JD Goulet
@jdgoulet
Writer & immigrant in Portugal
JD Goulet
jdgoulet.substack.com
"For the uninitiated on this side of the pond, the European Parliament is kind of a cross between the Continental Congress of the 1770s as envisioned under the weak, decentralized Articles of Confederation and the Galactic Senate from the Star Wars prequels. It has some power over the EU budget and approves members of the executive European
... See more“Inauthenticity is becoming the hallmark of our era: faked Facebook data, faked college admissions applications, faked resumes and “bullshit jobs”, faked news, faked mortgage-back security ratings, AI pretending to be humans, humans pretending to be AI. Lil Miquela and her CGI crew will expose the “inauthenticity” of our corporations and public figures, which will of course challenge our notion of authenticity altogether. Authenticity itself is a relatively new way of thinking about identity and human behavior. I trust we’ll create a new mode of understanding that’s better fit for the surreality we live in — one that demands transparency and acknowledges that people are beginning to see through all the manipulative corporate PR.”
Reality as we understand it is a phenomenon of social structures, language, and shared processes for engaging with the world. Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.
Jon Askonas • Reality Is Just a Game Now
The urgent task facing queer communites is that we must facilitate kinship that is strong enough that nobody has to fear exclusion.
The tendency to think of A.I. as a magical problem solver is indicative of a desire to avoid the hard work that building a better world requires. That hard work will involve things like addressing wealth inequality and taming capitalism. For technologists, the hardest work of all—the task that they most want to avoid—will be questioning the
... See moreTed Chiang • Will A.I. Become the New McKinsey? | The New Yorker
“To recap, neoliberalism's network of influence operates as follows:
• “Oligarchs and corporations often covertly (i.e. 'using dark money') fund think tanks and academic departments.
• “These institutions, in turn, make the unreasonable demands of the oligarchs and corporations sound reasonable and normal.
• “The press - also largely controlled by
He sees the hunger people have for a wisdom and nourishing that algorithms and devices don’t provide—but the humanities can. This is the real crisis in humanities, and it’s reached a boiling point.
I don’t travel as extensively as Dana, but I hear the exact same thing in my online dealings with people. They want something that the tech can’t... See more
I don’t travel as extensively as Dana, but I hear the exact same thing in my online dealings with people. They want something that the tech can’t... See more
Ted Gioia • The Real Crisis in Humanities Isn't Happening at College
How Too Much Information Can Make Us Stupid and Miserable
open.substack.com