A living collection of notes, ideas, and reflections from Doug Belshaw.
I met up with Tom this morning and he asked me if I was planning another zine. I told him about the idea behind Interfaces of Refusal, but actually I've got another idea. This one would be called something like Field Notes on Ambient Surveillance and cover the way in which, over the last couple of decades, surveillance has become normalised.
…I think the root of the problem is the globalization of all problems.
Now, it feels like anything bad that happens anywhere in the world is somehow relevant to me and my responsibility. It’s like, I’m not allowed to be happy as long as someone, somewhere, is having a bad time.
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Today, my wife Hannah and I celebrate our 23rd wedding anniversary – meaning we've been married for more than half our lives ❤️
Although she hasn't retained the accent, Hannah is originally from Liverpool, so it feels appropriate to quote the ending theme song from Surprise Surprise featuring famous Scouser, the one and only Cilla Black:
…There's definitely a cadence to times of the year when events happen. I'll be in Toronto and Barcelona next month, but this month you can find me here:
This is why Aristotle thought that you can't judge whether a man was "happy" until after he's dead. And sometimes until long after he's died, because it would depend on the actions of, say, his offspring (which would reflect the way he helped raise them).
…Per my 2x2 grid in this note everyone's talking past each other when it comes to "AI ethics".
Source: Substack Notes
Obligatory note that, no, I'm not about to top myself. I'm just philosophically interested in life, death, and everything in between.
This morning, the slowly-moving car crash that is my method of thinking things through served up an idea related to a previous note about consequences and boundaries.
Essentially, when we're talking about boundaries we're talking about legibility which is an important component of literacy. Literate practices involve encoding and decoding texts, and sit within an existing power dynamic. There are many forms of literate practices, which as I will keep repeating until I'm blue in the face, are dependent upon literate communities.
…A few years ago, it was fashionable among the youth, including my son, to refer to people as "NPCs" or "Non-Player Characters". As Wikipedia explains:
A non-player character (NPC) is a character in a game that is not controlled by a player. The term originated in traditional tabletop role-playing games where it applies to characters controlled by the gamemaster, or referee, rather than by another player. In video games, this term usually means a computer-controlled character that has a predetermined set of behaviors that potentially will impact gameplay.
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