dnvdk - Tumblr blog

[dnvdk]

All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace

[dnvdk]

Ethics, entrepreneurship, progress and pacifism Three images, two situations, simultaneously printed in today's newspaper. One of a Dutch soldier named Ewout (28) that perished while training in Germany, an accident that has 'stirred the peace of his local community'. The other two are joined at the hip as they are of outgoing/resigned Dutch defense minister Kajsa Ollongren visiting President Zelensky of Ukraine and one of the tech entrepreneurs in her delegation; Maurits Korthals Altes, founder of Avalon AI. This company specializes in robotic autonomous systems for persistent reconnaissance and has a background at Delft Technical University. In the video from last year Maurits explains in high detail why these unmanned ground- and aerial vehicles with advanced AI are so important: they will save lives as the fleet of systems will form a modern day equivalent to the 'circle the wagon' trope. Or in his own words; "Who can have anything against a solution like this?" explaining how all of this would remain fiction if not for their start-up to slay these problems and generate autonomous safety systems. Little more than a year later and that protective, defensive system is hailed as the new breakthrough to help Ukraine defeat Russia with drones that can detect enemy combatants and guide heavy artillery to where it will do the most damage. The shit end of that stick is off course the increase in casualties on the Russian side; boys and men like Ewout (28), sent to a battlefield far away from their loved ones. And this cynical cycle just continues, speeds up, worsens and is on a certain trajectory to escalate to a point of no return. Politicians resemble Silicon Valley executives with slick presentations and a blind trust in innovation while that good 'ol diplomacy lost all traction if it ever had any. The fact that the EU has fully and completely merged with NATO without acknowledging the glaringly obvious elephant in the room - being that the largest NATO partner not residing on the continent and having hardly any skin at all in this game. While geopolitically, the US has an obvious incentive to destabilize one of its two economic rivals all while humming the old Cold War tune of the danger of the Soviet Union. Which brings the circle back to today's news media. Unaware of its own ignorance it simultaneously delivers empathy porn for 'someone who could have been your next door neighbor' while presenting the slick, engineer-enabled death cult propaganda that resonates with this joke of a society's obsession with gadgets. I'm not here to name names and take sides, the narrative that Russia was provoked by decades of moving NATO-goalposts is quite simple to agree with but clearly a similar cynicism is projected through the lens of a different ideology on that side too. Russia will never be defeated by Ukraine alone, is far too rich in natural resources to lose any of their allies and with a compensation of about 20 year salaries for every deceased soldier, the local population is also not as adversed to the war as could be expected. Threatening with nuclear strikes still seems like a standard geopolitical tool from the playbook and mutually assured destruction still is a surprisingly effective system but the war pigs smell blood and it will run, one way or another. And newspapers and TV broadcasts only fuel this fire by endlessly regurgitating talking points of governments without any critical reflection on what is being said. It all feels very much like that fourth turning but the amount of systems that need to grind to a halt to get over this hurdle and move us as civilizations into the next phase is almost unimaginable. Carry on I guess.

[dnvdk]

Shareholderfeudalism I've been thinking about the term technofeudalism - as described by Yannis Varoufakis - a lot lately, especially in regards to the media stronghold and the societal implications of very small number of platform news and media get funneled through. The image above is not directly related, but adjacent in ethics and morality. It was placed with an article in a local news site about shoplifting in supermarkets and a newly implemented 'two strikes and your out' rule after which the shoplifter can't shop at that supermarket in the entire region. At face value the issue seems clear;

Shoplifting is illegal and a crime and the supermarkets are making enormous losses through these criminal activities, therefore they have all the right to educate their consumers about the risks of illegal behavior.

