Brian Sholis
@briansholis
Brian Sholis
- "the concrete practices of the tech industry now structure identity and individuality in ways that support its own hegemony. While it presents endless avenues for expression, it sees us as wholly reducible to market logic, where we are real to the degree that our consumption habits are rational. This vision of selfhood promotes uniformity and... See more
Emma Stamm • Who Can It Be Now — Real Life
- “… we never know as much about our own desires as we think we do. One of the great gifts and challenges of desire is that it illuminates who we are in unexpected ways.”
Garth Greenwell • Just a moment...
- “Textual interfaces make automation trivial, and automation tools much easier to build.”
Linus Lee • Text as an interface | thesephist.com
phone addiction and
- “On the elegant analog clock, meanwhile, time swells and recedes, like waves and seasons and life. The hands evoke the rotation of the earth, the movements of celestial objects, the cosmos.”
New York Times • How Analog Clocks Can Give Us More by Giving Us Less (Published 2020)
* “When you get on a plane and travel you go 15 heartbeats per mile. That is, in the time it takes to travel a mile in flight your heart beats 15 times. On a train your heart might beat 250 times per mile. And we count this up and we make sense of it. We’re constantly switching accelerations; we’re jumping between time frames. That’s what we’re... See more
Paul Ford • 10 Timeframes
Existentialism and
Sometimes you find ideas for the future in stories from the past. This book is the best survey I know of covering adult education, which is pretty much what all education was in many of the decades it covers. The description:
Stanford University Press • Stanford University Press
2019 profile of Wendell Berry by Amanda Petrusich.
Archive-friendly link: https://archive.is/wMaf1
WB: “The thing that worries me very much is how much language we’re using now that is so abstract as to require no thought at all. I mean very important words. Justice, for instance. I had a list, I think, of eleven kinds of justice. Restorative justice, climate justice, economic justice, social justice, and so on. The historian John Lukacs, whose work I greatly respect, said that “the indiscriminate pursuit of justice . . . may lay the world to waste.” And he invoked modern war, which kills indiscriminately for the sake of some “justice.” He thought the pursuit of truth, small “t,” much safer. I want to remember—and this comes to me from my dad, to some extent—that our system of justice requires a finding of truth, and it labors to see that justice is never done by one person.”
WB: “Once you accept that something or somebody is exploitable, there’s another limitlessness. Exploitation leads, with perfect logic, to exhaustion. And our ways of land use exploit both land and people.”
WB: “You must either decide this is worth working at, or just leave it undone. Marriage is not perfect agreement. But you’ve accepted this other person into your mind. I work alone, but always with her presence in my mind. And she is somebody I want to impress. I’m going to write this with the hope that it’ll help her to love me. I feel the stakes are pretty high. I’m in a conversation with her that hasn’t ended yet.”
WB; “Our dominant practice now is to solve problems with other problems.”
WB: “You can’t think about the issues we’re talking about without finally having to talk about mystery. You’ll finally have to talk about the commitment that doesn’t see any end. That’s a life that you are not going to be able to prescribe, that finally you’re not in charge of.”