Maybe I’m solidaric
When the pandemic started gathering attention in the Lombardy region of Italy, I was supposed to be going there. My roller derby league was supposed to play a tournament that weekend. About 25 of us were going to head down there, travel was booked. The news that something funny was going on got into our league chat, and people were trying to decide if we should make the trip. Skaters who studied or worked in healthcare, and people who were news junkies or traveled a lot for work (like me), pretty much immediately said “I’m not going.” This caused a bit of drama because we couldn’t play a tournament without a full roster, and there was almost a full roster. Discussion ensued.
Derby folx had tickets to go to Italy with their friends! Some of them had never been. Some of them didn’t travel very often. It was going to be an amazing weekend. It wasn’t that people were unaware of the unprecedented news at the beginning of the pandemic. It’s that it was unprecedented. People couldn’t imagine what, if anything, that news had to do with them. They couldn’t connect this global-scale thing with their own lives. For some of the derby people, the pandemic wasn’t real. Yet.
In the end, enough skaters decided not to go that the league couldn’t play. No one went. That was the weekend Lombardy went into lockdown and didn’t let anyone in or out. If we’d have gone, we would have had to pay for hotel rooms for 25+ people for nearly a month.
For some people, the pandemic didn’t ever become real. For whatever reason a lot of people couldn’t connect personally to the facts around contagion. They dismissed scientific advice and ranted about their “freedoms”. It felt like there was a further exacerbating of a growing cleft between individualists and collectivists. The boundary between individual freedom and solidaric no-brainers, though, did not become rigid for everyone.
In reality, the pandemic brought forth some stellar showings of humanity at its best. People helped each other. Countries helped each other. The speedy vaccine development was a result of collective endeavours, information sharing and open informational networks.
That insistence that my freedom is more important than our freedoms seems to be the underpinning for the onslaught of mis/dis information and propaganda oozing all around our information landscapes. The idea that the “others” don’t care about the rest of us. But, as Rebecca Solnit points out this week, that callous perspective of humanity is uncommon, steeped in cynicism and not the way most of us feel.
- How Human Nature Matters In This Emergency (Rebecca Solnit)> https://meditations-in-an-emergency.ghost.io/we-are-not-who-they-think-we-are-some-notions-about-human-nature-2/
- How to Raise Your Artificial Intelligence: A Conversation with Alison Gopnik and Melanie Mitchell > https://lareviewofbooks.org/article/how-to-raise-your-artificial-intelligence-a-conversation-with-alison-gopnik-and-melanie-mitchell/
- What we talk about when we talk about lifelong learning > https://readwriterespond.com/2025/02/what-we-talk-about-when-we-talk-about-lifelong-learning/
Maybe I’m doodling
We’re in a bit of a waiting period at the co-op. This year we will be helping Amnesty International UK with a community and platform project to help support their activists. Back in October when I had a first call with them, I was interested that their procurement timeline seemed so…reasonable. Now, I’m eager to get started.
Our article on artificial intelligence and environmentalism for Friends of the Earth is going to, finally, be published on Monday. We’ve got a series of blogposts to go out with it, but we finished our final edits back in like the first week of January. We’ve got another report coming out about the state of microcredentials in the Irish higher education sector that we submitted back in early December. So, waiting.
Patience is not one of my virtues.
“Moravec’s paradox: things that looked as if they would be really, really hard for AI and require a lot of intelligence, like playing chess, turned out to be relatively easy. And things that look like any two-year-old can do them, like picking up an object and putting it in a pot and stirring it, are actually really hard.” Alison Gopnik in the piece linked above
This week I spent more than a little time fighting with the robots trying to get them to do a basic OCR (optical character recognition) task for me. I set up some automations to mess with images, but the vast majority of my wasted time was in accepting that AI still isn’t very good at doing anything that requires the slightest bit of nuance. In the end, I typed up / dictated my own lessons and cropped and formatted my own images, and AI did jackshit to bring you a whole load of doodles.
- A doodle a day > https://www.laurahilliger.com/a-doodle-a-day/
- Check out my stories page for more fun stuff > https://www.laurahilliger.com/stories/
- WAO now has a little sticker shop > https://weareopen-shop.fourthwall.com
Maybe I need help?
I went ice skating and absolutely ate it. Punched myself in the chest hard enough to bruise, because ill-advisedly, I thought I would still be able to do tricks. I’m sore, days later.