Sublime

New long post: Progress, Postmodernism and the Tech Backlash -How innovation overtook progress -The resonance and coherence of the anti-tech movement -The rebellion against postmodernism -Guess which tech leader is sort of a Marxist? https://t.co/k6l5XrioNg... See more

In 1984 the futurist Stewart Brand made the now-iconic declaration ‘Information wants to be free.’ He would later clarify what that meant, saying, On the one hand information wants to be expensive, because it’s so valuable. The right information in the right place just changes your life. On the other hand, information wants to be free, because the

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It’s often forgotten, but Marx and Engels in The Communist Manifesto express great admiration for the best of what capitalist dynamism had wrought by the time of their writing in 1848, arguing that capitalism, in comparison to all the “slothful indolence” that went before, is a progressive force in the world. No greater paean to capitalism has yet

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Yet the cultural dominance of the iPhone — and the transformation of the open internet into “walled gardens” and apps focused on simplifying the user experience — has taken the “triumph of seamless usability” to a new level. This “tyranny of convenience,” to borrow Tim Wu’s phrase , should sensitize us to what may be lost when democratization

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In 2011 Cowen published a digital pamphlet in which he argued that since the 1973 oil-price shock, America had experienced a hidden crisis of lost growth that would be resolved only by the development of new technology. He called this period the “Great Stagnation”, and he proposed a cultural solution rather than an economic one: raise the social... See more