To rank the effort above the prize may be called love.

– Confucius

Featured artist: Malika Favre

Dense Discovery
Dense Discovery
 

Welcome to Issue 307!

Sep 24 2024 | Link to this issue

I’m always happy to see a new post by biologist and climate educator Spencer R. Scott, who, by the way, is living everyone’s solar-punk farm dream. In a recent post, Scott explores how social media often fosters a false sense of accomplishment in activism, distracting us from meaningful, long-term change.

He leans heavily on the insights of former classroom educator Mandy Harris Williams, who offers a candid critique of our ‘online protests’ and the self-deception that keeps us tethered to these platforms.

“We deceive ourselves that our online paltry protests are effective because it allows us to believe we’ve done the work; because the real work, as the subconscious believes, comes at a cost we’re not willing to pay if we don’t have to. This level of self-deception is what billion dollar tech companies know how to exploit, because we largely are appeased by the type of symbolic feedback we can receive on these platforms, and it allows us to avoid the real work, and stay on their platforms.”

“On social media we have a new arms race – those who can generate the most convincing appearance of ‘the work’, and those who attempt to verify the legitimacy of that appearance.”

Both Scott and Williams argue that real change doesn’t happen as performance art, highlighted in carefully curated reels. Instead, “activism requires intense focus and dedication to make even the smallest of progress. … There is a perverse incentive on social media to constantly have an eye-catching update; this is antithetical to how change actually happens: slowly (mostly uneventfully) through long-term dedication. If you think revolutionary change happens quickly, you are only looking at the threshold effect. The moment when years to decades of groundwork finally tips the scales past the social threshold.”

So how do we enact change in the real world? By consciously aligning our daily actions – whether in our jobs, as parents, friends, or consumers – with our moral framework:

“The question is how we transition from what could, despite our best intentions and deepest feelings, merely be a performance, to making the work the central thread of our lives, rather than just a sideshow. The power structure of our world doesn’t care much what you’re posting online. It cares what you are spending your entire life force on, how your job and total behavior align in opposition to the oppression.”

The challenge, then, is not just to critique the system from afar, but to shift our energy toward transforming our values into sustained action, where the focus is less on what we signal online and more on how we live out those principles day-to-day. A challenge, yes, but also an opportunity to ‘harmonise our dissonance’, as Scott writes.

“Someone could be sending no or irrelevant signals online – but have their entire life oriented in the direction of constructive politics, or vice versa. … There are billions of dollars against your very knowable brain structure, trying to keep you in a loop that starts and ends with the signals that are being sent, parsed, and regurgitated on the digital platform, which is famously not the real world that matters.”Kai

 

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Love Coffee, Not the Anxiety?SPONSOR

❏

Wimp Decaf →

Have coffee any time. Relax those brains.

I thought that a caffeine-fueled hustle and grind were the secrets to success. Turns out, they were bossy roommates. Now I’m trying something new. My coffee and my life – a little more decaffeinated. Let’s rethink it all, together. Wimp is redefining decaf from the grounds up.

 

Apps & Sites

Leaflet →

Easy, fun online docs

Open the Leaflet website and you’ll see a customisable document ready to be shared. Think Google Docs but without the office vibes. You can invite people to collaborate and connect multiple docs together. Read their Declaration of Delightful Documents.

Arclite Pro →

Archive utility

For those with large, compressed archives, Arclite Pro for macOS lets you ‘open’ archive formats such as ZIP, 7z, and RAR without the need to extract them first. View files with Preview first, then move them as you wish. You can, of course, also create new archives with advanced compression options and encryption.

Pathwright →

Online learning

A lof of online education tools feel overwhelming and eventually exhausting. Pathwright is a new platform for creating, sharing and teaching content online. It allows educators to design so-called ‘learning paths’ with videos, quizzes and discussions, and makes it easy for learners to follow along and complete courses at their own pace.

Supernuclear →

Guide to co-living

Co-living means communal living: it offers individuals the opportunity to reside in a shared space with others who have similar values and interests, while saving money. Supernuclear is an extensive guide to co-living with plenty of examples, dos and don’ts and practical advice. “Our guide to coliving is divided into ‘The Hard Stuff’ and ‘The Soft Stuff’. The Hard Stuff will appeal to the left side of your brain: Legal and financial structures, finding property etc. The Soft Stuff will tickle the right side of your brain: Managing conflict, decision-making, etc. We solemnly vow to leave no side of your brain untickled.”

 

Worthy Five: Francesco Schwarz

Five recommendations by Frontend dev, hobby runner and camper van builder Francesco Schwarz

A concept worth understanding:

Running slow to run fast is the counter-intuitive concept behind low heart rate training: you run your runs at an easy pace and build up your aerobic base, while reducing the risk for injuries and overtraining. I like how runner Floris Gierman translates this science-based approach into practice.

A podcast worth listening to:

Hidden Brain with host Shankar Vedantam is an insightful mix of science and storytelling that “explores the unconscious patterns that drive human behavior and questions that lie at the heart of our complex and changing world”.

A recipe worth trying:

Every now and then I make a classic Philly Cheesesteak for me and my wife. Real soul food material.

