Posts in: Quote posts

Luxury surveillance

Chris Gilliard: These “smart” devices all fall under the umbrella of what the digital-studies scholar David Golumbia and I call “luxury surveillance”—that is, surveillance that people pay for and whose tracking, monitoring, and quantification features are understood by the user as benefits. These gadgets are analogous to the surveillance technologies deployed in Detroit and many other cities across the country in that they are best understood as mechanisms of control: They gather data, which are then used to affect behavior.

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Animism

Graham Harvey: Animists are people who recognise that the world is full of persons, only some of whom are human, and that life is always lived in relationship to others. Dana Driscoll: Animism is a belief in the spirit of all things. Animistic views recognize that rivers, stones, trees, animals, human-created objects, and people all have spirits and that those spirits can be worked with, learned from, and honored in various ways.

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Choose reality

Alan Jacobs: I think we’re looking at not one but two futures — a fork in the road for humans in Technopoly. … A few will get frustrated by the fakery, minimize their time on the internet, and move back towards the real. They’ll be buying codex books, learning to throw pots or grow flowers, and meeting one another in person. The greater number will gradually be absorbed into some kind of Metaverse in which they really see Joe Biden transformed into Dark Brandon or hear Q whisper sweet nothings into their ears.

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Wendell Berry, “Family Work”:

Children, no matter how nurtured at home, must be risked to the world. And parenthood is not an exact science, but a vexed privilege and a blessed trial, absolutely necessary, and not altogether possible.

The loss of the night sky

Jack Leahy: There are probably fewer greater illustrations of the alienation from our true human situation than the loss of the night sky. The more our technical civilization grows the brighter its artificial illumination shelters us from knowing where we truly reside. We navigate our brief lives by its lights rather than navigating by the stars. We are obscured from the cosmic situation in which we find ourselves and are befuddled and lost.

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The problem is our solutions

Jack Leahy: The entire canyon had become blanketed in by fog. No, not fog. Up here it isn’t fog. Up here we are in the clouds. The evening sky had been crystal clear the evening before so this caught me by surprise. There was only the slight hiss of misting rain. A bit of wind. The nocturnal song of insects now hushed. I could hardly even make out the other buildings a few hundred feet beyond me.

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What do we hold sacred?

Charles Eisenstein: Today I saw a monarch butterfly. It was the only one I have seen this summer, and I am sad. I have been preserving all the milkweed that has been coming up as a weed in my gardens. An insignificant gesture, but for me it is a little prayer. I’ve loved these butterflies ever since I was a boy and my father told me about their migratory journey.

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There is no such thing as the “environment”

Sallie McFague, Blessed are the Consumers: Everything is interconnected. Philosopher Bruno Latour has imagined such a world. Its primary characteristic is that there is no “environment,” no external world that is our playfield. Rather, there is “one world,” a cosmos, a totality of things, all of which are “insiders,” members of the collective who have voice. Hence, “we must connect the question of the common world to the question of the common good.

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God is Ultimate Concern

A reference post, to define what I mean by God. As to the ontological status of God, I’m undecided – or perhaps more precisely, indifferent. Paul Tillich, The Essential Tillich: God is the answer to the question implied in man’s finitude; he is the name for that which concerns man ultimately. This does not mean that first there is a being called God and then the demand that man should be concerned about him.

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Harry Marks:

And let’s not forget what everyone brings up when they talk about why “return to office” is so important. “Oh, it’s about collaboration! We have such a great office culture!” What “office culture?” Fluorescent lighting and no privacy? A pizza party in lieu of a proper raise?

Let’s not mince words when it comes to discussing the return to the office and what it’s really about: capitalism. The banks have threatened to devalue office properties if the companies leasing them don’t use them. Apple spent billions on a brand new campus and it’ll be damned if people aren’t going to walk its sterile, glass hallways each day.

Spot on. You should be suspicious whenever certain buzzwords–like “culture”–start getting repeated. That’s a sure sign of ideology and the first thing to ask when you’ve found an ideology is “who does this benefit?” In this case, it benefits those who stand to lose asset value on their balance sheets due to property value markdowns.