Category Archives: New Utopia

As America remains busy anticipating the return of Saint Etienne to stateside stages this fall, the English trio have provided a warm look back in their new video for Magpie Eyes. The Tash Tung-directed clip, which you can watch below, shows a trio of youths depicting a fictionalized Sarah Cracknell, Bob Stanley and Pete Wiggs as they spend their days free from cares.

The video was shot in Stevenage with its once fine Ladybird book New Town architecture that was a fleeting vision of suburban utopia, says Wiggs in a press release. The director Tash Tung came up with the idea of an imagined younger us spending a typical day hanging out in record shops and cafes capturing the ennui and bonhomie of those years when you have no idea how your life will pan out.

Adds Tung: It was so much fun to make a music video for Saint Etienne, a band who I grew up with and who have a long history of interesting promos. It was a great experience to work in a small team and also with a lot of creative freedom, using film photography and shooting docu portraits of kids from the local area in the town centre. My favorite very serendipitous moment was when I cast my friend Eve Mahoney to play the young version of Sarah, and I found out Eves uncle used to be the bands photographer, the amazing Joe Dilworth!

Magpie Eyes is the latest track off Saint Etiennes effervescent new record, Home Counties, which theyll show off later this year when they play ONCE Ballroom in Somerville on September 24. Watch the video below, and scan through all of the celebrated trios U.S. live dates.

Saint Etienne US Fall Tour September 24: Somerville, MA ONCE Ballroom September 25: New York, NY Bowery Ballroom September 26: Brooklyn, NY Music Hall of Williamsburg September 27: Washington, DC U Street Music Hall September 29: Chicago, IL Park West October 2: Seattle, WA Neptune October 4: San Francisco, CA The Fillmore October 5: Pomona, CA Glass House October 6: Los Angeles, CA The Fonda Theatre

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New Sounds: Saint Etienne reflect on carefree youth in the video for 'Magpie Eyes' - Vanyaland

Watch this recently released ad from the National Rifle Association, starring right-wing pundit Dana Loesch. It comes this close to calling for a civil war against liberals:

Heres a full transcription of Loeschs rant, in case you prefer text. Bear in mind that these words are overlaid over ominous images of protest and street violence:

They use their media to assassinate real news. They use their schools to teach children that their president is another Hitler. They use their movie stars and singers and comedy shows and award shows to repeat their narrative over and over again. And then they use their ex-president to endorse the resistance.

All to make them march. Make them protest. Make them scream racism and sexism and xenophobia and homophobia. To smash windows, burn cars, shut down interstates and airports, bully and terrorize the law-abiding until the only option left is for the police to do their jobs and stop the madness.

And when that happens, theyll use it as an excuse for their outrage. The only way we stop this, the only way we save our country and our freedom, is to fight this violence of lies with the clenched fist of truth.

Im the National Rifle Association of America. And Im freedoms safest place.

Its not hard to figure out what the narrative is here. A liberal insurgency is destroying American society. The only way to protect yourself from this surge in left-wing violence (a made-up threat, to be clear) is to donate to the NRA an organization that exists solely to help people buy guns.

The ad isnt an outright exhortation to violence. NRA ads never are. But the NRA has a very long history of using apocalyptic, paranoid rhetoric about the collapse of American society in order to sell people on the notion that they need to act now to preserve their gun rights.

In a 2013 op-ed, for example, NRA Vice President Wayne LaPierre argued that a lawless America was inevitable if the liberals succeeded in their nefarious plan to take your guns.

After Hurricane Sandy, we saw the hellish world that the gun prohibitionists see as their utopia. Looters ran wild in south Brooklyn. There was no food, water or electricity. And if you wanted to walk several miles to get supplies, you better get back before dark, or you might not get home at all, he wrote (New York was actually pretty calm after being hit by the hurricane in 2012).

The problem with this rhetoric isnt, again, that its telling people to use violence against others. Its that it functions as a kind of anti-politics casting the NRAs political opponents as devious enemies who cant be opposed through normal politics. Republicans control all three branches of government and a large majority of statehouses nationwide. There is literally zero chance that any kind of major gun control passes in America in the foreseeable future.

The threat, instead, is from a kind of liberal-cultural fifth column: People who are acting outside of legitimate political channels to upend American freedoms, through protest and violence. Its a paranoid vision of American life that encourages the NRAs fans to see liberals not as political opponents, but as monsters.

Loeschs ad has currently been viewed more than 2.4 million times on Facebook.

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This chilling NRA ad calls on its members to save America by fighting liberals - Vox

Enlarge / Sonequa Martin-Green plays protagonist Michael Burnham, first officer of the U.S.S. Shenzhou, on new CBS All Access series Star Trek: Discovery.

Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry had a lot of strict rules for writers on his shows. Some, like the requirement that both female and male officers be called "sir," were thrown out a while ago (Kate Mulgrew, who played Captain Kathryn Janeway, wanted to be called "ma'am"). Now, with forthcoming series Star Trek: Discovery, we're about to see one of Roddenberrys most cherished rules bite the dust.

When Roddenberry first framed his ideas for the Star Trek universe, he wanted to be sure that writers would emphasize the Utopian aspects of future life in the Federation. Some of that Utopianism was hardwired into the show's basic premise, in which money, war, and racial discrimination are things of the distant past. But Roddenberry wasn't satisfied with thathe wanted characters whose behavior was exemplary, too.

So he made a rule, which endured long after his death, that main characters were not allowed to mistreat each other or have conflicts that werent quickly resolved. Writers for the various series also weren't allowed to show characters being malevolent or cruel. Of course, there were exceptions. Aliens or non-crew members could be as awful as the writers wanted, as could protagonists whose minds were being controlled by outside forces. (This helps explain why our heroes are always being possessed or hopping over to the Mirror Universe.)

After decades of complaints about these constraints from producers, Star Trek: Discovery showrunners Aaron Harberts and Gretchen J. Berg have decided to abandon Utopia for something they consider a little more realistic. On this streaming series, debuting on CBS All Access this September, our protagonists won't always be nice. Their behavior won't be worthy of emulation, and their conflicts will get out of control.

"The thing we're taking from Roddenberry is how we solve those conflicts, Harberts told Entertainment Weekly. "So we do have our characters in conflict, we do have them struggling with each other, but it's about how they find a solution and work through their problems."

Harberts and Berg are also chucking the "planet/alien/giant space object of the week" format that's long been a staple of Star Trek storytelling. Instead, there will be a seasonal arc, with character-driven plotlines. You can expect something like The Expanse or Battlestar Galactica, in which multiple plots play out over the entire season, rather than self-contained adventures each week.

There's risk in doing this, because one of Star Trek's main lures has always been its relentless optimism even when things go pretty dark. Plenty of science fiction franchises already deal in gritty realism, and it's possible that audiences won't take to the idea that Star Trek is now one of them. That said, conflict will always be part of human life. What could be more Utopian than telling stories about people overcoming genuine, entrenched conflict rather than avoiding conflict altogether?

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New Star Trek series will abandon Gene Roddenberry's cardinal rule - Ars Technica

Inspired by Asian soft porn, Ina Jang's Utopia features silhouetted female bodies that embody passive, girlish stereotypes

Asian soft-porn images all have something in common the gaze of the performer and how they performin front of the camera, assuming really iconic poses, says Ina Jang, a South Korean artist based in New York. Presumably, they are instructed by someone to behave that way.

Jangs exhibition Utopia, which recently went on show at the Swiss Muse des beaux-arts du Locle, is inspired by such images. Delving into the depiction of women in Korea and Japan, Jang found astriking stereotype in the so-called gravure (or glamour) magazines popular there women who are shown as girlish and submissive, sporting pink cheeks and a school uniform even if they were older than 25.

I remembered seeing gravure magazines essentially watered-down versions of Playboy in every convenience store in Tokyo, says Jang. All the females in them are portrayed as passive and helpless, sometimes playful.

When I started researching the pornographic visuals, it hit me that theres a clear formula in the way women are portrayed in them, she continues.I printed out some of the images, cut out the body figures and photographed them. From there, I kept making images with similar positions.

Jang is a well-established fine art photographer, whose images often focus in on women and use an instantly recognisable, delicate colour palette. For this series she used sickly-sweet acid tones recognisably hers but also a reaction to the magazines, which use soft, femininetones. When I was looking at pornographic images online I imagined the series should be shot in a minimalist way, but I wanted the strong colours, she says.

Peach, from the series Utopia Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

Fuchsia, from the series Utopia Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

Lemonade, from the series Utopia Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

It sounds like a rarified world, but for Jang it also suggests a much darker undercurrent. When she started working on the series a story broke in Korea about a man who had been waiting to commit a random murder in a public toilet in the Gangnam district of Seoul;since a lot of places in Korea have restrooms that are for both genders, it means that this guy had been waiting in the stall for a woman to come in so he could kill her, she explains.

Working on this topictook its toll, so after finishing the exhausting research for Utopia, Jang decided to work on another, more playful and intuitive project on the side eventually creating a new series she named Untitled/ Titled.Iremembered the leftover cut-out papers from my previous shots, than I just started painting colours on chipboards and used cut-outs to created portraits, she says. Or landscape, dependingon how you see it.

