Category: Technology
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once more, with feeling
Another eviscerating review of Bastani’s Fully-Automated Luxury Communism, this time at Radical Philosophy: … FALC is an improbable, unhelpful and frankly undesirable blueprint for our collective future: improbable because it glosses over the ecological reality of our desperate global predicament, unhelpful because at a time when we are heading for global ecological collapse FALC advocates…
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a quasi-military device
Loads of grimly chewy stuff in this Will Davies interview. Like this map-is-not-the-territory riff about smartphones, f’rex: What the phone promises you psychologically is not content as such, but a space on the screen that is totally obedient to you. This translates into the illusion that the world, seen through the screen, will be equally…
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nontransparent, unspiderable
Nicholas Carr on Page and Brin’s vanishing trick: They were prophets, Larry and Sergey. When, in their famous 1998 grad-school paper “The Anatomy of a Large-Scale Hypertextual Web Search Engine,” they introduced Google to the world, they warned that if the search engine were ever to leave the “academic realm” and become a business, it…
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nudge / hold / spin
Will Davies at the LRB, reviewing Justin E H Smith’s Irrationality: Away from the frontiers and mythology of Enlightenment, the meaning of ‘rationality’ (and hence ‘irrationality’) becomes difficult to pin down. You can resort to the otherworldly ideas of logic and mathematics floating free from all politics and culture. But the academic study of ‘rational…
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Nail them to Zuckerbot’s door
L M Sacasas, doing a concise post-McLuhan “nine theses” thing for the present media moment. 6: In oral societies, freedom is conformity to communal standards. In the culture of print, to be free is to choose for oneself. In digital culture, freedom is relief from the obligation to choose.