Sublime

We might say, following the Scottish philosopher Adam Ferguson and the Austrian economist F. A. Hayek, that the development of language is the result of human action but not of human design.2 Moreover, the humans performing these actions are just regular people speaking and writing intuitively, not fancy experts who’ve researched the rules.

much of their consciousness centers on the question, How can we use television (or the computer, or word processor) to control education? They have not yet got to the question, How can we use education to control television (or the computer, or word processor)?

what the New York Times recently referred to in a book review as the “traditional Jeffersonian role of the media as a counter-weight to government”—in other words, a cantankerous, obstinate, ubiquitous press, which must be suffered by those in authority in order to preserve the right of the people to know, and to help the population assert meaningf

After von Neumann, Shannon was the most important figure in the establishment of the system of the world that Google now embodies. I would like to say that he showed the way out. But Shannon himself ended up enmeshed in the same materialist superstition that afflicts the Google Age. “I think man is a machine of a very complex sort,”

The Language Instinct, written by Steven Pinker.

The main point is the shaping of history, the selection, the interpretation that takes place.

is that to a large extent the United States had to carry out its foreign interventions through the medium of mercenary states. There’s a whole network of U.S. mercenary states. Israel is the major one, but it also includes Taiwan, South Africa, South Korea, the states that are involved in the World Anti-Communist League and the various military gro

The media do not want to hear that they did an honest job, but within the framework of state power; they’d much rather hear that they were so subversive they may have even undermined democracy.