David Pennington

In this frivolous new world, everything must be pleasing and inoffensive. Everything and everybody gets marketed like an exciting new product—even old, creepy politicians, or ancient film actors, or 80-year-old rock stars.

They all get repackaged and rebranded—thank the digital gods for those apps that make old stuff look new! Everything is now... See more

This website runs on a solar powered server located in Barcelona, and will go off-line during longer periods of bad weather. This page shows live data relating to power supply, power demand, and energy storage.

Instantaneous access to everything obviously comes at a cost. The cost being that we all behave like demented Roman emperors, at once bored and deranged, summoning whatever we want at any time.

The question isn’t whether we can build cool things under authoritarianism. It’s whether those things will still matter in a system that punishes critical, independent thinking.

We are passionate defenders of allowing scientists to conduct their research with as few limits on intellectual curiosity as possible, and calling for a ban is not something that we do often or lightly. However, every rule has exceptions, and this is one of them. Unless compelling evidence emerges showing that mirror bacteria do not pose... See more

We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment.

“You who do not know how the mind is joined to the body know nothing of the works of God.”