I’ve been sharing links to the things I’ve read and found interesting since starting this site. And since these links come without context, I thought I’d start a practice of gathering the highlights I’ve made while reading them and put them on here. It’s a random list of things that stuck with me, lingering in my brain long after the tab was closed.
APOSSIBLE Interview: Jack Self
My attitude, while it can be naive in some ways, is that the means are the end. The way that you choose to live your life currently, is the type of society that you want to live in. Source
Naive maybe but something I very much agree with. On a sidenote I would love to dive deeper into ‘naivety’. I’m often naive myself in a lot of ways, and while it sometimes comes back to bite me, it’s an attitude I try to hold onto because there’s something about it that I truly value.
Care Culture Interview: Jared Zhang of Fresh Air
Well after day one, all we thought of was making our own meditation club or our own book club. You can actually book club anything. You could have a book club but only for objects, you know. A book club that is not a book club at all, but it’s fulfilling our needs of ingesting something and talking about it. Source
Absolutely love this idea from Jared Zhang about how everything can be a “book club.” It’s such a familiar and accessible framework to organise around, and I feel like we should have so many more book clubs around the things we care about and are curious to explore together.
Highlights—or lows rather—on loneliness and how it’s designed through capitalists incentives.
How Solitude Is Rewiring American Identity
We haven’t just privatized leisure. We’ve privatized ritual. Modern rituals are more likely to bind us to ourselves than to other people: Meditate at this time alone. Remember to work out alone, or around other people with noise-canceling headphones. Source
The Anti-Social Century
As our homes have become less social, residential architecture has become more anti-social. Clifton Harness is a co-founder of TestFit, a firm that makes software to design layouts for new housing developments. He told me that the cardinal rule of contemporary apartment design is that every room is built to accommodate maximal screen time. “In design meetings with developers and architects, you have to assure everybody that there will be space for a wall-mounted flatscreen television in every room,” he said. “It used to be ‘Let’s make sure our rooms have great light.’ But now, when the question is ‘How do we give the most comfort to the most people?,’ the answer is to feed their screen addiction.” Source
Digital communication has already prepared us for AI companionship, Fagone said, by transforming many of our physical-world relationships into a sequence of text chimes and blue bubbles. “I think part of why AI-companion apps have proven so seductive so quickly is that most of our relationships already happen exclusively through the phone,” Source
The media theorist Marshall McLuhan once said of technology that every augmentation is also an amputation. We chose our digitally enhanced world. We did not realize the significance of what was being amputated. Source
Which reminded me of this essay by Toby Shorin titled “The Loneliness Apparatus”
In order to look at the cultural ramifications of loneliness rhetoric, we need to understand the full ecosystem of what loneliness means. Instead of taking the so-called “loneliness epidemic” at face value, I propose we examine the loneliness apparatus: the many social institutions, regulatory decisions, policy programs, scientific research, and public messages that are implicated in the concept. Source
Is Accelerationism the Same Thing as Falling in Love?
But the dehumanizing vector in culture is no longer Terminator [1984]. Right now, it’s dollification: people getting cosmetic surgery to look like dolls, makeup tutorials, nail art, cat ears, miniskirts on boys, DIY endocrine experimentation. All of this belongs to a very different idea of what counts as futuristic technology from the iconic Terminator skull. The future isn’t sending robots to hunt us down and kill us; it’s already inside us, turning us into cute objects as we tumble inexorably toward the great asymptotic kitten outside history. It’s the explosion of integral selfhood into a database of libidinal fragments, or “moé-elements,” that displaces binary gender: It’s the interminable pursuit of the obscure state of “just-rightness” that is inherent to cuteness – along with the temporal distortions peculiar to all of these things. Source
This article didn’t fully resonate with me on all fronts, but I did like this part where it argues that accelerationism is more akin to dollification than killer robots.
Aha = Wow
Paulo fell in love with science for the visual beauty of nature, but his continued passion for it owes to what we call the beauty of understanding – the aesthetic experience of new insight into the way things are, when encountering the hidden order or inner logic underlying phenomena. To grow in understanding, Paulo reflected, is ‘something very satisfying’. ‘The beauty in science,’ he emphasised, ‘that is, at least for me, a huge motivator.’ Source
This feels very relatable. You start something driven by a love or passion for one thing, but it’s the feeling you feel of the journey itself and truly understanding something that makes you stay.
How to Be Truly Free: Lessons From a Philosopher President
You’re free when you escape the law of necessity — when you spend the time of your life on what you desire. If your needs multiply, you spend your life covering those needs. Source
Because life is beautiful. With all its ups and downs, I love life. And I’m losing it because it’s my time to leave. What meaning can we give to life? Man, compared to other animals, has the ability to find a purpose. Source
It’s not the phone’s fault. We’re the ones who are not ready. We make a disastrous use of it. Children walk around with a university in their pocket. That’s wonderful However, we have advanced more in technology than in values. Source
We are not so robotic. We learned to think, but first we are emotional beings. We believe we decide with our heads. Many times the head finds the arguments to justify the decisions made by the gut. We’re not as aware as we seem. Source
Loved this interview with José ‘Pepe’ Mujica in The New York Times last year, which my friend Bryan shared, by way of Tom, another friend. It’s a deeply human outlook on a bleak time yet somehow hopeful. I’m also really looking forward to watching this documentary on him. This video is great too.
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