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A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .
Among the many costs of the total economy, the loss of the principle of vocation is probably the most symptomatic and, from a cultural standpoint, the most critical. It is by the replacement of vocation with economic determinism that the exterior workings of a total economy destroy human character and culture also from the inside.
The World-Ending Fire
Wendell Berry
As digital culture becomes faster, higher bandwidth, and more image-based, it also becomes more costly and destructive – both literally and figuratively. It requires more input and energy, and affirms the supremacy of the image – the visual representation of data – as the representation of the world. But these images are no longer true, and none less so than our image of the future. As the past melts into the permafrost, so is the future rocked by the atmosphere. The changing climate shakes not merely our expectations, but our ability to predict any future at all.
New Dark Age
James Bridle
We have already explored how general artificial intelligence might be seen, not as something which overrides and supplants our own agency, but as something which might bring us to an accommodation with the intelligence and agency of other beings, non-human and more-than-human. Perhaps this is AI’s political role too: to warn us of the dangers of trying to segregate and oppress other beings and to point us towards a better path.
Ways of Being
James Bridle
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