flâneur

Jasmine Wang

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on the atlas — 40

highlights — 183

  • The Marxist literary critic and political theorist Fredric Jameson suggests that technology can only be theorised through the category of the sublime.
    Video Games and the Technological Sublime – Tate Papers | Tate
  • nd he read articles on how to stock a meat department... What he’s really done is he’s created this immense vertical filing cabinet in his brain of layers and layers and layers of files of inf
    Curius / Onboarding
  • Mark Fisher: “In the 1960s and 1970s, radical theory and politics (Laing, Foucault, Deleuze and Guattari, etc.) coalesced around extreme mental conditions such as schizophrenia, arguing, for instance, that madness was not a natural, but a political, category. But what is needed now is a politicization of much more common disorders. Indeed, it is their very commonness which is the issue: in Britain, depression is now the condition that is most treated by the NHS.”
    modern malaise - by Ava - bookbear express
  • Fisher on how Zizek believes that we use an ironic distance from capitalism to allow us to keep engaging in it: “Cynical distance is just one way ... to blind ourselves to the structural power of ideological fantasy: even if we do not take things seriously, even if we keep an ironical distance, we are still doing them.”
    modern malaise - by Ava - bookbear express
  • For most of us, this is not so: there is a frustrating gap between them, such that we’re not in accord with our own values, no matter how badly we wish to be. Our moral commitments are overwhelmed routinely, and our behavior subverts, distracts, and disappoints us. Perhaps we accept a remunerative job rather than dedicating our lives to what we feel is most important; or we pursue the important, but we get sleepy and head home from the office earlier than we suspect we should; we call in sick when we’re perfectly well; or we come to feel that our calling isn’t so important as we thought. We ha…
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • For most of us, this is not so: there is a frustrating gap between them, such that we’re not in accord with our own values, no matter how badly we wish to be. Our moral commitments are overwhelmed routinely, and our behavior subverts, distracts, and disappoints us. Perhaps we accept a remunerative job rather than dedicating our lives to what we feel is most important; or we pursue the important, but we get sleepy and head home from the office earlier than we suspect we should; we call in sick when we’re perfectly well; or we come to feel that our calling isn’t so important as we thought. We ha…
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • For most of us, this is not so: there is a frustrating gap between them, such that we’re not in accord with our own values, no matter how badly we wish to be. Our moral commitments are overwhelmed routinely, and our behavior subverts, distracts, and disappoints us. Perhaps we accept a remunerative job rather than dedicating our lives to what we feel is most important; or we pursue the important, but we get sleepy and head home from the office earlier than we suspect we should; we call in sick when we’re perfectly well; or we come to feel that our calling isn’t so important as we thought. We ha…
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • Bofællesskab is the Danish word for cohousing communities, which are one among many design remedies for loneliness. These are groups of private residences clustered around communal spaces, spanning kitchens to parks. The workload of everything from cooking, childcare, to grounds maintenance are distributed equally among residents, and social ties strengthened in the process. The benefits are legion.
    What If We Already Know How to Live?
  • Harry Frankfurt’s “Freedom of the Will and the Concept of a Person,” Susan Wolf’s “Moral Saints,” or Thomas Nagel’s “What Is It Like to Be a Bat?”
    The Writing Desk - The Raven Magazine
  • The plundering of the human spirit by the marketplace is paralleled by the plundering of the earth by capital.”
    Against Scarcity - by David Phelps - Three quarks
  • At the same time, however, we might make something of the opposite argument—that virtual economies have unparalleled ability to reduce items and relationships to the legibility of 1s and 0s, creating entire worlds that can be comprehended only as money. It is fair, of course, for transactions, labor-time, and digital production to be monetized—this is, indeed, one of the major promises of distributed ledger technology—but that doesn’t mean there isn’t also something slightly dystopian in seeing all our efforts reduced to financial equations.
    Against Scarcity - by David Phelps - Three quarks
  • For Bookchin, our own insistence of reducing one another and the world to a single, legible variable, money, in turn reduces the richness and complexity of relationships that we might have had with each other and the world as well.
    Against Scarcity - by David Phelps - Three quarks
  • It sees changes in values and structures over time as an inherent feature of all systems, and so seeks to steer them toward positive innovations, rather than insisting on preserving a system’s current self-definition.
    Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence | Vividness
  • Systematic ethics takes for granted your good intentions toward others (which are the essence of communal ethics). The central issue, rather, is how to resolve conflicts between good intentions. A systematic ethics recommends doing so on the basis of some set of enduring principles, which are rational in the sense of forming a coherent ideology, or structure of justification. (Any coherent structure counts as stage 4; systematicity is a criterion on the form of the ethics, not its contents.)
