Is Afrofuturism for Africans?

Afrofuturism: Ayashis’ Amateki – an essay by Mohale Mashigo

“Afrofuturism is an escape for those who find themselves in the minority and divorced or violently removed from their African roots, so they imagine a ‘black future’ where they aren’t a minority and are able to marry their culture with technology. That is a very important story and it means a lot to many people. There are so many wonderful writers from the diaspora dealing with those feelings or complexities that it would be insincere of me to parrot what they are doing.

“My story, as an African living in Africa, is this: I lived (as in, under the same roof ) with white people for the first time when I was a nineteen-year-old student. My television screen showed stories populated by black people speaking indigenous languages, so I have never suffered from a lack of representation as such. Was I, though, still living in a country where my culture, language and presence were considered a nuisance? Absolutely!”

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I just subscribed to Weird Horror.

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You know that cool future holographic internet where people just wave their hands around and we can see from the graphic overlay that they’re interacting with 3D graphics? Well, what if you don’t have hands? Or arms? Dots asked these questions and developed an inclusive interactive system.

“As the world is entering this hand-gesture controlled future driven by machine-learning, we realize it will be difficult to accommodate disabilities, due to a lack of datasets. While we may use thousands of people’s hand-motion video to train one model, it is almost impossible to find two people with exactly the same form of disabilities. Disability is often highly individual, which is not reflected in machine learning. Can we imagine asking an upper limb amputee to use Hololens?

“Dots is an inclusive interface for future spatial computing, which empowers the disabled person to design their way to interact with Mixed Reality and Internet-of-things, based on their body conditions.”

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The gap between expected deaths and real deaths suggests that COVID-19 has been more deadly than the numbers currently reported. It may be 33% higher (if we’re approximately 210,000 right now, the likely number of dead due to COVID-19 is probably closer to 280,000).

Used to be if you allowed 300,000 US American citizens die through neglect and disinformation campaigns you’d be persona non grata in the states. Now, the Republican Party will ask you to be their standard bearer. Is this what Freud meant by ‘death drive’?

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If you are into SFF scholarship, the latest issue of Studies in the Fantastic (No. 9 – Summer 2020) looks to be available as open access. Included is this interview with Sofia Samatar.

S.S.: Yeah, well, my scholarship and my creative work really move hand in hand. Every chapter of my dissertation produced either a short story or a section of a novel. 

This topic came up at happy hour on Friday. Is it OK to wish someone die?

I don’t know the answer. All I could do was sing this song in my head.

Holly Herndon notes something I mentioned in a previous post. How do you cite your AI?

She carries it further and notes that you’re probably building on uncompensated labor.

“The process of training an AI system immediately raised questions about the importance of attribution and remuneration in this area. What most people understand Artificial Intelligence to be is just us, in aggregate — often behind the spectacular results of machine learning systems lies a database of uncredited and uncompensated labor.”

Here’s a collaboration between Herndon and her AI named Spawn.

#OurCreepyFuture – Deepfakes will soon rule our world. A very tiny alteration can help deepfakes escape detection

“The results of their paper expose just how flawed our current security systems are. The neural networks the two trained initially identified over 95% of the normal, everyday deepfakes. But when they perturbed the images, the detectors were able to catch (checks notes) zero percent.”

And if you’re going for quality you’re going to need deepfake actors.

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Congrats to N. K. Jemisin for her recognition by the MacArthur Foundation!

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Yes, Senator Lee, but republicanism is supposed come with Republican virtue. Not only is the current Republican party without virtue, it seems to actively pursue criminality, immorality, and unethical behavior. Nor does it actively support ‘negative’ liberty (freedom from government interference). Otherwise the Republican party would be the party of decriminalizing cannabis, and ending government interference in same-sex marriage, and women’s reproductive rights. They would also be the party of encouraging voting and civic participation, instead of the party of voter suppression. It may be that many of the founders wanted to see a republican nation, but the Republican party does not reflect those republican values.

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I need a search engine that will give me a results list of only websites without advertising.

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Ignore the title (which should more accurately be written “Fascist Revolution is a Fascist Concept”), and the annoying interstitial ‘quote’ graphics. This is an excellent introduction to Rosi Braidotti. Somehow, she only appeared on my radar this year. She is awesome.

https://youtu.be/A6PLJqtDp6Q

Wow, I can’t remember the last time I looked at BoingBoing. Probably not 10 years, but eight maybe? Seven?

Anyway, my feed knows me and alerted me to this post by Gareth Branwyn about Dark Shadows. Like Branwyn, I have fond memories from childhood. However, I wasn’t rushing home from school, I was still too young. My memory is that my aunt would visit occasionally (she must have been a teenager then) and would want to watch Dark Shadows.

I was captivated because there was a child character named David. I think that’s also where my childhood interest in blue whales started (the Blue Whale was the name of the local bar).

In 2012 I decided to revisit the series and watched all the pre-Barnabas episodes and fell head over heels. I love that show. I especially love the pre-Barnabas episodes (though as a child I was infatuated with Jonathan Frid).

This summer I watched the 1990s remake, which I thought was a pretty good adaptation.

I think it’s all available through Amazon Prime, and there are probably worse ways to while away a pandemic than watching this one-of-a-kind soapy goth. (For some reason I especially love the introductory voice-over that opened each episode.) If you want some idea of what to expect Branwyn points to this 2019 article from Syfy covering the major plotlines that developed over six seasons.

