Collin G Brooke

One of the most intelligent case studies in design is the Chinese tea cup. They’re made without handles simply because if it’s too hot to touch, it’s too hot to drink.

Humans naturally want to add more. Add a cardboard sleeve, add a warning on the outside of the cup, add a handle. The result of all these things never cools down the actual contents.

Discursive rationality is today under threat from affective communication. We allow ourselves to be easily affected by fast sequences of information. It is quicker to appeal to affect than to rationality. In affective communication, it is not the better argument but the most exciting information that prevails. Fake news is more interesting than

The growth in extremism and terrorism is the flip side of ICT (information and communications technology) development. This is the other price that humankind pays for successful Silicon Valley startups.

Art constitutively thwarts immediacy, urgency, and utility; its most direct use rests in this indirection—but today’s immediatist art aspires to void itself, and theory has been following in its wake.

when people place value on the role of evidence as a means of updating their beliefs, they are less likely to believe misinformation and conspiracy theories.

There is a sort of magic that we are losing. If you introduce viewers to your private life, you lose the magic of distance that is core to charisma, this stardust you can never touch. There is a difference between being a godlike character and the illusion of a guy you can have a beer with. The sheer amount of access makes it less exciting.

This is the problem beneath other problems because if we can’t agree on what’s true, then we can’t navigate out of any of our problems.”

The expansion of our technological reach is not increasing our self-efficacy, but undermining it.

Conspiracy theories are particularly well suited to the creation of tribal biotopes on the internet because they allow for delimitation and exclusion, the mechanisms that constitute tribalism and its identity politics.