#human batteries

[reality-detective]

Greg Reese Report 👇

Nanobots That Release Toxins And Harvest Energy From the Body. Humans being turned into batteries to fuel digital A.I. prison 🤔

[awesomecooperlove]

HOW TO CHARGE OUR BODIES BATTERIES?

💡🔌🔋

[nomoneynobooks]

sometimes i need to go off on my own. i’m not sad. i’m not angry. i’m just recharging my batteries.

unknown.

[youradorablenightmare-blog]

Human Batteries

Human emotions often work like batteries. Most mornings, you wake up fully charged and ready for the day. Progressively throughout the day, the percentage of energy gets lower. Certain actions take more energy than others, and can drain the battery nearly all the way. Then at night, people go to bed and recharge. Not all people work that way though. Sometimes sleep doesn’t recharge. In certain cases, a person could sleep for the entire day and still feel drained, tired, and hollow. Sometimes those people can only be recharged by a certain person, activity, or when a problem is resolved. Or sometimes they don’t get recharged. Like if the charger broke and now they are forever a battery at 1% until they die, or overuse and kill themselves. It’s good to find a charger… Surround yourself with chargers, not draining activities and people.

[matrixthetrilogy]

[734fungus-blog]

picture

cars, phones and computers (and entire data-centers in extension to that, per se save plot twists) that magically run off blood naruto-style in order to prevent global warming from going down Fukushima-style with some international stuff still going on in the middle east, but Afghanistan has these really freakin huge lithium reserves, though; right?

[cool-yubari]

Abolishing grading promotes learning. But, like most truly subversive acts, it takes courage.

Critical pedagogy has long condemned grading as an impediment to genuine education, but critical pedagogues continue to grade, as a presumed condition of employment. “I hate it but I have to do it“ is their lame lament.

But they no longer have to do it. Throughout the thirty-odd years of my university teaching career I have always found ways around grading, primarily by giving all A’s, thereby eliminating grades de facto if not de jure. Last year for the first time, after long bemoaning my "anomalous" practice, York University officials formally prevailed upon me henceforth to designate my courses "ungraded" (a pass/fail option without the fail), thereby taking them off the radar and perhaps unintentionally establishing a promising academic precedent.

As a tenured full professor, of course, I do enjoy an unusual degree of job security, a privilege provided by a paying public in need of some truth and thus some unshackled, socially responsible scholars. Moreover, as a unionized employee I am protected by a collective agreement which requires only that I submit evaluations on time without specifying what they "should" be. Thus I am indeed in a good position to challenge the grading regime, but so too are many others who continue to grade.

Why? Typically, as already indicated, colleagues express a fear of administrative reprisal. But they embrace grades also for other, unspoken reasons, perhaps unacknowledged even to themselves.

Grades offer teachers a convenient device for allaying their anxieties about their own abilities by shifting them onto their students, through an endless round of tests, examinations and evaluations. Grades get teachers off the hook; they preserve professorial authority and are indifferent to professorial incompetence. Bad faith protestations about administration requirements can mask the fact that grades serve the teachers at the expense of the students, and at the sacrifice of education.

But in all this the primary reason for the existence of grades -- publicly-subsidized pre-employment screening -- is rarely acknowledged. Grades appear to be a matter between teacher and student -- until they are "submitted." At that point those for whom grades are really given -- those who have perhaps never even stepped into a classroom -- gain access to the measurements of their prospective labour force. Here is the silent third party in the halls of academia, the so-called elephant in the room, to whom academia has too long been held hostage. Eliminating grades eliminates the elephant from the room, emancipates academia, and reintroduces education.

The elimination of grades at a stroke shifts academic attention from evaluation to education, where it belongs. When skeptical colleagues protest that it is not fair for me to give the same grade both to people who work hard and to people who even fail to show up, I remind them that these people are not getting the same reward because the people who work hard also get an education. "Oh, yeah," they say, remembering as an afterthought what should be at the forefront of their profession.

Students themselves have collectively never resisted my refusal to grade them, and our experiences have been mutually rewarding beyond measure, and all measurement. With grades no longer a matter of concern, no time is ever wasted on discussions about evaluation -- heretofore students' primary preoccupation. Without having to fear or defer to professors or peers, students are freed for forthright and authentic engagement, an essential ingredient of genuine education, and discover that they are not alone, despite the rituals of competitive individualism enforced everywhere else around them.

With the substitution of encouragement for evaluation, intellectual excitement becomes the defining element in the educational ethos, replacing anxiety --which, as every parent knows, is lethal to learning. Abandoning grades annuls alienation: students no longer depend on others for a sense of their own worth.

Without grades, students do not have to try to read the professor's mind -- an impossible task anyway, so philosophers tell us -- and can instead concentrate upon reading their own minds, self-knowledge being the grail of education. With grades gone, and having thus side-stepped the institutionally routinized regime of infantilization so corrosive of self-respect, self-confidence and self-worth, students can now begin to take themselves and their own thoughts seriously -- for too many an altogether novel experience. This is the only true end of education.

