flâneur

Julie Lam

0 followers · 881 views

on the atlas — 43

highlights — 37

  • Moreover, he touches on the psychological impact of living under constant surveillance, where individuals must curate their online presence with the awareness that future employers, governments, or malicious actors might scrutinize their digital footprints. This reality erodes the distinction between public and private life, forcing individuals to self-censor or alter their behavior not just in digital spaces but in all aspects of life, due to the omnipresence of digital surveillance.
    Yanis Varoufakis: Technofeudalism - American Big Tech Has Enslaved Us - Scraps from the loft
  • I want to be a sea-shell, I want to be a mold, I want to be a spirit
    Metabolism (architecture) - Wikipedia
  • slink away from work into the disgusting climactic glop that awaits you out there
    Eola, "B and O Blues" - The Awl
  • being tall now just makes you a bigger target.
    Opinion | Being Short is Better Than We’re Told - The New York Times
  • As Snowden posits in his memoir Permanent Record, “As long as legal innovation lags behind technological innovation, institutions will seek to abuse that disparity… It falls to… developers to close that gap by providing the vital civil liberties protections that the law may be unable, or unwilling, to guarantee.”
    ⚡️ Take Back the Future! - Reboot
  • The solutions proposed by computer scientists are almost entirely reformist reforms. The standard logic of algorithmics—grounded in accuracy and efficiency [ 22 , 33 ]—tends to require accepting and working within the parameters of existing systems to promote the achievement of their goals. Computer science interventions are therefore typically proposed to improve the performance of a system rather than to substantively alter it. And while these types of reforms can have value under the right conditions, such an ethos of reformist reforms is unequipped to identify and pursue the larger changes…
    "Good" isn't good enough
  • “You’re a trickster,” I say, and she asks how I came to that word. I tell her that she seems to relate to the world on the level of mischief and play, rather than through any kind of ideology or strict moral code. I use the word “chaotic,” and she doesn’t object. A friend of hers wrote a book about tricksters, and she says she relates to it. Tricksters, he argued, can move unrestricted between any circumstances, because they’re always playing.
    Did Emma Sulkowicz Get Redpilled?
  • Having found the art world humorless, narrow-minded, and grotesquely competitive
    Did Emma Sulkowicz Get Redpilled?
  • a libertarian reporter on the snowflake beat
    Did Emma Sulkowicz Get Redpilled?
  • Meanwhile, members of the open-borders Left may try to convince themselves that they are adopting a radical position. But in practice they are just replacing the pursuit of economic equality with the politics of big business, masquerading as a virtuous identitarianism. America, still one of the richest countries in the world, should be able to provide not just full employment but a living wage for all of its people, including in jobs which open borders advocates claim “Americans won’t do.” Employers who exploit migrants for cheap labor illegally—at great risk to the migrants themselves—should …
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • Reducing the tensions of mass migration thus requires improving the prospects of the world’s poor. Mass migration itself will not accomplish this: it creates a race to the bottom for workers in wealthy countries and a brain drain in poor ones. The only real solution is to correct the imbalances in the global economy, and radically restructure a system of globalization that was designed to benefit the wealthy at the expense of the poor. This involves, to start with, structural changes to trade policies that prevent necessary, state-led development in emerging economies. Anti-labor trade deals l…
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • Progressives should focus on addressing the systemic exploitation at the root of mass migration rather than retreating to a shallow moralism that legitimates these exploitative forces. This does not mean that leftists should ignore injustices against immigrants. They should vigorously defend migrants against inhumane treatment. At the same time, any sincere Left must take a hard line against the corporate, financial, and other actors who create the desperate circumstances underlying mass migration (which, in turn, produces the populist reaction against it). Only a strong national Left in the s…
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • I’m always amazed at the arrogance and the strangely imperial mentality of British and American pro–open borders progressives who believe that they are performing an act of enlightened charity when they “welcome” PhDs from eastern Europe or Central America driving them around and serving them food. In the wealthiest nations, open borders advocacy seems to function as a fanatical cult among true believers—a product of big business and free market lobbying is carried along by a larger group of the urban creative, tech, media, and knowledge economy class, who are serving their own objective class…
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • Recently, the Western Growers Association and California Farm Bureau Federation, among others, blocked a bill that would have made E-Verify mandatory, despite several pro-business concessions.13 Democrats seemed totally absent from this debate. As a result, workers from economies devastated by U.S. agriculture will continue to be invited in with the promise of work in order to be cheaply and illegally exploited. Lacking full legal rights, these noncitizens will be impossible to unionize and will be kept in constant fear of being arrested and criminalized.
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • According to the Census Bureau’s figures for 2017, about 45 percent of migrants who have arrived in the United States since 2010 are college educated.8 Developing countries are struggling to retain their skilled and professional citizens, often trained at great public cost, because the largest and wealthiest economies that dominate the global market have the wealth to snap them up. Today, Mexico also ranks as one of the world’s biggest exporters of educated professionals, and its economy consequently suffers from a persistent “qualified employment deficit.” This developmental injustice is cert…
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • Advocates of open borders often overlook the costs of mass migration for developing countries. Indeed, globalization often creates a vicious cycle: liberalized trade policies destroy a region’s economy, which in turn leads to mass emigration from that area, further eroding the potential of the origin country while depressing wages for the lowest paid workers in the destination country. One of the major causes of labor migration from Mexico to the United States has been the economic and social devastation caused by the North American Free Trade Agreement (nafta). Nafta forced Mexican farmers to…
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • The importation of low-paid labor is a tool of oppression that divides workers and benefits those in power. The proper response, therefore, is not abstract moralism about welcoming all migrants as an imagined act of charity, but rather addressing the root causes of migration in the relationship between large and powerful economies and the smaller or developing economies from which people migrate.
