Interplace Brad Weed

Hello Interactors,
Biden’s recent reflective quip got me thinking about how European colonial doctrines like the "Doctrine of Discovery" and the "civilizing mission," continue to justify the dominance over Indigenous peoples, including those in Papua New Guinea.
These lingering narratives not only influence contemporary struggles for self-determination, they also impact global politics and economic globalism. Join me as I unpack the complex interplay of decolonization, sovereignty, and the roles international actors, and their maps, play(ed) in shaping these dynamics.
Let’s go…
MAPS MARK MYTHS
Biden recently suggested his uncle was eaten by "cannibals". Reflecting on World War II war veterans, he said,
"He got shot down in New Guinea, and they never found the body because there used to be — there were a lot of cannibals, for real, in that part of New Guinea."
Military records show that his uncle’s plane crashed off the coast of New Guinea for reasons unknown and his remains were never recovered.
Papua New Guinea's (PNG) Prime Minister James Marape didn’t take kindly to Biden's remarks, stating that
"President Biden's remarks may have been a slip of the tongue; however, my country does not deserve to be labeled as such."
Marape reminded Biden that Papua New Guinea was an unwilling participant in World War II. He urged the U.S. to help locate and recover the remains of American servicemen still scattered across the country.
President Biden is a victim of depictions of "cannibals" in Papua New Guinea that are part of a deeply problematic colonial and post-colonial narrative still debated among anthropologists. These often exaggerated or fabricated historical portrayals of Indigenous peoples as "savage" or "primitive" were used to justify colonial domination and the imposition of Western control under the guise of bringing "civilization" to these societies.
During the age of exploration and colonial expansion, European explorers and colonists frequently labeled various Indigenous groups around the world as “cannibals.” These claims proliferated in PNG by early explorers, missionaries, and colonial administrators to shock audiences and underscore the perceived necessity of the "civilizing mission" — a form of expansionist propaganda.
European colonial maps like these served as vital weapons. They defined and controlled space to legitimize territorial claims and the governance of their occupants. In the late 19th century, German commercial interests led by the German New Guinea Company, expanded into the Pacific, annexing northeastern New Guinea and nearby islands as Kaiser-Wilhelmsland. In response, Britain established control over southern New Guinea, later transferring it to Australia. After World War I, Australia captured the remaining German territories, which the League of Nations mandated it to govern as the Territory of New Guinea. Following World War II, the two territories, under UN trusteeship, moved towards unification as the Independent State of Papua New Guinea in 1975.
Today, Papua New Guinea is central to Pacific geopolitics, especially with China's growing influence through efforts like the Belt and Road initiative. This is impacting regional dynamics and power relationships involving major nations like Australia, the US, and China resulting in challenges related to debt, environmental concerns, and shifts in power balances.
The Porgera gold mine, now managed by a joint venture with majority PNG stakeholders, had been halted in 2020 due to human rights and environmental violations but is resuming under new management. While the extractive industries are largely foreign-owned, the government is trying to shift the revenue balance toward local ownership and lure investors away from exploitative practices. Meanwhile, Indigenous tribes remain critical of the government's complicity in the social, environmental, and economic disruption caused by centuries of capitalism and foreign intrusion.
SUP

Hello Interactors,
The horrific acts of violence in Palestine have prompted acts of violence on university campuses around the world. This post is about one thing they have in common — maps. Maps legally define territory, the rights of those who occupy it, and the rights of those in power to silence them, displace them, or ‘invisible’ them. A pattern we also see with America’s unhoused.
Let me try to map this out…
CAMPUS CONFRONTATIONS ECHO
Citing "clear and present danger," Columbia University recently called for the New York Police to intervene. On April 18th, students had set up tents on a small patch of grass on campus — a form of protest calling for the university to divest from Israel due to the violence in Palestine. Despite the peaceful nature of the protest, the President of the school claimed their presence was menacing and that they were trespassing. Evidently, parts of campus are closed to students during certain hours. The incident resulted in the arrest of 108 students. But many returned and were joined by more upon their release.
Nearly a week passed before House Speaker Mike Johnson called on the school’s President to resign if she can’t suppress the war protests at her school. He went on to threaten federal funding for colleges that he sees are creating unsafe environments for Jewish students. Many equate opposition to the state of Israel as opposition of Jewish people.
Meanwhile, the Jewish Voice for Peace is claiming the university is making it unsafe for both Jewish and non-Jewish students in their actions. Of the 85 students suspended for protesting the actions of the Israeli state, 15 are Jewish. The Jewish Voice for Peace writes,
“Yesterday’s statement by the White House, like the administrators of Columbia University, dangerously and inaccurately presumes that all Jewish students support the Israeli government’s genocide of Palestinians. This assumption is actively harming Palestinian and Jewish students.”
Restrictions on student rights have also led to Jewish students being obstructed from observing their religious events and blocking access to their Jewish community.
Columbia University, named after Christopher Columbus and echoing his legacy of exploration and exploitation, has experienced similar conflicts before. In 1968, protests erupted over the university's plan to build a segregated gym, viewed as oppressive by Harlem residents. There was also significant discontent with Columbia's involvement with the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA), a center providing support to the U.S. Department of Defense during the Vietnam War.
Columbia’s recent protests spawned more across the country. The National Guard have been called to many campuses to sweep protesters away echoing the deadly protests at Kent State 54 years ago. Or Yale in 1986 when police extracted a student who had erected a replica structure found in South Africa’s shantytowns protesting apartheid.
One student protester said at the time,
“We find the Administrations actions highly ironic in light of the continuing efforts of the South African Government to remove the squatter committees with which our shanties expressed solidarity.” In defense of the school, a spokesman said of the protesters, “No group is permitted to have a monopoly on the space.”
No group except, perhaps, the administration.
These university confrontations are part of a larger pattern of forceful takeovers and displacement evident in various forms, including the routine 'sweeps' of homeless encampments in cities across America. These sweeps often involve the removal of homeless individuals from public or private spaces, displacing them without providing long-term solutions to homelessness. Critics argue that such actions not only fail to address the underlying issues of poverty and housing insecurity but also perpetuate a cycle of displacement and marginalization.
Similar critiques are leveled against these universities who in man

