Anti-Capitalism
Instead you’ll be doing so in the spirit of the Amish, who ask first whether a specific technology seems likely to serve their highest values, and only embrace it if it does
Oliver Burkeman
“aliveness is so central to meaningful human experience that there’ll always be a market for those who can cultivate it, embed it in what they create, foster it in institutions and organisations, and bring people together to experience it”
Oliver Burkeman
When cars became more fuel-efficient, we didn’t save on fuel – we just made cars bigger and drove more. This phenomenon is called the ‘Jevons Paradox’, named after economist William Stanley Jevons who observed in 1865 that more efficient coal use led to more consumption, not less.
Studies have found that when people spend more time on social-media platforms, they are more likely to buy more things and to do so impulsively—especially when they feel emotionally connected to the content they watch. This is, perhaps, one of the more insidious effects of McVulnerability: It helps encourage a self-perpetuating cycle of materialism... See more
‘In the technocracy, nothing is any longer small or simple or readily apparent to the non-technical man’, wrote Roszak. ‘Instead, the scale and intricacy of all human activities – political, economic, cultural – transcends the competence of the amateurish citizen and inexorably demands the attention of specially trained experts’. Technocrats might... See more
Theodore Roszak, who coined the term counterculture in his 1969 book The Making of a Counterculture, later defined its unifying characteristic as ‘the rebellion against certain essential elements of industrial society: the priesthood of technical expertise, the world view of mainstream science and the social dominance of the corporate community’.
This idea of progress acknowledges that as soon as we have something, however well it meets our original desires, we see its flaws. ‘Form follows failure’, in the words of civil engineering professor Henry Petroski. Dissatisfaction drives progress. ‘Since nothing is perfect’, writes Petroski, ‘and, indeed, since even our ideas of perfection are not... See more
The world of tomorrow - Works in Progress
To dispirited fans, Spotify Wrapped suddenly seems less like an honoring of personal taste and more an ingenious user-generated content farm that benefits the bottom line and brand recognition of a corporation chiefly concerned with profit margins and squashing its competition.
“Neurasthenia” was once the diagnosis used to refer to a spectrum of symptoms, from fatigue to depression to anxiety. Also called nervous exhaustion, nerve deficiency, or nerve weakness, it was a burgeoning problem when the term was popularized by neurologist George Miller Beard in 1869. He didn’t characterize it as a curable disease, but as a distress signal from a brain assailed with and overcome by the hefty demands of a fast-paced, urban life. (The condition was also called “Americanitis.”)