So adtech, by extension, you are deciding how advertisers are supposed to make people feel like they are worthless. Adtech is the technology that decides how worth gets distributed. That’s the broad philosophical overview and the idea I have come around on.VFD: I think that’s pretty right.Shoshana Wodinsky: It’s really more philosophical and profound than people would like. Because they like to see their jobs as making beeps and boops that decide where the money goes, and they’re just making software that connects to more software, and it’s not their job to decide whose money is good or bad, or who gets it in the end. That’s somebody else’s job. It’s a job that’s predicated by staying in your lane and kicking the can down the road to somebody else. And when you have enough people deferring responsibility, and enough people just not caring, of course you’re going to get insane shit. Like, you have companies that won’t fund LGBT news outlets but will fund white neo-nazi news outlets – not because they know that’s happening, but because that’s what the tech told them to do. And when you call them out on it they’re just like: Oh, no, I had no idea! And it’s like: why didn’t you have an idea?

Likewise, curated link directories were a thing back when the Internet was in its infancy, but the task of maintaining such a directory is a full time job.

The creation of a bookmark list is a surprisingly fun project, it has some of the appeal of scrapbooking; and the end-result is also appealing to browse through.

relying on feeds shapes everything you write into a blog entry. It's stifling, homogenizing. The blogosphere, what remains of it, is incredibly samey.

It's a bit strange, almost nobody seems to be doing this. Looking through a sample of personal websites, very few of them has links to other personal websites.

Traffic is evaporating, and small websites are dying, which brings even fewer visitors. Rinse and repeat.

There are a lot of small websites on the Internet: Interesting websites, beautiful websites, unique websites. Unfortunately they are incredibly hard to find. You cannot find them on Google or Reddit

For veggies, the Irish relied on cabbages, onions, garlic, and parsnips, with some wild herbs and greens spicing up the plate, and on the fruit front, everyone loved wild berries, like blackberries and rowanberries, but only apples were actually grown on purpose. And, if you lived near the coast, edible seaweed like dulse and sloke made for tasty salads and side dishes.

Which raises the question: What was Irish food like for the 1500 years between Patrick and potatoes?The short answer is: milky. Every account of what Irish people ate, from the pre-Christian Celts up through the 16th-century anti-British freedom fighters, revolves around dairy. The island's green pastures gave rise to a culture that was fiercely proud of its cows (one of the main genres of Ancient Irish epics is entirely about violent cattle rustling), and a cuisine that revolved around banbidh, or "white foods."

Still

Still, looking across the political landscape, it is unclear who the David is to take on the tech Goliaths. Republicans are cozy with big business, [4] Democrats are cozy with tech interests, and constituents may not rally behind the issue on their own if the flow of information is controlled by the companies under threat.

Hindman’s underlying claim is that if one website has a wide array of content that frequently updates itself and is also tailored to users’ interests, then that website will dominate their attention. But, again, the advantage of bigness holds: the expenditure behind a feature like personalization is only feasible for the largest companies.

For instance, in his memoir, Twitter co-founder Biz Stone announces that he has come up with a new “social good”–oriented definition of capitalism (fact check: he is actually just repackaging Andrew Carnegie’s 1889 “The Gospel of Wealth,” a treatise justifying the concentration of wealth as a means of promoting public welfare).

Research in 2013 from demographer Richelle Winkler shows that in the U.S., age segregation is often as ingrained as racial segregation. Using census data from 1990 to 2010, Winkler found that in some parts of the country, old (age 60+) and young (age 20–34) are roughly as segregated as Hispanics and whites.

“I think we’re in the midst of a dangerous experiment,” Cornell University professor Karl Pillemer told The Huffington Post. “This is the most age-segregated society that’s ever been. Vast numbers of younger people are likely to live into their 90s without contact with older people. As a result, young people’s view of aging is highly unrealistic and absurd.”

In his book How Old Are You? Brown University historian Howard Chudacoff demonstrates that age was not an important part of everyday life for most of the 19th century. According to Chudacoff, “The country’s institutions were not structured according to age-defined divisions, and its cultural norms did not strongly prescribe age-related behavior.” (Birthdays were rarely celebrated or noticed — and the happy birthday song wasn’t even invented until 1934.) However, during the industrial age in the U.S., an assembly-line mentality led to grouping people by age, in the hopes of standardizing everything from the education of the young to the care for the elderly. And it brought some benefits. But the extreme degree to which we’ve shunted young people into educational institutions, middle-aged adults into workplaces, and older people into retirement communities, senior centers, and nursing homes has come with costs.

For all the hype that surrounds them, neural networks can’t reflect or explain anything deeper about cultural or societal phenomena any more than sharing a favorite character from The Office can predict long-term compatibility with a Tinder match. These systems can only instrumentalize taste; they turn any expression of self into a reductive data point meant to generate more data at the same level. They presuppose that “liking” just means more “liking” and that is as deep as our desire can be. As with vibes, these metrics carry no context or narrative; they can tell you nothing about how or why something might be desirable, only that they vaguely seem like they might be desirable because they seem similar to other things that are desirable. This opacity encourages users to disregard the possibility of understanding their desire at a deeper level, of probing it, developing it, attenuating it, or even negating it if need be.

While seemingly open-ended and allowing for an infinite recombination of elements, the idea of “vibes” is reductive. It discourages the more difficult work of interpretation and the search for meaning that defines human experience. It diverts attention away from narrative and moral implications in favor of foregrounding the idea of affect as inexplicable, ineffable — a matter of chance correlation of elements rather than something that requires deliberate causal explanation. The vibes framework may hone our abilities to identify settings like “cozy” or “cursed,” but it doesn’t give instructions on how we might build them or avoid them in our lives. As an analytic, vibes don’t connect feelings and consequence; as such, it is symbiotic with passive modes of media consumption.

The vibes are off, but they’re off fundamentally because they focus only on feelings and emotional connections that have already existed. They don’t provide or imagine pathways to new futures; they allow only for an understanding of what feels good or bad based on experiences that have already happened, things that have already been seen.

Content systems optimized by machine learning amplify the repetitive quality of internet content by identifying and recycling the same topics that generate interest and controversy, and the tendency spreads elsewhere in culture, such as in the continuous, unnecessary reiterations of movie franchises like Star Wars or The Matrix. The vibes are gamed until they become stale, and an increasing facility in vibes makes this trend all the more evident and noticeable.

In other words, “vibes” are similar to the approximations that machine learning systems use, and the two feed off of each other synergistically.

These masked bad vibes are actually pointing toward urgent questions: How do we break out of this loop? How do we escape this cycle of political deadlock, Covid lockdown, and the dread of climate catastrophe? How do we create new art forms that aren’t just remixes or nostalgic revivals of existing ones? PC Music can pose the question but can’t become the answer; it can only manifest the problem in a heightened, intensified form.

Consider the vibes-based music categories like hyperpop and PC Music, which serve as an avant-garde of the moment, mixing a wide variety of other genres with hyper-specific cultural references and inside jokes.

Instead it effectively identifies a “rainy” vibe through correlations of an initially arbitrary set of parameters.

As the salience of vibes as a way of (not) explaining experience has grown, so too have the applications of machine learning and neural networks. This parallel may not be a mere coincidence.

Intuitively, the question seems to me to be this: Can societies without religion reproduce themselves over the long run? 

