To a Blind Horse

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A Bicycle for the Mind, Redux

an interview with Alan Kay, by Judy Schuster: Q: What’s the matter with predefined functions? Kay: Put a prosthetic on a healthy limb and it withers. Using the logic of current day education, we could say that since students are going to be drivers as adults, at age two we should put them in a little motorized vehicle and they will just stay there and learn how to be much More...

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer

Ursula K. Le Guin on How to Become a Writer: Artists are people who are not at all interested in the facts—only in the truth. You get the facts from outside. The truth you get from inside. OK, how do you go about getting at that truth? You want to tell the truth. You want to be a writer. So what do you do? You write. Honestly, why do people ask that question? Does anybody ever

Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression

Adam Curtis on the dangers of self-expression: What happened from the early 1970s on was a shift, which said self-expression is the new politics. Self-expression is the new way of challenging the bad things in the world. But it can’t, because the whole world is actually based upon self-expression. If you want to make the world a better place, you have to start with where power More...

All Hail the Cloud

All Hail the Cloud: For a long time I believed unquestioningly the standard critique of our times. It’s the phones. It’s the algorithm. It’s our base narcissism. That our obsession with recording every fleeting moment of our lives betrayed a deeper malaise. We have become archivists of the self, I thought, curators of a life half-lived. Each countless photograph of a wonder, of More...