Category: ideas

If one looks at history, the answer seems obvious: What fences have very often indicated is not simply what is mine and what is yours, but, more subtly, who I am versus who you are. This tendency is based on the human inclination to define one’s identity in contrast to someone cast as a different, an untrustworthy Other best kept at a distance.

That’s what a pair of researchers found when studying firefighters in Colorado and undergraduates in London. “When you experience stressful events, whether personal (waiting for a medical diagnosis) or public (political turmoil), a physiological change is triggered that can cause you to take in any sort of warning and become fixated on what might go wrong.”

“My work consists entirely of creating the conditions for genius to flow. I am not in possession of it — it resides in that flow of output, which everyone participates in. “Genius” is the oxygen that those in a shared space breathe in and are transformed by; it allows them to reach their full potential. In this way, “genius” returns to its original Latin meaning of an “attendant spirit.”

The act of gesturing seems to be universal (every known human group does it), and we know that there are certain gestures that are culture-specific. (There are places where you definitely shouldn’t make the thumb-and-forefinger “okay” sign.) “What people produce much more often are gestures for ‘yes’ and ‘no’; points to people, places and things; gestures that sketch objects, actions and represent abstract ideas through visual metaphors. These are the real workhorses of gestural expression. And, as it turns out, a case can be made that these workhorses are broadly similar the world over.”

“Taken as a whole, the findings indicate that bullshitting is more than just a psychological phenomenon rooted in our own delusions – it’s socially constructed.”

China’s booming start-up scene has become as much a feature of its top-tier cities as traffic and smog. It used to be that college graduates applied for jobs at banks or state-owned enterprises, the proverbial “iron rice bowl” that their parents sought for them after the chaos of the Cultural Revolution. But many of those jobs were unsatisfying: In a 2012 Gallup survey, 94 percent of Chinese respondents said they were unengaged with their jobs. Now, with public and private funding flowing into Chinese start-ups, entrepreneurship has become an appealing alternative for a generation disillusioned with the conveyor-belt career paths of their forebears.

‘Who are you to tell me what to believe?’ replies the zealot. It is a misguided challenge: it implies that certifying one’s beliefs is a matter of someone’s authority. It ignores the role of reality. Believing has what philosophers call a ‘mind-to-world direction of fit’. Our beliefs are intended to reflect the real world – and it is on this point that beliefs can go haywire. There are irresponsible beliefs; more precisely, there are beliefs that are acquired and retained in an irresponsible way.

Technology is no longer a novelty—it’s a given. And artists, who might have in the past approached technological advancement with a hint of idealistic curiosity, now question the impact it’s had on the way humans interact with one another. This tension is ripe territory for artists, who are often more interested in creating provocations around technology than they are in building practical applications.