When a civilization stops giving birth to its future, and ceases to understand why it’s important to do so, it’s in trouble. This is a global crisis of the industrialized world, the collapse in fertility

Harvard sociologist Carle C. Zimmerman’s classic work Family And Civilization said that the collapse of the Greek and the Roman empires had to do with the collapse of the social forces that formed families.

Wokeness in America as hegemonic left-wing illiberalism is our own Cultural Revolution.

“The real cell of society in the United States is the individual,” he finds. This is so because the cell most foundational (per Aristotle) to society, “the family, has disintegrated.” Meanwhile, in the American system, “everything has a dual nature, and the glamour of high commodification abounds. Human flesh, sex, knowledge, politics, power, and law can all become the target of commodification.” This “commodification, in many ways, corrupts society and leads to a number of serious social problems.” In the end, “the American economic system has created human loneliness” as its foremost product, along with spectacular inequality. As a result, “nihilism has become the American way, which is a fatal shock to cultural development and the American spirit.”

Who asked for this? Who asked for superheroes to have sex lives, or gay sex lives? What does it mean that the ideological colonization of the superhero genre, the modern mythology of our times, means that transgressive sexual desire is now a definitive characteristic of our pop culture god figures?

In this respect, I don’t think our meritocracy is all that different from previous aristocracy. The definition of aristocracy is just the rule of the best, and people who have merit are also by definition the best. It’s the same kind of rhetoric. Yes, aristocracy usually relied more on birth, but that’s just a mechanism for identifying the people who are going to be perceived to be the best.

I think the underemphasized concern here is the extent to which the other 90 percent end up buying into this value system to some degree. I’ve been in the child-rearing game, and I see a lot of the madness firsthand — parents freaking out when their child takes a sip of soda out of the refrigerator because they somehow imagine this is really going to make it impossible for them to demonstrate enough virtue to get into the right college. They will curate every experience for their kids — every travel experience, every friendship. I mostly see it among members of the upper-middle class who can afford it. But increasingly, the same sets of values and practices are clearly spreading to where people can’t afford it and where it doesn’t make sense. They’re also buying into this idea that kids have to be absolutely optimized, maximized so they can get onto the narrow path that leads to a stable upper-middle-class life, and otherwise it’s Starbucks until the end of time. It basically takes away a potential countervailing mechanism. If society were such that you produce this one noxious class but then that gives rise to a reaction of people angry with this class and then acting out, you might have some conflict. Hopefully, it’s not violent but can be mediated through political institutions, but you have at least a mechanism that might lead to a solution. But when the ideology starts to spread, it effectively removes the basis for that conflict, it neutralizes the opposition in a way, and that’s a problem. It means that the system just continues further down the road toward greater instability.

The canonical example of a contagious idea would be some kind of evangelical religion, where they would say: "Hey, this is the way the universe is structured. This is how the cosmos exists, but also convert other people to this way of thinking, go out and find people and tell them this as well."But there's a way simpler idea of memes: a contagious song, a catch phrase, a political slogan, or even a symbol that's easy to draw. Wouldn't that be a meme as well? So looking at this I thought that some ideas are more contagious than others and some ideas aren't contagious at all—they just kind of sit there. So what's at the other end of the scale: what kind of ideas resist being spread? What information would you intrinsically not want anyone else to find out about? Or maybe you do want to spread it, but you can't for whatever reason?

And the vine-dressers would sacrifice goats in honor of Dionysus—for the goat is an enemy of the vine; and they would skin them, fill the skin-bags with air and jump on them.

If, in their effort to scan the literary field from Amazon’s point of view, the pages that follow try to see things as if this margin of autonomous creativity weren’t so, and as though the whole world were already Amazon, they also watch for signs of the enduring limits of the corporation’s power as the super-author of our time.

Our interest in fiction is in part an interest in encountering different degrees of (albeit, properly formatted) otherness, the better to assimilate it to ourselves in the spirit of personal augmentation.

Fiction in the Age of Amazon is the symbolic provision of more—above all, of more various and interesting “life experience” than can be had by any mortal being, let alone one constrained by the demands of work and family.

I could run my server on my own hardware – e.g. my laptop or a dedicated Raspberry Pi – but that’s unwieldy, subject to downtime, and so on. The alternative is to host a virtual server on a third-party cloud provider. This is unbelievably ironic. The best way for me to participate in Urbit’s decentralized, peer-to-peer universe is… to run a server on AWS.Obviously neither of those two options are desirable for hosting my Urbit server. Hosting on my own hardware is annoying, hosting in the centralized cloud defeats the whole point.This is where Urbit shows its age: it has no ambition for decentralized server ownership. The notion of a user running their own server, having to guarantee its uptime, backup its data, etc., is antiquated. If Urbit were reimagined in 2021, it would be running on Sia or Ethereum: your data is stored on the blockchain, your applications are running as perpetual smart contracts, and you can access it from anywhere in the world with just your private key. That’s compelling. In that world, both uptime of your personal instance and storage of your data are guaranteed as long as the network is healthy.

In this timeless land the dialect was richer in words with which to measure time than any other language; beyond the motionless and everlasting crai every day in the future had a name of its own. Crai meant tomorrow and forever; the day after tomorrow was prescrai [sic; should be pescrai — see update] and the day after that pescrille; then came pescruflo, maruflo, maruflone; the seventh day was maruflicchio. But these precise terms had an undertone of irony. They were used less often to indicate this or that day than they were said all together in a string, one after the other; their very sound was grotesque and they were like a reflection of the futility of trying to make anything clear out of the cloudiness of crai. I, too, began to lose hope that anything new might come forth from maruflo or maruflone or maruflicchio.

Toadying and pusillanimity define much cultural writing — “Please, shoot me last; I will happily denounce myself!” cry the white males; “No, shoot them first,” coldly reply the children of affirmative action who seek to take their places and turn all culture into a question of competing claims of superior victimhood.

Indexing flowered at a time when readers saw books as great mosaics of useful tags and examples that they could collect and organise for themselves. The chief tool they used to do this job was not the index but the commonplace book: a notebook, preferably organised by subject headings known as loci communes (common places), which provided both a material space in which to store material and a set of designators to help retrieve it.

The crafty and energetic Paris publisher Charlotte Guillard decided to reprint his edition of the Letters of Jerome. The Sorbonne had condemned Erasmus’s works, so Guillard (or a press professional in her shop) drew up an index of the passages in Erasmus’s commentary that most contradicted conventional Catholic wisdom. It took the form of a letter to the pious reader, warning that Erasmus’s paratexts ‘did more to cover the texts with darkness than to shed light on them’. Then it quoted a long series of passages in which Erasmus argued against practices including excessive veneration of the saints, supposedly in order to help the pious reader avoid them – but also, of course, to help the Protestant or critical Catholic reader discover them. A single index, creatively compiled, could make a big book respectable and subversive at the same time.

Konrad Pellikan, who compiled the index for Erasmus’s 1521 edition of the church father Cyprian, explained that he had gathered his lemmas quickly and keyed his references only to full pages, not to smaller segments of each page, ‘to avoid easing the way for gross laziness’. Conrad Gessner, who explained in detail how to compile an index on slips of paper, insisted that indexes were vital: without them, life would be too short to master more than one subject. But he also worried about those ‘who rely only on the indexes ... and who do not read the complete texts of their authors in the proper order and methodically’. The index gave its users formidable power to find and quote adages and examples, narratives and poems, scriptural and patristic texts, whether or not they had actually read the full works they cited. That power in turn inspired anxiety, especially among those who had learned what they knew in the old-fashioned way, or claimed that they had. Would the index kill close reading?

