March Kindle excerpts

Everything I highlighted on my Kindle last month, presented (as usual) without context, commentary, or adequate citation. More for my own reference than anything, so, reader beware.

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 211 | location 3224-3228 | Added on Tuesday, 1 March 2022 21:45:18

Many modern cultures, in which the economy was previously based on hoeing or shifting agriculture, such as African ones, are more egalitarian than those that used to plough, such as Middle Eastern ones, research shows. A similar change occurred in sub-Saharan Africa, where the spread of cattle ownership led to a switch from matrilineal to patrilineal norms.14 Matrilineal societies only persisted where the tsetse flies prohibited livestock farming. Environmental pressures can strongly influence human culture.

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 217 | location 3323-3325 | Added on Tuesday, 1 March 2022 22:28:23

once people began to own animals and plants, as opposed to interacting with them as one wild creature to another, this relationship shifted. As we transferred our gods from living animals and natural structures to our constructed, monumental representations and to human forms, we also changed the hierarchical status.

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 224 | location 3422-3426 | Added on Tuesday, 1 March 2022 22:41:35

The indigenous resistance there is coupled with a high incidence of hereditary sickle-cell anemia, which offers malaria protection (because the parasite can’t live in the oddly shaped hemoglobin), but is weakening because the blood can’t carry enough oxygen. Yam cultivation creates a perfect mosquito-breeding environment, so African populations with a history of yam cultivation have a higher incidence of sickle-cell anemia, but a lower mortality from malaria. As we change our environment, so we change our genes.

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 224 | location 3430-3433 | Added on Tuesday, 1 March 2022 23:09:21

The bicycle40 reduced this considerably, by enabling sex between geographically distant populations. The sale of 4 million bicycles before the First World War had a striking impact on French society, including making the French taller by reducing the number of marriages between blood relations.41 The same effect was seen in England.

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 227 | location 3468-3468 | Added on Tuesday, 1 March 2022 23:13:37

Cities represent the greatest expression of our urge to produce beauty and to triumph over the natural environment.

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 227 | location 3479-3481 | Added on Tuesday, 1 March 2022 23:15:29

The great cultural advances of the Roman Empire were actually pretty disastrous for the health of its subjects. The average femur length for men in Britain shrank over the course of Roman occupation, then rebounded after they had left: “The Romans were helplessly caught in the vice grip of their own progress, with its confounding ecological repercussions.”

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 239 | location 3662-3664 | Added on Wednesday, 2 March 2022 23:05:02

The Polynesians evolved an extraordinary mental “star compass” to track the movements of around 220 stars. Memorizing a sequence of rising and setting stars, and keeping track of their speed, direction, and time, enabled these expert seafarers to chart a star path through the night and command territory across the vast Pacific Ocean.

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 247 | location 3779-3782 | Added on Wednesday, 2 March 2022 23:18:40

The result is a mismatch between the clocks in our cells and our cultural interpretation of the atomic time beamed by satellites to our smartphones. We work late into the evenings, rise early in darkness, and those of us who are office-bound at high latitudes may not see the sun at all for weeks over wintertime. We live, many of us, in a perpetual jetlag, which impacts our health, including an increase in cancers and depression, and also our relationship with the natural world.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 3rd (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 242-245 | Added on Thursday, 3 March 2022 23:15:08

When it wants to dart away, it chooses upstream because it’s easier to form a strong vortex against the current. A sharp twist in the water and it spins itself away upstream to either create another vortex itself or hop a free ride from others it can sense in the water… The pinball effect. It has taken a couple of years but finally I understand Viktor Schauberger’s comment that has stuck in my mind

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 3rd (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 242-246 | Added on Thursday, 3 March 2022 23:15:23

Transcendence (Gaia Vince)

Your Highlight on page 275 | location 4216-4216 | Added on Friday, 4 March 2022 23:30:02

the consequences of our Anthropocene will be faced for generations to come: we have colonized the future.