There is however, an interesting counter narrative that is as true. In the last decade unemployment nearly vanished statistically but households struggle because the pay in relation to the inflation is out of control. Where the solution for the crisis of 2008 was found in austerity - an incredibly cynical process that cut government funding for basic necessities - this time around it is less visible. Let there be no mistake; we are currently experiencing a similar wave of austerity but the mechanics are more refined and purely financial. The form it takes however is one of optimism - employment is at a record high and governments are doing very well financially. The elephant in the room however is the costs that the covid measurements put on the financial system of the West. The costs were clearly enormous since both income dropped and costs went up. It was however never a topic conversation as it was a crisis that needed an intervention and 'the money printer went prrrr', as the meme goes. The costs of these decisions were obviously astronomical though and the main method of alleviating this burden - and more importantly, getting back control over government finances and spending - is by diluting the value of the currency even further. Kick the can down the road. Pray and delay. Whether it will burst or not is not clear but the fact that many politicians from western governments decided to leave office in the lasts few months could be an indication. And a good old global war is helpful in taking our collective mind of this issue too. Okay so back to the image with the Albert Heijn cardboard-cutout-panopticon. It is taken in a 'self scan area' where customer take on the role of employees. This has been my gut reaction to these things from day one; a dystopian area where, to the plings-and-bleeps that would have suited a Black Mirror episode, the consumer is loaded with the responsibility of an employee - making that employee redundant in the process. And the customer is happy because you remove multiple interactions from their life; no queueing, no talking, no handing over cash. Just wear you noise cancelling headphones and carry on. And then - groceries got expensive. Really expensive. Twice as expensive in a little over a year. We were told it was because of the conflict in Ukraine raw materials and energy became more expensive and everything cascaded from that. But that would or could have been the case in a normal economy. We are currently experiencing something closer to hyperinflation. And the consequences for the average family are dire. Getting your children fed, warm and clean used to be the bare minimum of what could be expected in a western country and now it is no longer a given. And since all of this is complex and opaque, the immigrant gets blamed for taking the houses and stealing the jobs and the far right gains more and more momentum. All in the name of capitalism and to not scare the shareholders. So here we are; people steal at a supermarket because they can no longer afford the groceries and they get the opportunity because the shareholders of that supermarket though cashiers were to expensive. And then that supermarket shows affiliation with one of the two institutions that have a violence monopoly to scare them straight.

[dnvdk]

Google Maps showed this beautiful in-between moment in time where Peter Struycken's Blauwe Golven (blue waves) is renovated. The work is just in front of my office and for the longest time I didn't fully understand why all the effort to replace one set of blue and white bricks for another.

It turns out the artwork in public space was always meant to be used as a parking space but was never really well implemented in the surrounding infrastructure and the parking functionality always felt as an after thought. When recently a plan arose to remove the Blue Waves in favor of a green corridor, the artist and others protested and got what they wanted; an infrastructure optimized version of the work. Check out the added width to the blue lines - these are now in line with a standard parking spot.

[dnvdk]

Watching Fargo season 5 and seeing Ole Munch channeling the modern day equivalent of Zeno of Citium. Gem of a stoic quote: "You don't yell at the boulder for being a rock."

[dnvdk]

Buckle up, interesting times ahead.

[dnvdk]

Driving Distances

Conscious constraints of mobility. Partially inspired by Rinus van de Velde who limits the distance he allows himself to travel to 1250 kilometers and personally contemplating the kind of restriction that would feel optimal. In a world and life of constant and ever increasing options and parallel use of resources I'm interested in finding parameters that would provide a new perspective on freedom of movement, travel, holiday, exploration. Both from a professional as personal perspective, a hard cap to your options feels simultaneously daunting and refreshing. Through the use of mapdevelopers.com I plotted circles ranging from 500 to 2250 kilometers in 250km increments starting from my house. It is interesting to immediately experience the limit of 500km being too restrictive for the rest of my life but would be fine for a period of a year or two. 2250km gets me to Moskow, Athena, Istanbul, Casablanca, Reykjavik and Hammerfest which spans the entirety of the European experience and feels to be more than sufficient to commit to. Will experiment with this in years to come.

[dnvdk]

Bomb-by-numbers as methodology to whitewash another wave catastrophes. Cynical, methodical genocide under false pretences.

