Hi tricia wang!

"He claimed he got his hairstyle — eventually a wild electric-white nimbus — “through negligence” and, explaining his overall sloppiness, said, “It would be a sad situation if the wrapper were better than the meat wrapped inside it.”" via Instapaper https://ift.tt/3H82W7E

"Leroy presciently describes them as “racial capitalist instruments” and traces their lineage to maritime insurance and other financial innovations of the slave trade, positing that it was the slave trade itself that served as the “primary motivator leading to the development of robust insurance networks.” His citation of the Zong slave ship massacre – where hundreds of captive men were thrown overboard and later claimed as insured property by the ship’s captain – dovetails perfectly with the reality of how social impact bonds replicate capitalism’s penchant for commodifying human life." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/369D7mh

"McDowell credits a talk she attended in 2017 at The Whitney Museum of American Art called “Race, Finance and the Afterlife of Slavery,” delivered by UC Davis professor Justin Leroy, for waking her up to the machinations behind the emerging models of financial exploitation and, in particular, the racialized nature of the novel financial instruments created for them, such as social impact bonds or SIBs." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/369D7mh

"Just last year, Blackstone acquired Ancestry.com Inc. for a cool $4.7 billion, making the world’s largest private landlord the owner of the largest private DNA database in the world as well, containing the genome of 18 million people across 30 countries." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/369D7mh

"l. That world is currently ruled by The Blackstone Group Inc., which controls a mind-boggling half trillion dollars under asset management, not to mention having the distinction of being the world’s biggest landlord and, ominously, the owner of the largest private DNA database on the planet." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/369D7mh

"the “Impact Economy” — an idea that arose out of the ashes of the controlled demolition of the global financial syste" via Instapaper https://ift.tt/369D7mh

"Christened as the fourth sector, this merger of “the corporate state […] with nonprofits and religion,” as McDowell puts it, operates through so-called “benefit corporations,” a novel incorporation structure the rules of which were developed and funded by the Rockefeller Foundation’s B Lab. Based on the “environmental social governance” or ESG framework, Certified B Corporations allow company executives to be shielded to a considerable extent from their shareholders and, therefore, provided with an unprecedented measure of freedom as a result of the ostensibly socially and environmentally beneficial entity." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/369D7mh

"theological technofascism.”" via Instapaper https://ift.tt/369D7mh

"“Blockchain is completely decentralised (unlike traditional centralised databases designed by banks and governments) and open to anyone. This means there is no infrastructural point of failure. No one owns blockchain, just like no one owns the Internet,” Marieke Flament, Managing Director for Europe, Circle comments." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2A8iSZ1

"The fact is, 59 percent of UK consumers will leave a business’ website within just 30 seconds if it is ugly or hard to navigate, according to an independent, nationally representative survey by Studio Graphene of more than 2,000 UK adults, to examine how discerning the public is when deciding which companies to spend money with. The study also showed that, in the past five years, a quarter (24 percent) of consumers have switched loyalty from one company to a competitor whose technology — website, app and payment system — delivered a better customer experience. The figure jumps to 41 percent among those aged between 18 and 34. It is clear that companies of all sizes and sectors must make sure their digital solutions look the part and function well." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2A8iSZ1

"Crypto markets are lit markets, by definition. So predators can see the prey coming. The prey can see them, too – but the prey cannot escape. When you submit an Ethereum transaction, it must wait in that mempool until a miner picks it up. It has nowhere else to go. So it is, to coin a phrase, a “sitting duck.” Every predator in the pool can see it. It inevitably gets replicated, front-run or otherwise stolen. The wonder is that any legitimate transactions ever get verified at all. Frances Coppola" via Instapaper https://ift.tt/3mS65wY

"We just witnessed the birth of the open Web3 Data Economy." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/378WEnY

"The most important outcome was: People started to treat data as an asset." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/378WEnY

"Mabel O. Wilson: Can I just add what I always describe as the boys jumped into cyberspace? With people adopting the computer and paperless architecture in the 90s—and the guys with their algorithms. In a way, with the adaptation of parametrics and fabrication, there was a recuperation of masculinity. And that jump flattened any understanding of what became known as identity politics—race, feminism, and sexuality—in architecture." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2XeBxLI

"We've heard a lot in the last 10 to 15 years about the re-disciplining of architecture and that architecture should not be engaged in cultural critique or critical theory. Those voices made the claim that architecture needed to be brought back from its margins. This was and is really a kind of conservative backlash and desire for reinstating the privileged white male point of view—away from, for example, discussions from the late 1970s through the ‘90s of architecture and gender; architecture and sexuality; and architecture and race." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2XeBxLI

"This really goes back to the foundation of architectural theory rooted in Vitruvius’s ideal man—a white male European subject—that is formulated and inscribed in architecture in Vitruvius’s Ten Books on Architecture. So the discipline of architecture as a system of orders and rules that we follow is all predicated upon that ideal subject." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2XeBxLI

"Filippo Brunelleschi, you know, designed his famous dome not long before Christopher Columbus sailed, right? So at a moment of colonial encounter, and the rise of Renaissance humanism, comes this sense of the European understanding himself in relationships to others. So race has to be conceptualized. It is not natural, but a construct. Yet is has real implications in terms of how architecture is created within those relationships of the nation state, and the bodies of knowledge of philosophy, technology, racial science—and they all have their own impacts on the discipline of architecture and on the discipline of architectural history." via Instapaper https://ift.tt/2XeBxLI