Category: Social Theory
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preludes to enantiodromia
I’m seeing enough of them, now, and discussing the concept with enough people online and off, that I think it’s time to start clipping examples of people pointing at harbingers of enantiodromia—the sudden inversion of a paradigm into its complete opposite. Here’s yer man Dougald Hine—a far better-known and more widely read Brit-who-fled-to-Sweden—in a longer…
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in the process of throwing it away for something we know is worse
If—as seems to be the case—I am to join the ranks of middle-aged men yelling at clouds, I guess I can bear it if Adam Kotsko is in the vanguard: Print was a perfected technology, an unsurpassable way of sharing information and ideas and stories — and we are all in the process of throwing…
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a mixture of Vatican clergy and the Wizard of Oz: on hype, strategy, and postmodernity
Don’t tell my mother I said this*, but as time goes by I’ve really come to appreciate the value of paying attention to the experience of old hands. Exhibit A comes with what I will gladly concede is a hefty slice of self-aggrandisement. Rodney Brooks has been working with robots and autonomous vehicles for almost…
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our experience as slaves to the everything machine can be changed
Lots of chewy goodies in this thoughtful long thing from Christopher Butler. I need to sit with it for longer, perhaps, before I can get the best of it—it is very much a designer’s view of things, and while Some Of My Best Friends Are DesignersTM, it’s a perspective which, in order to see properly…
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solar matter stomache-ache
So it seems I got a rise out of Matt Webb with my response to his “eating the sun” thing a week or so back. This was not exactly my intention—I had little expectation he’d actually read the thing, tbh—but I’m kinda pleased, for reasons which I’m going to try to explain here, as much…