#Futures

[neo--queen--serenity]

Play stupid games, win stupid prizes 🎲📱

[thecorruption-thespiralsversion]

TMP Stream Of Consciousness Theory

(Like, I'm forming it and I'm not sure where I'm headed here)

Spoilers All - TMP

So as I'm reading through a lot of Lena Post on here it's starting to strick at me. Her wording when she vaguely explained things to Gwen in EP 13, Futures.

Gwen asks if they're the bad guys.

Lena hesitates before answering "We are... Managing, the bad guys."

Unlike the The Magnus Institute they aren't collecting Statements, they're keeping track of them.

Lena doesn't see herself and her work as good, but a necessary evil.

This would make Lena NOT Jonah's Parallel, but Gertrude's.

To Gertrude, Michael was a necessary evil, but she hurt no more people than absolutely necessary.

Lena isn't willing to put her employees in unnecessary risk.

The Magnus Institute was destroyed and OIAR has something called The Magnus Protocol.

They're preventing the Dread Powers from taking hold. Be it Fear, Hunger, or Regret. They're making sure no one of them gets a real foothold into our world. And if one gets to close. Well, they have their last resort.

The Magnus Protocol

Non Vacillabimus

We Will Not Falter

[quasi-normalcy]

Anyways,the reason why we no longer have an agreed upon aesthetic of what the future should look like isn't because of apocalypticism; it's because modernism--which during the nineteenth and twentiety centuries, seemed utterly inexorable, like a train going in only one direction, foreclosing all other possibilities--is basically dead. Like, if you look at the stereotypical "future" in 20th century sci-fi, it was basically just the same thing that they were doing at the time, only Moreso. *Taller* skyscrapers! Personal *aircraft* instead of personal automobiles! Rockets to the moon, just like getting on a jumbo jet to Amsterdam! And anyway, we've reached the end of that--we're past even the Cyberpunk version of "what the future should look like"--and because there's no obvious "right" answer, no one can agree on what it should be.

Anyways, for my money,the future needs to look like a garden.

[fatehbaz]

Didn't wanna clog up your post, and these sources are more about relationships of time with space/place, but here's some stuff that I've encountered:

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“Temporal sovereignty”. Contemporary US/Australian claims over time-keeping. Reclaiming agency by operating on Indigenous/alternative time schedules. The importance of the “time revolution” in the Victorian era to Euro-American understandings of geology and deep past, precipitating nineteenth-century conquest of time. Mid-twentieth century understanding of “deep time” and its co-option by the Australian state. "Deep time dreaming".

Laura Rademaker. “60,000 Years is not forever: ‘time revolutions’ and Indigenous pasts.” Postcolonial Studies. September 2021.

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How "time is a form of enclosure". Checkpoints, "baroque processes to apply for permits to travel", fences, incapacity to change residences, and other "debilitating infrastructures" work to "turn able bodies into a range of disabled bodies" by "stretching time". This is a "slow death" and a simultaneous "slowing down of life" because "it takes so long to get anywhere" and "movement is suffocated". Thus "time itself is held hostage". This "suspended state" of anxiety and endless wait-times "wreaks multigenerational psychological and physical havoc". "Checkpoints ensure one is never sure of reaching work on time. Fear of not getting to work then adds to the labor of getting to work [...]. Bodies in line at checkpoints [...] [experience] the fractalizing of the emotive, cognitive, physiological capacities" through a "constant state of uncertainty". "The cordoning of time through space contributes to an overall 'lack of jurisdiction over the functions of one's own senses' [...] endemic to the operation of colonial rule". This "extraction of time" produces a "depleted" and tired person "beholden to the logistics" of administrative apparatuses, community suffers and "communing is thrawted".

Jabir K. Puar. "Spatial debilities: Slow Life and Carceral Capitalism [...]." South Atlantic Quarterly 120. April 2021.

