SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
The many analysts, including me, who had argued that Trump could not win the general election were relying on pre-Babel intuitions, which said that scandals such as the Access Hollywood tape (in which Trump boasted about committing sexual assault) are fatal to a presidential campaign. But after Babel, nothing really means anything anymore––at least... See more
Jonathan Haidt • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Context Omission and Trust are fundamental ingredients in the creation of facts, and both depend completely on subjective judgment. Facts are not “indivisible atoms of truth” — instead, they seem impossible to define with the objectivity we’ve come to expect from them.
Mike Elias • Wittgenstein’s Revenge
“Meaningless” is how some people put it. It’s just too easy to peek under the hood and realize there’s no master plan or final destination.
Molly Mielke • callings
How many illegible others, human and nonhuman, have perished because we did not attend to them properly? I think of the terrifying rates of species extinction, as well as the disproportionate death rates of queer, racialized, and otherwise marginalized bodies. How many have not perished, but are reduced in some way, smaller versions of the beings... See more
Jasmine Wang 🌱 • Attending to the Other
What we need most are temporal structures that stabilize life. When everything is short-term, life loses all stability. Stability comes over long stretches of time: faithfulness, bonds, integrity, commitment, promises, trust. These are the social practices that hold a community together. They all have a ritual character. They all require a lot of... See more
NOEMA • All That Is Solid Melts Into Information
Del.icio.us made us realize the importance of archiving casual web (and other) research. That process has a lot of positive effects that are hard to explain until you’ve built a habit out of it. For one, there’s a self-discovery that happens when you revisit things you’ve accumulated over a period of time. You look back and begin to recognize... See more
Laurel Schwulst • Charles Broskoski on self-discovery that happens upon revisiting things you’ve accumulated over time
The upshot is this: Communities and cults are both valid and reasonable ways to organize social structures. Flat communities worked well in the early internet of high barriers to participation and limited people and content. Hierarchical cults work better today, when the internet has a plethora of content and people, and all those barriers have... See more
The Information • Clubhouse and the Future of Cult-Driven Social Platforms
This image appears in two channels, Sublime and Feeling Futuristic . You can probably start to guess what these two channels are getting at, but it takes visiting both of them to understand the nuances of their content. While Feeling Futuristic often feels like some combination of wonderment, apocolyptic visions, and speculation on what our
... See moreCharles Broskoski • Information Systems
This is hardly a profound observation. It has been clear for many years that the Internet made it possible for new communities to form, sometimes with astonishing speed. The problem, as Zeynep Tufekci explained in [Twitter and Tear Gas](https://www.twitterandteargas.org/), is that the ease of network formation made these communities more fragile,... See more