Michelle L

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on the atlas — 14

highlights — 27

The Lean Institution is complicated in its genealogy but simple in its expression: it embraces methodologies and tactics from digital software production and attempts to remake the cultural institution in the image of the digital content platform.
The Lean Institution - by Mike Pepi - Heavy Machinery
We have entered what I call the era of the “Lean Institution”, in which the museum is not just reconfigured for a digital network (that is to say “digitized”), but more deeply transformed through the feverish adoption of the organizational frameworks of software production and deployment.
The Lean Institution - by Mike Pepi - Heavy Machinery
Speculative Realism insists upon the actuality of things or objects apart from the ways that our own (human) minds relate to them and understand them; it is thus part of what has been called the Nonhuman Turn in recent thought.
The Universe of Things: On Speculative Realism | Minnesota Scholarship Online | Oxford Academic
“National security includes the toughest and the most exciting problems that the country has to offer. And Facebook is basically fentanyl for your head. Why would I want students to go there?”
Stanford students want in on the military tech gold rush
“If you’re a brilliant technology expert, you can contribute to this new warrior class. There’s a renewed sense of responsibility to make sure advanced technologies support democratic values,” Fu explained.
Stanford students want in on the military tech gold rush
One master’s student in computer science, who asked not to be named, explained that he has a “moral aversion” to building weapons like drones and missiles but hopes to work at a company that focuses on intelligence operations, such as Vannevar Labs. Like Felter, he described national security work as “mission-driven,” unlike the “empty pursuit” of consumer software.
Stanford students want in on the military tech gold rush
Literature, part of our human birthright, has, like our food and water supply, our systems of care and education, and so many other things, been ransacked and misused by capitalism. Retaking that birthright, I believe, is a small part of the struggle to build a better world.
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
The literary world once looked to readers of (relatively inexpensive) books for its sustenance. Now, it relies upon costly creative writing education products, and hopeful writer-consumers willing to buy them.
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
Just as it is hard to imagine a world after capitalism, it is hard for American fiction writers to imagine a literature after Updike and Salinger.
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
The notion that “giving the mundane its beautiful due,” describing a barefoot girl walking across supermarket tile, is the purpose of fiction, may have come as news to a writer like Jane Austen. She was as much moral philosopher and social satirist as she was crafter of fine sentences about the mundane
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
Yet, how to ‘tell,’ how to give concise and witty information in exposition (à la Austen), is rarely taught in a classroom. How to ‘show,’ meanwhile, how to describe a girl walking barefoot across a supermarket, is the bread and butter of every fiction workshop in the land.
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
If you have taken a writing class in the United States in the last seventy years, you have probably received lessons that have been handed down from this period: from the New Critics and the Iowa Writers’ Workshop. You may, for instance, have been told that writing should “show and not tell.” In some ways, this advice is sound. To show (sensations, experiences, and memories) and not tell (doctrines, dogmas, and philosophies) in narrative fiction is a good idea.
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
What is unique in Updike’s writing, however, and in much writing from the postwar period, is how little it does beyond this beautification of the mundane.
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
While divorcing the craft of writing from the content of writing is not explicitly anticommunist or pro-capitalist, it is notable that teaching writing in this way grew to popularity during the Cold War and was popularized by vocal anticommunists. Paul Engle, the Iowa Writers’ Workshop director from 1941 to 1964, fundraised for the program using explicitly anticommunist rhetoric: he communicated with private and public donors that Iowa was in the business of bringing writers together in one place to train them to compete against their ideologically-driven counterparts in the Soviet Union. I
How Creative Writing Programs De-Politicized Fiction
Yet it is not just the success of design consultancies that should push us back to a more expansive vision of design. The diminished postindustrial meaning of design is inextricable from a corollary diminishing of the planet’s finite resources, whether the quarried stones stacked to form a Sienese palazzo or the rare-earth metals that anchor icons like the iPhone. While design can be a source for great good, it also shares responsibility for our current ecological crisis; every new thing is perhaps not much better than the old thing.
Why the definition of design might need a change | MIT Technology Review
But in addition to eliminating workers’ scope for error, it brought an end to their individual expression. And it was the subsequent and literal mechanization of production that firmly separated the work of designing from making—with profound consequences for the definition of design, as a word and as a structure of our society.
Why the definition of design might need a change | MIT Technology Review
We should expect many years of political turmoil, peaking in the 2020s. And because complex societies are much more fragile than we assume, there is a chance of a catastrophic failure of some kind, with a default on U.S. government bonds being among the less frightening possibilities.
Peter Turchin: How 'elite overproduction' and 'lawyer glut' could ruin the U.S. | National Post
The condition where widespread dissatisfaction with neoliberalism is met with the performance of politics for its aesthetic value and consumption within a wider capitalist framework is the condition where political agitation performatively gesturing towards revolution is described as LARP.
Paul Sutherland: LARP Politics and Hyperreality
The condition where widespread dissatisfaction with neoliberalism is met with the performance of politics for its aesthetic value and consumption within a wider capitalist framework is the condition where political agitation performatively gesturing towards revolution is described as LARP.
Paul Sutherland: LARP Politics and Hyperreality
Dale Beran, in It Came From Something Awful argues that by being surrounded by this co-option of political aspiration by capital, we are left with the sense that our subjectivity has been reduced to being a consumer. Therefore, all that we find ourselves able to ask of our political imaginary is that we have media representations available for our consumption that reinforce and signify our political ideals and display our ‘revolutionary’ identity brand.
Paul Sutherland: LARP Politics and Hyperreality
But maybe, as Devin said, “It’s easier to criticize a 22-year-old making PowerPoints, than it is to confront the factors that drove the person to the job in the first place.” But we must be candid about what those factors are. For some people, it’s the need to pay their family’s bills. But for others, it’s the desire to maintain the lifestyle that they’ve always known.
McKinsey and the Fig Tree - Yale Daily News
At certain points during consulting recruitment, I felt like my peers believed I was contributing to the world’s economic inequality more than the average person. It was often my richest friends, the greatest beneficiaries of capitalism, who expected me to forgo my — and my parent’s — financial stability in order to tear down some vaguely defined “man.”
McKinsey and the Fig Tree - Yale Daily News
Consulting aligned with his linear idea of success. “In hindsight, I recognize that my fundamental motivation was to go for the most challenging path because that, in my mind, was the key to success,” he said. “That had been the cause of my success up to that point, but I had no sense of self-reflection. I had no thought process about what I really wanted to do.”
McKinsey and the Fig Tree - Yale Daily News
In October 2024, a number of organizations held the Abundance 2024 conference. The event was sponsored by Arnold Ventures, Open Philanthropy, Renaissance Philanthropy, and Stand Together.
The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism’s Rebrand - The American Prospect
What exactly abundance adherents believe varies, of course, but there are a number of broad precepts: building more housing, producing more energy, and fostering more technological innovation. None of these are objectionable goals; the differences with progressives arise, largely, in how to get there. Abundance starts from a “growth above all” mindset.
The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism’s Rebrand - The American Prospect
The abundance agenda has also offered shelter to effective altruists, who have been searching for a flag to rally around that isn’t associated with one of the largest frauds in world history.
The Abundance Agenda: Neoliberalism’s Rebrand - The American Prospect
Elon Musk, whose company Tesla is building a version called Optimus, has said humanoid robots will create “a future where there is no poverty.”
What’s next for robots | MIT Technology Review