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It’s not just that living in a constant state of distraction is unpleasant, or that a life without willful thought and action is an impoverished one. If it’s true that collective agency both mirrors and relies on the individual capacity to “pay attention,” then in a time that demands action, distraction appears to be (at the level of the collective) a life-and-death matter. A social body that can’t concentrate or communicate with itself is like a person who can’t think and act.
How to Do Nothing
Jenny Odell
At that age I had a certain vision of the world, this very tidy, control-freak, Khalil Gibran–reading idea of nobility, like the way to be a good person was to hover righteously above all those weak, dopey sinners down there. Sort of a purity obsession. To go out in the Chicken Van every night was to constantly have that view undercut. Because the whole world was crazy and erratic and sinful. But the people I met were also sweet and weird and endearing. You’d get all of that in one night.
George Saunders, the Art of Fiction No. 245
theparisreview.org
Think about the future of your own career. The core shift of the 21st century, according to these sources, is the rapid movement away from having traditional jobs inside firms and moving toward a reality of humans interfacing with infrastructure systems. Just imagine a world where your daily tasks aren’t given to you by a human manager, but are assigned dynamically, second by second, by a coordinating algorithm optimizing for planetary efficiency.
An Interesting Experiment With LLMs
jjn1
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