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Voters outside the Alameda County Courthouse casting their ballots in the 2020 election in Oakland, Calif.
Reading up on Derek Parfit’s theory of personal identity as part of my research on non-essential accounts of self in literature, philosophy and neuroscience, I was astounded to come across a New Yorker feature on the philosopher which describes his inability to visualise imagery as an anomaly:
“He has few memories of his past, and he almost never thinks about it, although his memory for other things is very good. He attributes this to his inability to form mental images. Although he recognizes familiar things when he sees them, he cannot call up images of them afterward in his head: he cannot visualize even so simple an image as a flag; he cannot, when he is away, recall his wife’s face. (This condition is rare but not unheard of; it has been proposed that it is more common in people who think in abstractions.) He has always believed that this is why he never thinks about his childhood. He imagines other people, in quiet moments, playing their memories in their heads like wonderful old movies, whereas his few memories are stored as propositions, as sentences, with none of the vividness of a picture.”
Surely, Parfit’s experience would be representative of the norm, I thought – i.e. to only be able to see things that are actually there, physically present and immediately visible in the external surroundings? I certainly never had this seeming super-power of creating images myself and had always assumed that my subjective experience corresponded to the average.
As I was soon to find out, however, the absence of a visual component to Parfit’s imagination is part of a neurological condition which affects an estimated 2-5% of the population, including myself, namely aphantasia.
Recent studies into aphantasia (e.g. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/34296179/) connect it to a number of characteristics and personality traits, including introversion and autistic spectrum features, difficulty with recognition, including face-recognition, impoverished autobiographical memory and less event detail in general memory, difficulty with atemporal and future-directed imagination, including difficulties with projecting oneself into mentally constructed scenes and the future, reduced mind-wandering tendency, elevated levels of IQ and mathematical and scientific occupations.
In addition to these, I think aphantasia is likely connected to a certain philosophical belief or position, namely the non-essentialist view of the self that is found in both the reductionist account of personal identity in Western philosophy and the no-self doctrine in Eastern contemplative traditions. I offer a more extensive argument for this connection here: https://psyche.co/ideas/aphantasia-can-be-a-gift-to-philosophers-and-critics-like-me.
In Reasons and Persons Derek Parfit formulates the view that personal identity is reducible to physical and psychological continuity of mental states, and that there is no ‘further fact’, diachronic entity, or essence that determines identity. The belief that persons are separate entities with continuously existing selves, he argues, is to a great degree an illusion. The New Yorker profile only fleetingly connects Parfit’s philosophy to his aphantasia, but to me it seems an obviously relevant piece of explanation. Our philosophical views are based on our intuitions; our perceptual experience of the world guides our ideas about it.
As modern neuroscience is giving us deeper insight into the wide neuro- and perceptual diversity of people, it is also giving us new explanations of differences in people’s experience of reality and, accordingly, their philosophical intuitions and beliefs. According to the predictive processing theory of brain function, the reality we experience as objective and independently existing, is to a large degree created by our brain, a projection based on our brain’s best guesses about the external reality and as such a form of controlled hallucination. And as Anil Seth has recently pointed out, since we all have different brains, we will naturally make different guesses about the external reality we encounter and thus have different perceptual experiences of reality. “Just as it serves us well to occasionally question our social and political beliefs, it’s useful to know that others can literally see things differently to us, and that these differences may evolve into different beliefs and behaviours.”
The growing insight into perceptual diversity, then, gives way to an increased possibility of biographically understanding and explaining philosophers’ theories and as such allows for a new form of ‘neuro-biographical’ reading of philosophy.
It seems plausible that the flipside of a reduced sense of the past and future is an increased connection to and absorption in the present and a weaker identification with a continuous personal narrative and a coherent and substantial self. Parfit’s diminished sense of continuity of identity and substantiality of his own self – which he himself explicitly links to his aphantasia – may well have led him towards or at least strengthened his anti-essential views of personhood.
Likewise, my own aphantasia could at least in part explain my intellectual preference for and easy identification with non-essential conceptions of self in both Western philosophy and Buddhism. The question is, then, whether the condition of aphantasia gives people like Parfit and me a shortcut to enlightenment and clearer philosophical insight into and intuitive understanding of the human condition and nature of reality. Or, does it obscure the truth by barring us from dimensions that are integral to the most common human experience and installing intuitions that do not correspond to the norm?
