“Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data. This novel creed may be called “Dataism”. In its extreme form, proponents of the Dataist worldview perceive the entire universe as a flow of data, see organisms as little more than biochemical algorithms and believe that humanity’s cosmic vocation is to create an all-encompassing data-processing system — and then merge into it.”
Author: Douglas McLennan
Earthquake Exposes Fragility Of Italy’s Architectural Treasures
“Many experts maintain that Italy has among the world’s best anti-seismic standards already — at least on paper. But the problems in executing them are legion: money, corruption, tangled bureaucracy, shoddy construction and a lack of enforcement of national regulations at the local level.”
Man Versus The Machines – Be Not Afraid
“We are not in competition with our creations. They are the stuff we are made of. They are stuff we use to construct ourselves, together – a language, a culture, a looping feedback between things we have made but did not choose. If this is a crisis, it is one characterized not by winners and losers, but by shifts in what we believe ourselves to be.”
Are Non-Profits Limiting Themselves By Overworking Their Employees?
“There’s no doubt that nonprofits today face serious financial difficulties and constraints, but do they have no choice but to demand long, unpaid hours of their employees? Putting questions of fairness aside, is their treatment of their workers limiting their effectiveness?”
This Week In Audience: Are Middle Class Values Stifling The Arts?
This Week: Have orchestra pops concerts lost the pops thread?… A decade of experimenting with pay-as-you-will theatre in Charleston… NBC confirms a shift in how audiences want to watch the Olympics… Are middle class norms stifling the arts?… What do regular museum goers think about the art?
This Week’s AJ Highlights: That Time Nureyev And Fonteyn Got Arrested In A “Hippie Raid”
This Week: Earthquake Devastates Historic Italian Towns… Has the audience deserted blockbuster movies?… The best new beautiful library of 2016… Is it a good idea to pay young people to try culture?… When superstar dancers were arrested in a 1960s police raid.
Is This The Year That Movies Stopped Mattering In Pop Culture?
“Nowadays there’s likely something way more exciting than the latest alleged blockbuster waiting for you on your phone, whether it’s a Frank Ocean record, a cornered Charmeleon, or some dank memes. And with social media providing us real-time updates of our passions and consumption, it’s become clear that, in 2016, people are less passionate about films than ever before.”
Top Execs Quit Bronx Museum Over International Plans
“They are especially worried about the museum’s involvement with two Cuban projects: a plan to create a replica of the José Martí sculpture near Central Park and an exchange of artworks with Havana.”
A Relationship Between Your Politics And Your Personality?
“For many political psychologists, it seems abundantly clear that traits and politics go together. There’s evidence that many aspects of personality develop quite early in life and have a genetic component, but we don’t become actively political until we are older. So it’s sensible to assume that the one might have some bearing on the other. But most of the work on the subject in the past decades has consisted merely of scientists conducting surveys and observing correlations.”
Why We’re Stuck In A Morass Of Racial Euphemisms
“Some would say that black people have a right to decide what they want to be called, and that that’s all there is to it. However, that answer is incomplete, and risks people merely classifying the matter as one more example of what Steven Pinker has artfully called the “euphemism treadmill.” We can do better than that.”