2024
#KL vibe.
Lunar new year down south. Probing a (physical) filter at noon w/ harsh light conditions.
A place that smells like sambal and dhal, and where the SkyTrain cuts the horizon in half. Sure,
#kualalumpur #malaysia #sea #streetphotography
“Someone has to suffer, the writer or the reader. But the reader doesn’t want to.” (And thus quits.)
I’m re-reading the notorious German grandmaster Wolf Schneider. Precise language can achieve a lot. Yet it’s tough to cultivate.
#academicchatter #sociology #sts
A linkdump on hot climate events, web scams, and Vietnam greeting the dragon
Starting off with an odd one: Big Oil apparently funded climate science since the early 1950s. And it was Keeling himself at the centre. Think Keeling curves and long-term CO2 measurements. But it sounds like a different time. Less evil still, so that Keeling could use this funding for the good. Part of this story is that differences between air pollution and CO2 emissions were much less clear.
Newly discovered documents affirm that the automobile and petroleum industries funded early climate science Keeling conducted at the California Institute of Technology (Caltech) between 1954 and 1956. Records show that “oil and auto companies” sponsored the scientist’s research via an organization called the Southern California Air Pollution Foundation, formed in 1953 to tackle Los Angeles’s infamous smog. American Motors, Chrysler, Ford, and General Motors were among 18 automotive companies that gave money to the foundation.
Fast forward to the future of the present. Here is a sweet summary of climate disasters and tipping points on different levels:
And if you crave Solarpunk alternative futures, follow this recent link list:
mastodon.floe.earth/@lex/1118…
Talking academic reflections, check out the videos of the ADM+S Electronics < > Ecologies series:
5 events, 4 cities, and so many excellent speakers. My thanks to all of the presenters for joining and sharing expertise.
Many things are happening, it seems. Also, on the regulatory side. My current prime example of semiconductor manufacturing gets hotter every year, with tighter climate rules approaching. There’s yet another one:
www.northcountrypublicradio.org/news/npr/…
But, as Gerry McGovern notes, how much does it count?
Podcast of the week
I happen to share one podcast per week, and here is an episode of Drilled that you surely should not miss, featuring a “messy conversation” on the climate movement w/ Rhiana Gunn-Wright. Slightly tilted towards the American culture war, but quickly turning global. It also fits to the link mentioned before. Why are companies sending powerful signals to care for global emissions, but ignore to take into consideration affected communities next door?
Rhiana Gunn-Wright was one of the architects of the Green New Deal, and today works as the climate policy director for the Roosevelt Institute. In this episode we get into the nuances of the IRA, how to handle climate being a “culture war” issue, what’s going on with anti-renewables, and what the climate movement loses when it turns its back on justice issues and particularly when it turns its back on the Black community.
The new web of scams
I’ve recently framed the turn toward non-commercial web applications as a turn toward the lovely new web. Let’s not forget that it’s full of scams, too.
A phenomenal example is propaganda in India made by and for Modi.
In moments of political tension, stars with huge followings put out nearly copy-and-paste messages of support. And as the election nears, cabinet ministers have turned to podcasts and online broadcasts with influencers to reach a generation that gets its information outside the traditional channels that Mr. Modi has co-opted.
Cory Doctorow covers the more individual side of scams. Scams, basically. Reaching out when you’re most vulnerable.
I find the inner workings of scams to be fascinating, and it’s also important to remind people that everyone is vulnerable sometimes, and scammers are willing to try endless variations until an attack lands at just the right place, at just the right time, in just the right way. If you think you can’t get scammed, that makes you especially vulnerable.
Cory nailed it once again with another post this day, calling out Apple for its corruption, and blatantly misreading EU regulation.
There’s a strain of anti-anti-monopolist that insists that they’re not pro-monopoly – they’re just realists who understand that global gigacorporations are too big to fail, too big to jail, and that governments can’t hope to rein them in. Trying to regulate a tech giant, they say, is like trying to regulate the weather. This ploy is cousins with Jay Rosen’s idea of “savvying,” defined as: “dismissing valid questions with the insider’s, ‘and this surprises you?’” The reason this foolish nonsense flies is that we are living in an age of rampant corruption and utter impunity. Companies really do get away with both literal and figurative murder. Governments really do ignore horrible crimes by the rich and powerful, and fumble what rare, few enforcement efforts they assay. And then we get the details.
