Sam Seder and Emma Vigeland speak with Jon D. Erickson, professor of sustainability science and policy at The University of Vermont, to discuss his recent book The Progress Illusion: Reclaiming Our Future from the Fairytale of Economics.
When Social Control Masquerades as Social Justice | WHAT IS POLITICS?
When ideas and movements that threaten to overturn established hierarchies of power are absorbed into elite institutions like Ivy League universities and for-profit corporations, they get transformed into ideas that support the status quo, while remaining cloaked in the language and symbols of radicalism and egalitarianism.
The replacement of the word “equality” by the word “equity” in the worlds of academia, NGOs, activism, and corporate HR departments, is an example of the attempts by elite people and institutions to transform historical movements for racial and gender equality, into ideas that promote the interest of elites – in particular, economic inequality and the division of the working classes.
In this episode we explore how forms of oppression based on cultural factors like skin colour or gender or religion, etc, can only be understood and effectively combatted by understanding them in the context of economic exploitation and economic competition which is what the human propensity to discriminate evolved for in the first place.
Philanthropy Is Ruining America | Leeja Miller, JD
Billionaires and multi-millionaires love to pat themselves on the back for their charitable giving. But what if we just taxed the rich and regulated their business practices instead of letting them get away with theft and atrocity while still getting to pad their reputation by giving away the millions of dollars they stole from their laborers?
Why 10,000 Tiny Lenses Are Keys To Our Future | Hard Reset
The MIDI Association | Ezra Sandzer-Bell
On May 31st, Muzic published a research paper on their first ever text-to-midi application, MuseCoco.
Trained on a reported 947,659 Standard MIDI files (a file format which includes MIDI performance information) across six open source datasets, developers found that it significantly outperformed the music generation capabilities of GPT-4 (source).
You can explore a non-technical summary of the full collection of Muzic research papers to learn more about their efforts to train machine learning models on MIDI data.
The latest word from Pete Brown the Chair of the Executive Board of the MIDI Association, is that we will see MIDI 2.0 Windows drivers by Fall of this year.
Pete is the Principal Software Engineer and lead of the MIDI 2.0-focused Windows OS MIDI Services Project, so to subscribe to ongoing updates about Microsoft’s MIDI and related music efforts, point your browser to their DEVLOG and-or their MIDI GitHub Repository.
The full MIDI Association article and details can be found here 👇🏾
Cura 5.3 Material Interlocking | Lost In Tech
UltiMaker Cura 5.3 introduced a feature that enables dissimilar filaments with poor layer adhesion to mechanically lock together in a single multi-material print.
Does Music Have a Speed Limit? And Why? | Adam Neely
Adam Neely Asks?: Does music have a speed limit? And why is the Mahavishnu Orchestra’s live version of Vital Transformation so damn fast? A journey into embodied musical cognition.
Social Ecological Theory + Sociocracy | M3iT
Our proposal for intentional community is predicated on a sociocratic model of relationship management informed by a Socio-Ecological perspective, better known as Bronfenbrenner’s Ecological Systems Theory (critical analysis and understanding of people in context).
The intention is to automate and augment many tedious aspects of Cooperative Relationship Management, affording more time for higher quality social interactions that no mechanized or digital system can replace.
This CoRM+ DSS or Decision Support System takes the form of a secure community Intranet as Infranet: a secure local network with Internet access as public infrastructure, for democratized personal and collaborative labor + task sharing, resources and economic management, community systems modelling and analysis, planning and decision-making.
In this way, we enabled a high degree of personal autonomy with equally high communal awareness and social cohesion. A homeodynamic, creative, adaptive, agile permacultural approach to maintaining healthy equilibrium and resilience.
“To Optimize Human Strengths ― Accommodate Human Limitations”
AmeNote ProtoZOA MIDI 2.0 Prototype Hardware
MIDI 2.0 is set to revolutionize music technology in the coming years. AmeNote’s Mike Kent told us about the four years of prototyping by the MIDI Association, which has been using a hardware development tool for Mini 2.0 called the ProtoZOA from AmeNote. Apple OS and Google Android already have MIDI 2.0 integrated into their operating systems and Mike showed us the MIDI 2.0 driver which is being developed by AmeNote for windows in operation.