Now that the cultural resistance has been broken down, ‘Zoom surgery’ is likely to remain a feature of modern medicine. But during Covid-19 lockdowns, with travel restricted, doctors have not been able to work in other countries or share expertise with colleagues face to face. As a result, some of the cultural resistance among surgeons towards telemedicine has started to melt away. In 2020, there were ninefold and fivefold increases respectively in the number of users and procedures on Proximie’s platform. Read more (Financial Times)
Category Archives: ethics
The Promise and the Peril of Virtual Health Care
During the coronavirus pandemic, telemedicine looks like the future of health care. Is it a future that we want? Read more (New Yorker)
What Makes a Brand Sustainable Anyways?
Local, fair trade, carbon-neutral . . . What makes a brand ethical and sustainable anyways? While everyone has slightly different criteria, there are some universal standards these brands must uphold, and there are some that do so under relatively intense consumer scrutiny. Read more (Thread Magazine/Cornell)
Chanel Unveils Global Culture Fund To Support Pioneering Artists
Chanel has launched the Chanel Culture Fund, a global programme of initiatives and partnerships that aims to support innovators across the arts in advancing new ideas and greater representation in culture and society.
The fund seeks to champion equality of voice and give visibility to global game-changers at a time when the arts provide a vital source of inspiration and perspectives on the way we view the world. It builds on Chanel’s 100-year heritage of arts patronage, in the spirit of Gabrielle Chanel’s role as a patron and convener of the arts, reaffirming the house’s commitment to the freedom of creation and human potential. Read more (Tatler)
The Responsible Object: A History of Design Ideology for the Future
Within the design discipline, calls for sustainability and social responsibility have become some of the most common rallying cries of the past decade, generating countless new products, materials and technologies―all designed to change the course of our future. Adjectives like “sustainable,” “green” and “eco” describe this new wave of socially committed design. But though today’s conditions are urgent and particular, the ideologies behind these new products are often not totally new, but rather a part of design history. Contemporary sustainable design is just the newest chapter of a story that stretches back throughout the previous centuries. The Responsible Object presents a selected history of socially committed design strategies within the Western design tradition of roughly the last 150 years, from William Morris to Victor Papanek, and from VKhUTEMAS to FabLab. It includes about 20 interstitial mini-posters with slogans from the text, printed on different colored papers. Learn more (Amazon.com)
China’s TikTok Is Banning Users Who Brag About Their Wealth
The purported aim of the ban is to promote “rational spending” and “a civilized lifestyle,” as well as build a healthier community on Douyin, according to the notice. A spokesperson for the platform told media that flaunting wealth “pollutes the social atmosphere (on Douyin) and is particularly harmful for the mental and physical well-being of minors.”
The recently announced cleanup has actually been underway for weeks. Since the start of this year, close to 4,000 accounts that shared content related to the six now-forbidden categories have been given the boot, the statement said. Read more (Sixth Tone)
Toxic Beauty
The Secret Life of Groceries (New School Talk)
The Age of Surveillance Capitalism
We rushed to the internet expecting empowerment, the democratization of knowledge, and help with real problems, but surveillance capitalism really was just too lucrative to resist. This economic logic has now spread beyond the tech companies to new surveillance–based ecosystems in virtually every economic sector, from insurance to automobiles to health, education, finance, to every product described as “smart” and every service described as “personalized.” Read more (Harvard Gazette)
“Luxury Is That Which You Can Repair”—Why Renewable Fashion’s Time Has Come
The rise of conspicuous non-consumption has been a long time coming. Over the last decade or so, we have witnessed a slow and sometimes painful pivot as fashion at first ignored, then loftily entertained, and finally fell head-over-heels for the concept of “sustainability.” Those who were once dismissed as sackcloth-wearing, soy-munching, Gaia-loving outliers—ideology driven pioneers such as before-her-time Katharine Hamnett, perfectly-timed Stella McCartney, and of-his-time Christopher Raeburn—have proven to be the Cassandras who saw first what most of fashion was too busy making new stuff to realize: As a marker of desirability, being environmentally virtuous has transitioned from niche consideration to central parameter of desire. Read more (Vogue)
