Technology and science are valves for economic production. They can’t be the guiding themes of the content which is supposed to fuel our imagination for the future. Some of my thoughts on this are a little woowoo. I really believe there exist imaginative realms which, on one hand, contain nothing resembling the known universe, but […]
Really want to re-record this. Lyrics from As You Like It: I was seven of the nine days out of the wonder before you came, for look here what I found on a palm tree; I was never so berhymed since Pythagoras’ time, that I was an Irish rat, which I can hardly remember—
At one point I was in the habit of writing and producing music on an almost-daily basis. It’s the closest I’ve ever gotten to regular religious worship. The lyrics of the second song are taken from an epigraph to this graphic novel. “I knew two things to be true of your world here and there, […]
It’ll always be in progress, https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLlbdGIdtNv1jrYEu2TpSYP1OdbwGOvU-Y
On the “theory/data” problem, the notion that more data diminishes the need for theorization. Let’s assume this is true for a second: now, instead of developing hypotheses and testing them à la the scientific method, we simply subject our curiosities to computational operations. Feeding more data into better algorithms equals better living (through science!). This vision […]
…the invention of the Morse alphabet in 1837 was promptly followed by the tapping specters of spiritistic seances sending their messages from the realm of the dead. Promptly as well, photographic plates-even and especially those taken with the camera shutter closed-furnished reproductions of ghosts or specters, whose black-andwhite fuzziness only served to underscore the promise […]
“Magic is bloody untruth, but in it domination is not yet disclaimed by transforming itself into a pure truth underlying the world which it enslaves. The magician imitates demons; to frighten or placate them he makes intimidating or appeasing gestures. Although his task was impersonation he did not claim to be made in the image […]
Turns out, a lot of people have been thinking, writing, and preaching (!) about the connections between spirituality and surveillance for some time now. I found a podcast of a sermon given by Unitarian Universalist Reverend M. Lara Hoke a few years ago. She’s asking people of faith to use their belief system as the basis for questioning government […]
My fifth hotel in ten days — three in Virginia, one in New York City, one in North Carolina. These nights have been punctuated by stays at my parents’ house in New York and my apartment in Asheville, NC, whose lease expired on the thirty-first of July. Current location is Christiansburg, Virginia, not too far from the place I’ll be […]
In light of the DAO hack (here’s a tl;dr for those not in the know), a lot of people have been talking about intention — the role that conscious will, something we generally ascribe to humans, should play in code-based organizations that are designed to be run without centralized human oversight. The logic goes that […]
