Category: ideas

Kara Swisher: “What’s obvious is that the rules are not clear in a world in which the idea of the public square has been turned on its head. It is a truly challenging problem for democracy in the United States and for its increasingly voluble citizens who are now experiencing limits to what they can say. – The New York Times

The real risk is that companies might now try to outsource emotional labour rather than do it in-house – just like they did with ‘brain work’. The rise of management consulting a century ago was one upshot of the advent of ‘brain work’. What might the equivalent development be for emotional labour – and will it be an unalloyed good? – Aeon

Our digital beings are taking us apart. Pluralism is about holding ourselves together: various mental styles interact unpredictably within us, allowing for unpredictable contact with other thinking beings. Truthtelling B is helpless without the communication of chimerical A and the analysis of stern C. Without honest B, shapeshifting A will retreat to decadence with C, producing a digital tyranny that kills democracy and the planet. – New York Review of Books

“In this newly designated ‘human age’, our species’ impact on the oceans, the land and the atmosphere has become an inescapable feature of the Earth. This idea that humanity has forced a geological transition is capturing people’s attention not just because changes in epochs are rare. It is attracting notice because our species is gripped by the idea that we possess planetary powers.” – Aeon

There are old rules in the brain’s design that do not change: Use it or lose it. I would add, Choose it. A great deal hangs on how we work as a society to choose who we want to be—whether we choose to preserve the use of deep reading processes across every medium in our young and in ourselves as we expand our technologies. The stakes are multiple for our next generation: the capacity to discern truth; to appreciate and create beauty; and to be transported outside themselves—to encounter the thoughts and feelings of others so as to contemplate their own novel thoughts, the basis of our shared future. – Pacific Standard

“Our new engines of prediction are able to make more accurate predictions and to make predictions in domains that we used to think were impervious to them because this new technology can handle far more data, constrained by fewer human expectations about how that data fits together, with more complex rules, more complex interdependencies, and more sensitivity to starting points.” But with that benefit, we need to give up on our belief in stories and the theory of mind, not to mention our reliance on always being able to uncover knowable laws. – Medium

Camp relies on a sensibility that is deliberately not mainstream. So: “Is camp still ‘lots of fun’ when everyone’s on board, aboveboard? The ‘fugitive sensibility’ Sontag hoped to capture is now enshrined in the museum.” – The New York Times

Well, British Film Institute, you wanted to “start a conversation,” and you sure have. – BBC

The more an individual thought the issue involved playing God, the more morally unacceptable they judged it to be. – Nautilus

“We’re playing god every day. As the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes said, the natural state for human beings is a life that’s nasty, brutish, and short. We play god when we vaccinate. We play god when we give women pain relief during labor. The challenge is to decide how to change the course of nature, not whether to change it. Our whole life is entirely unnatural.” – Nautilus