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)

Your Highlight at location 158-160 | Added on Saturday, 5 March 2022 14:36:08

Because data center noise is unregulated by political authorities, facilities can be built in close proximity to residential communities. Given the subjective nature of hearing, the history of noise regulation might best be characterized by a series of contests over expertise and the “right” to quiet, as codified in liberal legal regimes.

The Staggering Ecological Impacts of Computation and the Cloud (thereader.mitpress.mit.edu)

Your Highlight at location 190-192 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 00:43:15

The Cloud is both cultural and technological. Like any aspect of culture, the Cloud’s trajectory — and its ecological impacts — are not predetermined or unchangeable. Like any aspect of culture, they are mutable.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 3rd (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 334-337 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 22:13:29

As Jameson points out, it is important to oppose political attacks on the idea of utopia, as these are usually reactionary statements on the behalf of the currently powerful, those who enjoy a poorly-hidden utopia-for-the-few alongside a dystopia-for-the-many. This observation provides the fourth term of the Greimas rectangle, often mysterious, but in this case perfectly clear: one must be anti-anti-utopian.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 3rd (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 365-370 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 22:20:16

An adequate life provided for all living beings is something the planet can still do; it has sufficient resources, and the sun provides enough energy. There is a sufficiency, in other words; adequacy for all is not physically impossible. It won’t be easy to arrange, obviously, because it would be a total civilizational project, involving technologies, systems, and power dynamics; but it is possible. This description of the situation may not remain true for too many more years, but while it does, since we can create a sustainable civilization, we should. If dystopia helps to scare us into working harder on that project, which maybe it does, then fine: dystopia. But always in service to the main project, which is utopia.

Instapaper: Sunday, Mar. 6th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 195-197 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 22:39:56

TED’s influence on intellectual culture was “taking something with value and substance and coring it out so that it can be swallowed without chewing,” Bratton said. “This is not the solution to our most frightening problems — rather, this is one of our most frightening problems.”

Instapaper: Sunday, Mar. 6th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 266-267 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 22:47:40

only complete the narrative, but we make new ones. When there is no cut, your eyes start doing the editing—Bazin scholars call this the democratization of the eye.

Instapaper: Sunday, Mar. 6th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 310-314 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 22:53:16

entertained by art; you should be challenged by it. Can transcendental animation be a solace for a fragilized humanity? As life slows down, can we use our enlarged bandwidth for more nothingness, for fewer cuts, less action, post-cinema, post-narrative, for animated slow cinema? We are in a time-movement experience, a mise en abyme of life imitating art. I would argue that we are ready for transcendental animation, as we have already mastered the art of wasting time, consuming an endless feed of cats, raccoons, and furry potatoes.

Instapaper: Sunday, Mar. 6th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 309-310 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 22:53:23

“I mean negative capability, that is when man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries and doubts without any irritable reaching after fact and reason.”

Instapaper: Sunday, Mar. 6th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 310-314 | Added on Sunday, 6 March 2022 22:53:47

Can transcendental animation be a solace for a fragilized humanity? As life slows down, can we use our enlarged bandwidth for more nothingness, for fewer cuts, less action, post-cinema, post-narrative, for animated slow cinema? We are in a time-movement experience, a mise en abyme of life imitating art. I would argue that we are ready for transcendental animation, as we have already mastered the art of wasting time, consuming an endless feed of cats, raccoons, and furry potatoes.

Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 8th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 108-109 | Added on Thursday, 10 March 2022 23:16:39

The Buddha once said to his cousin Ananda that cultivating wholesome and supportive friendships is not part of, but is in fact the whole of spiritual life,

Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 8th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 228-231 | Added on Thursday, 10 March 2022 23:34:46

One of my concerns with the spread of Buddhism is the way in which it seems to be spreading as Foucault terms a “technology of the self”, as a supplement to a liberal lifestyle that doesn’t challenge its worldview and not something that asks radical questions about our metaphysical and political being in the world. I think that’s one of my primary concerns in expressing Buddhism in the language of anarchy and vice versa.

Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 8th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 274-278 | Added on Thursday, 10 March 2022 23:38:41

Despite all this, those who do look into the matter are invariably forced to the conclusion that play does exist across the animal universe. And exists not just among such notoriously frivolous creatures as monkeys, dolphins, or puppies, but among such unlikely species as frogs, minnows, salamanders, fiddler crabs, and yes, even ants—which not only engage in frivolous activities as individuals, but also have been observed since the nineteenth century to arrange mock-wars, apparently just for the fun of it.

Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 8th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 340-343 | Added on Saturday, 12 March 2022 22:32:21

Once you reduce all living beings to the equivalent of market actors, rational calculating machines trying to propagate their genetic code, you accept that not only the cells that make up our bodies, but whatever beings are our immediate ancestors, lacked anything even remotely like self-consciousness, freedom, or moral life—which makes it hard to understand how or why consciousness (a mind, a soul) could ever have evolved in the first place.

Instapaper: Tuesday, Mar. 8th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 451-453 | Added on Saturday, 12 March 2022 22:45:41

Our minds are just a part of nature. We can understand the happiness of fishes—or ants, or inchworms—because what drives us to think and argue about such matters is, ultimately, exactly the same thing. Now wasn’t that fun?

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (Mark O’Connell)

Your Highlight on page 26 | location 399-401 | Added on Sunday, 13 March 2022 21:01:39

offer no visions of what the future might be like—partly because I claim no authority from which to do so, but mostly because the future interests me only as a lens through which to view our own time: its terrors, its neuroses, its strange fevers. Either we are alive in the last days or we are not, but the inarguable thing in any case, the interesting thing, is that we are alive.

Notes from an Apocalypse: A Personal Journey to the End of the World and Back (Mark O’Connell)

Your Highlight on page 26 | location 399-401 | Added on Sunday, 13 March 2022 21:01:46

I offer no visions of what the future might be like—partly because I claim no authority from which to do so, but mostly because the future interests me only as a lens through which to view our own time: its terrors, its neuroses, its strange fevers. Either we are alive in the last days or we are not, but the inarguable thing in any case, the interesting thing, is that we are alive.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 13 | location 197-198 | Added on Tuesday, 15 March 2022 23:47:55

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” Somehow,

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 13 | location 197-198 | Added on Tuesday, 15 March 2022 23:48:02

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.” Somehow, even before I heard the Buddhist teachings,

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 13 | location 197-198 | Added on Tuesday, 15 March 2022 23:48:07

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 13 | location 197-198 | Added on Tuesday, 15 March 2022 23:48:13

“Only to the extent that we expose ourselves over and over to annihilation can that which is indestructible be found in us.”

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 14 | location 211-213 | Added on Tuesday, 15 March 2022 23:49:53

Things falling apart is a kind of testing and also a kind of healing. We think that the point is to pass the test or to overcome the problem, but the truth is that things don’t really get solved. They come together and they fall apart. Then they come together again and fall apart again. It’s just like that.

Man’s Search for Meaning (Viktor E. Frankl)

Your Highlight on page 6 | location 78-83 | Added on Wednesday, 16 March 2022 09:17:23

“Don’t aim at success—the more you aim at it and make it a target, the more you are going to miss it. For success, like happiness, cannot be pursued; it must ensue, and it only does so as the unintended side-effect of one’s dedication to a cause greater than oneself or as the by-product of one’s surrender to a person other than oneself. Happiness must happen, and the same holds for success: you have to let it happen by not caring about it. I want you to listen to what your conscience commands you to do and go on to carry it out to the best of your knowledge. Then you will live to see that in the long run—in the long run, I say!—success will follow you precisely because you had forgotten to think of it.”

Instapaper: Monday, Mar. 14th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 70-72 | Added on Wednesday, 16 March 2022 22:31:23

Naming gives birth to descriptions that can create unnecessary dualisms that limit more than liberate. So, liberation is not a static condition or a happy ending to a movie. It’s not one thing. It’s a collage of many pieces that when combined creates a nameless composition. Since people’s needs are always changing, the answers to questions that meet those needs are always changing too.

