Category: Control
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Reactions to ‘Capital in the Twenty-First Century’ | Blog, Perspectives | BillMoyers.com
As Bill mentions in this week’s show, a lot of (digital) ink has been spilled over Piketty’s book. Reviewers have called it “a bulldozer of a book,” “magisterial,” “seminal,” “definitive,” “a watershed.” Below is a selection of reviews we think are worth reading, including several by previous Moyers & Company…
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Enjoying the powerless features of Democracy
Not really all that amazing but it does make one want to say something facile like “amazing” . Plutocracy is alive and thriving while the great mass of citizens play at republican democracy, enjoying all the best features–like voting, a good amount of freedom of speech, a certain amount of…
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Finding Life After Academia — and Not Feeling Bad About It – NYTimes.com
According to a 2011 National Science Foundation survey, 35 percent of doctorate recipients — and 43 percent of those in the humanities — had no commitment for employment at the time of completion. Fewer than half of Ph.D.’s are expected to land tenure-track jobs. And many voluntarily choose another path…
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The Future of Brain Implants – WSJ.com
What would you give for a retinal chip that let you see in the dark or for a next-generation cochlear implant that let you hear any conversation in a noisy restaurant, no matter how loud? Or for a memory chip, wired directly into your brain’s hippocampus, that gave you perfect…
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Barely Keeping Up in TV’s New Golden Age – NYTimes.com
The growing intellectual currency of television has altered the cultural conversation in fundamental ways. Water cooler chatter is now a high-minded pursuit, not just a way to pass the time at work. The three-camera sitcom with a laugh track has been replaced by television shows that are much more like…
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How Crowdworkers Became the Ghosts in the Digital Machine | The Nation
Mechanical Turk is the innovation behind “crowdworking,” the low-wage virtual labor phenomenon that has reinvented piecework for the digital age. Created by Amazon in 2005, it remains one of the central platforms—markets, really—where crowd-based labor is bought and sold. As many as 500,000 “crowdworkers” power the Mechanical Turk machine, while…
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Burned, Bombed, Beaten
Education is under attack worldwide. The report issued by the United Nations speaks to conditions in the most physically violent locales around the globe. We should pay close heed to these. Because they are the physical counterpart of the psychosocial warfare being waged on instructors in places like the United…
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The good white folks of the Academy | Al Jazeera America
A particular narrative about slavery is told over and over: The institution was a historical aberration perpetrated by evil white people, but luckily there were good white people who listened to the black people, and they helped free the slaves, and now it’s all over. A similarly simplistic narrative emerges…
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The “Deep State” – How Much Does It Explain?
…[T]here is another government concealed behind the one that is visible at either end of Pennsylvania Avenue, a hybrid entity of public and private institutions ruling the country according to consistent patterns in season and out, connected to, but only intermittently controlled by, the visible state whose leaders we choose.…
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The internet is a utility
…[C]orporations that control internet access insist that they’re providing specialized services that are somehow different than water, power, and telephones. They point to crazy bullshit you don’t want or need like free email addresses and web hosting solutions and goofy personalized search screens as evidence that they’re actually providing “information”…
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How Covert Agents Infiltrate the Internet to Manipulate, Deceive, and Destroy Reputations – The Intercept
…[T]hese agencies are attempting to control, infiltrate, manipulate, and warp online discourse, and in doing so, arecompromising the integrity of the internet itself. Among the core self-identified purposes of JTRIG are two tactics: (1) to inject all sorts of false material onto the internet in order to destroy the reputation…
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The Question Concerning Technoscience
A good show from the BBC. I begin the episode a bit of the way in. Worth watching the whole thing, but this gives you a taste of things to come in Humanity 2.0… Maybe.
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Why U.S. Internet Access is Slow, Costly and Unfair | Moyers and Company
Susan Crawford, former special assistant to President Obama for science, technology and innovation, and author of Captive Audience: The Telecom Industry and Monopoly Power in the New Gilded Age, joins Bill to discuss how our government has allowed a few powerful media conglomerates to put profit ahead of the public…
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Food Friends Family Faith–A Lost Dream
Wonderful little article that reminds us that the American Dream once centered on working less and having the leisure to enjoy the things that actually matter: among them, food, friends, family, and faith. Now that lost dream shows the foresight that could make for a better world. Why did we…
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Military Metaphysics: How Militarism Mangles the Mind
Homer in “The Iliad” showed his understanding of war. His heroes are not pleasant men. They are vain, imperial, filled with rage and violent. And Homer’s central character in “The Odyssey,” Odysseus, in his journey home from war must learn to shed his “hero’s heart,” to strip from himself the…
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Afternoon Memo 20140202
My MEMO Status update on FB: Some caricature metaphysics as the most meaningless of abstractions: e.g. pondering how many angels can dance on the head of a pin. Such examples work precisely to say that the “beyond” trumps the now/here for a metaphysician. But really, the true offense arises from…
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