#technosphere

[exhaled-spirals]

« To mention the global loss of biodiversity, that is to say, the disappearance of life on our planet, as one of our problems, along with air pollution or ocean acidification, is absurd—like a doctor listing the death of his patient as one symptom among others.

The ecological catastrophe cannot be reduced to the climate crisis. We must think about the disappearance of life in a global way. About two-thirds of insects, wild mammals and trees disappeared in a few years, a few decades and a few millennia, respectively. This mass extinction is not mainly caused by rising temperatures, but by the devastation of natural habitats.

Suppose we managed to invent clean and unlimited energy. This technological feat would be feted by the vast majority of scientists, synonymous in their eyes with a drastic reduction in CO2 emissions. In my opinion, it would lead to an even worse disaster. I am deeply convinced that, given the current state of our appetites and values, this energy would be used to intensify our gigantic project of systemic destruction of planetary life. Isn't that what we've set out to do—replace forests with supermarket parking lots, turn the planet into a landfill? What if, to cap it all, energy was free?

[...C]limate change has emerged as our most important ecological battle [...] because it is one that can perpetuate the delusional idea that we are faced with an engineering problem, in need of technological solutions. At the heart of current political and economic thought lies the idea that an ideal world would be a world in which we could continue to live in the same way, with fewer negative externalities. This is insane on several levels. Firstly because it is impossible. We can't have infinite growth in a finite world. We won't. But also, and more importantly, it is not desirable. Even if it were sustainable, the reality we construct is hell. [...]

It is often said that our Western world is desacralised. In reality, our civilisation treats the technosphere with almost devout reverence. And that's worse. We perceive the totality of reality through the prism of a hegemonic science, convinced that it “says” the only truth.

The problem is that technology is based on a very strange principle, so deeply ingrained in us that it remains unexpressed: no brakes are acceptable, what can be done must be done. We don't even bother to seriously and collectively debate the advisability of such "advances". We are under a spell. And we are avoiding the essential question: is this world in the making, standardised and computed, overbuilt and predictable, stripped of stars and birds, desirable?

To confine science to the search for "solutions" so we can continue down the same path is to lack both imagination and ambition. Because the “problem” we face doesn't seem to me, at this point, to be understood. No hope is possible if we don't start by questioning our assumptions, our values, our appetites, our symbols... [...] Let's stop pretending that the numerous and diverse human societies that have populated this planet did not exist. Certainly, some of them have taken the wrong route. But ours is the first to forge ahead towards guaranteed failure. »

— Aurélien Barrau, particle physicist and philosopher, in an interview in Télérama about his book L'Hypothèse K

[kai-dlugosch]

Technosphere (2023), Kai Dlugosch

[dullahandyke]

My hipster hatred of the modern technosphere does sometimes work against me.... mfw I'm trying to decrease how much time I spend on my phone but the tool I'm envisioning would actually work best on an app. But I hate apps

[carvalhais]

Eventually, it comes as no surprise that the most successful AI technique, namely artificial neural networks, is the one that can best mirror and therefore best capture, social cooperation. The paradigm of connectionist AI did not win out over symbolic AI because the former is ‘smarter’ or better able to mimic brain structures, but rather because  inductive and statistical algorithms are more efficient at capturing the logic of social cooperation than deductive ones. By tracing the evolution from linear to self-organising information, the history of data analysts, machine learning, and AI can begin to be seen in perspective as a grander process of self-organisation within the technosphere to follow the transformation of the social order. Matteo Pasquinelli, 2023. The Eye of the Master: A Social History of Artificial Intelligence. London: Verso.

[mostlysignssomeportents]

I wrote about the death of tech competition and its relationship to lax antitrust enforcement and regulatory capture for The American System in The American Conservative

Tech was forever a dynamic industry, where mainframes were bested by minicomputers, which were, in turn, devoured by PCs. Proprietary information services were subsumed into Gopher, Gopher was devoured by the web. If you didn’t like the management of the current technosphere, just wait a minute and there will be something new along presently. When it came to moving your relationships, data, and media over to the new service, the skids were so greased as to be nearly frictionless. What happened? Did a new generation of tech founders figure out how to build an interoperability-proof computer that defied the laws of computer science? Hardly. No one has invented a digital Roach Motel, where users and their data check in but they can't check out. Digital tools remain stubbornly universal, and the attacker’s advantage is still in effect. Any walled garden is liable to having holes blasted in its perimeter by upstarts who want to help an incumbent’s corralled customers evacuate to greener pastures. What changed was the posture of the state towards corporations. First, governments changed how they dealt with monopolies. Then, monopolies changed how governments treated reverse-engineering.

-A Murder Story: Whatever Happened to Interoperability?

[entheognosis]

Excerpt:

The researchers argue that even before humans arose, Earth’s biosphere—the global system of all life on the planet—may have displayed some of the hallmarks of planetary intelligence in a nascent form. Ancient microbial life caused profound changes in Earth’s atmosphere, like the Great Oxygenation Event 2.4 billion years ago. These changes then fed back on life, enabling new forms of oxygen-using biology and more complex ecosystems. In this way, the researchers argue the ancient biosphere “recognized” planetary states like global chemical balances and collectively responded in ways that altered those states, making the planet more stable and favorable for life in the long run. This could be seen as a very simple form of global information processing and adaptive behavior.

