“In that sense, maybe there’s no contradiction after all. Both futurism and conservationism entail what Brand would call “long-term thinking.” “One of the problems now,” he says in We Are As Gods, “is that civilization is revving itself into a pathologically short attention span.” A fundamentally weird, brilliant man, Brand has tried his whole life to force us outside the present moment, so that we might better understand how to fix it.”
Intelligencer: “Silicon Valley, it turns out, won’t save the world. But those who built the internet have provided us with a clear and disturbing account of why everything went so wrong — how the technology they created has been used to undermine the very aspects of a free society that made that technology possible in the first place.”
Ugh. We use to think things were going to be so different.
Memo Akten: “The day that I care about the internal state of that machine and what it has to say, that’s the day that I will have called that machine the artist.”
A poem by Anne Boyer
Always falling into a hole, then saying “ok, this is not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of the hole which is not the grave, falling into a hole again, saying “ok, this is also not your grave, get out of this hole,” getting out of that hole, falling into another one; sometimes falling into a hole within a hole, or many holes within holes, getting out of them one after the other, then falling again, saying “this is not your grave, get out of the hole”; sometimes being pushed, saying “you can not push me into this hole, it is not my grave,” and getting out defiantly, then falling into a hole again without any pushing; sometimes falling into a set of holes whose structures are predictable, ideological, and long dug, often falling into this set of structural and impersonal holes; sometimes falling into holes with other people, with other people, saying “this is not our mass grave, get out of this hole,” all together getting out of the hole together, hands and legs and arms and human ladders of each other to get out of the hole that is not the mass grave but that will only be gotten out of together; sometimes the willful-falling into a hole which is not the grave because it is easier than not falling into a hole really, but then once in it, realizing it is not the grave, getting out of the hole eventually; sometimes falling into a hole and languishing there for days, weeks, months, years, because while not the grave very difficult, still, to climb out of and you know after this hole there’s just another and another; sometimes surveying the landscape of holes and wishing for a high quality final hole; sometimes thinking of who has fallen into holes which are not graves but might be better if they were; sometimes too ardently contemplating the final hole while trying to avoid the provisional ones; sometimes dutifully falling and getting out, with perfect fortitude, saying “look at the skill and spirit with which I rise from that which resembles the grave but isn’t!”
Each year on February 7th, music lovers all over the world observe International Clash Day, an annual celebration of seminal UK punk band The Clash, and a recognition of the enduring influence of their music and human rights message.
Ed: Such a great way to celebrate the only band that really did matter.
Listen live on KEXP.org
Max Tegmark: (2014) Consciousness as a State of Matter
“We explore five basic principles that may distinguish conscious matter from other physical systems such as solids, liquids and gases: the information, integration, independence, dynamics and utility principles.”
Also Reading: Life 3.0: Being Human in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
This has become a decade long experiment in pushing WordPress updates, switching up hosting providers and keeping my admin skills somewhat tuned, but never really producing much content. Occasionally I’ll swing by and clean out the cobwebs. I’m mostly on twitter @moroz.
