culture
Content will be commoditized by AI—but content isn’t culture
From Hamish McKenzie
... See moreThis same surge in AI-led content production will simultaneously fuel a tremendous need for cultural connection: real humans in communion with one another. These relationships help us make sense of the world, and to know where to direct our attention. Their value will
The merging of personalisation and generation represents the ultimate optimisation for media production. Everybody satisfied, all of the time.
But such a simplistic optimisation overlooks the broader implications – those that differentiate entertainment from culture. They inspire a cascade of questions, such as how is human culture changed if we
... See moreJon McCormack • The cost of feeding the entertainment machine
The unabated “creative destruction” of one kind of capital after another has only further increased the wealth of a few and done nothing to emancipate the overall collective creative spirit, which has remained stagnant. Today, almost every artistic effort inevitably (perhaps unknowingly) reinscribes the values of the ruling capitalist class.
GD Dess • Cultural Dopes
How did a magical, spiritualist, mesmerized Europe ever convince itself that it was disenchanted? Josephson-Storm traces the history of the myth of disenchantment in the births of philosophy, anthropology, sociology, folklore, psychoanalysis, and religious studies. Ironically, the myth of mythless modernity formed at the very time that Britain,... See more
The Myth of Disenchantment: Magic, Modernity, and the Birth of the Human Sciences (University of Chicago Press, 2017)
Joanna Macy and Anita Barrows — ‘What a world you’ve got inside you.’ | The On Being Project
onbeing.org
We can’t address the decline in empathy without addressing the decline in attention . Empathy requires a degree of sustained focus:
When we are fragmented and distracted , we simply can’t... See more
- Paying attention to an experience someone is sharing
- Recalling experiencing a similar emotional response
- Sitting with your own and the other person’s inner state
When we are fragmented and distracted , we simply can’t... See more
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But this isn’t about phone numbers or navigation. It’s about how technology clearly changes our minds. And there is a risk that today’s siphoning of young brains into phones and laptops isn’t just happening with maps and digits, but with critical thinking and complex language.
Brian Klaas • The Death of the Student Essay—and the Future of Cognition
There’s also an almost unbearable sense of intimacy between author and reader — Céline famously said “what interests me is a direct message to the nervous system.” His total reliance on ellipses forecloses the cheap little tricks used to construct the artifice of what we are told is “good” writing: the strategic period, the melodramatic line break,... See more