Category: Social Theory
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a sense of an enclosed present, a total present, severed from history
I was yesterday years old when I learned (courtesy David Higgins’ Reverse Colonization, which I may write about directly if time allows) that David Harvey—yes, that’s Lovable Marxist Granddad David Harvey™—can count among his many achievements having been a minor contributor to Mike Moorcock’s run at New Worlds, where he published a piece of fiction…
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an epistemic heat death of universal solipsism
Interesting (old?) idea from Venkatesh Rao: Divergentism is both an idea you can believe or disbelieve, and a basis for an ideological doctrine (hence the –ism) that you can subscribe to or reject. You could capture both aspects with this simple statement: Humans diverge at all levels of thought-space, from the sub-individual to species, and…
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cultural fracking / “indie sleaze”
Nothing is more eyerollingly contemptible than someone else’s nostalgia, for the very obvious reason that—d’uh—there were better things to be nostalgic about when I was young. The above, for the avoidance of doubt, is meant to be read as deeply ironic, but there’s also an element of truth to it. This has become very apparent…
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this addiction can be overcome
On the one hand, it’s nice to see the theory’n’philosophy crowd come out swinging for “disruption”: In order to resist disruption it is not enough to demonstrate that its benefits are based on shaky evidence. […] While these analyses are useful to debunk the illusion that innovation is always an improvement, they do not modify…
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ecosystems are not factories / the tyranny of scale
Just a quick one today (in case yesterday’s table-thumpin’ epic gave you the fear), and it’s a call-back supplementary to an earlier squib about the fetish for “scaling up” in, well, everything. The case in hand here is food production, and perhaps it’s the case where the argument is made most easily. Scalability as a…