Pinboard (robertogreco)
https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/public/
recent bookmarks from robertogrecoThe Real Value of a Catholic Modernity – The Homebound Symphony2024-03-04T08:38:03+00:00
https://blog.ayjay.org/the-real-value-of-a-catholic-modernity/
robertogrecoalanjacobs charlestaylor 1996 2024 modernity catholicism culture philosophy technology technocracy legibility dracula illegibility jamescscotthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:2e6b665e530a/Design Against Design | Set Margins'2024-02-22T04:44:51+00:00
https://www.setmargins.press/books/design-against-design/
robertogrecodesign loki via:daniellucas socialmovements change practice critique graphics graphicdesign materiality craft legibility illegibility typography philippevermes nancyvermes sandykaltenbron kaiekellough chadimarouf sabinefriesinger sarahauches jennclamen rubenpater nataliailyin kevinyuenkitlohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fc3c3048f5cc/Is AI Going to RUIN Writing For Good? (w/ Corey Robin) - YouTube2023-09-07T23:27:26+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=E-A0W29J3zQ
robertogrecocoreyrobin writing howwewrite chatgpt ai artificialintelligence communication howwethink tiktok dialogue debate conversation iteration process learning howwelearn video podcasting education highered highereducation assessment schools schooling cursive briahnajoygray theses slow deliberation thinking composition grades grading performance cheating competition argument lawschool method reflection scripts scriptwriting bertholdbrecht form teaching pedagogy howweteach literacy legibility attention effectiveness audience time anxiety respect labor procrastination discussion socraticmethod seminar literature automation computing journalism colleges universities bias meaning meaningmaking dissonancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:eb97cbba0286/Colonial Cartography — Real Life2023-04-20T03:43:10+00:00
https://reallifemag.com/colonial-cartography/
robertogrecoapoorvatadepalli 2019 maps mapping legibility colonialism deniswood jbrianharley geography control birds-eyeview perspective gentrification consumerism capitalism decentralization centralization aldoushuxley georgeorwell markfisher cartography illegibility consumption consumerizationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fe2875cf69af/Unruly edges: Toddler literacies of the Capitalocene - Abigail Hackett, 20222022-09-19T01:45:20+00:00
https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/20436106221117575
robertogrecoabigailhackett 2022 children childhood toddlers capitalocene anthropocene posthumanism morethanhuman legibility literacies multiliteracies emergent unschooling deschooling learning howwelearn exceptionalism language everyday slow small time donnaharaway mariakromidas commonworldsresearchcollective fikilenxumalo annatsing annalowenhaupttsing gillesdeleuze felixguattari deleuze&guattari pedagogy education childood childhoodstudies ageism childism society schools schooling schooliness lcprojecthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fbb2576d95d6/Interstate in use - Fonts In Use2022-08-20T23:19:48+00:00
https://fontsinuse.com/typefaces/2247/interstate
robertogrecofonts nomos typography design graphicdesign fontbureau tobiasfrere-jones interstate transportation signs wayfinding legibility 1993 1994https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:50770160289d/The Shape of Walking | JOYLAND2022-03-24T16:42:04+00:00
https://joylandmagazine.com/nonfiction/the-shape-of-walking/
robertogreco2022 victorialivingstone walking howwewalk noticing parenting everyday patterns patternsensing meaningmaking loops local community shaneo'mara micheldecerteau thíchnhấthạnh gretchenreynolds davidamescurtis jean-françoisaugoyard psychogeography situationist order writing howwewrite trails paths neighborhoods legibility illegibility mindfulness observation thinking howwethink slow slowness small repetition routine stevenrendell cities suburbs thichnhathanhhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b1bd38c77708/Kameelah Janan Rasheed: The Edge of Legibility | Art212021-11-17T06:13:33+00:00
https://art21.org/watch/new-york-close-up/kameelah-janan-rasheed-the-edge-of-legibility/
robertogrecokameelahjananrasheed reading howweread writing howwewrite readers study art practice 2021 books marginalia legibility attention slow thinking howwethink learning howwelearn annotation notetaking meaningmaking excerpts fragments decoding recoding quran qur'an text work typography graphics design graphicdesign care visibility opacity access accessibilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1ec289d45fd6/Kameelah Janan Rasheed2021-04-13T01:56:27+00:00
https://kameelahr.com/
robertogrecokameelahjananrasheed eastpaloalto brooklyn poetry poems publishing art xerox collage visibility legibility revision interiority interspecies morethanhuman interdisciplinary writing howwewrite unfinishedhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:b0cecf25b9e7/FUC 018 | Tiffany Lethabo King — Beyond Work - YouTube2020-11-20T03:28:55+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=txP22LhUcgQ
robertogrecotiffanylethaboking karlmarx 2020 labor work communism socialism property humans dignity legibility disabilities disability disabilitystudies humnaity criptheory genocide race racism hierarchy settlercolonialism indigenous indigeneity queering organizing leannebetasamosakesimpson shonajackson deniseferreiradasilva humanity humanness land landback multispecies morethanhuman capitalism being belonging determinacy separability sequentiality animals nature ecology sustainability marxism unschooling deschooling anticapitalism critique naomiklein extractivism canada stewardship frankwildersonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7e99e915a63d/"The Right to Be and Become: Black Home-Educators as Child Privacy Prot" by Najarian R. Peters2020-08-31T18:42:30+00:00
https://repository.law.umich.edu/mjrl/vol25/iss1/3/
robertogreconajarianpeters 2020 homeschool education race privacy children parenting childhood discipline incarceration schooltoprisonpipeline unschooling deschooling legibility illegibility resistancehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7aa0d8299cc3/Millennials Are Killing Capitalism: "Wildcat The Totality" - Fred Moten And Stefano Harney Revisit The Undercommons In A Time Of Pandemic And Rebellion (Part 1)2020-07-07T16:39:38+00:00
https://millennialsarekillingcapitalism.libsyn.com/wildcat-the-totality-fred-moten-and-stefano-harney-revisit-the-undercommons-in-a-time-of-pandemic-and-rebellion-part-1
robertogrecofredmoten stefanoharney 2020 undercommons undercommoning acabspring covid-19 coronavirus whitesupremacy highereducation highered unschooling labor work whiteness politics citizenship blackness patriarchy solidarity empathy rebellion insurgency identity capitalism radicalism statues symbols police policing opacity individuation socialwealth policebrutality antagonism policy afropessimism cedricrobinson ruthwilsongilmore generalantagonism saidiyahartman frankwilderson averygordon tiffanylethaboking karlmarx freud heiddeger nietzsche opposition robindgkelley arthurjafa phantomlimbs beauty horror pain hortensespillers allyship liberalism thecommons commons privatization sharing power wealth interest interests poverty self-interest canon extraction subordination resistance angeladavis maternalism gender socialization sexuality difference blackpanthers blackpantherparty revolution personhood selfhood legibility illegibility refusal subjection electoralpolitics genocide us robinkelley millennialsarekillingcapitalishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c1a7e3bcfd7e/A crown for the tiger king - Anthropostures2020-04-13T21:36:11+00:00
https://anthropostures.substack.com/p/a-crown-for-the-tiger-king
robertogreco2020 matthewbattles tigers multispecies morethanhuman tigerking joeexotic us asia hmong karen jamescscott statelessness nomads forests nomadism animals wildlife zoos entanglement omelas borges writing freedom legibility illegibility zoonosis borders barrieres species cities urban urbanism kinshiphttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c6fc08cf7f61/Alec Resnick on Twitter: “OK, via prompt by @vgr, 1 like = 1 opinion about unschooling”2019-12-15T23:54:10+00:00
https://twitter.com/aresnick/status/1206336018410082305
robertogreco43. Continuing the environmental analogy: Unschooling would do well to find its Alice Waters https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alice_Waters — What is its Chez Panisse? What is the highest practice of it which is unimpeachable, even if it is upmarket and unreplicable?
45. Learning experiences involve tools/materials, learners, and facilitators. We are limited by our tools and materials. Many are designed for school. Funding the creation of new tools and materials generally requires targeting schools as your customer. This is unsolved.
46. An underappreciated question for theories of change which assume you can work forward from school as it exists: If culture eats strategy for breakfast, and if many of the fundamental, sector-wide issues in schooling are cultural, what form should your answer to that take?
47. A basic human capital challenge facing both unschooling and schooling: For youth to [learn to think critically, develop and pursue their own projects, whatever], they need to see people doing that. How do you define adults’ role as _both_ facilitators and investigators?
48. One of the most exciting shifts now possible (given the nature of remote knowledge work) is the economic emancipation of youth aged 14–18. Small steps toward this represent radical threats for traditional educational establishments.
49. A big strategic obstacle facing unschooling is that school can always shift internal structures to enable ongoing rent-seeking on your education. So you should expect (as you see), more options for flexible “school” experiences which don’t threaten the institution overall.
50. Just as we have postmortems and sunsets of companies and their strategies, we need the same for educational thinkers and initiatives. The arc of work by someone like John Holt can tell us a lot about the dangers and obstacles for reformers, these remain unarticulated.
51. Whatever your flavor of reform, one of the most valuable distinctions to make is between the political question of who should control youth’s experience how, and the technical question of how to support learning. Incumbents benefit from their conflation.
52. In the near-term, unschooling will be a force for increased socioeconomic and racial stratification. Whether it will be so in the long term is a question of institutions. This makes unschooling’s failure to engage with institutional politics all the more serious.
53. One of the most radical exogenous events which could unfold for unschooling (and many of the caring professions) is the development of a UBI and UBI-like systems.
54. There are many reasons you see “alternatives” flourish in K5, to a lesser extent 6–8, and not at all in 9–12. The proximity of social/economic realities of adulthood. Without changing this, those constraints will always backpropagate through the ghost of high school future.
55. In searching for an alternative identity, unschooling groups have a lot to learn from other groups which are quite narrow but seen as broadly rigorous (Iowa Writers Workshop, MIT Media Lab, Harvard Law School).
56. One of the core things unschooling [often] gets right is a set of advantages taken for granted by every upper-middle class family: a small set of people who know you well, are invested in your success, and can responsively allocate resources on the behalf of your development.
57. Another conceptual challenge for unschooling: Conceptually, what is the difference between a great book and a great lecture? How would you criticize a lecture without resorting to stereotypes of bad lectures? Or coercive elements?
58. Oftentimes, it is hard or impossible to get interested in things which are not in your environment. To the extent that unschooling focuses on the absence of structure, it also fails to grapple with the question of how to think about fertilizing youth’s soil.
[NB From this thread so far, it may sound like I'm just dumping on unschooling. If so, this is merely the narcissism of small differences: I have so much hope for alternative approaches, I wish their proponents tackled these bigger questions more seriously and aggressively!]
59. One of the greatest opportunities facing various, self-selected communities of “alternative” education is to use their access to time with youth and adults as the foundation for an organization analogous to the Mayo Clinic or Media Lab or Xerox PARC.
60. One of the most radical requirements of taking unschooling seriously is defining a social life/role for youth distinct from their identity as students. The dramatic expansion of the ease and possibility of this when you can be Very Online™️ is a tremendous opportunity.
61. One of the deeper things Seymour Papert ever said was that you can’t think about thinking without thinking about thinking about something. Strategically, this suggests that unschooling might do better to tackle supremacy topic by topic, tool by tool.
62. Significant portions of unschooling and homeschooling are not about alternative pedagogies. They are about avoiding toxic environments, securing needed special education services, and similar.
63. One of the beautiful things about the idea of “public” education is its availability to everyone. Minority needs (special education, English Language Learners, etc.) play an outsized role in school bureaucracy. Unschooling has ~ no answer to these questions currently.
64. One of the most important consequences of a constitutional guarantee of freedom of education would be to, over time, force the government to unbundle funding and services for these minority needs.
65. This is the most exciting/frustrating time to be alive if you’re interested in the future of learning. The gap between novices and real, intellectual work is shrinking at an unprecedented rate. There are lifetimes of work to be had mining the progress of the past decade.
66. Early College High School is a model for what rent-seeking will look like as alternatives push their way into school: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Early_college_high_school Its insight and reform is literally _send youth to less high school_. And they managed to get high schools to own it!
67. [For the wealthy,] the equivalent on the consumer side will look increasingly like the relationship between, say, Stanford and YC. Consumers will secure intangible cultural capital through institutional affiliation, and someone else will take on human capital.
68. Some branding alternatives for unschooling (if it is really about self-directed learning and removing school’s structures): PhD, MFA, apprenticeship, football team, contemplative practice. All of these have less brand liability than unschooling. Why stick with it?
69. One of the scariest suspicions of my own beliefs (as they align with unschooling) is that perhaps our relationship to institutions is just as fundamental, immovable, and worth just working forward from as our relationship to any other tribe.
70. Self-direction is powerful. It leaves largely unanswered questions of critique and quality. To the extent excellence emerges from environments of intense critique and aspirations to excellence, neither school nor unschooling have coherent answers to this cultural question.
71. One of the most powerful corollaries of erasing the line between learning/living is that you realize that novices are often doing the same _kind_ of intellectual work as professionals, just less effectively. Unschooling should leverage this opportunity for apprenticeship.
72. The biggest problem in unschooling is access to time with youth + money to spend it well. The second biggest is access to adults who can create intellectually rich/rigorous environments for youth. The third biggest is access to great tools and materials to support work.
73. A common question in confronting unschooling and similar is, “But what if they [don't want to, are bored, don't know what they're interested in, etc.]?” One of unschooling’s great integrities is pointing out that school has approximately no answer to this question either.
74. A categorical question unschooling must answer if it is to ever become mainstream: Left to their own devices, under what conditions can/should a young person be able to choose an “inferior” educational product or experience? Technocrats will say “None”, purists “Any”.
75. Every educational innovation is “experimenting” on youth, nearly nothing is validated with anything approaching the rigor or seriousness that you expect of any other good or service in the public sector.
76. One of the biggest reasons this is not a problem in practice is because youth are remarkably robust. This is as an advantage of this sector’s! Very little of what systems do or don’t has an outsized effect. Class remains the strongest predictor. [referencing 74]
77. People’s concerns about the “socialization” of unschooled youth are disconnected from reality. One of the best things unschooling could do would be to cement its position as often a socially and emotionally healthier pathway to reframe its work as a public health issue.
78. This is a photograph from the original Sudbury Valley School a few years ago. https://sudburyvalley.org It is the rules for operating the microwave. Democratic/free-schools make the same mistake as those suggesting that everyone need to re-discover calculus for themselves.
79. In contrast, this is a photograph from a Boston Public School. Plenty of people choose unschooling or free schooling or democratic schooling over public school because of nothing other than what the semiotics of this juxtaposition imply. [compared to 78]
80. Neither schooling nor unschooling will play a significant role in the liberal goals of equalizing society. School will always play handmaiden to the structure of labor and capital. The most radical efforts look for ways to leverage this fact.
81. Understandably, unschooling is full of people with a fraught relationship to school. Many in school look down on them (either irrelevant bc they are wealthy or irrelevant bc they secretly think failure in school makes you a failure). This is a serious strategic challenge.
82. In my lifetime, ~free college will become a reality in the United States. This will be an enormous opportunity for those interested in unschooling. They will not take this opportunity; industry will. And so industry will define the future of “alternative” education.
83. One of the most persistent sociological effects in education research is that poor youth define “good” students by obedience/work ethic while rich do so by creativity/intelligence. Changing this is one of the most politically radical projects unschooling could tackle.
84. Structure is not coercion. Just because something is hard does not mean it is rigorous. Just because something isn’t fun doesn’t mean its coercive. These distinctions matter, and both school and unschooling confuse them to no end.
85. As unhealthy as they can be, one of the better facets of, say, hustle culture or creative self-help is the embrace of meaningful work + fulfillment as hard + challenging. Progressive education (incl. unschooling) must get beyond handwaving about how to support this well.
86. The first thing people did w/ the movie camera was make films of plays. We’ve made online, distributed classes. Unschooling could be a *small* market for those exploring meaningful, creative applications of technology with youth. But it won’t be VC scale in the next 20y.
87. Nintendo spends more on R&D than the NSF spends on education research each year. These alternative sources of capital are long frustrated with the irrelevance of their results to traditional school. Unschooling, homeschooling, and similar could be real partners for them.
88. Graduate schools of education don’t investigate homeschooling and unschooling (or better yet, run their own educational environments) because (a) their clientele are traditional schools, and (b) they cannot afford the brand risk of failing. Business model is destiny.
89. One of the signs of a healthy professional and intellectual community is self-critique and reflection. I may not be in the community enough to know, but as a small, alternative perspective, unschooling has yet to muster this capacity.
90. At some point, industries w/ a surplus of inbound talent will take the already nearly-formalized structure of tech internships to their logical conclusion and begin charging tuition. One of the best things unschooling could do is offer case management around these paths.
91. One of the silliest illusions education reformers (including unschooling) labors under is that improved results will persuade the system to do anything.
92. In many other domains, 10x improvement is possible. In education, 10x improvement is ~ impossible on time or cost for reasons of human development. This has serious ramifications for the challenges of organizational change, theory of change, funding innovation, and similar.
93. Something unschooling gets right is that it frames its work as a movement and school of thought. Too much change these days is framed in terms of individual entrants, products, and technologies. The staying power of incumbents requires institutional time scales.
94. Something unschooling gets wrong, having gotten its timescales right, is its complete lack of any [critical] sense of history. There are no consensus explanations for the arc of unschooling’s success or lack thereof. This is a crazy situation for a reform movement.
95. The @recursecenter is one of the most serious and thoughtful efforts in (influenced by?) unschooling I know of. As practitioners, they have more to say about the practicalities of these issues than 90% of the people I meet.
96. Unschooling has many unknown allies in other disciplines and domains. The refusal, by and large, to engage the academy or its output means there are significant, low-hanging fruit to seize to bring to unschooling. This will require making epistemology and psychology allies.
97. Much as great management and communication is often the limiting reagent on a team, great management and mentorship is often the limiting reagent in human development. Pedagogy has nearly no language for this. Most differences in efficacy therefore go unexplained.
98. From the POV of theory of change, one of the most challenging aspects of beginning work w/ marginal communities is that you actually bolster and improve the position of the incumbent. “Disruptive” innovation moving upmarket requires feedback loops which don’t exist.
99. Confidence is socially constructed, and represents a significant part of what forms the cultural capital of top tier schools and similar. Unschooling would do well to establish and build counter-narratives around artifacts like this https://youtube.com/watch?v=Ng5qzH39nyg
100. Despite all of these challenges, I believe that inventing the future of learning is among the most exciting and impactful work anyone can do. It beats the constraints of industry and artifice of the academy. Unschooling would do well to leverage this to attract talent.
OK that’s 100. I have no original ideas. If you found anything in this thread interesting, please take the time to review, in detail, the work of thinkers like Holt, Papert, and Dewey. None have the answer, but they and others have done incredible work on these questions.
For those interested, a few starting points:
Dewey’s “My Pedagogic Creed” http://dewey.pragmatism.org/creed.htm
Papert’s _Mindstorms_ http://mindstorms.media.mit.edu
Illich’s Deschooling Society http://davidtinapple.com/illich/1970_deschooling.html
Holt’s How Children {Learn; Fail} https://amazon.com/dp/B074MGJ457 https://amazon.com/dp/0201484021
Please feel free to DM me or reach out to alec@powderhouse.org if you’d like to chat about any of this!
Thanks @vgr for the prompt!“]]>unschooling alecresnick education learning deschooling legibility credentials charterschools howwelearn pedagogy howweteach schools schooling society work chezpaniesse local alicewatters learningecologies environment rahcelcarson resources tools organization organizing montessori reggioemilia portfolios formal informal informallearning mastery labor homeschool waldorf johndewey history psychology humandevelopment skills coercion alternative altedu greatbooks networks networking class canon classism inequality universalbasicincome ubi constraints economics race institutions flexibility disciplines specialization exposure edg srg mitmedialab ledialab xeroxparc access identity opportunity edtech branding culture culturalcapital rent-seeking bureaucracy sudburyschools sudburyvalleyschools reality social technocrats publicschools publicgood apprenticeships mentoringhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:997cf2837970/Spiralism: Haiti’s Long-Lost Poetics of Protest | Public Books2018-11-14T01:51:40+00:00
https://www.publicbooks.org/spiralism-haitis-long-lost-poetics-of-protest/
robertogrecoMore effective at setting each twig aquiver in the passing of waves than a pebble dropped into a pool of water, Spiralism defines life at the level of relations (colors, odors, sounds, signs, words) and historical connections …
Re-creating wholes from mere details and secondary materials, the practice of Spiralism reconciles Art and Life through literature, and necessarily breaks with the hypocrisy of the Word … Spiralism uses the Complete Genre, in which novelistic description, poetic breath, theatrical effect, narratives, stories, autobiographical sketches, and fiction all coexist harmoniously …
These first pages are not set off from the main narrative as paratextual commentary; instead, they are woven directly into the fabric of the text they foretell."
…
"Unlike other Franco-Caribbean genres such as Négritude or Créolité, Spiralism does not announce a geopolitical project, but its social dimension is made explicit in Ready to Burst. Like Jean-Paul Sartre’s notion of Total Literature2—a genre that would be legible to both the oppressor and the oppressed, and that would be the synthesis of destruction and construction—Spiralism’s Complete Genre is meant to be accessible to all. As Paulin, the writer and Frankétienne’s fictional alter ego, explains, Spiralism must tailor its shape to the needs of proletarian readers: “Our age doesn’t lend itself to reading literary works, boring in their too often useless length. … Between the fatigue of the night before and that of the day after … the laboring classes only have limited time—if they have any at all—to read printed characters. … And so, it’s a question of stating things quickly.” Spiralism aims to cleanse the written word of its bourgeois nature by freeing it from the conventional sentence. Thus unshackled, Paulin explains, the word acquires velocity and magnitude. It becomes “Inflated with meanings. Swollen with allusions.”
Spiralism is, perhaps above all, a state of mind in the face of life’s absurdity. “Whirlwinds. Vertigos. Storms. My life beats to the rhythm of turbulences,” declares Paulin. “I am a Spiralist. … It’s not that I’m looking to be scandalous. But because life itself emerges from the cry of blood. Wayward child of pain. Of violence. And that, too, is Spiralism.” On the one hand, these semantic splinters perform the feeling of insularity, of oppression, of restlessness, and of fragmentation that characterized the life of the Haitian people under the Duvalier regime; on the other hand, the resistance they stage against traditional literature symbolically punctures all forms of dictatorships.
Spirals are intrinsically infinite, incomplete. Paulin never finishes his novel and eventually vanishes into thin air, having perhaps been a figment of Raynand’s imagination all along. And much as the spiral gives and takes, Frankétienne reminds the reader that his work’s self-proclaimed aesthetic allegiance matters less than the sheer fact of writing: “I no longer worry about what I write. I simply write. Because I must. Because I’m suffocating. I write anything. Any way. People can call it what they want: novel, essay, poem, autobiography, testimony, narrative, memory exercise, or nothing at all. I don’t even know, myself.”"]]>2015 spiralism haiti poetry poetics protest frankétienne kaimaglover aimécésaire édouardglissant literature form corinestofle jean-paulsartre canon legibility renéphiloctète jean-claudefignolé sartrehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ac4c8ee03b9e/Los Angeles, Houston and the appeal of the hard-to-read city2018-02-10T20:57:41+00:00
http://www.latimes.com/entertainment/arts/la-ca-cm-building-type-new-york-times-20180211-story.html
robertogrecohouston losangeles cities illegibility vitality urban urbanism nyc christopherhawthorne 2018 socal california larlerup manhattan boston sanfrancisco chicago nytimes careymcwilliams joshkun carolinamiranda danielhernandez davidulin latimes alissawalker matthewkang carolynkellogg timarango adamnagourney elitism legibility population place identity elusiveness hubris panic urbanization climatechange complexity charlesmoorehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9cbc1b6130cd/a rat is killed, a man broken, a horse splashes | sara hendren2018-01-22T00:44:57+00:00
http://sarahendren.com/2018/01/17/seeing-like-a-state/
robertogreco2018 sarahendren seeinglikeastate jamescscott urbanplanning socialservices government everyday maps mapping legibility highmodernism socialengineering reversibility small slow humanism humans ecosystems markets community cooperation scale scalability taylorismhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e445393c7563/The Black Outdoors: Fred Moten & Saidiya Hartman at Duke University - YouTube2017-12-24T00:17:55+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=t_tUZ6dybrc
robertogrecofredmoten saidiyahartman blackness 2016 jkameroncarter fredricjameson webdubois sarahjanecervenak unhomed unsettled legibility statelessness illegibility sovereignty citizenship governance escape achievement life living fannielouhamer resistance refusal terror beauty cornelwest fugitives captives captivity academia education grades grading degrading fugitivity language fellowship conviviality outdoors anarchy anarchism constraints slavery oppression race racism confidence poverty privilege place time bodies body humans mobility possessionshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:08cb945fcfe8/How Civilization Started | The New Yorker2017-10-16T04:33:33+00:00
https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/09/18/the-case-against-civilization
robertogrecoWhen the accumulation of wealth is no longer of high social importance, there will be great changes in the code of morals. We shall be able to rid ourselves of many of the pseudo-moral principles which have hag-ridden us for two hundred years, by which we have exalted some of the most distasteful of human qualities into the position of the highest virtues. We shall be able to afford to dare to assess the money-motive at its true value. The love of money as a possession—as distinguished from the love of money as a means to the enjoyments and realities of life—will be recognized for what it is, a somewhat disgusting morbidity, one of those semi-criminal, semi-pathological propensities which one hands over with a shudder to the specialists in mental disease.
The world has indeed got richer, but any such shift in morals and values is hard to detect. Money and the value system around its acquisition are fully intact. Greed is still good.
The study of hunter-gatherers, who live for the day and do not accumulate surpluses, shows that humanity can live more or less as Keynes suggests. It’s just that we’re choosing not to. A key to that lost or forsworn ability, Suzman suggests, lies in the ferocious egalitarianism of hunter-gatherers. For example, the most valuable thing a hunter can do is come back with meat. Unlike gathered plants, whose proceeds are “not subject to any strict conventions on sharing,” hunted meat is very carefully distributed according to protocol, and the people who eat the meat that is given to them go to great trouble to be rude about it. This ritual is called “insulting the meat,” and it is designed to make sure the hunter doesn’t get above himself and start thinking that he’s better than anyone else. “When a young man kills much meat,” a Bushman told the anthropologist Richard B. Lee, “he comes to think of himself as a chief or a big man, and he thinks of the rest of us as his servants or inferiors. . . . We can’t accept this.” The insults are designed to “cool his heart and make him gentle.” For these hunter-gatherers, Suzman writes, “the sum of individual self-interest and the jealousy that policed it was a fiercely egalitarian society where profitable exchange, hierarchy, and significant material inequality were not tolerated.”
This egalitarian impulse, Suzman suggests, is central to the hunter-gatherer’s ability to live a life that is, on its own terms, affluent, but without abundance, without excess, and without competitive acquisition. The secret ingredient seems to be the positive harnessing of the general human impulse to envy. As he says, “If this kind of egalitarianism is a precondition for us to embrace a post-labor world, then I suspect it may prove a very hard nut to crack.” There’s a lot that we could learn from the oldest extant branch of humanity, but that doesn’t mean we’re going to put the knowledge into effect. A socially positive use of envy—now, that would be a technology almost as useful as fire."]]>jamescscott fire technology hunter-gatherers 2017 anthropology johnlanchester anthropocene sedentism agriculture nomads nomadism archaeology writing legibility illegibility state civilization affluence abundance jamessuzman bushmen kalahari namibia khoisan mesopotamia egalitarianism humans self-interest jealousy greed inequality accumulation motivation society happiness moneyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c0c027c6da86/Asemic writing - Wikipedia2017-06-25T02:35:45+00:00
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Asemic_writing
robertogrecoThe people produce the artist, and it’s true. The artist also produces the people. And that’s a very violent and terrifying act of love. The role of the artist and the role of the lover. If I love you, I have to make you conscious of the things you don’t see. Insofar as that is true, in that effort, I became conscious of the things that I don’t see. And I will not see without you, and vice versa, you will not see without me. No one wants to see more than he sees. You have to be driven to see what you see. The only way you can get through it is to accept that two-way street which I call love. You can call it a poem, you can call it whatever you like. That’s how people grow up. An artist is here not to give you answers but to ask you questions.
Kazemi’s bot expands the field of how we might understand asemic writing. Illegible though its drawings may be to our eyes, it is without doubt trying very, very hard to communicate meaning. Humans are not its intended audience; rather, its visual language, like barcodes or the computer vision markup of Amazon warehouses, is entirely for bots, machines, scripts, and other denizens of the algorithmic world. It’s a robot laughing alone with salad, and its inner life, its own well of lactic acid that it draws from to express itself, is off-limits to us. We, however, are on view to them, from the moment we press our thumbprints into our iPhones in the morning to the moment we touch-type a 2 a.m. text message whose characters are so drunkenly scrambled as to form complete non-words, which an algorithm gently corrects to other words we did or did not mean, so long as they’re legible. Perhaps this is an imposition on our freedoms; perhaps this is that two-way street between us and the algorithms, learning from each other; perhaps this is love."
via: "This @_reallifemag essay on asemic writing by @cnqmdi might be the best unwitting 'take' on Trump, covefefefe, etc."
https://twitter.com/eyywa/status/875099774059507716 ]]]>writing asemicwriting scribbling randomness typewriters dictionaries howwewrite materiality rahelaima jeremybushnell lynhejinian dubravkadjuric content joséparla apophenia oseneworkekosrof scat scatsinging conlang language experession hélènesmith medewianta mirthadermisache zhangxu marcogiovenale timgaze jimleftwich dariuskazemi bots emmawinston horse_ebooks huaisui cursive legibility illegibility avakofman covfefe literacy postliteracy ocrhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5fc19077e686/Who Gets to Be a CIVILIZATION? - Between the Lines - YouTube2017-01-02T07:27:58+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=IIEKI-MWQ94
robertogrecocivilization classideas vgordonchilde humanity 2016 games videogames gaming barbarians cities citystates domination eurocentrism babylonianas egyptians babylon russia zulu rome ancientrome india ancientindia ancient ancientegypt england germany china ancientchina aztec us history bias mongolia polynesia arabia scandinavia portugal inca ottomanempire empire colonization france byzantines byzantium celts netherlands sumeria carthage japan greece ancientgreece ethiopia kylekallgren banedictanderson socialconstructs nationalism indonesia maps mapping museums census identity place community cartography legibility borders nations illegibility narrative edbeach archaeology culture tribes chess stratgey tactics peace war aggression competition howweteach quantification winning losing exploration expansion exploitation extermination southafrica mexico italy italia congo brasil brazil huns change metamorphosis iroquoishttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:3805677800ac/NONSTOP WITH CASEY GOLLAN & VICTORIA SOBEL — Lookie-Lookie2016-12-20T03:02:16+00:00
http://www.lookie-lookie.com/nonstop-with-casey-gollan-victoria-sobel/
robertogrecolegibility illegibility caseygollan 2016 victoriasobel systemsthinking christinahendricks ursulafranklin normalization ethics meadurementhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:52828addcd13/Berlin Biennale | All Problems Can Be Illuminated; Not All Problems Can Be Solved2016-07-23T22:33:31+00:00
http://bb9.berlinbiennale.de/all-problems-can-be-illuminated-not-all-problems-can-be-solved/
robertogrecoursulafranklin justice technology meredithmeredith 2016 efficiency compliance listening empathy progress racism militarism surveillance waronterror democracy society humility inclusivity inclusion vulnerability radicalchange power statusquo politics scrupling conversation problemsolving jacquesellul capitalism consumerism innovation quakers systems interrelationships systemsthinking complexity culture materials art mindset organization procedures symbols orthodoxy luddism occupywallstreet ows resistance disruption speed humanism science scientism legibility elitism experts authority privilege experience civilization authoritarianism socialjustice revolution peace spotlight hardproblems successhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9c8585aad84f/Walled Gardens & Escape Routes | Kneeling Bus2016-07-23T05:11:18+00:00
https://kneelingbus.wordpress.com/2016/07/22/walled-gardens-escape-routes/
robertogrecowalledgadens web online internet 2016 snapchat slack darknet darkweb instagram twitter legibility drewaustin fredericjameon reynerbanham email venkateshrao benbashe identity communication openweb facebook texting sms flowlaminarhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:339212ec5dd3/From A Pedagogy for Liberation to Liberation from Pedagogy [.pdf]2016-05-01T00:19:28+00:00
http://la.utexas.edu/users/hcleaver/330T/350kPEEEstevaVsFreiretable.pdf
robertogrecogustavoesteva madhuprakash danastuchul liberation pedagogy pedagogyoftheoppressed wendellberry solidarity care love caring carlossalinas neoliberalism teaching howweteach education conscientization liberationtheology charity service servicelearning economics oppression capitalism mediators leadership evangelization yvonnedion-buffalo johnmohawk legibility decolonization colonialism karlmarx ivanillich technology literacy illegibility bankingeducation oraltradition plato text writing memory communication justice modernism class inequality humility zapatistas comandantemarcos parochialism globalphilia resistance canon gandhi grassroots hope individuality newness sophistication specialization professionalization dislocation evolution careerism alienation self-knowledge schooling schools progress power victimization slow small zapatismohttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c5bf045a166f/Refusal as Research Method in Discard Studies « Discard Studies2016-03-27T20:05:36+00:00
http://discardstudies.com/2016/03/21/refusal-as-research-method-in-discard-studies/
robertogrecoethnography method refusal 2016 via:javierarbona research representation self-representation fieldwork decolonization ethnographicrefusal illegibility legibilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:beb63ca06b12/Frances Stonor Saunders · Where on Earth are you? · LRB 3 March 20162016-03-01T07:05:10+00:00
http://www.lrb.co.uk/v38/n05/frances-stonorsaunders/where-on-earth-are-you
robertogrecoThe private, the domestic (a space overfilled with my possessions: my bed, my carpet, my table, my typewriter, my books, my odd copies of the Nouvelle Revue française); on the other side, other people, the world, the public, politics. You can’t simply let yourself slide from one into the other, can’t pass from one to the other, neither in one direction nor in the other. You have to have the password, have to cross the threshold, have to show your credentials, have to communicate … with the world outside.
You lock the door. You’ve crossed the border. You’ve ignored Pascal’s warning that all humanity’s misery derives from not being able to sit alone in a quiet room. When the Savoyard aristocrat Xavier De Maistre was sentenced to six weeks’ house arrest for duelling in 1790, he turned his detention into a grand imaginary voyage. ‘My room is situated on the 45th degree of latitude,’ he records in A Journey around my Room. ‘It stretches from east to west; it forms a long rectangle, 36 paces in perimeter if you hug the wall.’ And so he sets off, charting a course from his desk towards a painting hung in a corner, and from there he continues obliquely towards the door, but is waylaid by his armchair, which he sits in for a while, poking the fire, daydreaming. Then he bestirs himself again, presses north towards his bed, the place where ‘for one half of our life’ we forget ‘the sorrows of the other half’. And so on, ‘from the expedition of the Argonauts to the Assembly of Notables, from the lowest depths of hell to the last fixed star beyond the Milky Way, to the confines of the universe, to the gates of chaos’. ‘This,’ he declares, ‘is the vast terrain which I wander across in every direction at leisure.’
Whether around your room in forty days, or around the world in eighty days, or around the Circle Line in eighty minutes, whether still or still moving, the self is an act of cartography, and every life a study of borders. The moment of conception is a barrier surpassed, birth a boundary crossed. Günter Grass’s Oskar, the mettlesome hero of The Tin Drum, narrates, in real time, his troubling passage through the birth canal and his desire, once delivered into the world, to reverse the process. The room is cold. A moth beats against the naked light bulb. But it’s too late to turn back, the midwife has cut the cord.
Despite this uncommon ability to report live on his own birth, even Oskar’s power of self-agency is subject to the one inalienable rule: there is only one way into this life, and one way out of it. Everything that happens in between – all the thresholds we cross and recross, all the ‘decisions and revisions that a minute will reverse’ – is bordered by this unbiddable truth. What we hope for is safe passage between these two fixed boundaries, to be able to make something of the experience of being alive before we are required to stop being alive. There’s no negotiating birth or death. What we have is the journey.
On the evening of 3 October 2013, a boat carrying more than five hundred Eritreans and Somalis foundered just off the tiny island of Lampedusa. In the darkness, locals mistook their desperate cries for the sound of seagulls. The boat sank within minutes, but survivors were in the water for five hours, some of them clinging to the bodies of their dead companions as floats. Many of the 368 people who drowned never made it off the capsizing boat. Among the 108 people trapped inside the bow was an Eritrean woman, thought to be about twenty years old, who had given birth as she drowned. Her waters had broken in the water. Rescue divers found the dead infant, still attached by the umbilical cord, in her leggings. The longest journey is also the shortest journey.
Already, in the womb, our brains are laying down neural pathways that will determine how we perceive the world and our place in it. Cognitive mapping is the way we mobilise a definition of who we are, and borders are the way we protect this definition. All borders – the lines and symbols on a map, the fretwork of walls and fences on the ground, and the often complex enmeshments by which we organise our lives – are explanations of identity. We construct borders, literally and figuratively, to fortify our sense of who we are; and we cross them in search of who we might become. They are philosophies of space, credibility contests, latitudes of neurosis, signatures to the social contract, soothing containments, scars.
They’re also death zones, portals to the underworld, where explanations of identity are foreclosed. The boat that sank half a mile from Lampedusa had entered Italian territorial waters, crossing the imaginary line drawn in the sea – the impossible line, if you think about it. It had gained the common European border, only to encounter its own vanishing point, the point at which its human cargo simply dropped off the map. Ne plus ultra, nothing lies beyond.
I have no theory, no grand narrative to explain why so many people are clambering into their own hearses before they are actually dead. I don’t understand the mechanisms by which globalisation, with all its hype of mobility and the collapse of distance and terrain, has instead delivered a world of barricades and partition, in which entire populations seem to be living – and dying – in a different history from mine. All I know is that a woman who believed in the future drowned while giving birth, and we have no idea who she was. And it’s this, her lack of known identity, which places us, who are fat with it, in direct if hopelessly unequal relationship to her.
Everyone reading this has a verified self, an identity, formed through and confirmed by identification, that is attested to be ‘true’. You can’t function in the world without it: you can’t open a bank account, get a credit card or national insurance number, or a driving licence, or access to your email and social media accounts, or a passport or visa, or points on your reward card. You can’t have your tonsils removed without it. You can’t die without it. Whether you’re conscious of it or not, whether you like it or not, the verified self is the governing calculus of your life, the spectrum on which you, as an individual, are plotted from cradle to grave. As Pierre-Joseph Proudhon explained, you must be ‘noted, registered, enumerated, accounted for, stamped, measured, classified, audited, patented, licensed, authorised, endorsed, reprimanded, prevented, reformed, rectified and corrected, in every operation, every transaction, every movement.’"
…
"All migrants know that the reply to the question ‘Who on earth are you?’ is another question: ‘Where on earth are you?’ And so they want what we’ve got, a verified self that will transport them to our side of history. Thus, the migrant identity becomes a burden to be unloaded. Migrants often make the journey without identity documents, and I mentioned one reason for this, namely that the attempt to obtain them in their country of origin can be very dangerous. Others lose them at the outset when they’re robbed by police or border guards, or by people traffickers en route. Many destroy them deliberately because they fear, not without reason, that our system of verification will be a mechanism for sending them back. In Algeria, they’re called harraga, Arabic for ‘those who burn’. And they don’t only burn their documents: many burn their fingertips on hobs or with lighters or acid, or mutilate them with razors, to avoid biometric capture and the prospect of expulsion. These are the weapons of the weak.
The boat carrying more than five hundred Eritreans and Somalis sank off Lampedusa in October 2013, barely three months after the pope’s visit. Whether they had lost their identity papers, or destroyed them, when facing death the people on board wanted to be known. As the boat listed and took on water, and with most of the women and children stuck below deck, those who knew they wouldn’t make it called out their names and the names of their villages, so that survivors might carry ashore news of their deaths.5 There isn’t really any other way: there’s no formal identification procedure for those who drown. In Lampedusa’s cemetery, the many plaques that read ‘unidentified migrant’ merely tell us that people have been dying in the Mediterranean for at least 25 years – more than twenty thousand of them, according to current estimates.
Everyone must be counted, but only if they count. Dead migrants don’t count. The woman who drowned while giving birth was not a biometric subject, she was a biodegradable one. I don’t want to reconstitute her as a sentimental artefact, an object to be smuggled into the already crowded room of my bad conscience. But I do want her to be known by more than just the number she was given after being hauled out of the water – 288 (and 289 for her baby) – because otherwise the story of migrants remains infinitely reproducible to the point of abstraction. For the past two years, I’ve searched for something by which to identify her. I’d all but given up when, just a few days ago, I stumbled across an article by Mattathias Schwartz, a journalist who visited Lampedusa after the tragedy. He found a survivor who turned out to be the woman’s partner and the father of her baby. Her name, this man said, was Yohanna. In Eritrean, it means ‘congratulations’."]]>borders identity cartography francesstonorsaunders georgesperec lampedusa güntergrass refugees identification personhood geopolitics legibility mobility passports pierre-josephproudhon globalization thresholds homes milankundera socialmedia digitalexhaust rfid data privacy smartphones verification biometrics biometricdata migration immigration popefrancis facialidentification visas paulfussell stefanzweig xenophobia naomimitchison nobility surveillance intentionality gilbertharding whauden lronhubbard paulekman auden proudhonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:5e0b9a1212b3/DIGITAL-MATERIALITY-OF-GIFS2016-01-05T06:39:57+00:00
http://digitalmateriality.com/
robertogreco>>>>>>>>
[Also at this URL: http://newhive.com/shashashasha/digital-materiality-of-gifs ]]]>shahwang gifs animatedgifs internet web facebook vine twitter fileformats constraints art webart tumblr memes remixing portability video animation emotions imgur okcupid redit newhive phenakistoscopes dvdp 89-a @dshep25 cinemagraphs jamiebeck kevinburg history media legibility resolution reactiongifs accessibility 1987 1989 gifpop culture remixculture multiliteracieshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6f5dc982dab2/toxic design : Index Gaia2015-12-26T00:31:56+00:00
http://namedgaia.com/index.php?/projects/toxic-design/
robertogrecogaiascagnetti place torino progress 2008 legibility comprehension understanding cities urban urbanism maps mapping networks geography communication visualization christiannold jimsegers donatoricci paolociuccarelli giuseppevaccario andrewridge tomziora aliciahorvathola federicamessina veronicafilicehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:748163cead70/Imperial Designs | The Unforgiving Minute2015-11-19T06:11:00+00:00
http://currion.net/2015/11/imperial-designs/
robertogrecodesignimperialism design via:tealtan humanitariandesign 2015 africa paulcurrion control colonialism technology technosolutionism evgenymorozov siliconvalley philosophy politics mooc moocs doublebind education bostondynamics googlex darpa robots californianideology yuvalnoahharari wikihouse globalconstructionset 3dprinting disobedientobjects anarchism anarchy legibility internet online web nezaralsayyad smarthphones mobile phones benedictevans migration refugees fiveeyes playpumps water chandbaori trevorpaglen yuvalhararihttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:7c0b41319eb2/Continuous Monuments and Imaginable Alternatives - Amateur Cities2015-05-23T08:44:11+00:00
http://amateurcities.com/continuous-monuments-and-imaginable-alternatives/
robertogrecotobiasrevell superstudio architecture government resistance cities data jamescscott seeinglikeastate davidgraeber infrastructure internet privacy surveillance technology design systemsthinking smartcities legibility illegibility imagination meshnetworks 2015https://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:40eeb1554e95/Jamie Zigelbaum: Excerpt From My Master's Thesis2015-05-20T19:47:21+00:00
http://www.jamiezigelbaum.com/#/external-legibility/
robertogrecojamiezigelbaum legibility workinginpublic modeling 2015 via:litherland lcproject openstudioproject interface interfacedesign design observation inference craft craftsmanship communication understanding process context visibilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:e8ef301c206e/The double-standard of making the poor prove they’re worthy of government benefits - The Washington Post2015-04-09T23:42:26+00:00
http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/wonkblog/wp/2015/04/07/the-double-standard-of-making-poor-people-prove-theyre-worthy-of-government-benefits/
robertogrecous poverty government benefits 2015 politics discrimination patronization legibility illegibility indignity emilybadger privacy freedom control suzannemettler law legal morality inequalityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:30d6d041d895/Insights: K-HOLE, New York — Insights: K-HOLE, New York — Channel — Walker Art Center2015-03-28T08:56:16+00:00
http://www.walkerart.org/channel/2015/insights-k-hole-new-york
robertogrecok-hole consumption online internet communication burnout normcore legibility illegibility simplicity technology mobile phones smartphones trends fashion art design branding brands socialmedia groupchat texting oversharing absence checkingout aesthetics lifestyle airplanemode privilege specialness generations marketing trendspotting coping messaging control socialcapital gregfong denayago personalbranding visibility invisibility identity punk prolasticity patagonia patience anxietymatrix chaos order anxiety normality abnormality youth millennials individuality box1824 hansulrichobrist alternative indie culture opposition massindie williamsburg simoncastets digitalnatives capitalism mainstream semiotics subcultures isolation 2015 walkerartcenter maxingout establishment difference 89plus basicness evasion blandness actingbasic empathy indifference eccentricity blankness tolerance rebellion signalling status coolness aspiration connections relationships presentationofself understanding territorialism sociology nehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:83ee6e1363f6/Hack Education Weekly Newsletter, No. 1012015-03-07T20:13:40+00:00
http://tinyletter.com/audreywatters/letters/hack-education-weekly-newsletter-no-101
robertogrecoI don’t think self-knowledge can be reduced to matters of data possession and retention; it can’t be represented as a substance than someone can have more or less of. Self-knowledge is not a matter of having the most thorough archive of your deeds and the intentions behind them. It is not a quality of memories, or an amount of data. It is not a terrain to which you are entitled to own the most detailed map. Self-knowledge is not a matter of reading your own permanent record.
We confuse individuals’ acts of (self-)documentation with structural change and justice. We confuse the “sharing economy” for the latter as well. According to Evgeny Morozov:
The citizens, who are not yet fully aware of these dilemmas, might eventually realise that the actual choice we are facing today is not between the market and the state, but between politics and non-politics. It’s a choice between a system bereft of any institutional and political imagination – where some permutation of hackers, entrepreneurs and venture capitalists is the default answer to every social problem – and a system, where explicitly political solutions that might question who – citizens, firms, the state – ought to own what, and on what terms, are still part of the conversation.
It doesn’t help that so many of these narratives comes from “a town without history,” as Mike Caulfield observes in “People Have the Star Trek Computer Backwards.”
[See also: https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:450933ec9018 ]]]>audreywatters alanjacobs robhorning evgenymorozov 2015 surveillance care education edtech mikecaulfield data datacollection management scientificmanagement self-knowledge caring permanentrecords permanentrecord records justice socialhustice hierarchy patriarchy siliconvalley edreform technosolutionism politics policy control power citizenship civics legibility documentation assessment accountability sharingeconomy jessestommel innovation disruption disruptiveinnovationhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:6b464bb06248/The Century of the Fugitive and the Secret of the Detainee | SAMPLE REALITY2015-02-26T23:17:21+00:00
http://www.samplereality.com/2013/04/22/the-century-of-the-fugitive-and-the-secret-of-the-detainee/
robertogrecofugitives detainees surveillance police prison amrksample 2013 storytelling law visibility legibilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:15c998bfd5fe/The Great Equity Test | EduShyster2015-02-25T01:25:16+00:00
http://edushyster.com/?p=6447
robertogrecoxianfranzingerbarrett xianbarrett 2015 jenniferberkshire teaching howweteach socialjustice schools publicschools inequality education policy measurement oppression control power learning testing standardizedtesting standardization brownvsboardofeducation integration segregation class chicago race equity justice legibility leadership privilege inequity empowerment agency activism curriculum voyce canonhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:727dfb712d83/[this is aaronland] interpretation roomba2014-10-09T07:14:20+00:00
http://www.aaronland.info/weblog/2014/10/06/interpretation/
robertogrecoaaronstraupcope 2014 history storytelling time memory scottmccloud abstraction gaps memorial objects artifacts shareholdervalue motive confidence internet web purpose networks littlenets meshnetworks community communities occupy.here visibility invisibility legibility illegibility samizdat realpolitik access information ingridburrington libraries sharing online commonshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:40f9b2092bf5/▶ No Neutral Ground in a Burning World [30c3] - YouTube2014-10-02T22:23:39+00:00
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DWg2qEEa9CE
robertogrecovia:caseygollan 2013 eleanorsaitta capitalism marxism anarchism anarchy endtimes geekculture politics ethics communication hackerculture internet web online coding civilization history culture technology outsiders seeinglikea state jamescscott legibility architecture brasilia surveillance authority power money ruleoflaw control positionalethics quinnnorton brasíliahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:15426e0c9a5a/something is rotten in the state of...Twitter | the theoryblog2014-09-05T17:56:28+00:00
http://theory.cribchronicles.com/2014/09/02/something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-twitter/
robertogreco…Oh, you formed a little unicorn world where you can communicate at scale outside the broadcast media model? Let us sponsor that for you, sisters and brothers. Let us draw you from your domains of your own to mass platforms where networking will, for awhile, come fully into flower while all the while Venture Capital logics tweak and incentivize and boil you slowly in the bosom of your networked connections until you wake up and realize that the way you talk to half the people you talk to doesn’t encourage talking so much as broadcasting anymore. Yeh. Oh hey, *that* went well.
And in academia, with Twitter finally on the radar of major institutions, and universities issuing social media policies and playing damage control over faculty tweets with the Salaita firing and even more recent, deeply disturbing rumours of institutional interventions in employee’s lives, this takeover threatens to choke a messy but powerful set of scholarly practices and approaches it never really got around to understanding. The threat of being summarily acted upon by the academy as a consequence of tweets – always present, frankly, particularly for untenured and more vulnerable members of the academic community – now hangs visibly over all heads…even while the medium is still scorned as scholarship by many.
[image of @bonstewart tweet: “academia, this whole “Twitter counts enough to get you fired but not hired” mindset is why we can’t have nice things.”]
You’re Doing It Wrong
But there’s more. The sense of participatory collective – always fraught – has waned as more and more subcultures are crammed and collapsed into a common, traceable, searchable medium. We hang over each other’s heads, more and more heavily, self-appointed swords of Damocles waiting with baited breath to strike. Participation is built on a set of practices that network consumption AND production of media together…so that audiences and producers shift roles and come to share contexts, to an extent. Sure, the whole thing can be gamed by the public and participatory sharing of sensationalism and scandal and sympathy and all the other things that drive eyeballs.
But where there are shared contexts, the big nodes and the smaller nodes are – ideally – still people to each other, with longterm, sustained exposure and impressions formed. In this sense, drawing on Walter Ong’s work on the distinctions between oral and literate cultures, Liliana Bounegru has claimed that Twitter is a hybrid: orality is performative and participatory and often repetitive, premised on memory and agonistic struggle and the acceptance of many things happening at once, which sounds like Twitter As We Knew It (TM), while textuality enables subjective and objective stances, transcending of time and space, and collaborative, archivable, analytical knowledge, among other things.
Thomas Pettitt even calls the era of pre-digital print literacy “The Gutenberg Parenthesis;” an anomaly of history that will be superceded by secondary orality via digital media.
Um…we may want to rethink signing up for that rodeo. Because lately secondary orality via digital media seems like a pretty nasty, reactive state of being, a collective hiss of “you’re doing it wrong.” Tweets are taken up as magnum opi to be leapt upon and eviscerated, not only by ideological opponents or threatened employers but by in-network peers…because the Attention Economy rewards those behaviours. Oh hai, print literacies and related vested interests back in ascendency, creating a competitive, zero-sum arena for interaction. Such fun!
[image of @bonstewart tweet: “the problem with 2014 Twitter, short version: being constantly on guard against saying the wrong thing leaves no much left to say.”]
Which is not to say there’s no place for “you’re doing it wrong.” Twitter, dead or no, is still a powerful and as yet unsurpassed platform for raising issues and calling out uncomfortable truths, as shown in its amplification of the #Ferguson protests to media visibility (in a way Facebook absolutely failed to do thanks to the aforementioned algorithmic filters). Twitter is, as my research continues to show, a path to voice. At the same time, Twitter is also a free soapbox for all kinds of shitty and hateful statements that minimize or reinforce marginalization, as any woman or person of colour who’s dared to speak openly about the raw deal of power relations in society will likely attest. And calls for civility will do nothing except reinforce a respectability politics of victim-blaming within networks. This intractable contradiction is where we are, as a global neoliberal society: Twitter just makes it particularly painfully visible, at times."
[See also: http://edcontexts.org/twitter/behind-something-is-rotten-in-the-state-of-twitter/ ]]]>academia competition fear twitter 2014 participatory branding institutions corporatization socialmedia corporatism gutenbergparenthesis thomaspettitt lilianabounegru performance orality oraltradition communication digital digitalmedia media attention attentioneconomy print literacies literacy subcultures legibility participation participatorymedia networkedculture culture walterong donnaharaway emilygordon ferguson participatorculture networkedpublics stevensalaita secondaryorality bonniestewarthttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9d259a350591/[Herald Interview] ‘Alternative education teaches students to be themselves’2014-08-24T21:36:14+00:00
http://www.koreaherald.com/view.php?ud=20140807000779
robertogrecokorea 2014 education alternative government policy unschooling deschooling freedom regulation standardization hyeonbyeon-ho chrismercogliano control legibility societyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:823fc588897f/Colonising the Clouds — Medium2014-07-15T22:18:52+00:00
https://medium.com/@thejaymo/colonising-the-clouds-4405d2d590b5
robertogrecostacktivism jayspringett infrastructure 2014 privacy politics internet google cloud benjaminbratton joannemcneil timhwang mathiascrawford brucesterling tobiasrevell maps mapping jurisdiction resilience joguldi jamescscott legibility illegibility metahaven networks networkpower law legal corporations states government espionage security web online facebook business capitalism microsoft drones droneproject nest edwardsnowden barackoabama markzuckerberg sergeybrinhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1d739b5136f8/Fantasy and the Buffered Self - The New Atlantis2014-07-15T21:03:31+00:00
http://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/fantasy-and-the-buffered-self
robertogreco2014 alanjacobs fantasy history legibility invisibility visibility belief modernity mysticism magic identity self protection boundaries unpredictability uncertainty supernatural spirits sciencefictionhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:9e8f24f76c2f/Homo Sacer | booktwo.org2014-07-10T10:58:05+00:00
http://booktwo.org/notebook/homo-sacer/
robertogrecovisibility invisibility legibility illegibility homesacer 2014 jamesbridle holograms surveillance systems systemsthinking technology law nationality citizenshiphttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:d27490bd97ca/The Problem with “Personalization”2014-06-13T04:58:51+00:00
https://modernlearners.com/the-problem-with-personalization/
robertogrecorocketshipschools audreywatters education personalization bigdata legibility autonomy personallearning learning schools policy adaptivelearningtechnology data datacollection adaptivelearning adaptivetechnologyhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:a8242e7ef6b5/sprout & co :: Rendering Learners Legible2014-06-04T19:45:27+00:00
http://thesprouts.org/blog/rendering-learners-legible
robertogrecoalecresnick education legibility jamescscott 2013 salkhan ethics unschooling deschooling personalization individualization sprout&co data inbloom schools facebook google khanacademy netflix sprout salmankhanhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fdc52b5e27b3/6, 6: Asymmetrical information2014-04-09T19:02:27+00:00
http://tinyletter.com/vruba/letters/6-6-asymmetrical-information
robertogrecocharlieloyd 2014 teaching learning xkcd legibility scale allsorts learningallthetime howwelearn howweteach perspective understanding layerdness datadrama jamescscott violence ooda johnboyd competition initiative offense empathy children legacy surveillance censorship babymonitors 4chan adulthood childhood parentinghttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:25c25a210906/Blight and Mirrors – Allen Tan is…writing2014-04-06T03:43:57+00:00
http://tanmade.com/writing/2014/04/05/medusa/
robertogrecoallentan 2014 privacy data datadrama ingridburrington networks cloud online internet legibility illegibility urbanism janejacobs surveillance cities bigdata liamyoung information securityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:96215460d986/6, 3: Seasteading2014-03-24T05:21:46+00:00
http://tinyletter.com/vruba/letters/6-3-seasteading
robertogrecoFor a Westerner to trash Western culture is like criticizing our nitrogen/oxygen atmosphere on the grounds that it sometimes gets windy, and besides, Jupiter’s is much prettier. You may not realize its advantages until you’re trying to breathe liquid methane.
Which is only to make a point that is easy to make but very hard to appreciate, and I have to practice making to myself in new ways all the time, re-estranging it to re-familiarize it: what we have going here, this system by which roads are paved, you can appeal a court ruling, you can just assume you got the right change back at Whole Foods, Whole Foods exists, etc., is so big and complicated that you can’t appreciate it. At best you can call upon cognitive intercessors, like thinky magazine features on the cold chain or whatever, to mediate between your grasp of the size of the culture and its reality. I say this as someone whose job is partly to look at enormous depictions of material culture – I mean staring at the Port of Tokyo–Yokohama, or Magnitogorsk, is kind of what I do all day, and I still take it for granted.
And the system has tremendous momentum. I am no historian, but my vague sense is that in recognizable form in the Euramerican sphere it goes back to things like the New Model Army and the aftermath of the French Revolution: the establishment of a bureauracy, i.e. a system of applied governance with accountability built in as paperwork and defined responsibilities, as opposed to something at best hollowed out like a nest of sticks inside feudalism.
