[nonostantement #175] - a line through scotland / arab of the future / anom
Now with MORE tattoo robots!
Welcome to nonostantement: a weekly newsletter with legal, shaking and sentimental stuff found all over the Internet.
Good morning from Barcelona, Joele here sending you the best links found online during the past week - met while working as a digital strategist for companies, brands and institutions.
Music soundtrack for this mail: Tricky - Poems and Trentemøller - Hands Down feat. jennylee (Trentemøller’s Blissed Out Mix). Always feel free to send me music recommendations, just reply to this email - they are more than welcome!
#PEOPLE
One of the most interesting and frightening things about one of my favorite books, 1984, is how newspaper archives were falsified to support the current narrative. If we consider the ease with which we could modify any online content now that it is all enjoyed via streaming (without physical archive copies), perhaps we already know what the next step will be. About this topic, we still don't know if there will be practical uses for the blockchain but it seems that in Hong Kong they have found one that I really like: using it to create archives to fight government censorship.
It seems like a trivial topic but I find it quite interesting: How the pandemic obliged - or enabled - many women to just let their hair grow gray. And how they’re still reckoning with the transformation.
Barcelona street sellers take on Nike with own-brand trainers. Living here I have often seen this topic up close (and in a work project we asked these guys to design the merch for a client) - I am very happy that this project is still up and running.
[Video] - A tattoo robot drawing a line on a dude's arm as an art performance. Ok, I guess.
[Video] - Attempting to cross SCOTLAND in a completely straight line. I really can't explain why but I can't wait to follow this absurd challenge. This is the kind of thing I would like to be involved in, even better if there were some brands supporting such a madness ;)
In the last few days I have read a very interesting graphic novel that I recommend, The Arab of the Future, about a kid growing up in France, Libya and Syria in the 1970s, 80s, and 90s. About Syria, I just found this interesting project preserving syrian design history and graphics in the Arab world: the Syrian Design Archive. Really nice stuff!
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#SOCIALMEDIA
“It’s also exhausting. I don’t know. I don’t want to jump on a social network and feel like I have to do work on it, and my feed is now people yelling at me that I have to do more to grow on Tiktok, but I don’t want to hear about that anymore, and I’ve unfollowed the ones I’d followed but I still get yelled at. Maybe I’m too old, or maybe I’m too used to my portable social network groups that I can jump between apps on.” - TikTok and the Algorithmic Promise of Virality
Instagram announced what it found: removing likes doesn’t seem to meaningfully depressurize Instagram, for young people or anyone else, and so likes will remain publicly viewable by default. But all users will now get the ability to switch them off if they like, either for their whole feed or on a per-post basis.
#THEDARKSIDE
Honestly it seems incredible to me that there are people who fall into traps of this kind (after various similar situations happened with markets in the deep web). This article explains better what “Anom” is and how did law enforcement tricked hundreds of alleged criminals into using an encrypted messaging app, secretly controlled by the FBI. 🤷♂️
That's it for now.
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