[dnvdk]

Ever since reading Against Empathy by Paul Bloom I'm finely tuned for moments and situations where empathy seems to make sense but on second inspection is misplaced, exaggerated, performative, toxic or part of an orthopraxy where the goal is to collectively chime in on a certain topic. In the last couple of years I have begun to notice an even more harsh call to and cry for placing oneself in the shoes of another and feeling their pain as if it was your own. And without slipping into an act of intergenerational polarization, it appeared to me that culture, and specifically in which decade that culture formed someone, seemed to be of importance. Almost by happenstance I searched for the term 'weaponized empathy' as a superlative of toxic empathy and my first hit was a short visual essay by Elliott Earls on his channel Studio Practice. In it he draws parallels with youth/pop-culture thoughout the last few decades that resonate with me personally and it was a perfect reminder of the great work and thoughts of David Foster Wallace - whose New Sincerity provided a framework where objective analysis could coexist with heartfelt emotions. A shift from the cool, ironic, nihilistic and cynical post-modernism. In the ZDF interview with David Foster Wallace it is interesting to see him point to TV and radio as sources for distraction and weaponization and through that lens it is even more important to understand the way in which social media operates. It truly is no holds barred media.

[dnvdk]

Zooming in - zooming out

[dnvdk]

Hell

[dnvdk]

Debadging a fleet of airplanes right before invasion. Plausible deniability.

[dnvdk]

The more I try to read and learn about the geopolitical and historical context of Israel/Palestine the more dispirited I get as it becomes clear that once scrambled into an omelette, it is impossible to split it into two eggs again. The idea of a two state solution is probably only feasible in the long term with an actual second state. When the process to establish the state over 100 years ago was started 'A land without people for a people without a land' had only one caveat; the land wasn't without people. And while Israel, Juda and Palestine go back literally thousands of years - it seems obvious that a radical rethink is in order. Coming from a country with the largest artificial island in the world (the ±1000m2 Flevopolder in The Netherlands) the mediterranean sea provides space for one of two potential synthetic states. Islandrael is an artificial island between Cyprus and Crete about 120 kilometers off the coast of Turkey. Being an island state in the middle of the mediterranean provides the added security of the water it is being surrounded by. Palestinsula is a synthetic peninsula off the coast of Cairo/Egypt where a mirror image of the current Israel could be created as a truly free Palestine. *All of this is obviously highly speculative from multiple perspectives and I in no way aim to trivialize the issue. The Zuiderzee where the Dutch formed the Flevopolder was only 5 meters deep where the mediterranean is between 300 and a 1000 times deeper. That being said, an engineering project of biblical proportions might just be the only realistic incentive to counter the prospect of a decade long war so view it as a science fiction proposal.

[dnvdk]

😍

[dnvdk]

Nate Hagens is host of the postcast The Great Simplification and has a very knowledgeable view on the level of systems thinking required for the coming phase of humanity after energy abundance. He refers to it as 'energy blindness' with which he means the lack of understanding in the contemporary paradigm about the sheer density of energy in fossil fuel as opposed to human and animal strength and the economic abundance that we've had since. Aligns really well with, and is inspiring to, my longer running ampliative.systems project that also investigates the immense vacant space once economic growth is no longer a certainty. Really clear 20 minute video segment for VPRO's Tegenlicht, well worth watching!

[dnvdk]

Very interesting 90-minute talk around the nuts and bolts of inequality in a rigged economic system. Gary Stevenson makes a compelling case for a revolution from the perspective of a financial trader. His advice to organize and become political around class as the only feasible antidote to the spiraling momentum of the rich is crystal clear.

[dnvdk]

Richard Proenneke lived in his self-built cabin from 1969 to 1999 and documented the process of building and living in nature both by himself and a filmmaker. Beautiful example of alternative living and extreme simplicity while showing his immense knowledge and ingenuity. Special mention of the hand-build bear cache. Full film only available on DVD (!) but the two samples of each edition are well worth it. Part 1 and Part 2. Edit: the YouTube channel of the filmmaker Bob Swerer shows a couple more clips that are equally compelling. See here.