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Machado de Assis (1870), "Captain Mendonça": "'So you think her eyes are pretty?' 'As I said, they have the rarest beauty.' 'Would you like to have them?' the old man asked." Quotes from other stories by Machado de Assis appear throughout Paul Christopher Johnson's prize-winning open access book Automatic Religion, which "reanimates one of the most mysterious ... questions in trans-Atlantic thought: what is agency?" in discussions of "hysteria" and Charcot's monkey [PDF], the trial of a "possession priest," the popular saint Escrava Anastácia [PDF], Ajeeb the chess automaton, the spiritist Chico Xavier, Locke's Brazilian parrot, and more. See also suggestions made by P. Gabrielle Foreman, et al., in "Writing about Slavery/Teaching about Slavery: This Might Help."
posted by Wobbuffet on May 1, 2022 - 2 comments

• The Fundamental Difference Between Stories And Reality - "Characters have clear transformative arcs [whereas] our identities and personal journeys are so much more complex."
• Your Life is Not a Hero's Journey - "The history of the heroic adventure and the implications of projecting the hero's journey on our own lives."
• Identity Without Storytelling - "The only thing is, when it comes to the stories of our own lives, we are both author and character."[1,2,3]

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posted by kliuless on Jun 2, 2020 - 15 comments

Why Technology Favors Tyranny - "Artificial intelligence could erase many practical advantages of democracy, and erode the ideals of liberty and equality. It will further concentrate power among a small elite if we don't take steps to stop it." (via)
posted by kliuless on Aug 31, 2018 - 8 comments

Finance isn't just an industry. It's a system of social control - "A system for constraining the choices of other social actors." [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Nov 7, 2017 - 19 comments

From deities to data - "For thousands of years humans believed that authority came from the gods. Then, during the modern era, humanism gradually shifted authority from deities to people... Now, a fresh shift is taking place. Just as divine authority was legitimised by religious mythologies, and human authority was legitimised by humanist ideologies, so high-tech gurus and Silicon Valley prophets are creating a new universal narrative that legitimises the authority of algorithms and Big Data." [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Sep 7, 2016 - 45 comments

In his follow-up to Sapiens, Yuval Noah Harari envisions what a 'useless class' of humans might look like as AI advances and spreads - "I'm aware that these kinds of forecasts have been around for at least 200 years, from the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, and they never came true so far. It's basically the boy who cried wolf, but in the original story of the boy who cried wolf, in the end, the wolf actually comes, and I think that is true this time." [more inside]
posted by kliuless on May 24, 2016 - 23 comments

World After Capital by Albert Wenger [Work in Progress; GitHub; GitBook; PDF; FAQ] - "Technological progress has shifted scarcity for humanity. When we were foragers, food was scarce. During the agrarian age, it was land. Following the industrial revolution, capital became scarce. With digital technologies scarcity is shifting from capital to attention. World After Capital suggests ways to expand economic, informational and psychological freedom to go from an industrial to a knowledge society." (previously)
posted by kliuless on May 7, 2016 - 23 comments

Lo and Behold: Reveries of the Connected World - "With interviewees ranging from Elon Musk to a gaming addict, Werner Herzog presents the web in all its wildness and utopian potential in this dizzying documentary." (via)
posted by kliuless on Jan 26, 2016 - 24 comments

The Future of (Post)Capitalism - "Paul Mason shows how, from the ashes of the recent financial crisis, we have the chance to create a more socially just and sustainable global economy." (previously; via) [more inside]
posted by kliuless on Nov 4, 2015 - 22 comments

Artist and film-maker, Hito Steyerl, asks us to stand shoulder to shoulder with our digital equivalents. Digital images are Things (like you and me) - a plethora of compressed, corrupted representations pushed and pulled through increasingly policed and capitalised information networks. If 80% of all internet traffic^* is SPAM - a liberated excess withdrawn^** from accepted channels of communication - perhaps it is in The Poor Image we find our closest kin? [more inside]
posted by 0bvious on Feb 16, 2012 - 5 comments

Researchers at Northwestern confirm that Male Bisexuals exist ( NYT )
posted by The Whelk on Aug 23, 2011 - 120 comments