The world surely contains some usurious Jews, gay paedophiles, muslim fanatics, sexually aggressive black men, hysterical women. But if you tell those ‘truths’ without the truth of others, who do not conform to such precise clichés, and without the truth that telling these certain individual truths as constitutive is a technique of oppression, then your ‘truth’ is in the service of a coercive lie. The comedian Wanda Sykes has joked that it is only since Obama that she’s able to buy watermelons: before a black president, the truth of her taste was too costly to indulge. Not because of anything intrinsic to the desire, but because of the gaze under which it fell. ‘Look at all these white people looking at me’, she says. ‘I ain’t buying a whole watermelon for your enjoyment.’

This is a whole other level at which the search for a ‘progressive’ content in culture can blind us. Underlying the suppleness of the system is the fact that not only does it fundamentally not matter to it which symbolic content you choose from an either-or on offer, nor even does it if you exercise that Boolean literalist rejection of the choice, except if and insofar as you undermine its power – which in capitalist culture means that you refuse its commodity-logic. We beat the system that throws up the art, the culture, not if we hate it or resent it – only, ultimately, if we stop it making money.

It is by this reversibility that such binaries works. The point of the familiar Madonna-Whore syndrome is that you can’t win by choosing one over the other. The deck is stacked, the dice loaded. It is the dyad, not one or other of its terms, that is the problem. That old insight helps show the limitations of the hunt for ‘empowering’, ‘progressive’ depictions, as well as for oppressive stereotypes. Of seeking problem and solution in representation’s content, rather in the range of choices made available.

As a supplement to paranoid reading, Sedgwick draws from Klein to propose a different kind of analysis. ‘The greatest interest of Klein’s concept [of ‘position’, rather than analytical ‘type’ or ’stage’] lies … in her seeing the paranoid position always in the oscillatory context of a very different possible one: the depressive position. … [This] is an anxiety-mitigating achievement that the infant or adult only sometimes, and often only briefly, succeeds in inhabiting’. From this position, Sedgwick suggests as methodology a drive to pleasure, including aesthetic; amelioration of the everyday; and openness to surprise, both good and bad. She calls this process ‘reparative reading’. ‘The desire of a reparative impulse … is additive and accretive. Its fear, a realistic one, is that the culture surrounding it is inadequate or inimical to its nurture; it wants to assemble and confer plenitude on an object that will then have resources to offer to an inchoate self’. This is perfectly compatible with the paranoid critique of un-nurturing culture. Where it differs – complements – is in what it wants to do with that culture’s objects: [T]o use one’s own resources to assemble or “repair” the murderous part-objects into something like a whole – though … not necessarily like any preexisting whole. Once assembled to one’s own specifications, the more satisfying object is available both to be identified with and to offer one nourishment and comfort in turn. Sedgwick closes with a beautiful aspiration, to ‘extract[…] sustenance from the objects of a culture – even of a culture whose avowed desire has often been not to sustain them’.

In an inversion of the fury of those ragefully defending texts from critics, those critics can be invested less in rigour than in the attack itself, going from diagnosis to performative dismissal, policing transgressions with surplus enthusiasm. In the addictive affect-economy of social media, this can come to mean a bleak and border-guarding backslapping.

Thus we were granted one of the great political autocritiques in literature, a text that interrogates and subverts its own predecessors.

Unlike Tokyo, a vast city held together by slippery threads of ramen

London’s appetites generate a colossal amount of food waste: with better organisation, it could be reduced. bio-bean is a company that collects waste coffee grounds from King’s Cross, Liverpool Street and other big London train stations and converts it to biofuel.

asparagus (or, in cockneydom, ‘sparrowgrass’)

There used to be a common language of food in the city, whereas now we have incoherent Babel of many cuisines, often exciting but hard to decipher

But when it came to seasonal produce, the whole city ate in sync. Sellers put notices in The Times to announce that Jersey pears had just come into season or that East Lothian potatoes had arrived.

n Germany, some doctors still practice Hildegardian medicine. In the town of Allenbach, for example, a clinic focuses exclusively on Hildegardian treatments. Beyond the realm of modern medicine, though, Hildgard’s work is alive and well at monasteries. At St. Hildegard Abbey, founded by Hildegard herself in Eibingen in 1165, nuns carry on her culinary traditions, making and selling “cookies of joy” along with galangal-ginger cookies, wine, and a selection of herbal liqueurs and teas.

she was struck by a mysterious illness after the abbot at Disibodenberg initially refused to let her leave and found her own monastery. (The abbot was reluctant to lose the prophet-nun, who’d attracted a fair share of visitors and revenue.) Hildegard lay in bed for months, unable to do anything until the will of God (i.e., her founding her own abbey) was completed. When the abbot finally relented, she made a miraculous recovery.

Born on the cusp of the prosperous 12th century, she was poised to reap the benefits of a booming era in European history. “It was just this far-out time,” Sweet says, adding that Hildegard was born into an era of scholastic advancement, population growth, and agriculturally beneficial weather. Although she would have lived separate from the men at the coed Disibodenberg monastery, Sweet notes that Hildegard would have likely communicated with educated monks and had access to the library, the medicinal garden, and the infirmary. The result was an education that rivaled those of leading medieval minds. “So Hildegard would have gotten the Latin-age academic tradition … the existing infirmarian tradition, and then, third, this sort of medical-women tradition with the midwives and the healers,” Sweet says. “So what she ends up giving us is a wonderful mixture of all that.”

The Hildegardian pharma-bakery didn’t just prescribe cookies to counter depression, but also recommended licorice-flavored cookies for nausea and ginger varieties for constipation.

Hildegard’s pharmacopoeia revolved around the kitchen and the garden. In her books Physica and Causes and Cures, she outlines herbal and culinary remedies for a vast array of ailments. For a weak heart, she proposes a daily teaspoon of “wine for the heart,” consisting of boiled parsley, honey, and wine. For stomach pain, a nightcap of wine mixed with powdered ginger, galingale (a ginger relative from Southeast Asia), and zedoary (another ginger cousin, from India). And for matters of melancholy, she offers her “cookies of joy” (or “nerve cookies”), wielding the key ingredients of spelt flour, nutmeg, cinnamon, and cloves to “calm all bitterness of the heart and mind, open your heart and impaired senses, and make your mind cheerful.”

The real scandal, if I may, is the fact that so many people who attended one seem to have no idea what it’s for. So let me come out and tell you what a university is for: a university is a place where people help each other access the highest intellectual goods.

In the real world, Plato’s view seemed to be that philosophers arise because occasionally a human being—for no reason, following no plan, and certainly not because he was secretly marked out as One of the Special Ones from birth—manages by sheer luck to find his way to the lone worthwhile life. Thus Socrates’s shortcomings with respect to the intellectual “talents” most valued in his era—memory and rhetorical cleverness—are often thematized by Plato. Plato’s explanation for why most people don’t get access to the best things is unsatisfying to those who are expecting either a tale of justice, such as the noble lie of the triumph of the talented, or a tale of injustice, such as the liberal account of how the equal potential in all of us is squandered when the powerful oppress the weak. But you don’t need to oppress people in order to withhold intellectual treasures from them if there is simply no reason they would find them in the first place. The intellectual goods lie hidden in plain view.

