✳flâneur — a map of the web's best reading

How to kill the university

thesephist.com · 1,571 words · saved by 1 readers

Humans are culture creation machines. We stumble on some idea or thought, share it with other humans, and if the idea sticks and spreads faster than we forget about it, it becomes embedded in the way we do things together in the future. These are your inside jokes, your traditions and your cults. Many such ideas disappear as soon as they come, like fashion trends and popular culture. Some great ones stick around for a while and influence history, like Jazz or the Enlightenment. The few most powerful ones, like religion and democracy, embed themselves into the DNA of civilization, and they become institutions, inseparable from the species that conceived of it in the first place. Institutions are much harder to replace than other kinds of culture, because they go beyond simply being a part of life, and take root as an infrastructural piece of the way we navigate the world. They are fabric, more than threads. These institutions are pieces of culture immortalized. There’s nothing inherentl

Humans are culture creation machines. We stumble on some idea or thought, share it with other humans, and if the idea sticks and spreads faster than we forget about it, it becomes embedded in the way we do things together in the future. These are your inside jokes, your traditions and your cults. Many such ideas disappear as soon as they come, like fashion trends and popular culture. Some great ones stick around for a while and influence history, like Jazz or the Enlightenment. The few most powerful ones, like religion and democracy, embed themselves into the DNA of civilization, and they beco

Explore this link on the map →

related reading