Brandon Marcus
@brandonjmarc
Brandon Marcus
the principles of efficiency and speed and optimization and profitability, recurring themes here of late, increasingly dictate how we act and interact in many if not most of the social spaces we inhabit. Thoughtless automaticity, which demoralizes all parties, becomes our default mode
L. M. Sacasas • Render Unto the Machine
David Lewis's now canonical idea is that conventions form in the process of trying to solve coordination problems.
What is Culture? Part Four: Conventions
A huge problem with the modern world, if you’ll permit me, is a confusion between arts and sciences: people try to apply scientific principles to the arts, and vice versa, with the result being a giant muddle.
Against Polling
we run into problems precisely when we start treating technology as an end rather than a means to an end. This is not to say that we can’t be legitimately impressed with technical achievements on their own terms, of course, or admire the skill that makes them possible. But we do well to also judge technologies according to the greater ends they... See more
What Is To Be Done? — Fragments
Deeply typographic folk forget to think of words as primarily oral, as events, and hence as necessarily powered: for them, words tend rather to be assimilated to things, ‘out there’ on a flat surface. Such ‘things’ are not so readily associated with magic, for they are not actions, but are in a radical sense dead, though subject to dynamic... See more
Orality and Literacy by Walter J. Ong
Conventions start as coordination problem solutions but are quick to become social norms. And as everyone follows them to some degree, they create the behavioral patterns we associate with those groups.
What is Culture? Part Four: Conventions
... See moreA commodity is any resource that has what economists call "substantial fungibility," where each instance is indistinguishable from another. Each barrel of crude oil is interchangeable with every other barrel of crude oil…Once something is transformed into a commodity, it unlocks its potential to be traded on markets, to be swapped and transferred
... See moreLiving things are always to be found in places they can master, surrounded by things and situations that make them vulnerable. Order is not enough. You can't just be stable, and secure, and unchanging, because there are still vital and important new things to be learned. Nonetheless, chaos can be too much. You can't long tolerate being swamped and