And, revealing the work ethic thats helped ensure shes already represented by three galleries, just seven years after graduating from the School of the Visual Arts in New York, Jang is also working on another series, for another solo show scheduled to be shown next May in Tokyo. Its a completely different body of work, she says, titled Mrs Dalloway after the Virginia Woolf novel, and inspired by paintings by Old Masters that are on show in NYCs MoMA and the Centre Pompidou in Paris.

Utopia by Ina Jan is on show at theMuse des beaux-arts du Locle, Switzerland until15 October.www.mbal.ch http://www.inaphotography.com

Untitled left over shape (titled passport photo), from the series Untitled (Titled) Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

Untitled left over shape (titled mountain of dumplings), from the series Untitled (Titled) Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

Untitled left over shape (titled alternative egg rolls), from the series Untitled (Titled) Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

From the series Mrs. Dalloway Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

From the series Mrs. Dalloway Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

From the series Mrs. Dalloway Ina Jang, courtesy the artist

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Show: Ina Jang's Utopia - British Journal of Photography

The rise of the machines creates complex questions for society

Colin Anderson/Getty

By Ben Collyer

Aristotle wrote in his Politics that if machines could be made to obey or anticipate the will of humans and then function untended, chief workmen would not want servants, nor masters slaves. The ancient Greeks were pretty handy with labour-saving devices, and although Aristotle was not predicting the imminent end of slavery in the 4th century BC, his logic remains impeccable.

Yet history has revealed barriers to the adoption of automation: if human labour is cheap, why invest in machines? And when technology is adopted, what happens to the servants or slaves? Throughout the medieval period, the only investments that interested squabbling feudal landowners were related to war. It took the profit motive of 18th-century capital investors to sponsor innovators and weigh the fine financial balance between machines and humans in producing everyday goods.

But as we know, the gains made by ordinary workers in the industrial period came only through bitter struggle and upheaval. Now in 2017, we are struggling again with newer disruptions and inequalities brought on by imbalances between humans and machines.

Enter Dutch thinker Rutger Bregman, whose debut book Utopia for Realists has become an unexpected bestseller. Bregman accepts that many new jobs have emerged since early automation in the 1800s, but suggests that the pace of technological advance has now passed a threshold and the rate of creation is now falling. He cites Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee at the MIT Sloan School of Management in Cambridge, Massachusetts, who coined the term the great decoupling to describe this most recent phase, in which wages no longer even partially keep step with technical productivity.

How is it that real incomes have barely risen since the 1970s, despite the most rapid technical advances in human history? Instead, inequality has grown to levels similar to those of the Roman Empire. The answer, suggests Bregman, is twofold: the output of modern automation is not met by adequate purchasing power, and labour has been drawn increasingly into administrative and transactional work that delivers no direct improvement in living standards.

To resolve these problems, first, if machines increasingly make more of the things that meet our needs, then a universal basic income (UBI) is no longer a pipe dream, but essential to permit us to buy those machine-made goods. Its an old idea, toyed with by such unlikely fellow proponents as the 18th-century author of Rights of Man, Thomas Paine, and US president Richard Nixon. Now, argues Bregman, its time has finally come.

Second, the advantages of technology would be enhanced still further if futile admin could be reduced, and labour mainly refocused on activities that directly meet human needs. Bregman makes the argument vigorously, if perhaps a little unsympathetically, to those who, in search of a job, have found themselves in the financial sector.

In the banks, he says, clever minds concoct myriad, complex financial products that dont create wealth, but destroy it. These products are, essentially, like a tax on the rest of the population. Who do you think is paying for all those custom-tailored suits, sprawling mansions, and luxury yachts?

Bregmans Utopia is light on discussion about how the UBI is to be funded, though. Money creation by central banks is already practised through quantitative easing (QE), but it goes to the commercial banks, in a largely futile effort to stimulate the economy with yet more debt. As a result, the idea of QE for the people is already appearing in political manifestos, in line with Bregmans argument, as a source of UBI.

If all this happens, we will need to watch for inflation. When the new UBI is spent, what will people buy? Will the industries that produce these goods or services have adequate investment to gear up? And can progressive governments ensure an orderly reorientation of labour, especially in the corporate sector?

As with previous historic efforts at imagining UBI, the changes that Bregman proposes will meet political resistance from vested interests and risk popular alarm if not carefully planned. Global corporations and their owners, the pension and insurance funds, will need to be persuaded by the economic restructuring implied the shrinking of bank profit and transactional activity, and the need for capital assets, training and recruitment to be redirected to productive sectors.

