Sublime

David Levy, a professor at the Information School at the University of Washington, has updated both the utilitarian and the humanistic arguments for the networked age by calling for a new “informational environmentalism.” Just as we fight to save marsh lands and old-growth forests from development and pollution, he says, so we need to fight to save

Technology companies drove the survivors into a mindset of engineered efficiency—the belief that data tells you everything of value. “Just like the tech companies, journalism has come to fetishize data. And this data has come to corrupt journalism,” Franklin Foer writes in World Without Mind. “Once journalists come to know what works, which stories

We may find that the culture of abundance being produced by the World Wide Computer is really just a culture of mediocrity—many miles wide but only a fraction of an inch deep.

The how questions generate quantitative propositions that computer programs can handle. As we translate the experience of life into machine language, we risk our minds becoming something like satellite servers to make things easier for the computers—which do not and cannot care. When we confuse the convenient with the significant, the death

Whereas Buchanan’s views were informed by a sense of earnestness, humility, and respect, Rothbard’s every breath was laden with irreverence for authority. Buchanan was an Irish Catholic who regarded 1959’s liberalizing Vatican II Council as a surrender of the forces of good (meaning orthodoxy) to those of decadent modernism. Rothbard, on the other

Es ist bezeichnend, dass ausgerechnet die Autoren des Exils wie Thomas Mann die „dunklen“ Seiten der deutschen Kultur und deren Hang zu Gehorsam und Autorität nicht als Versehen der Geschichte, als einen singulären Fehltritt, auslagerten, sondern von den Deutschen eine kulturelle Selbstkritik einforderten, die weit über den Schematismus einer