Ivan Illich, in his brilliant study of medieval reading and the evolution of the book, In the Vineyard of the Text, noted how emerging textual technologies reconfigured how readers related to what they read. It is a complex, multifaceted argument and I won’t do justice to it here, but the heart of it is summed up in the title of Illich’s closing chapter, “From Book to Text.” After explaining what Illich meant by the that formulation, I’m going to suggest that we consider an analogous development: from photograph to image. Like the photography, writing is, as Plato understood, a mnemonic technology. The book or codex is only one form the technology has taken, but it is arguably the most important form owing to its storage capacity and portability. Contrast the book to, for instance, a carved stone tablet or a scroll and you’ll immediately recognize the brilliance of the design. But the matter of sorting and searching remained a significant problem until the twelfth century. It is then that new features appeared to improve the book’s accessibility and user-friendliness, among them chapter titles, pagination, and the alphabetized index. Now one cloud access particular passages without having to either read the whole work or, more to the point, either memorize the passages or their location in the book (illuminated manuscripts were designed to aide with the latter).

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‘An engine for the imagination’: the rise of AI image generators

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Interview: Vitalik Buterin, creator of Ethereum

The Metaverse Is Already Here — It’s Minecraft

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The fight to keep ideas open to all

When transmitting personal speech, whether in the form of emails, text messages, video chats, or social media posts, Internet companies in general and social media companies in particular would be expected to act as common carriers. They would transmit our messages without prejudice, and they would be prohibited from exploiting the contents of those messages, or any related personal information, for commercial purposes. When an app needs to draw on personal data to perform a function requested by the user, it would operate as a closed-loop system, using the data only to provide the specified function. The privacy restrictions would also cover our conversations with chatbots like Alexa and Siri and our interactions with other automated systems such as Google’s search engine. Like the professional telegraph operators of old, the machines that “read” our correspondence would be expected to respect our privacy and dignity.

“Content is a word that was invented by people who want to create boxes that they can sell ads around, and they had to come up with a name for what goes in the box, and that word was “content.” In other words, if you’re using the word “content” that means you really don’t have a vision for what you’re making. Because creating good content requires specificity: It requires a point of view and strong writing and the right package to frame it, to catch someone’s attention, and to inspire trust.This is no easy task.”

“Our task is not to find the maximum amount of content in a work of art… Our task is to cut back content so that we can see the thing at all.”

Personal: Your data is yours. You can move it in, move it out, take it with you. The tool is also yours. You can use it as you like, and combine it with other tools.Multiplayer: Personal doesn’t have to mean solitary. One of the most interesting ways of thinking is thinking together. “Knowledge production is a group activity, not an individual one.” (Engelbart).Distributed: It’s a bummer that SaaS companies own most of our infrastructure for thought. I think it would be valuable if some of our infrastructure for thought was not-owned, or rather, owned by you, owned by everyone, interdependently, through some mix of federation, or p2p, maybe.Evolvable: Everyone thinks differently. I would like a tool with building blocks you can remix and evolve for new ways of thinking, new use-cases. An open-ended tool you can repurpose to your creative needs.

In Tools for Conviviality, Ivan Illich describes a kind of tool that is shared in common, and which expands personal creative freedom and communal interdependence. He calls these convivial tools. Bicycles, libraries, and sewing machines can all be convivial tools.

Improving Our Ability to Improve: A Call for Investment in a New Future

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Neil Gaiman: Why our future depends on libraries, reading and daydreaming

Ideas are fragile. If they were resolved, they would not be ideas, they would be products. It takes determined effort not to be consumed by the problems of a new idea. Problems are easy to articulate and understand, and they take the oxygen. Steve focused on the actual ideas, however partial and unlikely.

Defining the Dimensions of the “Space” of Computing

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Of what could art speak, indeed? If it adapts itself to what the majority of our society wants, art will be a meaningless recreation. If it blindly rejects that society, if the artist makes up his mind to take refuge in his dream, art will express nothing but a negation.

Of 15,000 Reasons to Stay in Relationships, Only Two Matter

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Fyodorov’s most famous follower was Konstantin Tsiolkovsky, whose astronautic theory shaped the Russian (and later the Soviet) space program. A drawing in his 1883 manuscript Free Space might be the first depiction of humans in orbital weightlessness. Four figures float in a spherical spaceship, each pointed in a different direction, disoriented. Tsiolkovsky’s ship seems better equipped than its passengers to operate in a fully three-dimensional environment. It has engines at both ends of a primary spine and gyroscopes on the other two axes, so that it can spin round and fire rocket thrust in any direction. This basic design — primary thruster, secondary retro rockets, axial gyros for orientation — has been used by all crewed Russian and American spacecraft to date, including the International Space Station.

In 1931, the German cultural critic Walter Benjamin wrote an essay called “Unpacking My Library,” describing these relationships with cultural objects. In the essay, Benjamin narrates removing his book collection from dusty crates, untouched for years. The volumes are splayed loose on the floor, “not yet touched by the mild boredom of order,” all set to be rearranged on shelves once more. For Benjamin, the very possession of these books formed his identity as a reader, writer, and human being — even if he hadn’t read all of them. They sat proudly on his shelves as symbols, representing the knowledge that he still aspired to gain or the cities he had traveled, where he encountered a book in a previously unknown shop. Collecting books was his way of interacting with the world, of building a worldview.

