Russell Davies

February 2021

Same same

The Dictionary of Visual Language

People of the Twenty-First Century

Same Energy

Coffee morning on Friday

This Friday. The 12th of Feb. 10am.

This zoom: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/8910289409?pwd=aWVJSUdCcjVLdDhaeWx3WkFkS0lyUT09

Blog all dog-eared pages: The Ministry for the Future

I read Kim Stanley Robinson's The Ministry of the Future back in November. Still thinking about it now. These are the bits I highlighted:

"Do you know Fourier, Charles Fourier, the French utopian? No, Mary said. Tell me. He was a utopian, he had followers in France and America, they started communes based on his ideas, and in his books he went into great detail about everything. Verne loved his work, he’s a kind of secret influence on Verne. And for him the animals were very important—they were going to join us, he said, and become a big part of civilization. So at one point he says, The mail will be delivered by lions. By lions! Mary exclaimed. That’s right. The mail will be delivered by lions!"

Not a lot of significance to that. I just like the idea of the mail being delivered by lions.

"State-owned enterprises using a lot of big data and Red Plenty algorithms became less lumbering than they had been, avoiding the old bad inefficiencies, while keeping the good inefficiencies in ways that were important for resilience and justice."

'Good inefficiencies for resilience and justice' is a good thought.

"Over all of it, in the most literal sense because of the banner, and the air itself, the immense flux of information was often summed up well by what was being called the Big Index or the Big Number, meaning the parts per million of CO2 in the atmosphere. This had now dropped 27 parts per million in the previous five years. It was down to 451 now, same as in the year 2032, and it was on a clear path to drop further, maybe even all the way to 350, the pre-industrial high point on the 280–350 ppm sine wave that had existed for the previous million years, marking shifts in the shape of Earth’s orbit around the sun."

I don't think we have this yet; the Big Number. It's hard to know what to promote or grasp. Temperature? Temperature change? Rate of temperature change? Parts per million. Something else.

"The 58th COP meeting of the Paris Agreement signatories, which included the sixth mandated global stocktake, concluded with a special supplementary two-day summing up of the previous decade and indeed the entire period of the Agreement’s existence, which was looking more and more like a break point in the history of both humans and the Earth itself, the start of something new. Indeed it can never be emphasized enough how important the Paris Agreement had been; weak though it might have been at its start, it was perhaps like the moment the tide turns: first barely perceptible, then unstoppable. The greatest turning point in human history, what some called the first big spark of planetary mind. The birth of a good Anthropocene."

I love this thought. The importance of Paris and the fact that it's already happened.

"...blooming buzzing confusion..."

I've come across this a lot in the last few months, for some reason. It's William James apparently.

"Everyone knows everything. The invisible hand never picks up the check. The money is already here, it just isn’t evenly distributed. Which is to say properly distributed."

Had never thought about the lack of justice in the William Gibson original.

"The Hebrew tradition speaks of those hidden good people who keep the world from falling apart, the Tzadikim Nistarim, the hidden righteous ones. In some versions they are thirty-six in number, and thus are called the Lamed-Vav Tzadikim, the thirty-six righteous ones."

That's going to be a film. If it's not already.

These bits aren't especially representative of the book. Just things that struck me. I thought it was great. Both terrifying and optimistic. Is very plausible about how geo-engineering will happen, and terrorism. And encouraging about central banking. Not a phrase I thought I'd ever type.

 

 

 

 

 

 

In other places

Over on instagram I continue to pointlessly amass #drumsonsunday...

And am now featuring #economistpoems...

And #minidiscmondays...

And on bandcamp the Pete Rugolo record shows up again as part of the source material for Bottlenecks.

And I've started playing with Roam as a way of collecting notes. There are links and bits collected by tags. It's folksonomy all over again.

January 2021

Music from Elite Panic.

I take full responsibility

Bogdana's got a meeting and I've got to work so Coffee Morning's going to be 11am not 10. This Friday. The 29th.

