Category: ideas

Nigerian philosopher Ada Agada writes about how, building on the ideas of African thinkers such as Léopold Sédar Senghor and Kwame Nkrumah, he found his way to this synthesis of Western academic philosophy and traditional African thought.

Ironically, the digital revolution was supposed to be an equalizer. The early boosters of the Internet sprang from the counterculture of the 1960s and the New Communalist movement. Some of them, like Stewart Brand, hoped to spread the sensibilities of hippie communes throughout the wilderness of the web. Others saw the internet more broadly as an opportunity to build a society that amended the failures of the physical world. But in the last few years, the most successful tech companies have built a new economy that often accentuates the worst parts of the old world they were bent on replacing.

Whether or not Google ultimately exercises this power depends on its human leaders—and on the digital society Google is so central to building. The company is investing heavily in machine intelligence, committing itself to a highly automated future where the mechanics and, perhaps, the true insights of the quest for knowledge become difficult or impossible for humans to understand. Google is gradually becoming an extension of individual and collective thought. It will get harder to recognize where people end and Google begins. People will become both empowered by and dependent on the technology—which will be easy for anyone to access but hard for people to control.

If decorous action is calm, staid and subdued, then people who are comfortable will inevitably find decorum a lighter burden. Meanwhile, it will weigh more heavily on those who are hurting, dispossessed and justly angry. If this basic inequity is baked into the concept, why not do away with decorum altogether?

That’s right: Tea was part of more than one U.S. revolution. In California, it united disparate cities and rural areas. “There were women who refused to pay for their grocery bills if their grocer did not carry Equality Tea.”

This is a cautionary tale of lying – to oneself and to editors – and where that road leads. Also, this is a severe skewering not only of the movie The English Patient but also of the book. “Sometimes, when I met people, they’d say, ‘Wait! Aren’t you the movie girl?’ Sometimes they would say, ‘Do you like anything?’ A guy in a bar told me once that he and his friends called me ‘the movie assassin.'”

That is to say, e-sports are real sports, especially in arenas like car racing. iRacing is now “the gearhead’s answer to Fortnite and the preferred training tool of a not-insignificant number of the drivers gunning for IndyCar, nascar, and Formula One championships this fall.”

“How we feel is as important to our survival as how we think. Our species comes equipped with adaptive emotions, such as fear, rage, lust and so on: religion was (and is) the cultural system that dials these feelings and behaviours up or down. We see this clearly if we look at mainstream religion, rather than the deleterious forms of extremism. Mainstream religion reduces anxiety, stress and depression. It provides existential meaning and hope. It focuses aggression and fear against enemies. It domesticates lust, and it strengthens filial connections. Through story, it trains feelings of empathy and compassion for others. And it provides consolation for suffering.”

Good thing breakthroughs in the human condition happen outside of politics. History is the record of political failure. Progress is the march of science and technology. Just think of the past 100 years: mass communication, penicillin, refrigerators, computing, commercial air travel, cheap birth control, PCs, the internet, smartphones, gene sequencing, fracking—altogether producing more human freedom and wealth than wars or laws.