End of the Season 🥶 ☀️
As we transition to the start of winter here in the south, summer beckons in the north. The world keeps turning. Here's my latest to help you make sense of these global revolutions.
I’ve noticed that since I have returned back to Wellington from London, I have been hit with occasional waves of inexplicable sadness - even on my birthday earlier this week. As I talked with friends about this over coffee on the south coast this morning, I came to realise that part of this may be some form of survivor’s guilt. As people in London started to reveal to me the number of people they knew that have died, I became overwhelmed with a sense of grief. And a sense of not having been there for them.
Since I have returned, I have been burdened with a feeling of not being good enough: as a friend, as a son, as a father, and as a husband. I know objectively this is untrue, but the feeling keeps coming up, telling me that there is something still to be processed. This will take time. I’ll write more about my perspective of both being “apart and a part” next week in my 30,000 Days post for paid members.
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Note, the tweet link above links to an absolutely harrowing interview. Please watch with care. I’m including it because it cuts through so much to the heart of the matter.
Another shooting in the USA: Is the Christchurch Call making a difference?
With three more horrific mass shootings and deaths in the US over the past two weeks, including live-streaming of the Buffalo attack over Twitch, it’s hard to make sense of how this continues to happen
This analysis from the Wall Street Journal asks if the Christchurch Call, conceived in 2019 after a white supremacist live-streamed his murders of 51 people at two mosques in Christchurch, New Zealand has made any difference.
Aliya Danzeisen, national coordinator of the Islamic Women’s Council of New Zealand, part of the Call’s advisory panel, said the Call had been expected to look beyond its immediate focus on stopping the spread of the Christchurch video to tackle the reasons why hatred based on factors such as religion and race flourishes online.
“It’s just kind of stopped,” Ms. Danzeisen said.
What if you just stopped reading the news?
The world and its troubles is enough to make you stop listening and watching the news. What happens if you actually do that?
“I was finding myself really anxious about the state of the world. And when I looked at the news, I was like, there’s actually nothing I can do as an individual to change anything that’s going on … I just thought, I need to step away from the information overload of all the negativity. It’s too much.”
Mental health isn’t the only reason some people are ditching the news. For some, the decision was largely a strategic move designed to help him to focus time on themselves. There’s a fine line between dropping out of the news cycle completely, and staying connected with what’s going on in the world. Here’s an article on the experience of some Australians who are trying to walk that line.
What I’m listening to: What Liberals misunderstand about authoritarianism
This is an equal parts fascinating and disturbing conversation between Ezra Klein and the Pulitzer Prize winning historian and journalist at The Atlantic, Anne Applebaum.
They discuss a new edition of Hannah Arendt’s 1951 classic, “The Origins of Totalitarianism”, a book that people keep referring back to, decade after decade.
Reading Arendt today can be a little disorienting, because some of — much of, in fact — what she writes is dated. It reads strangely. And then every so often, you tumble into these paragraphs or pages of this startling insight. It’s like watching a black and white T.V. that every once in a while flashes a hyper vivid picture of your own future across the screen.
Check out the podcast episode on how radical loneliness can lay the groundwork for authoritarianism here - and full transcript too.
Returning to the office? Not so fast
Decisions focused on getting people back to the office have grown more complex in recent weeks, as Covid cases surged and return to office plans lurched
Apple, for example, which has faced fierce internal opposition to its plan, told workers last week that the company was scaling its office requirement back from three days a week to an optional two days.
This New York Times article (free for readers of Noise Reduction) talks about how these rules are constantly shifting. We shouldn’t expect them to settle any time soon.
“People are way too fixated on number of days in office as a metric … The office has to earn its place in the average person’s week.”
Clearview AI receives fine in UK. Where next?
Until recently, John Edwards was the Privacy Commissioner in New Zealand. He’s now the U.K.’s Information Commissioner
Clearview AI is one of the high-tech surveillance tools used by New Zealand Police. Since adoption, it has almost constantly been mired in controversy. Canada has banned it and both Australia and the UK’s regulators are investigating its use by their police forces.
Clearview works by scraping publicly available images of people on the internet and storing the images in its database. This lets law enforcement agencies easily match an image to a person of interest, along with links to where those photos appeared on the web.
As more faces are scanned the accuracy of the platform increases. It has over 3 billion images scraped from websites.
If you, or even a friend, has ever publicly posted an image of yourself on Facebook, Instagram or YouTube or any other internet site you’re in Clearview’s database.
Here’s what just happened in the UK:
The U.K.’s data protection watchdog has confirmed a penalty for the controversial facial recognition company, Clearview AI — announcing a fine of just over £7.5 million today for a string of breaches of local privacy laws.
The watchdog has also issued an enforcement notice, ordering Clearview to stop obtaining and using the personal data of U.K. residents that is publicly available on the internet; and telling it to delete the information of U.K. residents from its systems.
Last I heard, NZ Police were conducting a ‘stocktake’ of its use of Clearview AI. That was about a year ago. How it is being used is important. I can’t see any developments on this stocktake since.
If you were to design a workout just to make you feel better, what would it look like?
Here are 6 research-informed moves to improve your mood, free for Noise Reduction members
Imagine fans erupting when their team clinches a playoff spot. They jump up and down like these school kids in a clip that went viral last year on Instagram.
Researchers have identified several movements like this that are recognizable in many cultures as inspired by joy: reaching your arms up; swaying from side to side, like concertgoers losing themselves in the music; other rhythmic movements, such as bouncing to a beat; or taking up more space, like dancers spinning, arms outstretched. These physical actions don’t just express a feeling of joy — research shows they can also elicit it.
How to beat anxiety: Set the bar ridiculously low
Check out Rhik Samadder (actor and columnist) and his ideas on how to beat anxiety
The only answer I’ve found is to set the bar ridiculously low. Just as when I’m faced with the anxiety of a blank page, and tell myself I need only write 200 words. That’s easy, and there’s always 200 more behind those. I need a low barrier of entry, and a sense of achievement. I know it is a good idea to leave the house every day, but what if I’m too stressed? I have a rule that I will at least go downstairs to check the post, and open the front door. Once there it is more than likely I’ll walk to the park, but that’s not the threshold of success. It is opening the door, or 200 words, or eating one green thing.
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Stop reading the news! So tempting, so so tempting