A video worth watching:

Bring on the learning revolution! is a 2010 TED talk from Sir Ken Robinson which I regularly come back to. He makes a compelling case for creating learning conditions where kids’ natural talents can flourish.

A quote worth repeating:

“Human communities depend upon a diversity of talent, not a singular conception of ability.” by Sir Ken Robinson from the above TED talk. To me, that’s become a kind of life motto, a way of thinking about the society we live in, which resonates deeply with me.

(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Francesco Schwarz in one click.)

 

Books & Accessories

Belonging Without Othering →

How we save ourselves and the world

A kind DD reader recommended this book as a follow-up to my intro about belonging and othering last week. I love this statement on the book’s purpose: ‘The root of all inequality is the process of othering – and its solution is the practice of belonging.’ “The pressures that separate us have a common root: our tendency to cast people and groups in irreconcilable terms – or the process of ‘othering’. This book gives vital language to this universal problem, unveiling its machinery at work across time and around the world.”

Regenerative Leadership →

Regenerative life-affirming businesses

Is it possible to pursue a holistic approach to leadership that draws on the principles of nature, systems thinking and sustainability and aims to create organisations that are resilient, adaptive and, above all, life-affirming? Leadership and sustainability experts Giles Hutchins and Laura Storm make the case for it in their latest book. “This new kind of organization is the organization-as-living-system that is designed on the Logic of Life: life-affirming businesses that thrive from the inside out, by cultivating conditions conducive for life, internally and externally.”

 

Overheard on Threads

One reason to love the Olympics is that people who believe diversity isn’t our strength have to watch day after day as diversity is absolutely our strength.

@akilahh

 

Food for Thought

Once You Get the Message, Hang Up the Phone  →

Read

Quoting heavily from educator and activist Mandy Harris Williams, Spencer R. Scott writes about social media’s shortcomings in enacting material change and why it creates a false sense of accomplishment in activism. “The question is how we transition from what could, despite our best intentions and deepest feelings, merely be a performance, to making the work the central thread of our lives, rather than just a sideshow. The power structure of our world doesn't care much what you’re posting online. It cares what you are spending your entire life force on, how your job and total behavior align in opposition to the oppression.”

A Standing Peoples’ Assembly For Europe →

Read

Democracy around the world is wounded and we’re all a little unsure as to whether the patient will survive at this point. For a beacon of hope, read Noema editor-in-chief Nathan Gardels’ piece about some exciting grass-roots experiments-cum-plans happening in the European Union: creating a permanent citizens’ assembly. “A ⁠⁠key legacy of the Conference, which ended in 2022, is a commitment by the [EU] Commission to ‘embed deliberative democracy in EU policymaking’. Since then, a new generation of panels, composed of randomly selected citizens in groups of 150, have been held to address topics such as ‘tackling hatred in society’, energy efficiency and food waste. The sum of the panels’ sentiments and recommendations will be taken into consideration by the Commission when formulating policies.” I’m a huge proponent of citizen assemblies and have covered the topic multiple times, including in DD220 and DD264.

Walking as Inactivity →

Read

Walking slowly and aimlessly is becoming somewhat of a lost art, argues Thomas J Bevan. Modern society tends to reduce walking to another productivity metric, turning a leisurely stroll into a purposeful task by incorporating phones, step counters and other goals. Bevan believes that the aimless walk is one of the last remaining spaces where we can reclaim our freedom to simply ‘be’. “The thrillingly, daringly subversive non-activity of moseying around the neighbourhood for no reason other than the sheer pleasure of being alive, able to walk and out of doors degenerates into just another means of being visibly productive. Because eking out maximum amounts of productivity from every moment of our days has been working out so great for us thus far. All work and no play makes Jack a dull boy and we are all so play-deprived that many of us are becoming passive, disembodied viewers of our own on-screen lives.” (via)

 

Aesthetically Pleasing

Rocco Buttliere is a brick builder and LEGO architect, creating detail-rich replica of famous landmarks and buildings. (via)

Showing how much potential a “workable, but quite grim” old home can hold, this renovation of a 1980s brick townhouse in inner city Melbourne brings out its beautifully warm, rich colours and textures.

Australian artist Joshua Smith creates highly detailed and lifelike miniature models of gritty, graffiti-covered buildings, referring to them as ‘sculptures of Urban Decay’. (via)

Ritualist is inspired by high-contrast wedge serif designs, defined by its infinitely sharp points and dangerous curves that accelerate like the edge of a blade.

 

Notable Numbers

35

Australia’s biggest cultural export, the wonderful kids animation ‘Bluey’ is now the most-watched show in the US so far this year. According to Nielsen Media Research data, the adventures of Bluey, the Aussie cattle dog, has racked up 35 billion minutes watched in 2024 alone.

30

Wind and solar generated more electricity than fossil fuels in the EU during the first six months of 2024 for the first time ever in a half-year period. Wind and solar grew to an all-time high of 30% of the EU’s electricity in the first half of 2024, compared to 27% from fossil fuels, which fell by 17%.

6,253

A recent court case revealed that over a 15-year period, 6,253 cars crashed into 7-Eleven storefronts in the US. That’s an average of 1.14 per day.

 

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The Week in a GIF

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