Sublime
An inspiration engine for ideas
In place of the human gatekeepers and curators of culture, the editors and DJs, we now have a set of algorithmic gatekeepers.
Kyle Chayka • Filterworld
‘landed property’ is not actual soil, rocks or grass. It is a legal understanding, maintained by a subtle mix of morality and the threat of violence. In fact, land ownership illustrates perfectly the logic of what Rudolf von Ihering called the state’s monopoly of violence within a territory – just within a much smaller territory than a nation
... See moreDavid Graeber • The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity

The main split in twenty-first-century politics might be not between democracies and totalitarian regimes but rather between human beings and nonhuman agents. Instead of dividing democracies from totalitarian regimes, a new Silicon Curtain may separate all humans from our unfathomable algorithmic overlords. People in all countries and walks of
... See moreYuval Noah Harari • Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI
L. M. Sacasas • What You Get Is the World
Yes, we’re drifting, but maybe we can choose to float towards a more collective stewardship... See more
Crimes Against Search | Dirt
Technology tends to represent a thrust toward the future, an accelerated promise of microrefined systems and networks, deeper probes into the way we live and think. Technology claims the future on our behalf.
Don DeLillo • Libra (Contemporary American Fiction)
A persuasive framework for the digital that has ontological implications is being developed by Benjamin Bratton in San Diego. Bratton’s (2014) concern with the geopolitics of planetary-scale computation leads him to posit the existence of an “accidental megastructure,” the Stack.
Arturo Escobar • Designs for the Pluriverse: Radical Interdependence, Autonomy, and the Making of Worlds (New Ecologies for the Twenty-First Century)
Politicians boggled at two political problems that would attend the implementation of the plans: their fantastic cost and the necessity of removing from their path and relocating thousands, even tens of thousands, of voters. For years—decades—in every city in the country, the expressways remained on the drawing boards. In every city, that is,
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