[leohtttbriar]

The power of our made world—its technological infrastructure and its markets—is part of the reason that Elon Musk and other charismatics of tech have nearly salvific status in today’s centrist optimism. They exemplify the kind of agency that is easiest to imagine in our infrastructure Leviathan: the hack. The hack is for the technosphere what the prayer of an adept was for seeking divine intervention: a way of getting inside the mind of the ultimate sovereign. The hack is a way of pursuing system-level agency in the absence of the political capacity to act at the scale of the system. Seen in this way, it is a new expression of one of the oldest forms of action: murmuring just the formula that will move the mind and hand of a sovereign that is not accountable, but is susceptible to an aptly phrased appeal. The apt chemical or software or other engineering formula really can flow into the infrastructure Leviathan’s circuitry and make it cleaner, faster, cheaper—change, in other words, its dictates to us, and make this infrastructure species over into a different species, one less ontologically devoted to ravaging the planet to live. Such a hack really may be the only readily imaginable form of agency that promises today to do what Rousseau said a lawgiver must be prepared to do: to change the nature of human beings by changing the world that orchestrates our choices, actions, and lives. But I can’t celebrate the hack. Hoping to be saved by a hack is like adopting the mindset of Homeric protagonists, anxious for some capricious god to tweak the rules on their behalf. It is not a way of facing one another, a form of collective power over our own direction, or an ambition to count every voice equally. In this moment of elite pessimism about democracy, ecological disaster can seem one more reason to suppose that we cannot save ourselves—only a god of tech can save us.

Britton-Purdy, "The World We’ve Built" (2018)

[historical-schemata]

The Incan Technosphere

“In the techno-sphere of the Andes people solved basic engineering problems through the manipulation of fibers, not by creating and joining hard wooden or metal objects. To make boats, Andean Cultures wove together reeds rather than cutting trees into planks and nailing them together. Although smaller than big European ships, these vessels were not puddle-mufflers; Europeans first encountered Tawantinsuyu in the form of an Inka ship sailing near the equator… it had a crew of twenty and was easily the size of a Spanish cavaralle. Famously the Inka used foot thick cables to make suspension bridges across the mountain gorges. And although Andean troops carried bows, javelins, maces, and clubs, their most fearsome weapon, the sling, was made of cloth. A sling is a woven pouch attached to two strings. The slinger puts a stone or slug in the pouch, picks up the strings by the free ends, spins them around a few times, and releases one of the strings at the proper moment. Expert users could hurl a stone with such force that it would kill a horse.” - 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus

[1eos]

archaeologists in the distant future will be in awe at the cultural influence nene leakes has had in the technosphere

[am--f]

Techno-aesthetic Milieux: Dewey to Simondon

John Dewey and Gilbert Simondon are thinkers of media and milieux as the all-too-excluded middle of genesis. Like the so-called process philosophers, they think in terms of phase, transfer, prefiguration, virtuality, impulsion, and continuous function. Both share a rejection of the hylomorphic schema, or the dualist partition of form and matter, as well as a focus on the potential forces carried along with every becoming, and an understanding of the recurrent causality of dynamic wholes, in which every individual “unity”—in accordance with the biological model of the living thing—has its pre-individual milieu, a field of composability. Form is not a reality beyond matter but emerges in the circular dynamic of the individual’s interchange with its milieu. The technical individual in Simondon and the work of art in Dewey are derived from this dynamic. They are organizations or selections of energy from within a situation (a medium, a milieu, or an environment). These organizations or selections do not bring anything to the situation that was not already there (a form, an idea, a design, a telos). Instead, there is a crystallization, a shifting of the phase of the situation or the solution. The tensions and incompatibilities that saturate it are brought up to and beyond a certain limit, and the individual being comes into being, resolving those tensions and incompatibilities while also preserving them within a new, higher unity.

Dewey, unlike Simondon, is not widely known as a philosopher of technics. But there may also be a convergence between the two thinkers on the issue of what Simondon calls “techno-aesthetics or aesthetico-technics,” an aesthetics of technics and a technics of aesthetics. To be sure, this convergence is largely projective. Something like techno-aesthetics is discussed occasionally throughout Dewey’s Art as Experience (1934), but not at any sustained length, although a positive consideration of the possibilities of communication and industrial technology forms a significant part of the book’s concluding chapter, “Art and Civilization.” Similarly, Simondon devotes only some of On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects (1958) to art and aesthetics, and only really arrives at techno-aesthetics in a letter written late in his career (“On Techno-Aesthetics”). Though the concept of techno-aesthetics remains strangely marginal in the history of aesthetic theory, I want to propose that these two thinkers offer a particularly concrete and compelling foundation for its theoretical elaboration.