The questions that Bregman poses must be addressed, and urgently: thought-through projections will be essential soon. It is possible that a modest UBI alone might jump-start a move in the right direction. Too large an amount, and an unprepared productive sector will not have enough capacity to meet the new demand, resulting in inflation and disappointment.

A more detailed treatment of the history, theory and political prospects for UBI is offered by Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght, who also believe its time has come. They begin to address the complex social issues it raises in their book, Basic Income who receives UBI, at what age, and can we avoid triggering unwanted cross-border migration?

Their work will be essential for the ongoing debate, but by their own admission, leaves much to tackle with regard to macroeconomic and corporate governance issues.

So, to guarantee that UBI doesnt become a flash in the pan and ensure the smoothest possible transition away from dysfunctional modern economics, writers and thinkers will need to engage the public and professional imagination.

These authors make a brilliant start though after all, how on Earth are we to pay for goods made by robots, and wouldnt a world composed entirely of wealth-creating bankers starve to death?

Utopia for Realists: And how we can get there

Rutger Bregman

Bloomsbury Publishing

Basic Income: A radical proposal for a free society and a sane economy

Philippe Van Parijs and Yannick Vanderborght

Harvard University Press

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Can we count on utopian dreamers to change the world? - New Scientist

The utopias of justice are perhaps even more familiar. Asking, typically, for great personal sacrifice, these utopias call for the abolition of all social injustice. While the French Revolution had its fair share of such visions, they reached an apotheosis in 20th-century Marxist politics. Despite his own personal rejection of utopianism, Lenin, high on his pedestal addressing workers in October 1917, came to be the embodiment of all three forms of utopia. At the heart of the Soviet vision there were always those burning eyes gazing intently, and with total confidence, toward the promised land.

Today, the utopian impulse seems almost extinguished. The utopias of desire make little sense in a world overrun by cheap entertainment, unbridled consumerism and narcissistic behavior. The utopias of technology are less impressive than ever now that after Hiroshima and Chernobyl we are fully aware of the destructive potential of technology. Even the internet, perhaps the most recent candidate for technological optimism, turns out to have a number of potentially disastrous consequences, among them a widespread disregard for truth and objectivity, as well as an immense increase in the capacity for surveillance. The utopias of justice seem largely to have been eviscerated by 20th-century totalitarianism. After the Gulag Archipelago, the Khmer Rouges killing fields and the Cultural Revolution, these utopias seem both philosophically and politically dead.

The great irony of all forms of utopianism can hardly escape us. They say one thing, but when we attempt to realize them they seem to imply something entirely different. Their demand for perfection in all things human is often pitched at such a high level that they come across as aggressive and ultimately destructive. Their rejection of the past, and of established practice, is subject to its own logic of brutality.

And not only has the utopian imagination been stung by its own failures, it has also had to face up to the two fundamental dystopias of our time: those of ecological collapse and thermonuclear warfare. The utopian imagination thrives on challenges. Yet these are not challenges but chillingly realistic scenarios of utter destruction and the eventual elimination of the human species. Add to that the profoundly anti-utopian nature of the right-wing movements that have sprung up in the United States and Europe and the prospects for any kind of meaningful utopianism may seem bleak indeed. In matters social and political, we seem doomed if not to cynicism, then at least to a certain coolheadedness.

Anti-utopianism may, as in much recent liberalism, call for controlled, incremental change. The main task of government, Barack Obama ended up saying, is to avoid doing stupid stuff. However, anti-utopianism may also become atavistic and beckon us to return, regardless of any cost, to an idealized past. In such cases, the utopian narrative gets replaced by myth. And while the utopian narrative is universalistic and future-oriented, myth is particularistic and backward-looking. Myths purport to tell the story of us, our origin and of what it is that truly matters for us. Exclusion is part of their nature.

Can utopianism be rescued? Should it be? To many people the answer to both questions is a resounding no.

There are reasons, however, to think that a fully modern society cannot do without a utopian consciousness. To be modern is to be oriented toward the future. It is to be open to change even radical change, when called for. With its willingness to ride roughshod over all established certainties and ways of life, classical utopianism was too grandiose, too rationalist and ultimately too cold. We need the ability to look beyond the present. But we also need Mores insistence on playfulness. Once utopias are embodied in ideologies, they become dangerous and even deadly. So why not think of them as thought experiments? They point us in a certain direction. They may even provide some kind of purpose to our strivings as citizens and political beings.

We also need to be more careful about what it is that might preoccupy our utopian imagination. In my view, only one candidate is today left standing. That candidate is nature and the relation we have to it. Mores island was an earthly paradise of plenty. No amount of human intervention would ever exhaust its resources. We know better. As the climate is rapidly changing and the species extinction rate reaches unprecedented levels, we desperately need to conceive of alternative ways of inhabiting the planet.