A university is a world inside the world, a haven, a bubble, and those who reacted to the college-admissions scandal tried to pop that bubble. My initial impulse was to see this as an act of aggression and hostility: they are trying to blame us for everything! But with hindsight, I have begun to entertain the possibility of a different interpretation. Maybe the sentiment driving the scandalmongering was marked as much by envy as indignation. After all, one reason you might try to pop a bubble is because you want in.

And it’s totally amazing that human beings can do this

“It is happening right here—this is what universities are for: reading Aristotle together.” All the arguments about elitism and corporatization and donations were as irrelevant as the ivy growing on the walls.

If I had left the university after college, I believe the intellectual life I occasionally glimpsed as an undergraduate would have faded into a nostalgic memory.

Our society has many questions and uncertainties about the just and correct manner of distributing wealth, or health care, or honor, or political power; but these difficulties seem insignificant in comparison to the gaping chasm of total cluelessness we have when it comes to the problem of distributing the very highest goods of all—the intellectual ones.

The same is true for many of my close high-school classmates: If they left for college, most have never returned for longer than a few months at a time. Practically all of them now live in major metro areas scattered across the country, not our hometown. The kinds of jobs they are now qualified for—in corporate or management consulting, nonprofits, media, and finance—don’t really exist in Yakima.

Plavchan has considered offering a separate course on directory structure — but he’s not sure it’s worth it.

Plavchan agrees that there are limits to how much he can bridge the generational divide. Despite his efforts to tailor his teaching, “some of the tools we use rely on some knowledge that our students just aren’t getting.”

A cynic could blame generational incompetence. An international 2018 study that measured eighth-graders’ “capacities to use information and computer technologies productively” proclaimed that just 2 percent of Gen Z had achieved the highest “digital native” tier of computer literacy.

It could also have to do with the other software they’re accustomed to — dominant smartphone apps like Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, and YouTube all involve pulling content from a vast online sea rather than locating it within a nested hierarchy.

The primary issue is that the code researchers write, run at the command line, needs to be told exactly how to access the files it’s working with — it can’t search for those files on its own. Some programming languages have search functions, but they’re difficult to implement and not commonly used. It’s in the programming lessons where STEM professors, across fields, are encountering problems.

Guarín-Zapata was taught computer basics in high school — how to save, how to use file folders, how to navigate the terminal

Colling’s courses now include a full two-hour lecture to explain directory structure.

despite the slick approach of several of these businesses, at the heart of it, the broad objective of almost all of them is to protect the Indian cow from slaughter. The profit surpluses generated by many of them are either entirely offered or generously shared with cow shelters. They believe that unlike cows of foreign species, which have undergone many genetic mutations, the Indian cow is special.

Unadulterated cow urine and dung have always been procured from cow-shelters by the traditional for use at home and in temple pujas. What’s recent is the array of therapeutic and beauty products flooding the market that use these as ingredients. There are face packs, bath scrubbers, mosquito coils and incense sticks that contain cow dung. There are creams, cough syrups, body oils, health tonics, weight-loss tonics, and floor disinfectants that contain distilled cow urine. You name it, they have it. And the names of gau mutra or gau arka (cow urine) or cow dung are not hidden away in long lists of fine print on the packages. It is star-lighted right up front as the chief ingredient in bold letters.

The peaks correspond to the symbols: “a”, “c”, “e”, “i”, “o”, “s” and “y” of the EVA alphabet.

D0 Soil is dry; irrigation delivery begins earlyDryland crop germination is stuntedActive fire season beginsWinter resort visitation is low; snowpack is minimal D1 Dryland pasture growth is stunted; producers give supplemental feed to cattleLandscaping and gardens need irrigation earlier; wildlife patterns begin to changeStock ponds and creeks are lower than usual D2 Grazing land is inadequateProducers increase water efficiency methods and drought-resistant cropsFire season is longer, with high burn intensity, dry fuels, and large fire spatial extent; more fire crews are on staffWine country tourism increases; lake- and river-based tourism declines; boat ramps closeTrees are stressed; plants increase reproductive mechanisms; wildlife diseases increaseWater temperature increases; programs to divert water to protect fish beginRiver flows decrease; reservoir levels are low and banks are exposed D3 Livestock need expensive supplemental feed, cattle and horses are sold; little pasture remains, producers find it difficult to maintain organic meat requirementsFruit trees bud early; producers begin irrigating in the winterFederal water is not adequate to meet irrigation contracts; extracting supplemental groundwater is expensiveDairy operations closeFire season lasts year-round; fires occur in typically wet parts of state; burn bans are implementedSki and rafting business is low, mountain communities sufferOrchard removal and well drilling company business increase; panning for gold increasesLow river levels impede fish migration and cause lower survival ratesWildlife encroach on developed areas; little native food and water is available for bears, which hibernate lessWater sanitation is a concern, reservoir levels drop significantly, surface water is nearly dry, flows are very low; water theft occursWells and aquifer levels decrease; homeowners drill new wellsWater conservation rebate programs increase; water use restrictions are implemented; water transfers increaseWater is inadequate for agriculture, wildlife, and urban needs; reservoirs are extremely low; hydropower is restricted D4 Fields are left fallow; orchards are removed; vegetable yields are low; honey harvest is smallFire season is very costly; number of fires and area burned are extensiveMany recreational activities are affectedFish rescue and relocation begins; pine beetle infestation occurs; forest mortality is high; wetlands dry up; survival of native plants and animals is low; fewer wildflowers bloom; wildlife death is widespread; algae blooms appearPolicy change; agriculture unemployment is high, food aid is neededPoor air quality affects health; greenhouse gas emissions increase as hydropower production decreases; West Nile Virus outbreaks riseWater shortages are widespread; surface water is depleted; federal irrigation water deliveries are extremely low; junior water rights are curtailed; water prices are extremely high; wells are dry, more and deeper wells are drilled; water quality is poo

However, he added, “I don’t know of a medical society that doesn’t serve alcohol.” Even the attendees at the Research Society on Alcoholism get two drink chits at the opening reception, he said.

“When you extinguish a learned habit, it doesn’t disappear,” Koob said. “All you’re doing is replacing that habit with a different habit.” Volkow compared my behavior to a binge. “It’s an automatic compulsive behavior,” she said.

Also, as a young father, I was thinking of the positive impact this could make

I could manage a meal in a restaurant, but if anyone proposed a toast I felt as if I were inviting bad luck to the table by raising my glass of water.

But here’s the truth: Annotation is just a comment box you can put anywhere on a web page. Some annotations are great! If you have a coherent community with shared goals and common values, they can be amazing and create something on a Wikipedia scale. But they have all the flaws of the comment box, too — namely, they’re a great place to see people be assholes to one another, and most people don’t much of unique value to add to the discussion.

To my surprise, IRC is making a comeback

The small web is for the rest of us. Those of us who don't live in America (or Germany), don't make six-figure salaries and can't even dream of flying to a meetup on another continent. Those of us who struggle to be heard at all.

Over on the IndieWeb wiki, Tantek Çelik claims the small web is just what they've been doing, under another name. Uh, no. Hands off. You already have a community, with a fancy brand name, international events and so on. Leave us alone.

