Substrate

The thing that's shifted in my lifetime is shame as a public mechanism for affecting change. I still think that it has a massive effect (especially on men) in the personal realm, but because of news cycles, algorithmic feeds, and the pace of modern life, we live in a world of what this article calls "attention spam".

There's a lot of talk about dumbphones at the moment, at least in my circles. But, of course, everyone still wants access to WhatsApp, Signal, etc. So there's a whole niche of expensive 'dumb' phones which are supposed to help you reclaim your life.

Just a quick note to say that each tag on Substrate now has an RSS feed. For example #philosophy has this feed. So you don't have to see my donkey memes if you don't want to.

Every Sunday, my Little Robot Friend sends me a report which I call 'News Canary'. It assembles a weekly set of roughly ten "global change signal" stories from the last seven days, with at least one item from each continent It mixes hard developments (laws, policies, conflicts, technical releases) with soft signals (cultural shifts, viral posts) that may influence how systems evolve.

Delighted at this, especially the bit I've highlighted in bold:

OpenAI, the US company behind ChatGPT, has lost its legal challenge against the refusal to register the trademark "OPENAI" at the European Union's General Court.

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On the one hand, it's good that the UK government has updated its Essential Digital Skills Standards. On the other hand, they're about a decade out of date (in the same way that the previous ones were even more out of date).

This, from Ada Palmer's excellent Inventing the Renaissance, which she just casually mentions in passing, is pretty mind-blowing:

Excluding tiny villages with little traffic, losing a friend or sibling to plague was a universal experience from 1348 to the 1720s, when plague finally diminished in Europe, not because of any advance in medicine, but because so many generations of exposure gave natural selection time to work, those who survived to reproduce passing on the genes that enabled their heightened immune response, a defensive adaptation bought over centuries by millions of deaths. Outbreaks persisted into the nineteenth century in the Ottoman world, and thousands of cases of Y. pestis still occur each year, most in sub-Saharan Africa and East Asia, where it was not endemic as it was in Europe. And if Mihai Netea—down the block in the Genetics Lab—is correct that the immune mutation which helps those of European descent resist Y. pestis also causes our greater rate of autoimmune disorders like rheumatoid arthritis, celiac, and (in my case) Crohn’s disease, then the Black Death is still constantly claiming lives through the changes it worked into European DNA over 400 years.⁶ As for the Renaissance, not only endemic plague but malaria, typhoid, dysentery, deadly influenza, measles, and the classic pox were old constants of life, which not only persisted but grew fiercer decade by decade.

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I'm not sure where this is from, as I discovered it via Are.na but Thanks to Matt (see comments) I now know this was created by Giorgio Orsucci and I think it's particularly useful for me in showing why I'm so interested in Systems Design (and Thinking).

A collage of unedited photos taken during a sweaty morning run on my holiday phone (an iPhone SE 2).