Our Times
by Andreas Vlach · updated 4mo ago
Our Times
by Andreas Vlach · updated 4mo ago
Andreas Vlach added 4mo ago
Trauma is a far subtler concept than many of us realise. It isn't just a word for something extremely stressful. It doesn't always come from short, sharp shocks like car accidents, terrorist attacks, or firefights. And, trauma isn't the same thing as post-traumatic stress disorder (PTSD). What trauma is about is events and their effect on the mind.
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Andreas Vlach added 5mo ago
In a recent newsletter, “The Shopping Cure,” Anne Helen Petersen explored the compulsion to buy and accumulate stuff that’s been fostered by technologies of frictionless consumption. Every conceivable activity or hobby one sets out to enjoy becomes an occasion to buy stuff: “They transform from sites of actual pleasure and diversion to means of sel
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This is the era of no good choices. Take schooling, for example. Keeping children home robs them of education and socialization. It scars their futures, steals their joys. It makes it impossible for their parents to work, or even to rest. But sending them to school endangers their health, and that of their teachers and their families. The argument
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Andreas Vlach added 5mo ago
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 ad
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As we have seen in the previous theses, our digital environment:
Regulates our lives towards a smaller number of paths purposely designed by others rather than trails more fortuitous and exploratory.
Builds up a monolithic authentic self rather than a lush set of mutually-enriching contextual identities.
Is heavily focused on categorising people, whic
Andreas Vlach added 5mo ago
In den meisten Ländern kann man sich heute – eingeschränkt allenfalls durch Eigentumsrechte – innerhalb des Territoriums frei bewegen, muss aber staatliche Kontrollen akzeptieren, sobald man eine Staatsgrenze überschreiten möchte. Der Staat wurde zum einzig legitimen Akteur der Mobilitätsermöglichung und ‑beschränkung sowie der Grenzkontrolle am Sa
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