Dewey’s pragmatism and Simondon’s philosophy of technics—unlike the classical aesthetics of Hume, Kant, and Schiller—recognize the intertwining of technical media and human life in aesthetics: there is an aesthetic feeling that we have in our absorption in technical tasks (the use of a tool or a machine), a technics that we must account for in the production of artworks (the artist’s ongoing engagement with manufactured materials, tools, and techniques), a creative or aesthetic side to technical development, and a technosphere that affects our ways of sensing. But Dewey’s naturalism and biologism can occasionally seem to overstate the importance of the human’s relationship to nature, bracketing the role of technics—and especially industrial technics, or machines, and their “non-human modes of energy” (Art as Experience, 351)—in constituting the human, its environment, and its experience in the first place. For Dewey, the industrial or “mechanical” (Dewey’s preferred term) is usually the negation of an authentic aesthetics of art, which is always natural, not in the sense that it is unchanging or otherwise opposed to culture but in the sense that it is derived from and consummates the ongoing development of the organism—rather than the machine—in its environment. Culture does not stand opposed to nature, but “the mechanical stands at the pole opposite to that of the esthetic” (355), because it is composed only of discrete parts which are instances of types or models, whereas the “dominantly esthetic” is a dynamic whole made of organs that are in continuous relation, and which has communication with and development in an environment. Machines, it is implied, do not have environments. Indeed, Dewey often suggests that machine operations are responsible for the very problem he wants to address: the separation of fine art from the praxis of everyday life, and not just any life, but the “significant life of an organized community” (5).* Simondon, on the other hand, more directly questions the dominant understanding of industrial technics, arguing that “culture has constituted itself as a defense system against technics,” and has therefore failed to understand them, even as it makes use of them as instruments of domination and extraction (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 15). Simondon might help us to make manifest some of Dewey’s latent modernist sympathies, recovering a vision of machines and humans working alongside each other. His thinking allows us to expand Dewey’s own limited application of the organism/environment model.

The term “techno-aesthetics [techno-esthétique]” appears in an unsent letter by Simondon to Jacques Derrida regarding the foundation of the Collège International de Philosophie in 1982. “If our fundamental aim is to revitalize contemporary philosophy, we should first of all think of interfaces . . . Why not think about founding and perhaps even provisionally axiomatizing an aesthetico-technics or techno-aesthetics?” asks Simondon (1). With techno-aesthetics, Simondon is not primarily thinking of art that is “about” technology, although he does briefly mention Marinetti, Léger, and Xenakis. What techno-aesthetics offers is instead an “intercategorial axiology” that would examine the “contemplation and handling of tools,” the “perceptive-motoric and sensorial” intuition in the use of tools and the care of machines (2), “phanero-technics,” or the exposure of technical components or techniques (2), artworks that “call for a technical analysis” (4), and the “technicized landscape,” or the aesthetics of infrastructure (6). Simondon’s letter is relatively brief but wide-ranging, and it would be too much to enumerate all of the points of correspondence with Dewey’s project: the attempt to think aesthetics in production and not only in consumption (the aesthetic experience of “contact with matter that is being transformed through work,” of “soldering or driving in a long screw” [Simondon, 3]); the refusal, in principle, of the distinction between “useful or technological art” and “fine art” (Dewey, 27); the recognition of what Simondon calls a “margin of indeterminacy” or “margin of liberty” in all technical products that allows them to be “liberated from limitation to a specialized end,” to become “esthetic and not merely useful” (Dewey, 121), to be transferred between or to negotiate different milieux, and thereby to be newly concretized and individuated. What I want to focus on in particular is how Dewey and Simondon do or do not think the concepts of milieu and environment across the organic and machinic in relation to techno-aesthetics.

Dewey’s critique of aesthetics in Art as Experience wants to do justice to the ordinary “doing and undergoing” that is subjacent to fine art and philosophical reflection. It wants to re-situate art in and as collective experience. It wants to show that there is nothing inherent in art’s subject-matter that justifies the separation of art from experience, and that this separation can only be attributed to “specifiable extraneous conditions” that are “embedded in institutions and in habits of life,” operating “unconsciously” (9). In order to perform this critique, a basic and universal theory of experience must be initialized. Dewey’s theory is schematically biological; he does not begin, like the Enlightenment empiricists, with the constant succession of individual impressions in the mind, nor with the Cartesian division of subject and object, but with something like Jakob von Uexküll’s proto-cybernetic interchange between organism and environment (its Umwelt, in Uexküll’s vocabulary, or its milieu, in Simondon’s). Every living thing comes in and out of step with its environment by responding to it, by making adjustments, by having directionality or impulsions. This is all immanent in sense experience. Dewey narrates the process by which (aesthetic) form, which he defines as “consummation” or “integral fulfillment” (142), emerges:

The world is full of things that are indifferent and even hostile to life; the very processes by which life is maintained tend to throw it out of gear with its surroundings. Nevertheless, if life continues and if in continuing it expands, there is an overcoming of factors of opposition and conflict; there is a transformation of them into differentiated aspects of a higher powered and more significant life . . . Here in germ are balance and harmony attained through rhythm. Equilibrium comes about not mechanically and inertly but out of, and because of, tension.  There is in nature, even below the level of life, something more than mere flux and change. Form is arrived at whenever a stable, even though moving, equilibrium is reached. Changes interlock and sustain one another. Wherever there is this coherence there is endurance. Order is not imposed from without but is made out of the relations of harmonious interactions that energies bear to one another. (13)

