Albert Bates – Medium

18 hours ago

The view from the half century

The economics of 2050 will be the reverse image of 1950, if we make it that far. Every year, current and former residents of my ecovillage, The Farm, gather here in Summertown, Tennessee to meet and reminisce. We call the reunion our Ragweed Festival because it began as a celebration…

History

9 min read

Jun 19

Return of the Wampum

This is the last of several parts on the long beaded belt of white wampum with two parallel lines of purple beads, the Gä•sweñta’. A Canadian art museum site says the original Gä•sweñta’ exists today only in memory and reproduction. From what they say, one is left to speculate. Perhaps…

Indigenous People

11 min read

Jun 12

Losing the Peace: The Beaded Blockchain of Kahionni

A chain is no stronger than its weakest link, and life is after all a chain. — William James This is the second in a series. Last week we looked at the way that cultural heritage was preserved through the distributed ledger of wampum, or kahionni, based upon both proof…

Indigenous People

12 min read

Losing the Peace: The Beaded Blockchain of Kahionni

Published in The Shadow

·Jun 5

The First NFTs Pre-existed the United States

The first NFT was a long, beaded belt of white wampum with two parallel lines of purple beads. At the time when Europeans made first contact with North Americans, beaded belts of wampum were something like blockchain tokens — employing proof of work as authentication of value. They were not…

History

16 min read

The First NFTs Pre-existed the United States

May 29

Upending Settled Expectations

Why the Onondaga Land Case may decide the fate of humanity In a Taino legend, there was a time when the Earth was very hot and the people were confined to two caves. They were kept fed by a brave man named Marocael who wandered out at night to hunt…

Indigenous Rights

10 min read

May 22

The Doubt Club, Social Media and Catastrophic Risk

Have we run ourselves into an inescapable trap? We only have eight years before we are cast into a course that will be hard to claw back from. — Kim Stanley Robinson, Your Undivided Attention podcast, February 10, 2022 In 2007, when Tristan Harris was 22 and a Stanford undergrad…

Social Media

8 min read

May 15

Amplification Loops on Fault Lines

We have paleolithic emotions, medieval institutions, and god-like technology — E.O. Wilson Last week I began untangling a string about how we as a species have evolved in the past two centuries into behaviors that run counter to our own survival. I described how modern public relations magicians had been…

Social Media

9 min read

Published in The Shadow

·May 8

Edward Bernays’ Red Pill

Instead of knowledge, universal access has given the common man a rubber stamp inked with advertising slogans. The terms “red pill” and “blue pill” refer to a choice between the willingness to learn a potentially unsettling or life-changing truth by taking the red pill or remaining in contented ignorance with…

Edward Bernays

10 min read

Apr 27

Musk on Mars

Don’t expect to see dome cities adorn the Red Planet like they did the covers of 1940s science fiction magazines. — I think Elon will find that space travel is easier than content moderation. – Tyler Crowley Just days before the enigmatic founder of PayPal, Tesla and Space X acquired control of Twitter for $44 billion, stock trading news wires lit up with the story of how Elon Musk had secured…

Musk

10 min read

Apr 24

Witch-hunting with Jesús

Can you provide a definition for the word “woman?” — Sen. Marsha Blackburn to Supreme Court nominee Jackson Looking up the background of Alicia Garcia-Falgueras, I immediately fell in love. Garcia-Falgueras is a neuroscientist in Amsterdam whose 46 publications probe the connection between musical composition and the brain structures of…

Homophobia

13 min read