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The real urban jungle: how ancient societies reimagined what cities could beThe 12th-century Ta Prohm temple in Cambodia. Photograph: Mark Croucher/Alamy Stock Photo

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While we’re still in the early stages, AI tools have the potential to democratize content creation and empower human creators to focus on higher-level design and story-telling. Both the quantity and quality of UGC will improve as these tools are adopted. And over time, as AI models improve, the quality of emergent, AI-created content may one day even surpass the caliber of human-created content, paving the way for a shift in how we socialize and spend time in virtual worlds.

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“Just as the mail, the telegraph, the telephone, text and video are utilities for collaborative work, we believe Roblox and the metaverse will join these as essential tools for business communication,” Mr. Baszucki said. “Ultimately, someday we may even shop within Roblox.”

the last decade of social has been about simply putting videos, photos, and text up. And making this easy for anyone to publish. This has unlocked hundreds of billions of dollars of business value. I think it may not be enough to simply do more photos, text, and video. Instead, new platforms will emerge that let people author 3D content more easily — and maybe put it into a game. Or interactive content. Or NFTs. And of course audio. All of these new forms of media will probably look like toys at first, but they may catch on in a big way.

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If you're paying close attention, you might have noticed this phenomenon has an important corollary for platforms and publishers: no matter where you draw the line, your content moderation decisions will put you in a double-bind where you can't win. Double-bind content theory is that the edgiest content will be the one that garners the most attention, however by virtue of it being edgy it will have negative social outcomes and thus negatively impact business outcomes.

“One of the biggest issues social networks face is that, when left unchecked, people will engage disproportionately with more sensationalist and provocative content. This is not a new phenomenon. It is widespread on cable news today and has been a staple of tabloids for more than a century. At scale it can undermine the quality of public discourse and lead to polarization. In our case, it can also degrade the quality of our services.

Loot is randomized adventurer gear generated and stored on chain. Stats, images, and other functionality are intentionally omitted for others to interpret. Feel free to use Loot in any way you want.

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Freud, Nietzsche, Paglia, Fanon: our expert guide to the books of The White Lotus

the metaverse as Zuckerberg describes it—a shared 3D space where we live and work and view advertising in an embodied internet—would be an actual nightmare if it were to be designed, built, or administered by Facebook, perhaps the most notoriously drab, misinformation-littered, and aesthetically unappealing environment on the web. 

there is something inherently dystopian in a future where humans abandon the real world in favor of an escapist and consumerist-oriented fully immersive digital one. To want to spend any serious amount of time in a metaverse, it must be made more appealing than reality, a feat which can be accomplished in one of two ways—either the world outside is already shitty enough to drive you into a glitch-prone, murder-filled alternative, or the fantasy of becoming someone else is compelling enough to consume you totally. 

Tim Berners- Lee, founder of the World Wide Web, said: “The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished.”

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Stripe: Thinking Like a Civilization

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Afghanistan collapsed because corruption had hollowed out the state 

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“In our vision, metaverse platforms will connect people from different life experiences with new and interesting ideas,” Roblox CEO David Baszucki wrote in the prospectus. “We believe these connections will help build empathy by safely immersing people in different perspectives, where they will hear diverse viewpoints. And someday, as the metaverse supports a broader range of positive educational and social experiences, we hope this can expand opportunities for all people around the world.”

Epic has stated that its goal is to allow all IP owners and companies to build on top of its platform to the fullest.

mountain biking is the physical embodiment of the concept of mindfulness: it requires you to be in the moment, because if your attention wanders, the consequences can be severe. For that short hour or two on the trail, I am how people are meant to be—free. Biking helps me momentarily forget that I’ve spent years wrestling with anxiety and depression.

Mingling art and science opens minds

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Inside Facebook’s metaverse for work

Facebook isn’t the first company to come up with the idea of VR-powered office meetings. Spatial, which Recode’s Adam Clark Estes wrote about last year, offers a lot of the same features as Workrooms, raising familiar questions about whether Facebook is copying some of its smaller competitors.

Gayatri Spivak: ‘The Subaltern Speaks Through Dying’

Deaf and Incarcerated in the U.S.

Your Olympic Team May Be an Illusion

In 1963, the computer science luminary J.C.R. Licklider wrote a memo to his colleagues in which he envisioned a proto-internet that he called the “Intergalactic Computing Network.” The name was facetious, but it also linked Licklider’s computing vision to the overwhelming excitement around Cold War era space exploration and the sense of human possibility that came with it.

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Half of All Single People Just Don’t Want a Relationship

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If you're trying to write an 80,000 word novel and you only write 80,000 words, it might be acceptable. But if you wrote 300,000 or 400,000 words and cut that back to 80,000, it’s almost certain that it would be a better novel.

For me, a walk is a tool or platform upon which I can build, sort of like an operating system. When I become fully immersed in ‘walk mode’ the operating system begins to hum along, becoming almost autonomous, and I find the experience of this incredibly empowering. It just feels like the world and my place within it vibrates at a higher, more finely tuned level. I realize this sounds somewhat insane, and I suppose that’s true—but a long walk contains within it the act of losing your mind: the long hours, the endless kilometers. On a properly executed long walk, it feels like the world pops from HD to 4K in terms of detail and texture, if that makes any sense.

Slavoj Žižek: Last Exit to Socialism

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The salacious Middle Ages

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Our age of horror

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