The Sociology of Molecules

1. From within the smudge of the smoke from the Camp Fire calamity, it is strange to consider the ways postmodernist writers (like DeLillo here) and critics aestheticized their 1980s dread.

"Ever since the airborne toxic event, the sunsets had become almost unbearably beautiful. Not that there was a measurable connection. If the social character of Nyodene Derivative (added to the everyday drift of effluents, pollutants, contaminants and deliriant) had caused this aesthetic leap from already brilliant sunsets to broad towering riddled visionary skyscrapers, tinged with dread, no one had been able to prove it."

+ This is less judgment and more discomfort at being irreducibly afloat in history. We here in the Bay are performing the same operation, but with a different visual substrate. Our dread aesthetic assumes these forms: the mask selfie and the disappeared cityscape photo. An AQI reading is sometimes given, as if this number is itself responsible, or that people really want to write PPM. There's nothing beautiful or visionary. It is loss of face, erasure of place. And yet, we document: I was here among the hazardous murk of the air, persisting.

2. I imagine these scientists furiously building a track across the desolate plains of cosmic aloneness back towards life.

"Bottom-up synthetic biologists predict that the first fully artificial cells could spark to life in little more than a decade. 'I’m pretty sure we’ll get there,' says Schwille. Research groups have made big strides recreating several aspects of cell-like life, especially in mimicking the membranes that surround cells and compartmentalize internal components. That’s because organizing molecules is key to getting them to work together at the right time and place. Although you can open up a billion bacteria and pour the contents into a test tube, for example, the biological processes would not continue for long. Some components need to be kept apart, and others brought together. 'To me, it’s about the sociology of molecules,' says Cees Dekker, a biophysicist also at Delft University of Technology."

3. This call for more friction in technology from inside Alphabet is very interesting.

"It’s time to bring friction back. Friction buys time, and time reduces systemic risk. A disease cannot become an epidemic if patients are cured more quickly than the illness spreads. Friction looks different across contexts. In the physical world, highways have speed limits to prevent catastrophic accidents, mortgages require inspections to prevent fraud, and certain jobs require background checks. In the digital world, there are a few ways of potentially adding friction to improve designs."

4. The Turing Normalizing Machine.

"Alan Turing was a mathematician, a logician, a cryptanalyst, and a computer scientist (as i’m sure you all know.) During World War 2 he cracked the Nazi Enigma code, and later came to be regarded as the father of computer science and artificial intelligence. In the 1952, Turing was convicted of having committed criminal acts of homosexuality. Given a choice between imprisonment and chemical castration, Turing chose to undergo a medical treatment that made him impotent and caused gynaecomastia. Suffering from the effects of the treatment and from being regarded as abnormal by a society, the scientist committed suicide in June 1954. Inspired by Turing’s life and research, Mushon Zer-Aviv and Yonatan Ben-Simhon have devised a machine that attempts to answer a question which, at first, might seem baffling: 'Who is normal?'"

5. The goals of artificial intelligence from the longue durée perspective of a historian of 16th and 17th century science.

"Peter Dear provides an account of the two fundamental purposes toward which scientific and technical communities... direct their activities: intelligibility and instrumentality. Crudely summarized, Dear proposes that there are two distinct, separate, but intertwined purposes that have motivated these communities. One is a pursuit of the 'intellectual understanding of the natural world,' including ourselves. This is the striving to make sense of the world, to provide satisfying answers to basic questions about how things are, and why they are. Dear notes, 'Evidently … there are not timeless, ahistorical criteria for determining what will count as satisfactory to the understanding. Assertions of intelligibility can be understood only in the particular cultural settings that produce them.' The other purpose is the creation of effective techniques that afford, as Dear puts it, '… power over matter, and indirectly, power over people.' Here the goal is the creation and refinement of an 'operational, or instrumental, set of techniques used to do things … Such accomplishments … in fact result from complex endeavors involving a huge array of mutually dependent theoretical and empirical techniques and competences.'"

Extra: This week, I considered two interrelated and very 2018 aspects of the wildfires. First, I wrote about the gadgets of the coming hellscape as a way of thinking about individualistic climate adaptation, and then, I covered the return of private firefighting as an exemplar of American ambivalence about public goods. From the latter:

"The insurance companies AIG and Chubb have publicly talked about their private wildfire teams. AIG has its own “Wildfire Protection Unit,” while Chubb—and up to a dozen other insurers—contract with Wildfire Defense Systems, a Montana company that claims to have made 550 “wildfire responses on behalf of insurers,” including 255 in just the past two years. Right now in California, the company has 53 engines working to protect close to 1,000 homes.The TMZ story feels uniquely 2018—financial capitalism, inequality, KimYe, the fires of Armageddon—and it is, for Americans at least."

[the sociology of molecules]