This week's best things
Generative poetry, AI hypocrisy, women in tech leadership, immersive funding, access to French 3D scans, new AirPod features, teenage burnout, TikTok harms, GTA Paisley, perceptions of time, and a load of TV
The Syllabary
Spotted via Matt Muir's Web Curios newsletter. I am a big fan of this sort of 'randomised'/generative experience.
"The Syllabary consists of 1319 empty sounds and 2281 spoken parts of 1 to 37 lines in length, each based on a cluster of between 1 and 47 monosyllabic words. The program chooses an initial text at random and leads the viewer to the next in any of three directions through some 15013 lines of verse."
Microsoft’s Hypocrisy on AI
Some of the fury that was thrown at the Living Museum thing I shared last week was around the environmental impact of AI tools, which is significant (AI energy demands are so large that Google recently signed a supply agreement with a nuclear power company).
This piece in The Atlantic looks at how the tech giants (specifically Microsoft) square the climate commitments many of them have (loudly) made over recent years with these new and growing energy demands, and the fact that many fossil fuel companies are using these AI tools to develop new oil and gas reserves.
"as Microsoft attempts to buoy its reputation as an AI leader in climate innovation, the company is also selling its AI to fossil-fuel companies. Hundreds of pages of internal documents I’ve obtained, plus interviews I’ve conducted over the past year with 15 current and former employees and executives, show that the tech giant has sought to market the technology to companies such as ExxonMobil and Chevron as a powerful tool for finding and developing new oil and gas reserves and maximizing their production—all while publicly committing to dramatically reduce emissions."
Karen Hao
Tech has never looked more macho
A depressing piece from Caitlin Dewey on the current state of women representation and success in the tech sector.
"I can’t think of many graduation-gift books that aged as poorly as Lean In, Sheryl Sandberg’s 2013 #girlboss manifesto on female corporate empowerment. Take a seat at the table, Sandberg told women, and assert yourselves more — then equal wages and advancement will surely be yours.
Maybe that’s true in some industries, but it hasn’t panned out in Sandberg’s native tech. The share of women in high-tech roles has barely budged in two decades, despite the invocation to … lean in. The percentage of women in tech leadership roles is also trending down, as is the share of venture capital raised by female founders."
With the disappearance of initiatives like Tech Talent Charter, and the scaling back of DEI initiatives it feels like the hard-won progress of the last few years is being eroded. And it's not like parity was ever achieved in the first place.
Caitlin Dewey
Immersive funding
"£3.6 million of funding available until 2027, Immersive Arts will fund over 200 UK based Artists across 3 different strands of work."
The deadline for the first round is 2nd December 2024.
Secret 3D Scans in the French Supreme Court
Spotted via Adam Koszary, Cosmo Wenman writes about his ongoing court case in France in which he is fighting to open up access to the 3D scans of objects in the collections of the French national museums - in line with the norms in many other countries.
"For the last seven years, I have been campaigning to establish and defend the public’s right to access all French national museums’ 3D scans of their collections, starting with the prestigious and influential Rodin Museum in Paris. My efforts have reached the Conseil d’État, France’s supreme court for administrative justice, and a great deal is at stake. The museum and the French Ministry of Culture appear determined to lie, break the law, defy court orders, and set fire to French freedom of information law in order to prevent the public from accessing 3D scans of cultural heritage. [...] Anyone in the world with an internet connection can view, interact with, and download the British Museum’s 3D scan of the Rosetta Stone, for example. The public can freely access hundreds of scans of classical sculpture from the National Gallery of Denmark, and visitors to the Smithsonian’s website can view, navigate, and freely download thousands of high-quality scans of artifacts ranging from dinosaur fossils to the Apollo 11 space capsule."
Cosmo Wenman
Apple’s AirPods Pro hearing health features are as good as they sound
As someone who gets quite overwhelmed in really loud environments it's interesting to see the new use cases that Apple are pushing with their AirPod Pro headphones.
One of which is "more robust hearing protection".
