Thomas

Soon after I first posted this essay in a blog some 15 years ago, a young man approached me to ask if I minded him reposting it. I asked him where that would be. He and some others had launched a site called ‘Generation’. Its aim was to prepare for the coming war between the generations by assembling useful documents and providing a forum for... See more

According to another global study from a few years ago, and the largest one on the topic so far, over two-thirds (68%) of the public would like more rest.

creative expression is often used as a gateway to something more practical, and is rarely accepted as something practical in itself .

This is why parents will rush to place their kids on long waitlists for art and music programs, but won’t encourage them to become artists or musicians as they age. It’s as if creative expression is useful for its... See more

Technology removes the soul from human performance in order to make it more compatible with industry.

‘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

Is not about the knowledge but about the intensity and the reason that created the purpose to seek such knowledge

when we use athletic and energy language to discuss our work’s efficiency, we are drawing upon a specific and exploitive lineage in the history of energy physics and its impact on the western cultural imagination.