The Madoff family wielded remarkable power in the financial world and was not reluctant to use that power to reward friends and punish enemies. In such a world, silence becomes judicious prudence.
Traders, like gaming designers, manipulate bodies, machines, and mental states to promote peak experience.
The history of economics has been a battle of ideas, and it is unclear that the best ideas have been the winners.
The unscientific foundation of science and technology is in need of wisdom, practical and theoretical, about human ends.
Like it or not, the basis of human culture has a great deal to do with the evolution of a socio-affective/social-cognitive infrastructure that opens up an enormous arc of possibility.
We have allowed the American university to be a farm team for professional sports.
This is a fertile time in the philosophy of mind and cognitive science for thinking about attention.
With the rise of humanism and modern critical scholarly practices in subsequent centuries, texts began to be treated as material objects to be fixed and plumbed for meaning.
Capitalism has been a form of enchantment, a metamorphosis of the sacred in the raiment of secularity. With money as its ontological marrow, it represents a moral and metaphysical imagination as well as a sublimation of our desire for the presence of divinity in the everyday world.
A eulogy for book culture, a polemic against the online-content economy that has replaced it, and an international, interreligious romp.
Confusion about our digital technologies and their use is not limited to the masters of Silicon Valley.
This was the nightmare of scientific progress: The truths of today would become the falsehoods—or at least the errors—of tomorrow.
The invisibility of embedded science is an apparently paradoxical, but reliable, index of the significance of science for everyday life—for government, for commerce, and, not least, for our sense of self.
The quest for personal authenticity and autonomy in the face of unreliable communities and institutions has become a defining feature of the modern working class.
Disruption culture has filtered out of the boardrooms of the economic elite into management texts, self-help literature, and career development advice meant for the average worker.
Taking a hard look at the smart city requires that we ask not only where it might fail to live up to the promises of its boosters, but also where it is successful and how it might nonetheless still fail us as citizens and as human beings.
Great as they are, the challenges of the digital age are not only profoundly intellectual and conceptual.
At the beginning of the digital revolution, there existed a speculative energy that we could use now. It was put at the service not of innovation or disruption but of maintenance and politics, of establishing categories to put our digital world on a better course.
The complexities of social media ought to prompt deep reflection on what we all owe to the future, and how we might discharge this debt.
Our political moment demands to see who we are—a beautiful and terrifying ordeal.
The highly abstract and immaterial phantom economy is inextricable from the “real economy.”
Social and cultural change, from the rise of the “information economy” to changes in family life to the technological mediation of our relationships, is happening all around us.
Work is not just an economic matter. Beyond survival, a range of other human values and ideals are at stake.
Demands on our attention come from the informational environments and shared physical spaces we inhabit. At issue are ethical questions about the conduct of civic life.
Untruth—information that could be described as unverified, misleading, or an out-and-out lie—has been spreading with new ease and abandon, and often to undemocratic effect.
Is the whole world slouching toward a Panopticon of digitally enabled surveillance and control?
The interplay of friendship and technology has been far longer-running than we think.
Is modern-day philanthropy a disease in the democratic body politic?
If projects like E-Estonia mark a break with paper, they also represent the continuation of an administrative order made possible by the first paper revolution.
Never has food been delivered in such abundance, so far, or so safely.
Could the great size of companies like Apple and Walmart actually be a good thing?
Every society in history has limited speech in some way, yet some have remained freer than others.
Democracy and science can be mutually reinforcing only if there is a recognition of the limited authority of each.
We shouldn’t assume that the measures we take to combat the coronavirus today are temporary.
By suggesting that the constant resetting is all there is, disruption becomes “a theodicy of hypercapitalism,” a kind of “newness for people who are scared of genuine newness.”
All modern forms of government presume an objectification of their citizens.
In any case, trying to use Twitter as a public square is like hiking the Matterhorn at Disneyland. Like the Matterhorn, Twitter is an amusement, not a place for exploration.
I envision a world in which the increased fragmentation of our media scene leads, over time, to the rise of new institutions that are built on stronger foundations.
Because so many of our material and technological advances have been inherited, we take them for granted and demand more.
Substack prompts the question should the people we rely on to inform us be celebrities?
How is an alignment of the authentic self and the college admissions process possible?
The mass migration of ordinary life into virtual space begins to look like a fantasy of perfect governance.
Viewing the Anthropocene as “a measure of human impact on the planet” allows us to tell only one story.
It is nearly impossible to be a white, American Christian without being an evangelical.
What, then, of democracy? I doubt it will survive—at least in the form we know.
The Internet as we know and use it in our daily lives significantly limits our capacity for freedom in all the various and complex senses of the term.
The essential component of the liberal project might be the marketplace of ideas.
Exploring the social and psychological costs of a life increasingly lived online.
