[NetBehaviour] Full moon feelings

[IJAD Dance]

Thank you Ruth this is great, I was looking at reading books about tech, human, all that we are not able to witness in our ever sooo busy life.
Hope you are all well!
Kindness to all  

> On 10 Jul 2024, at 17:58, Ruth Catlow <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org> wrote:
> 
> I think this might still be relevant 6 months later ;)
> 
> ---------- Forwarded message ---------
> From: Ruth Catlow <ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org <mailto:ruth.catlow at furtherfield.org>>
> Date: Thu, 28 Dec 2023 at 22:22
> Subject: Full moon feelings
> To: NetBehaviour for networked distributed creativity <netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org <mailto:netbehaviour at lists.netbehaviour.org>>
> 
> 
> Hello all, from the stormy dark of the year, here in East England. 
> 
> At dawn, a few mornings back, we saw the fullish moon drop into the arms of a tree silhouetted on the horizon. It inspired me to reflect on the moiling feelings of the year. Then it inspired me to share these four books that produced very different feelings - energising, humbling, interrupting, and delightful.
> 
> 1. Wayward Lives, Beautiful Experiments by Saidiya Hartman. (2019). Recommended by our friend Cassie Thornton, artist, debt activist and initiator of The Hologram peer to peer feminist healthcare network. 
> 
> This is a book about black intimate life in New York and Philadelphia at the beginning of the twentieth century, 35 years after the abolition of slavery. The author brings her literary imagination to historical archive materials. It's a total revelation about the myriad modes and flows of fierce informal battles against personal and institutional oppression across generations.
> 
> 2. Hospicing Modernity: Parting with Harmful Ways of Living (2021) by Vanessa Machado De Oliveira. Recommended by our friend Dani Admis, researcher and curator (of the collective environmental justice project Sunlight Doesn't Need a Pipeline).
> 
> This book is a manifesto and workbook that shows how profoundly out of balance our ecosocial world has become as a result of colonialism, resource extraction etc. It also reveals all the psychological moves we make to feel OK about how we are each implicated and the limits we feel to our agency. It strips away any safe or comfortable perspectives on the terrible harms inflicted by the modernist idea of progress and the different parts we might play in it.
> 
> 3. In the Absence of the Sacred: The Failure of Technology and the Survival of the Indian Nations,(1991) by Jerry Mander. I read this after coming across Mander's Obituary in Marc's subscription to Resurgence magazine. 
> 
> This book blew my mind. It was written before anyone knew what the Web would become and is a historic and prophetic analysis of the combined harms of unregulated social tech development, and the primacy of profit, protected through corporate law. It also demonstrates the role that the lying and cheating of so-called civilised states and business has played in the devastation of the environment, democracy and indigenous cultures over the last 250+ years. Mander was an anti-globalisation activist, known as "the Adman for Progressive Causes" so he communicates all this with great clarity and verve.
> The argument that interrupted me most profoundly was that since the mid 1950s tech conglomerates have sold consumer-citizens on the edge-case benefits of technologies (a good recent example is the medical diagnostic ability of AI) while the known or predictable hazards to society have been suppressed, minimized or defended as an unfortunate sacrifice worth making for inevitable "progress".
> 
> 4. The Animals in That Country by Laura Jean McKay (2020).
> We (a bunch of us at Furtherfield) have spent the last few years LARPing interspecies justice scenarios in Finsbury Park in North London (more to follow on this in the new year). We encountered a series of fascinating challenges and questions like: what do we actually already know and feel about what matters to other living beings? What difference would knowing more make?* Is multi-species democracy worth exploring, and if not, why not? What actions might be taken by whom to change interspecies relations, and ecosystems-care for the better? 
> 
> McKay's novel is an Aussie black comedy sci-fi that explores what might happen to humans if they could be hypnotised by whales, bullied by wild dogs, and could hear the glee of midges as they sucked their blood. It is an incredible, funny, delightful, impressive work of imagination that did what we were trying to do too - exploring what it might feel like to acknowledge the sentience of all other beings,  with their own experience, and to live in relationship with them.
> 
> *While our LARP involved a fictitious device that allows all flora and fauna to communicate freely with each other I am highly suspicious of all the recent AI projects that claim to allow us to communicate with animals and plants. That's because I don't see the problem (with mass species extinctions and ecosystems collapse and injustice) as a knowledge problem but a relating-and-care problem.
> 
> Wow! Thank you if you got this far.
> All the feelz, including warm, respectful and well-wishing ones.
> Ruth
> 
> 
> 
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