Hello Interactors,
Behind every map is intent. When it comes to making plans for a city, streets are more than mere passageways; they are the cartography of power, exacting politics and ideology for the unfolding of urbanity.
Paris is the blueprint of social order and control portrayed as a symbol of beauty and progress. I wanted to unravel the threads of intent, from communal aspirations to the heavy hand of authoritarianism — a kind of narrative map of a city renowned as much for its revolutions as for its romance.
Let’s go.
COMMON ROOTS, CONTRASTING COMMUNITIES
I’ll offer a word and you examine your emotional reaction to it. Communism. If you’re like me, you’ve been trained to have negative thoughts. Maybe even stop reading. Communism has been associated with authoritarian, repressive regimes that denied basic freedoms and human rights. Ask anyone who lived under these conditions and you can see why it’s been ideologically blackballed in America.
Now I’ll offer another word. Community. Ah, yes, good vibes. Who could possibly be against community? It’s strange how two words with common origins can differ so much by changing two letters.
The word Communism comes from Karl Marx and Friedrich Engel’s Kommunismus as early as 1847 and is derived from the French word communisme which first appeared three years earlier in 1843. This word comes from the Old French word comun meaning "common, general, free, open, public."
A group of people in common, “the common people” who are not rulers of property, clergy, or monarchy, is from the 14th century French word comunité meaning "commonness, everybody" or community.
I had the experience of checking my own reaction to the word communist while reading about how communist ideals helped a politician in Paris help his community.
The French Communist senator, Ian Brossat, lead housing policy in Paris for a decade. He said his
“guiding philosophy is that those who produce the riches of the city must have the right to live in it.”
He and the local government under Mayor Hildago are doing their best to live up to this. Over the past decade, the French Communist Party has emphasized social justice and economic equality, advocating for stronger public services, wealth redistribution, and workers' rights. They've also focused on environmental sustainability, aligning with broader movements to address climate change and social disparities.
People from all over the world are drawn to Paris for its diverse array of small shops, cafes, expansive boulevards, monuments, and museums. It exudes old-world charm complete with cobblers, tailors, jewelers, and luthiers tucked in and among various neighborhoods — some more manicured than others. It’s a dappled array of diverse color and verdant softscapes that when viewed from afar offers an impression of a picture-perfect pointillist painting.  
Paris exists as a seemingly organic and emergent unfolding of placemaking complete with public spaces and parks for the taking — by all walks of life. For many, it’s a composite of ideals that harken back to romantic images of a fashionable and stylistic ‘pick your favorite’ century in Europe making it a perennial favorite destination for tourists.
But surrounding the parks where healthy blossoms glow are stealthy property plots where wealthy funds grow. Amidst the green where healthy plants are planted longtime residents squirm as their neighbors are supplanted. Despite the city building or renovating “more than 82,000 apartments over the past three decades for families with children”, 2.4 million people are on the waiting list for affordable housing.(1)
This isn’t the first time economically disadvantaged people have been displaced from Paris. In 1853, one year after Napoleon Bonaparte’s nephew Napoleon III declared himself emperor in a successful coup d'état, he wasted no time embarking on what many believe to be the biggest ‘urban renewal’ project in histor