As neuroscience and neurotechnology continue to develop and give us better understanding of the variations and differences in the neurological constitution of brains, it will be interesting to see to how far the awareness of perceptual differences and specificity can reach in the explanation of differences in philosophical intuitions and beliefs – and to what extent it can disqualify philosophical positions and theories. The notion of perceptual diversity offers a valuable route for philosophers to exercise self-criticism, scrutinise their theories and intuitions and investigate the underlying perceptions and experiences. At the same time, it troubles some of the fundamental concepts on which the discipline of philosophy relies, paving the way for further relativisation and destabilisation of the already undermined notion of objective truth and rationality and potentially removing us further from consensus.
Thomas Jefferson High School for Science and Technology in Alexandria, Va.
The professional bureaucracies of both the US and Chinese national security states encourage mistrust, jingoistic attitudes, pessimistic assumptions, and hawkish policies. This is a growing source of war risk, and the only near-term fix is a security dilemma sensibility.
Let me explain.
Some time ago, Kenneth Booth and Nicholas Wheeler wrote of a “security dilemma sensibility” that policymakers could (and should) cultivate in order to better manage the interactive processes that can lead to crisis and war, even between two actors who have only defensive intentions.
They described a security dilemma sensibility as:
an actor’s intention and capacity to perceive the motives behind, and to show responsiveness towards, the potential complexity of the military intentions of others…the ability to understand the role that fear might play in their attitudes and behaviour, including, crucially, the role that one’s own actions may play in provoking that fear.
I first came across their book while finishing my PhD, which I did on the side while working in Obama’s Pentagon. Like (hopefully) everyone who studies international relations, I’d learned about the security dilemma as an undergrad. It made sense that non-aggressive countries could inadvertently make themselves less secure by taking measures that would be misperceived by others as threatening, leading to counter-measures also perceived as threatening.
But a security dilemma sensibility really resonated with me as a practical extension of the original concept. And so I found myself trying to bring this sensibility to bear over and again—on the “Korea desk” in the midst of two North Korean attacks on South Korea; among a small group of policy nerds trying to make the “pivot to Asia” real; as a one-time defense strategist contemplating “emerging technologies”; and as a public critic warning about the ways the Trump-Kim nuclear crisis of 2017 could (and nearly did) go sideways.
My role in these things was inarguably negligible; with the exception of the North Korean nuclear crisis, none of the policy paths taken reflect my counsel. Nevertheless, the security dilemma sensibility strongly colored how I made sense of these wide-ranging problem sets.
I was reminded of all this while reading a piece in Foreign Affairs by Tong Zhao, whose research on China-related strategic questions is among the most insightful in the business. In the essay, Zhao argues:
The dynamics among China’s political leadership, its policy elite, and the broader public have generated an internal feedback loop that is not entirely within Xi’s comprehension or control. This could result in China’s being fully mobilized for war even without Xi deciding to attack Taiwan.
Recognizing the presence of policy feedback loops is important—they describe how we can imagine security dilemmas escalating into conflict spirals. And it’s not surprising that feedback loops would be present in a rivalry that is intensifying right in front of us.
The valence of a relationship constrains available policy choices and how those choices are perceived, making rivalries self-reinforcing and stubbornly path dependent.
In China, as in the United States, the opinion-makers are virtually all hawks. Everyone is outbidding everyone else. Above all, nobody wants to be seen as “weak” or naïve about the enemy. And all the while, the national security states of both sides are doing everything that politicians allow to optimize themselves for war.
Fueling this is ethnonationalism—in Washington as in Beijing. Reactionary politicians feed implicitly racialized nationalist policies to publics whom they refuse to feed political democracy or economic security. As Yuen Yuen Ang saw in 2022:
The only people who are winning [Sino-US competition] are the ardent radicals, the extremists, and the autocrats on both sides. It’s so easy to be nationalists…You just need to scream and say extreme things and get people roused.
Neither Chinese nor US officials exercise sufficient control of the violent forces they’re manipulating for political, strategic, and personal gain.
We can’t afford to overlook the root sources of Sino-US confrontation, which include a nightmarish melange of exceptionalist nationalism on both sides, shifting patterns of capital accumulation under the previous economic order, and an unwillingness by either side to take a relational view of the other.
