nathanjurgenson

If the mid-20th century saw the rise of the republic of drivers, then the early 21st century will be marked by a new republic of riders. Whereas the republic of drivers derived its ideological allure from longstanding myths of American individualism, the republic of riders will leverage the same nation’s equally fabricated story of attainable luxury: that Americans live the biggest and best lives that money can buy.

In a move toward symbolic enclosure, both witches and Indians have been reduced to accessorized signifiers hawked by Urban Outfitters and Forever 21, available for the carefree to adorn themselves with at Coachella and express their pagan predilections for living ever so briefly outside time.

Facebook offers an alternative idea of the public sphere, which has nothing to do with deliberative democracy or good governance but on wide-scale depoliticization. In its "public sphere" people talk for the sake of talking, for the sake of belonging and not out of any hope of changing anyone's minds. Nothing matters beyond friends and family anyway. Between the lines of Facebook's pleas for us to "get closer" is the idea that all our interaction is "meaningful" as long as it is harmless.

The engineers’ worldview and the fiction that is created as a critique to engineers’ creations forms an Ouroboros of destruction in the name of engineers’ own job security. Engineers’ work begets fiction, begets new engineering projects, begets fiction again, which in turn begets position papers about the possibility of it all going wrong. Each step requires additional funding, that cannot wait because the latest threat is already overdue. Charlie Brooker makes a Black Mirror episode about it, and then another engineer reads dystopia as a new product idea and so on. The engineers are still operating the siege engines, but they are also the ones building things back up, all the while warning us of the new siege engines they’re building. Perhaps, instead of such fictions, we should have more stories about engineers coming to terms with the consequences of their creations. All of this might be less worrying if there was a robust and popular movement against this authoritarian engineering establishment that manufactures its own worst enemy. What we have instead are people who prescribe block chains and disconnection sleepaway camps. The former conflates encryption and privacy tools with confronting the corrupting influence of power. The latter clutch their pearls at teenagers and wax nostalgic about conversations and deep thinking.

Conspiracy theorizing “solves” feelings of powerlessness by enhancing them, just as social media can sometimes seem to solve loneliness by increasing feelings of isolation. The isolated come together to consume their collective helplessness as nourishment — and to experience their helplessness at the level of practice as a kind of omniscience at the level of theorizing

The engineers’ worldview and the fiction that is created as a critique to engineers’ creations forms an Ouroboros of destruction in the name of engineers’ own job security. Engineers’ work begets fiction, begets new engineering projects, begets fiction again, which in turn begets position papers about the possibility of it all going wrong. Each step requires additional funding, that cannot wait because the latest threat is already overdue. Charlie Brooker makes a Black Mirror episode about it, and then another engineer reads dystopia as a new product idea and so on. The engineers are still operating the siege engines, but they are also the ones building things back up, all the while warning us of the new siege engines they’re building. Perhaps, instead of such fictions, we should have more stories about engineers coming to terms with the consequences of their creations.

Facebook offers an alternative idea of the public sphere, which has nothing to do with deliberative democracy or good governance but on wide-scale depoliticization. In its "public sphere" people talk for the sake of talking, for the sake of belonging and not out of any hope of changing anyone's minds. Nothing matters beyond friends and family anyway. Between the lines of Facebook's pleas for us to "get closer" is the idea that all our interaction is "meaningful" as long as it is harmless

If you hate him, it’s likely because he represents what you’ve always resented about the world — that someone so utterly thoughtless and lacking evident empathy could still thrive, and worse, become wildly famous

Engineering culture is about making the product. If you make the product work, that’s all you’ve got to do to fulfill the ethical warrant of your profession. The ethics of engineering are an ethics of: Does it work? If you make something that works, you’ve done the ethical thing. It’s up to other people to figure out the social mission for your object. It’s like the famous line from the Tom Lehrer song: “‘Once the rockets are up, who cares where they come down? That's not my department,’ says Wernher von Braun."

The common advice that social media is best used in moderation, and only so long as users keep engaging face-to-face isn’t negated by the research, but shown irrelevant—people are using social media to facilitate, augment, and supplement face-to-face interaction

By design, Facebook created the highlight reel phenomenon, and onlookers suffer for it

There is a sense in which the printing press invents boredom, and then cameras reinvent it — every new medium posits a new form of seductive boredom as it finds its particular ways to think for us, to entertain us

Trump is not trying to persuade anyone of anything as much as he is trying to render reality irrelevant, and reduce the pursuit of agreement on it to just another part of the circus

Blade Runner 2049’s replicants invest deeply and sentimentally in the organic family. The ability to make more replicants does not seem to be the issue; after all, they could always organize to take over the Wallace Corporation and seize the means of reproduction as it stands. What’s it to a robot whether it comes from a womb as a baby or is brought to life by industrial means, so long as it’s free once it’s born? Why is birth the trigger for their rebellion, and not pain or suffering or even boredom with their labor, as in Her? More than the replicants in the first Blade Runner, 2049’s bots behave like David in Steven Spielberg’s A.I.: a perpetual child whose only programmed directive is to be bonded to a mother. 2049 would have us believe that replicants arrive at this desire on their own, not as a result of human programming but as a response to new, unexpected stimuli. Rather than constructing value beyond the human, they long for the nuclear family structure as soon as they know it’s available to them, flattering patriarchal conceptions of meaning, purpose, and worth

maybe Facebook and Second Life aren’t so different in their appeal. Both find traction in the allure of inhabiting a selective self

I keep coming back to these words: If our journalists are perceived as biased… that can undercut the credibility of the entire newsroom. Dean Baquet — who approved these words and made them law — doesn’t seem to realize that if the perception of critics can edit the actions of his staff then he has surrendered power to enemies of the Times, who will always perceive bias because it is basic to their interests to do so. This is part of a larger problem in mainstream journalism, which is unable to think politically because it is constantly accused of acting politically by hyper-partisan critics peddling fixed ideas