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The "apocalyptic temporality" that presumes extinction. Indigenous Polynesian/Pacific perceptions and ways of being "destabilize the colonial present" and also "transfigure the past" by "contesting linear and teleological Western time". Indigenous "ontologies of cyclical temporality or inhabitation of heterogenous time". How United States and Europe colonized Oceania for weapons testing and conquest of tropical Edens while rendering local Indigenous people "ungrievable" and "without future". "Pacific time is a layering of oral and somatic memory". Instead of accepting an apocalyptic future or doomsday or nightmare, assert the possibility of a livable future, in spite of "Western temporal closures".

Rebecca Oh. “Making Time: Pacific Futures in Kiribati’s Migration with Dignity, Kathy Jetnil-Kijiner’s Iep Jaltok, and Keri Hume’s Stonefish.” MFS Modern Fiction Studies. Winter 2020.

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Colonial "space-time homogenization". The experience of "homogenous, empty time". Orientalist "time lag" and the naturalization of a supposed East-West hemispheric divide. Late Victorian imperial conceptions of temporality. The British establishment of the Greenwich meridian and International Date Line. The influence of British imperial seafaring and cartography on the establishment of time and on European/US feelings towards the Pacific Ocean. How the origin of English science fiction literature, space travel aspirations, and time travel narratives coincided with the Yellow Peril and xenophobia targeting East Asia.

Timothy J. Yamamura. "Fictions of Science, American Orientalism, and the Alien/Asian of Percival Lowell". Dis-Orienting Planets: Racial Representation of Asia in Science Fiction. 2017.

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Imprisonment as time-control. Here “the question of the past the present and the future indeed time itself looms” especially around the prisoner. “The law renders punishment in units of time”, taking away a the right to a future. There are alternative worlds, many of them, which have been practiced and brought into being, which colonization tried to obscure. There is “a whole anthropology of people without future embedded in the assumptions that justify mass imprisonment as poverty management”. "The prison’s logic exterminates time as we know it”. In prison, bodies have been alienated from time and history ... the punishment seems endless ... to “achieve a measure of agency and possibility it is necessary to redeem time”, to refuse the doom, fated to a life of abandonment.

Avery Gordon. “Some Thoughts on Haunting and Futurity.” borderlands. 2011.

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Bursting the Limits of Time: The Reconstruction of Geohistory in the Age of Revolution (Martin J.S. Rudwick, 2010) explores how the advent of European sciences like geology, preceding the "time revolution" when Europeans experienced revelations about the scale of "deep time", happened alongside and after the Haitian Revolution and other abolitionist movements. French, German, and British naturalists translated the explosion of "new" scientific knowledge from the colonies, so that the metropolitan European audience became a market for historical and scientific "narratives" about how "nature" and time functioned.

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Prartik Chakrabarti's writing on time, temporality, and "the deep past" as British imperial concepts built in conversation with colonial encounters with South Asia. (British Empire reaching such heights in the middle of the nineteenth century at the same time that the newly professionalized sciences of geology were providing revelations about the previously unknown vast scale of "deep time". New colonial anthropology/ethnology also presumed to connect this "primitive" past with "primitive" people.)

See Chakrabarti's "Gondwana and the Politics of Deep Past". Past & Present. 2019.

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We must witness and consider "multiple space-times" to understand how "unfree labour" of plantations was "foundational" to contemporary work, movement, subjugation, health, etc. We must "trace the geneaology of contemporary sovereign institutions of terror, discipline and segregation" [workplaces, imperial/colonial nations, factories, mines, etc.] back in time to plantations. How "the [plantation] estate hierarchy survives in post-plantation" times and places, with the plantation "being a major blueprint of socialization into [contemporary] work". The plantation was "a laboratory for [...] migration regulation in subsequent epochs" that practiced methods of racializing and criminalizing.

Irene Peano, Marta Macedo, and Colette Le Petitcorps. "Introduction: Viewing Plantations at the Intersection of Political Ecologies and Multiple Space-Times". Global Plantations in the Modern World: Sovereignties, Ecologies, Afterlives. 2023.

