flâneur

Wendi Yan

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on the atlas — 81

highlights — 1792

  • In Saving the Nation Through Material Means, his canonical work, Kang proposed a simple remedy to China’s woes: The state should send Chinese students abroad to learn from more technologically advanced countries and upon their return they should apply and pass on this new knowledge to industry, machinery, infrastructure, and military capacity—in particular the navy, whose weakness had exposed China to repeated defeats and humiliation.
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • While many searched for the causes of China’s decline in its cultural or civilizational foundations, Kang advanced a different idea. His extensive travels through Asia, Europe, and the US had convinced him that in an age of intensifying competition among nation-states, a country’s strength rested on a single factor: material power. “Why Europe is strong and China is weak has nothing to do with philosophy,”
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • Few figures embody this juncture more vividly than the late-nineteenth-century reformer Kang Youwei.
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • For Party and government cadres, everyday politics consists of identifying which social forces might become destabilizing and deciding whether to accommodate them, channel them into state-controlled forms, or stamp them out, all while sustaining economic development as the ultimate social pacifier.
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • What emerges from this history is a technological trajectory shaped not by universal forces but by China’s specific inheritance: the role science and technology have played in rescuing the country from foreign aggression and internal collapse, and the institutional imperatives that flow from an authoritarian state’s need to maintain control over a vast, rapidly modernizing society
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • AI built outside of authoritarian systems can also produce authoritarian effects.
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • industrialization through a methodical climb up the value chain of an export-oriented economy.
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • The year 1984 is also notable for two far more modest events, whose significance only appears in retrospect. In April, a group of pioneering entrepreneurs led by Wan Runnan, then an engineer at the Chinese Academy of Sciences, founded the country’s first private computer company, Stone Emerging Industries. The venture quickly overtook previous state-led efforts to develop software able to handle the input of Chinese characters, and it launched a computer revolution by gaining government ministries and large state-owned enterprises as its first clients. Around the same time, a small laboratory …
    Shooting the Suns - The Ideas Letter
  • Digital counter-colonization would require many of the same things that actors in the Global South were asking for in the 1960s and 1970s: matching the promise of national sovereignty formally held out by international law with the capacity to exercise that sovereignty. Alongside digital empires, one could discuss a Digital Non-Aligned Movement and a Silicon Bandung to create space between the two poles of absolute refusal and absolute domination.
    Digital Bandung - The Ideas Letter
  • Benedict Anderson made the case for what he called “creole nationalism” that emerged in Latin America as print capitalism made possible a sense of shared identity and “imagined communities” distinct from the metropole. He sees this as the beginning of the modern nation-state
    Digital Bandung - The Ideas Letter
  • we, in the Global North, are in an Ouroboros-like relationship with our tech companies that is hard to find a parallel for in the history of empires.
    Digital Bandung - The Ideas Letter
  • People who denounce digital empires are often left facing this paradox: What if people don’t want to be liberated?
    Digital Bandung - The Ideas Letter
  • it makes little sense to try to understand the onward march of digital empires without seeing them as purveyors of a never-ending bliss—in the sense not only of addiction, but also of genuine access to some of humanity’s kaleidoscopic creativity
    Digital Bandung - The Ideas Letter
  • We subject ourselves to the requirements of our new “tech lords” not simply because we do not understand their language and have no other choice, but because we are given real pleasures in return: the hedonic experience of drifting along streaming videos, absorbing for hours the whispers of people we admire, and avoiding burdensome trips to distant retail outlets, which grants us time for more meaningful forms of human interaction.
    Digital Bandung - The Ideas Letter
  • Yet if empire works as an emotional category, the larger problems also start here
    Digital Bandung - The Ideas Letter
  • Three Mile Island, the site of the most famous US nuclear accident, is coming back online, as soon as mid-2027, to power chatbots and other artificial intelligence applications. That’s thanks to a long-term agreement signed by Microsoft Corp. and Constellation Energy Corp., the power company that owns the facility, in September 2024. The deal will see the Pennsylvania plant restart under a new and baggage-free name: the Crane Clean Energy Center. The agreement commits Microsoft to buying all the electricity produced by the site’s remaining functional 835-megawatt reactor for 20 years.
    Microsoft AI Deal Secures Three Mile Island Nuclear Restart - Bloomberg
  • Most professors of art history can attest that the social contexts within which art can exist are far more varied than today’s art market and high-profile institutions. Art isn’t in danger of irrelevance. Positions like Bishop’s are.
    Technical Difficulties
  • Because as long as there is a mainstream art world that is still invested in the analog, the archival impulse, and “dead tech” and that is slow to invent new vocabularies with which to talk about perception in the digital era, there will have to be a self-marginalizing alternative called new media art that asserts its own relevance for the future. One is obsessed with the technology of the past, the other with the technology of the present; they are mutually constitutive products of similarly blinkered thinking. In this light, the inability of both to speak meaningfully about our contemporary …
    Technical Difficulties
  • I argue that contemporary art’s attachment to these modes is largely a consequence of its being wedded to a market that prefers and privileges auratic forms.
    Technical Difficulties
  • I’m not talking about individuals and institutions using new media, but about how new media changes us. And a work does not necessarily have to use these technologies to address the effects and processes of digital media.
    Technical Difficulties
  • Imagine an exhibition about the medium of watercolor.
    Brian Droitcour on “Digital Witness” - Criticism - e-flux
