210 / How ‘ark head’ insulates us from the troubles of the world

To be an artist, you don’t have to compose music or paint or be in the movies or write books. It’s just a way of living. It has to do with paying attention, remembering, filtering what you see and answering back, participating in life.

– Viggo Mortensen

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Featured artist: Shai Glickman

Dense Discovery
Dense Discovery
 

Welcome to Issue 210!

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Last week, while I sat at a café working on this issue of DD, I overheard a group of three elderly people lamenting how terrible things were across the board, mentioning the war in Ukraine, the out-of-control inflation and the ‘extreme weather crisis’. All three agreed that they were happy to be as old as they were because, I assume, it meant that these were issues that other, younger generations had to ‘deal with’. They then went on to talk about backyard renovations and holiday plans.

Coincidently, Venkatesh Rao’s post titled Ark Head popped up on my reading list later that day. According to his theory, we’re so overwhelmed with multiplying global crises that we’ve come to accept a certain degree of collapse is inevitable and therefore concluded that the rational response is to restrict our concerns to a small subset of local reality where we can build a little bubble – an ark – in which competition for resources is limited to a small, understandable group of people.

“We’ve concluded the flood cannot be stopped, and we’re building arks to retreat to. The specifics of the arks don’t matter: utopian city-states, tech sectors (like AI, crypto, or metaverse) that seem capable of weathering the flood, narrow altruistic ventures, or artistic subcultures. With or without DAOs and Discord servers. If you can retreat within it, and either tune out or delusionally recode the rest of reality, it works as an ark. The point of an ark is to survive a cataclysmic flood while preserving as much of everything you care about as possible. Not to make sense of the world past the hull. Ark-head is a survivalist mindset, not a sensemaking mindset.”

While I don’t agree with his entire theory – in part because it’s quite cynical and therefore unhelpful – it’s worth a read if only to identify the arks in your own life. I certainly can see ark building happening in a lot of places, be they online or offline. And I’m not excluding myself here.

One of Dave Karpf’s recent posts points to a similar phenomenon, calling out the tech industry’s biggest blindspot: pretending that their cool new startups somehow won’t be affected by the climate crisis. The ark that holds VCs and techies is lively and full of hope, happily sailing towards the next IPO, so long as nobody opens a porthole to look outside.

What is the remedy against ‘ark head’? Rao suggests trying to tell stories “beyond ark-scale until one succeeds in expanding [our] horizons again”. Although, he acknowledges that those stories – the big, TED talk kind of stories – have a place and a time to be effective, and today is no longer one of them.

As I mentioned last week, I’m currently listening to a lot of climate-related podcasts and one of them offers suggestions that may help us fight ark head. More on that next week… – Kai

 

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Your New Creative Space SPONSOR

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Explore →

A brand new platform for creatives

Explore is a place where you can share work and meet the community without the distraction of ads or unwanted content. Explore has only the essential features to make & share your work. It’s time to make a place we own, not vice versa. Let’s make the new creative space together!

 

Apps & Sites

Chuck →

Bulk email organiser

This iOS app automatically groups emails by various categories so that you can bulk move/delete them. It also lets you locate your newsletter subscriptions and unsubscribe in a single click.

Packr →

Packing list app

Let this iPhone app help you be better organised when it comes to packing your bag for your next trip. Packr adjusts your item list depending on the weather and temperature forcast for your destination.

Chptr →

Remembering lost loved ones

A potentially controversial new app that helps people connect and share memories of a loved one that recently died. I think it’s an interesting idea: create a digital gathering place where friends and family can collect photos, videos and other memories in honour of a deceased person. The result could be a truly heartwarming remembrance, but there are also plenty of pitfalls – privacy violations and insensitive remarks being the obvious ones.

Read Something Great →

Timeless essays

If your reading list isn’t already bursting at the seams, Read Something Great will help you fill it: presenting five articles at a time – new or old, long or short, covering a range of topics from different corners of the web.

 

Worthy Five: Nia Carnelio

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Five recommendations by copywriter and content marketer Nia Carnelio

A question worth asking:

What is Mental Load and why is it carried mainly by women? Society usually defers to women to do the managing, planning, and delegating when it comes to chores. It’s time to examine why this mental labour is usually carried out by women.

An Instagram account worth following:

Disappointing Affirmations – sometimes, I like to break through all the toxic positivity with realistic (and effectively disappointing) affirmations.

A book worth reading:

Maybe You Should Talk To Someone is a memoir written by Lori Gottlieb, a therapist, about her seeking therapy during a difficult time in her life. She explores some of the different experiences and perspectives of her patients throughout the book, the result of which is an interconnected story about the similarities and extreme reliability of all our lives. The book stays with you, seeps into your thoughts. I think I understand myself and the people around me a little better because of it.

A piece of advice worth passing on:

When a fan told SUGA (a member of K-pop band BTS) that they’d given up on their dream, he responded: “I think you must have had tremendous courage. Giving something up decisively takes lots of courage.” He reminds us that sometimes dreams change, and it’s okay to give up, change course, and move on. You can choose a new dream or mourn the old one – but all of it requires some form of courage.

A quote worth repeating:

“We’re all made of star-stuff.” – Carl Sagan. I love this because it reminds me that my body (and yours!) is made up of atoms that were forged in the cores of stars billions and billions of years ago. We’ve come a long way, and there’s so much more to go.