We have here something very similar to the cybernetic theory of information later proposed by Dewey’s student Norbert Wiener: the negentropy of a responsive life that periodically establishes form and pattern as temporary or metastable equilibria amidst quasi-entropy. (Unlike Wiener, Dewey believes that this information cannot be generated “mechanically.”) We might also detect, in the language of “overcoming of factors of opposition” and differentiation into a “higher” form of life, the shadow of Hegel, but Dewey’s opposition is not between sense and intellect. There is a becoming-conscious that is proper to the human, but sense and intellect are not discernible in it. Dewey will associate the compartmentalization of sense and intellect with the division of intellectual and manual labor, with the Cartesian dualism of matter and spirit, with the Kantian schema of the faculties, with the theoretical and institutional scission of art from experience, and with the mechanical: the application of the “bare outline as a stencil” (54), or the imposition of “some old model fixed like a blueprint” in the mind (52). 

Art and aesthetic experience, unlike the “mechanical,” are prefigured in the natural feedback processes of “living,” and it is with the conscious “regulation,” “selection,” and “redisposition” of the matter of sense “on the plane of meaning” (26) that we get works of art. In other words, in its production of “dynamic organizations” (57), art does not impose form or design on a raw, unformed matter of experience. “Design, plan, order, pattern, purpose” emerge from materials that are already saturated with potential organizations (26). Experience, or the milieu from which the work of art emerges, is no more flux or chaotic substratum than it is a succession of stable forms. Experience and the “pre-individual” milieu are infrastructural, saturated with virtually formed matters, which can be actualized and thereby socialized as metastable forms, or works of art, which can then always shift in and out of phase with their environments.

For Simondon, who is writing both with and against Wiener’s and Claude Shannon’s respective theories of information, individual things or beings are likewise never the products of predetermined forms stamped onto shapeless, unformed matter. This is the “hylomorphic schema” that Simondon associates with the major tradition of Western philosophy, and which he wants to dismantle first and foremost.** As explicated in Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information (1964), individual beings are the outcome of a process of transduction which tries to resolve incompatibilities between milieux, or to relate initially non-communicating regions of a milieu. The resulting state is always metastable, not stagnant, not absolutely but relatively complete. This is also true of the “integral fulfillment” that constitutes an individual artwork for Dewey: “consummation is relative; instead of occurring once and for all at a given point, it is recurrent” (143).

Dewey feels the need to oppose this “recurrence” of the “consummatory phase” with the mechanical. Recurrence “sets the insuperable barrier between mechanical production and use and esthetic creation and perception. In the former there are no ends until the final end is reached . . . But there is no final term in appreciation of a work of art” (145). Yet for Simondon, actual technical beings (tools, machines, apparatuses) individuate in a way that is explicitly analogous and not at all opposed to the way living things, and by extension works of art, individuate. The individuation of technical beings is “made possible by the recurrence of causality within a milieu that the technical object creates around itself and that conditions it, just as it is conditioned by it” (On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects, 59). The milieu is both natural and technical—Simondon calls it an “associated milieu.” This milieu changes in ways that escape predetermined human ends according to a “margin of indeterminacy” within the situation, which is the condition of technical development. “The unity of the technical object’s associated milieu is analogous to the unity of the living being” (60). Dewey seems less certain. Like the artwork, “every machine, every utensil, has, within limits, a similar reciprocal adaptation,” he says. “In each case, an end is fulfilled. That which is merely a utility satisfies, however, a particular and limited end.” On the contrary, “the work of esthetic art satisfies many ends, none of which is laid down in advance” (140). But elsewhere, Dewey admits, as we have already seen, that any utensil can be “liberated from limitation to a specialized end” (121). The instability of an inorganic and closed essence of useful objects as opposed to an organic and open essence of aesthetic objects, can only be finally resolved, it seems, by an appeal to social determination, by a tentative historical materialism: “Much of the current opposition of objects of beauty and use—to use the antithesis most frequently used—is due to dislocations that have their origin in the economic system” (271). Can the conditions under which technical objects would be as open as artworks be positively articulated?

In his brief letter, Simondon wants to show us that there is a beauty even in those dislocations, in those monstrosities of industrial capital and mass communication, those “places of production and emission,” that escapes the economic horizon, and that entails a different kind of techno-aesthetic autonomy than Dewey has in mind. I want to conclude with one of Simondon’s examples, which in a strange way might have also been one of Dewey’s. Many of the objects that Simondon discusses in “On Techno-Aesthetics” are opposed to an aesthetics that sees only instrumentality, unresponsiveness, and a lack of milieu in industrial technics. Simondon’s descriptions of the antennas of the Eiffel Tower, Corbusier’s chapel of Notre-Dame du Haut, the Garabit viaduct, and the antennas on the plateau of Villebon are like counter-images of Heidegger’s hydroelectric dam on the Rhine—which enframes nature by revealing it only as a “standing-reserve” [Bestand]—or parodies of his silver chalice and its fourfold causality. To Simondon, the “technicized landscape also takes on the meaning of a work of art” (6). 

