Author: danlatorre
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Generative AI As High-res Clipart. Does Rainbow Cyber Hide Techno-Authoritarianism?
I remember when the first powerful Macs came out, like the Quadra, enabling desktop publishing tools like Aldus PageMaker to fuel the desktop revolution. Suddenly anyone could create a “design” (in the nouning of a verb, objectifying sense) and print materials, but graphics often came from clipart catalogs since digital cameras were not yet common.…
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Why Our Tech Talk Needs A Values Talk
(Or, why we need to remove that elevated freeway to hell paved with “good” tech intentions) That breathless hyper excitement so often celebrated in talk about technology is not new. Almost 100 years ago (about 3 generations ago) the automobile was the “Big Data” application or fancy wearable of its day. It was a product…
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Moscow, Place-full Global City
It’s 6AM in Moscow, I’m on the street near the Yugo-Zapadnaya metro station, the second to last stop on the southern end of the red line. Staying at Shaninka University for the duration of the Urban Studies mini-course on digital placemaking I was teaching meant getting up early to catch a cab to the Paveletsky…
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Dark Light, A Solar Eclipse Writing Month
I’ve been here in Moscow teaching a mini-course on digital placemaking and wise city methods, a project one year in the planning. Today, it’s the first day of Spring in the northern hemisphere, students at a university here look up through compact discs to see the eclipse, a coincidence with the Spring equinox not seen…
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Yesterday’s Trickle-Down Hype Is Today’s Post-Capitalist Meme
Speaking truth to power is a brave thing in any era, in any moment. Trickle-down theory. Critiques of this neoliberal belief, its ironic usage, once a slam relegated to smaller progressive and academic circles now seems to be growing as a default critique. Meme-worthy even. We are moving beyond questioning the myth of trickle-down assumptions,…
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Grounding Actually
By Maxine Greene. 1988. Freedom, Education, and Public Spaces. In The Dialectic of Freedom. Via Catherine Despont’s Teaching Roundtable at Pioneer Works.
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Know Your Watershed, Mapping Rivers, Mapping Our Commons
Fresh water is more valuable than oil because humanity can live without one of these. There’s something about mapping water, about mapping rivers, that resonates so well with our online hyper connected lives. Maybe it’s because we take water for granted almost as much as we take all of our social connectedness for granted. Maps…
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Google Maps don’t convey, to humans, that cities are made of neighborhoods. These handmade maps do.
Via Slate: Circular city maps: Archie Archambault designs minimalist city maps printed on a 19th-Century letterpress.