More true is to say that early internet champions were alive to the importance of the internet, and therefore both excited about the possibilities of the internet to deliver a world of connection, idiosyncrasy, love and solidarity; and about the danger of the internet as a dystopian system of surveillance and manipulation
blue bits. red rocks.
The iPad’s much-lauded “ease of use” was entirely about how easy it was to use an iPad to consume technology. But the iPad remains the single most user-innovation-hostile technology in modern history, a device designed to make it impossible to produce technology without permission from a remorseless multinational corporation.
If commodities could speak, they would say this: our use-value may interest man, but it does not belong to us as objects. What does belong to us as objects, however, is our value. Our own intercourse as commodities proves it. We relate to each other merely as exchange-values.— Marx
You will know you’re old when you cease to be amazed.
Big tech has given this machinery telemetry, automation, and scale. The platform feed is a Jones machine. It puts other people’s vacations, kitchens, bodies, weddings, and workout routines in front of us not as occasional local gossip but as a continuous global stream. The result is not just envy: it is the normalization of comparison as a default mental state. Am I fit enough, rich enough, busy enough, stylish enough, politically informed enough, raising my children well enough, or aging well enough? A system that can keep those questions humming in the background can monetize them indefinitely.
Call me crazy, but I always thought that learning should be at the center of educational institutions.
In Defense of Difficult Reading
The winning jolt of the book, in fact, is the way it positions a Great Books defense as natural and important for readers on the political and cultural left, where Kanakia locates herself. Culture wars have gerrymandered reading lists, and the Great Books usually, as we say now, code right. Kanakia redraws the redrawn map, defending the status of books that are more often valued in classical academies and conservative blogs. Daniel Walden’s recent article for The Point, “The Left Case for Great Books,” makes a related argument. Maybe classic texts will slip partisan sorting after all. Maybe that’s part of what makes them Great Books in the first place.
In spite of freefalling support for Zionism in the US body politic, support for the Zionist regime in Congress remains overwhelming. Israel broke the code on American transactional pay-to-play politics a long time ago; and so they formed the American Israel Public Affairs Committee (AIPAC). 30 percent of American voters don’t even know what this is; and AIPAC would prefer that number was 100. It’s Israel’s core lobbyist, and its alarmingly allowed—even as the representative of a foreign power (under barely legal cover, of course)—to spend tsunamis of cash for the purpose of influencing US electoral outcomes and legislative/executive agendas. To cover some of its tracks, it uses vassal media and NGOs, a network of super-PACS, and political fronts.