ourselves

3Apr

By THEIRL1ADMIN01No Comments

AI, TECHNOLOGY, VIDEO REELS

A Killer App For The Metaverse? Fill It With AI Avatars Of Ourselves – So We Don’t Need To Go There

Big numbers coming. Microsoft’s US$75 billion (£55 billion) acquisition of Activision Blizzard has landed – true to Call of Duty vernacular – “like a bomb” on the US$200 billion revenue video games industry. It heavily arms the Xbox giant for its vision of the metaverse, in which gaming is the marketing adrenaline of this much-touted online future that is to be experienced immersively through virtual reality (VR) headsets or augmented-reality (AR) glasses. The stock market knocked US$10 billion off Playstation maker Sony’s valuation on the news. The metaverse was also a big noise at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas earlier this month, branded “tech’s hottest trend” by Variety magazine. Product launches included Samsung’s new VR world My House, offering virtual home makeovers; a...

With Reparations, We Must Demand Repair—and Heal Ourselves

Part two of this six-part series explores the plurality of reparations that includes Black people’s spiritual and psychological healing. The first panel at the National Grassroots Reparations Convening in Ferguson, Missouri, earlier this month was titled “Spirituality, Healing and Reparations.” Facilitator Rev. Emma Jordan-Simpson, executive director at Fellowship of Reconciliation, the organization cohosting the four-day convening, opened the discussion by sharing a story about the Lyft driver who brought her there that day. The driver was an older African American woman who described to Jordan-Simpson having multiple jobs, caring for grandchildren, and needing another source of income. The driver told her simply, “My soul is tired.” “What do we say to our people whose so...

By Reconnecting With Soil, We Heal the Planet and Ourselves

Enslavement and sharecropping cannot erase thousands of years of Black people’s sacred relationship with the land. Dijour Carter refused to get out of the van parked in the gravel driveway at Soul Fire Farm in Grafton, New York. The other teens in his program emerged skeptical, but Dijour lingered in the van with his hood up, headphones on, eyes averted. There was no way he was going to get mud on his new Jordans and no way he would soil his hands with the dirty work of farming. I didn’t blame him. Almost without exception, when I ask Black visitors to the farm what they first think of when they see the soil, they respond “slavery” or “plantation.” Our families fled the red clays of Georgia for good reason—the memories of chattel slavery, sharecropping, convict leasing, a...