Defenders of abortion might more wisely reframe their case around the central importance of care.
Nouns became verbs, verbs became nouns, and both became passive and adjectival.
There is a world within the world, and that world is not, as it is for the Marxist, a metaphor. It’s where the lizard people meet.
Television is a paradigm that frames all visual communication as entertainment.
What is the relationship between our conception of ultimate purpose and digital technology?
More and more, our lives happen there, on the screens of the bleeping little tyrants in our pockets.
Because you don’t need friends, and they don’t need you, you must seek them out.
Work is hard in large part because it is a site where people place serious demands on each other. Meeting those demands can be painful.
For many tech billionaires, citizenship is just one more consumer option in a competitive global marketplace.
The ultimate semantic receivers, selectors, and transmitters are still us.
The rise of unbelief is correlated to the lived experience of urban and industrial settings.
What if the logic of the social media world continues to envelop our discourse?
The growing damage to truthfulness reflects something more—not just a personal discrepancy but a deep social discrepancy as well.
Mick Herron’s Jackson Lamb is a casualty of both the Cold War and its aftermath.
A world that has tossed out the print edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica in favor of Wikipedia is not necessarily a richer one.
Augmented Reality doesn’t just add things to our perceptual experience; it redirects our attention.
Robert Sheckley absorbed Freud and worried about modernity as the unleashing of fantasies old and new.
The actual exchange between Oppenheimer and Einstein was far less cordial than the film’s version.
Skepticism about free will is said to produce two disastrous but opposed states of mind: apathy and frenzy.
The Amazon economy has unquestionably changed consumption.
How did we reach the age of the average, and what did it mean for American democracy?
When we communicate using little data, we’re speaking the language of robots.
The costs of a consumerist culture in which obsolescence is a strategy continue to mount.
An unsettling study of “connective labor” and its increasing subjection to bureaucratic and technological control.
Do we really believe that the meaning of our lives comes to us most reliably through a steady immersion in snatches of “real time,” complete with quantified and time-stamped certifications of their “reality”?
The ten thousand photographs stored on a cellphone are a dramatic refutation of my photographic diffidence.
Racing to catch hold of the boons of progress, we trust in our power to secure our lives, singly and together, through “smart” decisions.
Superbloom appraises the past and present of information technology and issues a warning about its future.
What data we do have on AI teaching tools suggest these technologies have the same limitations as older digital tools.
Down there in the comments, the likers, haters, and manipulators are thus vying for space with the spammers, solicitors, doxxers, and tangent-takers.
The development of AI reads less like a familiar chapter from the history of consumer capitalism and more like the storyboard of a Bond film in which we’ve all been cast as extras.
Most of us live the important parts of our lives not in town halls and public forums but in the aisles of supermarkets, among the friends we elect to cultivate, or in the mazes of online opinion bazaars.
The rot in our technology culture is managerialism, which is to say the belief that a business can be abstracted into its financial components, each of which is subject to principles of scientific management.
Why is the essential promise of technology—the alleviation of drudgery—not enough? Maybe, in the case of AI, because it remains unclear what drudgery it can realistically alleviate.
Part of the political bizarreness of our time comes from the fact that the possibility of data’s neutrality is rarely disputed as such.
Can Big Data be harnessed for the pursuit of thriving urban communities and, if so, how?
Cities can benefit from Big Data through city-to-city learning, the exchange of best practices, and improving the lives of their citizens.
Cities are increasingly being eyed by tech companies for their social dynamism and ability to generate innovation. This will have tremendous consequences for the future of society.
In India's rush to transform, build, and even engineer entire new cities, critics are right to raise concerns about citizenship and access.
Reimagining our cities provides us an important opportunity to reconsider the various structures of urban life.
The virtual dimensions of assembly may yield insights for how we understand more traditional assemblies and the legal protections that we assign to them.
What's the real-world significance of arguing in a New York Times op-ed that life doesn't exist? More than we might initially think.
A monkey's selfie has done more than just raise awareness about an endangered species.
To reduce a museum experience to the laws of supply and demand devalues not only the art itself but also the curators’ years of education and expertise—connoisseurship on which we rely in institutions that position themselves as cultural arbiters.
If technology rarely delivers on its claims, then need we waste so much as a backward glance as we dash ahead to the next digital milestone?
It's just not possible to love something that says “be unique, but only as unique as we'll allow you to be.”
If we want the Internet to remain free and open for everyone, is it right to exclude bullies and jerks? Lessons from the Ellen Pao incident.
According to Sherry Turkle's latest book, my peers and I simply can’t stand sitting alone with our thoughts, and it’s hurting our capacity for intimacy.
As we remember the Challenger disaster, let’s not forget the engineers who tried to convince NASA not to send up the Space Shuttle on a cold morning thirty years ago.
