culture

mostly of the internet kind

The San Francisco Bay Area has a long history as the playground of consciousness. For decades, many of its resident technologists have been both habitually curious about — and determined to master — the inside of their brains. This sort of cerebral hedonism is hardly visible to outsiders, in the way that visitors to Miami might be dazzled by the sp... See more

Manufacturing Bliss

“Cerebral hedonism”

Philosophy is bad because you think thoughts that you think are your own thoughts, and you think you’re in charge of those thoughts, and you’re figuring things out.

But the reality is, our thoughts are almost entirely drawn from the soup in our culture of thoughts that people have had before. And all we’re doing is repeating them. We think we’re thi... See more

David Chapman • Myth, adult developmental stages, and entrepreneurship

I’ve said this many times before. Most people don’t actually know what thinking is. Instead they have thoughts. Thoughts occur to them. What David adds here is the perspective of where thoughts come from, which is basically our environment, our culture, all of our conditioning. Everything is a remix, as Visa likes to say. What does recognizing this do for us?

The meaning of OXI we should fight for is the belief in politics itself. OXI is the belief that we can throw off the demands of a supposedly ‘impartial’ economy that serves only the few, that we can reject the fallacy that ‘economic necessity’ demands something we consider socially unacceptable, and instead begin to make decisions about our own col... See more

k-punk • Democracy is Joy

Anywhere from 90 percent to 97 percent of vanilla-flavored products are made with vanillin , a substance found in small quantities in natural vanilla but made synthetically for processed commercial foods. Real vanilla contains hundreds of different components that contribute to its nuanced taste and aroma. It is as different from vanillin as sugar ... See more

Amanda Fortini • How Vanilla Became Shorthand for Bland

On the richness and complexity of real vanilla. Vanilla is not vanilla.

How many of us actually identify the public good with our own good? For most of us, the outside world exists for our income and our enjoyment. We have a using-based relationship with the world, not a caring one. Again, this is not entirely our fault.

Omar F. Najjarine • Why modern life feels meaningless

Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words. So many of their phrases are still used in common speech. They named all sorts of things for us. And by using those names, we expand what we can understand about the world.

Henry Oliver • Notes Towards an Applied Literature

What gives multinational corporations the right to pollute the air we breathe, drain our groundwater and exhaust our planet’s dwindling resources – and deprives us of the right to stop them? One powerful idea: private property. Because the rich own things, and the poor do not, it is legal for the rich to destroy Earth and illegal for the poor to st... See more

Sally Rooney • Sally Rooney: When are we going to have the courage to stop the climate crisis?

I ultimately think that the people who are histrionic about safety in San Francisco—they just hate cities! They hate the fact that they have to interact with other people, people who are visibly poorer than them and different from them, when they go out into the world. They hate the fact that homeless people exist and that they have to see them, in... See more

Celine Nguyen • In Defense of San Francisco

Historically, work looked very different. In the 1700s, approximately 90% of Americans were self-employed or engaged in family-owned trades or agriculture. Even by the early to mid-1800s, around 80-85% were independent artisans or farmers, continuing the tradition of self-employment. This dynamic began to shift dramatically with industrialization, ... See more