Tag: Politics & Society
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Consuming valueless info
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The tabloids will always outsell good books because people like valueless info. Instead of chasing the interesting, our eyeballs fall into the hands of attention merchants who monetize our dopamine-obsessed heads with precision drone strikes. We sell our souls to click on ads. The outcome of a Brave New World is short attention spans and…
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Turning heads in the sand
With peace comes prosperity, until people get bored. They want to start a raucous to make themselves to feel alive again. So they gulp down and share tabloid rumors. Meanwhile, some folks prefer to turn their heads in the sand so they can ignore the swathe of breaking news. They prefer ignorance over heaps of…
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Why people deny the facts
Everyone gets it. That rush of blood to the head when something or someone reconfirms your beliefs. You just knew it! But how often is that perspective the result of wearing blinders? The partisan brain is real and nonsense. Say and hear anything enough and of course it’ll feel true. Such mimetic behavior even dupes…
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Punching back against nihilism
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The brain is stuck on hype rather than facts and figures. It devours the external stimuli of incessant feeds and 24/7 news and predictably shuns the details. If we want to overthrow the swathe of nihilism, then we need to create a system that supports credibility. The algorithm failed to do it. Pre-programmed maths exposed…
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Cultivating disparate views
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Two America’s, two different realities. If you can shape your own feeds and build an arsenal of self-confirming information, why do you ever have to see the other side? But that’s precisely the problem. Inundated with reassurances and accelerated culture, people promptly ignore what they disagree with. Technology is not neutral; instead, it is weaponized…
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Relic of the past
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A combination of elements, a mere idea transforms into something new. From Polaroid to Instagram, railroad to internet, snail mail to email, what is the future but a remix of stems mashed up and built on top of extant systems. We introduce new things and promptly forget that they already existed, in the guise of…
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Regression in time
You’re part of an idea. So is every variety of human. One idea is that democracy is the best form of government. But we can’t hide its flaws. It still allows for bombastic celebrities to take charge. Humans are also part of nature. We are to climate change what the asteroid was to the dinosaur.…
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America, the paperback version 🔖
“I think of Europe as a hardcover book, America as the paperback version” Don DeLillo, The Names (Amazon)
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Embrace the void
Most people can’t stand to be left out the loop. The urge to know is what keeps them on their feet, building a knowledge base of facts that usually amounts to gossip. Ignorance is therefore a discipline. Just as we can’t do everything, we can’t stay totally informed either. Ambient awareness already cultivates more information…
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The rebel. RIP John McCain, ‘McNasty’
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Whipsawed by family relocations, young John attended some 20 schools before finally settling into Episcopal High School, an all-white, all-boys boarding school in Alexandria, Va., in the fall of 1951 for his last three years of secondary education. The school, with an all-male faculty and enrollments drawn mostly from upper-crust families of the Old South,…
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The change game
The older you get, the less inclined you are to care what other people think. Individuality hardens with age. It is not for lack of interest. The wise person is always looking for new ways to challenge their views. They separate their emotions from the facts. But experience also teaches them they’ve seen enough to…