The elimination of grades is no longer merely a theoretical proposition. It is an actuality, and a precedent, given my experience at York University. I now teach officially-designated "ungraded" courses with the formal sanction of the Office of the Dean of the Faculty of Arts and in full recognition of the Vice President/Academic. From this fertile ground, I advise my colleagues across the country: Try it; you are bound to like it. And so, I suspect, are your students, who will at last start receiving what they have been presumably been paying for and what we have been professing to provide.

--Giving Up The Grade, by professor and historian of science and technology David F. Noble, published in the 2007 edition of Our Schools / Our Selves

Bolding mine. Directly under that was a brief response by a student, elaborating on their experience of Noble’s grade-less classroom:

I first took a course with Professor Noble in 1992 when I was in the second year of my undergraduate degree. I remember that first day of his class vividly, as it was a turning point in both my approach to education and my views of our education system.

Professor Noble's first order of business on that first day of class was to inform the students that they could all have A's. As a student who was already scoring straight A's, many thoughts were racing through my head -- is this a joke? How could he possibly give A's to all these other schleps when they surely won't deserve them? This is unfair! This surely was not a serious way to go about conducting a university course.

My initial skepticism was actualized as the first few weeks of class produced the typical scenario in university undergrad seminars -- four or five of us were doing the readings and engaged, while the other 25 or so sat uncomfortably, some hoping not to be called upon, and others saying something, anything to score a participation mark.

A funny thing happened along the way. By the time we hit the halfway mark of the course, virtually all of the students were highly engaged in the material and discussions each week. These are students who would have never otherwise been so engaged or thoughtful about their studies. They were no longer being processed; they were learning.

For myself, it completely changed the way I approached my education. No longer was it about completing this or that course requirement, pleasing a professor or filling another degree requirement. It was about learning. I was freed from the prison house of grading. I learned how to learn -- not how to get good grades (which, though I was no longer consumed with concern for them, I still managed to do, incidentally.)

--Joseph Graves, suma cum laude graduate of York University’s class of 1994.

[cool-yubari]

Capitalism and Transhumanism

This is a thing I wrote to some friends about this link on transhumanism. (Unfortunately, it looks like that post is no longer there.) Said friends asked me to explain what I saw in it, and summarize, so I did. Posting also here because I thought it might be of more general interest:

What I read from her gripe with transhumanism was that most existing technologies are an outgrowth of "pay me to keep you running" style disposability and consumerism, control freak "everything we haven't decided you're allowed to do is locked, out of the box" and embedded surveillance, and other inherent failures of a system that suspects its users of being criminals, idiots, and so on. The military is a control system, and most of its tech that trickles down to non-military applications still contains all of the failures and shortcomings of that. Capitalism is a control system, although it's more focused on having regular monetary tribute in exchange for any kind of service rendered (or not rendered, if it really managed to screw you over).

I just - I was reading that paragraph and thinking so much of the fuckjob that is modern dentistry. We have materials that can last much longer than a human lifetime. But what are bridges, crowns, etc. generally made of, unless you pay through the nose for them? Stuff that will last ... oh, anywhere from three to ten years. Depending on your budget, of course. I think of that, and I wince at the idea of people entrusting more of their vital functions to a system that considers that acceptable. We have cars with kill switches, cars that can be remote controlled by law enforcement or anyone savvy enough to hack them, and very little public awareness or protest of that. It's not a way of thinking that's going to automatically stop because what we're implanting computers in next is human bodies. You know? But also, it's not a thing I've seen most of the dialog on transhumanism address. (There's a glut of "oh, but we can't because poor people" and stupid backpatting for being so ethical as to think of them, but little - "we need to unfuck our assumptions in these specific ways in order to keep basic human abilities in the transition. These things can't be engineered out of an organic body, but they will be jeopardized by the way neoliberal business models work, if we don't realize it's a problem and put a stop to that.") Sort of along the lines of the blog post where you guys were talking about being fed up with stories that "are going to explore what it means to be human" and don't, it felt to me like most of the conversation about implants, augmentation, etc. blathers on about inane non-issues while the real questions go unanswered and the real decisions are made without democratic anything. I want any kind of body I have to be answerable to me. I want it to do exactly what I tell it to do, without checking with anyone else. I want it to last at least as long as my organic body could. Etc. Not reproducing the same hierarchy of "who gets what they need and who doesn't" is a subset of ... deciding what cultural memes get to go forward or don't. What kinds of design principles we will grant ongoing legitimacy. I think what she's saying is that if we don't want all the problems we already have with *things* ratcheted up to eleven and played out on human bodies, we have to confront that from a political angle, and not just treat transhumanism as a philosophical thing. I.e., cyborg-ness will not make any of the old fuckery obsolete on its own. We're not just going to *evolve* past the control structures that a certain subset of society keeps busily building around us. The other big thing I was getting from it was what she was saying about identities. Basically, that there's oppression that you can address by not boxing yourself into an identity that doesn't fully represent you, and then there's oppression that you can't fight without acknowledging that other people's idea of you is limiting what you can and can't do.