Numbers and big data may be able to show us how to do things better, but they cannot show us how to do things.
As the power of science grows, its dominion extends even into areas of our culture where its proclaimed authority is questionable.
While prognosticating about the future can be liberating, it is also a cautionary tale.
What does dominion “over every living thing that moves on the earth” mean? Brute sovereignty and ruthless exploitation? Or thoughtful stewardship and responsible cultivation?
It is precisely at such moments of technological dependency that one might consider interrogating one’s relationship with technology more broadly.
Who will emerge as the new elite from this particular moment’s cast of winners and losers?
The Internet is a technical system that has reshaped social roles and relationships in ways that we are at this point far from fully understanding. We are living out the terms of the new social contract.
Why read long books? Well, if you have to ask…
Our writing process lacks sufficient resistance, hesitation, reconsideration.
Without the distance between self and thought, self and utterance, we are unable to entertain, probe, or debate ideas.
As the titans of big tech see it, the reticence to upgrade is nothing less than resistance to progress. But a willingness to upgrade does not benefit customers in the long run.
What if the more successful political commentators on Substack, or music teachers on YouTube, or masters of the podcast interview, began to teach their craft to others?
If you get out in your yard with a push mower, everyone who passes wants to talk with you about it.
What makes someone a likely Substack star is an ability to cultivate one-way, parasocial relationships with readers.
Corporations are not defanging a threatening ideology but welcoming it back home from a field trip.
Models are only valuable in the long run if we are free to take them apart.
The modern state is founded on a dream—the dream of perfect knowledge that secures perfect power.
Perhaps computers are so bad at conversation because it is something like prayer.
Nature knows what is best for itself better than we do.
Just as Mims worries now over the unfulfilling tedium of employment at Amazon, Smith worried over the deleterious effects of monotonous work.
It is true that a thin plastic device that displays pixels doesn’t make much of a mess, but then, it is also true that life is messy.
Big data can’t save us from mental distresses and disorders.
For Mark Zuckerberg, the metaverse is personally important, a way to achieve an absolute good through connecting people.
Any attempt to create a monoculture is necessarily self-defeating.
Cognitive wellness culture proposes to curate our attention so that we can better spend it.
It is my belief that rapid technological “progress” will always threaten a culture with social regress, and that mitigating that threat should be a priority.
The world circa 2000 was not Napoleonic.
In the output of the AI generated image, the technique is there but the techne is not.
Does the Meta-Birkin seriously compromise consumers’ ability to separate the NFT from the real Hermès bag?
The cultivation of taste, in morals as well as in art, is neither snobbish nor elitist.
It is time for the tech world to start thinking institutionally.
It took the roiling events of 1963 to open the ears and hearts of the American public to the Beatles.
What might the world look like if we refined our understanding of progress?
We can aim to harmonize with our phones through ritual.
Calvino recognized the digital age as an existential condition as well as a technological one.
The answer cannot simply come in the form of another list of dos-and-don’ts.
Reconstituting the totality of a person knowing only the “parts” of his or her mind is equally nonsensical.
Much of what we know is unspeakable, and language is but one expressive medium.
Memories are important because—and when—they are selective, and few.
Could we ban cell phone photography in museums and at performances?
Could it be otherwise? Probably not, at least at the moment.
What looks like a disastrous collapse in students’ literacy may be simply a reversion to a kind of mean.
John Ruskin said, “Lay a brick level in its mortar, or take a straight shaving from a plank, and you’ll have learned a multitude of things that the words of man can never tell.”
The ironic result of the triumph of the machine may be the creation of an ecosystem in which supra-rational gnostic appeals flourish.
I don’t like this collapse of trust; I don’t like being in a technological arms race with my students.
Only through regular injections of human writing can the models improve and the machines stay up to date.
As he roamed the edges of Lake Como, Romano Guardini foresaw the birth of a new world.
Even in a technological age, Albert Borgmann believed we can still have what is real.
The unlikely connection between podcast studios, Renaissance libraries and man-caves.
The vinyl record signifies a larger world of which the audible dimension of music is only one part.
SNL’s contemporary standing as an established institution has somewhat obscures its initial trailblazing daring.
Those of us who remain tethered to reality do not require our lovers to pretend to be a succession of role-playing fantasy lovers.
As people reflect on the chasm that separates their experience from that of their grandparents, everyone is confused.
AI offers a tempting illusion to students—and evidently to some teachers.
Claude’s confession did not convince me that it was conscious.
Can the works of the Mechanic Muse be put to genuinely human uses?
We may be approaching a time when the illusion of selfhood is strengthened, not weakened, because we are surrounded by machines enacting it.
Without a doubt, irony plays a large part in the phenomenon of Porky. His mere existence in a fanciful form at a restaurant that specializes in pork meats is deliciously ironic.