David Pennington
@dtpennington
I write stuff. I’d like to write more stuff. Currently: reclaiming my brain.
David Pennington
dtpennington.com
I think that “doing nothing”—in the sense of refusing productivity and stopping to listen—entails an active process of listening that seeks out the effects of racial, environmental, and economic injustice and brings about real change.
Jenny Odell • How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy
How I learned, early on, that we did not live in a home that welcomed art.
The Zeitgeist Is Changing. A Strange, Romantic Backlash to the Tech Era Looms
Ross Barkantheguardian.com“The new romanticism has arrived…Backlash is bubbling against tech’s dominance in everyday life, particularly the godlike algorithms - their true calculus still proprietary - that rule all of digital existence.”
It is a mistake and a misreading of nature to think that you, a living creature, will be flourishing all the days of your life.
I’m not languishing, I’m dormant - Austin Kleon
The internet is (mostly) a machine for light things.
Anu Atluru • Make Something Heavy.
Mastery is fine, but you must retain the ability to think like a beginner.
Austin Kleon • Questions without answers
As content becomes more engineered than written, AI has stepped into the role of ghostwriter; fluent but fatally hollow. Tools like ChatGPT and its cousins can produce grammatically perfect, tonally inoffensive copy at scale. What they lack, of course, is experience. They have no stake in what they say.
Carl Hendrick • Ultra-Processed Minds: The End of Deep Reading and What It Costs Us
Go to just about any LATAM country or Carribean island. Go away from the resorts. Hell, just look over the fence - you will find MOUNTAINS of garbage. There is no trash collection, nowhere for this stuff to GO. So it piles up, it gets picked off by the wind. Eventually they just set it on fire - causing all sorts of other climate and health issues.
This is a real, never-ending American Colonialism - our idea of single use yet permeant.
When I had the flip phone, I had to put in effort to get to places, to talk to people. Everything was a task. Now it’s easy to do things. I guess I still don’t like needing the crutch of a smartphone, though I couldn’t figure out how to go on without one.”