The plateau of Villebon is constituted and structured on its east side by a field of emission antennas. The highest one is that of France-Culture. Its height was reduced from eighty to forty meters because of the planes passing to land at Orly. But it has preserved a certain majesty. There is also the antenna of the Paris-IV-Villebon emitter, which helps diffuse Radio-Sorbonne. And there are several others. This field of antennas is evidently first of all made up by each antenna by itself, and for itself. They are pylons that are generally propped up several times, with the support structures being cut in several segments by insulators so as to reduce the resonance phenomena that would otherwise absorb part of the radiation. This structure is very remarkable, especially because it cannot be found in nature. It is completely artificial, unless perhaps one would recognize it in the sacred fig tree. This tree has several points of support and subsistence on the ground thanks to the roots that its branches let down, all the way to the ground, where they dig themselves in. This enables them to support their branches.  [. . .] A group of emission antennas is a kind of set, like a forest of metal, and it can remind one of the rigging of a sailboat. This set has intense semantic power. These wires, these pylons radiate in space, and each leaf of the tree, each blade of grass, even if it’s hundreds of kilometers away, receives an infinitesimally small fraction of this radiation. The antenna is immobile, and yet it radiates. It is, as the English word has it, an “aerial,” something of the air. And indeed, the antenna plays with the sky into which it cuts. It is a structure that cuts into the clouds or into a light-colored background. It is part of a certain aerial space over which it sometimes fights with airplanes, as the example of France-Culture demonstrates. Even on a car, an antenna—especially if it’s an emission antenna—, testifies to the existence of an energetic, non-material world. (5)

Here, at an infrastructural site, there is an aesthetic beauty that emerges from the experience of a utility that is diffuse and invisible—the radio network—as well as an apparent integration between the network, the plateau, the atmosphere, and finally the end users. (Divinities, earth, sky, mortals.) This would make it perversely coincident with Heidegger’s artwork just as much as with Dewey’s: it is quite literally a selection, filtering, and organization of energies that also determine its form, and that would otherwise remain below the level of “an experience.” But it is not clear that the aesthetic feeling has to do completely with our participation in this environment or with our continuity with it, nor even with the possibility of communication that the antennas signify. It may be the silent distance or disjunction of our world from the milieu of the antennas that strikes us most immediately, not our overcoming of them or enduring of them. The radio network is, obviously, a practical part of the significant life of a community. And undoubtedly, if we are even discussing the antenna array, for instance, as a consummating experience, we are speaking of a human experience. But Simondon’s point is simply that it is important that the antenna array has performed, and continues to perform, a kind of consummation that does not immediately concern us, and that this has not been concealed.

*While there are clear affinities here with Martin Heidegger’s aesthetics, Dewey gives us slightly more specificity than Heidegger, who associates the separation of poiesis from substantial communal life with a mystifying “forgetting of Being” or “abandonment of Being.” Dewey attributes the division of art from life and techne from poiesis to historical conditions such as nationalism, imperialism, industrial production, and global capitalism, all of which have yielded a disarticulation of the social coherence of art that was imagined to exist in ancient Greece. The extent to which such a social totality has ever empirically existed is a question that does not particularly interest either Dewey or Heidegger.

**Here is Dewey’s version of the hylomorphic schema: “Form was treated as something intrinsic, as the very essence of a thing in virtue of the metaphysical structure of the universe . . . it was concluded that form is the rational, the intelligible, element in the objects and events of the world. Then it was set over against “matter,” the latter being the irrational, the inherently chaotic and fluctuating, stuff upon which form was impressed. It was as eternal as the latter was shifting. The metaphysical distinction of matter and form was embodied in the philosophy that ruled European thought for centuries” (120).

Works Cited

Dewey, John. Art As Experience. Penguin, 1934.

———. Democracy and Education. Macmillan, 1916.

Heidegger, Martin. “Building Dwelling Thinking.” 1951. Poetry, Language, Thought. Translated by Albert Hofstadter, Harper Colophon, 1971.

———. “The Question Concerning Technology.” 1954. Translated by Taylor Carman, Harper Perennial, 2008, pp. 307–342.

Simondon, Gilbert. Individuation in Light of Notions of Form and Information. 1964. Translated by Taylor Adkins, University of Minnesota Press, 2020.

———. On the Mode of Existence of Technical Objects. 1958. Translated by Cecile Malaspina and John Rogove, Univocal, 2016.

———. “On Techno-Aesthetics.” Translated by Arne De Boever, Parrhesia no. 14, 2012, pp. 1–8.

Uexküll, Jakob von. A Foray into the Worlds of Animals and Humans with A Theory of Meaning. 1934. Translated by Joseph D. O’Neil, University of Minnesota Press, 2010.

