SpaceXponential
@spacexponential
Conscientious Questioner
SpaceXponential
The structure of games is not that the points are valuable, but that the attempt to get those points, the attempts to win the game and the game’s terms sculpt some kind of interesting or beautiful activity.
New York Times • A Philosophy of Games That Is Really a Philosophy of Life
I love this! Nguyen follows this up with
“The philosopher Talbot Brewer, in his book, “The Retrieval of Ethics,” says something like we’ve lost sight of how important activities are and we’re just obsessed with how important the output is and the product is. And that’s partially because we’ve been swept up in this hyper-industrialized product-oriented world where we think, look, the thing that I’m trying to achieve is the thing that’s valuable. And I think what we lose sight of is how interesting it can be to be caught in the process of doing something.”
I think we can date the fall of the tower to the years between 2011 (Gurri’s focal year of “nihilistic” protests) and 2015, a year marked by the “great awokening on the left and the ascendancy of Donald Trump on the right. Trump did not destroy the tower; he merely exploited its fall. He was the first politician to master the new dynamics of ... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Banks and other industries have “know your customer” rules so that they can’t do business with anonymous clients laundering money from criminal enterprises. Large social-media platforms should be required to do the same. That does not mean users would have to post under their real names; they could still use a pseudonym. It just means that before a... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Political scientist Russel Hardin (2002) argues that trust is really about encapsulated interest, i.e., a kind of closed loop of each party’s self-interests. Like the real estate agent who sells a house at a reasonable price not because she cares about the client but because her commission is directly tied to the sale price, the drug dealer also ea... See more
JENA MARIE ESPELITA • TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology
The era we live in requires us to take trust leaps at a surprisingly high rate – we have jumped from using credit cards to dabbling with cryptocurrencies; from making reservations at trusted hotel brands to booking rooms from complete strangers; from public transportation to using Uber or Blablacar; from libraries and encyclopedias, to open informa... See more
JENA MARIE ESPELITA • TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology
...“blockchain trust” can be defined as generalized trust, since it does not deal with personal relationships; it is a form of distributed trust, because the truth is ensured not by a centralized body but through a consensus of all the participants; it has both affective and cognitive aspects of trust, due to the fact that although human elements w... See more
JENA MARIE ESPELITA • TRUSTING A TRUSTLESS NETWORK. The Paradoxes of Trust in Blockchain Technology
The former CIA analyst Martin Gurri predicted these fracturing effects in his 2014 book, The Revolt of the Public. Gurri’s analysis focused on the authority-subverting effects of information’s exponential growth, beginning with the internet in the 1990s. Writing nearly a decade ago, Gurri could already see the power of social media as a universal s... See more
The Atlantic • Why the Past 10 Years of American Life Have Been Uniquely Stupid
Pure Scenius will be a six-hour improvised show featuring several musicians ... Pure Scenius first took place in Sydney last year, prompting the Morning Herald to say: "The theatre of the music-making process was as enthralling as the music itself." Above the musicians sits an overhead projector, on which Eno writes notes. "I'll write things like, ... See more
Stuart Jeffries • Surrender. It's Brian Eno
The main thing crypto challenged me to consider was the definition of art itself. What I consider to be art is different from what the crypto world calls art. To me, art is more than an aesthetic image. Inputting a prompt, generating an image with a style transfer, for example, isn’t enough to be art. Drawing, and then generating, a thousand ... See more