All Hallows

by Louise Gluck

Even now this landscape is assembling.
The hills darken. The oxen
sleep in their blue yoke,
the fields having been
picked clean, the sheaves
bound evenly and piled at the roadside
among cinquefoil, as the toothed moon rises:

This is the barrenness
of harvest or pestilence.
And the wife leaning out the window
with her hand extended, as in payment,
and the seeds
distinct, gold, calling
Come here
Come here, little one

And the soul creeps out of the tree.

Van Halen was my first concert.

I was a 15-year old no-goodnik and concerts were a way to escape parental supervision and enjoy the good things in life – cheap pot, cheap beer, and painfully loud rock and roll.

I remember wearing that concert t-shirt for years. I’m not sure why, but it was important to have the “baseball t-shirt” style with the 3-quarter sleeves.

I stopped listening to Van Halen when David Lee Roth left the group. I was not a Hagar fan. In fact, by the time Hagar joined up I probably wasn’t much of a Van Halen fan. Women and Children First was the last album of theirs I ever bought.

It’s hard to believe Eddie was only 10 years older than me. When I was a 15-year old doofus whipping my long hair to his guitar solos, he was a 25-year old rock god.

If you want a taste of that experience, here’s a bootleg taken from the same tour.

It’s hard to watch a video like the one below, and not think of Spinal Tap, but it sure meant a lot to me when I was younger and dumber than today.

Adios, Eddie. Thanks for rocking my teenage heart.

Excellent adaptation of Robert Sheckley’s “Store of the Worlds.”

The Air Force wants you to build them a flying car.

“Late last year, the U.S. military branch announced a program called “Agility Prime” seeking to turn commercial advances with flying cars into military applications. Set up like a DARPA Challenge, the Air Force released a preliminary solicitation this week for the kinds of vehicles companies can submit for the first stage of Agility Prime — these being electric or hybrid-powered eVTOL aircraft with autonomous, remote, or onboard-pilot controls.”

Periodically I drop into the DARPA page to see what shenanigans they’re up to. And every time I’m struck with the thought – imagine what the world would look like if research universities and medical research facilities were getting all that money funneled into the military.

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Mythaxis interviews Bruce Sterling.

“Also, I dislike schedules and responsibilities. There was a time in my life when I could put up with that — while raising children, mostly — but I find in later life that I travel a lot just for the joy of avoiding chores through not being around. I like to wake up when I feel like it, and follow my own proclivities through the day.

“This likely sounds pretty alarming to writers with a firmer work-ethic, but I’m not indolent, I’m just not always commercially productive as a team player.”

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Every time I hear arguments about ‘religious liberty’ (this time in conjunction with same-sex marriage) I think about Exodus 31:15.

“You may work for six days, but the seventh day is a day of worship, a day when you don’t work. It is holy to the LORD. Whoever works on that day must be put to death.”

Sounds to me like ‘religious liberty’ allows me to murder people working on the sabbath. And, if I don’t have that religious liberty, then any appeal to religious liberty is really a tissue-thin cover for bigotry.

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The finalists for the National Book Award have been announced.

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New-to-me phrase – Digital Emotion Contagion.

“Given the tremendous exposure to the emotions of others on digital media, the contagious spread of digital emotions seems to be having a powerful impact on user emotions and behavior”

While walking this morning my brain mulled over the intersection of the gig economy and AI, trying to figure out what this new class of AI curation will look like for the precariat.

Unearthing the following conference paper last night fed my thinking this morning: “The Future of Techno-disruption in Gig Economy Workforces: Challenging the Dialogue with Fictional Abstracts.”

In the paper the authors provide a few design-fiction scenarios, including, A case study of gig workers as responsible moral centres of semi-automated systems, as well as this glorious bit of imaginary scholarly future research:

“Auto-writing and deep-research software enables app-tutors (normally academic staff and unemployed graduates) to co-write up to 400 student dissertations simultaneously, costing between £250 – £1100 per essay (Stuart & Shatner 2028, Teacheroober 2026). Academic support apps were banned for final year students at Sony TRUMP University in 2028. Research showed that these students have worse post-grad employment outcomes in the first month (Teacheroober et al. 2029). Here, we examine the impact of the ban on staff.”

Bates, Oliver & Remy, Christian & Nash, Callum & Kirman, Ben. (2019). The future of techno-disruption in gig economy workforces: challenging the dialogue with fictional abstracts. HTTF 2019: Proceedings of the Halfway to the Future Symposium 2019. 1-4. 10.1145/3363384.3363476.

And then, while browsing the web at lunch I came across ANTHROPOCENE: An A.I. Opera by Michael Green.

“ANTHROPOCENE: An A.I. Opera” follows the story of EVA, a post human cyborg prophet, and BLADE, a security droid officer, and their survival after a major cataclysmic event. Blade arrested Eva for her possession of her FreeThought upload mind software, but the two were forced to work together after a swarm of meteors struck the Earth. BLADE takes EVA to the abandoned Biodome, with the objective to find their technocratic ruler, “NEURO”, in hope to reprogram his mission objectives, and build a New Earth Utopian model, with the use of nanotechnology, that will reign peacefully for the next 1000 years.

“ANTHROPOCENE was composed with the assistance of artificial intelligence. The music was generated using A.I. software, where the composer has control over Articulation Melodic role, Dynamics, Register, Polyphony and Different Chord Notes. The thematic concepts of the lyrical content was pre arranged by the composer, and generated through the use of GPT-2, a text generating model. Once the lyrical content of the Opera was completed, it was fed through voice synthesizer software. The software synthesizes singing by typing in lyrics and melody.”

I expect we’ll see a lot more AI/human collaborations over the next few years.

I wonder when MLA, APA, Chicago, etc. will add citation styles for acknowledging which AI you used in the creation of your work.