Cyd Harrell, devout civic technologist, joins us to discuss Jorge Luis Borges’s “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius.” We talk about tungsten cubes, techno cults, and our guesses about the “horrifying or banal” truth revealed by the story.

Show notes:

• Buy Cyd’s book! A Civic Technologist’s Practice Guide (Bookshop.org, Amazon)
• “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” on Wikipedia
• “Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius” PDF
• Discussion of Tlön, Uqbar, Orbis Tertius on Very Bad Wizards
• Julius Pringles
• Karl the fog
• Rosicrucianism
• Crisis Text Line and Loris.ai Controversy
• Picigin: an amateur sport from Split, Croatia played in shoals or other shallow water, usually consisting of cooperating players keeping a small ball from falling in the water.
• “Pets” by Porno for Pyros
• Reality-based community
• Great Data Products blog post - blog post based on the talk I gave in October in which I warn against open data dogmas.
• The duodecimal system
• A painting called Pan Arbol referencing the duodecimal system by Borges’s friend Xul Solar, who is mentioned in Andrew Hurley’s translation of the story as a translator of Tlön’s language.
• When Republicans Became ‘Red’ and Democrats Became ‘Blue’