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The problem, however, was that this idea of culture went rather too deep. It seemed to suggest that actual social differences — being a woman rather than a man, or a landowner rather than a window cleaner — didn’t really matter. And this was rather more convenient for men and landowners than it was for women and window cleaners. As long as culture brought us together in spirit, we could remain the mutually hostile, vastly unequal people we actually were. Culture seemed to make all the difference, and yet to make no difference at all.
Britain Is Stronger Divided
Terry Eagleton
I want to propose today that we rethink a little bit about the role of contemporary math -- not just financial math, but math in general. That its transition from being something that we extract and derive from the world to something that actually starts to shape it -- the world around us and the world inside us. And it's specifically algorithms, which are basically the math that computers use to decide stuff. They acquire the sensibility of truth because they repeat over and over again, and they ossify and calcify, and they become real.
How Algorithms Shape Our World
Kevin Slavin
As in Videodrome before it, eXistenZ draws out all the ambiguities of the concept of the player. On the one hand, the player is the one in control, the agent; on the other, the player is the one being played, the passive substance directed by external forces.
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