Elizabeth Anderson discusses the implications of the market mechanism for human freedom and autonomy. In a pluralistic world, different individuals value goods in different ways; a same good may have multiple valuations, based on social conditions and frameworks within which this good is ‘consumed’. Same good may be valued differently by several people and by […]
My fancies are fireflies, — Specks of living light twinkling in the dark. The voice of wayside pansies, that do not attract the careless glance, murmurs in these desultory lines. In the drowsy dark caves of the mind dreams build their nest with fragments dropped from day’s caravan. Spring scatters the petals of flowers that […]
Umberto Eco wrote this in 1994 — creatively speculating on how different operating systems are like different religious orders. Access to information is ritualized, after all! http://www.themodernword.com/eco/eco_mac_vs_pc.html
I wrote this paper as a final exam essay for Metaphysics and Sci-Fi last semester, discussing Nick Bostrom’s essay “Could we be in a simulation?” It seems to me that transhumanists tend to be wide-eyed techno-optimists in a delusional kind of way–there’s usually little discussion of the social and political consequences of asserting an ideology […]
Umbr(a) This is an intruiging journal I stumbled upon just a little while ago. It has a confluence of cultural studies, technology and media studies, ecological criticism, literary theory, and philosophy. There are some interesting names associated with the journal — Steigler (who writes on technics, and whom I posted about already), Zizek, Baidou, Graham […]
Technology today has changed the way we interact, the way we look at the world, what we have the ability to see. The distinction between what is real and what is not has blurred. People with iPhones talk to Siri and she talks back; people without iPhones spend a lot of time Wanting to talk […]
Keith Hart’s book, “Money in an Unequal World,” takes an account of where 5,000 years of agricultural civilization have brought us and comes to the conclusion that we, as a species on the brink of an unprecedented information explosion, must not allow our excess capacity to be monopolized by feudal institutions. To this end, personalized […]
Networks and spheres, subjective/objective spacetime. Bruno Latour presents some insights in “Some Experiments in Art and Politics” on spiderweb connections and cloth-like interweaving. Here is a visual metaphor of why I prefer the language of “outgrowing, reweaving, or rewiring” our given socio-political arrangements, which recognizes how we are a dense bundle of stitching floating in […]
nodes, networks, and who is in power
Database Aesthetics Collect and conquer, man!
Collective Conversations 