In the face of complicated events, bewildering new technologies, and sometimes contradictory information, the explanatory power of some occult yet totalizing narrative easily overmasters more prosaic explanations of the world. To those in thrall to such conspiracy beliefs, observable reality conceals plots that are hatched in secret by powerful people and organizations with malevolent purpose—to control, harm, or kill...
We live in a technopoly, a society in which powerful technologies come to dominate the people they are supposed to serve, and reshape us in their image. These technologies, therefore, might be called prescriptive or manipulatory. For example, social networks promise to forge connections — but they also encourage mob rule. The proper response to this situation is not...
What we haven’t pulled out yet is a black ball: a technology that invariably destroys the civilisation that invents it. That’s not because we’ve been particularly careful or wise when it comes to innovation. We’ve just been lucky. But what if there’s a black ball somewhere in the urn? If scientific and technological research continues, we’ll eventually pull it...
If computers could do literature, they could invent like Wells and Homer, taking over from sci-fi authors to engineer the next utopia-dystopia. And right now, you probably suspect that computers are on the verge of doing just so... Yet despite all this gaudy credentialing, the hoax is a complete cheat, a total scam, a fiction of the grossest kind....
The immense force of Western institutions – capitalism, democracy, Christianity – stamped itself on other parts of the globe, creating independent democratic nations committed to freedom, end of story. Or is it the end of the story? If 21st-century world trends are any indication, we might have badly overstated Westernisation’s influence and achievement. - Aeon
"The inner voice, which is also an inward-turning voice, tends to linger over negative content. What’s more, it can call our attention to processes that run more smoothly in the dark, deconstructing what should be seamless movement into a broken jumble of steps." - The New Yorker
If hygiene theater were actual theater, it would exist in the genre of catastrophic improv. Hundreds of millions of people are ad-libbing their way through a crisis in the absence of a clear script. That script could begin something like this: The best defenses against an airborne virus are masks, social distancing, and ventilation—at least until you can get...
His epiphany was this: One of the most finite resources in the world is human attention. To describe its scarcity, he latched onto what was then an obscure term, coined by a psychologist, Herbert A. Simon: “the attention economy.” - The New York Times
The internet is healing, I would say now, but we should all know better: a garbage vortex of such scale doesn’t just disappear, but drifts on, accumulating more and more trash, slowly choking everything around it. - The Drift
The philosopher Friedrich Nietzsche once described play as ‘ecoming and dissolution, building and destruction without moral implication, in eternal innocence’ – as an act to be found ‘in the world only in the play of the artist and child’. - Aeon
In Springfield, Oregon, if you see people wandering around with choose your own adventure-style art books in their hands, don't be surprised: "Three writers, an executive editor and an illustrator worked side-by-side with local businesses and organizers at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., to create the 51-page illustrated epic journey along Main Street in Springfield." - The Eugene Register-Guard
Warning people off doesn't work: "We hear a lot about inoculating people against fake news or 'prebunking' it, but new research shows that the best time to fact-check a false headline — and have subjects remember the fact-check a week later — is after the subject has already read the headline." - Nieman Lab
Philip Kennicott: "Inflammation isn’t just an actual symptom of the disease. It seems to be part of its etiology, its moral and social origins and effects. Covid makes bad things worse; it inflames things." - Washington Post
A lot of science fiction and fantasy predicts the future - so why not a well-researched movie about a pandemic? (It's worth noting that Britain's vaccine response has been one of the fastest in the world.) - Irish Times
In September the EU launched "an ambitious and historic initiative to fund innovative scientific and artistic endeavours to abate climate change and allow Europe to meet its goal of zero net carbon emissions by 2050. The Commission intends to bring the European Green Deal to life by creating ‘a collaborative design and creative space, where architects, artists, students, scientists, engineers...