    Developing ethical, social, and cognitive competence | Vividness
  • writing. It’s the form of art that requires the least money and that gives you the highest expression. It was this relationship of quantity and quality that I enjoyed. I started to write even though I’m dyslexic. I had huge problems in writing, but I developed a form that was very creative.
    Love and Crypto: The Hackatao Story | Wealthsimple
  • In Zen Buddhism, there’s such an appreciation of absence, ambiguity and an awareness of the ephemerality of life. But also, a kind of playfulness and joy. So, there’s this mixture of the awareness of death and the knowledge that our lives don't really matter. But also, there is this search for beauty, sensation, and for the appreciation of what’s around you and for the possibilities of the human mind and creativity.
    Can Kyle Chayka Change the Meaning of Minimalism? | Vanity Fair
  • “Saving time” with Smart Compose ensures further objectification within work processes, more and more emails automatically spoken through us, less and less hope that it is worth thinking about what we do to live: Better to adhere to templates that codify and automate the fulfillment of social expectations according to what the data apparently proves are accepted practices.
    Real Life - guided-tours
  • Perhaps the hope is that automating the “work self” frees time for subjectively inhabiting some other creative self — that it could somehow produce time for leisure, for enjoyment on terms other than efficiency. But efficiency under capitalism inevitably serves further acceleration: more work in less time, not more freedom once “the work” is done. Its effect is to make more work (and more exploitation) possible. There is no “freeing up time for workers” under capitalism.
    Real Life - guided-tours
  • When text completion is adopted as streamlining and inserted into social relations as an expedient, however, it becomes more problematic. Rather than estrange language and refresh our relation to it, it impoverishes communication and sociality more generally. Alang makes the point that automated text completion generates a “centripetal” force that standardizes and simplifies language across unprecedentedly global populations, making for the communicative equivalent of Marc Augé’s nonplaces: conversations that “work” with the stark, bland efficiency of airports or fast-food chains.
    Real Life - guided-tours
  • One obvious expression of desubjectification is the example Navneet Alang discusses in this column: algorithmic text completion — e.g. Google’s “Smart Compose,” which tries to write your emails for you, so you don’t have to be psychically present or “hold appropriate space” to communicate. The pretense in part is that this kind of automation is a form of self-care that frees you to do higher-level things, have the “real conversations” full of deep self-expression, in the same way fast-forwarding through junk content would theoretically save you time to watch more rewarding material later. But …
    Real Life - guided-tours
  • In the introduction to Frames of War, Judith Butler makes a nominal distinction between “precariousness” (the fact that we all will die and we all depend on social interconnection to live at all) and “precarity,” which she defines as the “politically induced condition in which certain populations suffer from failing social and economic networks of support and become differentially exposed to injury, violence, and death.”
    Real Life - guided-tours
  • Beauty, fashion, and wellness brands have adopted the standards of tech giants, reframing the body as a vessel for optimization and utility rather than the historical feminine ideal.
    Unfleshing — Real Life
  • “created beauty is a relationship, and a relationship with the Holy at that. Reducing such work to ‘content’ is like praying in swear words.”
    Paid in Full — Real Life
  • Psychologists use the term “enmeshment” to describe a situation where the boundaries between people become blurred, and individual identities lose importance. Enmeshment prevents the development of a stable, independent sense of self. Dan — like many in high-pressure jobs — had become enmeshed not with another person, but with his career.
    What Happens When Your Career Becomes Your Whole Identity
  • le Mozart assassiné. A quick Google search told me it was something Saint-Ex had written on a train. I brought it up on my screen: I sat down [facing a sleeping] couple. Between the man and the woman a child had hollowed himself out a place and fallen asleep. He turned in his slumber, and in the dim lamplight I saw his face. What an adorable face! A golden fruit had been born of these two peasants… This is a musician’s face, I told myself. This is the child Mozart. Little princes in legends are not different from this. Protected, sheltered, cultivated, what could not this child become? When by…
    Hunting For The Little Prince - The Rumpus.net
  • “A novel that does not uncover a hitherto unknown segment of existence is immoral. Knowledge is the novel’s only morality.”
    Meta is Murder
  • one has the sense that no one ever got “inside him,” perhaps because “inside” is where the failed self resides, the self that falls short of its conscience
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • we do not know what great work really is —we lack confidence in any system of values or ideals; we cannot give ourselves wholly over to anything without doubt; we cannot have faith, and utter dedication seems faintly ludicrous— or we cannot decide how much of ourselves or others we are willing to sacrifice. We want love and labor, freedom and meaning, flexibility and commitment.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • James does not explain why this kind of unity is so magnetic, so charismatic, but his broader discussion of various types of persons imply that it may have something to do with the perennial problem of human meaning: the confrontation between morality —which tends to be ideal— and praxis, in which innumerable considerations problematize and overwhelm us.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • What Jobs was was indefatigable, convinced of the rightness of his pursuits —whatever they happened to be at any given time— and always in possession of a unified conscience and will.
