David Pennington

@davidpennington

I write stuff. I’d like to write more stuff. Currently: reclaiming my brain.

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We are never as good as we should be; and neither, it seems, are other people. A life without a so-called critical faculty would seem an idiocy: what are we, after all, but our powers of discrimination, our taste, the violence of our preferences? Self-criticism, and the self as critical, are essential to our sense, our picture, of our so-called... See more

Adam Phillips • Adam Phillips · Against Self-Criticism

The New Romantics

atomization encourages us to reduce multivariate experiences, often the most important parts of life, to their single most obvious element

Nat Eliason • De-Atomization is the Secret to Happiness

The New Romantics

What we want in 2025

Yancey Strickler • What we want in 2025

I Talked to the Cassandra of the Internet Age

archive.ph

Techocalypse and Idleism

Michael Goldhaber is the internet prophet you’ve never heard of. Here’s a short list of things he saw coming: the complete dominance of the internet, increased shamelessness in politics, terrorists co-opting social media, the rise of reality television, personal websites, oversharing, personal essay, fandoms and online influencer culture — along with the near destruction of our ability to focus.

Deep literacy is what happens when a reader engages with an extended piece of writing in such a way as to anticipate an author's direction and meaning, and engages what one already knows in a dialectical process with the text. The result, with any luck, is a fusion of writer and reader, with the potential to bear original insight.

Adam Garfinkle • The Erosion of Deep Literacy

I personally think it makes people less attractive, authentic and worth connecting to. Anything that strips us of our imperfections is missing the point. The AI images, music and video are another. Of note, I actually think the meme uses are fine (it’s entertainment, not art, and that’s something else).

Adam Singer • The rise of AI nihilism

Techocalypse

He would identify the topic he wanted to focus on for the next season of life. He would usually be weighing what he planned to do during this time, like teaching a seminar, writing articles, attending conferences, etc.

He would then revisit key papers and ideas from that topic as a way of refreshing his mind.

Then, he would begin in earnest. This