Thomas

Even when the tradeoffs are more clear, I think that technology has to feel humane and serve very human purposes to be worthwhile. Most gadgets feel careless and unwholesome and I worry that they, subconsciously, cause us to treat our homes differently. They are not viscerally pleasing, and if you have enough of that sort of thing in your home I... See more

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

. Stay weird

Lastly, we need to accept the fundamental trippy weirdness of imagination, the sheer play of it, and not always reduce it to functional adaptation. There must be room for the surreal, the fantastic, the idealistic and even the nonsensical. Even in the full bloom of the scientific revolution, thinkers of all stripes – Emanuel... See more

As economic anthropologist Jason Hickel has explained,“under capitalism, ‘growth’ is not about increasing production to meet human needs. It is about increasing production in order to extract and accumulate profit. That is the overriding objective.”

To me, challenging doesn’t look like the person who just grinds through a project to get it done, sacrificing sleep, family, or any semblance of balance. While brute force may be effective short -term, I’m convinced it doesn’t lend itself to sustainable creativity, joy, or meaning (and sustainability is everything – from a biological and... See more