But being clear-eyed about the root causes of security problems doesn’t buy you out of taking seriously potential proximate causes of war, like feedback loops.
Now, I worry about whether China and the United States actually have defensive intentions. Xi Jinping’s jingoism has infected China’s governing regime, and the People’s Liberation Army is definitely taking seriously Xi’s priority to “be ready by 2027 to invade Taiwan.” And while it’s impolitic to point it out in Washington, there is good reason to think that the United States could be a revisionist actor too.
But even though it can be difficult to know whether to code states as having defensive or aggressive intentions, it is not hard to find policy elites within states who are unquestionably aggressive or unquestionably defensive.
The trouble is that even individuals harboring non-aggressive, security-seeking motivations are trapped in systems whose pressures and incentives are much bigger than them.
This is true at the nuclear level. We can reasonably say neither country has the desire to launch a first strike, yet the nature of today’s technologies and Sino-US nuclear postures have locked the two countries in a structural security dilemma. As recent research shows:
The shift in the conventional balance of force in the region and the U.S. development of lower-yield nuclear weapons has led to greater fears in China of U.S. limited nuclear use in a conflict. Chinese strategists increasingly believe that U.S. nonnuclear strategic capabilities threaten China’s nuclear forces.
This is also why feedback loops are an important phenomenon to grasp. The point of Zhao’s warning is that we ought to be trying to “understand how certain efforts to deter Beijing can inadvertently exacerbate the security challenge.” It’s a matter of urgency that US policy thinks through how to disrupt—rather than blissfully ignore—feedback loop dynamics within the Chinese system.
How? By cultivating a security dilemma sensibility.
Our policies need to do more than give us psychological comfort and optimize for a war that nobody can win. They need to self-consciously prioritize preventing war.
So for every new basing access agreement we announce, for every new tariff or economic restriction we unveil, for every new military exercise or arms sale we conduct, we must ask: How does this make us more secure? How does this feed into China’s distorted view of our intentions?
Similarly, when China makes moves we don’t like, we must ask: To what extent are they responding to what we are doing?
I know that many a policy wonk worships at the altar of Thomas Schelling and therefore tends to view life as an endless series of rational games where you as an individual are just constantly trying to get the best of everyone.
But that’s exhausting and unsustainable, and probably self-defeating. It impedes adopting a security dilemma sensibility. And ironically, even Schelling stressed the importance of reassurance and the idea that adversaries needed to believe not just your threats but that they can get on peaceably if they don’t challenge your resolve.
This is cross-posted at Security in Context’s blog, as well as Van’s newsletter.
Maggie Tokuda-Hall declined Scholastic’s offer to license her book, “Love in the Library,” on the condition that she edit her author’s note to remove a description of past and present instances of racism.
Does the author-read audiobook offer a perfect confluence between person, authorial persona, voice, and aesthetic form?
The post Finding Your “Voice”: Author-Read Audiobooks appeared first on Public Books.
By Juergen Dankwort.
The proposal to provide assistance with voluntary assisted dying (VAD) has grown significantly over the past two decades at an accelerating rate. Right-to-die movement societies and organizations now number over 80 from around the world, 58 of which are members of the World Federation of Right to Die Societies. However, most are also increasingly beset with formidable challenges opposing their advances that raise profound ethical, moral and legal considerations.
The prevalent approach towards VAD
A review of these assisted dying regimes show how they were set up through legislative acts often resulting from initial court challenges to an existing assisted dying prohibition within that country’s criminal code. They reveal a common paradigmatic model whereby the criminal act remained intact with amendments added establishing a legislated framework to allow a service under specifically designated conditions and exempting the providers from punishment.
Generally, the legal criterion for accessing such a medically-centred service requires a person to be suffering intolerably from an existing, irremediable condition defined within legislated parameters, establishing who may access them, best practices, where and when they can be done, and who may perform them.
While not alone, Canada’s often-vaunted medically assisted dying regime (also known as MAID), implemented in 2016, is exemplary of this development with attendant massive challenges facing it. Its formulation illustrates an attempt to balance a previously court-declared constitutional right to life, liberty and security of the person with a perceived societal harm resulting from a state-sanctioned service to assisted dying.
Such legislated regimes have since been challenged legally numerous times by persons refused access, while featuring alarming stories in the media when access was sought and granted. A backlash to VAD has gained recent traction.
