Human experience is now recorded on something that looks a bit like an informal version of the blockchain – the distributed public ledger whose unforgiving mathematics underpins cryptocurrencies. - The Spectator
How does such a tiny group dominate what we think of as normality? With meticulous research, Sarah Chaney traces the history of such narratives back to the year 1800, when the word “normal” was simply a mathematical term designating a line at a right angle. - The Guardian
The machine world is a binary world, and it strikes me that we have learned to apply those zeroes and ones to our thinking, intensifying our impulse to sort one another into like-me and not-like-me at what might well be, historically speaking, the worst possible moment. - The Guardian
Resisting the rule of the algorithm takes energy and creativity and courage, and the risk for our culture is that our technological skill and our cultural exhaustion are working together, defending decadence and closing off escape. - The New York Times
According to the Saudis, artificial intelligence will be central to how people live in the 500-metre-high, 200-metre-wide structure, a car-free, carbon neutral bubble that will boast near total sustainability and a temperate, regulated microclimate. - The Guardian
Public transport should be considered a human right, alongside access to health and education. It’s necessary to life in a city. “Public transport is an extremely efficient way to get people around,” she says. “Buses and trains are not only efficient for people who use them, but also people who don’t.” - Wired
If you have read one Kendi book, you have read them all. And whether one agrees or disagrees with his arguments, they are the very opposite of complex. He thinks in binaries. For Kendi, there are no ambiguities when it comes to understanding racism, no shades of grey. - New Statesman
What we haven’t figured out how to make sense of yet is the fun that many Americans act like they’re having with the national fracture. - The New Atlantis
“Our art has become exhaustively political, but it is no longer discernibly subversive,” observed the writer Greg Jackson about the literature of the Trump years, “It is what major cultural institutions, foundations, and media organizations find congenial.” - Liberties Journal
While the idea of an intermediate state after death is present in many religions – Buddhism has its bardo, Judaism its Sheol, Islam its A’raf – Purgatory stands out precisely for its ambiguity, an ambiguity rooted in the fact that there is scant scriptural evidence for its existence. - Aeon
The demand to “stay informed” creates and nurtures that feeling of helplessness. By now, it’s common knowledge that social media is exquisitely crafted to make people feel terrible, but it’s also being increasingly recognized that mainstream news media is just as bad. - 3 Quarks Daily
Why can it feel as though the entire ecosystem of content that we interact with online has been engineered to influence us in ways that we can’t quite parse, and that have only a distant relationship to our own authentic preferences? - The New Yorker
We humans are besotted by intelligence, especially our own. And yet “intelligence is not the miracle of evolution we like to think it is. - The Wall Street Journal
We need not consume drugs or get inebriated to be met on a daily basis with sights and behaviours to which the only reasonable reaction is an alternation between ‘wow!’ and ‘oh my god…!’ - 3 Quarks Daily
To fully understand a culture it’s necessary to get to know the specific patterns of life within it, and these can’t be captured by abstractions or generalisations. You might, for example, say that culture X is Christian but that doesn’t actually tell you very much about how life is lived in that culture. - 3 Quarks Daily