Wiener, Norbert. Cybernetics: Or Control and Communication in the Animal and the Machine.1948. The MIT Press, 1965.

[sniffanimal]

Time and the Technosphere by Dr. Jose Argüelles PROVES that 9/11 was the end of artificial time and in fact is a way that we are able to time travel, assuming you are able to believe 9/11 didn't occur.

in my sickly haze I somehow installed 2 tumblrs

[yunant]

DES303 Week 9 - Charge to the finish line

For this week's practices, I wanted to develop upon the Designs of week 8 based on the feedback I received from peers. I was very grateful for the highlighted areas of improvement, and I wanted to take this opportunity to implement them. This week, I will focus on enacting changes from the crit session and see how well I can refine my iterations thoroughly.

Firstly, the reward system needed to be changed. A point-based reward system was experimented with, with the smallest steps. Each card offered the player a unique number of points, and the dice landed on a number that granted them the card in their hand [6 or greater than 6].

Prototyping:

These are the adjusted cards made according to the feedback from week 8.

What changes have been made?

The basis of narrative construction and formation is kept from last week, but this time, it's aimed at a younger audience in their teen years. These changes are made to keep players engaged, to keep them thinking critically, and to arrive at the culmination of finding the right idea for a story. In case they get stuck on a topic, the little captions are inserted to guide them into thinking.

Additional changes include using Te Reo Māori on some of the words to help players gradually adopt those words into their daily vocabulary. Given how Te Reo Māori is used and its word denotations and connotations, not every word is on par with its English counterpart. Much of it comes down to how Māori culture and worldviews are holistic and collectivised, as dominant Western society is linear and individualised (Harmsworth & Awatere, 2013).

Why such changes?

When we think of people who are interested in creative writing, it is more reasonable to include more teenagers in specific demographics than fully employed adults. Due to the age adjustment, words like Biosphere, Technosphere, and Sociosphere were also simplified to avoid any confusion with the academic-level vocabulary.

So far, each topic card has 3 variations with unique captions that differ. I can picture being 17 and having the worst creative block you could ever imagine, and I would ask myself, what kind of questions would spark that creativity? It's a way of saying that everyone has good ideas, and they don't need to look too far ahead to reach for one. This way, people can generate endless combinations to develop their creative writing ideas.

If anybody is curious to see at full resolution, here is the link: https://www.canva.com/design/DAGGUG2RmYU/XbinLdA1SyHawTvcDGXCGw/edit?utm_content=DAGGUG2RmYU&utm_campaign=designshare&utm_medium=link2&utm_source=sharebutton

System map diagram

The next step was nothing down those adjustments to the mechanics I have implemented, and rigorously re-doing the systems diagram to make the visuals consistent with what is delivered. What I hope for is that this illustration simplifies the procedure of the game I have been creating rather than complicating it or rendering it too perplexing for the general audience.

Post feedback [high fidelity] mock-ups:

This is where the fun begins! It's time to test the work and see if it holds up. A student suggested they would have liked to see more visual guidance on how these cards work rather than in written form, so I tried to add labels and captions to guide the viewer without much ambiguity. I spent so many hours last week perfecting the photoshopping of the previous set of images, so naturally, I would be hesitant to let them go and start over.

Nope, such sacrifices had to be made to improve the quality of deliverables. But the most demanding courses are usually the right ones, so I put my tongue out and chose to start over, recreating my setup using a new deck of cards fresh out of the stationery store.

As you might have noticed, all these photos above have been edited using mattes of blank white cards, with my graphic design superimposed onto the image, and I passed it through curves colour correction. Many hours were spent on Adobe Photoshop to get the lighting and texture right using layer blending and the blend-if tool. I admit that it isn't complete, and I am by no means a professional photo manipulator by a long shot, but hopefully, this will be compelling enough to be believable. To finally get the message across.

Reflection:

Time constraints and external factors limited my ability to refine my prototypes fully, and despite many hours of effort, this iteration is still a work in progress. While it may seem polished at first glance, there are gaps and uncertainties, particularly in the curated topics and their relevance to narrative creation. There are also self-conflicting ethical considerations about having a reward system and whether such changes could undermine the game by rendering it too exploitative for a young audience.

A concern that has arisen is the ethics side of my game and its potential effects on young people if co-opted into harmful practices such as aggressive monetisation. But at this early stage of my development, that argument could be a slippery slope fallacy. Despite these challenges, I hope the content is engaging and reflects the essence of games that unite people. This journey is not about limiting choices but committing to values that support and uplift the people it serves.

Theory: I recently stumbled upon this article, which goes into a multilayered lecture about educational game design. The abstract emphasises educational game development and how gaming could be framed for healthy learning benefits for young people, which I find relevant for my design coursework. Other topics were gamification, learning curves, and player identity and motivation. More importantly, the article discusses how design mechanics must factor in a power balance between a player and a game designer - if the players believe they are contributing, not just receiving (Cheung & Ng, 2021).

What's next?

