As a result, the future has fallen from view, replaced by a sense of stasis. And so has the past, which ought to be a resource but has become so weightless that it might as well not exist at all.
– Ted Gioia on Alvin Toffler and Future Shock
Reading: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici 📚
We can see, in other words, that the human body and not the steam engine, was the first machine developed by capitalism.
Reading: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici 📚
The course of scientific rationalization was intimately connected to the attempt by the state to impose its control over an unwilling workforce.
Very excited… have confirmed that hashtags placed in notes in Kindle import to Obsidian smoothly… a game changer for organizing highlighted material when imported!
Some pics from yesterday…
From this morning’s walk…
When a Single Person Controlled the Copyright on All Music (Even Blank Music Paper)
But the saddest conclusion I draw from all this is that musicians themselves can be just as oppressive as governments or bureaucracies if you give them too much power. Of course, there’s little risk of that happening in our current musical culture.
From today’s walk…
Reading: The Matter with Things by 📚
… ‘the layman’s grounds for accepting the models propounded by the scientist are often no different from the young African villager’s ground for accepting the models propounded by one of his elders.’
From the past couple of days…
From this morning’s walk…
From yesterday, a picture of the pack…
More recently, though, I have lost my enthusiasm for human space exploration, largely because I cannot figure out where there is for flesh and blood to go. There is no destination reachable within a current human life span that is hospitable, as far as I know.
What Intelligent Life is Made Of, Part 2 Essays On Attention Paid
From today’s walk…
Reading: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici 📚
The stakes on which witches and other practitioners of magic died, and the chambers in which their tortures were executed, were a laboratory in which social discipline was sedimented, and much knowledge about the body gained. Here those irrationalities were eliminated that stood in the way of the transformation of the individual and social body into a set of predictable and controllable mechanisms.
Reading: Caliban and the Witch by Silvia Federici 📚
What died was the concept of the body as receptacle of magical powers that had prevailed in the medieval world. In reality, it was destroyed. For in the background of the new philosophy we find a vast initiative by the state, whereby what the philosophers classified as “irrational” was branded as crime.
@manton, Really like the redesign of the M.b app!
Some Block Island homes…
Apparently we’ve been to the brink and beyond before and it was the Democrats who took us there….
On October 22, 1985, Treasury Secretary James A. Baker III told congressional leaders that if Congress failed to raise the debt ceiling by the end of the month, the Reagan administration would pay the nation’s bills by taking back Treasury securities in which Social Security had invested.
So let’s be frank and honest. Alternative intelligence of superior stature to our own, should it come about, will be an entirely natural extension of, evolution of, intelligence on this planet and in the universe.
What Intelligent Life is Made Of, Part 2 Essays On Attention Paid
When I published a description of the 2009 talk these posts are based on, I used the phrase “alternative intelligence” instead of the far more common “artificial intelligence.” This is because I do not believe that the distinction between natural and artificial is useful when it comes to intelligent technologies.
What Intelligent Life is Made Of, Part 2 Essays On Attention Paid
If Monet lived on Block Island…
Scenes from this morning’s walk…
Ada Limon, Dead Stars … a really lovely poem!
We’ve come this far, survived this much. What would happen if we decided to survive more? To love harder?
Cardamom/saffron frozen soufflés setting up in the freezer…
