Category: ideas

What might I want history to do to me? I might want history to reduce my historical antagonist—and increase me. I might ask it to urgently remind me why I’m moving forward, away from history. Or speak to me always of our intimate relation, of the ties that bind—and indelibly link—my history and me. I could want history to tell me that my future is tied to my past, whether I want it to be or not. Or ask it to promise me that my future will be revenge upon my past. Or warn me that the past is not erased by this revenge. Or suggest to me that brutal oppression implicates the oppressors, who are in turn brutalized by their own acts of oppression. Or argue that an oppressor can believe herself to be an oppressor only within a system in which she herself has been oppressed. – New York Review of Books

Will an AI system ever deliver a translation of a literary text, say, that is not only accurate but also sensitive to meaning, unless it has a genuine understanding of what the story is about? But what would such understanding amount to? AI researchers like to talk about “human-level” intelligence… Yet we don’t even know what that means unless the system is conscious of itself; certainly it won’t be attained simply by making systems excel at the imitation game. – Prospect

Viktor Frankl argued that literature, art, religion and all the other cultural phenomena that place meaning at their core are things-unto-themselves, and furthermore are the very basis for how we find purpose. In private practice, Frankl developed a methodology he called ‘logotherapy’ – from logos, Greek for ‘reason’ – describing it as defined by the fact that ‘this striving to find a meaning in one’s life is the primary motivational force in man’. He believed that there was much that humanity can live without, but if we’re devoid of a sense of purpose and meaning then we ensure our eventual demise. – Aeon

Cultural institutions are a kind of technology – a social technology. Just as physical technologies – agriculture, the wheel or computers – are tools for transforming matter, energy or information in pursuit of our goals, social technologies are tools for organising people in pursuit of our goals. While we are fascinated and sometimes frightened by the pace of evolution of physical technologies, we experience the evolution of social technologies differently. – Aeon

Over-tourism is damaging popular cities and cultural attractions. Instagram is sending mobs to previously bucolic places. Then there’s the carbon cost of all that air travel, which is killing the planet. The best thing you can do for the planet? Maybe stay home! – Post Alley

What has happened in journalism in the twenty-first century is a version, perhaps an extreme one, of what has happened in many fields. A blind faith that market forces and new technologies would always produce a better society has resulted in more inequality, the heedless dismantling of existing arrangements that had real value, and a heightened gap in influence, prosperity, and happiness between the dominant cities and the provinces. – New York Review of Books

Ross Douthat: “What if the feeling of acceleration is an illusion, conjured by our expectations of perpetual progress and exaggerated by the distorting filter of the internet? What if we — or at least we in the developed world, in America and Europe and the Pacific Rim — really inhabit an era in which repetition is more the norm than invention; in which stalemate rather than revolution stamps our politics; in which sclerosis afflicts public institutions and private life alike; in which new developments in science, new exploratory projects, consistently underdeliver?” – The New York Times

Given that psychological pain is so ubiquitous, we should focus less on what might make us happy, and more on achieving a sense of meaning, regardless of how we’re feeling. – Aeon

Nothing exemplifies the promises and perils of self-actualised work better than the cultural conversations around ‘do what you love’. The injunction to ‘do what you love’ has had no shortage of critics, who point out its classist nature, advocate for a clearer delineation between work and life, and remind us that burnout might just be the flipside of self-actualised work. Not all agree that work should be a calling or that we should devote ourselves wholly to work. – Aeon