And that is why she is a popular and effective leader in Chile’s student revolution.

The New York Times Magazine dedicates an inordinate amount of space over its seven pages relaying anecdotes about her looks and explaining how captivating her appearance is, rather than, you know, offering a detailed account of her personal history or, say, an in-depth look at her politics. The print version leads with this:

The result trivializes her achievements and reduces her story to a sexist cliche. People like Camila Vallejo because she is beautiful.

From the very first paragraph:

“With guarded smiles, they let us know they supported the Chilean student movement and especially its most prominent leader, Camila Vallejo. A bartender said, “La Camila es valiente”; he laughed and added, “Está bien buena la mina” — “She’s hot.”

The very next sentence describes Vallejo as “a Botticelli beauty who wears a silver nose ring”.

There are also sentences like this:

-”(people are always debating who is more beautiful, Camila or Karol)”

-”Vallejo’s air of serene self-confidence, he elaborated, her girl-next-door demeanor and, of course, her pretty face, won sympathy and trust in working- and middle-class households throughout Chile.”

There are others.

It is certainly valid to analyze the role the prominent person’s appearance plays in their public perception. But from the title on down, the article fetishizes her looks, makes it a focus of the profile, and tacitly uses it to explain away her power and popularity. Not only does this lead to a one-dimensional rendering of her story, it undermines her work and person.

For a woman to be an icon, she must first be a “hot” “glamorous” “Botticelli beauty” [[echoing the perspective of male dominated society]]. Then she might take up politics and organizing. But seriously, have you seen how hot and glamorous and Botticellian she is? Damn!

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Black Moth Super Rainbow offers a synth-soaked portrait of a mundane daily routine soaked in an equally mundane [but enveloping] brand of melancholy. The sentiments are frank, blunt, almost tired; rattled off half-assedly. But they stick. They appropriately approximate the angry, stilted ideas likely to spill forth from someone in the midst of such melancholia:

In the morning, I won’t cry.

I won’t eat a bunch of things to make me smile.

I can’t be without you.

Fuck that when I’m living without you.

I couldn’t need you more.

[[Lyrics are often indecipherable, but those are (probably) some key lines]]

Google’s augmented reality glasses are like an Android in your eyewear. Look how convenient and hip your life will be in tomorrow’s Google+Reality. You will be able to locate books in independent bookstores (which your augmented reality glasses, smart phones and other e-reading have evidently and thankfully not yet made obsolete) and meet cool friends outside of food trucks. You will no longer actually have to hang out with your hot girlfriend, you will just Skype her from a rooftop and play her songs on the ukelele.

Perhaps this is what life will look like for us all when technological advances have eliminated the need for most of us to work, in the soft utopia of the near-future.

Of course, that demo is missing Google’s bread and butter: the ads. Your actual reality is bound to look closer to this with those shades on:

This is Jonathan McIntosh’s “remix” of the Google presentation, with the ads factored in. It is funny, but also probably pretty close to what we should expect the final version to look like, given Google’s business model. At first thought, the notion seems outrageous—but then consider that for a good portion of our day, a significant fraction of our periphery is already clogged with ads anyway.

The LowLine underground park will easily surpass its $100,000 target for Kickstarter funding. The project would transform a subterranean trolley platform into an expansive park lit by innovative solar technology. There’s still time to pledge if you want in on the perks …

Now, in coming decades, society is poised to see the elimination of whole sectors. Robots, as we’ve seen, can take worker’s jobs on the production lines, iPads can take food orders in restaurants, and companies like Amazon are displacing traditional shopkeepers. To name a few. Meanwhile, industries that do remain, like resource extraction and distribution, are limited and profit only a small number of people.

So, what happens next? There aren’t going to be enough openings in the remaining service and information industry jobs to employ the millions of de-jobbed if the trend continues.

So, in a post called ‘Slouching Towards Utopia”, economics writer Matthew Yglesias imagines what happens next:

The ideal outcome is that (perhaps after a social crisis à la the Bell Riots) everyone gets expropriated and we abolish private property in ideas and natural resources. Then by taxing pollution, land, congestion, and other externalities we have adequate revenue to provide a decent social minimum for all at which point people do what they like. Some people’s hobbies will align reasonably well with some kind of labor market opportunity whereas others won’t, but society won’t be organized around a “work hard or else you’ll starve and be homeless” model because there will not objectively be a shortfall of food and houses or much of anything else.

This is a more realistically-tinged variant of technoutopianism than we’re accustomed to hearing—those Star Trek-esque utopias where machines do all the work and human society is egalitarian. Instead, Yglesias imagines a more socialistic society that nonetheless still harbors a relatively free market. There’s evidently some variation of a guaranteed minimum income that ensures everybody has enough resources and buying power to live freely, but the financially ambitious can still seek to accrue capital and more material goods than others.

