Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics
It’s been a bit quiet on the blog. I continue to research, to map, to watch talks and prop myself up reading books about resistance. A friend told me I needed to take a break and get some perspective-to MAKE something.
Eventually, I did. I spent a few weeks making a quilt for a colleague who is expecting her first child. I viewed it as a meditation on hope for young people coming up, those who might work together to build a future that acknowledges past harms, rectifies injustice, and creates space to be otherwise.
As I stood over the cutting mat,
sat at the kitchen table with my foot on the sewing machine pedal,
crouched on the quilt inserting basting pins, and
hand-stitched the binding,
I fought a growing sense of alarm that keeps rising in my chest.
So many stories coming through my social media feed attest to the fact that Big Data, Big Brother, and global finance are on the move.
- Pearson joining with Tom Vander Ark’s Learn Capital on a $50 million venture fund advancing innovative education enterprises prioritizing augmented reality. Here
- DataKind and Commit!, Strive’s partner in Dallas, making plans to run the data of the school district’s 500,000 children through machine learning to see what patterns they can discern. Here
- A story about income sharing agreements funding tuition for higher education. Here
- Former McKinsey Mayor Pete’s South Bend, Indiana being set up as a pilot cradle to grey “City of Lifelong Learning” via the Drucker Institute-yeah, Peter Drucker the father of management science and mentor to Saddleback Church’s Rick Warren and Bob Buford (deceased), the Institute’s Board Chair Emeritus, Texas television tycoon, and mega-church consultant. Here
We are striding towards a cybernetic reckoning, one that aims to meld people with machines in service of viciously lean efficiencies that profit the global elite. Power players in finance, tech, faith communities, and the government want nothing more than to engineer a future for the masses that allows them to maintain control and preempt insurgency. To them the poor are numbers, 1s and 0s set up to be harvested and poured into CONTINUE READING: Quilting Resistance: Fabric, Humanity, Serendipity & Cybernetics – Wrench in the Gears