Tootfinder

I had an interesting chat with a friend who mentioned a book called "The Living Company." Apparently Shell was one of the few companies that saw the 1970's oil crisis coming and was able to adapt. They did it by talking to a bunch of people randomly about the future, identifying patterns, and coming up with possible future scenarios. They then formed clear plans for these future scenarios, where those plans would cover as many related scenarios as possible.
This was actually really familiar to me, though I hadn't read the book, because that's very close to what the Seattle GDC disaster prep committee did. We identified possible disaster scenarios, then identified preparedness steps that served multiple purposes. We got boxes of n95 masks in 2018 and 2019 for wildfire smoke and did a bit of work building box-fan air purifiers. Over the years we handed out these masks to houseless folks who were most exposed to the smoke. When the pandemic hit, we were able to take some of those boxes to first responders just as manufacturing in China dropped because of their lockdowns and as others started PPE hoarding. We focused on N95 because that was one of the overlap points between the unexpected but catastrophic "flu pandemic" that we knew was possible, and the regular "wildfire smoke" problem we were just getting used to.
The book sounds like it's at least partially influenced by cybernetics. There's this Dutch cybernetics connection that I haven't quite figured out. Anyway, this guy talked about how a company needs to be sustainable and all that. My dude, you worked for an oil company. That is categorically not sustainable. All this aside, I think there are a lot of things we can and should take from capitalists (or take back, in some cases). This practice is one of them.
So maybe get together with friends and talk about what you think might happen. We live in a world of crisis, so I'll always recommend disaster preparedness. But there's more than that.
What do you think will happen in the next 5 years?
Assuming that happens, what actions would you take to push that towards the most positive outcome?
I'm listening to Revolutions and reminded of how much effort monarchies put in to preventing revolutions. Corporations can be even more advanced in their planning and preemption. What would it look like if we planned like that?

As @… noticed, the study on how stalkers can exploit Tile tracking tags, which I noticed this past week and included in Metacurity's long reads issue today, was published last September, after which she wrote a piece in Wired about it. Mea culpa.

Tile Tracking Tags Can Be Exploited by Tech-Savvy Stalkers, Researchers Say
A team of researchers found that, by not encrypting the data broadcast by Tile tags, users could be vulnerable to having their location information exposed to malicious actors.

Heute mal ausprobiert, wie gut die "#Brompton Basket Bag S" mit dem #EerderMetaal #SeatPostHugger XS am

Tessera Labs, which uses AI agents to automate enterprise IT migrations and ERP transformations, raised a $60M Series A led by a16z at a $320M valuation (Anna Tong/Forbes)
https://www.forbes.com/sites/annatong/2026

This 22 Year-Old Just Raised $60 Million To Automate This ‘Sneaky Big’ Enterprise Market
This 22 Year-Old Just Raised $60 Million To Automate This ‘Sneaky Big’ Enterprise Market

Ich liege zwar hustend im Bett, aber dank moderner Technik bin ich gleich bei #Breitband im #DLFKultur zum Thema #Deepfakes zu hören.
Schaltet die Radiogeräte ein, wenn Ihr welche habt!

Last month, I was in Vienna to talk about #Wikipedia and AI (and #Wikidata, #AbstractWikipedia, and the Wikidata Embedding Project). It took me some time, but I have now written down most of my talk…

#heiseshow: .de-Domain-Probleme, EU-Digitalsteuer, Commodore 64C
In der #heiseshow: Ein kurioser Ausfall bei den .de-Domains, die EU will Big Tech zur Kasse bitten und der Commodore 64C feiert ein Comeback.

#heiseshow: .de-Domain-Probleme, EU-Digitalsteuer, Commodore 64C
In der #heiseshow: Ein kurioser Ausfall bei den .de-Domains, die EU will Big Tech zur Kasse bitten und der Commodore 64C feiert ein Comeback.

I gave the Strangers in a Tangled Wilderness crew the significant challenge of trying to make me sound coherent in this interview with Inmn Neruin. I was managing some pretty significant sleep deprivation and a mild cold, but I think it turned out pretty good (despite my best efforts).
But I did talk a lot about my trauma related to some of my experience living in #rural areas, and in doing that I was definitely not as careful as I could have been to talk about that as a trauma experience rather than as reality. Some people get trapped in rural areas, but other folks live there because they find beautiful things.
Not only is #RuralOrganizing critical (Trumpism grew out of areas neglected by "the left"), but rural living can be beautiful and rewarding. I briefly mentioned growing up throwing knives. A friend of mine lived way out in the woods, and there's something special about having a playground that spans several square miles. Intertwined with the old settler colonialism, antisemitism, *phobias, and isolation, that is at the heart of a lot of my personal rural misery, there's also a joyous and feral thing that taught me a lot and, I think, helped me organize more fearlessly. That thing is both individualist and collectivist, in different ways, and I don't think it's well understood without experiencing it. There's far more nuance than I was able to offer (and I definitely could have been more careful not to play into anti-rural stereotypes).
I think I said, "no one wants to live there." People do. You do. So let me try to fix that by giving you a chance to talk about that. I also talked about how slow things move, how nothing changes, but there are also sometimes opportunities to change things in huge ways specifically because structures don't exist to stop those changes. So while I'm bumping this zine and interview, also I want to use this as an opportunity to welcome my rural comrades to help fill in the gaps:
What draws you to where you are?
Do you choose to live in a rural area vs urban, and why?
Is there any other thing I've said that you would like to correct?
What other things should folks know?
https://www.tangledwilderness.org/features/near-death

Germany-based eleQtron, which develops trapped-ion quantum computing processors using proprietary tech, raised a €57M Series A led by Schwarz Digits (Tamara Djurickovic/Tech.eu)
https://tech.eu/2026/05/05/german-deeptech-eleqtron-lands-eur57m-series-a-fundi…

German deeptech eleQtron lands €57M Series A funding
German deeptech company eleQtron has raised €57 million in a Series A funding round to accelerate the industrial scaling of its trapped-ion quantum computing technology. The investment was led by Schwarz Digits, the digital and IT arm of the Schwarz Group, with participation from the European Innovation Council Fund. Additional investors include existing backer Earlybird, alongside new participants such as Ankaa Ventures, Precitec, NRW.BANK, and IFB Hamburg. The funding package also in…

The US' February jobs report shows the tech sector's post-2022 job losses are now outpacing past downturns in 2008 and 2020 (Business Insider)
https://www.businessinsider.com/tech-jobs-getting-demolished-great-recession-dot-com-era-2026…

Tech jobs are getting demolished in ways not seen since 2008 and the dot-com bust
It's a rough time to be looking for a tech job. Economist Joseph Politano said losses in the industry outpaced those in the last two recessions.