? Is technology or culture the problem?
As the French philosopher Gilles Deleuze said, machines “express those social forms capable of producing them and making use of them.”59 Looking at the ways we interact with our smartphones reveals the social relationships and power structures that undergird modern society.
Nicole Aschoff • The Smartphone Society
Of course, things have not quite worked out this way. As the late nineteenth-century French sociologist Émile Durkheim perceived, the flipside of free-floating autonomy is anomie — a society without any authoritative norms. Pried from closed communities, many people suffer from pathologies of isolation and purposelessness. Family breakdown, drug
... See morenoemamag.com • Surveillance Capitalism vs. The Surveillance State - NOEMA
(Jono from Sketchplanations).
It took him forty years to formulate, but in the 1960s, Richardson finally found a model for this uncertainty; a paradox that neatly summarises the existential problem of computational thinking. While working on the ‘Statistics of Deadly Quarrels’, an early attempt at the scientific analysis of conflict, he set out to find a correlation between the
... See moreJames Bridle • New Dark Age
Never before in history have so many people been under the gaze of so many strangers. Humans evolved in small groups, defined by kinship: those we knew, knew us. And our imaginative capabilities allowed us to know strangers—kings and queens, heroes of legend, gods above—all manner of at least partly mythic personalities to whom we may have felt as... See more
Chris Hayes • On the Internet, We’re Always Famous
Paul Bogard’s 2013 The End of Night: Searching for Natural Darkness in an Age of Artificial Light is probably about as a good a survey of the consequences of light pollution as you’re likely to find. Bogard traces the rise of the regime of artificial lighting and its less than benign consequences for both humans and non-humans, from the
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