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“Slow life” and the relationship between “settler colonialism, carceral capitalism, and the modulation of ... registers of time,” including “historical time, the stealing of time through the expansion of labor time, ... and the cordoning off of space through time”. For example, as in occupied zones or at border checkpoints, “the cordoning off of space through time” includes physical architecture like fences and customs, obstacles that impede movement and rhythm, so that “nothing ever happens on time” and there is “a stretching of time”. All the wasted time spent in line, showing papers, waiting for confirmation, etc. “is not a by-product of surveillance, it is the point of surveillance”. Such that “uncertainty becomes a primary affective orientation ... flesh as felt” with a racializing effect“. "This is a biopolitics conditioned through pure capacitation and its metrics”:

Jasbir Puar. In: “Mass Debilitation and Algorithmic Governance” by Ezekiel Dixon-Roman and Jasbir Puar. e-flux Journal Issue #123. December 2021.

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"Starfish time". Indigenous Australian/Aboriginal perceptions of time and "attending to more-than-human agencies of time". Acknowledging the timescales of entire ecosystems, as part of multispecies relationships, a "transcorporeal collaboration". Cyclical time vs linear time. Contrasting timescales experienced by insects that only live a few days and creatures that live for decades. "Starfish may seem to be still" but they slowly move; "larval time" and "the time it takes for eggs to develop and hatch"'. The "immensity of the alterity is literally incomprehensible"; "we can't know what these beings know" but we "should seek respect and be aware of how our lives are entangled".

Bawaka Country including, S. Wright, S.  Suchet-Pearson, K. Lloyd, L. Burarrwanga, R. Ganambarr, M. Ganambarr-Stubbs, B. Ganambarr, D. Maymuru. “Gathering of the Clouds: Attending to Indigenous understandings of time and climate through songspirals.” Geoforum. January 2020.

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The use of calendars, dates, clocks, and industrial/corporate temporality as fundamental to the rise of plantations and financialization in United States/Europe, with a case study of the modern Colombian/Latin American state. Observance of certain dates and strict adherence to specific calendars support "mythologized deeds and heroic retellings" of colonization and industrialization. “The evolution and internalization of disciplined concepts of time” were intimately tied to the rise of wage labor in industrializing England and later during the global ascendancy of work and industrialized plantation monoculture, but the persistence of alternative time should “serve as a reminder that futures and the demarcation of epochs are never as simple as a neatly organized calendar”.

Timothy Lorek. “Keeping Time with Colombian Plantation Calendars.” Edge Effects. April 2020.

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Indigenous people of Alaska and the US control over time management. For the past 50 years, Yupiak people have been subject to US government’s “investment in a certain way of being in time” which “standardized the clock” and disrupted human relationships with salmon. This US management model “anonymized care” and made “a way of attending to the life and death of others that strips life of the social and ecological bonds that imbue it” with resilience and meaning, which “ignores not only the temporality of Yupiaq peoples relations with fish, but also the human relations that human-fish relations make possible”. This disregards “the continuity of salmon lives but also the duration of Yupiat lifeworlds ... life is doubly negated” ... “futures depend on an orientation to salmon in the present”.

William Voinot-Baron. “Inescapable Temporalities: Chinook Salmon and the Non-Sovereignty of Co-Management in Southwest Alaska.” July 2019.

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"Idling" and "being idle" as a form of reclaiming agency and life. Case studies of fugitive Blackness in Caribbean plantation societies. “Disruptive waiting”. “The maroon’s relationship to time challenges [both] the totalizing time of the modern state, but also the [...] narratives to negotiate struggle in the [...] present" in "antagonistic relationship with colonial power". Defying the “European narrative of modernity”. Refusing to be productive.

Amanda Lagji. “Marooned time: disruptive waiting and idleness in Carpentier and Coetzee.” Safundi: The Journal of South African and American Studies. March 2018.

