Global Warming

Maintenance isn’t a program. It’s a practice. Melvin Kranzberg, the former president of the Society for the History of Technology, once wrote that “technology is neither good nor bad, nor is it neutral,” which is to say that its value is always contingent, even as certain technologies have their own internal logic that must be accounted for. The same goes for maintenance or sustainability, or any mental framework. Climate change and resource scarcity are real phenomena, but they must be addressed in the full context of other social aims, such as a given standard of living — or in the case of maintenance, a state of repair