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UofWinds 414,Week 24, 2025: TRMNL, The Who Cares Era / It matters. I care, When Building a Brand-New City Doesn’t Go as Planned


Good morning. Today is a day filled with No Kings protests across the border. While I will be tempted to glean how these events unfold from my social media feeds, I'm going to try to not to do that. Instead, I'll probably work on a little online project that I have been using as my personal worry stone, as its sooo close to being done and I am chasing that feeling of finishing something.

I'm also letting the summer slow me down. On Tuesday, I saw Kendrick Lamar and SZA play at Detroit's Ford Field on their Grand National Tour. I'm finally reading The Name of Rose (with this by my side) largely because I understand that it has evil librarians in it. I've watched the first season of Andor and am about to start the second. Yesterday I finished the remarkable Martian Revolution podcast season from Mike Duncan, which is both timeless and very much of this moment. Every Friday I watch an episode of Murderbot with my daughter and every other Monday, I watch a new episodes of Game Changer because I love games with rules that change.

Let's change the rules so more can win.

TRMNL


It's been a long time since I've done this but I have a product recommendation from the University of Winds. I hereby endorse TRMNL - an e-ink display that doesn't require knowing how to hack a raspberry pi or other board to use.

I've had the device for a couple weeks now and I'm still finding new plugins and ways to add to my display's playlist. I have a morning playlist that gives me a tarot and i ching reading, as well as other more practical daily updates like the weather. And then I have an evening playlist with different reminders and other entertaining gentle distractions. It's a lot of fun and I think the form and format holds a lot of potential.

I wrote about it and a particular work-related use case that I could use it for on my blog, Librarian of Things. That post begins,

For years, I have been waiting for low-energy e-ink signage to become ubiquitous because they are so solarpunk retropunk.

And because this present is a past’s terrible future, digital e-ink signs (with lights to help gig-workers find products faster) are ubiquitous at local grocery and big box stores, but e-ink e-book readers remain costly and my local transit system seems to have never heard of them or their promise.

This is all to say, that when I heard that there was a developing e-ink sign ecosystem that being launched that allowed users to easily create desktop displays without knowing how to jailbreak a kobo, I put myself on the waiting list to get myself a TRMNL when the next batch was available.

The Who Cares Era / It matters. I care


I read lots of good essays that try to get at this moment of dissonance, when systems are crumbling – but daily life continues.

“Welcome to the hypernormalization club,” Harfoush said in a response video. “I’m so sorry that you’re here.”...

... First articulated in 2005 by scholar Alexei Yurchak to describe the civilian experience in Soviet Russia, hypernormalization describes life in a society where two main things are happening.

The first is people seeing that governing systems and institutions are broken. And the second is that, for reasons including a lack of effective leadership and an inability to imagine how to disrupt the status quo, people carry on with their lives as normal despite systemic dysfunction – give or take a heavy load of fear, dread, denial and dissociation.

“What you are feeling is the disconnect between seeing that systems are failing, that things aren’t working … and yet the institutions and the people in power just are, like, ignoring it and pretending everything is going to go on the way that it has,” Harfoush says in her video.

Dan Sinker gives us a name for this moment: The Who Cares Era

It's so emblematic of the moment we're in, the Who Cares Era, where completely disposable things are shoddily produced for people to mostly ignore.

AI is, of course, at the center of this moment. It's a mediocrity machine by default, attempting to bend everything it touches toward a mathematical average. Using extraordinary amounts of resources, it has the ability to create something good enough, a squint-and-it-looks-right simulacrum of normality. If you don't care, it's miraculous. If you do, the illusion falls apart pretty quickly. The fact that the userbase for AI chatbots has exploded exponentially demonstrates that good enough is, in fact, good enough for most people. Because most people don't care.

Others have noticed that AI has been framed as a tool for de-caring.

If this diagnosis is correct, then we now know – if not a remedy – a salve to reach for to deal with the pain: Molly White's "It matters. I care."

“Who cares? It doesn’t matter anyway.” I’ve come to expect these words in my social media replies to my own work, and elsewhere in response to other journalists doing critical reporting on the abuses of the Trump regime.

Explain the clear corruption exemplified by Donald Trump’s growing list of cryptocurrency businesses? “Nobody cares.” Expose the pseudonymous individuals spending millions of dollars to buy influence with the president via his personal memecoin? “It doesn’t matter, he’s never going to face consequences.” Document apparently illegal campaign contributions by the largest American cryptocurrency exchange? “What does it matter, no one’s going to do anything about it.”

And these aren’t just a few social media responses, they’re expressions of a much broader resignation I’m seeing on- and offline: That caring is somehow naive. That documenting the truth is pointless. That hope is for fools.

Let me be clear: It fucking matters. Truth matters. Documentation matters. Fighting corruption matters. That accountability seems out of reach right now doesn’t change that. When we internalize the belief that nothing can change, we stop demanding change. When we accept corruption as normal, we stop fighting it. When we dismiss documentation of wrongdoing as pointless, we give wrongdoers exactly what they want: permission to continue unchecked and with no record of their actions.
I understand the despair in these kinds of responses. We’ve all watched impeachments fail, courts falter, institutions buckle, and politicians repeatedly trade away democracy for their next campaign check. But giving up on the very idea that truth and morality matter is not just cynicism, it’s surrender.

When Building a Brand-New City Doesn’t Go as Planned


I was having difficulty deciding what my third highlight should be, and so I decided to skip ahead and work on this newsletter's previous links section (immediately below). That task reminded me that for about five years, starting in 2015, I was keeping tabs on the possibilities and threats of the Smart City.

From the Guardian article The truth about smart cities: ‘In the end, they will destroy democracy' from December 2014:

Whole new cities, such as Songdo in South Korea, have already been constructed according to this template. Its buildings have automatic climate control and computerised access; its roads and water, waste and electricity systems are dense with electronic sensors to enable the city’s brain to track and respond to the movement of residents. But such places retain an eerie and half-finished feel to visitors – which perhaps shouldn’t be surprising. According to Antony M Townsend, in his 2013 book Smart Cities, Songdo was originally conceived as “a weapon for fighting trade wars”; the idea was “to entice multinationals to set up Asian operations at Songdo … with lower taxes and less regulation”.

This week I watched a YouTube video from Not Just Bikes, in which our narrator visits Songdo as well as nearby smart-cities Sanbon, Pangyo, Bundang, and Dongtan to see how they feel. Spoiler: they don't feel great if you are a pedestrian.

If you've ever gone to a protest, you may have heard the call and response chant: "Whose Streets?" "OUR STREETS". In the French revolution, the streets were barricaded. In this revolution, driver-less cars spy for police and are being set on fire.

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