Traditional assisted dying opponents, including the orthodox religious, some disability groups, and conservative politicians who often troll to their populist base, are joined by additional academics and some physicians, providing more legitimacy with compelling arguments at stopping any wider access to a state-initiated and financially-covered national health service.
Germany breaks tradition
In a remarkable judgment by the German Federal Constitutional Court in February 2020, regarding assisted suicide, a ground-breaking option for any country or jurisdiction contemplating the creation of an assisted dying regime was identified that may well avoid much of the controversy and many of the challenges faced by existing ones. It does so by revealing a pathway to set up the service based on an entirely different orientation and approach from the existing one that began decades earlier in Europe, and later largely copied by others.
The German Court’s ruling stated for the first time that matters of quality of life and degrees of suffering are wholly subjective and that governments should therefore not prescribe nor proscribe assisted dying access based on categories of populations defined by such individually-experienced life-determinants because such restrictions would violate entrenched principles regarding personal autonomy and the liberal foundation separating state and personhood in pluralist societies. A VAD regime built on this premise could then also avoid all expressed objection to assisted suicide, no longer based on those normative criteria.
A recent study out of Europe contrasting two ways of how assisted dying services function, detail the actual process deciding for whom and when the service may be administered and who can perform it. The legislated regime of Belgium – a model used for Canada’s – was compared with the process in Switzerland.
Importantly, no legislated system was erected in Switzerland that specifies through amendments or exceptions how, when, by, and for whom it may be done. It has remained unlawful for decades with the simple caveat if it is done to exploit another vulnerable person. Several salient differences were observed by the researchers that also reveal the challenges presently facing existing VAD regimes. The Swiss model featured:
While claims that Canada has become the wild west for assisted dying with catastrophic consequences is arguably exaggerated given its stringent access requirements, it is nevertheless exemplary of a heightened political drama resulting from the path it took historically that set it on its stormy course.
That begs the question if the many countries and jurisdictions now considering a VAD gateway might not consider taking a different route illustrated by the current Swiss way, recently given a legal foundation by its European neighbour.
Though convincing evidence is still lacking on how expanding assisted dying allegedly leads to a slippery slope of harming the most vulnerable, as reported by some right-to-die societies and as shown in studies, opposition and barriers to it will likely invite more impulsive, desperate suicides that may traumatize and endanger friends, family, and first responders.
Author: Juergen Dankwort
Affiliations: Associate, University of West Virginia Research Center on Violence
Competing interests: Member, Right to Die Society of Canada; Supporter, World Federation of Right to Die Societies; Coordinator, Canada chapter, Exit International.
Declaration:
The author was not paid by any organization, group, government or individual in conducting research for and writing this article.
The post Overcoming impediments to medically assisted dying: A signal for another approach? appeared first on Journal of Medical Ethics blog.
One of the privileges of teaching Southeast Asian Politics is how it helps me to discover new facts, new anecdotes, and new perspectives on old subjects. Sometimes I learn these things from my students, sometimes I learn these things as a result of trying to answer a question from students.
Several years ago, for example, I learned about the Joyoboyo prophesy while trying to answering the question from a student about what do Indonesians learn about the Japanese occupation during WWII? My recent lectures on modern Vietnamese politics have provided me with another good one.
Here is a picture taken from a Vietnamese school. Thanks to one solid year of Vietnamese language in graduate school Google Translate, I can get a sense of the conversation.
It relates the story of an enterprising young man in colonial-era Annam (French Indochina) named Nguyễn Tất Thành (that name is what is obscured by the head on the left… written Ng Tất Th___). He is speaking with his friend Pear (bạn = a familiar term of address, lê = pear) about his desire to go overseas to see the world and use his experiences to help the Vietnamese people:
Tôi muốn đi ra nước ngoài, xem nước Pháp và các nước khác. Sau khi xem xét họ làm như thế nào, Tôi sẽ trở về giúp đồng bào chúng ta.
I want to go abroad, to see France as well as other countries. After seeing how they do it, I will return to help our compatriots.
But look at Mr. Nguyễn’s hands. Part of the story I have been told is that Mr. Nguyễn responded to the question “how will you earn money to do this?” by responding “with my hands—my hands are my money.” It is remarkable to see that those hands are stamped with dollar signs rather than the đồng symbol (₫) to signify this point.
