Earlier this year I read Shoshana Zuboff’s The Age of Surveillance Capitalism and was strongly affected by it. It’s always hard to judge how new works will age, but I found her narrative a poignant comment on the last few decades of the information society: a society that evolved quite differently from what many expected […]
The premise of the enlightenment would be that we have finally discovered how to live rationally. Authority is located in natural science, free enterprise and free markets, and empirical knowledge. Thus we can cast aside all the superstitions of the past and finally become what we were meant to be. Can we? Not everyone agrees. Marx, Freud […]
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Posted 26 December 2018
† Johan
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Philosophy
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Tagged: bergman, capitalism, china, existentialism, freud, god, india, japan, jung, marx, pinker, rosling, tolstoy
Humans primarily live in a world of beings, each of which has meaning. Meaningful beings appear to us interconnected, referencing practices and other beings in a referential totality. Buttons suggest pushing, chairs suggest sitting, a tractor suggests farming. A (Japanese) rice paddy may suggest the heavy labour that goes into the rice harvest each year, […]
A characteristic of a naive approach to the digital world is the tendency to record and store everything. JustBecauseWeCan. Every photo, every e-mail, every song, every web site ever visited, every acquaintance who ever added you as a friend on some social network, every message you ever received. Somebody, probably an author, termed this the […]
After 13 months and 51 posts, my experiments in blogging continue, although they are perhaps better described as polymorphic than monomorphic. Maybe it’s time for some reflections. On the whole blogging in this format and at this frequency has been a pretty fun and fulfilling process. I get to practice writing free-form, nonscientific texts, and […]