Read moreBut my experience with BldgBlog is that following your voice and the things you find interesting actually does work and does find an audience. It underestimates audiences to say you have to dumb everything down or make it sarcastic. You can share off-kilter ideas with tens of thousands, if not millions, of people.
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This is the story of that reality: my journey through the corporate R&D wormhole and out the other side into the blogosphere; my first-hand witness of how the future is—and mostly isn’t—created; how I became an anarchist futurist, a Doktor of Mystery and, above all else, a grinder.
http://www.thestate.ae/anarchist-futurism-the-lie-of-history-part-1/
My first piece for The State; an origin tale 🙂
Read moreThe ancestors of sharks survived at least three mass extinctions. Sharks are a “generalist” species, which means they feed on a variety of foods in many different habitats. They can even eat garbage and survive. Humans can do that, too. So if we find ourselves in a situation where food supplies dwindle, we will still be able to eke out an existence eating bugs, slimes, and other perfectly fine sources of nutrition that most of us to do not ordinarily consider a meal.
Read moreNow, the real estate market is booming in these favelas. Middle-class Brazilians have discovered the slums as a cheap housing alternative. They are also accompanied by an influx of foreigners, most of whom come from the crisis-ridden countries of Southern Europe. Many of the newcomers head to Rio to build an entirely new life for themselves.
Cantagalo is now home to Spaniards, Italians, Argentineans and an Australian. In the neighboring favela of Pavão-Pavãozinho, a prominent immigrant from Germany has also found a place to live: the former senator of the interior in the city-state of Hamburg, Ronald Schill, who was once called “Judge Merciless” for his harsh rulings. Until recently, he was living in an apartment on the Copacabana. Now, he has purchased a small house in the favela.
“Rents and purchasing prices are lower here than down below,” he says as he points to the asphalt jungle at his feet. It’s primarily the favelas in the southern zone of the city that attract the gringos. These areas are usually only minutes from the beach and offer some of the best views of Rio’s stunning urban landscape.
Standing on his terrace, Baronio gazes at the Atlantic. It takes him only 15 minutes to get to the beach. “In Europe the rich would live here,” he says in amazement.
Read moreThe upside of a major climate crisis is the prospect it offers to entirely liberate cities from their sordid heritage in the planet’s soil. A space colony is just a Dubai-style super-tall desert skyscraper – plus some zero-gravity bone depletion. A lunar colony is just a London mogul’s subterranean basement, without the crusties or the labour strikes.
Read moreWe’ve started using drones in the production of the show itself. We love that collision between way we make the show and what it’s about. We always want to be five minutes into the future. And the pace of weirdness in the last year alone means we’re gonna have to step it up. Some of the software developed to analyze surveillance footage is more advanced than we even talked about. You’ve got data mining and domain awareness with the NYPD. When we launched the pilot it was deemed nonsensical fantasy, but now [these technologies] have become banal. People have become blase about them.
Read moreNo one was calling the Springfield police and no one was calling the state police,” he told “60 Minutes” reporter Lesley Stahl. “Insurgents and gang members both want to operate in a failed area — a failed community or a failed state. They know they can live off the passive support of the community, where the local community is not going to call or engage the local police.
Read more“It is the largest scientific collaboration in the world. In fact, the project is so complex we even had to invent our own currency – known as the Iter Unit of Account – to decide how each country pays its share,” says Carlos Alejaldre, Iter’s deputy director responsible for safety.
His personal computer is monitored by the government, a service for which he pays $29 a month, and he’s prohibited from using an iPhone or Android device, though he can use a BlackBerry — authorities told him the iPhone had too many capabilities.
Caught in the System, Ex-Hacker Is Stalked by His Past | Threat Level | Wired.com (via iamdanw)
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I’m increasingly resistant to the notion of Sustainability… because what are we sustaining but the slow motion death of the life on Earth that has supported us? WE NEED TO ACCELERATE FORWARDS INTO THE FUTURE, DRAGGING ALL OF HISTORY AND ITS LESSONS WITH US.
Okay, that’s a tad hyperbolic… but there are a lot of legacy civilizational myths that need to be exploded. For starters, the crux of the Environmental Mythology, that the Amazon is some untouched Gaian Paradise, when the evidence points to it being a pre-Columbian garden that’s since ReWilded…
– let the great mythological post series begin!
http://grinding.be/2013/04/21/conservation-aint-what-it-used-to-be-we-need-to-be-bigger/ (via grinderbot)
The Committee to Nuke Elysium 