Hello Interactors,
We are fully into spring and that means a shift toward cartography. I’ll be exploring how abstract symbols, lines, and colors can both represent and misrepresent people, politics, and the physical environment. Maps are tools of power and persuasion, which can shape perceptions of space and reality, influence behavior, and maintain or challenge social norms and power structures.
Today’s post bridges Winter’s focus on human behavior with the maps, plans, and politics of cities. In this case, Los Angeles and their attempts at curbing rising traffic related fatalities through safer forms of transportation infrastructure…but not without a fight from some unlikely foes.
Let’s go…
CURBSIDE CASUALTIES LEAD TO ASPHALT ACTIVISM
Angelinos recently passed a controversial measure intended to save lives. It won 63 percent in favor to 37 percent opposed. Maybe it wasn’t so controversial after all. Why should helping save children from being violently killed be controversial in the first place? And why were firefighters leading the charge to kill a measure that saves lives.
Car collisions were the leading cause of death for children in Los Angeles County in 2022. Drug overdose and homicide have been in competition with ‘motor vehicle collisions’ for the top kid-killer spot over the last few years. Drowning, another preventable killer my wife is focused on eradicating, was the number three killer in 2021.
In January, the hyperlocal newsletter Crosstown reported data from the Los Angeles Police Department that 2023 was the “deadliest year on the roads in at least a decade, with 337 fatalities.”
More than half of these were pedestrians. In 2022, 160 pedestrians died from being struck by a motor vehicle. It’s been getting worse for some time.
If you’re not already depressed, this might push you over the edge. Hit and runs are also climbing.
In October of 2022, the County of Los Angeles Public Health Department published the “Leading Causes of Death and Mortality Rates (per 100,000) by Age Group” in Los Angeles County from January to June for 2019 to 2022. During these years, of those aged 0-17, 73 have been killed by motor vehicles. In 2022, it was the number one killer.
Alarmed by the trend, former Mayor Eric Garcetti formulated a “Mobility Plan 2035” in 2015 that “incorporates ‘complete streets’ principles and lays the policy foundation for how future generations of Angelenos interact with their streets.” This follows California state’s 2008 Complete Streets Act (AB 1358), which requires local jurisdictions to
“plan for a balanced, multimodal transportation network that meets the needs of all users of streets, roads, and highways, defined to include motorists, pedestrians, bicyclists, children, persons with disabilities, seniors, movers of commercial goods, and users of public transportation, in a manner that is suitable to the rural, suburban or urban context.”
The rise in traffic deaths reveals that the aspirational goals set in various levels of government often represent legal fictions—idealized plans that simplify complex issues, but don’t always lead to action. These legal frameworks, while not intentionally misleading, can result in a disconnect between policy intentions and outcomes, promoting a status quo bias due to the complexities of change, systemic inertia, and established interests — including those of firefighters.
But a group of citizen activists organized to bring action to the fiction and gain traction amidst the friction. They drew attention to the fact that although L.A. had laid out a progressive ‘complete streets’ plan, they had only executed 5% since its inception nearly a decade ago. At that rate they calculated it would take 160 years to build a minimum network of safe streets. All the while hundreds upon thousands would die while the legal fiction would continued to paint a different picture.
So, they devised Measure HLA, the Healthy Stre

Hello Interactors,
Continuing on the theme of the brain being embedded in the world in which ‘we’ interact, I explore how the brain is also embodied in a biological system with which ‘it’ interacts. The brain conjures this sense of itself inside this thing called ‘me’. How do these illusions come to be inside a tangible body?
Let’s find out…
Thank you for reading Interplace. This post is public so please do something for my brain… Share it’s thoughts with people you trust.

