Dr Laura James's writings

Somehow I ended up at Alex Steffen's 2008 piece about optimism (this link is to a lightly edited 2016 version). Optimism is a political act. Entrenched interests use despair, confusion and apathy to prevent change. They encourage modes of thinking which lead us to believe that problems are insolvable, that nothing we do can matter, that the issue is too complex to present even the opportunity for change. ... Cynicism is often seen as a rebellious attitude in Western popular culture, but, in reality, cynicism in average people is the attitude exactly most likely to conform to the desires of the powerful — cynicism is obedience. ... Optimism, by contrast, especially optimism which is neither foolish nor silent, can be revolutionary. Where no one believes in a better future, despair is a logical choice, and people in despair almost never change anything. Where no one believes a better solution is possible, those benefiting from the continuation of a problem are safe. Where no one bel...

Devon Powers on quarantine . Highlights mine. ... quarantine baking, quarantine nesting, and quaratinis. Quaranteams: workplace near-togetherness, a longing for what we used to dread. ... Quarantine was a vocabulary. It was the language we conjured to bear the unbearable, to speak the present without the future. But that’s just me. For others, quarantine was a sale. A great time to go to Orlando or Vegas, a sweet deal on gasoline or jeans. Quarantine was a day off from school, an extended spring break, a much-needed vacay. That knock on the door of a pop-up speakeasy? That notification disclosing the secret location of an underground party? That was quarantine. Quarantine was what other people in other states and countries did, when fake news and weak leaders and aging and general whatever made them fear freedom and each other. Quarantine was malaise. Quarantine was the problem, not the solution.   ... And then there are those for whom quarantine never began — lying in hospital bed...

Infrastructure as cyborg collective. Deb Chachra writes in her newsletter : The infrastructure researcher and science fiction writer Paul Graham Raven has offered up a surprising and insightful way of thinking about our infrastructural systems: he describes them as making us a 'cyborg collective'. Not an individual cyborg, in the 'Ellen Ripley operating a power loader' sense, and not a collective of individual cyborgs, but a single cyborg collective: Infrastructures are a sort of tool: they’re a prosthesis, an extension of baseline human abilities. … But it’s not just you that’s dependent on infrastructure, the way an earlier you was dependent on being able to knap flint and whittle bone. No - you’re dependent on infrastructure as a community. The prostheses upon which your life now depends are augmentations not of your own body, but of the collective body of your tribe or village. ... Alone in my apartment, at dusk, I flip a switch to turn on a light. In that instant, ...

The last edition was a wall of text, so I resolved to make a concerted effort to post less, more often. Having made this resolution, a full "approximate week" (and a bit) has passed and lo, there is a lot of text again. I'll try to add some pictures (or at least images of things that amused me on Twitter).  What happens to public space, as everything moves outside for safety?  Who gets access, for what? Who is affected - by potentially infectious crowds, by noise, by loss of amenity? From Drew Austin in Kneeling Bus : But the movements of these private businesses into new spaces pose new challenges about who gets to occupy outside spaces that are increasingly in demand. Reopened parks, one of the few place to freely and safely congregate during coronavirus, are frequently packed. Many streets already have sidewalks filled with lines of people waiting to enter stores enforcing a low customer capacity. Add a new range of table service businesses to this busy streetsca...