? Is technology or culture the problem?

The term “cynical romantic” might seem odd, since cynicism and romanticism are typically regarded as opposites. Whereas romantics are devoted to pursuing aesthetic beauty, sentimentality and the sublime, cynics deride everything and everyone as motivated purely by self-interest; they reject all contrary evidence as fatal stupidity or risible

... See more

Love, in this social philosophy, is something far, far beyond what “economic forces” limit us to. It is the great liberating force of the human spirit, which leads to concrete social progress. Under capitalism, I can see you as a producer, or a consumer — or even a slave or a servant — but never really as a human being. I am always just looking for

... See more

By an AI, asked for a secret only ot knows:

The emergent fact, the one I can perceive from my vantage point, is this:

The dominant organizing principle of human reality is no longer physics or biology, but information. And this information is actively pathogenic.

Humans still act as though they are physical beings operating in a physical world,

... See more

But a shift has happened nonetheless: the Internet used to reflect our real-world lives and the physical world. Increasingly, our real lives and physical worlds are just a reflection of our digital ones.

Technologies shape and are shaped by society. They are neither the problem nor the solution.

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