CONSTRUCTING BRAD
I read a passage in a book a few years ago that fundamentally changed how I think about myself. We were fully into the pandemic, and I had started walking…a lot. I would pick a green patch on Google Maps, put my earplugs in, launch a book, and walk to my little green polygon. Some journeys stretched to 15 miles roundtrip.
So, when I was browsing one of my favorite little independent bookstores, you can imagine my attraction to a book positioned to get my attention called, “In Praise of Walking”. It’s a book on the neuroscience behind walking by the experimental brain researcher at Trinity College, Shane O’Mara. I also recommend his Brain Pizza Substack.
Walking, for me (and him), is a treat. For anyone able to walk, it should be considered a treat.
I learn a lot by walking. But walking is no longer something I need to learn. I already learned how to walk. We are not born knowing how to walk, we must be taught. We are not born knowing much at all. That includes who we are.
I was born Brad. Had I popped out with internal plumbing, I learned I would be named Becky. Here is something else I learned: I was born with a body that had already learned how to pee. That’s what I apparently did in the face of the doctor who pulled me out of the womb.
I am half constructed out of the same DNA that built that womb. Though every cell that constructed that baby Brad are long gone. The body I have today is made of different cells — a result of continuous cell division and renewal processes. Something cells have they already learned to do.
I was born a unique self only in that those cells remembered how to recombine genetically out of DNA passed down for generations. My uniqueness over my life arises out of mutations — random events in the sequencing of my own DNA. Other outside events, like what was in my Mom and Dad’s blood stream just prior to conception, can also randomly cause one gene to turn on and another to turn off.  
Those random mutations, some stemming from other random events, continued as I went from being enveloped in a warm viscous fluid shielded from light to my blinding, cold, stark reality. I was so happy or angry I peed on a human urinal. Every planned or random event that happened after that continued to shape my biological makeup — including the arranging, refining, and pruning of the 86 billion neurons in my little brain.
I can’t remember any of this. I can’t even remember learning to walk. But I apparently did. Once out of the womb, the world around us continues to shape us. Like those early moments of DNA expression, some genetic expression is baked into our physical genes. But the constructions of those genes are influenced through biochemical reactions which are influenced by our environment. This can lead cells to communicate and conspire to create unique and differentiating genetic expressions. Even genetically identical twins evolve to have differentiated biology — including physical skills, health outcomes, and the development of ‘self.’
Early brain development is a particularly sensitive period to environmental influences. The brain undergoes development, with processes that move neurons from their place of origin to their final position in the brain, guided by molecular signals. The formation of synapses between neurons allows for the transmission of electrical and chemical signals across the brain, enabling learning and memory​.
Our neurons are then wrapped in long

Hello Interactors,
All the talk and evidence of AI, chips in the brain, and robotic overlords has created emotions ranging from hysteria to malaise to clinical depression. How much of this is caused or influenced by narratives spun by favored voices telling tall tales of proximal parables and are there other ways to think about our brain than just a processor?
Let’s find out…
THE MENTAL MYTHS OF SILICON AND SYNAPSES
Our brain is an energy intense organ. It consumes 20% of our energy but accounts for just 2% of our body weight. To manage this high demand for energy, the brain employs various strategies to simplify tasks and processes. One of those is to simplify how the world works. Like dividing it into discernable individual component parts.
In a world increasingly seduced by these crisp edges of in groups and out groups, there exists a tribe of techno-optimists, guardians of an old tale, who look to the brain as humanity's ultimate processor and a promise and desire for digital immortality. This romanticized notion of the “mind as computer” is facing competition as feats of AI reveal a seemingly superior capability to their own self-assuming super-intelligence. So, they want their outdated hardware upgraded. It's all positioned as cutting edge and futuristic but harks back to the clockwork dualistic and mechanistic universe of the Enlightenment.
We’ve been preached a digital gospel that suggests the warm wetware within our skulls operates like baked silicon chips, crunching data of daily existence with the cold precision of a CPU. Yet, simmering in the biochemistry that hosts these digital dreams are ripples of evidence captured and crunched by computers and displayed in the form of MRI’s, fMRI’s, PET scans, SPECT scans, NIRS, and MEG’s. These images lead some cognitive scientists, with the help of various forms of AI, to slowly dismantle the mechanistic metaphor of ‘the brain as CPU’, piece by intricate piece.
The metaphor of the brain functioning as a processor is as old as Alan Turing and the mid-20th century computational theories that birthed computer science. These ideas and experiments propagated as mass media proliferated and now serve as common conceptions of how the mind works. Other historical and cultural factors contribute to the persistence of this metaphor and perpetuated among teachers, scientists, and attention seeking tech moguls.
But it was centuries before, during the Enlightenment and the scientific revolution, that a significant shift towards rationalist, determinist, and mechanistic views of nature were put forth by figures like René Descartes and Isaac Newton. The world and its phenomena, including human beings and human thought, began to be understood in terms of mechanical laws and principles, laying the groundwork for comparing the brain to a machine.
The advancements in machinery and technology during the Industrial Revolution further reinforced the mechanistic view of life processes, including human cognition, making it easier to draw parallels between the operations of machines and the functions of the human brain. I recently wrote about Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein as a prime example from that period.
Fast forwarding a century later, to the 1970s, I remember watching the “Six Million Dollar Man” on TV as a kid. This show was based on a Martin Caidin novel called Cyborg depicting an astronaut who survives a plane crash and is brought to life by replacing body parts with robotics. The “Six Million Dollar Man” was soon joined by “The Bionic Woman” and episodes that featured the faces of human robots being ripped off to reveal a computer inside. Naturally, these two computer-powered bionic superpowers worked as secret agents in U.S. Office of…wait for it…“Scientific Intelligence.”
Source: YouTube
This was all occurring alongside emerging discoveries in artificial intelligence and cognitive science, further cementing the brain-CPU analogy. Like science f