In fact, making a leaf-less salad not only expands your concept of what a “salad” could be, it makes you a more creative, more adaptable cook and vegetable-eater by removing a component you may have been leaning on a bit too heavily.

And if you’re wondering about horrisonant, it’s “< stem of Latin horrēre (see horripilation n.) + sonānt-em sounding” and means “Sounding horribly; of terrible sound.”

Last Best Hope was inspired, Packer says, by “political pamphlets from other periods of crisis.” In the best tradition of Carlyle and Swift, he spends much of the first half of the book summarizing year-old tweets.

The end goal of both zine and indieweb technologies is ownership of your own identity without a filter. Before proceeding, let me put you in a good vibe with 666 casino where great casino games are placed on a site. Join today to receive awesome welcome rewards! Just as subcultures and those whose experiences are marginalized by mainstream media have flocked to zines to find community and express (possibly unpopular) opinions, the Indie Web has the potential to be a great tool for those who do not find corporate social media to fit their needs.

That’s how London became a preferred place for Hollywood to record: a large population of well-trained musicians, whose union doesn’t insist on residuals. Several London-based singers I spoke with suggested that the reason Hollywood doesn’t record in, say, Germany as often is that singers in continental Europe have steadier income and are less dependent on session work. And once a producer decides that even London-based musicians are too demanding — well, then there’s always Prague or Budapest. The gorgeous voices you heard in a John Ford Western were the sound of unions and full-time employment; in a Hollywood score today they are monuments to the globalizing power of the gig economy.

Workers get paid when they accept and complete a delivery, and a gamelike system of rewards and penalties keeps them moving: high scores for being on time, low scores and fewer orders for tardiness, and so on. Chavez and others call it the patrón fantasma, the phantom boss — always watching and quick to punish you for being late but nowhere to be found when you need $10 to fix your bike or when you get doored and have to go to the hospital.

In March, the researchers said Instagram should reduce exposure to celebrity content about fashion, beauty and relationships, while increasing exposure to content from close friends, according to a slide deck they uploaded to Facebook’s internal message board. A current employee, in comments on the message board, questioned that idea, saying celebrities with perfect lives were key to the app. “Isn’t that what IG is mostly about?” he wrote. Getting a peek at “the (very photogenic) life of the top 0.1%? Isn’t that the reason why teens are on the platform?” A now-former executive questioned the idea of overhauling Instagram to avoid social comparison. “People use Instagram because it’s a competition,” the former executive said. “That’s the fun part.”

In five presentations over 18 months to this spring, the researchers conducted what they called a “teen mental health deep dive” and follow-up studies. They came to the conclusion that some of the problems were specific to Instagram, and not social media more broadly. That is especially true concerning so-called social comparison, which is when people assess their own value in relation to the attractiveness, wealth and success of others. “Social comparison is worse on Instagram,” states Facebook’s deep dive into teen girl body-image issues in 2020, noting that TikTok, a short-video app, is grounded in performance, while users on Snapchat, a rival photo and video-sharing app, are sheltered by jokey filters that “keep the focus on the face.” In contrast, Instagram focuses heavily on the body and lifestyle. The features that Instagram identifies as most harmful to teens appear to be at the platform’s core. The tendency to share only the best moments, a pressure to look perfect and an addictive product can send teens spiraling toward eating disorders, an unhealthy sense of their own bodies and depression, March 2020 internal research states. It warns that the Explore page, which serves users photos and videos curated by an algorithm, can send users deep into content that can be harmful. “Aspects of Instagram exacerbate each other to create a perfect storm,” the research states.

Among teens who reported suicidal thoughts, 13% of British users and 6% of American users traced the desire to kill themselves to Instagram, one presentation showed.

G & O owner Oil notes that the he’s already seeing this populist political effect. “Before electric assist and electric cargo bikes became as reliable as they are now, you’d see a very specific, very homogeneous type of person at city hall to speak up on behalf of cycling,” Oil said. “And they were typically wearing recreational clothing or they were typically retirees and most of them were men. Now those public hearings are always packed with mothers and young children, good people to listen when it comes to safety. The same thing goes for disabled people. Electric-assist makes cycling more accessible to people living with disabilities and mobility challenges.”

“Once you teach a man how to shelter himself and feed his own face, then fuck you,” Tommy explains. “You can say that to everybody. It's a powerful thing. They don't want to teach you that. In fourth grade they should put seeds in your hand. They want control. But nobody else is in control—you are.”

The magazine was launched the same year as Gloria Steinem's Ms. and found a similar audience, with its distribution at one point hitting 9,000 copies.

I'd been thumbing through an issue of the Whole Earth Catalog, a compendium of self-help advice and product reviews, founded and edited by Stewart Brand, that became the bible for back-to-the-landers when it was first published in 1968. (Steve Jobs would later call it “Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along.”) What struck me most was the opening statement: “We are as gods and might as well get used to it. A realm of intimate, personal power is developing—power of the individual to conduct his own education, find his own inspiration, shape his own environment, and share his adventure with whoever is interested.”

Berg didn't know it then, but when he joined the commune he became part of the greatest urban exodus in American history. From the late '60s to the mid '70s, nearly a million young people went back to the land. Nowhere was the urge to reconnect with nature more keenly felt than in San Francisco, where droves of young people were suddenly fleeing a city overrun by heroin, speed, and bad vibes. Cops were shooting down Black Panthers in Oakland and the military was tear-gassing students in People's Park in Berkeley. Vietnam veterans were looking for a salve for their PTSD. Faithful Marxists aimed to put their ideals to the test. Some just wanted to get high in the woods.

a while back for april fools if you clicked the april fools link your icon got a little top hat on the dashboard, which accomplished nothing and literally only showed up on the dash and yet still annoyed enough people that they made userscripts to hide the hatsand i’m not gonna lie, i think there are a lot of people out there who might not pay to give their icon a little hat but who might instead pay one dollar to give another user of their choice a little hat for a day which could at any time and without recourse be overwritten by another user paying a dollar to give that icon a different hat for a day, leading to lucrative hat wars

Many communities-in-recovery follow some sort of shared rubric for identifying and relinquishing a desire to control or manage one’s own unproductive anger or resentment, not because the ideal state for the sober alcoholic is one of constant imperturbability, but because the delusion that repeated attempts to control one’s circumstances through sheer force of will is a particularly damaging one, and we are often able to live much more sanely and usefully on another basis. The design is not to rid oneself of the experience of anger completely. Anger is often a perfectly appropriate, powerful, necessary, practical, and even restorative state. Rather, the design is to seek out a steadier foundation for living, to distinguish our angers from our fears, our shames, our desires, our delusions, our hopes, our ambitions, our securities, and to seek out appropriate support, counsel, freedom, and possible courses of action (even sometimes possible courses of inaction, as the case may be).

It is “detracting from the enjoyment of the volunteer editors who actually contribute to this encyclopaedia,” he writes.

The article tells how “the division acquitted itself well” even against “stiffening resistance,” how it “held the line” and earned the “grudging respect” of skeptical commanders. One contributor has used the eyebrow-raising phrase “baptism of fire.” It’s as if the editors don’t see the part lower down the page where a soldier uses the phrase “and then we cleaned a Jew hole.”

In her neighborhood, she remembers fondly, there was a recycling kiosk that rewarded you with literature. “For this number of kilos of paper you could get these books,” she says. “Classics: Pushkin, Tolstoy. Reading was encouraged.”

