(alternate phrasing for Chomskyites: technology increases the efficiency of manufacturing consent in the same way it increases the efficiency of manufacturing everything else)

Ennobling

As Barfield says, “the full meanings of words are flashing, iridescent shapes like flames—ever-flickering vestiges of the slowly evolving consciousness beneath them.”

In our century the fires of mass slaughter have burned low—perhaps from genuine spiritual advance, but perhaps from a general decline in the passion and energy of humanity. When peace is just apathy, avarice and accidie, peace is not a symptom of health. The peace of decline is the peace of death.

. So power and those who love power will crush you, and your old principles, like a bug.

Borgesian

Maybe it’s that we’re all dopamine junkies at heart and ascending the information chain keeps it pumping more intensely [citation needed].

onrushing subhuman future being manufactured for us will only accelerate.

without the ability to compel datacenters and compute to serve us in this way

ridding China of crypto holdings and mining meant strangling a rival to the Party’s social credit system in its crib.

Many wonders must be seen to be believed, and a far greater number must be believed before they can be seen.

It is as though Sergio Leone had gotten hold of the screenplay for Eyes Wide Shut and suffused it with a major dose of Phillip K. Dick. And the series pursues questions that Dick, over the course of his literary career, doggedly forced his gradually expanding public to confront. 

Reducing ourselves to one another’s pets is not.

A long time ago, in a data center far, far away, an ancient group of powerful beings known as sysadmins used to deploy infrastructure manually. Every server, every route table entry, every database configuration, and every load balancer was created and managed by hand. It was a dark and fearful age: fear of downtime, fear of accidental misconfiguration, fear of slow and fragile deployments, and fear of what would happen if the sysadmins fell to the dark side (i.e. took a vacation). The good news is that thanks to the DevOps Rebel Alliance, we now have a better way to do things: Infrastructure-as-Code (IAC).

provocative take on twenty-first-century attitudes about safety, privacy, celebrity culture, ethics, justice, and rational thought itself.

Techno-optimism

you are being formatted by them. You will be assimilated. ♠

Digital media is remaking all of these in such a way that media consumption more and more resembles the act of playing an alternate reality game.

“Nature has all sorts of phenomena in stock and can suit many different tastes,” wrote C. S. Lewis.

To be a consumer of digital media is to find yourself increasingly “trapped in an audience,” as Charlie Warzel puts it

“information ecosystem,”

Spiritual Speciation

Can you consider the possibility that, beneath the curtain of your conditioned ignorance, and under the noise of hyperactive ego, there is a silent Being at the core of yourself; that this is your true self; that this Being is divine; and that it offers an endless spring of joy, peace, and enchantment?  

helping to overcome the atomizing isolation and loneliness of liquid modernity.

he cable of institutional Christianity was corroded by science and cultural entropy;

what can be coomercialized for a social good can be weaponized for social control.

Data is the new oil, the ethereal residue of human life.

It isn't a little robot friend, it's a digital homunculus mirroring your face.

trying to save me from the death march of my race.

We need to getour thoughts on paper first and improve them there, where we canlook at them. Especially complex ideas are difficult to turn into alinear text in the head alone. If we try to please the critical readerinstantly, our workflow would come to a standstill. We tend to callextremely slow writers, who always try to write as if for print,perfectionists. Even though it sounds like praise for extremeprofessionalism, it is not: A real professional would wait until it wastime for proofreading, so he or she can focus on one thing at a time.While proofreading requires more focused attention, finding the rightwords during writing requires much more floating attention.

Statistics

You will want to report this as follows:

Example: Reporting the results of ANOVA

Among the potential benefits are receiving a helpful treatment

For they are themselves so stupid and conceive others to be so dull that, although the speeches which they compose are worse than those which some laymen improvise, nevertheless they promise to make their students such clever orators that they will not overlook any of the possibilities which a subject affords