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Things
One of our favourite emails that we wish still existed was Heath Killen’s In Wild Air, a formerly weekly collection of interesting recommendations from interesting people, which had an honesty and warmth to it that these things so rarely have. We were delighted to see Heath launch an archive site of every edition of the email this week—what’s left behind is a treasure trove of people we really want to get to know and the things they care about. This here email medium is such an ephemeral thing, and it’s nice to see the narratives, stories, and surprising permanence that emerge only afterwards.
“The music I like and the artists I like are in the business of making meaning. Tools will change and new rituals will emerge, but it does not really matter how easy it is to make meaningless art.” We try to spare you the tedium of celebrity Twitter arguments here because we figure you’re like us and can inflict your own self-punishing scrolling through those, as and when you need. But we do want to share this great three-screengrab response from the musician Holly Herndon to a claim by Grimes that AI could bring about the end of human art. What Herndon’s music explores, and what she articulates well here, is that there’s nothing magical or out of control about AI, it is simply a trained and algorithmic interpretation of us, “a new coordination mechanism in the legacy of human coordination systems” which requires a different kind of logic to interpet and reckon with, to understand how we value our labour of both input and consumption.
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More Things
A decade ago, a group of climate scientists identified nine potential tipping points in Earth’s ecosystem that would indicate us having fallen over the real ledge (or, in drier science talk, having pushed “components of the Earth system past critical states into qualitatively different modes of operation”). In a follow-up this week, those scientists suggested we may already have reached half of those tipping points. “The intervention time left to prevent tipping could already have shrunk towards zero,” they write in Nature, but beyond that dramatic claim, they do still offer something meant to sound like hope. As they attempt to apply mathematical proof and shake just a few more skeptics awake and get them to accept we’re living in a state of emergency, they write: “We might already have lost control of whether tipping happens. A saving grace is that the rate at which damage accumulates from tipping — and hence the risk posed — could still be under our control to some extent. The stability and resilience of our planet is in peril. International action — not just words — must reflect this.”
Did you see the thing about koalas being functionally extinct, though? We’re not linking to that, because it was as untrue as it was sad. Just using it as your periodic reminder that regardless of topic, Forbes is not and never will be again a reliable source of any actual information. Make sure your panic is peer reviewed.
At The Verge, Willy Blackmore writes on the arrival of the emerald ash borer in Maine, and a fascinating approach for inventorying the remaining ash trees that combines the knowledge of the local Wabanaki basket weavers with western science models. As we’ve learned in Ontario, you can’t save every tree from the borer once it’s here, but with careful management and genuine understanding, you can maybe stave it off enough to at least keep a little tradition alive.
The description for the new issue of Logic, on the theme of nature, puts a thought that’s one of the primary drivers of Buckslip into better words than we’ve yet managed:
“We change our nature as we change our technologies, and our technologies change us. Every story about technology is also a story about nature. In any tool, the nature of the user entangles itself with the nature she shapes, and which in turn shapes her.”
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