say words

But I think animus toward tenured employees goes beyond simply not wanting to fund universities. It also provides a way of imagining oneself in a position of power, since if taxpayers fund universities they can understand themselves as faculty members’ bosses. Of course the form this takes reflects a diminished understanding of even private enterprise, since we no longer understand bosses as people who build things but rather only as those with the power to fire people. In this regard, the well-documented critiques of Trump as a businessman hardly matter — “You’re fired” is, for good reason, his best-known quote.

The safer space is just as capable of self-critique as any other, which is to say: mostly not very, but somewhat. Critics seem not to have noticed this, or how their own safety is premised on the radical lack of safety of others. They are more troubled by the thought police, who don’t exist, than by the real police, who kill. They are free to speak, and believe themselves to be so, but they seem surprised to find that others are, too.

this twist in the story (‘twist’ in the sense of a recurring trope in protest documentation) that finds overzealous documenters rebuffed by protesters — and the free speech extremism that ensued — is important not only as a tale of actual ethics in journalism (or the lack thereof), but also about the effects of the attentional economy and what it rewards and reinforces for the media(s) that indulge it. ... Here the students’/faculty’s attempts to create space between themselves and the journalists documenting their activity could be understood, I argue, as the Movement trying to exercise a degree of control over the construction of its own narrative against readily shareable (viral) packaging.

The potential power of digital is that it can take the ponderous and isolated nature of physical things and make them light and movable. Physical things are difficult to copy at scale, while digital things in open environments can replicate effortlessly. Physical is largely immutable, digital can be malleable. Physical is isolated, digital is networked. This is where digital rights management (DRM) – a closed, proprietary layer of many digital reading stacks – hurts books most and undermines almost all that latent value proposition in digital. It artificially imposes the heaviness and isolation of physical books on their digital counterparts, which should be loose, networked objects. DRM constraints over our rights as readers make it feel like we’re renting our digital books, not owning them.

The logic of trigger warnings is that trauma can be mitigated if content producers prepare consumers for the inclusion of sensitive material. This supposes that the producer can identify what’s sensitive and thereby determine what requires warning. That is, trigger warnings presume that we can predict each other’s trauma. Avoiding psychological harm then depends upon accurate prediction. It’s essentially a bet that hinges on mindreading. If we take seriously what trigger warnings are intended for, this is a pretty risky bet.

what would the software equivalent of the jersey knit cotton T-shirt look like?

If telephony was the first technology to connect people directly and immediately over long distances, then the handset was the avatar of this once new and then magical union. A handset grew warm with use. One could hold it delicately or grasp it with worry. It could be hurled back into the cradle with anger or dangled from the cord in enticement. AT&T’s now-retrograde “reach out and touch someone” tagline wasn’t entirely metaphorical. The handset made telephony a tactile activity as much as an auditory one. ... Today, we have an alternative for long-distance intimacy: the capacitive touch screen. On your iPhone or your Galaxy, tactility can be achieved directly, by touching the cool screen to warm it, by swiping or stroking through a text chat. Your fingers can linger even if not for functional reasons. True, iMessage and Facebook Messenger might seem more aloof and impersonal than calling by voice, but today’s smartphone user is right to identify those experiences as the sensual, tactile successors to the telephone handset with its duplex of truncated 3 kHz voices echoing inside.

A cruelly optimistic relationship to self-care is one in which self-care is envisioned primarily as a means to rejuvenate us so that we’re able to work faster and harder—precisely the condition that has caused so much of our stress to begin with.

As anthropologists and neuroscientists have and continue to show, the mind is a process, and this process requires training. Like machines, humans have to learn how to learn. Like machines, the human brain is manufactured. Like machines, the human brain learns with the cultural logic within which it develops. Variations in intelligence do not, therefore, hinge on artificiality. Instead, they hinge on vessel and autonomy.

... ignoring and minimizing the false allegation narrative won’t make people trust rape victims any more. Looking at the story closer almost always shows that stories about false allegations don’t land on 'bitches be crazy' they explore how deeply screwed up a society’s attitude toward rape can be. Analysis detoxifies better than dismissal, better than calling false allegations a 'myth.'

Safeguarding Pluto or scrunching my nose at gravity’s pull, or nowadays still, welcoming how quickly mnemonics coax from me my past, all these quirks, console my strangest yet most beloved sensation: the calm I derive from knowing there are things simply too big to really get

Just as the double-negative construction becomes affirmative, not knowing what a body isn’t affirms all bodies by doing away with the ideal of the normative body altogether. To not know what a body isn’t means that the idea of the body is infinitely open, rather than just momentarily open

Although the promise and actual experience that these devices might afford deserves evaluation of its own, to insinuate that holograms or some other future ideal might yield a more “real,” “natural” or authentic experience than our already augmented reality resembles less prophecy than the apocryphal projections of their creators, magicians deceived by the allure of believing their own illusions

This is the decadent end of the current innovation cycle, the part where people stop having new ideas and start adding filigree and extra orifices to the stuff we've got and call it the future