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Like an air control system mistaking a flock of birds for a fleet of bombers, software is unable to distinguish between its model of the world and rea

Culture is itself a code/space. The danger of this emphasis on the coproduction of physical and cultural space by computation is that it in turn occlu

Within the parameters of modern science, subjective experience has come to seem entirely unreal—a private drama of sensations, thoughts, and beliefs t

We interact with these constructs of other people that make our own minds instead of interacting with the person as they really exist. We are machines

We are all engaged in two projects: living life, and telling stories about it. Our lives as lived are often chaotic, jumbled, aimless. They suggest no

Since then, researchers have expanded on this idea, discovering a virtually infinite number of internalized patterns that govern our thoughts, actions

For Freire, education is fundamentally about freedom, which is “not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rathe

Yet in truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-heart

Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, an

all serious intellectual work happens on the page, and we shouldn’t pretend otherwise. If you want to contribute to the world of ideas, if you want to

The arguments for breaking up concentrations of property were at once pragmatic and political. For the new republic to remain free, land, wealth, and

My point, my very unoriginal point, is that you will do your own thinking and your own political outlook a great favor by seeing America as a power st

To win, we must redraw the lines of political conflict along divisions of class. In practice, this means that the people you might currently think of

“Natural taste is not a theoretical knowledge,” Montesquieu continued, “it’s a quick and exquisite application of rules which we do not even know.”

Kant’s earlier work on reason had framed it as a solitary, individual activity. His definition of aesthetic judgment, however, was different. To judge

For Andreessen, technology and markets are inextricable from each other. The market is itself a kind of technology, a “discovery machine,” an “explora

Many of them believe not only in a hierarchy within humanity, with some people better than others, but that machines are or soon will be superior to p

By conflating approximation with simulation, the high priests of computational thinking replace the world with flawed models of itself; and in doing s

Humans are a cultural species. Our brains and psychology are specialized for acquiring, storing, and organizing information gleaned from the minds and

Individuals and communities preferentially attend to and learn from more successful or prestigious groups. This causes social norms and beliefs to dif

“It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of

Henrich argues that humans have evolved “brains to allow us to most effectively learn the ideas, beliefs, values, motivations, and practices we’ll nee

Just as global telecommunications have collapsed time and space, computation conflates past and future. That which is gathered as data is modelled as

Faith in the machine is a prerequisite for its employment, and this backs up other cognitive biases that see automated responses as inherently more tr

Our thirst for data, like our thirst for oil, is historically imperialist and colonialist, and tightly tied to capitalist networks of exploitation. Th

Culture is itself a code/space. The danger of this emphasis on the coproduction of physical and cultural space by computation is that it in turn occlu

Just as global telecommunications have collapsed time and space, computation conflates past and future. That which is gathered as data is modelled as

Our thirst for data, like our thirst for oil, is historically imperialist and colonialist, and tightly tied to capitalist networks of exploitation. Th

At the same time the software systems that govern our lives are also built on probabilities, not particularities: The recommendation algorithm serving

But to love is to be drawn out of our self-centered patterns toward some positive object that is other than oneself. Love thus has the same outward-pu

What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practice

What’s more, the capacity to pay attention is the result of several processes in the brain. These include sustained attention, the ability to stay eng

The attention economy takes advantage of what philosopher Jennifer Nagel calls “our natural attraction to knowledge gain.” It is natural because this

Culture is shaped by the technology we are surrounded by, and the marketplace of ideas depends on the structure of the communications and culture indu

Our digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.

In medieval communities… Fama was the mark of authority and reliability that attaches to a piece of information, new, gossip, and to the teller, to

The attention economy takes advantage of what philosopher Jennifer Nagel calls “our natural attraction to knowledge gain.” It is natural because this

For all the people on these platforms, every interaction, every moment of passive consumption, is mediated by algorithmic recommendations. Even if som

But what we should be seeing is the network itself, in all of its complexity. The network is only the latest, but certainly the most advanced, civilis

Our thirst for data, like our thirst for oil, is historically imperialist and colonialist, and tightly tied to capitalist networks of exploitation. Th

In Humby’s original formulation, data resembled oil because ‘it’s valuable, but if unrefined it cannot really be used. It has to be changed into gas,

For the most part, whether we believe something depends on whether and how we trust the source. Whether and how we trust the source often has more to

The temptation of the age of data, again, is to believe that any coherent narrative path that can be charted through the data has a claim to truth.

Conspiracies literalise the horror we feel lurking unspoken in the world.

The term ‘conspiracy theory’ has more to do with the relation of people to power, than that of people to truth.

McLuhan used “media” broadly, to include any tools, technologies, or interfaces that mediate our interactions with environments. According to him, “Al

The telegraph, radio, and TV formed a clear progression: they extended the central nervous system into the world through wires, each step bringing com

“People will pay for the convenience of not poring through internet sludge all day and having someone clarify what they need to know.” Exactly! No one

And so we find ourselves today connected to vast repositories of knowledge, and yet we have not learned to think. In fact, the opposite is true: that

Equal and independent people will satisfy their own desires with no obligation to others outside their narrow circle. The chance to be anything or any

“For only through the union can the wage-earner participate in the control of industry,” Lippmann wrote, “and only through the union can he obtain the

antagonistic groups begin to lose their mutual hostility and acquire trust when they have to work together, as long as they’re engaged in a specific p

The central question of democracy is the degree to which power in all its forms is shared equally among members of a political community.

This paradigm—Israel as the perpetual target of aggression, never its author—frames the Jewish establishment’s rendition of Israeli history.

It’s also our story about Israel’s present. The plot goes like this. We have finally achieved what every other people takes for granted: a state of ou

The problem with our communal story is not that it acknowledges the crimes we have suffered. The problem is that it ignores the crimes we commit.

he had created the conditions within which a network of conversations could move fluidly across the boundary between the online and off-line worlds. B

Real distribution answers a harder set of questions. Which specific people need to encounter a piece of content, in what context they will trust it, t

Publications, whether massive or tiny, are platforms now. Audiences will choose a small number and become very loyal to them. Thus news publications w

living well entails remembering. To forget certain truths is to be at a loss as to who we are and what we ought to be about, to enter the state of let

Some critics have argued that emergentism is just an updated version of vitalism—the ancient notion that the world is animated by a life force or ener

The German philosopher Hans Blumenberg argued that myth first emerged to help people cope with what he called “the absolutism of reality” — the overwh

According to Tiger Dingsun and Libby Marrs, the authors of a series of essays entitled The Lore Zone, “lore is history, myth and knowledge on a smalle

We viewed the information age as an age of reason, governed by the scientist and the mathematician. We’re now coming to realize it’s altogether differ

The discipline of information literacy has always pushed back against this. Its foundational premise is that access to information should serve the pe

Passive reception, letting a feed decide what we see next and for how long, is a fundamentally different cognitive experience than active retrieval, g

who benefits from my not knowing? That question changes what we look at. Instead of asking whether a claim sounds “right”, we ask who’s telling us and