An 1897 article in The American Electrician worried that a growing dependence on the telephone would turn us all into “transparent heaps of jelly.” But while the notion of addiction to our smartphones (the most usual suspects in the current attention crisis) is contested, numerous studies have found that compulsive phone use can lead to separation anxiety, chronic fear of missing out, and a painful thumb condition known as de Quervain’s tenosynovitis—signs worrying enough that we can’t rule out the eventual jellification of humanity.
Category: ideas
Seeing Is Believing? With AI, Not Anymore
“Why did Stalin airbrush those people out of those photographs?” he asked. “Why go to the trouble? It’s because there is something very, very powerful about the visual image. If you change the image, you change history. We’re incredibly visual beings. We rely on vision—and, historically, it’s been very reliable. And so photos and videos still have this incredible resonance. How much longer will that be true?”
How Fascists Connected Themselves To Ancient Culture
Nazi Germany and Fascist Italy both proudly and explicitly connected themselves with the ancient Romans and borrowed many of their symbols — the very name “Fascist” refers to an important Roman status marker, and the Nazi Imperial Eagle is derived from the Roman standard. Himmler’s reading of antiquity, on that train in 1924, was extreme, but it was also the natural extension of the discipline’s origins; earlier classicists had simply been more genteel, or perhaps less proactive, in their application of white supremacy to antiquity.
Alas – The Internet Is Designed To Spread Hate Faster Than Love
Social media platforms — and Facebook and Twitter are as guilty of this as Gab is — are designed so that the awful travels twice as fast as the good. And they are operating with sloppy disregard of the consequences of that awful speech, leading to disasters that they then have to clean up after.
How To Revive A Town? “Curate” It!
Curating a town as one might an art collection — or in latter days, a party or store — is not a lonely pursuit. Wealthy individuals like Mr. Resnick, well-funded nonprofits and even corporations like Walmart have begun buying deserted American main streets, hoping to reinvent them with a fresh aesthetic.
How Did Los Angeles’ Arts Institutions Survive The Great Recession?
There’s no one way to answer that question. “Skeletons of skyscrapers have risen in city’s core, while unemployment rates have fallen. Occupy is gone from downtown, but homeless encampments have taken their place. When historians look back at Los Angeles cultural landscape in the years after the Great Recession — reflecting on the lives of cultural figures like Argote and the well-being of our city’s arts institutions — they’ll find a strange mix of obstacles and successes.”
A Typo In The First Printing Of The Declaration Of Independence Has Been A Problem For Centuries
Oh. Whoops. We’ve often been reprinting it with the accidental addition of a period after “the pursuit of happiness” because the first printer deposited one there. And … that’s not what that sentence means. One typo means most of us have been “losing sight of what the Declaration of Independence is all about.”
Myths Of The Gig Economy
he gig economy has not only turned millions of Americans into contractors, but it’s given the more successful entrepreneurs the tools to grow even faster. A fast-moving startup can secure talent as it needs it, outsource more quotidian tasks like payroll, and stay lean and mean; indeed, I see entrepreneurs employ this approach through my work at EY supporting creative, successful startups. But there are lots of myths about gig work, whether full-time or part time.
Why Do Various Foods Disgust Some People And Not Others? There’s A Museum Devoted To The Question
“What’s interesting,” says Samuel West, an organizational psychologist who’s the lead curator of the Disgusting Food Museum, “is that disgust is hard-wired biologically. But you still have to learn from your surroundings what [in particular] you should find disgusting.”
Virtual Reality Promises To Give You Experiences Outside Your Experience. But Can It Cultivate Empathy?
VR researchers tell us that simulations can let us see what it’s like to experience the day-to-day indignities of racist microaggression, of becoming homeless, or even of being an animal primed for butchering. The hope is that this technologically-enabled empathy will help us to become better, kinder, more understanding people. But we should be skeptical of these claims. While VR might help us to cultivate sympathy, it fails to generate true empathy.