(Did you know? Friends of DD can respond to and engage with guest contributors like Nia Carnelio in one click.)

 

Books & Accessories

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The Value of a Whale →

On the illusions of green capitalism

While straight-up climate change denial is on the way out, empty pledges are proliferating from the left to the right of politics. The promise of ‘green capitalism’ doesn’t seem to end the commodification of nature and falls well short of what is needed to secure a safe and abundant future for all, author Adrienne Buller argues in her newest book. “Tracing the intricate connections between financial power, economic injustice and ecological crisis, she exposes the myopic economism and market-centric thinking presently undermining a future where all life can flourish.”

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Data Feminism  →

Local efforts for resilient cities

We talk a lot about AI but too little about the data that informs/trains AI. This crucially important book exposes some of the blindspots we need to address if we are to correct past injustices: “Today, data science is a form of power. It has been used to expose injustice, improve health outcomes, and topple governments. But it has also been used to discriminate, police, and surveil. This potential for good, on the one hand, and harm, on the other, makes it essential to ask: Data science by whom? Data science for whom? Data science with whose interests in mind?”

 

Overheard on Twitter

Maybe most of our problems metaphorically boil down to ‘The wrong Amazon is on fire.’

@map

 

Food for Thought

Tech futurism’s blind spot →

Read

I can’t agree more with Dave Karpf here: the majority of big tech leaders are selling a future that pretends climate change is not happening and that it won’t interrupt their stylised vision of a ‘better tomorrow’. “Technological innovation alone is not going to solve the climate crisis. But it is appalling how so many of Silicon Valley’s engineers, investors, and entrepreneurs have invested themselves in ambitious visions of the future that outright ignore the climate crisis. (A future that they want to build! A future that they want us to buy into! A future that distracts attention from the failures of the present.) For all their wealth and power, the Technorati remain curiously incurious about how a hotter planet and increasing social instability will factor into their plans.”

Ark Head →

Read

Writer Venkatesh Rao proposes a theory in wich we’re retreating into our own little arks (as in Noah’s Ark) where dealing with a smaller, more practical reality is possible and where we can safely accept that ‘the outside world’ is no longer our responsibility to care about. “...with the unraveling of grand narratives all around, there is no default context of global caring for people to turn insights about the world into simple good/evil judgments and coherent actions that are meaningful on a global scale. All we have is ark-scale narratives, and ark-scale caring. There is no meaningful way to think in save-the-world terms. There’s only save-this-ark.”

The Science of What Makes People Care →

Read

I rarely share advice-type lists, but this one seems particularly useful in the climate action debate: “If you’re finding that your communications strategies aren’t working, consider this: People fail to act not because they do not have enough information, but because they don’t care or they don’t know what to do. If you start with this perspective as the foundation for your work, you can craft a strategy that helps people care and tells them exactly what you want them to do.”

 

Aesthetically Pleasing

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I somehow stumbled upon the photographic work of Chinese visual artist ‘rain look’ who showcases some truly stunning images of Tibet, Bhutan and other mountainous areas in Asia.

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Estonian artist Anastasia Parmson is testing the limits of two-dimensional art with her outline installations. (Yes, that’s a real room.) “Everything is stripped down to the line, blanking out any heavy implications or preconceived notions. Drawing you in too, so that you can read your own stories between the lines.”

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Nigerian artist Silas Onoja paints giant hyperrealistic oil paintings. (via)

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The latest release by Simon Walker’s type foundry Beasts of England is Newsagent, a headline face inspired by, you guessed it, newspaper headline.

 

Notable Numbers

1.21

The total number of people living in countries that have legalised same-sex marriage has increased from 15.9 million people in 2000 (0.3% of the global population) to 1.21 billion people in 2022 (15.1%).

88

Half way through the world’s largest four-day work week experiment in the UK, 88% of surveyed participants said that it’s working well for their business. 86% of survey respondents indicate that they are likely or extremely likely to retain the four-day work week, while a total of 46% of respondents report some increase in productivity.

100

For at least five hours on a day early October, renewables accounted for 100 per cent of Greece’s power generation, reaching a record high of 3,106 megawatt hours.

 

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The Week in a GIF

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Reply or tweet at DD with your favourite GIF and it might get featured here in a future issue.

 
 

Key phrases

Older messages

209 / France’s citizen-led climate experiment

Tuesday, October 11, 2022

Everyone you will ever meet knows something you don't. – Bill Nye Featured artist: Adil Khanna Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue 209! View/share online → I finally had time to catch

208 / Marketing for people that hate marketing

Tuesday, October 4, 2022

Leading into a world of unknowns, a world where you don't have the answer, the best you can do is to ask better questions, as well as help those around you to do the same. – Pascal Finette Featured

207 / A taste of the future of mobility

Tuesday, September 27, 2022

Curiosity is, in great and generous minds, the first passion and the last. – Samuel Johnson Featured artist: Léo Alexandre Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue 207! View/share online → I

206 / A guest poem while I’m out on a hike...

Tuesday, September 20, 2022

Success is getting what you want. Happiness is wanting what you get. – Dale Carnegie Featured artist: Zach Hill Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue 206! View/share online → After four

205 / Some housekeeping & survey results

Monday, September 12, 2022

Life is not a problem to be solved, but a reality to be experienced. – Søren Kierkegaard Featured artist: Sebastian Curi Dense Discovery Dense Discovery Welcome to Issue 205! View/share online → I'

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