Hot monarch summer

The Future Is Like Pie #23

Author

Lisa Maria Marquis
July 16, 2021

I’ve been gardening. I’ve been slowly trying to dig up the front lawn because grass is for suckers, replacing it with a pebbled walkway, pollinator plants, and evergreen ground cover. Mat tends grapes, raspberries, and blueberries on one side of the yard, and has a raised bed for vegetables on the other; a stray pumpkin has been rebelliously, gorgeously, taking over the lawn I haven’t yet removed.

We planted a pomegranate tree. We planted lingonberries. We planted a crop of milkweeds, one of which came with a monarch caterpillar, who we immediately christened Sidecar and encapsulated in a house made from our discarded bee shipping container; we woke up this morning to a glossy green chrysalis.

Weekly I fill a bird feeder that’s become a constant battleground between sparrows, house finches, and mourning doves. I am trying to understand if there are multiple types of sparrows; they’re just a conglomerate of specks and stripes. Every once in a while a cardinal or crow or grackle shows up and bullies the smaller birds.

It’s only now, mid-summer, that I’m noticing how alive our outside space has become. It’s mobbed with birds, swarming with insects; the plants actually feel like they’re moving. I wonder why it took me so long to live like this.

Here are some interesting articles I’ve read recently:

On linguistics, semiotics, and science fiction:

How, exactly, does one build the necessary cognitive scaffolding…to explain “grace” to an alien that may or may not have the emotional wiring to even conceptualize the word? And if the alien does have an equivalent word, how do you know with any amount of certainty that the word means the same thing? “Grace,” after all, is a squishy concept involving morality and value judgments. A huge array of other concepts have to be settled with equivalencies before you can even begin to understand whether or not, when the alien says “grace,” it means the same thing to each speaker.

To properly showcase video game culture, it’s necessary to talk about our digital lives more broadly. We live in a world where your exercise bike has a leaderboard, and language apps have daily challenges. Maintaining anyone’s attention now necessitates treating platforms, their algorithms, and their functions like systems that can be gamed and won. Games provide a crucial framework for parsing modern life.

The company did not lift its ban on the social and racial justice terms we shared, but it did block the hate terms that we had pointed out were in contradiction with them, including “White lives matter” and “White power.” The company also responded by blocking even more of the 62 social and racial justice terms on our list. When we began our investigation, Google Ads only blocked a third of them for searches. Now it blocks more than 80 percent, adding dozens of terms to its blocklist, including “Black in Tech,” “Black excellence,” and “antiracism.”

In professional news, I’m giving a talk next week at the Design & Content Conference, called “The System is Down: Practicing Good IA in a Bad World.” I will mostly be yelling about amoral tech companies, our complicity, and the imperfect but necessary antidote of systems thinking. Join us (it’s virtual!) to hear more. 

There are some excruciating crises around the world right now, to the point where I don’t want to talk about them, I just want to share some links where you can send some money:

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