Imagination: A Manifesto (A Norton Short) by Ruha Benjamin 📚
In order to flourish as individuals and a society we must free ourselves from the strictures of standardized testing, industrialized education, “accelerated learning”, technocratic utopianism, solutionism, longtermism, white supremacy and eugenic thinking, the carceral state, credit scoring and the “ordinal society” (See Fourcade and Healy), and more! It is hard to be imaginative when we are oppressed… but we have to be imaginative to overthrow the oppressors.
I am in the middle of two book series right now: Joe Abercrombie’s (@joeabercrombie.bsky.social) “The First Law” and Adrian Tchaikovsky’s (@aptshadow.bsky.social) “The Final Architecture”. In the middle I tells ya!
A handmade #FathersDay card from my smart A 12 year old daughter. Pretty great despite the commentary track. 🧝♀️💍⚔️(Both my kids spitefully refuse to watch the films or read the books because I have been trying to get them to since they were little)
11th move in 4 years, 3 of which were international moves under pandemic conditions. We are getting good at this, but tbh I don’t want to do it anymore 😭
Rokuharamitsuji. See how colourful Japanese temples used to be before all the wabi-sabi? Finally got to see the Kūya statue. He’s said to have introduced the nenbutsu to Japan. The figures coming out his mouth represent the syllables NA-MO-A-MI-DA-BUTSU #kyoto #Japan #Buddhism
At Sanjusangendo, the EXTRA WIDE temple built to accomodate 1000 life-sized 1000-armed Kannon. Inside is ASTOUNDING (no pics 😞). My 1st time after 25 yrs in Kyoto! This is the backside where they have an annual archery competition where young women wear their best kimono and shoot for New Years
After sharing this on MAE, our tech policy community, I continue to share this link to others. The report shows how Big Tech controls AI through corporate VC, share structure, cloud credits, control of infra, dual affiliation research positions, open source, and more: lemmy.ml/post/1630…
I finished Ursula Le Guin’s book “The Lathe of Heaven” yesterday and one of the quotes I still have in my mind (especially as I listen to this old interview of David Graeber this morning) is “All we have is means.” #utilitarianism #anarchism
Squeezing onto the crowded train. Hair coiffed. Long dark slacks. Shirt tucked in. Hip hop in the earbuds. Monday morning rush hour. Been a long time for this remote worker!
(It’s just for a meeting at the kids’ school. I am just having fun salaryman cosplaying 😇)