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Indigenous futures. "It is important to remember that some futures never went anywhere" and "yet they survive. These are futures suppressed and cancelled by colonial power." These are "parallel futures". "Colonial power must control the past so as to deny the emergence of" an alternative future; "colonial power creates a future in advance so that no others will take its place". Poor, racialized, Black, Indigenous people manifest alternative futures.

Pedro Neves Marques. "Parallel Futures: One or Many Dystopias?" e-flux. April 2019.

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The "legacy of slavery and the labor of the unfree shape and are part of the environment we inhabit". The "idea of the plantation is migratory" and it lives on "as the persistent blueprint of our contemporary spatial troubles", so we must seek out "secretive histories" that no longer "rehearse lifelessness".

Katherine McKittrick. “Plantation Futures.” Small Axe. 2013.

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“The temporal dispossession” of Congolese people. There is an “impossibility” of “predictable time” because temporal dispossession “disrupts the possibility of building a future”. Livelihoods/income is driven by market and price fluctuations in United States and Europe tech industries, so “there is an inescapable day-to-day sense of uncertainty”. As Mbembe says, “in Africa, the spread of terror ... blows apart temporal frames”.

James H. Smith. ‘Tantalus in the Digital Age: Coltan ore, temporal dispossession, and “movement” in the Eastern Democratic Republic of the Congo.’ American Ethnologist Volume 38 Issue 1. February 2011.

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“Slow death”. Chronic illness not just as a byproduct of colonialism/dispossession, but also as part of its aim, a weapon that debilitates people, who become exhausted. Dooming poor and racialized people to lives “without future” through debility, “a condition of being worn out”. Relationship of illness, lack of healthcare, and debt as functionally incapacitating, a form of death sentence. A “zone of temporality” unfolding unlike abrupt/sudden traumatic events and becoming an inescapable condition.

Jasbir K. Puar. The Right to Maim: Debility, Capacity, Disability. 2017.

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The extension of poverty, landlessness, homeless, and imprisonment. "To be unable to transcend the horror of such a world order is what hell means", and "without a glimpse of an elsewhere or otherwise, we are living in hell". The utopian is not only or merely a “fantasy of” and for “the future collectivity” but can be claimed and built and lived here, now. There is "no guarantee" of “coming millenniums or historically inevitable socialisms”, no guarantee that “the time is right” one day if we wait just long enough. Instead: "can a past that the present has not yet caught up with be summoned to haunt the present as an alternative?" The "utopian margins", an alternate world crossing time and place, an "imaginative space and temporality to trace the remains of what "was almost or not quite, of the future yet to come", living as if it were the present. Colonialism tried to crush the many headed hydra of the revolutionary Atlantic, those who challenged the making of the modern world system.

Avery F. Gordon. As interviewed by Brenna Bhandar and  Rafeef Ziadah. “Revolutionary Feminisms: Avery F. Gordon.” As transcribed and published online in the Blog section of Verso Books. 2 September 2020. And: Avery Gordon. “Some thoughts on the Utopian.” 2016.

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The US/European "city is the site of regulatory regimes" that try to impose a definitive narrative about history, progress, and possible futures. But it cannot achieve "a wholly Apollonian, seamlessly regulated realm" because the land "continues to be haunted by the neglected, the disposed of, the repressed". The "commodification" of landscapes "circulates an imaginary geography" mediated through advertisements, labels, soap operas, television, etc. which celebrate "sanctioned narratives and institutionalized rhetoric". A "wild zone" of informal spaces, debris. "Ruins are places where the things, people, and "other memories can be articulated". There is "a spectral residue" that "haunts dominant ways of seeing and being". "Alternative stories might be assembled", so that we can respect the people banished to abandonment, the periphery, and reclaim agency.

Tim Edensor. “The ghosts of industrial ruins: ordering and disordering memory in excessive space.” Environment and Planning D: Society and Space volume 23. 2005.

