Category: ideas

One science fiction writer and futurist says we can – but a lot will need to change. “The issue isn’t technical. It has to do with the way business is being done in Silicon Valley. The problem, as most people know by now, is that tech companies want to grab a ton of private data from their customers without telling anyone why they need it. And this … is bad design for users.” – The New York Times

Fines probably seemed like a great idea at the time – an encouragement for children (and adults) to keep track of time, keep track of library books and DVDs, and go back into the library to return books and encounter yet more of a library’s offerings. Yet libraries have realized fines and overdue fees are agents of inequity: “The penalties drive away the people who stand to benefit the most from free library resources.” Scrapping fines is one part of the answer. – NPR

What happens after you admit you might have ruined the internet, or helped elect a lunatic, or undercut Western democracy? I suppose that, like with any confession, you feel relief. Nothing is worse than keeping a secret. Then, to borrow a cliché, you might take some time to work on yourself. Unburdened, perhaps, by their No Good Very Bad Election Year, the elite of Silicon Valley have discovered a new depth of self-reflection that they didn’t realized they possessed—and a new opportunity to grow their consciousness. – The Baffler

Studies have found that Nobel Prize-winning scientists are about 25 times more likely to sing, dance or act than the average scientist. They are also 17 times more likely to create visual art, 12 times more likely to write poetry and four times more likely to be a musician. – BBC

Instead, it’s about the dark abyss of the adult soul. “Adulthood, for most of us, is about acquiring the skills to feel no feelings at all. Feelings are distracting, inefficient, unoptimizable, unprofessional — childlike. They interfere with our capacity to work. In fact, some of us use work, especially if we’re ‘good’ at it, to avoid our feelings.” But of course, Mr. Rogers can short-circuit all of that. – BuzzFeed

What is real? How should one live? What government is best? Why do the good suffer and the evil prosper? Any answers can only be propositional or tentative, inviting further amplification or rebuttal. – Washington Post

Academia is an honor-culture, in which recognition—in the form of citations—serves as a kind of ersatz currency. In ancient Greek, there is a word “pleonexia,” which means “grasping after more than your share.” Plagiarism norms encourage pleonectic overreach. One can see such overreach in the fact that those with perfect job-security—famous, tenured faculty—do not seem less given to touchiness about having “their” ideas surface in the work of another, unattributed. Quite the contrary. The higher one rises, the louder the call for obeisance: kiss my ring! Stigmatizing plagiarism serves those at the top. – The Point

As you might have noticed, the use of trigger warnings has since spread beyond US universities to educational institutions around the world, and further: into theatres, festivals and even news stories. The warnings have become another battlefield in the culture wars, with many seeing them as threatening free speech and the latest sign of ‘political correctness’ gone mad. – Aeon

We are currently facing a new systemic collapse, one that has built far more swiftly but poses potent risks for all of humanity: the collapse of the information ecosystem. We see it play out every day with the viral spread of misinformation, widening news deserts and the proliferation of fake news. This collapse has much in common with the environmental collapse of the planet that we’re only now beginning to grasp, and its consequences for life as we know it are shaping up to be just as profound. – The Guardian