Sparks 👁️

It begins to feel as though you’re failing at life, in some indistinct way, if you’re not treating your time off as an investment in your future. Sometimes this pressure takes the form of the explicit argument that you ought to think of your leisure hours as an opportunity to become a better worker (“Relax! You’ll Be More Productive,” reads the... See more

The archetypal influencer produces life-style porn of one form or another, playing up the aspirational glamour of their own home or meals or vacations. The new wave of curators is more outward-looking, borrowing from the influencer’s playbook and piggybacking on social media’s intimate interaction with followers in order to address a body of... See more

the fingerprints of climate change

But Alfani’s observation that the rich as a group have no clear social function is borne out by the fact that, in the Musk era, they have reacted to populist pressures largely by justifying their fortunes as individuals. When they maintain a combative social-media presence, fixate on meritocracy, employ idealistic language to describe for-profit... See more

Technology should be a force for good, but we don’t live in a world of wise elders who release it gradually to keep pace with our maturity as a species. Dissonance arises from the desire to believe in technology as a shared human endeavour for the greater good, while knowing that most world-changing technologies are injected into society’s... See more

That is, we’ve traded our craftsmenship for management. We now are less immersed in the exact pieces we’re putting together and more interested in the outcome of the work. To us, programming has now become a means to an end, instead of an end in itself.

“When we are deprived of green, of plants, of trees, most of us (though evidently not all of us) succumb to a demoralization of spirit which we usually blame on some psychological or neurochemical malady, until one day we find ourselves in a garden or park or countryside and feel the oppression vanish as if by magic.”

➪ Robert Harrison