Commentary on technologies of reading, writing, research, and, generally, knowledge. As these technologies change and develop, what do we lose, what do we gain, what is (fundamentally or trivially) altered? And, not least, what’s fun?
By: Alan Jacobs
May 30, 2017
Friends: My beloved and I are about to take a road trip to Southern California, where next week I’ll be leading a faculty seminar at Biola University. We’ll take our time driving out there and driving back, because I’ve never seen the desert Southwest and plan to enjoy taking some of it in. Blogging will resume soon...
May 29, 2017
The most recent episode of Canvas — the podcast on iOS and “productivity” (a word I hate, but never mind that for now) hosted by Federico Viticci and Fraser Speirs — focused on hopes for the upcoming iOS 11. Merlin Mann joined the podcast as a guest, and the three of them went around and talked about features they’d...
May 28, 2017
A follow-up to yesterday’s post… Of course it’s possible to reach too far into the past to get context for current events in the university, but this book certainly offers some interesting food for thought: I love the fact that there was something called the Conic Section Rebellion. Anyone who said that nothing like...
May 27, 2017
Several long quotations coming. Please read them in full. James Kirchik writes, Of the 100 or so students who confronted [Nicholas] Christakis that day, a young woman who called him “disgusting” and shouted “who the fuck hired you?” before storming off in tears became the most infamous, thanks to an 81-second YouTube clip that...
May 25, 2017
Yesterday I read Jeff VanderMeer’s creepy, disturbing, uncanny, and somehow heart-warming new novel Borne, and it has prompted two sets of thoughts that may or may not be related to one another. But hey, this is a blog: incoherence is its birthright. So here goes. 1. A few months ago I wrote a post in which I quoted this passage from a...
May 25, 2017
May 23, 2017
I’ve been reading a good bit lately about accelerationism — the belief that to solve our social problems and reach the full potential of humanity we need to accelerate the speed of technological innovation and achievement. Accelerationism is generally associated with techno-libertarians, but there is a left accelerationism also,...
May 22, 2017
In the Boston Globe, Kumble R. Subbaswamy writes, More than 850 years ago, the emperor of the Holy Roman Empire, Frederick Barbarossa, issued the Authentica habita, granting imperial protection for traveling scholars. This seminal document ensured that research and scholarship could develop throughout the empire independent of government...
May 19, 2017
I’m not a great fan of Kevin Kelly’s brand of futurism, but this is a great essay by him on the problems that arise when thinking about artificial intelligence begins with what the Marxists used to call “false reification”: the belief that intelligence is a bounded and unified concept that functions like a thing....
May 19, 2017
I promised a kind of summary or overview of my current project on Anthropocene theology, but that will need to wait a while. This post will explain why. I understand the Anthropocene as an era in which some human beings are effectively the gods of this world but also are profoundly disoriented by their godlike status, while other human...