Thomas

Culture is to humans a bit like water is to fish; it is everywhere and yet imperceptible because it is not so much what we perceive but what we perceive through . Culture is what brings the world into focus, and it can be thought of as the lens through which objects are seen, not the object as such. In this sense, looking for culture is like... See more

Nostalgia need not be conservative, stultifying or sentimental. Rather, expressions of nostalgia are one way we communicate a desire for the past, dissatisfaction about the present, and our visions for the future. My version of nostalgia will be joyful, creative and progressive.

"The key to thriving in our high-tech world, they’ve learned, is to spend much less time using technology." (Cal Newport, Digital Minimalism)

I have long been a subscriber to the idea that any intelligence needs to be embodied and situated. The very first problems a baby has to solve are, How do I move my body? How do I move around in the world? Those tasks are entirely missing from existing large language models. And, as many people noted, the phrase “large language model” is a... See more

‘Yeah, TikTok is for three things: learning stuff and feeling good about yourself, stalking people, and brain rot.’

In this way, brain rot is what we might call a ‘genre of participation’, to borrow a term from the work of the cultural anthropologist Mimi Ito. On a digital social media application like TikTok, with its endless different types of... See more

Implicit in the promise of outsourcing and automation and time-saving devices is a freedom to be something other than what we ought to be. The liberation we are offered is a liberation from the very care-driven involvement in the world and in our communities that would render our lives meaningful and satisfying. In other words, the promise of... See more