I rather keep working on the lovely new old web. So here is one more of the encouraging examples, cherishing the open and un-commodifiable nature of RSS.
Vietnam welcoming the Dragon
Lunar new year is very close, and as you can see with the image attached, it’s colourful and vibrant. Yet it’s a hectic time. The new year will be the year of the dragon (we’re leaving the cat behind). Everyone on the streets felt tense. Better getting things sorted before you leave to the family events. I also saw some and heard about more road accidents.
Meanwhile, local police officers get tough on drunk driving. Considering the high number of fatalities…this sounds like a good idea. But perhaps do it less random?
Tourists pouring in still complain about the “lacklustre” nightlife in Vietnam. Perhaps not a bad sign after all?
Lunar new year is like Christmas and New Year packed into one (maybe more on top), basically shutting down the urban centres. This is also the reason I will keep a low profile for a week. Cheers.
New year celebrations.
#Hanoi is full of flowers and colours. Usually there is a grey filter on top. But we had a sunny day!
Just a few more days until the moon has turned.
#streetphotography #vietnam
Particles.
The energy sending them afar is here. And it’s not. People see the burning. But they cannot fathom the coal plants, close, far.
How many particles can power plants send travelling? How can you know? You.
#photography #airpollution #vietnam
A linkdump that explores the lovely new web, the Vietnamese chip news cycle, and ambivalent ecological developments
“Where have all the websites gone?” is the question posed by blogger Jason. And he sends us a link with a marvellous list. Let’s go down this path.
It’s a technical marvel, that internet. Something so mindblowingly impressive that if you showed it to someone even thirty years ago, their face would melt the fuck off. So why does it feel like something’s missing? Why are we all so collectively unhappy with the state of the web?
Take the Grumpy Website:
Or the manifest for a cheap internet. Sweet.
So, work on your own website and be sceptical of the containers of modern social media (or whatever, do what you want with the web, it’s just in another exciting new phase). The topic has been nicely summarised here:
I’ve started exploring RSS feeds in creative ways, which is also how I came across the “where have all the websites gone” topic via No Tech Magazine. Not only is there the interesting (if sometimes flawed) Low Tech Magazine, but there’s also No Tech Magazine, yes. Check out the recent post about various interesting meta links,
www.notechmagazine.com/2024/01/n…
As a science and technology scholar who studies digital infrastructures and ecology (and happens to be in love with photography), this post is well worth reading, too:
The History and environmental impact of digital image formats [By Unthinking Photography].
As the ecological footprint of photography shifted from film rolls and developing chemicals to digital storage, network transfer and processing power, I see only three ways to reduce our footprint: making fewer pictures, reducing their quality, or using better image formats. Which of these options do you prefer?
What is actually the value of photography in research, how does it come about, how can (must!) it be done differently? This is something I’ve only thought about superficially in the past (and websites have piqued my interest in kbs and the carbon footprint of megabytes). However, I have a feeling that there is still a lot of discussion to be had here.
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Moving on. We’re still deep in the fog here in Vietnam. But it’s an exciting time. I’ve been working on a commentary about the ongoing chip rush, and every week there’s new material in the form of hot news. (On a side-note: my commentary has just been desk-rejected by the first journal I submitted it to. But it has been such a nice comment that helps me put out the text somewhere else, or expand on it in a longer piece. Cultivate friendly terms of rejection, and academia becomes a happier place!).
Vietnam speaks money: German chipmakers want to take part. And American investors have raised billions (!) of dollars. With a big if: Eight billion if the local government invests in renewable energy, which it finds difficult – and will not tackle to quickly because of a) fear of too risky investments leading to accusations of corruption and landing in a local jail or worse (yes, that’s exactly what happens in the context of wind and solar certificates very recently), b) the strong coal lobby and c) the enormous task of maintaining and expanding infrastructure. The past wars have destroyed a lot which still hinders development. Nevertheless, the Vietnamese government is sending strong signals, just this week in Davos.
asia.nikkei.com/Business/… asia.nikkei.com/Spotlight… vietnamweekly.substack.com/p/strivin…
To cite Mike from his Substack:
[Prime minister] Chính guaranteed government support for investors in these fields while noting that the government views semiconductors as a driving force for development, with VnExpress quoting him as saying:
“To develop these fields, Vietnam will promote three strategic breakthroughs: strategic infrastructure, training high-quality human resources and perfecting institutions."
