Elsewhat

Listening to the audiobook for Sand Talk, How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World by Tyson Yunkaporta, I came across this passage which discusses a sort of spirituality which resonated with me:

There are at least four parts to your spirit, from an Aboriginal point of view, and this shadow is only one of them. Your highest self may be what they call the “super ego” in psychology is your big spirit, and it goes back to sky camp when you die. …

Your shadow spirit is that part of you that wants things you don’t need and makes you think you’re better than other people and above the land, and it takes all the other parts of your spirit to hold it in check. If the rest of your spirit is not clear and in balance, it gets away from you, causing conflict and destruction. You gossip behind people’s backs, spread uncertainty, deliver judgements, or upset people, take more than you need, and accumulate goods without sharing. It makes you a competitor instead of a human being. But only when it’s out of balance. If it is checked by the other parts of you, it becomes a stable ego that drives you to act upon the world in perfect ways. You don’t know what you’re going to do, but you’re going to have to do it in a way you’re You need to believe in ghosts to balance spirit and live the right way in this world. You can use any metaphor you like. For example, ego, id, superego, persona. Frontal lobe, monkey brain, neocortex, and lizard brain. Athos, Porthos, Aramis, and d’Artagnon. Harry, Ron, Hermione, and Malfoy. Monkey spirit, pig spirit, fish spirit and tripataka. Matthew, Mark, Luke and John. Whatever stories your cultural experience offers you, you can still perceive spirit through metaphor and bring it into balance to step into your designated role as a custodian of reality.

This idea of accessing spirituality through metaphor really resonated with me.

This is a bit of a touchy subject, but one that is important to discuss, especially considering the disastrous results of the recent U.S. election. Media analysis show On The Media reran an episode of theirs entitled ‘Why Men and Boys are Struggling‘, which features an interview between host Micah Loewinger and author Richard Reeves:

Micah Loewinger: You write about how many advised you against writing this book. I also want to acknowledge the cognitive dissonance of the thesis and the book that some listeners might identify, which is that men and boys are struggling at a time when men still very much run our society. There are many ways you could quantify this. There are three times as many men in Congress than women, less than 10% of the Fortune 500 companies are run by women, and casual misogyny is pervasive throughout our culture.

…

Richard Reeves: The way you ask the question depends on where you look. If you look at the apex of our society, it’s absolutely true that there’s still a long way to go. I would say, especially in the US in terms of female representation in politics, for example, and in boardrooms and in other areas of society.

If we look further down, then we see a very, very different picture. For working-class men, for black boys and men, those with less economic power, there’s a very different story. It can simultaneously be true that men at the top of the distribution are doing better on many fronts, including in terms of earnings. It can also be true that most American men are earning less today than most American men did in 1979. This is very much a class and a race story.

…

In 1972 when Title IX was passed to support women and girls in education, men were about 13 percentage points more likely to get a four-year college degree. Today, women are 15 percentage points more likely than men to get a four-year college degree. There’s been this huge overtaking in education. We also see that in high school, where girls account for 2/3 of the top 10% of students ranked by GPA

Much like the Democrats running their recent presidential campaign on the premise that “the economy is doing great”, while ignoring the fact that most of the middle class is struggling with housing and food costs, I think these issues are important to at least address.

Listen to the whole episode →

From the dearly departed XOXO festival, which I sadly was never able to attend. Erin Kissane talks about the degradation of the social internet and her own role in the remarkable Covid Tracking Project.

The state of news media in Canada, and elsewhere, is certainly not at a good place. Newsrooms are closing, or contracting across the country. A Canadian law designed to get social media companies to share part of their revenue with news outlets backfired spectacularly when Facebook decided to remove news outlets from all of their feeds rather than share their ample profits with them.

I would never have predicted what would happen next. Facebook banishing news made an already dire news vacuum even worse. In the small prairie city of Regina, a literal dumpster company with a penchant for sharing local news on their social media accounts has stepped into the void, and has become one of the biggest sources of local news in the city. The company has amassed tens of thousands of followers for their

In writing this post, I’ve rewritten the same basic joke about media these days being ‘trash’ or ‘a dumpster fire’ over and over, but honestly it’s more exasperating than funny.

Read More (and listen to the story in Podcast form) at Canadaland →

the most recent episode of Ezra Klein featured author Zadie Smith, who gave a summary of social media and phones which has been bouncing around my head since I heard it:

the facts of this technology is that it was designed as and is intended to be a behaviour modification system. That is the right term for it … the phone tells me exactly what to think about, where to think about it and often how to think about it, and it’s not even to me the content of those thoughts, like there’s a lot of emphasis put on the kind of politics to express on these platforms to the right or to the left. To me, it’s the structure. It’s not the content of what’s on them. It’s that it’s structured in a certain way. That an argument is this long that there are two sides to every debate that they must be in fierce contest with each other is actually structuring the way you think about thought…

