Here’s Baylor University humanities professor Alan Jacobs, in a remarkable essay for The New Atlantis, referencing a variety of literary and real-world instances of the “madness of crowds” (as in the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot) to offer a demonic account of what’s happening to us in this age of digitally distributed memes and thought…
Category: Science & Technology
The Internet + 24/7 Capitalism = Apocalyptic Dystopia
Here’s a pointedly stark and palpably fierce excerpt from art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, which was published just this month: If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems…
On ditching your phone and social media to achieve your potential
From The Wall Street Journal: Chen delivered a rapturous free program with five quadruple jumps here on Thursday to win the menâs individual gold medal for the United States, avenging his devastatingly uneven performance at the Olympics four years ago in the grandest way and reigniting a conversation about whether heâs the greatest figure skater…
When Artificial Intelligence Hacks the Muse
Stephen Marche in The New Yorker: Sudowrite uses, as its base, GPT-3, the latest version of a deep-learning neural network that can auto-generate text. The organization that created GPT-3, OpenAI, was founded as a nonprofit with a mission âto advance digital intelligence in the way that is most likely to benefit humanity as a whole,…
Michio Kaku on the “terrible idea” of alien contact and the Buddhist Christianity of string theory
Two interesting excerpts from a recent Guardian interview with the famed Dr. Kaku in connection with his book The God Equation. On the prospect of meeting alien life: Soon weâll have the Webb telescope up in orbit and weâll have thousands of planets to look at, and thatâs why I think the chances are quite…
Quantum physics, cultural madness, and the Azathoth paradigm
Apparently, working from home during the current disruption and suspension of all normal activities due to the COVID-19 pandemic is leaving me too much time and mental space for reflection. Please pardon me while I ill-advisedly correlate some contents and piece together some dissociated knowledge. Bernardo Kastrup in Scientific American: [A]s Kuhn pointed out, when…
Teeming Links – August 9, 2019
Before the links, a brief screed that arose spontaneously from some well in my psyche: If you’re a writer or another type of creator, never compare your gift to that of others. Your particular gift of vision, subject matter, passion, skill level, style, approach, and the life circumstances in which these all exist and unfold…
The necessity of constructive pessimism in our dystopian world of digital illusions
Robert Kaplan, writing for The Washington Post: It is impossible to imagine Trump and his repeated big lies that go viral except in the digital-video age. It is impossible to imagine our present political polarization except in the age of the Internet, which drives people to sites of extreme views that validate their preexisting prejudices….
The man who invented the Internet didn’t foresee our Neuromancer/Black Mirror future
The following insights are excerpted from a brief but engaging NPR piece that traces the cultural arc from Vint Cerf (the “inventor of the Internet”) and his early naive optimism about this new technology, to William Gibson’s uncanny prescience in forecasting exactly where the Internet would really take us (to a corporate-controlled cyberdystopia with sharply…
You will be assimilated: Our future of tech-enhanced brains to keep up with AI
Here’s renowned neuroscientist Christopher Koch explaining in a Wall Street Journal piece that our future will be a dystopian nightmare in which humans will necessarily become ever more completely fused on a neurological level with super sophisticated computer technologies. This will, he says, be a non-negotiable requirement if we want to keep up with the…