Also, how "master narratives of history as progress decompose" when faced with "a continuously remembered past" when "the ghosts of this past rear up in the ruin" to expose "the debris of unprecedented material destruction" of colonialism/empire-building. These "hauntings rupture linear temporality" and recall those people beaten down as "the trash of history". It is "essential to see the things and the people [...] banished to the periphery [...]."

Tim Edensor. "Haunting in the ruins: matter and immateriality". Space and Culture Issue 11. 2002.

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"Many kinds of time" of bacteria, fungi, algae, humans, and "Western colonialism meet on the gravestones". Some creatures, like lichen, are very long-lived and "these temporal feats alert us that modernity is not the only kind of time, and that our metronomic synchrony is not the only time that matters". The "long duree evolutionary rapprochements to the quick boom and bust of investment capital" where "minor forms of space and time merge with great ones". Extinction is "a breakdown of coordinations with reverberating effects". Ghosts remind us that we live in an impossible present, a time of rupture. "Deep histories tumble in unruly graves that are bulldozed into gardens of Progress". "Endings come with the death of a leaf, the death of a city, the death of a friendship".

Elaine  Gan, Anna Tsing, Heather Swanson, and Nils Burbandt. “Introduction: Haunted Landscapes of the Anthropocene.” Arts of Living on a Damaged Planet: Ghosts and Monsters of the Anthropocene. 2017.

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Everywhen: Australia and the Language of Deep History. (Edited by Ann McGrath, Laura Rademaker, and Jakelin Troy. 2023.)

Chapters include: "Bugarrigarra Nyurdany, Because of the Dreaming: A Discussion of Time and Place in Yawuru Cosmology" (Sarah Yu et al.); "Songs and the Deep Present" (Linda Barwick); "Yirriyengburnama-langwa mamawura-langwa: Talking about Time in Anindilyakwa (James Bednall); "Across 'Koori Time' and Space (John Maynard)

[solarpunks]

Solarpunk is both pragmatic and utopian. It has to incorporate the latter because that allows us to push the boundaries of what is considered possible. At the same time, being pragmatic is a way of bringing back the reader (or listener) to the present after temporarily escaping into a Solarpunk story. For example, a Solarpunk story set in Gaza in the year 2040 could imagine climate change-related challenges that the Palestinians there would be facing then, and imagine ways of solving them. This would be told in a story in a setting with its own specificity which differs from, say, a story set in Paris in that same year. A Solarpunk story set in Gaza 2040 would therefore have to respect the specific history of that city while also trying to imagine what it could look like free of colonialism, apartheid, patriarchy and other forms of oppression. In that world, are there still two nation-states (Israel and Egypt) restricting the freedom of movement of Palestinians in Gaza? What is the access to resources such as water like? Could permablitzing be one tool against societal atomization brought about by an oppressive state? What are the heatwaves like? Are they dealing with droughts? Is the Mediterranean a source of recreation and abundance, or an intimidating body of water rendered more dangerous by global warming? How are relations with their neighbors?

Fantastic long read on Solarpunk in New Lines Magazine from The Fire These Times podcast host Joey Ayoub

[desire-mona]

JAMIROQUAI?

[cognitivejustice]

“One year of nuclear weapons spending could pay for wind power for more than 12 million homes to help combat climate change, plant one million trees a minute, or clean up the Great Pacific Garbage Patch for 187 years in a row,” 

[gennsoup]

I'm on the cliff of myself & these aren't wings, they're futures.

Ocean Vuong, Beautiful Short Loser

[bisexual-in-denial]

TMAGP 13 connections/theories?

Metallic chittering; maybe a machine? Insectoid design?

1a. What is this metallic chittering thing?

1b. Darrien attacked in a hospital by a weird, mechanical thing. He could see/hear it, as proven by how he called for a nurse, so would be visible like Mr. Bonzo/Needles

1c. Who is the "external" Lena needed Gwen to visit? Could it be this machine or someone "in charge" of this machine?

