Link List #100: Women surfers, Al writers, and cultural ideas of virginity - Friends of Friends / Freunde von Freunden (FvF)

Link List #100: Women surfers, Al writers, and cultural ideas of virginity

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This week, we’re reading about the Iranian Revolution (and its consequences), the work of a feminist art collective, and how our habits and desires are turned into online maps.

Links

    • 1 Big-wave surfing originated in Hawaii in the ’40s. By the late ’50s, it was synonymous with a break called Waimea Bay, on Oahu’s North Shore. It also screamed masculinity. Six decades on, the sport remains overwhelmingly male, with close to 300 men and two dozen women total, worldwide. This interactive article in The New York Timestells the stories of some of them, and how they tirelessly fight for gender equality.
    • 2 Will we one day be replaced by enigmatic AI writers? Researchers at OpenAI, (an organisation backed by Elon Musk, among others) have created GPT2, a scarily accurate text generator. OpenAI are withholding the majority of the general public for fears that it could stoke the technological development of fake news and ‘deep fakes’ in this piece by Alex Hern for The Guardian
    • 3 It’s been forty years since the Iranian Revolution. Since then, the country’s relationship with the US has been in jeopardy, women have been elected to parliament, and citizens have gained a voice in domestic and foreign affairs. This article by The New Yorker examines its aftermath, shining a light on both its failures and successes.
    • 4 Maps have become real-time documentation of daily life. These days, endless streams of data create virtual locations, mapped by our habits and desires. “Maps have the power to give a physicality to places and things that do not exist,” writes Apoorva Tadepalli in Colonising Cartography for Real Life.
    • 5 Rosana Elkhatib, Gabrielle Printz, and Virginia Black of feminist architecture collective F-architecture work as multidisciplinary practitioners to examine, disentangle and challenge spatial politics which restrict our bodies. In this interview with Pin Up, they discuss their recent multisensory project Cosmo-Clinical Interiors of Beirut, challenging cultural ideas of virginity by unpacking the medical-cosmetic industry and the construction of hymenoplasty and prosthetic hymens in Arab culture.
    • 6 Landing a job at a major tech firm is often as much about prestige as passion for students at Stanford University but 2018 was a year that was rocked by scandal in the industry. From Facebook’s Cambridge Analytica debacle to Google’s sexual misconduct investigations, the tech scandals of 2018 seem to be more shocking than any year prior—and they’ve triggered second thoughts among the Stanford students and their dream jobs. This article by The Ringer explores the reasoning behind why Stanford now must reevaluate its role in shaping the Valley’s future leaders.

Hopefully you enjoyed the reads from this week’s Link List, but if you’ve still got an internet itch to scratch, you can find more here.

Also, be sure to check out FvF Mixtapes for some tracks selected by our friends and favorite artists, and subscribe to our newsletter to stay up-to-date with FvF stories.

Text: FvF editorial team
Photography: Brian Ferry

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