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 better drivers. Now, we would think that was pretty horrible. More...

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 has gone. It’s very difficult to see. We live in a world where we see ourselves as independent individuals. If you’re an independent individual, you don’t really think in terms of power. You think only in terms of your own influence on the world. 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 dinner, of a view, of our children, of the utter banality of our everyday lives, was not a memento, a way of remembering the things we did, but instead evidence of the poverty of our engagement with the present moment. We frame our lives through lenses, filters, and screens, trading the chaotic beauty of reality for a sanitised, editable version. Our photographs are not memories; they are advertisements, billboards for a life we are too preoccupied to live. More...