2. Darrien's incident was live(?)/not read out by Norris or Chester; how will OIAR staff become aware of it in later episodes?

3. Zorrotrade/self-mutilation for money; could be connected to ep. 9's "lucky" bone dice.

4. Sam/Celia are so cute together and will probably be attacked by some sort of avatar in coming episodes. However, I think they'll survive because they are beginning to understand that the cases are real.

5. The name of the episodes--"Futures"--it doesn't quite make sense to me. Could be referring to the "futures" associated with Zorrotrade and projected earnings from incidents, but I think it could have a deeper meaning that will be revealed in later episodes.

Final thoughts: Any way it goes, I think this mechanical chittering being will be another recurring 'avatar' of sorts, like Mr. Bonzo, Needles, the stranger from ep. 4, etc.

[xlelife]

Next on XLE.LIFE's New Terms 2024 list is the very broad arena of Futurisms. I've posted this in two sections so far:

XLE.LIFE: New Terms 2024: Futurisms--Part I: Intro >>

A very brief and loose introduction to futurisms with a similarly loose timeline, in case you've never heard this term in your life!

XLE.LIFE: New Terms 2024: Futurisms--Part II: A List of Emergent Futurisms >>

The more exciting part of the futurisms research--a sprawling, wild list of 235 (and counting) genres of futurisms, including several I've named or predicted. Looking at this list, especially in an array, really makes me feel some type of way. I hope it makes you feel a way also. What a time to be alive.

[tamaramora26]

•[ Creek post-covid ]•

•[ English ]•

HELLOOOOOOO good here I bring you a drawing with them as old people, I almost never draw them like this because originally I did not know how to do it as they say "he who does not risk does not win" and well here you can see how beautiful the babies are.

•[ Español ]•

HOLAAAAA buenas aquí les traigo un dibujo con ellos de viejos, casi nunca los dibujo así por qué originalmente no sabía cómo hacerlo como como dicen " el que no arriesga no gana" y bueno aquí los pueden ver a qué estan bien preciosos los nenes

[sowhatifiliveinasmalltowninjapan]

Jimmy Eat World

Futures (2004)

[fabiobruna]

One picture

[fatehbaz]

And the penal colony was to remain a viable alternative to the penitentiary, not only in nineteenth-century Britain, but also in twentieth-century France [...]. But what might it mean to have a rigorous and distant form of imprisonment, located in a colony and continuing until the mid–twentieth century? [...]

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French Guiana emerged as an early favorite for the placement of a French penal colony. [...] Daniel Lescallier, [...] authored a work entitled [...] (Exposition of the means by which to develop French Guiana). In it he points to the example the British have set in exporting offenders to the colonies [...]. Louis-Napoleon, still serving in the capacity of president of the republic, threw his weight behind [...] the exile of criminals as well as political dissidents. “It seems possible to me,” he declared near the end of 1850, “to render the punishment of hard labor more efficient, more moralizing, less expensive [...], by using it to advance French colonization.” [...] The era of the French penal colony was now open; the new French Empire had begun its Botany Bay, even as the British original [penal colony in Australia] wound to a close. [...] The double logic of the British system also drives the French imagination; proposals alternatively concentrate on a desire to punish criminals and rid the Metropole of their presence, on the one hand, and a hope of furthering the work of colonial expansion and economic progress, on the other. Within this logic the focus shifts between the need to colonize, the need to punish [...].

In the case of France, it shimmers with colonial fantasy, allowing future Australias to emerge on tropical horizons. [...] [T]he penal colony requires location. The specificity of the site matters; it is the very place that is to enact punishment [...]. The penal colony is in essence a geographic technique [...]. But despite frequent outcries and sensational reports, the French Guiana penal establishment continued to exist through the end of World War II. [...] As geography itself becomes a technique of isolation, the French penal experiment in Guiana threatens further ordeals implicit in separation from all that is civilized. [...] In sensational accounts these tropics incessantly punish [...]: “Fever and dysentery get every man! Clouds of buzzing mosquitoes and fire ants sting your aching body while you labor [...].” As the commandant of the bagne would inform convicts on their arrival, “The real guards here are the jungle and the sea.” [...] Many of the prisoners, after all, were from urban environments [...]. The terror of Devil's Island takes shape amid metaphoric invocations of the jungle and of the savage [...].

