kev
@kev
objet.cc 🪡 opensb.org 🛹 k7v.in ✍️ dad 👦👦
kev
k7v.in
weekly Go Flip Yourself and dreaming of a better internet
Discussing the long arc of tech; and why optimism.
- being connected to information; then being connected to people; then machines start to own the spaces
- social media is judging all the time
- we now gravitate toward technologies which are more isiolationist
Whether or not you have worked out your own understanding of free will, just thinking about your potential lack of agency can be an exercise in mindfulness. By observing the thoughts that run amuck your mind, and contemplating the subconscious factors that govern your waking consciousness, you allow awareness to take the wheel — rather than... See more
Alex Olshonsky • Free will: who's in control?
weekly Go Flip Yourself and weekly Objet library
Getting new things feels exciting. Simply having the things you already have, even if those things are immensely valuable, doesn’t usually feel like anything. The relative view only allows new acquisitions to feel strongly rewarding for a brief time, before you fully assimilate your new identity as an iPad-haver or Blundstone-wearer.
Feeling the full wealth of what you’ve already got is possible only when you measure that wealth from zero. Then you can feel its absolute value, rather than its relative value.
“Infinite growth in a finite world is an impossibility” goes a popular quote. It is usually rolled out to illustrate that sustainability requires humanity to impose limits. Sometimes people then point to a specific element that they argue we will run out of in relatively short order, for instance phosphorus. I believe that this view is... See more
Albert Wenger • To Infinity and Beyond
Paradise Lost?—Existential anxiety and the iron cage of consumerism | Blog by Tim Jackson
TIM JACKSONcusp.ac.uk
weekly Objet library and Consumerism
The iron cage of consumerism:
the profit motive stimulates a continual search for newer, better or cheaper products and services
our own relentless search for social status lock us into an escalating spiral of consumerism
The language of cool is conveyed through a vocabulary of the new.
Confidence in our place in the social world hangs or falls on our ability to participate in consumerism.
We created these conditions [above ☝️].
The restless desire of the consumer is the perfect complement for the restless innovation of the entrepreneur. […] The ‘iron cage of consumerism’ is a system in which no one is free.
I want to argue of course that modern society has internalised a number of specific functions of world maintenance within the dynamics and organisation of consumerism.
The language of stuff:
This is one of the key lessons from the sociology of consumption. It is now broadly accepted that material things are deeply implicated in the social and psychological fabric of our lives. This role depends heavily on the human tendency to imbue material artefacts with symbolic meaning.
Mary Douglas (1976, 207):
“[a]n individual’s main objective in consumption is to help create the social world and to find a credible place in it.”
If consumption plays such a vital role in the construction and maintenance of our social world, then asking people to give up material commodities is asking them to risk a kind of social suicide. People will rightly resist threats to identity. They will resist threats to meaning.