I hope this isn’t the main takeaway from this essay - the essayist confesses his own experience has repudiated this chart.

It assumes individual people can, in spite of heavy propaganda and social pressure, individually can accurately evaluate an opaque hierarchical system as changeable and/or ‘totalizing.’ He viewed Trump as proof that the neoliberal system is not totalizing, that system change is possible.

Surprise! He was wrong.

For the documentary aspects of it, yeah.

It’s mostly a collection of found news footage, shots lifted from other dystopian films, and a low-budget self-narrated life of a silent women of the future living in the rubble of a mall in San Fransisco. The future fiction parts feel over the top coming from September 2022 when it was announced, or even October 2024 when it was released, but in July 2025 it definitely hits different.

The documentary parts take up the lion’s share of the run-time, and are relevant to our role as citizen news aggregators. It puts the right-wing news actors and politicians in their proper context, and is a good summary of what we’re up against.

This is a tedious recording of two people, one of whom doesn’t understand how to play nor cares to learn, try and suffer through an unpopular discontinued collectible card game. No wait there’s more: they also engage in annoying small-talk about their lives.

That sounds like a really nice neighborhood to live in.

Congratulations!

It’s called Tractorbeam Earth because it’s a quarterly publication run as a sweepstakes by Tractor Beverages, Inc.

Tractor Beverages is a corporation in Coeur d’Alene, ID that sells canned beverages through Amazon and Walmart, correct?

It sounds like extremely toxic organic chemistry. I imagine the waste from the reactions has special disposal requirements. Do you think the powder is hazardous as well?

I’m not a chemist, but from what I can tell it’s created using cesium salt as a precursor or catalyst. This doesn’t sound like something punks can safely mix in a bathtub.

I was a little disappointed that she tried to find some kind of synthesis between her own fawning opinion and Kim Stanley Robinson’s critical view of Always Coming Home.

Ursula’s concern with erasure due to sexism is warranted, but everyone’s star must fade. No one is completely correct, and while Le Guin was ahead of her time, no one has a perfect vision of the future or even a clear vision of their own present. Sincere criticism is a form of flattery, and many authors long gone continue to be referenced not just because they had a prescient view, but because their critics keep them alive. Tolstoy was the most famous author in the Soviet Union because despite being banned to print, the publishing of rebuttals and counter-apologetics were subsidized by the central soviet, so that everyone knew his name and anarchist views.

In this cast, DeFreitas celebrates Le Guin in a way that is effusive but neither hot nor cold. It’s exactly this kind of inoffensive praise that reduces the great to symbols of greatness, and from there to cliché, mediocrity, and obscurity. Good authors deserve trenchant praise, or at least honest criticism.

Clean energy infrastructure is desperately needed, but capitalists don’t want to pay labor a fair wage.

The stories I hear from tradespeople in clean energy work is that entry level positions are paying less, and the bonuses they were seeing when they started are drying up. Many are looking to move away from clean-energy specific labor and into electrical or construction where unions are better established.

Improperly installed solar panels short out and fail early, carelessly sealed roof mountings leak and damage the dwelling, and most importantly, pressured novice workers make often fatal mistakes while working with electricity or at significant heights. To those with the experience of prison labor as a baseline, the risks and rewards of this kind of labor may be attractive. But most tradespeople know these jobs exist, and choose not to take them.

Instead of support for labor, you see state, provincial, and national incentives to recruit new workers into these fields, as well as articles like this one touting the potential of employment in the clean energy economy. But noticeably absent from the article is any mention of labor organization or workers protections for the people doing this work. If the state was serious about building this infrastructure, they would make these fields union jobs. That’s the only way to get quality renewable energy infrastructure built at scale.

‘AI’ in the sense of machine learning algorithms is very old technology, and has seen revolutionary applications at every step of its development. Eliza was created in the 1960s and demonstrated that if the test of a computer’s artificial intelligence was whether it could fool a human that it was sentient, the value of that test depended very heavily on how willing the human correspondent was to ‘fill in the blanks.’ The results of those experiments show that the average person is extremely willing to fill in the blanks even when the technology is full of gaping holes.

In the podcast, they’re talking specifically about ChatGPT-style technology, its flaws, and the willingness of people to ‘fill in the blanks’ in a new dimension – to assume LLM technology is a truckload more graphics cards or a nuclear reactor away from what sci-fi writers mean when they say ‘Artificial Intelligence’ – and that is evidently false.

The petro-billionaire people who brought you “The Line” are joining up with the badly conceived Octopus Crane Tower idea people to bring you something that definitely will never be built and probably has deep conceptual flaws.

The important take away from this performance art is that the people causing global warming and who stand to benefit from pumping even more carbon into the air to are working on clever solutions to reverse it, and you can continue living your life as if things will eventually return to the pre-climate crisis status quo.

Thank you!

I can’t find !abc – I guess it overlaps with another community like !abolition so you can’t mouse-over it.

This distinction is important. I’ve seen a lot of greenwashing about hydrogen as a renewable energy source, but it is only a non-carbon producing form energy storage, and is almost entirely energy stored from processing fossil fuels.

Quelle jolie vue!

They kind of undersold their message by giving the vlogger jeans that had merely been cut to fit rather than using their robotic weaving method.

It would be very impressive if they could spin denim, but I suspect that’s currently outside of their envelope. It may only be usable for sweaters or something.

Five birds represent!

From what I could understand, it sounds like a really good introduction to the genre and the movement. I was surprised all of the reference books were in English - I would have expected an article for German-speaking audiences to be familiar with more German contributions to the genre.