The story also becomes more evocative when you realize that Nguyễn Tất Thành is a sobriquet that means “Nguyen the Accomplished.” And even more so once you realize that this same Nguyen was later known to the world as Ho Chi Minh.
tompepinsky
Guest post by Niloufer Siddiqui and Erum Haider
In 2021, in the midst of national political turmoil resulting from increasingly polarized politics, by-elections in the Pakistani mega-city of Karachi were being tightly contested over a seemingly mundane issue: access to water.
That water should become an election issue was perhaps not surprising. Karachi “faces an absolute scarcity of water,” with experts estimating that demand for water exceeds supply by twice as much. Most of Karachi’s residential areas are connected through pipes managed by the state-run Karachi Water and Sewerage Board (KWSB); however, given vastly inadequate supply, some of these physical connections only provide water once or twice a month. Problems are compounded in Karachi’s many low-income, informal settlements, which have little established infrastructure for water supply. Households in these neighborhoods often rely on low-quality water sold at exorbitant rates by private water vendors.
Water in Karachi involves a large number of actors with complex, often bewildering links to one another. In addition to the state-run KWSB, public benefit corporations direct water at certain neighborhoods at the expense of others. Sometimes the paramilitary Rangers step in by operating tankers. Licensed private water companies also provide water at a cost. All of these providers operate legally, but there is also a shadowy water mafia in Karachi that illegally siphons off water from the main supply and uses it to fill its own fleet of tankers and operate its own hydrants. The mafia sells this water to rich and poor consumers alike—anyone willing, or desperate enough, to pay for it.
In interviews conducted in July 2021, we were told that control over water from the city’s depleting freshwater sources has become one of the most lucrative arenas in a mega-city already saturated with criminality and political violence. The people we spoke with reaffirmed what others have found: that the water mafia operates often with explicit links to and assistance from political figures and representatives of the state. And because ethnicity remains central to how political and social life in Karachi is organized, many Karachi citizens believe that ethnic links are critical to how water is directed and prioritized.
That access to a commodity as vital as water should be determined by political ties and who can pay is not unique to Karachi. Where state capacity is weak, the provision of goods and services is often taken over by non-state actors, including criminal and illegal organizations. Scholars, journalists, and activists have chronicled this phenomenon in contexts ranging from Medellin to Baghdad to New York City. These often illicit actors step in to provide security in the presence of a weak state, but also provide citizens with essential public goods—at a price.
In December 2021 and January 2022, together with the Pakistan Institute of Public Opinion (an affiliate of Gallup International in Pakistan), we surveyed 2,000 people in Karachi to understand how voters in this ethnically-polarized city evaluate political candidates based on the candidates’ ethnicity and their claimed links to water resources.
We found that, while a majority of respondents preferred candidates who share their ethnicity, ties to the water mafia seem to do little to increase the appeal of even a co-ethnic candidate. Indeed, co-ethnic candidates with mafia linkages are seen as significantly less credible and helpful than those with state water linkages. Most people preferred candidates who share their ethnicity, especially when they have links to state water resources.
These results surprised us. It is often assumed that politicians use connections to the water mafia to direct water to their political constituencies as a vote-getting strategy. What we found, however, is that voters appear skeptical that politicians’ connections to the water mafia will directly benefit them, and so those connections do little to boost votes.
For politicians, manipulating the source of water is a profitable business opportunity. “Water provision ‘is more lucrative than drugs’” and, as one former National Assembly member told us, selling public water to tankers is “the easiest racket in town.” Rather than benefitting voters, water access is used by politicians to “fill their [own] swimming pools, water their lush lawns, bestow on friends, or indulge in their own tanker business on the side.” It is also used to curry favor with groups other than voters. Where water mafia connections do result in patronage, it appears to be primarily targeted towards political workers linked to the party apparatus rather than ordinary citizens.
There are many examples around the world where criminal gangs have been able to garner local support by stepping in where the state fails, providing health, education, and myriad other services. Think Hezbollah in Lebanon, gangs in Rio de Janeiro, and militant actors in Iraq. In Karachi, the water tanker mafia is perceived as contributing to, and emblematic of, overall state corruption. When respondents in our survey were asked who they believed was responsible for the water mafia in Karachi, about 53 percent blamed the provincial government and nearly 10 percent blamed the KWSB. In this context, then, it is likely that a politician with ties to water tanker networks would not be seen as an attractive candidate to alleviate the respondents’ water problems but rather seen as responsible for Karachi’s water crisis itself.
