Join 📚 Jim's Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what Jim's read, .
This situation is compounded by yet another social dynamic analyzed by sociologist Hartmut Rosa. “A modern society,” Rosa argued, “is one that can stabilize itself only dynamically, in other words one that requires constant economic growth, technological acceleration, and cultural innovation in order to maintain its institutional status quo.” The ideal subject of such a society is one who is schooled to be a perpetual and indiscriminate consumer, and digital media is uniquely suited to be the everlasting commodity.
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet
The Convivial Society
Once the 'bourgeois revolution' had cleared the ground of awkward obstacles like the peasantry, the artisans, common land, local cultures and traditions, family and home life, a sense of history and mutual obligation, and religions which preached against wealth and wordly power, then the captains and priests of the Machine could get on with the work they were made for, the work of our time, the holy effort to which all human will, skill and energy is now bent: making money.
An engineer from the studio will be there, and usually someone from the PFC partner company will come along, too—acting as a producer, giving light feedback, at times inching the musicians in a more playlist-friendly direction. The most common feedback: play simpler. “That’s definitely the thing: nothing that could be even remotely challenging or offensive, really,” the musician told me. “The goal, for sure, is to be as milquetoast as possible.”
The Ghosts in the Machine
Liz Pelly
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise