Tag: failure

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Health Mental Health Personal Growth Work

Assuming no change is an option

Replied to The devil you know | everything changes by Mandy Brown (everything changes)

I had spent months chewing on the various dangers and risks of each step I could take, and had not at all considered the dangers and risks of staying put.

I can see now that I was, in fact, making several mistakes. Principal among them was that I considered no change at all to be a viable option. It wasn’t, and not only because the present circumstances were untenable, but also because they were not static.

The second, related, error was that I assumed that all the risk was in moving, that by definition staying put was the prudent option.

Continue reading “Assuming no change is an option”
Categories
Art and Design Personal Growth Technology

Defined by failures

“Whatever you now find weird, ugly, uncomfortable and nasty about a new medium will surely become its signature. CD distortion, the jitteriness of digital video, the crap sound of 8-bit – all of these will be cherished and emulated as soon as they can be avoided. It’s the sound of failure: so much modern art is the sound of things going out of control, of a medium pushing to its limits and breaking apart. The distorted guitar sound is the sound of something too loud for the medium supposed to carry it. The blues singer with the cracked voice is the sound of an emotional cry too powerful for the throat that releases it.

— Brian Eno

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Seeing the strings attached by Austin Kleon

That bit about the strings the signs of the human hand made me think about the way AI blends images together — you can’t see the seams!

The seams are what is so good to me about collage. The seams show the different origins of the material. They tell me that a human made it.

And to a certain extent it’s true for all the art I like: the imperfections…

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“Artists; you do know, don’t you, That your mistakes are your style.”
—Jerry Saltz

(via Austin Kleon)

Categories
Getting Shit Done Personal Growth

The fears that hold us back

Bookmarked THE 7 FEARS THAT HOLD US BACK FROM JOY (aestheticsofjoy.com)

I began to notice that they all had one thing in common: fear.

The fear that I wouldn’t get it “right.”

The fear that I was lazy or self-indulgent.

The fear that I would embarrass myself.

These fears created an inner conflict: I would feel pulled toward joy, and then yanked back by the fear.

What might happen if my best-case scenario came true?

Categories
Health

4% of the population, 30% of the deaths

Liked

jUsT a CoLd 🤪

Categories
Society The Internet

Listened to Cory Doctorow interview

Listened Cory Doctorow on The Wondrous World of the Early Internet & How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism from currentaffairs.simplecast.com

43:3044:11

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Cory Doctorow on The Wondrous World of the Early Internet & How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism
JULY 31ST, 2022 | 44:11 | E161

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EPISODE NOTES
Pioneering blogger and science fiction writer Cory Doctorow has been an activist for online freedom since the early days of the history of the internet. He has long been one of the major voices opposing restrictive copyright and corporate domination, and a visionary defending a pluralistic online world where eccentricity and individuality are allowed to flourish. In books like Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright and the Future of the Future (which, like all of his books, is available in full for free), Doctorow has shown what an internet created by the people, unconstrained by intellectual property law, Digital Rights Management, and monopolistic corporate gatekeeping, could be like.

In this conversation, Doctorow joins to discuss the importance of a democratic internet, and his recent book How To Destroy Surveillance Capitalism, which argues that many people misidentify the main problem with what is called “surveillance capitalism,” assuming that the problem is that corporations are amassing to manipulate us the power through intrusive collection of Big Data. In fact, Doctorow argues, the problem is less about a particular thing these corporations can do to us and more about the fact that monopolistic tech companies are in control in the first place. This has important implications, because it means that we cannot just regulate what companies do with our data, we have to fundamentally redistribute power over the internet. In this conversation, we talk about how Wikipedia provides an alternative vision for a participatory internet where the rules are set by users and there is oversight over governance. We do not need better and more benevolent Zuckerbergs. We need what Doctorow calls the pluralistic internet.

“Hegemonic internet” today versus pluralistic internet

Internet start aligned with cessation of antitrust enforcement – 1982 AT&T

(Cough, current news: Penguin – Simon & Schuster merger court case)

Today we keep talking about how to make “the lord of the manor” better rather than how to get rid of them

What is the failure mode? <– way to evaluate platforms and systems

Cultural flattening? (versus quirkiness of early internet)

Formalism of internet e.g. TikTok duet format = imposed by platform

Expansive opportunity of ebook format — can be 3 or 1000 pages — Wikipedia has built-in

Formal adventurism / playfulness e.g. “slow TV”

Used to have consentual formalism — community defined rather than platform/ corporate

–> more editorial freedom, less creative freedom

Can you give meaningful consent if you can’t leave a platform (because there’s nowhere else to be with other people)?

Control of platforms is more important issue than collecting our data because they can control our discourse, the information we receive (e.g. Google Answers) and what we can use (e.g. iOS app store)

Band together against monopoly across industries — tech not the only area, though a place to start

Categories
Health Political Commentary Society

The Great Surrender on COVID

Liked The Great Surrender: How We Gave Up And Let COVID Win by Chuck Wendig (Chuck Wendig: Terribleminds)

I feel like I’ve lost my goddamn mind…our numbers are higher than they’ve ever been, in most cases not just by a hair’s breadth, but often by two, three, even four times their previous peaks…we are doing less now to mitigate cases than ever before.

It’s a relief to see someone else thinking that the world is going crazy to just give up on a disease that gives anywhere from 10-77% of people chronic illness – especially in a country that shits on disabled people (Exhibit A, the CDC Director saying oh the people who are dying were already sick, F U disabled people) (also can we stop diminishing comorbidities, which like a ton of Americans actually have when you consider they’re common things like depression and diabetes and heart disease and obesity – it’s like an ostrich in the sand invincibility mentality with the “it’s other people dying I’m not sick I just have all the common American health problems that’s not *sick* sick”)

My coworkers say they want to get it to get it over with. I’m just not ready to risk getting a disease that trashes my brain (with mild sickness (pre-pub)) and has a good shot of disabling me before I have to!!! Even the WHO says it’s too early to treat it as endemic.

Categories
Getting Shit Done

Fail Small, Not Big

Quoted

“Instead of feeling that you’ve blown the day and thinking, “I’ll get back on track tomorrow,” try thinking of each day as a set of four quarters: morning, midday, afternoon, evening. If you blow one quarter, you get back on track for the next quarter.

Fail small, not big.”

— Gretchen Rubin

Via James Clear.

Categories
Future Building

Trading Activism for Personal Action

Quoted Knitting at the end of the world – Austin Kleon (Austin Kleon)

George Orwell on the importance of hobbies in times of political turmoil.

“Only two ways of reacting to the current crisis of nature were offered. On the one hand, there was ‘fighting’. This fighting was to be aimed at the ‘elite’ that was destroying the planet – oil companies, politicians, corporate leaders, the rich. On the other hand, there was ‘giving up’. Giving up meant not fighting. It meant running away from a necessary battle. It meant being selfish. It meant ‘doing nothing’, and letting the planet go to hell.

 

All of this hinged on a narrow definition of what doing something involved, and what action meant. It seemed to suggest that action must be something grand and global and gestural. Small actions were not actions at all: if you couldn’t ‘change the world’ there seemed little point in changing anything.”

— Paul Kingsnorth, via Austin Kleon

This discussion and diminishment of personal, direct action arises often in the environmental field. We need systemic change but I still feel there is value in living in accordance with your values and being cognizant of the resources you personally use, even if the system makes it hard to reduce that and your individual contributions are a pittance compared to corporate impacts. But especially right now when we’re basically holding back the floodwaters and can’t make progress with a hostile government, there’s no sense in giving up entirely.

Or maybe this is appealing to me because I can do something and feel like I’ve accomplished something, which excuses me from fighting the big fight.

Categories
Entrepreneurship Getting Shit Done

Invisible Failure

Quoted Back in the tube (Seth’s Blog)

There are two kinds of mistakes. One is the sort where failure is not noticeable because failure means that you didn’t engage with an audience. If you do an art show and no one comes, no one …

“One is the sort where failure is not noticeable because failure means that you didn’t engage with an audience. If you do an art show and no one comes, no one realizes that your art show failed.”
— Seth Godin

Well, this hits close to home.