New Adventures 2020 – Tatiana Mac's Our Banal Binary

What a fantastic talk. I can't promise that I understood all of it, but from the way gender is weirdly portrayed on bathroom doors through to trying to prove the existence of God via binary arithmetic... Tatiana Mac gave a brilliant talk encouraging us to realise that everything is a spectrum and that the world would be a better place if we all understood that.

My notes:

• “We use very strange things to identify bathrooms” “James dean vs Marilyn Monroe” “nuts or bolts”
• Usual woman with triangle dress is “oppressive limiting and incomplete social construct”
• “What are you?”
• “Going to the restroom without an identity crisis is a privilege”
• You can be gender non conforming and identify as woman at same time
• Dictionaries we all use are rooted into systems of society
• Want to find alternatives to commonly ableist, discriminative terms
• “Something I have to use 10x a day shouldn’t give me an identity crisis”
• “What does gender have to do with the bathroom at all?”
• Call it a toilet not what the person walking through the door is
• Lull 1232-1315 - Ars Magna a universal more to define reality.
• Leibniz 1646-1716 - “father of binary system”
• George Boole 1815-1846 - Boolean algebra
• Bouvet
• I Ching
• Bouvet taught Louis 14th and Leibniz about I Ching
• Tried to prove god existed via Explanation of Binary Arithmetic
• Mary Everest Boole (wife of Boole and niece of George Everest who Mount Everest is named for)
• Boole wrote Laws Of Thought, built upon Leibniz
• Truth comes from West Saxon three meanings “fidelity (faith), loyalty (social), veracity (technical)”
• Moved from “truth” to “Truth”
• Rings of Lull 1: Linear 2: geometric 3: exponential 4: super exponential
• Logical truth must be true for all variables. Philosophical truth is undefined it’s relative to the individual
• Ferdinand Saussure - founded structuralism
• Binary opposition “whatever you’re using to define it gets to be the signifier and the thing that is contradictory to it is signified. So define night, day is the opposite to it”
• Land acknowledgement.
• “The British empire referred to itself as the empire where the sun never sets” owner 24% of population
• Everything is through the context of the other. Abled and disabled
• “Everything has, is, and will always be about power”
• “Bill Gates is not in politics because he has far more power where he is now”
• Binaries reinforces systemic power
• Truth defined by the system.
• So monarch then church, later media and science
• “Even if our technology carries the indent to help, we too are complicit”
• “We are here in the bad place” “how do we fix it?”
• “Stack overflow and other places reduce down to truth”
• “Use and instead of or”
• “Leave space for what you don’t know”
• “State fewer facts, more curiosities”
• Qubits result based on when you look at it.
• “Complexity is the problem, so to introduce a computer with more complexity is not good”
• George Boole died because his wife added wet blankets to him when he was cold and wet already
• Ancient Egypt built Agriculture and felled by it
• Mesopotamia built irrigation but felled by it
• Roman empire conquered and ran out of money by borrowing from their conquests
• “We’ve already stolen from future generations ones already alive”
• “Efficiency is not our answer”
• “Jevon’s paradox, more efficiency uses more resources”
• “Efficiency is a tool of capitalism”
• “An efficient cyber trick still contributed to anti environmental”
• “Learn to unlearn”
• Non binary is the “lack of binary” “saying to non binary people they are missing something”
• Live posting “The Futura Is Spectral” t shirt
• Encouraging spectral thinking over binary thinking
• “Reject the binary within”
• “I don’t believe in good or bad people”
• “Inheritance of original sin” “thou mayest”
• “You’re not a bad person. But sorry love you’re not a good one either”
• “What happens when a good character does a bad act. Or a bad person does a good act”
• “We need to give space to change”
• “Don’t separate art from artist. Connect the art to the context”
• “Actions are accountable things, our context”
• Angela Davis “we must not be not-racist we must be anti-racist”
• “Have to take power away from the center people”
• “Have to be anti colonisation”
• “Morality mustn’t be the currency of others”
• Too often people on twitter shame people for working at the big 5 companies
• You can only spend your own morality but people try to spend for others
• “We will mess up. Don’t apologise don’t make it about you”
• If humans died off the ecosystem would be fine. If ants or bees died off it would collapse the whole system.