The case of the Karachi water mafia is emblematic of an increasingly common paradox in cities where weak governance and criminality plague the provision of basic services. On the one hand, rich and poor citizens alike are frustrated with illegal water provision, which many see as linked to corrupt practices within the state apparatus. On the other hand, illegal water services fill a gap created by inadequate state provision. Many individuals, particularly the poor in underserved neighborhoods, depend on these services. But just because they rely on illicit actors doesn’t imply that they are happy about it.
Niloufer Siddiqui is an Assistant Professor at the University at Albany-State University of New York. Erum Haider is an Assistant Professor at the College of Wooster.
This post is the first in a series on illicit economies, organized crime, and extra-legal actors and came out of an IGCC-sponsored conference hosted in October 2022 by the Center for U.S.-Mexican Studies at UC San Diego’s School of Global Policy and Strategy.
The authors acknowledge funding from the International Growth Centre in support of this project.
Individual protests, like those in Hong Kong, may be defeated. But the global protest movement is only beginning.
The post Protesters of the World, Unite appeared first on Public Books.
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“All I could do those days was stay in bed because my head was spinning from the painkillers."
The post “To Convey Love Through Sound”: A Jazz Musician’s Comeback in the Aftermath of a Hate Crime appeared first on Public Books.
Stories that recount an embarrassing “lunchbox moment” can be effective accounts of lived discrimination, writes Angie Kang, but they shouldn’t be the only ones. “Telling this story has its limits,” she writes. In this fantastic illustrated essay for Catapult, she urges storytellers to create new, varied stories that don’t simplify Chinese culture and the wider Asian American experience. “There are so many other stories to tell that aren’t only food-related,” she writes, pointing to shows and films like Fresh Off the Boat and Everything Everywhere All At Once as examples. Kang’s resonant words and lovely illustrations combine in a fresh and powerful piece about narrative and representation.
I don’t discount the importance of food as part of culture.
Food and language are two forms of intimacy in the same mouth, and former might be a more accessible option for some people.
Language and art require time to understand, but food can be eaten tonight.
Countries worldwide have pledged to reduce their energy usage and reach net-zero energy targets by 2050. To get there, they will need to find clever ways to decarbonize especially dirty businesses, including the buildings sector. The push to clean up the built environment has spawned a lot of policy, as well as overlapping acronyms, including net-zero energy buildings (nZEBs) and zero-emission buildings (ZEBs).
In the EU, a ZEB requirement is expected to start in January 2030 for all new buildings. Likewise, the U.S. Department of Energy said it will retrofit new federal buildings that are greater than 5,000 square feet by 2030. South Korea is also taking measures to reduce emissions in the building sector by retrofitting buildings and strengthening ZEB requirements for new buildings through 2030.
Buildings are a major source of air, water and noise pollution. The built environment’s whole process — including materials manufacturing, construction, heating and electricity, maintenance and demolition, drives an estimated 40% of greenhouse gas emissions globally. The steep environmental cost and looming deadlines inspired Energy X, a Seoul-based startup and marketplace that “enables the construction of zero-energy buildings,” from architectural design to completion of construction.
Energy X was founded in 2019 by co-CEOs Sean Park and Tom Hong. That’s when the duo pivoted from their first startup — a sustainable architecture crowdfunding platform, called Xquare.
The outfit already works with a host of clients, including large conglomerates that want to retrofit their buildings in South Korea, like Hyundai, Naver and Lotte, Park told TechCrunch. Energy X’s users include building owners, construction companies and architects.
Since its inception in 2019, the startup says it has sealed 573 deals, which it estimates are worth 1.6 trillion won ($1.3 billion) in terms of the construction cost for sustainable architecture — like zero-energy buildings and LEED-certified (Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design) buildings. Some projects are still ongoing, and others have already been completed, Park said.
There are lots of other construction marketplaces on the scene. Procore, a construction tech unicorn, went public in 2021, and Aconex, an Australia-based construction platform, was acquired by Oracle for $1.2 billion in 2017. In energy-efficiency tech, Energy X’s peers include Enpal, which raised a $174 million Series C at a valuation of $1.1 billion in 2021, and Uplight, which received undisclosed funding at a $1.5 billion valuation in 2021, Park mentioned.
