filed under articles – lucas did this

February 4th 2023
filed under hyperlinks, articles

When a person aspires to be a brand, they forfeit everything that is truly glorious about being human. Building any brand requires consensus. When we position ourselves as a brand, we are forced to project an image of what we believe most people will approve of and admire and buy into. The moment we cater our creativity to popular opinion is the precise moment we lose our freedom and autonomy.

Designer and brand consultant Debbie Millman about The personal brand paradox and how social media (with its followers, likes and click-throughs) is pushing the long-lasting concept of the ‘personal brand’ at the present time.

wepresent.wetransfer.com/stories/personal-brand-paradox-debbie-millman
January 25th 2023
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Design has shifted more toward manufacturability and appearance than functionality, when it should be a balance of all three. Arguably, it’s nearly impossible for corporations to avoid participating in the trend cycle as long as consumers have an appetite for more — whether it’s a predilection for cooler clothing or whatever new incremental yet buzzy technology just came out. At the same time, the blame does not lie on consumers’ shoulders; corporations are responsible for creating and stoking the ‘new and more is better’ culture we have today.

Izzie Ramirez sums up why Your stuff is actually worse now, especially in the fashion and the tech industry. What has happened to “less but better”?

vox.com/the-goods/23529587/consumer-goods-quality-fast-fashion-technology
January 25th 2023
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Our current ideal of beauty, specifically in Western culture, specifically at this time in history, means being as divorced from your humanity as possible,” beauty culture critic Jessica DeFino told Jezebel. “These AI drawings have almost no humanity in them: They’re cartoon, digital renderings, created by artificial intelligence without a human hand involved in the making of it all. It just feels very depressingly on track for what our culture considers beautiful.

Lensa AI and the Trap of Otherworldly Beauty by Emily Leibert.

jezebel.com/lensa-ai-images-beauty-trap-1849875644
December 12th 2022
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But this new crop of generative AI technologies seems to possess qualities that are more indelibly human. Call it creative synthesis—the uncanny ability to channel ideas, information, and artistic influences to produce original work. Articles and visual art are just the beginning.

Derek Thompson from The Atlantic on why the rise of AI is the most important story of the year.

theatlantic.com/newsletters/archive/2022/12/why-the-rise-of-ai-is-the-most-important-story-of-the-year/672308/
November 28th 2022
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We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

According to Ian Bogost from The Atlantic The Age of Social Media Is Ending. Yes, please!

theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2022/11/twitter-facebook-social-media-decline/672074
November 5th 2022
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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.

A wonderful plea by freelance journalist Alex Vuocolo for The Disappearing Art Of Maintenance.

noemamag.com/the-disappearing-art-of-maintenance
November 5th 2022
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Five principles based in social science that will help organizations connect their work to what people care most about.

The Science of What Makes People Care is part of an online series called ‘Essentials of Social Innovation’ published by Stanford Social Innovation Review by Stanford University. There’s a lot of great lessons to be found in this “starter kit for leaders of social change”.

ssir.org/articles/entry/the_science_of_what_makes_people_care
November 5th 2022
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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?

Interesting essay –with a bunch of hyperlinks to some other great resources– about Tech futurism’s blind spot written by Dave Karpf, a Professor at the School of Media and Public Affairs at the George Washington University.

davekarpf.substack.com/p/tech-futurisms-blind-spot
October 14th 2022
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At this point, you could even say that the point of the theory is so obvious, it’s cliché—people talk about longing for the days of weird web design and personal sites and listservs all the time. Even Facebook employees say they miss the “old” internet.

Never heard of the “dead-internet theory” before, but as a lover of the “old” internet, I kind of get how this pretty far-out-there idea got its followers. At least it’s an entertaining, relatively little-threatening conspiracy theory.

theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2021/08/dead-internet-theory-wrong-but-feels-true/619937/
October 7th 2022
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There are no rules to blogging except this one: always self-host your website because your URL, your own private domain, is the most valuable thing you can own. Your career will thank you for it later and no-one can take it away.

I second everything addressed in this short plea for blogging (on your own domain) published by Robin –of course– on his personal blog; Take Care of Your Blog.

robinrendle.com/notes/take-care-of-your-blog-/
August 23rd 2022
filed under hyperlinks, articles, videos

© SUGi (via YouTube)

SUGi’s mission is to empower rewilding and bring Nature closer to anyone anywhere. Our Forest Makers and Ocean Gardeners use your funds to restore biodiversity and regenerate ecosystems.

From the YouTube-Channel by the beautiful SUGi project. If you want to know more about the propagated Miyawaki method and the idea of the “Mini-forests”, there’s a book by Hannah Lewi.

One for my growing antilibrary.

sugiproject.com
August 5th 2022
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In this article, I set to understand and explore fundamental thinking that examines a new design worldview. A proposal to change our ways of working as designers, first in voluntary communities (which we already have, but with different goals) and then to be better equipped to understand and explore as individuals and as a community. This is not a desperate article. Believe me when I say this is an article full of hope and wonder.

A great plea by fellow designer Angelos Arnis to transform design (and business) and get ready for the new realities and challenges of the future: Designing for the last earth.

jointfrontiers.com/designing-for-the-last-earth
July 26th 2022
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Technology is touted as an apolitical, neutral, “objectively” benevolent entity that epitomizes human creativity, innovation and is merely created to improve the quality of human life. […] However, technology like science as a whole is a tool which when created by the capitalist state is a tool of extraction, exploitation, control, repression and subjugation.

Quite a long read, but absolutely worth it: Surveillance Capitalism I: How digital platforms watch, track & control you

wokescientist.substack.com/p/surveillance-capitalism-i-how-digital