Fresser.

It’s been a long minute, and I’m not really the same person I was when I started posting, really. Wondering if Tumblr is the same platform.

Last shot from an amazing day, cooking in the kitchen (📷 Sebastian)

Had to clean up a closet to make room for diapers. Inside a cardboard tube was this ancient print from an old Felix Gonzalez-Torres piece. It was like a time capsule and a time machine both at once. If you don't know Felix's work (RIP, gentle soul) one component of it was the simple act of isolating and then replicating the tiny bits of detritus that revealed the country we were actually living in. Most came from the then-contemporary copies of the New York Times, generally late 80s early 90s. I think this must have been 1991 or so. The thing is that they were always juxtaposed against the HIV that he was fighting, and in this way, even in the moment they felt like desperate messages to the future. Felix, there is no way you can read this, but it's just to say, it's 2016 and the message was received. Thank you.

Friends, friends of friends, if you've lost your pager, it's here on the corner of Porter and Main. But when I leave here, it will be somewhere else because now it's in my pocket. Let's see what happens. (at Massachusetts Institute of Technology (MIT))

at Canal Plastics Center

"After Hitler We Will Take Over" (Nach Hitler kommen wir) that time the KPD (Communist Party Germany) accidentally helped Hitler rise to power, whose gratitude was expressed by rounding them up into Dachau. And I know that facts and history are not fashionable right now and that they have been conflated with mansplaining or even a kind of elitism in the use of facts in a discussion. And I know that Godwin's law is strongly enforced these days. But still. Still. My point is this: still. Read it through, even though you know how it ends. -- "The [communist KPD] theory of social fascism dictated that Nazis and [leftist SPD] Social Democrats were essentially two sides of the same coin. The primary enemy of the Communists was supposedly the Social Democrats, who protected capitalism from a workers’ revolution by deceiving the class with pseudo-socialist rhetoric. The worst of them all were the left wing [SPD] Social Democrats, whose rhetoric was particularly deceptive. According to the theory, it was impossible to fight side by side with the SPD against the Nazis under such conditions. Indeed, the [far left] KPD declared that defeating the social fascists was the “prerequisite to smashing fascism”. By 1932 the KPD began engaging in isolated attempts to initiate broader anti-fascist fronts, most importantly the Antifascischistsche Aktion, but these were formulated as “united fronts from below”—ie without the leadership of the SPD. Turning the logic of the united front on its head, SPD supporters were expected to give up their party allegiance before joining, as opposed to the united front being a first practical step towards the Communist Party. Throughout this period the leaderships of both the SPD and the KPD never came to a formal agreement regarding the fight against Nazism. Another fatal consequence of the KPD’s ultra-leftism was that the term “fascism” was used irresponsibly to describe any and all opponents to the right of the [Communist] party. The SPD-led government that ruled Germany until 1930 was considered “social fascist”. When Brüning formed a new right-wing government by decree without a parliamentary majority in 1930, the KPD declared that fascism had taken power. This went hand in hand with a deadly underestimation of the Nazi danger. Thus [the Communist leader] Thälmann could declare in 1932: “Nothing could be more fatal for us than to opportunistically overestimate the danger posed by Hitler-fascism”. The KPD’s seeming inability to distinguish between democratic, authoritarian and fascist expressions of capitalist rule proved to be its undoing. An organisation that continually vilified bourgeois democratic governments as fascist was unable to understand the true meaning of Hitler’s ascension to power on 30 January 1933, the day the KPD infamously (and ominously) declared: “After Hitler, we will take over!"

Auspicious. (at Municipal Building)

Good job Logan Airport (at Boston Logan International Airport)

Ed Snowden's first academic talk, together with Bunnie, here at #forbiddenml (at MIT Media Lab)

Jesus Christ @cory_doctorow it's not even 9AM #forbiddenml (at MIT Media Lab)

Was at some TED something or other last week and bla bla bla about all that but this thing brought me to tears. Suzanne Simard gave a beautiful talk on the vast network of sensors and systems that look - on the surface - like a bunch of trees in a forest. A talk about how these networks share information, nutrients, and water between "stands" (what we call "trees") and how "mothers" even favor the offspring in the network. Then she took us on a two hour tour of the forest and revealed its intricacies as a system, instead of stuff. Which is obvious if you spend time in nature, maybe. Or maybe not. Either way: seeing these guys towering above us, knowing that in their own way they were chattering about us underground, this was the moment I was reminded that there are a small number of people who can turn the world upside down for you and that they are often the most soft-spoken. Maybe that is also obvious if you spend a lot of time in nature. Maybe. (at Banff National Park)