February 2021: Jeff Bezos to step down as Amazon chief executive to spend more time on space exploration and climate emergency.

Take all your hate and all your fear with you
And blast them into the blue

Building your walls to keep them out
Building your stash to wipe them out
You staked your claim on planets new
You built your ship and up you flew
Looking back on the world below
Safe from the damage and woe
But you cannot play golf in space

Take all your hate and all your fear
Take all your hate and all your fear
Take all your hate and all your fear with you
And blast them into the blue

Platinum club for psychopaths
Draining the tank with dirty maths
Plundering all to gild the few
You built your ships and up you flew
Infinity pool on Ganymede
You took so much more than you need
But you cannot play golf in space

Take all your hatе and all your fear
Take all your hate and all your fеar
Take all your hate and all your fear with you
And blast them into the blue

Space Golf by Hen Ogledd

I’m in love with the track for a number of reasons – it sounds as if Steeleye Span had been born on a Generation Ship.

It could have only been written in these times.

The punch of some of those couplets. Oof.

Perhaps it will survive the new dark ages and be sung acapella – a ‘Gaudete‘ for the 24th Century – by our descendents in Jupiter space.

I wish Mr Bezos well, and hope that perhaps he gives the track a listen.

Platinum club for psychopaths
Draining the tank with dirty maths
Plundering all to gild the few
You built your ships and up you flew
Infinity pool on Ganymede
You took so much more than you need
But you cannot play golf in space.

The “Jump” e-bikes in the city of London have had Lime decals and tags applied to them in the last six months or so, as the business and physical assets have transferred over to Lime.

Matt Webb’s Thingscon keynote introduced me to the notion of “Jobs below the API” as coined by Peter Reinhardt in his excellent 2015 blog post “replacing middle-management with APIs”

As I spotted them, the Jump bikes resonated with this – a fleet of physical objects in the city that had moved from one distant company to another beneath the API, probably re-branded and maintained by humans beneath another…

Look at this. You are a city. A planet. A cosmos.

via William Gibson – his commentary adroit as always:

Nature, she’s not so simple as she looks to the nekkid eye, but lots of folks still like to understand her on the basis of the nekkid eye. Flat earth, masks do nothing, etc.

William Gibson

We are trapped in the middle world but we can see so much more when we try.

Our survival depends on it.

From the estimable Saul Griffith’s “If I Were Secretary of Energy”:

The first thing I would do is hire a team of DOE artists in residence. We need ideas and creativity. These artists would fulfill a role similar to the NASA art program that began in 1962 which was critical to filling the American imagination with the possibilities of space travel, the adventure, the future, the wonder. In the 50 years since Earth Day, an enormous number of column-inches have been written about our deteriorating environment (and more recently deteriorating climate) but not enough about visions for what success looks like for humanity. The DOE artists-in-residence would go to work showing us what the future of cleaner electrified building stock would look like, how much cleaner our streets and air will be with electric cars and new electric transit modes, including electric flight. We’d see verdant pictures of the future of regenerative agriculture and an even more productive carbon sequestering food system that also makes more space for wildness and national park and recreation areas. You might find it odd that the first thing I’d do at DOE is make art, but this is critical, we need a shared vision of where we are going, one of abundance and success and of the U.S. winning, if we are to get the popular buy-in and acceptance we need to address climate change in earnest and at scale.

Which made me think immediately of the late, great Sascha Pohflepp‘s piece from back in 2009 – The Golden Institute.

It imagines a counterfactual history of the 1980s where Jimmy Carter beats Reagan – and the USA embarks on an Apollo/Manhattan Project scale of investment in renewable energy independence.

Sascha is remembered this weekend by friends and collaborators at this event “Pohflepp in Practice”.

I’m attending the event online as I write. The talks will be recorded and archived. As the introduction by Calum Bowden and Stephanie Sherman stated – we can’t help wonder what Sascha would have made of these strange times.

I’m sure he would have brought the curiosity and vision that Saul is searching for – with a twist of humor and criticality.

Injecting humanity and humility into the technological hubris of a possible future, while maintaining an essential central optimism – which for me was his trademark.

“I think a lot about what these birds see when they look at me — and I’m sure anyone who has a pet is familiar with this feeling. I assume they just see a female human who for some reason seems to pay attention to them. They don’t know what my work is, they don’t see progress — they just see recurrence, day after day, week after week.

And through them, I am able to inhabit that perspective, to see myself as the human animal that I am, and when they fly off, to some extent, I can inhabit that perspective too, noticing the shape of the hill that I live on and where all of the tall trees and good landing spots are.

These alien animal perspectives on me and our shared world have provided me not only with an escape hatch from contemporary anxiety but also a reminder of my own animality and the animateness of the world I live in.”

– “How to do nothing” by Jenny Odell

“You’re distracted,” said Dr Easy. “You’re so focused on distraction that, as a species,

you will never exceed what you are, right now.” The robot gestured at the students assembled in the lecture theatre.

“You are it, for humanity. You’re as far as your species goes. Whereas my people are going much further. But don’t worry: we will send you a postcard.”

A downbeat note to end on, thought Theodore, and he rebuked the robot on their walk back to his office.

Dr Easy replied, “I gave them permission to focus on their own enjoyment and not torment themselves with ambitions they cannot realise. It’s what they really wanted to hear.”

“You intervened,” said Theodore. “You closed off possibilities for their future.”

“I offered them an excuse,” the robot brushed moon dust from its suede chassis. “Some of them will take it. The best will not accept it.”

From “The Destructives” by Matthew D’Abaitua

“Old England is an imaginary place, a landscape built from words, woodcuts, films, paintings, picturesque engravings. It is a place imagined by people, and people do not live very long or look very hard. We are very bad at scale. The things that live in the soil are too small to care about; climate change too large to imagine. We are bad at time, too. We cannot remember what lived here before we did; we cannot love what is not. Nor can we imagine what will be different when we are dead. We live out our three score and ten, and tie our knots and lines only to ourselves. We take solace in pictures, and we wipe the hills of history.”

From “H is for Hawk” by Helen McDonald.

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