Beyond hosting a marketplace to develop energy-efficient buildings, Energy X says it’s working on solar and energy-saving tech, including BIPV (building integrated photovoltaics) for energy production, HVAC (heating, ventilation and air conditioning) for energy conservation and BEMS (building energy management systems) for energy management, Park explained. More than half of Energy X’s employees focus on energy technologies for the R&D team, Park added.
“Most building owners are not experts in building management, and they don’t know how to use it because building energy management systems (BEMS) are software-based,” Park said. In addition to the marketplace, “Energy X provides cloud-based BEMS where our AI manages, maintains and optimizes the system at all times without always having to monitor, manage or control directly,” said Park.
The Seoul-headquartered startup secured $20.3 million in Series B financing at a valuation of $120 million, Park told TechCrunch.
The new round, led by Shinhan Financial Group, brings the startup’s total funding to approximately $31.5 million. The funds will help Energy X expand its marketplace and energy efficiency tech, grow its team from 86 to 200 employees this year and launch in Japan, Park said. The startup will open an office in Japan in February, Park added.
Note: We’ve updated the story to reflect that Energy X plans to grow its team to 200 employees this year.
Energy X secures $20M at $120M valuation to slash building sector emissions by Kate Park originally published on TechCrunch
As January draws to a close, our favorite stories this week included a stirring critical essay, a paean to the world’s greatest boxed meal, a rethinking of psychedelics’ impact on the planet, a profile of a craftsperson at his peak, and an eye-opener about how humpback whales use air in some unexpected ways.
Ken Chen | n+1 | 11,542 words | January 25, 2023
After Corky Lee passed last year, the photographer and community organizer was memorialized in his hometown’s most conventionally prestigious outlets: The Times offered a sizable obituary, as did Hua Hsu in The New Yorker. This week, on the first anniversary of Lee’s death, Ken Chen rendered an altogether different kind of portrait in n+1. Much of the same biographical information is included, as are a number of Lee’s iconic photographs of Asian Americans in New York throughout the last six decades. Yet, when Chen writes about his encounters with Lee, and about the 14 photographs he selects to represent Lee’s work, the grief that suffuses his words isn’t solely about Lee, but about the many atrocities visited upon the Asian American community, up to and after Lee’s death. Chen’s critical acumen here is reason enough to read: “His images lack a charismatic subject,” he writes of Lee. “Those whom capital dismissed as surplus, he saw as beautiful. He commemorated the multitude, the striking waiters and seamstresses whose unruly abundance crowded away any beatific composition.” But he brings a similar understated poetry to the social conditions Lee’s work served to illuminate — and with violence against Asian American elders and others seemingly unending (including a horrifying recent attack in my own hometown), that juxtaposition makes Chen’s piece nearly as indelible as the images it contains. —PR
Ivana Rihter | Catapult | January 19, 2023 | 2,261 words
I only discovered Kraft dinners later in life after moving to North America revealed the cult of Kraft to me. A stable lurking in every cupboard; I admired the respect that something so impossibly orange had managed to garner. When Ivana Rihter finds KDs, though, they are much more; cooked for her by her baba, they are inextricably linked to her immigration story. She describes the process of boiling the pasta and adding the sauce with reverence, the memory mixed in with her love for her baba and appreciation for the economic hardships her family struggled through to start their new life. Her baba teaches her to put feta on top, and with this “secret little piece of the home country mixed in with all-American shelf-stable cheese” it remains a food for life, and — consistently sitting at about a dollar a box — one that carries on seeing her through hard times. I found this an unexpectedly beautiful essay, more about memory and belonging than cheesy pasta. Food can transport you back in time, especially if, as Rihter describes it, it “is soaked with memories of [an] origin story.” —CW
Amber X. Chen | Atmos | January 16, 2023 | 3,196 words