Instapaper: Monday, Mar. 14th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 98-101 | Added on Wednesday, 16 March 2022 22:35:10

Let’s question our attachments and see what new things we can bring forth. Rest in peace to Thich Nhat Hanh. As he wrote: “Dualistic notions, such as birth and death, being and nonbeing, sameness and otherness, coming and going, are the foundation of all afflictions.” This applies to much more than our physical bodies. It helps us think through the binaries we get trapped by and I’d love for a lot of these teachings to help us break free of it all and transcend and transform for the sake of much better things.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 18 | location 270-272 | Added on Thursday, 17 March 2022 09:22:09

In fact, the rampant materialism that we see in the world stems from this moment. There are so many ways that have been dreamt up to entertain us away from the moment, soften its hard edge, deaden it so we don’t have to feel the full impact of the pain that arises when we cannot manipulate the situation to make us come out looking fine.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 20 | location 295-297 | Added on Thursday, 17 March 2022 09:25:16

The spiritual journey involves going beyond hope and fear, stepping into unknown territory, continually moving forward. The most important aspect of being on the spiritual path may be to just keep moving. Usually, when we

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 20 | location 295-296 | Added on Thursday, 17 March 2022 09:25:29

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 22 | location 325-328 | Added on Thursday, 17 March 2022 09:28:46

We might think, as we become more open, that it’s going to take bigger catastrophes for us to reach our limit. The interesting thing is that, as we open more and more, it’s the big ones that immediately wake us up and the little things that catch us off guard. However, no matter what the size, color, or shape is, the point is still to lean toward the discomfort of life and see it clearly rather than to protect ourselves from it.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 17th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 330-331 | Added on Thursday, 17 March 2022 23:03:37

Each of the Tāniko patterns was chosen as an important visual symbol throughout the report and illustrates the importance of symbolism to connect narrative and soul of any project.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 29 | location 443-445 | Added on Thursday, 17 March 2022 23:09:12

This starts with realizing that whatever occurs is neither the beginning nor the end. It is just the same kind of normal human experience that’s been happening to everyday people from the beginning of time. Thoughts, emotions, moods, and memories come and they go, and basic nowness is always here.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 37 | location 559-560 | Added on Friday, 18 March 2022 22:38:29

It’s a transformative experience to simply pause instead of immediately filling up the space. By waiting, we begin to connect with fundamental restlessness as well as fundamental spaciousness.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 39 | location 594-595 | Added on Sunday, 20 March 2022 00:49:52

This is the beginning of the beginning. Without giving up hope—that there’s somewhere better to be, that there’s someone better to be—we will never relax with where we are or who we are.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 46 | location 698-699 | Added on Sunday, 20 March 2022 22:48:16

According to this very simple teaching, becoming immersed in these four pairs of opposites—pleasure and pain, loss and gain, fame and disgrace, and praise and blame—is what keeps us stuck in the pain of samsara.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 57 | location 871-873 | Added on Monday, 21 March 2022 22:22:01

It’s easy to get the idea that there is something wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness, which is like thinking that there is something wrong with our fundamental situation. But there’s nothing wrong with impermanence, suffering, and egolessness; they can be celebrated. Our fundamental situation is joyful.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 59 | location 900-902 | Added on Monday, 21 March 2022 22:24:53

Egolessness is a state of mind that has complete confidence in the sacredness of the world. It is unconditional well-being, unconditional joy that includes all the different qualities of our experience.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 67 | location 1027-1031 | Added on Tuesday, 22 March 2022 23:41:09

To be fully alive, fully human, and completely awake is to be continually thrown out of the nest. To live fully is to be always in no-man’s-land, to experience each moment as completely new and fresh. To live is to be willing to die over and over again. From the awakened point of view, that’s life. Death is wanting to hold on to what you have and to have every experience confirm you and congratulate you and make you feel completely together. So even though we say the yama mara is fear of death, it’s actually fear of life. We want to be perfect, but we just keep seeing

Instapaper: Sunday, Mar. 20th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 297-298 | Added on Wednesday, 23 March 2022 08:25:11