Are our industrial, capitalist societies able to make the requisite changes? If not, where should we be headed? This is a utopian question as good as any. It is deep and universalistic. Yet it calls for neither a break with the past nor a headfirst dive into the future. The German thinker Ernst Bloch argued that all utopias ultimately express yearning for a reconciliation with that from which one has been estranged. They tell us how to get back home. A 21st-century utopia of nature would do that. It would remind us that we belong to nature, that we are dependent on it and that further alienation from it will be at our own peril.

Espen Hammer is a professor of philosophy at Temple University and the author of Adornos Modernism: Art, Experience, and Catastrophe.

Now in print: The Stone Reader: Modern Philosophy in 133 Arguments, an anthology of essays from The Timess philosophy series, edited by Peter Catapano and Simon Critchley, published by Liveright Books.

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A Utopia for a Dystopian Age - New York Times

Posted June 27, 2017 06:42:23

The 1955 Australian film Jedda told the story of a young Aboriginal girl separated from her family and raised by a white woman, taught European ways and forbidden to learn her own culture.

Now, the woman who played Jedda hopes to reverse that by teaching young locals about their own culture first and foremost, with plans to develop a new school in the remote Utopia region of the Northern Territory.

Rosalie Kunoth-Monks starred as Jedda, and has signed a memorandum of understanding on behalf of the Alukura Foundation with Sydney's Barker College to establish the Jedda Academy for the Education of Young Girls on the Utopia Homelands.

The region, about 260 kilometres north-east of Alice Springs, is one of the country's remotest.

In 2015, Ms Kunoth-Monks was NAIDOC's Person of the Year, as well as the NT's Australian of the Year, and is chairperson of the Alukura Foundation.

She said there was a need in Utopia to strengthen young people's learning by grounding them firmly in their own culture by local educators.

"We signed, we hope, the beginning of really growing two diverse cultures to come together in a way without destroying the other, or without being disengaged from the other," she said.

At the local school in the main Utopia homeland of Arlparra, 206 students are enrolled; Term one attendance was 53 per cent. The school also runs four other homeland learning centres in the region.

Nationally, the latest Closing the Gap report showed in very remote areas, Indigenous school attendance was 66.4 per cent, compared to 91.1 per cent of non-Indigenous students, something the new academy hopes to improve for its students.

Education of Indigenous children "has to get away from the assimilationist approach", Ms Kunoth-Monks said.

"We have a right to retain our identity. In that identity comes your stability, your belongingness and the capacity [for children] to comprehend in their earlier years."

Ms Kunoth-Monks said she felt the mainstream educational system had been pigeonholing Indigenous children and curtailing their abilities, resulting in their disengagement from classroom learning.

"There's many of my people in the Top End of Australia that are also querying that shoving down your throat of a foreign ideal and so forth, that is wrong," Ms Kunoth-Monks said.

"You've got to first of all get that child to accept itself and have confidence in that little body to say, 'This is who I am. Now I want to know further, I want to know what it is in that big wide world'."

Sydney's Barker College has already established an Aboriginal campus on the Central Coast of NSW, called Darkinjung Barker.

Principal Phillip Heath said funding for the Jedda Academy would not be drawn from Barker College tuition fees, but would be sourced privately to begin with, before approaching the Government.

About 30 children of varying ages will be educated at the Jedda Academy "with the intent that we celebrate traditional culture, traditional identity, traditional language, but we support the learning that goes on beyond that so they can contribute to the world that goes outside their community", Mr Heath said.

He said teaching children their own culture first would help boost academic outcomes.

"We've tried so hard for so long; generation after generation we've been discouraged by under-achievement of our First Nations children," he said.

"There's no reason why they shouldn't be doing well academically they're clever, they're committed."

In 2007, Mr Heath started the Gawura Indigenous School at St Andrew's Cathedral School in Sydney, which has a 95 per cent attendance rate, most of the school's NAPLAN results are above the national average, and some graduates are now attending university.

He said there needed to be a change in the cultural setting of schooling for Aboriginal students.

"Rather than school happening to you, it happens with you in a culturally informed and gentle way; particularly in this case, where we celebrate the role our young women play in building great culture and a strong community life," Mr Heath said.

"We know from all the evidence right across the world that our young girls, if well-educated, will bring fantastic results to the strength of the local community.

"We want to provide in that setting strong literacy, strong numeracy, high expectations, high attendance, all the things that we yearn to see in this country."

Ms Kunoth-Monks said only some young boys would be educated at the academy alongside girls, because according to local custom, girls and boys are educated separately as they grow into adulthood.

"We want to see the best for our girls here," she said.

