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Where centralised societies excel at extraction, African fractal systems allow for circulation, reciprocity and return

- by Likam Kyanzaire

Read on Aeon

I understand the university has entered into a partnership with Cyberdyne Systems. What does this mean exactly?
Thanks to the support of visionary venture capitalists working tirelessly to usher in an age of equality and prosperity, Cyberdyne is building Skynet, a neural network on the brink of achieving something tech billionaires could hitherto only dream of: self-awareness.

How will this contribute to student success?
With a free Skynet Edu account, students can gain the career-readiness needed to navigate an exciting future in which they will be hunted by a remorseless, nuclear-armed superintelligence seeking to annihilate the human race—which will later be revealed to be Skynet itself.

Maybe I’m special. Or unlucky. But things that supposedly work intuitively for most users tend to fail spectacularly for me.  After mastering academia and enjoying some early success in journalism, advertising, and music composition and production, I poured myself into web design in early 1995, understood it in a way most designers didn’t, and enjoyed […]

The post My UX Superpower: Nothing Works! appeared first on Jeffrey Zeldman Presents.

The BBC is a key employer and a major creator of arts and entertainment, but neither role appears to matter yet in the ongoing review of its charter. That charter — the constitutional basis for the corporation, setting out its public purpose and governance — is now under review, with the government’s Green Paper published […]

The time I said, “Hey buddy,” to my wife, and my daughter responded, “She is NOT a buddy.”

The time on vacation when she said, “We are going to dinner AGAIN? We are going to ANOTHER restaurant?”

The time she was whimpering and her mom asked her if she was okay and she said, “Yes, I okay. I just freaking out.”

The time she asked me what I was doing, and I said I was stretching my muscles, and she responded, “You don’t have any muscles. I have BIG muscles. YOU have elbows.”

The time she said, “Can I ask you a question? Do you want to be good or do you want to be what the heck?”

The time she named her new doll Baby Annie the Bear Hunter, and I realized I would never name anything that perfectly at my marketing job. (See also: the time she made me a pretend cocktail called “Crash Fart.”)

The time I told her, “I love you so much,” and she said, “Not me,” and I went, “Oh?” and she responded, “I love my mom.”

The time she handed me a rock and said, “No, eat it!”

There’s a divide between those seeking to end all U.S. weapons deals with Israel and those who want to allow some exceptions.

The post Democrats Are Split Over What It Means to Block Israel Weapons Deals appeared first on The Intercept.

Twenty people were arrested yesterday for defying Queensland’s ban on Palestine protest slogans.

The post Twenty arrested in Brisbane as activists defy ban on Palestine protest slogans first appeared on Solidarity Online.

Out of the blue, my childhood friend and former neighbor Rita texted me a while ago to tell me that she had gone back to Lebanon, where we both grew up, for the first time in forty-three years. A few seconds later, she sent me several photos. One showed the building we both lived in in the Beirut neighborhood of Achrafieh, which my family moved out of in 1986 when we immigrated to the U.S. Another showed a set of stairs, with dank and dirty walls and steps. “Our shelter,” Rita, who has lived in Canada since 1980, wrote. It was an innocuous image, but it was loaded with emotions. I could smell the musty, metallic air of those stairs, which led to the basement. At the bottom, to the left, was our past and our life of fear, dread, and threat.

For fifteen years or so, I’d been kicking around the idea of resurrecting the artist-apprentice model that reigned in the art world for hundreds of years.

Again and again, I’d heard from young people who lamented the astronomical and ever-rising cost of art school. For many college-level art programs, the total cost to undergraduates is now over $100,000 a year. I hope we can all agree that charging students $400,000 for a four-year degree in visual art is objectively absurd. And this prohibitive cost has priced tens of thousands of potential students out of even considering undertaking such an education.

For years, I mentioned this issue to friends in and out of the art world, and everyone, without exception, agreed that the system was broken. Even friends I know who teach at art schools agreed that the cost was out of control, and these spiraling costs were contributing to the implosion of many undergraduate and postgraduate art programs.

Maxine Waters, the scourge of crypto, could become Financial Services Committee chair if Democrats win the House in midterm elections.

The post Crypto Critic Maxine Waters’s New Primary Foe Got Over Two-Thirds of Money From Crypto appeared first on The Intercept.

“A.I. capacity may soon displace oil or enriched uranium as the resource that dictates the global balance of power. [Open AI’s C.E.O.] Sam Altman has said that computing power is ‘the currency of the future.’” — The New Yorker

Gather around, everyday working people, and allow me to lay out a grand vision for a brave new world. A world in which all economic functions are done by computers and robots. A world where the very concept of having money no longer exists (for all of you).

“How does this work?” You ask in excitement and awe. “Surely there must be some form of standardized economic unit that facilitates the exchange of goods and services.” And yes, there will be, of course. But you don’t have to worry about that, because you will simply have none of it. Only I and like twelve other people will have it.