Apple have also released a software update which allows the AirPods to conduct hearing tests and function as hearing aids for people "with mild to moderate hearing loss".
This article in The Verge gives an in-depth review of this new functionality, and also ponders the impact that these changes may have on social norms, expectations, and prejudices.
"That also means we’re about to enter an era where we’ll need to get comfortable with people wearing earbuds at all times. There’s a perception that leaving your earbuds in while talking with other people is rude. Transparency mode in many of today’s earbuds sounds totally natural and lifelike, yet I still constantly remove my buds to show someone they’ve got my undivided attention. That way of thinking has to change when popular earbuds start pulling double duty as hearing aids. It’s a powerful way to reduce the stigma that’s all too common with hearing aids, but this shift will take time."
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The new burnout generation
An(other) extremely depressing article (sorry) reporting on research that has shown "the pressure to live a scheduled, optimized, perfected life has trickled down to teenagers, leading to symptoms of stress and burnout more closely associated with people decades older.
Of the 1,545 teens the researchers surveyed, 56 percent felt pressure to have a “game plan” for their future lives, while 53 percent felt pressure to “be exceptional and impressive through their achievements.”
Anna North
TikTok executives know about app’s effect on teens, lawsuit documents allege
Following on from the article above, further potential explanations for why teenagers are having such a tough time at the moment.
"For the first time, internal TikTok communications have been made public that show a company unconcerned with the harms the app poses for American teenagers. This is despite its own research validating many child safety concerns."
GTA Paisley
"The Paisley-based artist, known as Bovine, has rendered parts of the town in painstaking detail, including Neilston Road and surrounding areas. The 3D game rendering, reminiscent of the Edinburgh-made Grand Theft Auto series, has been created under the working title 'Crystal Garden', like the famous Neilston Road takeaway, as Bovine works towards creating a full game set in Paisley.
The 34-year-old artist says he was inspired by Grand Theft Auto III and "realising things don't last that long and wanting to preserve locations in different periods of time." He said: "I have a memory — which I'm sure a lot of guys around my age will have had in 2001 when GTA III was released — which was 'I want my hometown version of this'."
Caveman: An Interview with Michel Siffre
This is an outlier, entirely unrelated to anything to do with digital or culture, but it was too fascinating not to include.
A long interview with Michel Siffre, a geologist who inadvertently discovered the subjective nature of human's relationship to time, and the elasticity of our internal body clocks whilst spending prolonged periods of time underground in the dark.
His findings were subsequently used by NASA to understand how astronauts' sense of time and their circadian rhythms may become skewed in space.
Siffre became a leading figure in the field of chronobiology, the study of how the human body understands time.
"There was a very large perturbation in my sense of time. I descended into the cave on July 16 and was planning finish the experiment on September 14. When my surface team notified me that the day had finally arrived, I thought that it was only August 20. I believed I still had another month to spend in the cave. My psychological time had compressed by a factor of two.
What do you think caused this dramatic disconnect between psychological time and the clock?
That’s a big question that I’ve been investigating for forty years. I believe that when you are surrounded by night—the cave was completely dark, with just a light bulb—your memory does not capture the time. You forget. After one or two days, you don’t remember what you have done a day or two before. The only things that change are when you wake up and when you go to bed. Besides that, it’s entirely black. It’s like one long day."
Joshua Foer and Michel Siffre
This week's consumption
I finished A Psalm for the Wild-Built by Becky Chambers - someone described her work as 'comfort science fiction' which is pretty accurate I think.
I started reading Born to Run, Bruce Springsteen's memoir.
I've been baking a lot of bread recently, Ken Forkish's Flour, Water, Salt, Yeast is an excellent companion guide if you're interested in this sort of thing.
I revisited my teenagedom by listening to a lot of Jimmy Eat World ahead of seeing them play a show in Berlin next month.
We watched Rivals on Disney+ which is very silly and very fun. The (very 80s) production design is especially good.
I also finished season 2 of The Rings of Power which is much better than season 1 but still a bit slow and po-faced, maybe season 3 is where it'll all click.