Coffman knows the book is legit, because she happens to have a copy on loan from the library. When she goes to the cited page, she finds a paragraph that appears to confirm all the Wikipedia article’s wild claims. But then she reads the first sentence of the next paragraph: “This is, of course, nonsense.”The level of bad faith is eye-opening for Coffman. She is “very appalled.” She sees that her confidence in Wikipedia was “very much misplaced.”

"No temperature rise is 'safe'," the editorial says. "In the past 20 years, heat-related mortality among people over 65 years of age has increased by more than 50%."

When successful, the website shall transmit a feeling of "unknowable depths" to visitors.

As an accessory to and representation of my person, the website should be continuous with my sense of "self" in a manner equivalent to e.g. my irl clothing.

My limitations in making and organizing a website shall be considered acceptable

Asia is, as veteran Risk players will know, very big

There are just only so many retainers a king can keep a personal relationship with – and so on down the line. Second, those retainers aren’t ‘on retainer’ to serve forever. They are obliged to a certain number of days of military service per year. Specifically, the standard number – which comes out of William the Conqueror’s settlement of his vassals after taking the English throne – was 40 days. The entire point of this system is that the king gives his vassals land and they give him military service so that no one has to pay anyone anything, because medieval kings do not have the kind of revenue to maintain long-term standing armies. It is no accident that the most destructive medieval conflicts were religious wars where the warriors participating were essentially engaged in ‘armed pilgrimage’ and so might stay in the field longer (God having a more unlimited claim on a knight’s time than the king).

In that context – where the Romans are at war with an entire people, then the entire people became valid military targets. And the Romans behaved as such. Polybius describes the Roman process for sacking a city – “When Scipio thought that a sufficient number of troops had entered [the city] he sent most of them, as is the Roman custom, against the inhabitants of the city with order to kill all they encountered, sparing none,

While the Middle Ages was a period of frequent (small) wars, it also saw some of the first efforts to curtail violence in a general sense, arising out of the Catholic Church: the Peace of God and Truce of God movements. The Peace of God (10th-11th cent.) gave religious protection to the peasantry and the clergy (along with women and widows) as non-combatants. The Church encouraged knights and lords to swear oaths to the effect that they would not violate the peace by attacking the peasantry.

The mad schemes degrowthers advocate are a fantasy that distracts us from real efforts to save the planet

China and India and the rest will be able to take advantage of the efficiency-inducing technologies created by the developed countries, like solar power (indeed, they are already doing so). And they will be able to embrace “dematerialized” goods and services like social networks and video games (sorry, Xi Jinping) very early in their growth path. So these countries’ resource use trajectories won’t look quite like the U.S.’ or Europe’s.

A lot of growth is figuring out how to substitute plentiful resources for rare ones

In Roman Italy, these were the nundinae (‘ninth days,’ although it was an 8-day cycle as the Romans count inclusively); the nundinae were minor festivals, days of rest

Now, normally when you ask what the ancients knew of the gods and how they knew it, the immediate thought – quite intuitively – is to go read Greek and Roman philosophers discussing on the nature of man, the gods, the soul and so on. This is a mistake. Many of our religions work that way: they begin with a doctrine, a theory of how the divine works, and then construct ritual and practice with that doctrine as a foundation.

Before I knew anything at all about the world, I could hear history traduced down through my father’s mother’s Arkansas accent, which distinguished her from the kin and kind of my mother’s mother, which endowed her with a different nature. Everything I have learned since, about the Dustbowl migrations, about class and identity in America, has been an accretion on top of that primary experience of my tabula-rasa consciousness. No knowledge replaces what was heard and seen and felt before anything was known, but only ever adds topsoil to the bedrock of those primary sensations.

while the internet will probably tell you this was an instance of “appropriation”,

Lihotzky, with all her research into pantry placement, didn’t seem very concerned when peasants' pantries were made fatally empty.

In doing so, DeviantArt created templates for later social sites, rolling out the ability to create avatars and write on each other’s profiles, the latter of which would eventually be adopted by Myspace and Facebook. In addition, “[DeviantArt] had the ability to follow people long before that ever became an idea,” Jarkoff explained.

When “Deliciously Deviant Deviant Art!” went live in August 2000, it focused on wallpapers and webskins

Broskoski, of are.na, who was involved in net art communities in the 1990s, remembered making a site called “Welcometohell.com,” which listed links to other websites—a common practice at the time. “You were sort of making or creating who you were by pointing at the other things that you liked,” he explained.

deliberately and carefully think about what is absent.

That's one of the consumer impacts of Amazon is that there's this narrowing of the products that we see, and thus a narrowing of that we might find.

There's some data that shows that if you're in a physical bookstore, you're in a local bookstore in particular, you're about three times as likely to discover some book that you didn't know about that you'd like to read than if you're shopping on Amazon.

“As enclosure by the lords increased national productivity by denying the individual peasant to keep a few sheep,” Illich continued, “so the encroachment of the loudspeaker has destroyed that silence which so far had given each man and woman his or her proper and equal voice. Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.”

What if we saw attention in the same way that we saw air or water, as a valuable resource that we hold in common? Perhaps, if we could envision an ‘attentional commons,’ then we could figure out how to protect it.”

the drive to render our experience quantifiable and subject to computational analysis. Life conducted within the metaverse is already reduced to data. If we were running up against the limits of profitably data-mining human experience in the so called “real world,” then translating even more of our experience into a realm of virtual simulacrum would open up a new frontier. Alternatively, if you’ve run out of physical goods to sell and physical spaces in which to place ads, then a new persistent virtual realm solves those problems.

There is now no time during which it is not possible to engage in commercial activity, and I am hard pressed to think of instances where it is discouraged by the force of custom or principle.

This is not to discount the fact that digital media has, in fact, has been a boon to many, helping, for example, to alleviate the loneliness of those who might remain isolated and alone without it, or supplying opportunities for many who would’ve languished otherwise. But one can acknowledge and celebrate such things without disparaging “reality” or implying that a good life for most people will depend on their immersion in ever more elaborate digital simulations.

The problem is recast as one of ontological deficiency rather than economic or political failure. It suggests that what is broken is reality itself rather than what we have made of it. Thus the solution is building a technologically mediated simulation that can improve on this broken reality rather than the work of building a more just society.

To note one recent example, when Clubhouse, an audio-only social platform, was a big deal earlier this year, it was not uncommon to come across someone claiming that it marked the return of oral culture, culture characterized by the spoken word rather than writing. (There were, to be sure, more and less sophisticated versions of this claim.) But this was always impossible. Better to say, I think, that Clubhouse or Discord might retrieve certain aspects of orality, but there can be no return to orality because you cannot undo the effects of literacy.

There is, however, one Fuggerei rule that remains difficult to enforce. Original residents of the Fuggerei were asked to offer three prayers a day for Jakob Fugger and his family. Several residents currently living in the complex were coy about their adherence to the rule. Several said they interpret it more broadly, spending a few minutes a day reflecting on things they're grateful for. 

Readers of the future are likely to want even more digital content, but it may not look the same as it does now. Audible, which is owned by Amazon, has already made listening to books more like streaming, with subscribers gaining access to a shifting catalogue of audiobooks that they do not need to buy separately. “We have moved away from owning, to accessing,” Mirela Roncevic, a longtime publishing and library consultant, told me.