Once again: This topic should always be covered with a hint towards a struggling civil society. Here is one.
www.thevietnamese.org/2024/01/l…
I not only try to take stock of high-tech chip developments in Vietnam, but curious developments in other sectors concerning socio-ecological transitions more broadly. Two links were just remarkable during the past week.
One, look at this feature on parcels stolenfrom train carriages in the US. It’s a wild ride with lovely (friendly gangster-type) characters.
Of all the dozens of suspected thieves questioned by the detectives of the Train Burglary Task Force at the Los Angeles Police Department during the months they spent investigating the rise in theft from the city’s freight trains, one man stood out. What made Victor Llamas memorable wasn’t his criminality so much as his giddy enthusiasm for trespassing. He was a self-taught expert of the supply chain, a connoisseur of shipping containers. Even in custody, as the detectives interrogated him numerous times, after multiple arrests, in a windowless police-station room in the spring of 2022, a kind of nostalgia would sweep over the man. “He said that was the best feeling he’d ever had, jumping on the train while it was moving,” Joe Chavez, who supervised the task force’s detectives, told me. “It was euphoric for him.”
Second, and not so funny, the transition to low-carbon energy grids is being thwarted by finance capitalism. That’s a bit of a non-surprise. Still, the details of the new scams are (sorry for the uncreative repetition) wild.
The government created subsidies – tax credits, direct cash, and mixes thereof – in the expectation that Wall Street would see all these credits and subsidies that everyday people were entitled to and go on the hunt for them. And they did! Armies of fast-talking sales-reps fanned out across America, ringing dooorbells and sticking fliers in mailboxes, and lying like hell about how your new solar roof was gonna work out for you.
These hustlers tricked old and vulnerable people into signing up for arrangements that saw them saddled with ballooning debt payments (after a honeymoon period at a super-low teaser rate), backstopped by liens on their houses, which meant that missing a payment could mean losing your home.
To finish with multimedia: watch this episode about “The KGB, The Computer and Me - The Cuckoo’s Egg Story”
“The making of critical data center studies,” Dustin Edwards, Zane Griffin Talley Cooper and Mél Hogan have finally published their piece in Convergence. Countering Truth made by Big Tech.
Twisted.
Tết, lunar new year, is almost there. And everyone’s busy heading out of town. Or is it just the daily rush?
#vietnam #streetphotography #traffic
Proud smoker. Indeed, the men love to smoke.
Shot through two wine bottles and a window. Layered #streetphotography. But this is also an admiration of architecture and alleys in #Hanoi. So many cozy sightings.
#vietnam #photography
I’m a satisfied reader of Dominic Boyer’s new book “No More Fossils.” What a splendid excercise in energy thinking. And just today, Dominic and Cymene published an episode of my favourite academic podcast discussing this very book w/ Cara Daggett. Cultures of Energy ftw.
The book is open access, and so is the podcast.
www.upress.umn.edu/book-divi… podcasts.google.com/feed/aHR0…
#energy #humanities #sts #sociology
Talking blogs.
I got many fluffy podcasts by asking on social media, so here’s the blog question. What do you follow? I enjoy my RSS reader setup (miniflux btw) and seek diversity. 🙏
#tech #ecology #sociology #criticalthinking #asia #feminism #sts #photography, that kind of thing.
From pluralistics and kottke to grist and rest of the world.
Attached, a recent shot from a coffee place I like 🌄
Still a smart low-tech invention, the dumpster.
#waste #vietnam #streetphotography
Conducting.
And an update on my recent blog post featuring repair, air purity, and a bit of Taiwan.
✨
#photography #trains #landscape #vietnam
A link dump featuring: Public decay
Picture me as A Person Who Stares At Infrastructures, focusing on anything to do with repair, a lot of tech, low-carbon experiments, and a bias towards Asia-Pacific.