Once I am safe with every corner of the process, I will further develop my ideas and examine how this prototype could benefit people in Tamaki Makaurau. It is essential not to be vague when discussing these ideas and processes. It's also vital to address design's intricacies and unrealised consequences, especially in game design. It could make or break my game by recognising that my primary demographic is people below my age. I should spend the next week refining how I articulate my ideas correctly so I don't leave gaps for such miscommunication.

References:

Canva. (n.d.). Canva Visual Suite. Retrieved from Canva

Cheung, S. Y. and Ng, K. Y. (2021). Application of the Educational Game to Enhance Student Learning. Front. Educ. 6:623793. doi: 10.3389/feduc.2021.623793

Harmsworth, G. R. & Awatere, S. (2013) INDIGENOUS MĀORI KNOWLEDGE AND PERSPECTIVES OF ECOSYSTEMS. Landcare Research, Hamilton, New Zealand. Retrieved from: https://www.landcareresearch.co.nz/assets/Discover-Our-Research/Environment/Sustainable-society-policy/VMO/Indigenous_Maori_knowledge_perspectives_ecosystems.pdf

[healthcare-updates-with-sns]

Diabetes Drug Market: Industry Overview and Forecast 2024-2032

According to the latest findings, the Diabetes Drug Market was valued at USD 68.58 billion in 2023 and is projected to reach USD 113.02 billion by 2031, growing at a CAGR of 6.4% during the forecast period 2024-2031. This growth trajectory is driven by increasing global incidences of diabetes, rising awareness about diabetes management, and continuous innovation in pharmaceutical treatments.

Market Description

The diabetes drug market encompasses a wide range of medications designed to manage blood sugar levels in individuals with diabetes mellitus. The market has witnessed a notable surge due to lifestyle changes, increasing geriatric populations, and higher rates of obesity—key risk factors for type 2 diabetes. In addition, pharmaceutical companies are actively investing in research and development to launch next-generation insulin analogs, oral anti-diabetic drugs, and combination therapies that offer more efficient glycemic control with fewer side effects.

Get Free Sample Report @ https://www.snsinsider.com/sample-request/4177

Regional Analysis

North America continues to dominate the global market due to a well-established healthcare infrastructure, high disease prevalence, and early adoption of advanced therapeutics.

Europe holds a significant share, driven by supportive government initiatives and a growing diabetic population.

Asia-Pacific is anticipated to register the fastest growth rate during the forecast period, primarily due to urbanization, increasing healthcare expenditure, and rising awareness campaigns in countries like India and China.

Latin America and the Middle East & Africa are also seeing a steady uptick in demand, though limited access to advanced medications remains a challenge in certain areas.

Market Segmentation

By Drug Class:

Insulin

DPP-4 Inhibitors

GLP-1 Receptor Agonists

SGLT-2 Inhibitors

Others

By Type:

Type 1 Diabetes

Type 2 Diabetes

Gestational Diabetes

By Route of Administration:

Oral

Injectable

By Distribution Channel:

Hospital Pharmacies

Retail Pharmacies

Online Pharmacies

Key Players

Key Service Providers/Manufacturers

Novo Nordisk A/S (Ozempic, Rybelsus)

Eli Lilly and Company (Mounjaro, Trulicity)

Sanofi (Lantus, Toujeo)

Merck & Co., Inc. (Januvia, Janumet)

AstraZeneca (Farxiga, Bydureon)

Boehringer Ingelheim (Jardiance, Trajenta)

Bayer AG (Glucobay, Acarbose)

Takeda Pharmaceutical Company Limited (Actos, Nesina)

Pfizer Inc. (Exubera, Ertugliflozin)

MannKind Corporation (Afrezza, Technosphere Insulin)

Key Highlights

Rising prevalence of both type 1 and type 2 diabetes globally is significantly propelling market growth.

Technological advancements in insulin delivery devices are enhancing treatment adherence.

Oral anti-diabetic drugs are gaining traction due to convenience and reduced injection-related complications.

Strategic partnerships and acquisitions among key players are fueling innovation and expanding product pipelines.

Government initiatives and reimbursement policies are further supporting the market expansion.

Future Scope

The future of the diabetes drug market is expected to be shaped by precision medicine, personalized treatment plans, and biologics that target specific patient profiles. Artificial intelligence and machine learning will increasingly aid in early diagnosis and real-time glucose monitoring, thereby influencing prescription trends. Moreover, the emergence of smart insulin pens and closed-loop insulin delivery systems is likely to redefine disease management. As awareness and accessibility improve in emerging economies, the market is set for robust, long-term growth.

Conclusion

The diabetes drug market is witnessing dynamic growth driven by medical innovation, rising global health concerns, and a strong demand for improved therapeutic outcomes. As stakeholders across the value chain continue to collaborate on advancing patient care, the market is well-positioned to meet the growing healthcare needs of diabetic populations worldwide.

