When Engineers Were Humanists New York Review of Books
Making Sense of the Mass Data Generated From Firing Neurons Neuroscience News
Some relative optimism from YouYang Gu. And from Trevor Bedford
Working for Zuckerberg and Bezos, what it is like
Israel moving toward a two-tier system for vaccinated and unvaccinated (NYT)
More from Olivier Blanchard on the stimulus
What it was like working at Trump Hotel
Cancellation standards at Lehigh are shifting
Experts Say the ‘New Normal’ in 2025 Will Be Far More Tech-Driven, Presenting More Big Challenges
Pew – “A plurality of experts think sweeping societal change will make life worse for most people as greater inequality, rising authoritarianism and rampant misinformation take hold in the wake of the COVID-19 outbreak. Still, a portion believe life will be better in a ‘tele-everything’ world where workplaces, health care and social activity improve…Asked to consider what life will be like in 2025 in the wake of the outbreak of the global pandemic and other crises in 2020, some 915 innovators, developers, business and policy leaders, researchers and activists responded. Their broad and nearly universal view is that people’s relationship with technology will deepen as larger segments of the population come to rely more on digital connections for work, education, health care, daily commercial transactions and essential social interactions. A number describe this as a “tele-everything” world…”
New York Times – We can have democracy, or we can have a surveillance society, but we cannot have both. Dr. Shoshana Zuboff, a professor emeritus at Harvard Business School, is the author of “The Age of Surveillance Capitalism.”
“I have spent exactly 42 years studying the rise of the digital as an economic force driving our transformation into an information civilization. Over the last two decades, I’ve observed the consequences of this surprising political-economic fraternity as those young companies morphed into surveillance empires powered by global architectures of behavioral monitoring, analysis, targeting and prediction that I have called surveillance capitalism. On the strength of their surveillance capabilities and for the sake of their surveillance profits, the new empires engineered a fundamentally anti-democratic epistemic coup marked by unprecedented concentrations of knowledge about us and the unaccountable power that accrues to such knowledge. In an information civilization, societies are defined by questions of knowledge — how it is distributed, the authority that governs its distribution and the power that protects that authority. Who knows? Who decides who knows? Who decides who decides who knows? Surveillance capitalists now hold the answers to each question, though we never elected them to govern. This is the essence of the epistemic coup. They claim the authority to decide who knows by asserting ownership rights over our personal information and defend that authority with the power to control critical information systems and infrastructures. The horrific depths of Donald Trump’s attempted political coup ride the wave of this shadow coup, prosecuted over the last two decades by the antisocial media we once welcomed as agents of liberation. On Inauguration Day, President Biden said that “democracy has prevailed” and promised to restore the value of truth to its rightful place in democratic society. Nevertheless, democracy and truth remain under the highest level of threat until we defeat surveillance capitalism’s other coup. The epistemic coup proceeds in four stages…
Modern Farmer This Teenager Helped Launch Seed Libraries in Every State – “During the pandemic, Alicia Serratos has spent countless hours assembling kits containing organic vegetable, herb and flower seeds, envelopes and plant markers to help communities establish seed libraries.Seed libraries maintain stocks of seeds that the public can “check out” to plant in their gardens. Boxes stocked with packets of seeds are often housed in public libraries, but businesses and homeowners have also started creating mini libraries in an effort to boost food gardening and seed saving while promoting food access and security. “Seed libraries are so important because they teach people where their food comes from,” Serratos says. “It’s made me so happy that so many people are interested in growing food and having seed libraries.” Serratos, who is just 14, came up with the idea to start 3 Sisters Seed Box in 2019. Her goal: Send out enough starter kits to have at least two seed libraries in all 50 states. It started out as a Girl Scout project and turned into a nationwide movement. Seed Savers Exchange donated heirloom seeds for the project and the Community Seed Networkmapped all of the seed library locations. Since she started her campaign, requests have flooded in via social media from communities eager to start their own seed libraries. The first 3 Sisters Seed Box was installed in Pennsylvania in April 2020 and the last, installed in Auburn, New Hampshire, was shipped in January 2021. To date, Serratos has shipped 108 seed library starter kits to communities nationwide…”
