📚 J'S Highlights

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A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .

This may be a cold-blooded way of looking at sharing—that we increasingly learn about the world through strangers’ random choices about what to share—but even that has some human benefit. As Kurt Vonnegut’s protagonist says at the close of The Sirens of Titan, “The worst thing that could possibly happen to anybody would be to not be used for anything by anybody.” The ways in which we are combining our cognitive surplus make that fate less likely by the day.

Cognitive Surplus

Clay Shirky

The other side of this was mass surveillance of workers in factories and partnerships between the Life Extension Institute and Ford Motor Company—maybe no surprise there given Henry Ford’s general politics. A lot of it was about looking at different races and ethnicities of workers, and women workers versus men, and factors like disability and age. And trying to predict when workers would wear out while also trying to understand the conditions under which workers would be the most productive and most effective without killing them.

Who Gets to Live Forever? With Tamara Kneese and Santiago Sanchez

Tamara Kneese , Santiago Sanchez

Lears references the historian and politician John Bigelow’s 1895 essay “What Is Gambling”: > What, [Bigelow] wondered, was “the ethical distinction between putting one’s money on a wheel of fortune” and “underwriting a policy of insurance” or “buying shares in a corporation”? . . . What if the captain of industry were really no better than a common gambler? Few Progressives were willing to risk this question.

The Polymarketification of American Life

https://www.facebook.com/TheBafflerMagazine

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