I don’t think any one of my age who knows anyone they knew in 2008 thinks that that person has not been seriously modified. In many different directions but the fundamental modification is the same, and that’s okay, all mediums modify you. Books modify you, TV modifies you, radio modifies you, the social life of a 16th century village modifies you, but the question becomes who do you want to be modified by and to what degree? That’s my only question, and when I look at the people who have designed these things, what they want, what their aims are, what they think a human being is or should be…This machinery is not worthy of them. That’s the best way I can put it, and I speak of someone who grew up as an entirely TV addicted human. I love TV. I love reading. Modification is my bread and butter, and when the internet came, I was like, “Hallelujah. Finally, we’ve got a medium which isn’t made by the man or centralized. We’re just going to be like talking to each other, hanging out with each other. It’s going to be amazing.” That is not the internet that we have. That is not what occurred.

Find the whole episode here →

Kevin Kelly‘s Excellent Advice for Living: Wisdom I Wished I’d Known Earlier, was a perfect quick rainy day cottage read. It’s a collection of advice which the author has gathered in their 70-plus years on earth. Some are pithy aphorisms, like ‘If someone is trying to convince you it’s not a pyramid scheme, it’s a pyramid scheme.’ Very true.

Though generally pithy and easy to digest, the chunks of advice sometimes come a little longer, like this (still brief) thought about creativity:

Seperate the processes of creating from improving. You can’t write and edit, or sculpt and polish, or make and analyze at the same time. If you do, the editor stops the creator. While you invent, don’t select. While you sketch, don’t inspect. While you write the first draft, don’t reflect. At the start, the creator mind must be unleashed from judgement.

Get the Book →

A fascinating and risqué new podcast from the creators of Canadaland. Some viewer discretion advised.

From gay swans to self-pleasuring elephants and amorous giraffes, they learn how scientists have been understanding and misunderstanding queerness in nature for centuries. And they introduce us to a bold researcher in the 1990’s who helped us see nature for what it is – queer as fuck.

Learn More →

As someone who is quite solidly anti-social media (this blog is the closest I come to taking part in social media), this episode of the Your Undivided Attention podcast is a sobering listen. It’s an interview with writer Jonathan Haidt, where they particularly focus on the mental health crisis among Gen Z, the first generation who have grown up completely in the social media era. Notably, Zoomers have much higher rates of anxiety and depression.

It starts with a sobering detailing of a slow educational crisis starting with Ben Z (generally considered to be kids born from the mid/late 90’s into the early 2010’s):

…humans had a play-based childhood for millions of years because that’s what mammals do. All mammals play. They have to play to wire up their brains. But that play-based childhood began to fade out in the 1980s in the United States and it was gone by 2010, and that’s because right around 2010 is when the phone based childhood sweeps in…

…scores in math and reading and those were all fairly steady, and then all of a sudden, after 2012, they drop. So that’s international. Around the world, our young people are… not learning as much as they would have a few years before.

Find The Episode Here →

Synesthesia is a phenomenon where some people experience their senses intermixing with each other. They might see sounds, or hear sights, or even physically feel words. It’s a mental condition apparently attributed to many great artists, from Vincent Van Gogh to Billie Eilish to allegedly even Beyonce.

I have always wanted to experience synesthesia myself, but I always assumed it would be impossible. Certain pieces of art can give me a fleeting sensation of it—Van Gogh’s paintings and Kanye’s 808s & Heartbreak come to mind. Visuals at a concert, when done well, can give a feeling of seeing the music. But that’s a sort of inferred collective synesthesia, where I can sense the impact of it on the work, but I don’t really get to experience it as someone with the condition would.

It occurred to me recently that augmented reality headsets like Apple’s Vision Pro, along with generative AI, could provide the technology to do a reasonable real-time synesthesia simulator. I’m adding it to the list of projects I’d undertake if I had unlimited resources, but for now it’s just a thought experiment.

The Vision Pro, along with generative AI, would fail to reproduce all iterations of the condition, but it could hypothetically reproduce the following types of synesthesia:

• Grapheme Color Synesthesia, who see colours or shapes next to specific words or characters.
• Number Form, who see particular forms or shapes for some numbers.
• Chromesthesia, who sees sounds as colours or shapes.
• Ticker Tape, who see strings of words scroll underneath people as they talk.

Here are some art/tech projects which explore other aspects of synesthesia. Google’s Play a Kandinsky is beautiful, but is again an interpretation of an artist’s view.

The game Audiosurf matches audio to visuals in a synesthetic way. A seemingly defunct smartphone VR app seemingly tried to accomplish the same concept, though it glitches on my phone and hasn’t been updated in 6 years. There are some fascinating video visualizations of synesthesia, like this YouTube video of a violinist who sees notes as coloured shapes.

My version would be real time, and importantly, individualized. You would choose the type of synesthesia you wanted to recreate, or even the specific artist whose synesthesia you wanted to experience, and everything you saw and heard would be filtered to recreate the look and sound of that type.