Books, like music and movies and TV shows, are increasingly something that libraries and readers do not own but, rather, access temporarily, from corporations that do.

But, Inouye added, OverDrive’s influence is an important counterweight to the largest publishers and to Amazon, which dominates the consumer e-book market and operates as a publisher in its own right. (Amazon did not make its own e-books available to libraries until May, when it announced a deal with the Digital Public Library of America.) When I asked Potash about the concern that consolidation could also give OverDrive too much influence over the market, he called that “a far-fetched conspiracy theory.”

The process starts with concept art, and then the artists start building props and other elements of the diorama. Once completed, the set is photographed, turned into a 3D model, and transported into the game engine, where it can then be enhanced with effects like lighting or fog.

Normally people solve this by simply block quoting themselves, but this is a waste of an opportunity. The indented block quote is a print medium invention almost as old as typesetting. The block quote is plaintext, it is not actually linked to the original text or its context. I’ve been experimenting with one idea for a solution, and if you’ve read the last couple blog posts you’ll have seen it there. My stab at an answer is an iframe which shows the quote within its original context and gives a hint at its surroundings. Effectively, it’s a transclusion within my own blog.

To quote yourself, you’ll need to create an <a> anchor tag in the markdown file for the post you want to quote. If you wish to highlight a specific piece of text, instead create a <span></span> around the section you want to quote. Note that this can only be on your own website—it doesn’t work cross domain.

“Hypertext books,” online books which are made up of an abundance of interlinked HTML pages, are mostly unpopular. The failure of this experiment is, in my opinion, very revealing.

This was the original vision of the Web.

I'll end with my original claim: If your personal website turns into an "app", you're doing it wrong.

Like most websites, mckinley.cc doesn't need much more than basic formatting and hyperlinks, so why shouldn't it work well on NCSA Mosaic 2.7?

They are h2 tags, for some reason, and they require JavaScript to implement hyperlinking functionality. The user can't even see where the links go by hovering over them with his mouse. Why was it designed this way? I couldn't tell you

Not only does it require over 200 kilobytes of JavaScript to put text on the screen, most of it is external JavaScript, served from a CDN.

You must also choose to allow the owner of that website to execute arbitrary code on your computer.

you must have a new or advanced enough Web browser capable of running a (probably poorly written) script to fetch the document and put it on the screen

Your serverless, headless, Micropub-powered personal website is unreliable precisely because you chose to introduce unnecessary complexity. Just use a static site generator like mkws and call it a day.

I did not believe that a Cause which stood for a beautiful ideal, for anarchism, for release and freedom from conventions and prejudice, should demand the denial of life and joy. I insisted that our Cause could not expect me to become a nun and that the movement should not be turned into a cloister. If it meant that, I did not want it. “I want freedom, the right to self-expression, everybody’s right to beautiful, radiant things.

A 2017 study found a correlation between high levels of PFAS in the air and in human blood serum, and the new study used modeling that found that kindergarteners were probably exposed to more PFAS by breathing them in than by ingesting the compounds.

Also notable are the types of PFAS that the study detected. Among the most prevalent was 6:2 FTOH, a compound used in floor waxes, stain guards and food packaging.

For years, Netflix has identified its competition as “leisure” at large:“As discussed in our Long-Term View, we compete with all the activities that consumers have at their disposal in their leisure time. This includes watching content on other streaming services, linear TV, DVD or TVOD but also reading a book, surfing YouTube, playing video games, socializing on Facebook, going out to dinner with friends or enjoying a glass of wine with their partner, just to name a few.” - Netflix IR

You know this is how it works, right? It has to be. You can infer it from how bad the ads are.

Let's be clear: the best targeted ads I will ever see are the ones I get from a search engine when it serves an ad for exactly the thing I was searching for. Everybody wins: I find what I wanted, the vendor helps me buy their thing, and the search engine gets paid for connecting us. I don't know anybody who complains about this sort of ad. It's a good ad.

Someone who works on web search once told me that they already have an algorithm that guarantees the maximum click-through rate for any web search: just return a page full of porn links. (Someone else said you can reverse this to make a porn detector: any link which has a high click-through rate, regardless of which query it's answering, is probably porn.) Now, the thing is, legitimate-seeming businesses can't just give you porn links all the time, because that's Not Safe For Work, so the job of most modern recommendation algorithms is to return the closest thing to porn that is still Safe For Work. In other words, celebrities (ideally attractive ones, or at least controversial ones), or politics, or both. They walk that line as closely as they can, because that's the local maximum for their profitability. Sometimes they accidentally cross that line, and then have to apologize or pay a token fine, and then go back to what they were doing. This makes me sad, but okay, it's just math. And maybe human nature. And maybe capitalism. Whatever. I might not like it, but I understand it.

I can hardly remember the days before I became a man of tungsten. How distant those days seem now, how burdened by the apparent heaviness of everyday objects. I laugh at the philistines who still operate in a world devoid of tungsten, their shoulders thin and unempowered by the experience of bearing tungsten. Ha, what fools, blissful in their ignorance, anesthetized by their lack of meaningful struggle, devoid of passion.Nietzsche once said that a man who has a why can bear almost any how. But a man who has a tungsten cube can bear any object less dense, and all this talk of why and how becomes unnecessary.

To Jeremy’s point, the onus should not be on web developers to keep track of older APIs in danger of deprecation. substr is an API that’s been in browser since, well, as far back as caniuse.com tracks browser support. alert, confirm, and prompt are the same. Green boxes back to the year 2002.

On questions of the divine and the ineffable, do philosophers really have more access to truth than, say, clergy?

Who is to say that Dawkins is not a scholar of religion now?

Get someone to review it Get a lot of someones to review it

What should the title look like? yes yes yes: I discovered bees can talk but unfortunately they are racist i’m begging you not to do this: It’s not just Barry from Bee Movie who might have a secret The title should represent the post as much as possible. It should prepare the reader emotionally for the clown carnival ride you are about to take them on. It should be the opposite of clickbait.

As we begin to rely on ever more complex technological systems, the shadow work required to support them balloons, as does the need for increasingly stringent, technocratic regulation.

The importance of limits is a key touchpoint in Illich’s thought. He identified the “vernacular” domain as fundamental to the flourishing of human autonomy. From the Latin vernaculum, meaning “homebred, homespun, homegrown, homemade,” Illich took it to comprise the broad spectrum of agricultural techniques, building styles, culinary traditions, and language patterns that emerge when non-economic, non-standard modes of being are allowed to thrive.

Here, he draws on Karl Polanyi, author of the 1944 book The Great Transformation, who saw the transition to a market-based system as a historical turning point in human relations. Polanyi famously noted that as the market comes to dominate, “instead of economy being embedded in social relations, social relations are embedded in the economic system.”

He saw modern-day institutions as successors of the Church, which evolved into a homogenizing, bureaucratic apparatus that made individuals dependent on its authority to fulfill the Christian vision of the good. In other words, stripping people of the capacity for autonomous decision-making and action — whether via professionalization, technocratic governance, or otherwise — is not always worth the added safety that regulation provides. As Illich writes in Tools for Conviviality, “institutions are functional when they promote a delicate balance between what people can do for themselves and what tools at the service of anonymous institutions can do for them.”

In a memorable quote from Deschooling Society, he refers to the “pedagogical hubris” that is “our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.”