    Meta is Murder — The Charisma of Leaders
  • Sometimes these conversations have a goal, but frequently the benefits come from thinking publicly about things happening in the space and honing in on incongruities in our language. The language we use in casual conversation exposes mental models and assumptions more viscerally than well-prepared research posts. I find myself with lists of things to follow up on after most conversations with brains I respect.
    Lakshman Sankar
  • Architectural (de)centralization — how many physical computers is a system made up of? How many of those computers can it tolerate breaking down at any single time? Political (de)centralization — how many individuals or organizations ultimately control the computers that the system is made up of? Logical (de)centralization— does the interface and data structures that the system presents and maintains look more like a single monolithic object, or an amorphous swarm? One simple heuristic is: if you cut the system in half, including both providers and users, will both halves continue to fully ope…
    The Meaning of Decentralization. “Decentralization” is one of the words… | by Vitalik Buterin | Medium
  • Why should it not be possible to rotate the role of donning the moustache and pouring the wine? Why must we assume that this man does not pour wine for the sheer joy of pouring it? Can we not take pleasure in taking turns serving one another?
    For A Luxury Leftism | Current Affairs
  • Timechains whose record of history cannot be reverted hold us to a higher standard of intentionality.
    🔍 Intention | Kernel
  • We tend to only engage in conversations which we think we can "take something away from", be it new knowledge, an altered perspective, or an inside story we can leverage for our own gain. However, Kernel conversations are about humility, presence and a genuine attentiveness towards others, not because you stand to benefit from them, but because cultivating these three capacities within yourself is its own reward, which may allow you to see clearly the complete and perfect sacred core of every person you encounter.
    Introduction to Kernel | Kernel
  • The sacred as we experience it in every day life is undecidable, irreducible, paradoxical.
    Is Perfection | Kernel
  • who knows, it may tell us or someone some day with breathtaking eloquence and in then simple terms what we, today, almost speechlessly have wanted so much.
    Of No Paradigm | Kernel
  • on the contrary: language is to be measured by a standard it barely reaches, if ever, namely the imagery of human doubt and human desire
    Of No Paradigm | Kernel
  • become the creative artists who compose language to teach its writers and speakers how to be thoughtfully and carefully inconsistent with undesirable premises, to be incompatible with the morals, the religions, the armed forces, the arguments of the reward-oriented hierarchy.
    Of No Paradigm | Kernel
  • This phenomenon is best described as the inertia of language.
    Of No Paradigm | Kernel
  • the plot of our narratives is actually written in economic code and executed without the context stories provide.
    Of No Paradigm | Kernel
  • But there is one kind of knowledge — infinitely precious, time-resistant more than monuments, here to be passed between the generations in any way it may be: never to be used. And that is poetry.
    The Gift | Kernel
  • Anonymity widens the field within which gifts operate, because if there is no obligation for reciprocity, how do you best respond?
    The Gift | Kernel
  • To feel the affection that comes from those unknown to us, who are watching over our sleep and our solitude, over our dangers and our weaknesses: that is something still greater and more beautiful because it widens out the boundaries of our being and unites all living things.
    The Gift | Kernel
  • a story about Pablo Neruda, who - as a boy - was gifted a unique toy sheep anonymously, through a hole in the fence. He responded with his most precious possession: a pine cone.
    The Gift | Kernel
  • It is also not impossible that storge may be applied to the relationship between a poet and a generation of readers to come. Beneath the ambition to perfect one's art, without hope of being rewarded by contemporaries, lurks a magnanimity of gift-offering to posterity.
    The Gift | Kernel
  • While the materialist is mainly interested in goods, the Buddhist is mainly interested in liberation.
    Buddhist Economics: How to Start Prioritizing People Over Products and Creativity Over Consumption – Brain Pickings
  • From the Buddhist point of view, there are therefore two types of mechanization which must be clearly distinguished: one that enhances a man’s skill and power and one that turns the work of man over to a mechanical slave, leaving man in a position of having to serve the slave.
    Buddhist Economics: How to Start Prioritizing People Over Products and Creativity Over Consumption – Brain Pickings
  • a fundamental fallacy that considers “goods as more important than people and consumption as more important than creative activity.”
    Buddhist Economics: How to Start Prioritizing People Over Products and Creativity Over Consumption – Brain Pickings
  • Revolutions always end up failing because they are reliant on people who are error-prone, corruptible, and whose priorities change over time. However, a smart contract I wrote that expresses a particular economic ideal, which is now deployed on mainnet, will remain there irrespective of what happens to me. There is no bribe or threat which can get me to change this. I literally cannot take it back, even if my life depends on it.
    🔍 Intention | Kernel