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For those in Metropolitan France the penal colony served as a hidden punishment, a distant if graphic terror, retaining elements of torture out of public view. Yet it retained a veneer of reformation, for the convicts were still told to “make a new life for themselves.” In addition, shipping convicts away from France in the name of colonization cloaked their punishment in the robes of the “civilizing” mission: they would be part of an effort to build a greater France, to develop Guiana, and to integrate it into a Franco-world system. At the same time the bagne underscored that resistance to the humane norms of France could lead to decivilization and exile in the wilderness. [...]

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For those sent to French Guiana, however, the penal colony served directly as a public display, a constant reminder of the operations of justice. The convicts were not merely confined but forced to labor on public works. Official executions were performed by that once-humane instrument, the guillotine, but before an audience of convicts and by a fellow convict, far beyond the gates of Paris. A slower execution, that of the “dry guillotine,” the effects of the tropical climate, surrounded the entire process of deportation, reminding the convicts that this punishment could only happen here and not within Metropolitan boundaries. Theirs was a raw and primitive environment, one of torture and deprivation away from the public eye. Against the truth invoked in their conviction -- justice -- lay a suggested truth invoked in their punishment: no longer civilized, they were no longer human.

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And for those already living in French Guiana, the penal colony also served as a public spectacle, if one not aimed directly at them or of their making. Not only did the proximity of prison life to their own lives parade the power of justice before them in an immediate fashion, but the constant importation of prisoners for this apparatus of punishment emphasized the particularly colonial nature of this power. Uncivilized elements were sent to them; their relation to France was that of a repository for human waste, and acts and punishments deemed unseemly for the homeland could still occur within their boundaries.

In addition, the appropriation of the names “Guyane” and “Cayenne” in myths of the bagne and “Devil's Island” precluded other identities, while burdening the area with a symbolic brand and a historical chain to France. “The bagne,” writes Ian Hammel, “left only a disastrous brand on Guiana.”

Brand here means “trademark” as well as “scar,” indicating purpose, function, and maker.

To be remembered as a penal colony is to be remembered not only as a prison, an exotic place of horror, but also as a colony, the object and product of another. [...] Modernizing France, a convulsive patchwork of provinces, cities, farms, and factories, casts its shadow overseas. [...] The penal colony takes shape at a crucial moment in European colonial understandings of place and labor. Slavery had just been abolished in the French Empire […]. If slavery were at an end, then the crucial question facing the colony was that of finding an alternative source of labor [...], not only in French Guiana, but also throughout colonies built on the plantation model.

---

All text above by: Peter Redfield. Space in the Tropics: From Convicts to Rockets in French Guiana. 2000. [Bold emphasis and some paragraph breaks/contractions added by me. The text shown here comes from several different chapters in Redfield’s book, shown in the order that they originally appear. Presented here for commentary, teaching, criticism purposes.]

[acelania]

“Nearly five years after Leviathan’s attack on Tokyo, a precisely unremarkable robotics lecturer is assigned to mentor a fresh student with dreams of AI research. They don’t know each other, at all. That’s the problem.”

“Finally: nineteen, his, every, more-

And something else, found in the dark." With a very happy birthday to the boy of all time, Haru Shinkai, here's the fourth and last section of my dramatised PowerPoint essay on the intersection between the philosophy of artificial intelligence and children's anime from seven years ago. Enjoy!

[punkrockmixtapes]

Jimmy Eat World - 23

I won't always love what I'll never have I won't always live in my regrets