Sorry. Hope that's OK.

The zoom: https://us04web.zoom.us/j/8910289409?pwd=aWVJSUdCcjVLdDhaeWx3WkFkS0lyUT09

 

This is what they would buy

I've always been obsessed with how the super rich live different lives than everyone else. And the extent to which they can't.

I once wrote something for Wired about how the rich can't get a better OS than the rest of us (the wayback machine has it) but if they could it would just be people. That's apparently how Larry King has a better twitter than the rest of us.

https://t.co/eBXB0kUiHI pic.twitter.com/Baplo0aeFi

— hunter harris (@hunteryharris) January 23, 2021

And on Friday at Coffee Morning Flora told me of Yellowstone which we started watching yesterday and this seemed related:

“Leverage is knowing if someone had all the money in the world… this is what they’d buy.” - John Dutton (Kevin Costner) #Yellowstone pic.twitter.com/PR4Y8mo4ip

— Yellowstone (@Yellowstone) June 21, 2018

And then I was reading Garner's Quotations and came across: 

"Real wealth is never having to spend time with assholes" - John Waters

and

"The best things in life are free. The second best things are very, very expensive" - Coco Channel 

Incidentally Coffee Morning this week will be at 10am on Friday. Same link as below. It will be free. Or it will be very, very expensive.

2 coffee 2 morning

Bogdana has written of a coffee morning plan but she's written it on Medium which is like writing on sand so she's asked me to put details here where they are a little more permanent and accessible.

First new coffee morning will be this Friday. The 22nd. At 8am GMT. At this Zoom. UPDATE: Apparently that link doesn't work. Try this one:

https://us04web.zoom.us/j/8910289409?pwd=aWVJSUdCcjVLdDhaeWx3WkFkS0lyUT09

Be nice. Be patient. If it doesn't work perfectly we will try and make it better next time. Don't be that guy.

If you don't know what I'm on about...

We started coffee mornings years ago because it seemed there were a lot of planners and strategists out there who were a bit lonely. The only planner in an agency. Or freelancing. Or whathaveyou.

 

It wasn't complicated. Come and have a coffee and a chat. No networking. Anyone can come, you just have to expect a lot of chat about advertising and brands.

 

And then we stopped doing it, because lots of other events turned up to fill the void.

 

Right now, though, it's obvious that the loneliness problem hasn't gone away. And I bet there are loads of people who'd like to see some different faces on their screens. So we're going to try and do it again, virtually.

 

This might be more complicated. Large groups aren't automatically sorted by chairs and tables, ice isn't easily broken through beverage ordering. But we shall see what we can do.

 

Bogdana thinks that Zoom can be used cleverly to break people off into smaller rooms if it all gets too chaotic. We might try that. But, basically, we're just going to try it and see what happens.

 

(We will arrange subsequent events for different times of day so that other people can join in.)

 

Bogdana will probably have more news on twitter. If there is more news.

Remote intimacy

I've been listening a lot to this: a 3,350-Song Playlist of Music from Haruki Murakami’s Personal Record Collection (about). It's very listenable because it's in the right ballpark for music I'd like on in the background at home, lots of jazz, some classical and early rock/pop but knowing there's a human intelligence behind it - a guiding sense of taste - makes it somehow slightly more intimate than an algorithm. And, while I've only read one of his books, it fits how he feels. The whole aesthetic hangs together. It's like you're round his house and he's playing you stuff. It's revealing.

I've also been listening to a James Baldwin version. Chez Baldwin - the music in his record collection. I don't know tons about Baldwin but his record selection makes me want to know more. My image of him is austere and intellectual, waspish, dry. But his records aren't like that. So much Diana Ross and Randy Crawford. It's funky and joyful.

This remote intimacy is a bit like Ben's point: part of the fun of Zooms at home and on the media is peeking behind the scenes at someone's life. Which is why it's annoying and funny when someone tries to fake it.