Random
Email is a wonderful thing for people whose role in life is to be on top of things. But not for me; my role is to be on the bottom of things.
About a happy man –Donald Knuth’s approach to email
Ecology is the study of these interrelationships: those unbreakable cords which tie everything to everything else.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
Notes from Deep Work by Cal Newport:
The key to developing a deep work habit is to move beyond good intentions and add routines and rituals to your working life designed to minimize the amount of your limited willpower necessary to transition into and maintain a state of unbroken concentration.
The Monastic Philosophy of Deep Work Scheduling:... See more
Careful technology
open.substack.com
Ecology is fundamentally different to the other sciences in that it describes a scope and an attitude of study, rather than a field. There is an ecology – and ecologists – of mathematics, behaviour, economics, physics, history, art, linguistics, psychology, warfare, and almost any other discipline that you can think of.
James Bridle • Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence
“Technology” and “hi tech” are not synonymous, and a technology that isn't “hi,” isn’t necessarily '“low” in any meaningful sense.
We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all.... See more
We have been so desensitized by a hundred and fifty years of ceaselessly expanding technical prowess that we think nothing less complex and showy than a computer or a jet bomber deserves to be called “technology” at all.... See more
Ursula K. Le Guin • A Rant About “Technology”
And since technology is not value neutral, to be a technologist is to be inherently opinionated about how the world ought to be. Each act of creation is a statement about one particular means to an end being the best possible means. As Saffron Huang writes, “[b]ringing something into existence is in fact endorsing that thing itself. As we hurtle al... See more