Modern humans have created instruments of such immense power that hyperregulation has become necessary to circumvent catastrophic harm. Since we have cars, most people would prefer that those permitted to drive them pass a test demonstrating their ability to do so without causing damage or injury.

Meanwhile, employment in the formal economy can only be sustained by “shadow work,” a term Illich coined for unpaid tasks like domestic labor, grocery shopping, and car maintenance that drain people of time and energy for other pursuits.

Whereas people used to build their own homes according to their unique specifications, today such an undertaking is discouraged, or even illegal. Instead, plans are drawn up by a licensed architect, and construction carried out by a team of wage workers. “When dwelling by people is transformed into housing for people,” Illich writes, paraphrasing architect John Turner, “housing is changed from an activity into a commodity.”

Arguably, as careers have become increasingly specialized, we have ceded too many spheres of activity to experts, institutions, and markets.

Illich connects the creation of scarcity and the loss of specificity to the rise of professional authority on which we have become overly reliant.

By erasing specificity — which encapsulates the history of each thing, its kinship with other beings, and its participation in a community that defines it according to its own cultural and social norms — the world can be reconfigured in terms of resources amenable to any and every use, and which are always in limited supply.

You know you’re at least supposed to try to establish a sense of unity and proportion for the overall composition of your memory palace, right? Do you think your enemies have been going in there when you’re not looking and making it worse? Because that’s honestly the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. You know why it’s called a primary organizing detail? Because there’s just one. You can’t just slap a bunch of bell towers and colonnades wherever and think it’s going to result in a memorably-arranged, discretely-distinct floor plan. It’s not. I mean, it is memorable, but not at the level of detail. I remember that your memory palace is a fucking mess, but I wouldn’t put, like, a premise in there fore safekeeping. Great job cultivating a genteel retreat for your most private self inside your fucking mind, dude. I wouldn’t even put a fucking inference in there. Have some self-respect.

Before reading any farther on this site, This website is not made for poser vamps, close-minded people, or those who think that they are, or claim to be a vampire because they think the spirit of a vampire entered them at some time making them a vampire. We call these people posers, which they are; they are confused lost children. This site is not here for them in any way! It is for real vampires, curious people, and open-minded skeptics.

Fashion and the public space upon which it depends are both participatory zones in which culture is created, and neither is meant to be consumed individualistically. Fashion can be understood as a collective experience of the zeitgeist in which everyone can participate, which is open to innovations from outsiders. The tech industry would like to reimagine it as a series of fully instrumentalized status signifiers that attest to our social rank and are always already integrated into branded “universes” of intellectual property.

Like its disdain for fashion, tech’s myopically optimistic take on the metaverse exposes its contempt for public space.

Fashion on platforms is simply an informational commodity that translates into algorithmic rankings, ad valuations, and cash transactions. Those platforms monetize what was previously more difficult to cash in on: the everyday value in looking and being looked at — the process that constitutes Arendt’s reality. In digitally mediated or augmented spaces, the benefits created by fashion can be more readily captured by the wearer: The views, likes, and followers that accrue to an influencer or a brand equate to potential advertising revenue or direct merchandise sales, with less spillover. The value of that data also accrues to the platform itself, which can synthesize the behavior of its aggregate user base into far more valuable information products, such as ad targeting, trend identification, and other marketing efforts. Social media platforms thus structure a reality in which all “shared appearances” are also implicit transactions that can and should be priced. As long as fashion is happening in public, from this perspective, it is essentially a waste.

In other words, fashion conveys not just specific trends or an individual’s personal style but a sense of the public itself, of shared space. Fashion implies a desire to see and be seen while affirming the need for public spaces and occasions where that seeing can occur. The manner in which fashion circulates and evolves speaks to the kind of shared reality that we are constituting for one another. To the tech world, however, those positive externalities look suspiciously inefficient. These unpaid-for pleasures are externalities that could, with the right technological fixes, be reinternalized and made into someone’s property again.

And it gets worse: recommendation algorithms are also known to have an anchoring effect, in which their output reinforces users’ unconscious biases and can even change their preferences over time.

An algorithm that interprets your behavior inside such a filter bubble might assume that you dislike people with darker skin.

“In China, the beauty standard is more homogeneous,” she says, adding that the filters “erase lots of differences to our faces” and reinforce one particular look. 

Amy Niu researches selfie-editing behavior as part of her PhD in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2019, she conducted a study to determine the effect of beauty filters on self-image for American and Chinese women. She took pictures of 325 college-aged women and, without telling them, applied a filter to some photos. She then surveyed the women to measure their emotions and self-esteem when they saw edited or unedited photos. Her results, which have not yet been published, found that Chinese women viewing edited photos felt better about themselves, while American women (87% of whom were white) felt about the same whether their photos were edited or not.

Historically, when African-Americans were enslaved, those with lighter skin were often given more domestic tasks where those with darker skin were more likely to work in the fields.

I argue that these more feminized, pink-collar corners of the internet are also part of broader gig and piecework economies and help broaden the definition of “tech worker,” which is still often perceived in narrow, masculinist terms.

AGAMEMNON How are women to master men? HECUBA Numbers are a fearful thing, and joined to craft a desperate foe. AGAMEMNON True; still I have a mean opinion of the female race.

I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT-3 only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. The AI matched my canned language; clichés abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same. It made sense, given that GPT-3 generates its own text based on the language it has been fed: Candor, apparently, begat candor.

The Zohar comments on this verse that the word eleh, i.e., “these,” implies multiplicity, whereas the word mi, i.e., “who,” refers to the Creator. If we put these two words together and rearrange the order of the letters, it will read Elokim,[20] implying that Elokim is the source of multiplicity in the world. The name Elokim acts as an “interface” between the absolute oneness of the Creator and the multiplicity of the creation. If its modus operandi is from-one-to-many, it is the role of humanity to do the reverse—to sublimate the multiplicity of the creation into its source in the one Creator, from many-to-one. This is done by uncovering the underlying godly nature of the physical world and by revealing its hidden unity. The Tzemach Tzedek stresses that “even after multiplicity is created by the name Elokim, everything is included in the unity of Havayah just as before the creation of the world; and, in truth, there is no separate existence—all is one seamless unity.”

By abstracting our interactions into a placeless world of symbolic interchange, which generates the conditions of what Jay Bolter has labelled digital plenitude, digital media appears to undermine rather than sustain our capacity to experience a common world, which in turn sustains a common sense.

Illich believed that we need to rediscover modes of perception and a richness of sensory experience, which had been lost to us by our encasement in a human-built world.

Humans are incapable of true multi-tasking, and as a species we have trouble keeping much at all in our active memories. Depending on the language you speak, there's somewhere between five and thirteen items you can keep in your head at once. The introduction of tabs into the toolbox of Web users single-handedly destroyed any hopes we may once have had of the Web being a source of infinite, global potential that could reach across borders and create a better, more meritocratic society.

At-home vet care

Write on a post-it note affixed to a greeting card rather than on the greeting card itself, so the recipient can throw away the post-it and reuse your card Employ similar logic for any disposable/consumable item

Treat fines like payments E.g. park illegally and let yourself think of the (expected value of the) fine as a parking fee

Engage a human productivity monitor I know two people who have hired people to sit next to them or frequently contact them to keep them on-task Examples: focusmate.com and coding-pal.com

Travel to friends just to visit them Move close to friends