#linkdump #vietnam #taiwan #Asia #tech #sts
👇🏼
Let me know what you think of such a dump.
I’m sitting in front of a screen in the capital of Vietnam, and we’ve seen some curious trouble recently. We, meaning: the caste of expats. There have been rumours of the most important man, the general secretary of the CPV, being sick. Perhaps deceased.
And then he turned up in a parliamentary session. www.bloomberg.com/news/arti…
What strikes me is how some men were quite sure and eager to discuss the matter. Being ahead of things. You found this mostly on former Twitter, of course, a place that cherishes public decay.
There is another hot topic during the Winter months. Air pollution not only keeps expats busy and wondering how to do things differently. Still, it’s the expats (like me) who set up sensors and think about this very often. Some of them move.
vietnamweekly.substack.com/p/the-air…
This reminds me of a fierce discussion in Delhi a few years back. Journalists openly called for others to leave. There is a colonial touch in this cleanliness fetish, which just recently has been captured beautifully in a podcast episode of Radio Web MACBA that I highly recommend. It emphasizes how infrastructures are political, and entangled with historical burden, in multiple ways.
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Cory Doctorow has been very busy explaining how monopolies are at the heart of tech companies, which is problematic for most humans except the billionaires attached to it.
Such a system produces engines that cannot tame SEO bullshit.
And corporate blogging platforms that should not exist in the first place.
badnewsletter.substack.com/p/all-the…
But there are interesting, almost surprising developments on other tech fronts. Notably, the right to repair. On the one hand, sure:
Apple embraced the movement half-heartedly a while ago, but in reality, it is still going for software-based locking of its system and pushing its robot-driven recycling, aka shredding system. Alison and I have written about this a while ago.
www.ephemerajournal.org/contribut…
It is also worth noting that Apple keeps on drifting away from its security features, not only with its messenger integration wars but also when it comes to AirDrop exploits that harm Chinese citizens (and China proudly shared its strategy of exploiting Apple devices),
Yet on the other hand, there’s Google, this week entirely going down the right-to-repair road. Let’s see how this plays out.
It may have to do with a new regulatory environment wary of monopolies.
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In other news, the Taiwan democracy had a little ballot thingy. China is not happy, but neither is the youth. This is of major regional and global relevance>
China apparently tries new economic strategies to exert power, yet its force is limited. So far.
Meanwhile, Taiwan’s semiconductor powerhouse, the Taiwan Semiconductor Manufacturing Company, aka TSMC, oscillates between bad closing and awesome prediction numbers. Taking part in these evaluations is wild and perfect for analysts to play with.
I am currently working on an academic comment bringing together insights from semiconductor industry events in Asia-Pacific, and I make the case that the realities on the ground need to be acknowledged and brought together with how we envision digital things to work. This is how I think of staring at infrastructures.
Let me close with a little gem I found this week. A little dated it may be, but very helpful for building low-carbon digital tools. Websites, really. try keeping the main load below 14kb. It comes at multiple benefits and makes users happy. As nicely visualised by this post:
So much for the link dump, a new experiment in my note-taking.
In the shadows.
Increasing the shutter speed at night and playing with digital filters. Why not?
#Vietnam #Pagoda #photography #streetphotography
Sunday is badminton day.
Since we will only get sun from March onwards, it’s time to play with shutter speed.
#Vietnam #Hanoi #streetphotography
The #Taiwan election finishes with a call for stability, in a way.
“It may be that the DPP managed to retain power because it is still viewed as the party that defends Taiwanese sovereignty, with backlash against its inability to resolve socioeconomic inequality in Taiwan still not managing to oust it from the presidency.” It comes at a cost, as outlined by @brian_hioe@mastodon.online of New Bloom magazine. Kicking out youth progressives.
#China
Premium living.
#ciputra #Hanoi #photography #urbanphotography
Disturbing news. #Vietnam fires 21-gun salute to welcome the Indonesian President, but more salutes of other kinds may follow. The most important man in the country, General Secretary Nguyễn Phú Trọng, is not doing well. He might have surpassed that state 13 hours ago.
Twitter speculates. Wikipedia declared him deceased a few hours ago, only to reverse the status.
Phú Trọng has changed the country drastically in the past 10 years. Let’s see what happens and who’s rising.