Space food, but make it fashion
Welcome to the second installment of Not Dead Yet, my monthly-ish roundup of compelling writing. It's been two years since I last caused a dust-up on Twitter about how we brand Kitchener, Waterloo and Cambridge as "Waterloo" for economic development purposes. I'm sorry, but I did it again because this is the petty hill I want to die on.
One of my favourite writers on music and culture is Hanif Abdurraqib. He recently put an informal call-out for stories from people who worked in shopping malls. The mall as the hub of social activity, especially for teen life, is less true now than it was in the '90s or early 2000s. Their cultural significance has become diluted, and now's a good time to reflect on what a weird, obsessive, insecure, dominant place they once occupied.
Among the replies to Hanif's tweet was a link to this essay called Blue Raspberry by Robert James Russell, about his time working at Abercrombie & Fitch.
The phrase “good-looking people” was one I came to despise. I saw how it made people feel, shopping in our store. The management culture was one of cold-shouldering-rejection. We were supposed to ignore customers—we were told, in no certain terms—to seem “out of touch” with what was going on. It would make customers want to be part of our brand.
What's the best way to convince people to adopt a plant-based diet? Has the gimmick of processed veggies that taste, look, and feel like meat run out of steam? The approach taken by nonfood continues to fascinate me because they run in the complete opposite direction. They market themselves more as a high-art fashion brand than a sustainable food company.
nonfood's solution is algae, and lots of it. There's a lot of techno-utopianism in their vision of the future, one where urban agriculture is thriving thanks to self-reliant, community-scaled greenhouses. In The Future is Flavorless, Alison Sinkewicz tackles the question of how algae could work its way into our food culture while not pretending to be anything else.
It’s perhaps nonfood’s unsentimental approach to food systems that makes it such an interesting endeavor. There are no grandiose man-made solutions to be found in nonbar. There’s no promise that it will taste like the bake-sale cupcake of your elementary days, nor that it will bleed like an animal when you cut it. It will taste like green algae.
An oldie but a goodie resurfaced in my newsfeed this month. In light of the ongoing violence by the RCMP to push a pipeline through Wet'suwet'en territories, Chelsea Vowel re-shared her blog post about the concept of traditional territory, and how settlers generally don't have a good grasp of what it means. The post is titled, Questioning assumptions, Sawyer did it, will you? and it upends the typical colonial understanding of "setting down roots" and what it means to maintain a stable home base over generations.
You’ve probably heard of our territories which perhaps in your mind mark some sort of hazy boundary within which we did all this roaming. You’ve no doubt also heard about our tie to the land, blah blah blah, but perhaps you never really considered what that actually means, and what knowledge (and stability) it requires us to have.
Did you know that 750 oil refinery workers have been locked out by their employer for the last 50 days? That they're blockading access to the factory, facing down police, fighting a hostile media and pulling in support from labour groups across the country, all in an effort to save their pensions? I only knew about this saga thanks to Emily Leedham's investigative reporting from the prairies.
She tells all from the front line of one of the biggest labour disputes happening in Canada right now: Dance Parties, Personal Growth, and Police: Three Days with Locked Out Regina Oil Workers.
I'm a sucker for speculative fiction that wrestles with the consequences of our tech-connected world. In Fair Arbiters, Rebecca Lynch takes us on a thought experiment of how we might moderate online discussion to weed out extremism.
A solution presents itself, in the form of yet another new tech platform (of course):
“For humans, the task would be insurmountable. Even with these tools. But AI gives us the chance of making a real impact. All of this data – it’s also a training ground. We’re training a team of AI moderators – Fair Arbiters, we call them – who can work across hundreds of platforms at once.”
“You’re making an army of bots to spam the internet with Keep Calm memes?” I said.
After you've read Rebecca's essay, you can poke around the entire archive of other stories published alongside it, as part of Finding ctrl: Visions for the future internet. This is an online "vision book" that was put together to mark the 30th anniversary of the World Wide Web, featuring contributions from thinkers and artists from around the globe.
(Sorry! That's my way of sneaking in a bunch of additional links at the end of this newsletter~)
I’d love to hear what you thought about these stories. You can reply directly to this email.
The next Not Dead Yet will come in four weeks’ time. Until then, why not forward this email to a friend who’d appreciate it?
Cheers,
Sam