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Design fiction is a design practice aiming at exploring and criticising possible futures by creating speculative, and often provocative, scenarios narrated through designed artifacts
‘lore’—it’s a model of knowledge that is able to interface with both reality and fiction.
You’re talking to a person at a party and his or her attention is elsewhere, annoyingly. How do you get their attention back to you, and then hold it
..it is possible that every bit of complex technology will in its turn reveal to us something about ourselves we did not know. Part of inventing and t
Now on to the good news. Your no thanks doesn’t need to be an absolute, total, eternal no. We can use typewriters to write letters and write a poem on
The Technology That Actually Runs Our World
Flatness, like scalability, is efficient. The same culture flows through the same pipes to the same net-average consumer. But since when did efficienc
Technology increasingly robs us of the mystical in our lives. Not everything needs to be fast and available and convenient. I love ideas and products
I think there are things in life that you want to telescope and compress and accelerate and streamline and make more efficient. And there are things w
the messiness of what it means to be human, with all of its messiness and complexities
A conversation between Alex Dobrenko and Douglas Rushkoff on the spiritual nature of awe, rescuing the human from the machine, and why the future depe
We've fallen for the trap of thinking something doesn't exist if it isn't on the Internet. Maria Popova: "The internet is a surface level of the oce
A person spends years trying to become beautiful online. They finally achieve the exact face, body, lifestyle, and aesthetic they once fantasized abou
THEN Almitra spoke again and said, And what of Marriage, master? And he answered saying: You were born together, and together you shall be forevermore
And yet, as is often the case, those of us who need love so badly at a particular moment can be off-putting to those who want to love us, and to those
Two loves hold reality and make our universe unique to the rest: tetrahedron → “hollywood love” hypertetrahedron/pentachoron/5-cell → “real love“ —88
this is a way of thinking with analogies, metaphors, play, related to sensemaking
Market forces incentivise us to get on the property ladder, and then to set fire to the rungs beneath us so that nobody else can climb up. Moloch need
“True teachers are those who use themselves as bridges over which they invite their students to cross; then, having facilitated their crossing, joyful
social media will never be the impetus for real social change. He compared Twitter unfavorably to the civil rights movement. The Woolworth’s lunch cou
It's hard to save the world voluntarily when others are destroying it full-time.
What if we re-embraced activism as the intentional acts carried out by each generation to guide us from legacy narratives to new challenger narratives
An alternative approach and methodology, “complementary ways of thinking, doing, and making emphasise the practice of care and imagination and challenge us to work with, not against, vulnerability, humility and interdependence.” As multi species anthropologist Anne Galloway writes: “what if we deny that human beings are exceptional? What if we stop speaking and listening only to ourselves?”
I'm not talking about anything as narrow as ambition. After all, ambition eventually wears out and probably should. But you can keep your zest until t
Instead of a holistic and intersectional approach, entrenched in the ability to tap into collective support structures as a form of personal resilienc
People around you, constantly under the pull of their emotions, change their ideas by the day or by the hour, depending on their mood. You must never
Anyhow, the older I get, the less impressed I become with originality. These days, I’m far more moved by authenticity. Attempts at originality can oft
1/ The good news: the METAVERSE is exciting but NOT for the reasons most people are talking about. The bad news: odds are the 'Metaverse' will be us
Whether it is through a VR headset, the manipulation of projectors, or clever set design, immersion fulfills our desire for escapism, instantly transp
In large part this is because education, like most social systems, is slow to adapt, iterate, and evolve to be relevant for changing times. The glacia
generative AI is but the latest in a line of innovations that draws attention to the flaws of the modern education system, leaving us to question how
The humanities, rightly understood, are the things that technology cannot take away or substitute for. Of course, I don’t mean ‘humanities’ in the way
It’s hard to talk about “masterpieces” because the concept trades on a theory of aesthetics that is controversial when spelled out (aesthetic value re
The inhabitants of /lit/ see themselves as the victim of anti-canon efforts, as the academy has sought to “decolonise” and expand the curriculum over
A reading revolution is taking place on this notorious message board, most famous for alt-right memes, anything-goes chatter, and large-scale coordina
So why try to predict the future at all if it’s so difficult, so nearly impossible? Because making predictions is one way to give warning when we see
I think of it as the difference between order and a different kind of order. Because there’s nothing chaotic in diversity. There’s nothing chaotic in