  • “Digital Witness” begins with a nod to chronology, displaying Susan Kare’s 1983 sketches for Apple’s graphic user icons, the boxes that contained the disks for an early edition of Adobe Photoshop, and other artifacts of early personal computing. But works and clips from various decades are mixed together in this and other galleries, and there’s virtually no attention to software environments after the ’90s.
    Brian Droitcour on “Digital Witness” - Criticism - e-flux
  • It also convincingly makes a case that the digital medium—unlike, say, watercolors—is so ubiquitous in everyday life that its use by artists cannot be fully appreciated in isolation from design, entertainment, and personal computing
    Brian Droitcour on “Digital Witness” - Criticism - e-flux
  • Of course, I also understood that theory was mainly misused in promoting art, that the references to Walter Benjamin and Jean Baudrillard, Fredric Jameson and Judith Butler, were mainly ornamental. But if art institutions and magazines often exploited theory superficially, they did so because this was a domain where people were generally expected to be interested in ideas. And there actually were such people around.
    Artspeak After Social Media - Journal #155
  • not everything that benefited from context was either elitist or fraudulent. “The obsessions of others are opaque to the unobsessed, and thus easy to mock. NASCAR, jazz, baseball, roses, poetry, quilts, fishing. If we’re lucky, we all have at least one.” The sense of participating in a culture with its own reference points isn’t just gatekeeping to keep people out but, very often, a part of the allure; it makes you want to get beyond the gate to figure out the mystery.
    Artspeak After Social Media - Journal #155
  • It was because the book focused so singularly on attacking this angle without seeing how so many pressures of the last decade were pushing the other way. Jeff Koons, the apex predator of the art market for decades, is not a “theory artist”; he literally instructs you to turn off your critical brain and just enjoy
    Artspeak After Social Media - Journal #155
  • All to the good. Yet the leveling pressures of digital media and the intense anxiety of the new culture wars are major issues looming over the landscape. If they are notably in the background and out of focus in this picture of art’s culture now, that says something about the limits of this genre of aesthetic populism. It suggests that a pitfall of the demand for clarity in art writing is that it easily conceals a demand to reduce the complexity of its objects and lower its stakes.
    Artspeak After Social Media - Journal #155
  • calling for a revival of patriotic industry and innovation.
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • Group chats are now where everything important and interesting happens.”
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • Torenberg independently founded a group of tech chats on WhatsApp and some more political Signal chats.
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • The closed groups offered an alternative to the Twitter and Slack conversations once dominated by progressive social movements,
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • described them as a “Republic of Letters,”
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • the groups had formed out of a mix of fear and disdain for journalists they believed were “out to get us,” as one member put it.
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • he described the group chats to the podcaster Lex Fridman as “the equivalent of samizdat” — the self-published Soviet underground press — in a “soft authoritarian” age of social media shaming and censorship. “The combination of encryption and disappearing messages really unleashed it,”
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • There are group chats for Black political elites and morning show producers
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • The group chats are “the memetic upstream of mainstream opinion,” wrote one of their key organizers, Sriram Krishnan
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • “This is insane CCP thinking,” Lonsdale, a co-founder of Palantir, wrote to a 300-member Signal group. “Not sure what leaders hang out w you in Singapore but on this you have been taken over by a crazy China mind virus.”
    The group chats that changed America | Semafor
  • hoped to avoid a repetition of the Treaty of Versailles after World War I, which had created enough economic and political tension to lead to WWII
    Bretton Woods system
  • It also envisioned greater cooperation among countries in order to prevent future competitive devaluations, and thus established the International Monetary Fund (IMF) to monitor exchange rates and lend reserve currencies to countries with balance of payments deficits.[
    Bretton Woods system
  • first example of a fully negotiated monetary order intended to govern monetary relations among independent states
    Bretton Woods system
  • Madame Lavoisier had first been depicted wearing an enormous hat decorated with ribbons and artificial flowers
    Refashioning the Lavoisiers - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • using a scanning electron microscope (SEM)
    Refashioning the Lavoisiers - The Metropolitan Museum of Art
  • Their reply is that “a critical juncture,” namely Mao’s death, followed by Deng’s efforts to build a reform coalition, turned China around. Furthermore, they claim, growth under extractive institutions was possible because an extremely poor country like China had plenty of “catching up” to do. Finally, they sum up: “Some luck is key, because history always unfolds in a contingent way.”
    The 2024 Nobel Laureates Are Not Only Wrong About China, But Also About the West - The Ideas Letter
  • The oligarch-intellectuals demonstrate precisely the opposite instinct: They are treading the Soviet path.
    The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
  • Andreessen, meanwhile, paints elite universities as Marxist seminaries producing “America-hating communists.” Joe Lonsdale, another tech mogul (and a co-founder of Palantir) has been the driving force behind the University of Austin— the anti-woke university hoping to mass produce “America-loving capitalists.
    The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
  • Capital has beaten the left at its own game—oligarch-intellectuals now serve as capital’s unanointed organic intellectuals, with capitalism perfecting in a decade what socialists couldn’t achieve in a century.
    The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
  • tech oligarchs crowning themselves humanity’s official spokesmen
    The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
  • our oligarch-intellectuals orchestrate reality’s symphony—controlling media platforms, deploying venture capital like carpet bombs, and perfecting Steve Bannon’s “flooding the zone” strategy to a hydraulic science.
    The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
  • Musk diagrams humanity’s cosmic destiny with the certainty of a Soviet five-year plan
    The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter
  • they demand specific sacrifices—from the public, the government, and their employees.
    The New Legislators of Silicon Valley - The Ideas Letter