Dr Laura James's writings

 So many discussions of inclusion and diversity seem to ignore class, so I appreciated this -  https://twitter.com/Anna_Colom/status/1327348323330764800 A great article by Tim Carmody covering two different ways people have written about pandemic risks/decisions: Maddow has constructed a universe where she is a tiny satellite orbiting a much larger planet, whose continued health and existence is the central focus of her concern. Manjoo has drawn a map with himself at its center, where anyone beyond the reach of his telephone falls off the edges. Maddow is also explicitly pleading with her viewers to learn what they can from her experience, and adjust their behavior accordingly. Manjoo is performing his calculus only for himself; he implicitly presents himself as a representative example (while also claiming he and his circle are extraordinarily conscientious and effective), but each reader can draw their own conclusions and make their own decision. At this point the balancing...

The wonderful denizens of ClimateAction.Tech have collaborated on a new magazine , because: According to Nature, even before we pivoted to our screens so fully in 2020, uptake, information and communications systems accounted for two per cent of the world’s carbon emissions. The authors point to the music video for the hit song “Despacito” by Luis Fonsi feat. Daddy Yankee, which has five billion views on YouTube, and argue that to generate this kind of energy would take either 850,000 barrels of oil or 93 wind turbines running for an entire year. In the first quarter of 2020, Facebook reportedly removed 2.2 billion fake accounts, with each active profile estimated to account for 281 grams of CO2 – the same carbon footprint as a medium latte. And in 2019, the average user living in Europe scrolled the equivalent of 180 meters a day, exposing themselves on average to 1,700 carbon intensive – but ultimately ineffective – banner ads a month. Branch is about a sustainable internet for all;...

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...