In this piece, Chen explores what the current psychedelic renaissance means for environmental activism, and how synthetic drugs like LSD and MDMA and psychoactive plants like ayahuasca and peyote can stir change within individuals — and ultimately galvanize social movements. This all sounds incredibly positive on the surface, but not everyone who dabbles in such mind-altering journeys is transformed for the better; psychedelics also fuel right-wing movements, too. (See: “QAnon Shaman.“) The decriminalization of psychedelics is a step toward making their therapeutic benefits accessible to more people, yes, but as Chen notes, it increases the threat of deforestation, and — with today’s psychedelic movement being largely white — it also takes power away from Indigenous people, who have harnessed the healing power of these sacred plants for thousands of years. (See also a Top 5 essay I picked last year: “The Gentrification of Consciousness.”) I appreciate Chen’s exploration here, and the questions posed that I haven’t stopped thinking about, like: “How broken is Western society that we think we need drugs in order to facilitate mass climate action?” —CLR
Elly Fishman | Chicago Magazine | January 17, 2023 | 4,177 words
Recently, in his late 60s, my dad decided to learn how to play the violin. I respect the choice to try the impossible, especially something as delicate and timeless as bowing a stringed instrument. (My parents’ cats, who endure the scratching out of notes from beneath the couch or bed, seem to have a different opinion.) After reading this lovely profile, I think perhaps my dad, a skilled carpenter, should also try apprenticing as a luthier. I, someone with zero skills at playing an instrument besides an egg shaker, who curses putting IKEA furniture together, was mesmerized by the descriptions of how John Becker, perhaps the best violin restorer on earth, practices his craft. Elly Fishman’s profile has a musical quality: It sweeps readers through chapters of Becker’s personal story and dwells in long, lyrical moments when, with the surest of hands, Becker repairs some of the most revered instruments on the planet — namely, Stradivari. There are just 650 of the violins left. What makes them so extraordinary? Musicians and scientists may puzzle over that question forever. In the meantime, Becker works — quietly, meticulously, instinctively. “We are caretakers of these instruments,” one of his clients tells him. “We move on, but these instruments continue to the next generation.” —SD
Doug Perrine | Hakai Magazine | December 20, 2022 | 1,500 words
It’s well known that many animals use tools to aid feeding and other tasks of life. Think: otters floating on their backs, cracking shells with rocks. You’d think it would be hard for whales to use tools, but as Doug Perrine reports at Hakai Magazine, humpbacks use what’s available to them — air and water — to form bubbles for a variety of activities. “I’m tempted to describe the air in a humpback’s lungs as a Swiss army knife because I’ve seen whales do so many different things with it,” he wrote. “It is not actually a tool collection though, but a storehouse of raw construction material with which the whale can fashion a variety of tools. Lacking free fingers and opposable thumbs, whales are unable to create and use tools in the same way as humans, but reveal their intelligence through the manner in which they utilize other body parts for tool production and use.” —KS
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On the first anniversary of photographer Corky Lee’s death, Ken Chen sets forth an astounding feat of remembrance: a mosaic of photocriticism from which he teases out an elegy to Lee’s empathic genius, all set against a litany of horrors perpetuated on the Asian American community. Stunning writing, brimming with clarity and anger and love.
I spent a year looking at Corky Lee’s photographs. I saw grandmothers squat on the curb and laugh. I saw girls pluck the guqin. I saw boys pose on their fire escape. I saw women set up a streetside clinic whose sign says without shame: PAP SMEAR / BREAST EXAM / GONORRHEA TEST. I saw tenements, picketers, parades, veterans, and flags. I saw Reyna Elena, Miss Philippines and a B-Boy flying his bare arms wide. I saw a dapper Desi boy protesting Dotbusters. I saw men beat Taiko drums, I saw them hold up tombstones for Vincent Chin. I saw three women from Sakhi say: WE WILL NOT TOLERATE ABUSE. I saw a bride and groom order from a hot dog cart. I saw two cool women throw a cool glance. I saw a man remembering at a table marked POSTON ARIZONA and I wondered how many years had passed since the prison camps. I saw New York City and the tangled warrens of Chinatown. I saw a hollering woman in a hardhat hoist her sign high, the text that also tells her biography: INJURED ON THE JOB, THEN FIRED BY THE BOSS! There is something moving about the sheer number of people Corky Lee thought were worth remembering. His archive is an Aleph in which you can glimpse everyone from an Asian American world bulging vast with time and complexity. Over the past few years, we have asked for someone to finally see us. Looking at these kaleidoscopic images, I found myself thinking the only power that can recognize us is ourselves.
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