Category: Futures
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Red Planet Blues
A fine piece of speculative journalism from the redoubtable Geoff Manaugh: crime and policing on the off-world colonies. Full of chewy gems and story-starters, alongside the existential stuff that proponents of such neocolonial projects either ignore or lack the imagination to consider: In the precarious Martian environment, where so much depends on the efficient, seamless…
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BAU infrastructure futures
Residents of Lebanon have three basic options: buy a generator subscription, own your own generator, or splurge for what’s known as an uninterruptible power supply. When you move into an apartment, you will most often connect with the local generator owner who will set up a subscription for 5 amps, 10 amps, 15 amps, or…
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The aesthetics of decentralisation
Despite the cacophony of political conjecture, the story of blockchain so far is a tale of financial speculation, in which the cash rewards reaped by bankers and venture capitalists are largely a result of the techno-utopian hype. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose. The prospect of decentralizing control does not absolve us of…
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Arming the archipelago / guerrilla na(rra)tion
If people don’t have the conceptual mechanisms in place to understand how narrative is created and employed to manipulate, then the better the fake, the more susceptible and increasingly large segment of the population becomes to this kind of attack. Maybe this kind of media literacy should be the domain of primary-school education not art-activism,…