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • Today’s well-intentioned activists have become the useful idiots of big business. With their adoption of “open borders” advocacy—and a fierce moral absolutism that regards any limit to migration as an unspeakable evil—any criticism of the exploitative system of mass migration is effectively dismissed as blasphemy. Even solidly leftist politicians, like Bernie Sanders in the United States and Jeremy Corbyn in the United Kingdom, are accused of “nativism” by critics if they recognize the legitimacy of borders or migration restriction at any point. This open borders radicalism ultimately benefits…
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • But acting on the correct moral impulse to defend the human dignity of migrants, the Left has ended up pulling the front line too far back, effectively defending the exploitative system of migration itself.
    The Left Case against Open Borders - American Affairs Journal
  • There is a thin line between man and blob.
    The Cudgel of Antisemitism - by Sam Kriss - Outside Voices
  • In the late 1950s and early 1960s, white Southerners grew resentful toward national journalists who covered the movement, whom they saw as advocating desegregation. Losing the battle for public opinion, Southern spokesmen such as Alabama Governor George Wallace adopted a populistic idiom, promoting the notion that an elite, left‐leaning Northeastern media were distorting the news to fit their politics – an idea that soon, under President Nixon, became conservative dogma.
    The useful myth of "the liberal media" - by Josh Sternberg
  • “The friends I made in there—we’d always say, we’ll meet when we’re out. But one of them lives in Colombia, and perhaps I won’t get to see him again for the rest of my life,” he said. “Being [in jail] for a couple more months just means we’ll get to hang out more—what’s wrong with that?”
    Leung Wing Lai: the gentle anarchist – Still / Loud
  • How are you going to teach the people you love to continue building the world you wanted for them?
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • In the middle of all this I’ve felt rushes of feeling this world was mine, because I was free and capable and independent, and then deep senses of purposelessness. I think purpose is of course, defined only by ourselves, and perhaps the hardest thing to seek — for those who can’t live life without it, like me. All this life was about other people and I had no one; and most of the time all this pro-bono work was killing me and getting me closer only to loose abstractions of care.
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • The work identifies two main populations of drug user: experimentalists (open, agreeable, sensation-seeking) who are interested in unusual mental sensations, and troubled drug users (withdrawn, emotionally vulnerable, unconscientious) who use substances that are depressant or otherwise obliterating.
    Personality traits of drug users -- ScienceDaily
  • The current goal is to find what is an appropriate ceiling to work towards and to immerse myself in local communities again. Living for local structures of care and building smaller, purposeful tools is important: while I believe in abundance, too many things are extended and scaled to the point of disconnection. Nihilism and isolation, which are clear things plaguing me from my writing and just reading me for a minute, are symptoms not just of the self but are pervasive byproducts from the world today. This is why the ceilings I was told to go for were individualistic, capital-oriented. A lot…
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • I want a home with a ceiling as high as we have collectively chosen, welcoming all the old and new and all who have yet to come under it.
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • It is easy to build a ‘good’ life for yourself. It’s much harder to build an interconnected one: a life that all the people you love can build towards together and find themselves around.
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • One brick after another. A brick tossed. I’m laying the world I wanted, as I always have. I’m struggling with my imaginary against the complex interweaving of lives within insecure systems that my loved ones are stuck within. I’m imagining more than the ceiling, perhaps. Every space I’m in from now on, an open one; just as I built my life in this realm.
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • I believe in other simple things: that because I’m 8,000 miles away from the people I love and have met so many wonderful people I truly care for that I unfortunately haven’t met in real life, systems of communication for when we are far apart matter just as much as the ways we convene in-person. I think the debate of authenticity and the duality of the online vs. offline self is skewed by people who have had overwhelmingly performative experiences with technology, which I cannot blame them for because technology must be reclaimed, for growing up it was only online that I began to discover mys…
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • Again, there’s the tactic of rerouting and the preservation of my mental energy outside of work hours to build larger structures of care: ones more pertinent to the people I love, ones that will outlast me so greatly that I will make them and find myself no longer necessary. Creating systems that empower the people I love to continue building those systems is of main interest to me, amongst other things I want to do.
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • systems of communal care outside the structure of the nuclear family
    On Ceilings - Chia's Blog
  • After all, “the body is an assemblage,” Billy-Ray Belcourt writes, “a mass of everyone who’s ever moved us, for better or for worse.”
    Interlude: Queering and Grieving Short-Term Relationship Breakups
  • Zhang, who is autistic, has self-published three memoirs detailing the creation of the Dragon Combat Club, a series he called “Neurodivergent Ninja.” He estimates that DCC has trained hundreds of people. “If you’re anti-cop, I understand where you’re coming from. There are many valid reasons. However, if you’re using that to promote inaction as we’re literally getting stabbed in our own homes, in our own goddamn bathtub 40 times?” Zhang said. “That’s racism.”
    The New Politics of Stop Asian Hate
  • My chief concern about a tech culture that privileges and lavishly rewards building over maintaining is that this particular mindset is being instilled in us through their tools. That, by relying on their products, we’re subtly adopting their virtues
    The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology
  • It’s not just that we are distracted, but that our devices offer us the option to attend less to the world around us.
    The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology
  • He’s saying that frictionless experiences with technology mean that we notice less about the tools we’re using and what it is they actually do. This, he thinks, promotes a kind of self-absorption. We don’t see ourselves as being in conversation with our tools or the physical world; instead, we see ourselves as masters of our environment, with the expectation that every tool and service ought to perfectly attend to our needs. And, because we don’t know how our tools work, we can’t repair them when they break.
    The Dark Side of Frictionless Technology