Durant seems to bow his head before the “unfathomable abyss” of his topic, which proves “too wide, too deep, too vast for perfect exploration”.18 Seaweed chastened his ego, and abasement made space for love.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 24th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 49-50 | Added on Thursday, 24 March 2022 23:05:45

In translating his final missive, I hope to transmit his message to an even wider audience. It is not a hopeful message, but the world is not currently an especially hopeful place.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 24th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 198-201 | Added on Thursday, 24 March 2022 23:22:52

what matters to Beer is the relationships between different layers of a system: whether the actors at each level have appropriate, timely information from below and above, and the extent to which they are empowered to act. In other words, both capitalist and state socialist organizations can fail by reducing their human agents to mere machines, preventing the flow of information necessary to adapt to a complex and continually changing world.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 24th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 227-229 | Added on Thursday, 24 March 2022 23:25:56

massive corporations like Walmart and Amazon today carry out economic planning at a scale far beyond Chile in 1973; modern technology plus the political will to implement something like Cybersyn would enable a genuinely new political economy.

Instapaper: Thursday, Mar. 24th (Instapaper)

Your Highlight at location 379-380 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 07:47:48

When will we ever see realized what Sultana glimpses: the abolition of fossil-fuel technologies, the greenifying of cities, the detoxification of masculinity, and the triumph of love and truth over fear and hatred?

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 74 | location 1121-1124 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 16:30:19

hurting—something we soon notice is that the person we set out to help may trigger unresolved issues in us. Even though we want to help, and maybe we do help for a few days or a month or two, sooner or later someone walks through that door and pushes all our buttons. We find ourselves hating those people or scared of them or feeling like we just can’t handle them. This is true always, if we are sincere about wanting to benefit others. Sooner or later, all our own unresolved issues will come up; we’ll be confronted with ourselves.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 74 | location 1129-1131 | Added on Friday, 25 March 2022 16:31:11

we find ourselves unworkable and give up on ourselves, then we’ll find others unworkable and give up on them. What we hate in ourselves, we’ll hate in others. To the degree that we have compassion for

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 81 | location 1231-1234 | Added on Tuesday, 29 March 2022 21:58:37

When we see a woman and her child begging on the street, when we see a man mercilessly beating his terrified dog, when we see a teenager who has been badly beaten or see fear in the eyes of a child, do we turn away because we can’t bear it? Most of us probably do. Someone needs to encourage us not to brush aside what we feel, not to be ashamed of the love and grief it arouses in us, not to be afraid of pain. Someone needs to encourage us that this soft spot in us could be awakened and that to do this would change our lives.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 101 | location 1535-1536 | Added on Wednesday, 30 March 2022 22:48:30

One piece of advice that Don Juan gave to Carlos Casteneda was to do everything as if it were the only thing in the world that mattered, while all the time knowing that it doesn’t matter at all. That

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 108 | location 1654-1655 | Added on Wednesday, 30 March 2022 23:10:33

As Milarepa sang to the monsters he found in his cave, “It is wonderful you demons came today. You must come again tomorrow. From time to time, we should converse.”

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 114 | location 1741-1743 | Added on Thursday, 31 March 2022 08:10:00

From the point of view of samaya, we could say that looking for alternatives is the only thing that keeps us from realizing that we’re already in a sacred world.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 124 | location 1901-1903 | Added on Thursday, 31 March 2022 09:05:44

Maybe the most important teaching is to lighten up and relax. It’s such a huge help in working with our crazy mixed-up minds to remember that what we’re doing is unlocking a softness that is in us and letting it spread. We’re letting it blur the sharp corners of self-criticism and complaint.

When Things Fall Apart (Pema Chodron)

Your Highlight on page 127 | location 1947-1948 | Added on Thursday, 31 March 2022 09:10:08

Now is the time. If there’s any possibility for enlightenment, it’s right now, not at some future time. Now is the time.

Wander Lines

Roaming the wilds of art and culture

March Kindle excerpts

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