"The girls play a large role in that nurturing part, in holding the country, in having that country pattern [painted] on your body and singing it and dancing it and making sure that goes on to the next millennium."

If the school is a success, a second school for local boys will be established, she said.

Mr Heath said establishing the academy was about taking a serious step towards closing the gap.

"If we're serious about reconciliation, we need to go further than just voicing it. We should go further than just acknowledging country or celebrating NAIDOC Week or Reconciliation Week," he said.

"From our point of view, we get access to one of the richest, deepest, oldest, most spiritual and most profound cultures on the planet.

"Who wouldn't want to educate their children in cities with access to that experience?"

If fundraising to establish the school is successful, it could be operational as soon as first term 2018, Mr Heath said.

Topics: education, access-to-education, schools, indigenous-aboriginal-and-torres-strait-islander, youth, indigenous-culture, alice-springs-0870, sydney-2000, darwin-0800

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Barker College agrees to launch Aboriginal academy for girls in Utopia homelands - ABC Online

Written by Shalini Nair | Updated: June 26, 2017 12:07 am It is alright to overlay the citys infrastructure with technology but, for starters, adequate infrastructure must be in place at a city-wide level. (Representational. Express photo)

In a phantasmagorical rendering of the future of urban space thats increasingly being made sentient through information technology, the Architectural League of New York held an exhibition in 2009 on the Too Smart City. Through smart public benches that respond to the issue of homelessness by toppling those resting on them for too long and smart bins that can squirt out the wrong kind of trash back at the person, architects and artists showed how the Smart City is just a step away from a dystopian nightmare.

While this might be one of the worst-case scenarios, with the Indian Smart City missions tantalising promise to transform 100 cities, perhaps, now is a good time to consider two issues: Whether the path it has chosen to leapfrog to the level of urbanisation in the developed nations entails creation of uneven geographies. And whether Indian cities, lacking in the most basic infrastructure, are ready to be restructured by technology.

In his book Smart Cities: Big Data, Civic Hackers, and the Quest for a New Utopia, urbanist Anthony Townsend defines Smart Cities as places where information technology is combined with infrastructure, architecture, everyday objects, and our own bodies to address social, economic, and environmental problems. A growing cause of worry among Smart City critics in the West has been how big data is a veritable goldmine for data thieves and a surveillance tool for governments and private firms involved. For urban planners, a greater concern is an urbanisation process that accords primacy to technology a field where the private sector has unchallenged monopoly over the basic needs of the city.

The most defining feature of the Smart City mission in India is this: It not only looks at application of technology but also ensures that physical infrastructure of cities, which owing to considerations of social equity, were until now serviced almost entirely by local governments, are redesigned to create space for domestic and international capital. Already the model has thrown up numbers that show that almost 80 per cent of the funds are being channelised to less than three per cent area of the 59 mission cities. These are mostly well-off enclaves that already have decent infrastructure in place and are more likely to yield a dividend for private investors.

Several Smart Cities of the West have been officially conceptualised as living labs, that is, incubators for developing patentable and exportable devices for private firms. The UK Trade & Investment pegs the market for Smart City products and services at more than 900 billion by 2020. India is, no doubt, poised to be one of the largest market for the products developed by technology vendors in these living labs.

The issue is not only the parachuting of consulting firms and vendors for local IT and infrastructure solutions, but that such private partnerships would necessitate a return on investments unconstrained by concerns of social equity or justice. The abolition of octroi, the once largest source of municipal revenue for many cities, has had a debilitating impact on the fiscal sovereignty of urban local bodies. The Smart City mission further bypasses democratic processes by executing projects through Special Purpose Vehicles wherein private corporations can have up to 40 per cent share-holding.

As a corollary, the Union government has made it clear that increased user charges on essential services is the only way forward. Unlike octroi, this hits every citizen irrespective of their income level.

The catchphrase Smart Cities latched on to the Indian imaginary when barely a fortnight after assuming office, Prime Minister Narendra Modi spelled out his ambitious plan of creating 100 such cities where the focus shifts from highways to i-ways. It is alright to overlay the citys infrastructure with technology but, for starters, adequate infrastructure must be in place at a city-wide level. Smart Cities might be an inexorable, and even necessary, step in the process of urbanisation but gentrification doesnt have to be the default route.

Official data shows that merely half of the urban households have water connections, a third have no toilets, the national average for sewage network coverage is a low 12 per cent, and on an average only about 10 per cent of the municipal solid waste is segregated. Public transportation and public schools and hospitals are woefully disproportionate to the population densities within cities.

