https://www.growbyginkgo.com/2023/05/01/against-scale/
"It begins, as everything does, with some seeds.
Wildflowers, a local blend of California poppies, lupines, and tidy tips. I
sowed them five years ago, in November. The following February, they began to
sprout, and by April the wildflower patch was a painting — its lazy splashes of
orange, yellow and purple bowing in the spring breeze. With every season, it
has bloomed, died, re-sown itself, disappeared and returned, its colors and
dimensions shifting with the year’s offerings of sun and rain, welcoming
drunken bees, lizards, migrating birds, and butterflies. A few years ago, the
flowers left the back garden and appeared in the concrete median in front of my
house, following the sun.
Not far from where I live, the spring rains will soon awaken bright orange
fields of wild California poppies in the wind-swept Antelope Valley. Already,
the local communities have signaled they will forbid visitors to come and see
them. Social media has transformed this once-bucolic annual pilgrimage; over
the last few years, as Instagram has swelled with floral selfies, the country
roads leading to the blooms have swollen with cars and the detritus left behind
by inconsiderate tourists. Nearby rural communities, unable to support the
chaos of “Disneyland-sized” crowds, have suffered, as have the flowers, whose
delicate habitats are irrevocably destroyed by influencers making snow angels
in the bloom.
Here is the difference between
growth and
scalability: on one hand, an
unruly seasonal explosion of flowers, on the other, the algorithmically-boosted
presentation of those same flowers as a product, a highly-reproducible image
driving traffic both online and onto California State Route 14. In the Antelope
Valley and in my back garden, wildflowers adapt to the season. They map the sun
onto the land. They come and go. Online, the poppy is detached from place. It
has become a sea of orange to monetize. The monolithic ubiquity of the poppy
field as an image is inversely correlated to the ephemeral poppy itself, which
wilts as soon as it is picked."
Via
Future Crunch:
<
https://futurecrunch.com/good-news-respiratory-diseases-labour-bangladesh-conservation-bolivia/>
Cheers,
*** Xanni ***
--
mailto:xanni@xanadu.net Andrew Pam
http://xanadu.com.au/ Chief Scientist, Xanadu
https://glasswings.com.au/ Partner, Glass Wings
https://sericyb.com.au/ Manager, Serious Cybernetics