Contact Us: Jagney Dave - Vice President of Client Engagement Phone: +1-315 636 4242 (US) | +44- 20 3290 5010 (UK)

Other Related Reports:

Cell Viability Assay Market

Medical Power Supply Market

Post Traumatic Stress Disorder Treatment Market

MRI Guided Neurosurgical Ablation Market

[treasurechest]

I love calculator

The calculator is a fully self-contained physical artifact that has an almost zero "dependency footprint" on the rest of our technosphere. To perform its function it only requires light (thanks to its tiny solar panel on the front), and/or batteries, which are a universal commodity. You may choose to purchase the calculator with one single exchange for money. From that point on it is yours. It turns on whenever you press "ON", ready to compute on your behalf. If you traveled back in time with this little thing that you can hold in the palm of your hand and gave it to people living thousands of years ago, it would just... work. It would feel completely, wildly, insanely miraculous.

Let's put this in perspective to the technology we increasingly accept as normal. The calculator requires no internet connection to set up. It won't ask for bluetooth permissions. It doesn't want to know your precise location. You won't be prompted to create an account and you don't need to log in. It does not download updates every other week. You're not going to be asked over and over to create and upgrade your subscription to the Calculator+ version that also calculates sine and cosine. It won't try to awkwardly become a platform. It doesn't need your credit card on file. It doesn't ask to track your usage to improve the product. It doesn't interrupt you randomly asking you to review it or send feedback. It does not harvest your information, for it be sold later on sketchy data markets, or for it to be leaked on the dark web on the next data breach. It does not automatically subscribe you to the monthly newsletter. It does not notify you every time the Terms of Service change. It won't break when the servers go down. The computation you perform on this device is perfectly private, secure, constrained fully to the device, and no running record of it is maintained or logged anywhere. The calculator is a fully self-contained arithmetic plugin for your brain. It works today and it would work a thousand years ago. You paid for it and now it is yours.

[sodomyaspraxis]

“The labor of perspectival reformatting is an ongoing labor of care, as well as a careful labor, driven by a generative force of alienation. Being grasped by concepts is an alienation from familiar logical/categorical perspectives. Despite the term having been locked down in a negative register, signaling social anomie or dehumanization and positioned as something to be overcome, on a perspectival front, alienation is a necessary force of estrangement from what is. Alienation can never be ‘total’: it expresses the quality of a relation, and not a thing unto itself; something is alienated from something else, and to properly understand it requires reflection in at least two directions. When ‘alienation’ is often taken as a ubiquitous descriptor of life in our technosphere, to avoid the meaninglessness of its (seeming) semantic self-evidence we need to ask: What would a non-alienated condition look like? The consequence of a world without alienation binds us to familiar cognitive schemata since it refuses engagement with the strange, the foreign, and the unknown, fixing ‘common-sense’ to the given. Alienation and abstraction form a kinship in this regard, since both pertain to modes of separation and impersonalization. While certain vectors of these forces undeniably structure our contemporary status-quo for unjust ends, the cognitive potency inherent to them should not be abandoned, for what these capacities can do and are today is more necessary than ever.

Immediate, proximate, concrete reality is often positioned as desirable because it is unalienated, yet this preference indicates two crucial problems that cannot be ignored, especially in view of our complex reality and the means we need to politicize it otherwise. On the one hand, the formulation which pits the concrete against the abstract neglects the constitution of concreteness by abstraction, while on the other, the expression of a preference for concrete immediacy reveals an anthropocentric bias, since the scale at which something is identified as ‘proximate’ is correlated to our particular phenomenal, human interface. If we are to adequately cope with the multiple scales of reality and care for the complex entanglements of our planetary condition, our own generic anthropocentric schemata must be effectively ‘situated,’ which as the historical cascading of Copernican humiliations informs us, is becoming increasingly alienated from the center. We’re ex-centric, and to add a further humiliation, the human can no longer claim a monopoly on intelligence, as Artificial General Intelligence stands to multiply what ‘intelligence’ even means and what it could do. This plight cannot be reduced to a simplistic binary framing, of either a techno-evangelist celebration of human limits being trumped by the ‘perfection’ of computational processes, or by naively insisting on the enduring inflation of human exceptionalism (the very concept of exceptionalism that scaffolds our crises). To reduce this transformation to an either/or option curtails possibilities of enablement on both fronts. ‘Staying with the trouble,’ as Donna Haraway proposes, entails a negotiation of the world’s messiness, not a deflation or disavowal of it. To stay with the trouble means there is no easy way out, forcing us to navigate through it mesopolitically; not with an ‘anything goes’ attitude, but with careful attention paid to how the ‘trouble’ informs the way we fashion distinctions in the world, for which a clear, fundamental distinction must be drawn between decentering and dehumanization. The decentering of the human does not equal dehumanization; rather, it can simply enable something other. That said, this process will not just ‘naturally’ occur, so to care for and nurture this important non-equation requires a corresponding perspectival recalibration; plotting where we are, in the generic, and provoking a reframing of the human in view of its humiliation. The question before us is not whether we ramp-up or reject these developments, but how we will be grasped and alienated by this Copernican trauma and, vitally, what conceptual architectures will we construct to buttress both its enabling and constraining possibilities?”

-Patricia Reed, Xenophily and Computational Denaturalization (2017)

[stanfave3-72217]

Scientists issue warning over potential hazard lurking in 'technosphere': 'It's like a ticking time bomb'