boost: Thoughtful Essays Elsewhere

[jesse_the_k]

Kitty O’Meara Captures the Possibility in the Time of Pandemic

IN THE TIME OF PANDEMIC

And the people stayed home. And they read books, and listened, and rested, and exercised, and made art, and played games, and learned new ways of being, and were still. And they listened more deeply. Some meditated, some prayed, some danced. Some met their shadows. And the people began to think differently.

And the people healed. And, in the absence of people living in ignorant, dangerous, mindless, and heartless ways, the earth began to heal.

And when the danger passed, and the people joined together again, they grieved their losses, and made new choices, and dreamed new images, and created new ways to live, and they healed the earth fully, as they had been healed.

please share this one widely! https://is.gd/OMearaHopeful
original: https://the-daily-round.com/2020/03/16/in-the-time-of-pandemic/

That’s from sonia’s recent links post full of non-terrifying COVID-related thoughts and photos: https://sonia.dreamwidth.org/247063.html

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Robin Sloan on Making Art Amidst Chaos

I often read the monthly email newsletter from Robin Sloan, a West Coast creative of a type made familiar to me by the Whole Earth Catalog/Co-Evolution Quarterly.

This week, I found his exhortation to keep safe and make art reassuring:

I don’t like the “breathless creative exhortation” genre any more than you do, but, I have spared you for enough years that I think I’ve stored up some credit: which I will now spend.

We’re entering a stretch during which no subject, no task, other than this pandemic and its prevention will seem to “matter,” and I am here to insist, as you contemplate the next level of the video game you were building, the next stitch in the fanny pack you were designing, the next edition of the newsletter you just started:

It matters.

The diagnostic tool is straightforward: Do you want every glorious weirdo you’ve ever followed to morph into the same obsessive faux public health expert? YOU DO NOT!

I’m writing this as much to myself as to you.

Every calamity fractures the world, opens new seams: many economic, some political, still others aesthetic.

In 1816, the gloomy “Year Without a Summer,” Mary Shelley stayed indoors at a lakeside hotel; not quarantine, but maybe quarantine-adjacent. There, bored and haunted, she conceived the story that would grow into her novel Frankenstein, the foundation stone of the genre we now call science fiction.

It’s moderately annoying when people invoke work like that, because it feels like the implication is, if you’re not writing Frankenstein what are you even DOING? That’s not what I mean. It’s just that the big, bright examples help us see it clearly: toil in the shadow of calamity will have its day.

Toil in the shadow of calamity WILL have its day.

A crack in everything; that’s how the art gets in.

full post: https://www.robinsloan.com/newsletter/march-2020/

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Payal Arora explores what internet access will mean for the folks who don’t have it now. Relevant because internet access may very well prevent revolutions from happening during this unstable time.

The biggest myths about the next billion internet users

I have been working as a researcher and as a liaison for aid agencies for more than a decade in India, Brazil, and in recent years in, South Africa and Namibia. I was very much part of the “doing good” tribe. However, since early 2000, I encountered a pattern of usage among low-income young people that didn’t quite align with the pervasive tech evangelism

The shocking result from years of studying how the global poor engage with new applications is that they are like us.

They are not extraordinarily disciplined or significantly virtuous or productive with these digital resources. They want what we want: connection, entertainment, fun. If anything, they spend disproportionately more time on this leisure than we do. A significant amount of their monthly income gets diverted to their data plans, so, for instance, a boy can at last chat up a girl on Facebook. While people in wealthy nations spend about 2% of their monthly income on data, this can go as high as 5% among people in low-income countries. This should not be surprising. Many of these young people live in deeply conservative societies where arranged marriages are the norm. WhatsApp and Facebook double as Tinder and Grindr as young people go about hunting for the possibility of romance.

[… snip …]

We must not forget that behind all this, they are inherently teenagers with the deep need to develop their identities.

Full post https://qz.com/1669754/tech-companies-misunderstand-the-next-billion-internet-users/