https://x.com/ripplebrain/status/2046264499049583092

Happy 420 day folks!

About 12 percent of plastic waste is burned globally, according to a landmark study based on data through 2015. Even when done in incinerators equipped with air scrubbers and filters, such burning is linked to higher rates of premature birth, congenital abnormalities including heart and neural tube defects, and may increase cancer risk for those living nearby, studies have found.

But when plastics—which a Nature study last year found can contain any of more than 16,000 different chemicals, a quarter of which may pose health concerns—are burned in low-tech furnaces lacking any pollution-reduction technology, the dangers are far greater.

That’s exactly what happens in Tropodo, a tofu production center where informal backyard factories use plastic as a fuel for making the soy-based staple.

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His parents were tofu-makers too, and when he was a boy, their factory burned rice husks. But they began using plastic in the 1980s, so when he started his own company, he did too. He later switched to wood, but when his wood supplier closed, he went back to plastic. “It’s good, and cheap,” he tells me. All Tropodo’s tofu factories burn plastic, he says, and he doesn’t see any problem with it.

Much of the plastic Gufron and factory owners like him use is waste from overseas—packaging tossed away in places such as the United States, Europe, South Korea, Japan, and Australia. He buys it from local sorters who purchase it from paper recycling companies. Plastic scrap is often mixed in with the bundles of waste paper those companies import, and they must remove it before processing the paper. Indonesian regulations limit such contamination to 2 percent of any shipment, and while the industry insists violations are rare, Daru Setyorini, the environmentalist and researcher who has accompanied me to Tropodo, says that in reality, the amount of plastic can far exceed that limit.

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An adult eating an egg like the one found in Tropodo would exceed Europe’s acceptable maximum intake of chlorinated dioxins—chemicals linked to cardiovascular disease, cancer, diabetes, and hormonal changes—by 70 times, the groups reported. The eggs also contained short-chain chlorinated paraffins and polybrominated diphenyl ethers, which are both used as flame retardants in plastic and are linked to hormonal disruption, developmental and neurological damage, and cancer.

Chickens wander everywhere in Indonesian villages, and Tropodo is far from the only place where they peck through toxic ash. Many rural areas lack garbage collection, so households there often burn their waste. The faint whiff of that smoke hangs everywhere, and I often see hens munching their way through the blackened remains of such fires.

The threat goes far beyond Indonesia, of course, to everywhere plastic is burned out in the open. In Accra, Ghana, for example, researchers testing eggs near one of the world’s largest electronic waste scrapyards, where workers burn plastic culled from discarded devices, found chlorinated dioxin levels more than three times Tropodo’s very dangerous levels.

The contemporary world-system, mediated by ubiquitous connectivity, has altered the logic of social organization. The hegemonic order that emerged after the war not only imposed an economic model but also achieved the naturalization of a liberal-capitalist superstructure. This ontological architecture uses the media industry to stifle dissent, making the formation of alternative political poles increasingly complex. However, the dynamism of the Eastern giants and the insurgency of the global peripheries are fracturing this common sense, providing vital categories for the analysis and invention of new proposals for political action.

American hegemony is not merely military or financial; it is a lust for power that seeks the total subordination of thought. By manipulating the institutions of international law, Washington attempts to reduce politics to an unreflective adherence to its doctrine. However, its own extractive frenzy generates the contradictions that are now fracturing its monolithic dominance. Studying these fissures is a fundamental task for those of us who seek a global organization based on self-determination, not on tutelage.

Europe, the cradle of the modern nation-state, faces a paradox today: after World War II, it surrendered its economic sovereignty to the dollar standard through the Marshall Plan. This placed the once imperial powers in a position of veiled subordination , forcing them to endorse decisions made by others. The European “welfare state” was built on the foundation of suppressing systemic criticism, turning the continent into a supporting actor in the global hegemonic drama controlled from across the Atlantic.

Faced with unipolar dominance, powers are emerging that do not align with Western tradition. The alliance between Russia—with its own historical depth and political landscape—and China—the Asian giant with an alternative production logic—constitutes the main threat to the continuation of US dominance. These actors not only compete in the market; they represent a complex and diverse formula that challenges Washington's political monologue, paving the way for a multicentric balance.

The periphery, historically condemned to be a supplier of raw materials and labor, is today the space of re-existence . The BRICS (Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa), in their process of expansion, are not only an economic bloc; they are the architecture of a new political juncture .

By proposing an escape route from the dictatorship of the dollar and the asymmetries of development, the BRICS enable the Global South to cease being an object of exploitation and become an agent of transformation. This articulation is the driving force behind a system that progressively seeks to alleviate the structural injustices of capitalist modernity.

While states set the formal guidelines, the emergence of subaltern voices through new mechanisms of resonance allows organized people to participate in global political struggles . The construction of popular platforms that escape the bureaucratic logic of the state is a concrete reality. A global popular agenda is under construction, seeking to influence power structures and claiming the right to be “participant” in defining our shared destiny.

The technological development of the 21st century has expanded the public sphere into a borderless digital dimension. Although corporate interests attempt to capture this space, marginalized groups find avenues for resistance in open technologies.

In this scenario, Artificial Intelligence (AI) emerges as the ultimate frontier in the struggle for meaning. Applying Samuel Robinson's Original Thought , we must approach AI not as a neutral tool of the West, but as a territory to be colonized by our own logic.

Robinson's method—standing outside the dominant tradition and listening to the periphery—is key to ensuring that these technologies are not instruments of control, but rather devices of social invention . The challenge is to wrest technology from hegemony and place it at the service of a new humanity that, recognizing its diversity, dares to think and act from its own historical and sovereign roots.

WhatsApp is testing a subscription after Meta debuted a similar subscription for Instagram earlier this year

Archived version: https://archive.is/newest/https://techcrunch.com/2026/04/20/whatsapp-is-testing-a-premium-subscription-put-it-is-mainly-cosmetic/

Cross post: https://lemmy.world/post/45816072

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China’s new device could reach vital undersea fiber optic cables deeper than its competitors’ known remote submersibles.

Impromptu is at once a transfixing audiovisual experience and a whirlwind visual history. In the short, the Spanish director María Lorenzo draws on a wide variety of animated styles and archival footage to build a tribute to ‘the forgotten parents of film’. This includes swift references to pre-cinema devices such as zoetropes and thaumatropes, film pioneers such as the Lumière brothers and Eadweard Muybridge, and visual cultures from around the world. The result feels deeply researched and yet – as the title hints at – somewhat informal, prioritising the kinetic power of moving images over a more formal exploration of their history.

Day is ruined.