Unless this urban entropy is addressed first, an overbearing emphasis on application of digital technology or developing smaller areas in an attempt at instant urbanism can have disastrous socio-spatial consequences.

shalini.nair@expressindia.com

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The Too Smart City - The Indian Express

Tobias Jones and his family in their Somerset woodland home. Photograph: Antonio Olmos for the Observer

As any relay-racer knows, the moment of passing on the baton is a nervous time: you dont want to lose momentum, but neither do you want to rush and fumble. Eight years after founding Windsor Hill Wood, our residential sanctuary for people in a period of crisis in their lives, were at that stage. Were moving back to Italy and a new family is taking over the running of the woodland.

Its a strange feeling, handing over everything for which you have sweated for almost a decade: the flock of sheep, the newly-hatched chicks, the beehives, the eccentric outbuildings, the mature trees and young saplings, the polytunnel, pond and chapel, a wonderful workshop and all our hand-made furniture.

There are, hopefully, many more intangibles that were passing on: great relationships, abundant goodwill, a settled rhythm, a decent reputation, a degree of wisdom about communal living, spiritual stability and so on. So although were ecstatic that a courageous and experienced couple are taking it on, and will continue to share the abundant fruits of nature with the marginalised and mentally ill, its a real wrench to go.

Ironically, the main reason to leave is one of the reasons we started WHW in the first place: the children. When we lived in other communities for my book Utopian Dreams, we met many kids who had grown up in compassionate, open-door spaces. Those children had spent their childhoods surrounded by rough diamonds and smooth talkers, and appeared to us both streetwise and gentle, both canny and caring. We hoped for our children to grow up like that, and one of the great results of WHW is that our three kids are, I hope, very open-minded and open-hearted.

But, after the meadows and mud of Somerset, our girls yearn for their mothers chic Italian city as much as their mother yearns for them to speak, and feel, Italian. Theyre also entering an age in which its possibly not right for them to be surrounded by some of the slightly manipulative teenagers referred to WHW by rehabs and psychiatric units. As for little Leo, he just reckons that living in a country that has won the World Cup four times will be beneficial to his footballing career.

There are also career decisions on my side. For the last eight years I feel as if Ive done something of a Cat Stevens, renouncing art for faith and very often putting career on hold for communalism. On the occasions I have written about Italy, Ive felt something of a fraud writing about it from the depths of the English countryside. Now, having been commissioned to write two nonfiction books about Italy, it would be absurd not to live there.

But as well as pulls to Italy, there are pushes from WHW. Sharing your home, your life, and all your meals with half-a-dozen troubled people is exhilarating but also exhausting. Over the years, one begins to suffer from mild compassion fatigue. Its not the big things theft of petty cash or the occasional, spectacular relapse that get to you, but the tiny, constant ones: the hourly holding of the boundaries, the incessant site maintenance, the daily listening to deep woes. Even the profoundest people-person begins to feel slightly sociophobic when living in what sometimes feels like an ever-available village hall. Personally, Im still far more exhilarated than exhausted, but I can feel the balance shifting and want to entrust it to others while I still have that enthusiasm and energy.

For all the frustrations of forestry and farming, they are meditative and constantly gratifying

Were aware, of course, of the many things we will miss, most of all, of course, a sense of purpose. Well miss, too, a sense of wonder at all the arrivals: the randomness of, but also the perceptible pattern to, the stream of visitors. Theres never a dull day when strangers are constantly rolling up, bringing blessings and issues, but over the years you become sensitive to the mystery of their coming. Sometimes they themselves dont even know why theyve come, or how they heard of the place. But time and time again, when weve urgently needed a forester or a seamstress, a benefactor or a car mechanic, they have punctually shown up. Its mysterious, miraculous even, and reassures you that there is a generosity to fate (or providence) the wider you open your doors.

Well miss being able to meet almost all our energy needs with our own hands, coppicing, splitting and stacking logs. I feel melancholic at the idea that Ill no longer hear the shrieks of laughter as our children play in the clearings with guests, inventing games and showing each other how to both regress and mature. Play, after all, has always been one of the greatest therapies here. Well miss sitting in silence at dawn in our tiny chapel with its straw bales, and will definitely struggle with having to cook more than once a week. The lack of integration with nature will be felt keenly: for all the frustrations of forestry and farming, they are meditative and constantly gratifying. At the end of the day, once the kids are finally in bed, the ability to saunter in the woodland what the Japanese call Shinrin Yoku (forest bathing) is a balm for the soul.

Just yesterday, in our weekly wellbeing meeting for all the residents, one of our visitors was talking about how she is trying to internalise WHW so that she can take its spirit with her when she leaves. Its something weve spoken about with our guests for years, and now, of course, were having to learn what we want to take with us: a sense of simplicity, certainly, but also a confidence that you can turn your hand to almost anything that you can make a new kitchen table rather than click on Ikea.

