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UofWinds 412,Week 20, 2025: Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum, I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt, Oikos vs polis: a new (but old) axis on the political map


Good morning. I'm sitting at my desk in the office and repeatedly removing my beloved cat who is repeatedly positioning herself in front of my keyboard. Since I've been back from away, she has been keeping close to me and in her sights.

I had a busy road trip with my family, and while I can say that we ate well and we saw a great many things, I am not feeling particularly well rested. Luckily it is the May long weekend and I still have time to spend my days in a more quiet fashion.

Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum


I'm not sure if it is because of my age or because of the import of this historical moment we are in, but I have found myself caring less about keeping up with cultural curiosities and trends. I've mentioned before I that I am trying to make a practice of revisiting my old bookmarks from years past, and I can say that I am doing this on the daily, not because of a new found reserve of self-discipline, but because I find it routinely fulfilling. It feels more useful to look back than forward, for insight and instruction, when the immediate future (as suggested) is so dark and so dumb.

Some days ago, I re-watched artist and author, James Bridle's 40 minute re:publica 2015 presentation, Living in the Electromagnetic Spectrum. It was a sobering experience to see evidence that the disturbing practices of how our governments, under the cover of literal darkness, regularly ignore borders and erase citizenship. These practices –that we think of as of this particular time– were already apparent ten years ago, made by redrawing electromagnetic tracings.

I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt


I think one of the reasons why I found Bridle's presentation so instructive is that it reminded me that bringing evidence of a wrong to light is not enough. It might be the first step in the process of an attempt to set things right, but it cannot be the only step if meaningful change is to occur.

Shame is not enough to curb the shameless.

I came across a great of example of this while I was on Bluesky. It was a recommendation to read a recent essay, published on Huffpost entitled, I Randomly Decided To Pay Off A School’s Lunch Debt. Then Something Incredible Happened. It was introduced with the phrase, "spreadsheets as care".

The essay begins:

The thing about witnessing a 7-year-old having their hot lunch tray yanked away and replaced with a cold sandwich — what cafeteria workers in the biz euphemistically call an “alternative meal” — is not just the obvious cruelty of the public spectacle, though there’s plenty of that.
It’s the bizarre normalization of the whole affair, as if we’ve collectively agreed that fiscal responsibility is best taught through the ritual humiliation of second graders. It’s watching the adults in the room — ordinary, decent people who’d never dream of snatching food from a child in any other context — perform this strange ceremony with the mechanical resignation of DMV employees, while around them life continues uninterrupted, because this is just How Things Are...
... It’s the kind of thing most adults have trained themselves not to see, which is how I managed to live 29 years without recognizing an entire shadow economy of grade-school debt operating in the fluorescent-lit cafeterias of Utah, where I live. The invisibility of it all seems almost by design — a sleight-of-hand that kept this particular form of childhood poverty comfortably out of my peripheral vision until an algorithm decided I needed to know about it.
I was doomscrolling through news articles one evening — this was June 2024, which feels simultaneously like yesterday and several epochs ago — when I saw a headline stating there was $2.8 million in school lunch debt across Utah.
That seemed, you know, bad.

I found this article as a re-post of a re-post. The other introduction of this essay is also good:

civic technology origin story right here (ok this kind of civic awakening can in fact go many places, but when the first step is a spreadsheet, there's a version where 5-6 years later you are talking about federal procurement regs at parties)

Oikos vs polis: a new (but old) axis on the political map


Not only have I been regularly re-visiting my collection of bookmarks that have been saved, I did spend some of my vacation time reading the toread bookmarks I have been holding onto since 2024. I say this as a way of an introduction to this Boston Review essay from last October, The Violent Exhaustion of Liberal Democracy. Here's the quote that launched me into action, of a sort:

Wendy Brown: Most good political thinking about ecological damage centers capitalism as the culprit. Certainly the reign of capital—with its need for growth based on artless and wasteful consumption, its powering by fossil fuels (coal, then oil), its valorization of profit over any other value, and more recently the capture of state projects, including decarbonization, by private finance—has been a planetary disaster. And in every way, it has roughed up the Global South more than the North. We can’t overstate the need for a different political economy for a habitable and just future.
However, Western anthropocentrism is older and deeper than capitalism, which is why socialism is insufficient for addressing the climate emergency and cratering biodiversity. As you say, democracy in the West emerges at the site of ancient Greek oppositions between polis and oikos, politics and economy, city and outside lands—freedom always aligned with the former and in opposition to the latter. This means democracy is founded in a sequester of politics from life, both social and earthly. Political freedom in the West is founded in consequential political and ecological exclusions.

As it happened, I had just re-visited a blog post on this particular theme: designer Matt Webb's Oikos vs polis: a new (but old) axis on the political map:

The term oikos has framed my thinking for a while. A few years back I read Benjamin Peter’s How Not to Network a Nation which is a great look at why there was never a successful Soviet internet, despite many attempts between 1959 and 1989. From the blurb on the back, the book argues that the American ARPANET took shape thanks to well-managed state subsidies and collaborative research environments, while the Soviet network projects stumbled because of unregulated competition among self-interested institutions, bureaucrats, and others.
Here’s the passage that grabbed my attention (p194 of my edition).
Consider the language of Hannah Arendt’s The Human Condition - a landmark work of political theory that introduces its disenchantment with normative liberal values with a discussion of Sputnik and the nuclear age, the two ingredients that, once combined, could spell instantaneous planetary annihilation. For Arendt, the distinction between the public and the private is not the liberal economic opposition of the public state and the private market but a classical (Aristotelian) distinction between the public as an expression of the polis (where actors gather “to speak and act together”) and the private as an expression of the oikos (Greek for household and the root of the word economy) (where actors inhabit a domain of animal necessity and are compelled to pursue their own interests for their survival).– Benjamin Peters, How Not to Network a Nation

As a civic-minded person who would love to live in a city that loves me back, I have a personal disposition to polis, but it is increasing difficult to find in a robust state. But as Matt reminds us, oikos is not inherently bad. Indeed, when I searched my bookmarks to see if I had any other saved works on this theme, I found an excerpt in the essay, The Serviceberry: An Economy of Abundance by Robin Wall Kimmerer.

The words “ecology” and “economy” come from the same root, the Greek oikos, meaning “home” or “household”: i.e., the systems of relationship, the goods and services that keep us alive. The system of market economies that we’re given as a default is hardly the only model out there. Anthropologists have observed and shared multiple cultural frameworks colored by very different worldviews on “how we provide for ourselves,” including gift economies.
As the berries plunk into my bucket, I’m thinking about what I’ll do with them all. I’ll drop some off for friends and neighbors, and I’ll certainly fill the freezer for Juneberry muffins in February. This “problem” of managing decisions about abundance reminds me of a report that linguist Daniel Everett wrote as he was learning from a hunter-gatherer community in the Brazilian rainforest. A hunter had brought home a sizable kill, far too much to be eaten by his family. The researcher asked how he would store the excess. Smoking and drying technologies were well known; storing was possible. The hunter was puzzled by the question—store the meat? Why would he do that? Instead, he sent out an invitation to a feast, and soon the neighboring families were gathered around his fire, until every last morsel was consumed. This seemed like maladaptive behavior to the anthropologist, who asked again: given the uncertainty of meat in the forest, why didn’t he store the meat for himself, which is what the economic system of his home culture would predict.
“Store my meat? I store my meat in the belly of my brother,” replied the hunter.

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