Faine Greenwood

The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: Tower-Jumpers and Hungry Eagles

To get to drones, we needed to learn to fly first. And throughout the generations upon generations that were required to get humanity into the air, that process often involved a lot of very hands-on experimentation. Earlier in this series, I discussed the tragic fate of the French tailor Franz

The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: The Fear and Fantasy of Flying

There is something deeply rooted in our psyche that is both appalled and fascinated by the prospect of a human being flying like a bird, by this act that is both deeply unnatural and has also become, over the course of about 120 years, totally pedestrian for us jaded residents

The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: Pondering Orbs, Black Mirrors, and World-Viewing Cups

Staring into the mysterious depths of a sacred water-filled cup. Lighting a match in front of a mirror round' midnight. Pondering an orb at the top of a sweet-looking tower. These atmospheric activities all involve objects that humans have, at some point, believed could be used by certain magically-talented

The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: Death Rays, Brass Horses, and Dragon-Surprising Mirrors

There is something creepy about mirrors, an otherworldly and fascinating quality that writers and thinkers have returned to repeatedly throughout the ages. When I was about four, my grandmother, a scientifically-minded type, took me into their master bathroom and directed my attention to the mirrors on the closet, which reflected

The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: Forgotten Technologies, Towers, and Roman Shitposting

Humanity has long dreamed of being able to see everything around us. From the perspective of a bird. From the perspective of a god. From the perspective of a vast network of god-like eyes. Today, we have constructed tools, like drones and satellites and airplanes, that allow us to do

The Virtual Pet Games of My 90s Youth and AI Ethics: Some Thoughts

Back in the 1990s and early 2000s, back when I was a mere dweeby child, there existed a tween-driven online social movement against the cruel practice of abusing pets. This movement was not about the abuse of living, flesh and blood pets (although I'm sure its proponents weren&

I Answer Some Of Your Burning Drone Questions

Whenever drones pop up in the news, whenever they buzz unnervingly again into popular perception, people ask me what I think about these latest developments on social media. Most of the time, and regardless of the precipitating drone-related event in the news, they're about the same questions, revolving

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The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: Concerning Eyeballs, Spiritual Surveillance, and Odin's Ravens

In modern times, we have democratized the formerly inhuman god's eye view. We have extended to everyone the steely gaze of a god peering down upon the activities of mortals from a celestial perch, or the exalted viewpoint of an emperor regarding his holdings from the vertical fastness

We Have to Stop Using Facebook and X to Warn People About Disasters

In the early morning hours of July 4th, as the Guadalupe River reached catastrophic heights, city officials in Kerr County, Texas turned to an all-too familiar mechanism for getting the word out to area residents: Facebook. While the National Weather Service had been issuing warnings across multiple platforms about the

The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: A Drone of The Mind

We have a body. We have a soul. It is possible to separate the two. Usually, this happens when we die. But not always. Sometimes, the soul, and the ability to perceive that accompanies it, separates from our bodies for other, stranger reasons. Throughout history and across cultures, humans have,

A Brief Ode to Data Minimization

Data is real, and it can hurt you. Conversely, data cannot hurt you if you do not pluck it from the ether and rudely force it into existence in the first place. Let's talk, briefly, about data minimization. Data minimization is a term that describes what is, on

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Ukraine's Audacious Drone Attack: Some Thoughts

Ukraine took out a bunch of Russian nuclear-capable strategic bomber aircraft last weekend, and they did it with small, cheap drones. As well as with over a year of intricate and incredibly stealthy planning, which is, if you ask me, the really important part. Keeping in mind that information on

The Three Dreams You Need to Make a Drone: Preface

To build new technology, we must imagine it first. Every technological marvel that humanity has ever come up with came into being by this process of imagination, of both individual and collective musing about things we’d like to do, and the tools we might be able to build to

A World In the Grip of a Terrible Onlineness

When the pandemic began, back in those flopsweat days of March 2020, I came to a horrible realization. Due to necessary quarantines, lockdowns, travel restrictions, and general social disruption, the human race was going to be forced into a state of collective and sudden Onlineness totally unprecedented in history. Billions

I Just Want a Cute Robot Lamp That Isn't Evil

Apple's engineers have figured out how to design a robot lamp so adorable that everyone I've shown the video to says they'd die for it. By studying how to translate human expression into the movements of an outwardly-normal looking appliance, Apple's team

Coming Back to America

I'm back in the USA. I haven't been here since December 16th. I spent the last month in Sulawesi, and then spent a few more days in Jakarta and Singapore before boarding a flight back to California, where I'm staying with my parents for

Temples, Noodles, and Red Earth in Sukhothai and Si Satchanalai

I went to Thailand in March because I needed to get some work done. Bangkok is a pretty ideal place if you're looking for somewhere easy to hunker down for a while to grind away on projects, proposals, and emails. There's excellent public transportation, great and

Guide to the Gaspé Peninsula: Along the St Lawrence

As I write this, America's mad king Donald Trump continues his cruel and needless attacks on Canada, from asinine tariffs to batshit insane threats to make the country the USA's 51st state. Entirely understandably, Canadians are outraged by this act of betrayal from a formerly staunch

Taiwan: The Low-Key Pleasures of Taipei

Taipei: Week One I spent my first eight nights in Taiwan at the Riviera Hotel, a nicely renovated, mid-century built place near the Yuanshan Taipei MRT Station, in a green and pleasant neighborhood that used to be home to a lot of American GIs during the period when the US

Posting from Taiwan at the End of the World

Hi, I'm in Taiwan. It has come to my attention that the world may be ending. Well, kind of. For some of us, in a sense. I can't begin to catalog the horrors here since January 20th: a lot of people are working on that (like

Everything Happens So Much: Bluesky's L'affaire Singal + Butternut Squash Soup

We live in the era of too much news, but even by those already-low standards, there's been too much goddamned news over the last two weeks. Every time I try to sit down and write one of these, something else happens. It's kind of been like

The Death and Life of Simon's Rock

In the middle of this terrible month - a month made to shamble through, a month which must be endured - I received a far smaller piece of bad news. Simon's Rock, the weird little college for weird kids where I spent a weird year and a half,

The Great Bluesky Migration: I Answer (Some) Of Your Questions

For the last year and a half, us Bluesky users have frequently reminded one another that we are merely posters on a niche microblogging website. It's intended as a warning about hubris. A protective against the ever-present danger of poster's madness. A nerd-ass version of the

Waiting For the End of the World in Lord Nelson's Toilet

In the course of fending off my gnawing existential dread about the election, I found myself looking at Lord Horatio Nelson's toilet - hero of Trafalgar, icon of British naval power - wedged at a curious oblong angle into the constantly under-refurbishment hulk of the HMS Victory. And

Newsletter: Drones in Helene, Bad GOP Conspiracy Theories, and The Religion of Technology

It's officially fall in the Boston area, which I both enjoy on its own merits and also dread as it presages the arrival of winter. In any case, I'll be spending part of this month in the UK, where I'm traveling for a conference.