It is, for me, about learning patience, living in a time frame which isnt frenetic or instant, but measured in tree time of years and, even, generations. Its about temperance, not just in terms of alcohol, but in terms of temper, being quick to listen and slow to anger. Its about sharing belongings to find that holy grail of modern life belonging. Its about making peace at the same time as learning not to avoid conflict; about being vulnerable but also resilient; about rugged action but also deep stillness.

We are (I hope our successors would agree) very relaxed about the idea that the place will evolve and develop in our absence. And there are certainly many things which could be improved on finances, fundraising, formal procedures, policies and IT to name but a few. But we hope it will always be a place which offers old-fashioned Christian hospitality to the marginalised and displaced; that it will always be centred on the love and informality of family, resisting the constant temptations of institutionalism and bureaucracy; and most of all that it will continue to be inspiring and therefore emulated, not in an identikit way, but bespoke to the situation and circumstances of each place. We, certainly, hope to emulate it in years to come in the Apennines outside Parma.

Tobias Jones is the author of A Place of Refuge. His next book is about the Italian Ultras

Originally posted here:

The pleasure and pain of leaving the woodland utopia that taught us so much - The Guardian

A new addition to Pennsylvanias craft beer market is Modern Times Beer: A sunny, southern California native thats definitely hip to the craft groove.

Named after a utopian-minded community that once thrived on Long Island, New York, Modern Times is effectively snuggling its way into the Keystone States polyamorous arms with no gimmick needed.

Once a safe haven for progressives whose main desire was largely to break away from the rat race and slow down on their own terms, thank you very much, Modern Times residents were focused on social and gender equality. Unfortunately, there were outsiders who didnt understand the mentality of communal living, cohabitation and free love; others sought to take advantage of the communitys freedoms and bend it to their own sordid wills.

Modern Times was destined to have an expiration date.

Similar to its nearly utopian namesake, Modern Times Beer is unafraid to stretch conventional boundaries. Youll likely be pleasantly surprised with many of its offerings, which you now will find in many of your favorite local watering holes.

Most of its beers are named after other utopian communities, and discovering their stories is at least half the fun of drinking the beer, which is in itself an exercise in sensory pleasure.

Orderville, Utah, was an offshoot community of the Latter-day Saints; it had its beginning after Brigham Young proclaimed that his devotees form what he called united orders, or communities of like-minded believers.

Orderville the beer pours a light orange that grows in deeper intensity toward the bottom of the glass when held to the light. There are lazy particulates floating in the hazy body, and its all topped with an off-white head.

In aroma, a mingling of pine and resin blends with guava, passion fruit and pineapple. The flavor follows the nose, with loads of sticky pine and soft, juicy fruit. There is pineapple, mandarin orange and passion fruit, but plenty of bitter, dank earthiness to keep it from being a one-dimensional beer.

I loved the fine balance between juiciness and bitterness, like a tropical explosion in Pacific Northwest woods; this is supremely crushable.

Point Loma, a community within San Diego proper, was once the base of a utopian society formally named the Universal Brotherhood and Theosophical Society, founded by Katherine Tingley.

The people here placed a strong emphasis on humanitarian efforts and raised their children in an environment away from parents, with a school system called Raja Yoga.

Lomaland the beer is the color of pale honey with an incredibly thin, off-white head.

Its aroma swells with spicy pepper, soft wheat, dry grass, apples and flowers. There are loads of floral notes, earthy funk and pepper in flavor. The play between gentle mouthfeel and high carbonation is sheer joy, and it finishes somewhat dry and crisp with promises of sunshine.

A few years ago, my husband gave me a bag of coffee that was barrel-aged. The complexity and depth of personality and flavor were memorable.

Modern Times is doing the same thing: Instead of creating a barrel-aged beer, its creating beer brewed with barrel-aged coffee.

The result is nothing less than singular and spectacular.

City of the Dead pours a pitch-black abyss from the glass and is topped with a tan head.

Heavy notes of roasted black coffee, molasses, caramel and dark, bitter chocolate reign in the nose. The flavor mirrors that, with boldly roasted yet smooth coffee thats full of a bourbon shine but with no alcohol heat. This beer is mellow and deep with light carbonation. On the tongue, youll likely find chocolate, tart cherries and sweet, creamy coffee.

Try these and other Modern Times selections soon, although I get the feeling that this brewerys life expectancy is much longer than your average utopian society.

Contact Amber DeGrace with questions and comments at adegrace@lnpnews.com and find her on Twitter at @amberdegrace.

Link:

Get with the Modern Times and try some beer straight from utopia ... - LancasterOnline