And when I see bureaucracy around me doing things like getting all fetishistic about a piece of paper, I have to remind myself that yes, this is imperfect, but the point is that we enshrine the word, something roughly permanent and widely legible, as opposed to worshipping the squire, i.e., whatever he feels like today, that we can’t even examine directly to mutually identify and begin to debate whether it’s good. A whig history but I’m a whig."
[Related: http://masochuticon.com/2006/05/24/
via: https://twitter.com/annegalloway/status/484597685396045824
in this thread: https://twitter.com/annegalloway/status/484483973767110656
follow-up http://tinyletter.com/vruba/letters/6-16-america-again ]]]>complexity canon interconnectedness seasteading frontier waldronisland bureaucracy 2014 charlieloyd slow change purpose purposefulness civilization interdependence seeing noticing separateness libertarianism capitalism globalization materials systems systemsthinking siliconvalley laws governance government society nealstephenson simplicity distractions bighere dependencies supplychains legibility illegibility coffee waldron interconnected interconnectivityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:30fd0e555c34/What Your Culture Really Says — about work — Medium2014-03-17T06:47:36+00:00
https://medium.com/about-work/e8ab06c3b75f
robertogrecoshanley 2013 business culture github horizontality hierarchy hierarchies control power meetings homogeneity organzations vacation policies politics work labor process social socialpressure management administration illegibility legibility decisionmaking powerstructures criticism valvehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:fe92252e8622/managers are awesome / managers are cool when they’re part of your team (tecznotes)2014-03-17T06:42:26+00:00
http://mike.teczno.com/notes/on-managers.html
robertogrecoManagement is about subjugation; it’s about control.
At Github, Tom described a setup where the power structure of the company is defined by the social structures of the employees. He showed a network hairball to illustrate his point, said that Github employees can work on what they feel like, subject to the strategic direction set for the company. There are no managers.
This bothered me a bit when I heard it last summer, and it’s gotten increasingly more uncomfortable since. I’ve been paraphrasing this part of the talk as “management is a form of workplace violence,” and the still-evolving story of Julie Ann Horvath suggests that the removal of one form of workplace violence has resulted in the reintroduction of another, much worse form. In my first post-college job, I was blessed with an awesome manager who described his work as “firefighter up and cheerleader down,” an idea I’ve tried to live by as I’ve moved into positions of authority myself. The idea of having no managers, echoed in other companies like Valve Software, suggests the presence of major cultural problems at a company like Github. As Shanley Kane wrote in What Your Culture Really Says, “we don’t have an explicit power structure, which makes it easier for the unspoken power dynamics in the company to play out without investigation or criticism.” Managers might be difficult, hostile, or useless, but because they are parts of an explicit power structure they can be evaluted explicitly. For people on the wrong side of a power dynamic, engaging with explicit structure is often the only means possible to fix a problem.
Implicit power can be a liability as well as a strength. In the popular imagination, implicit power elites close sweetheart deals in smoke-filled rooms. In reality, the need for implicit power to stay in the shadows can cripple it in the face of an outside context problem. Aaron Bady wrote of Julian Assange and Wikileaks that “while an organization structured by direct and open lines of communication will be much more vulnerable to outside penetration, the more opaque it becomes to itself (as a defense against the outside gaze), the less able it will be to “think” as a system, to communicate with itself. The more conspiratorial it becomes, in a certain sense, the less effective it will be as a conspiracy.”
Going back to the social diagram, this lack of ability to communicate internally seems to be an eventual property of purely bottoms-up social structures. Github has been enormously successful on the strength of a single core strategy: the creation of a delightful, easy-to-use web UI on top of a work-sharing system designed for distributed use. I’ve been a user since 2009, and my belief is that the product has consistently improved, but not meaningfully changed. Github’s central, most powerful innovation is the Pull Request. Github has annexed adjoining territory, but has not yet had to respond to a threat that may force it to abandon territory or change approach entirely.
Without a structured means of communication, the company is left with the vague notion that employees can do what they feel like, as long as it’s compliant with the company’s strategic direction. Who sets that direction, and how might it be possible to change it? There’s your implicit power and first point of weakness.
This is incidentally what’s so fascinating about the government technology position I’m in at Code for America. I believe that we’re in the midst of a shift in power from abusive tech vendor relationships to something driven by a city’s own digital capabilities. The amazing thing about GOV.UK is that a government has decided it has the know-how to hire its own team of designers and developers, and exercised its authority. That it’s a cost-saving measure is beside the point. It’s the change I want to see in the world: for governments large and small to stop copy-pasting RFP line items and cargo-culting tech trends (including the OMFG Ur On Github trend) and start thinking for themselves about their relationship with digital communication."]]>michalmigurski 2014 julieannhovarth github horizontality hierarchy hierarchies power julianassange wikileaks valve culture business organizations management legibility illegibility communication gov.uk codeforamerica subjugation abuse shanley teams administration leadershiphttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:cf6c96b430f8/Former Valve Employee: 'It Felt a Lot Like High School' | Game|Life | Wired.com2014-03-17T06:33:14+00:00
http://www.wired.com/gamelife/2013/07/wireduk-valve-jeri-ellsworth/
robertogrecobusiness valve 2013 via:caseygollan structurelessness horizontality power control hierarchy hierarchies leadership organzations communities culture legibility illegibilityhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:01224cb5f96c/STET | Attention, rhythm & weight2013-12-03T18:02:17+00:00
http://stet.editorially.com/articles/attention-rhythm-and-weight/
robertogrecoallentan publishing writing internet web timcarmody 2013 papermodernism literacy fluency intuitiveness legibility metaphor interaction howweread howwewrite communication multiliteracies skills touch scrolling snowfall immersive focus distraction attention cinema cinematic film flickr usability information historiasextraordinarias narrative storytelling jose-luismoctezuma text reading multimedia rhythm pacing purpose weight animation gamedesign design games gaming mediainvention mediahttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:ae56d6a028f9/Eye Magazine | Opinion | Are you sure you need that new logo?2013-08-15T05:21:49+00:00
http://www.eyemagazine.com/opinion/article/agenda2
robertogrecolegibility design wayfinding kengarland unproduct notbuilding bigidea 1993 branding logos simplicity navigation cities graphicdesignhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:8a3c96e58ceb/The Little Mystical - Some Obvious Things About Drawing Maps2013-08-10T02:17:19+00:00
http://tealtan.tumblr.com/post/57484734408/some-obvious-things-about-drawing-maps
robertogrecoallentan 2013 maps mapping wikipedia osm openstreetmap charlieloyd comments history information knowledge undertsanding change accuracy time memory legibility infospace infospaceshttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:1ebe597e28c2/Legible maps of places and infospaces (with tweets) · rogre · Storify2013-08-10T02:15:43+00:00
http://storify.com/rogre/legible-maps-of-places-and-infospaces
robertogrecointernet knowledge legibility maps mapping infomapping infospaces allentan lukeneff charlieloyd comments savasahelisingh osm openstreetmap history change cities urban urbanism infospace memory memories cv googlemaps wikipedia 2013 storify timehttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c4c4cd636726/Platforms of Visibility: Exploring legibility through the contemporary Latin American city on Vimeo2013-07-18T03:44:51+00:00
https://vimeo.com/66418746
robertogrecospatiotemporality urban urbanism latinamerica quito medellin caracas ecuador venezuela colombia cities socialmedia visualization mapping maps architecture emmettruxes scale boundaries flows networks adjacency legibility urbanlegibility data via:sha video visibility planning medellínhttps://pinboard.in/https://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:c525fea21ae7/A Big Little Idea Called Legibility2011-08-17T19:47:37+00:00
http://www.ribbonfarm.com/2010/07/26/a-big-little-idea-called-legibility/
robertogrecopolitics history philosophy problemsolving imperialism colonialism jamescscott design architecture urbanplanning urbanism nomads nomadism gypsies pastoralists mainstream radicals radicalism 2011 venkateshrao legibility illegiblepeople illegibles stevenjohnson patternmaking patterns patternrecognition complexity unschooling deschooling utopianthinking india high-modenism lecorbusier forests brasilia bauhaus control decolonization power nicholasdirks rome edwardgibbon civilization authoritarianism authoritarianhigh-modernism elephantpaths desirelines anarchism organizations illegibility highmodernism utopia governance simplification measurement quantification brasíliahttps://pinboard.in/u:robertogreco/b:605dba5af0b2/