Clearly, this isn’t an ideal situation—let’s call it a “soft” utopia, or semi-utopia—as those commanding more resources and capital would inevitably wield more power than those at the bottom, but it’s an interesting path to consider given our current economic trajectory …

A lawyer and early #Occupy supporter has spearheaded a splendidly wonky effort to get Washington to take the issues raised by the thousands of people who came together over the course of the OWS uprising seriously. It’s called the 99% Declaration, and the plan involves democratically electing delegates from each of the US states to draft a “petition for redress of grievances”—basically 10 or so of the biggest plights facing working families and the health of our democracy; think repealing Citizens United or a fairer tax code—to present to the sitting Congress.

If the 112th Congress fails to redress the contents of the petition, then a team of lawyers will sue the federal government. The First Amendment, after all, guarantees “the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the Government for a redress of grievances.”

It’s a brilliant plan in theory. Sad that many will seek to dismiss as utopian daydreaming this valid effort to reform our system into something closer resembling a truly representative democracy.

Suggest a grievance, register to vote for a delegate, or weed through the lengthy documents describing the technical details of the process at 99% Declaration.

They cost $300,000 and will be available later this year.

If you are rich, and want to purchase one, you will still need your pilot’s license before you can pretend you’re Bruce Willis in the Fifth Element. Also, flying cars evidently burn 5 gallons of gas an hour, and provide no discernible advantage over private jets—except perhaps, that the driver gets to show off that he owns and operates a super-cool and cutting edge private jet/tech toy every time he heads to the airfield.

The small platoon of soldiers stationed atop the first of a group of arid rolling hills looks like an ant farm from the valley bellow, a bunch of dots scrambling around moving indiscernible items here and there.

Two children are standing on the roof of a tiny weathered building there, squinting towards the commotion. One tugs the other’s shirtsleeve, and points to the east.

Next door, the village elders are squatting inside a barren room, weary already of a discussion that has barely begun. One leans his back against the wall, another steadies himself with a walking stick. They are all troubled, because the ants want to meet again.

The evenings have been punctuated by sporadic pop and crackle, there are flares at night and worse.

Taliban, Taliban, Taliban.

They will propose the topic of conversation, and they will ask questions for which there are no good answers.

Excited chatter from outside turns all eyes to the open door. Standing and hurrying to the frame, a middle-aged man with intelligent blue eyes shields them from the sun and looks. Fast-ascending above the cloud cover, there is this:

It is rising quickly, but its enormous frame refuses to be obscured. A burgeoning crowd, all heads turned upward, squinting, shielding, until the airship finally grows too small to follow, miles up.

They quickly arrive at a consensus: they will meet with those ants.

[[The giant spy blimp is real--read all about it at Wired]]

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You see, primitive alien race X, our scientists have just discovered that there are likely tens of billions of rocky, potentially life-supporting planets in the Milky Way alone. Space.com reports:

There should be billions of habitable, rocky planets around the faint red stars of our Milky Way galaxy, a new study suggests.

Though these alien planets are difficult to detect, and only a few have been discovered so far, they should be ubiquitous, scientists say. And some of them could be good candidates to host extraterrestrial life.

Which is good news for us, since we’re on the verge of royally and permanently ruining the presently hospitable climate of the one we live on.

Also, we’re cutting down all of our trees and blowing the tops off of all of our mountains at the moment. And in the future, our global elite will surely want a private planet with all of its mountains and trees intact to vacation on, or to sell to other global elites to establish an intergalactic minerals trading hub.

So what good news that there are potentially tens of billions of unspoiled, inhabitable new ones! Totally takes the pressure off of preventing this one from going to shit. See you soon, aliens!

P.S. Just a heads up: Might want to brush up on the words of Stephen Hawking, and/or rent some of our better sci-fi films for reference. Cheers!

It’s still Shins music, so it’s still abstract, metaphor-laden and melodic. But here:

—
Living high on a giant hog
On a mountain so steep
Keep your head in a hollow log
As the ruling fog are about to creep

What have we done?
How’d we get so far from the sun?
Lost, lost in an oscillating phase
Where a tiny few catch all of the rays

Out beyond the western squalls
In an alien land
They work for nothing at all
They don’t know the mall or the layaway plan
—

Not your average Guthrie-esque populist folk tune (nor Springsteensian anthem), here we engage the complexities of our slippery, inequality-laden times. Sure, a tiny few “are having all of the fun”, but is it even possible to even the odds without “having our gold teeth/pulled from our mouths”? How does this thing work? How does social reform take root; is violent revolution incipient? These menacing questions seem latent between the song’s winding hooks.

The conclusion is not optimistic: Either way, Mercer muses, none of this will end well. If the ruling fog relents, chaos follows. But stasis might be worse, as the current state of affairs foists this attitude on the world:

Apologies to the sick and the young; Get used to their dust in your lungs.