Dr Laura James's writings

Thanks Peter Bihr for picking out this from the Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson: The tragedy of the time horizon:     “Having debunked the tragedy of the commons, they now were trying to direct our attention to what they called the tragedy of the time horizon. Meaning we can’t imagine the suffering of the people of the future, so nothing much gets done on their behalf. (…) What we do now creates damage that hits decades later, so we don’t charge ourselves for it, and the standard approach has been that future generations will be richer and stronger than us, and they’ll find solutions to their problems. But by the time they get here, these problems will have become too big to solve. That’s the tragedy of the time horizon, that we don’t look more than a few years ahead” The infrastructures we don't pay attention to:      https://twitter.com/seanmmcdonald/status/1315622673888743424 Eli Pariser on online public parks : Venture-backed platfo...

This reminded me of the end of SomethingNew noted last week: https://twitter.com/WebDevLaw/status/1313055442105495552   I enjoyed this Politics on the Couch podcast about Brexit, featuring Fintan O'Toole - some novel outside perspectives and the analogy with the Italian Job was great. Rest of World features phone homescreens (via Matt Locke). Partly for the perspectives of healthcare workers around the world, and partly for their experiences with tech - the things they do to manage the costs (the costs themselves!) or the notifications, or the stuff they feel unable to change, like this: Why do you have a woman doing yoga as your background? ‍* With a Huawei phone, there’s an app that regularly updates with their photos. I’ve deleted them a few times, but it keeps sending them. Holly Gramazio found something weird : after some debate in the thread, it turns out the proportions are off because google scans different kinds of documents at different times , so a lot of weird pape...

Some time ago, Something New set up as a new kind of political party. This is, as tech people say, an extremely non-trivial thing to attempt - especially as the focus was on how people could get more involved with policy development together. Now it's winding up - the right decision, but not an easy one: We started on this journey to try to bring some better engagement with politics. The OpenPolitics Manifesto was a way to explore new ways of working together, and Something New was a party created to put that experiment out in front of voters. But we’ve found the last few years incredibly hard to engage with. The approach of rationality and evidence has no foothold in politics now, so it’s incredibly difficult to get any traction. Our ideals around a vision of a better future seem a very long way from the current political world. https://twitter.com/alexhern/status/1312717870619557889 https://twitter.com/aka_pugs/status/1311310109088182274   James Smith on unionizing in tech : Wh...