Society

From million-dollar slide shows to Steve Jobs’s introduction of the iPhone, a bit of show business never hurt plain old business.

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Is affirmative action unfair to black achievement? Not any more than the forms of unfairness that affect other races' accomplishments

A new paper shows underinvesting in government comes at a staggering cost.

A YouTube controversy around a major channel reflects the complexity of maintaining editorial standards, or even integrity, when quantity trumps all.

New data on series like Suits and Bluey makes a strong case that streaming giants like Netflix and Disney+ need to learn the value of their own content.

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Once the culture wars are dialed down and localized, the more important economic fissures will be able to take center stage.

Sirens in Maui were not turned on before or during the devastating fire in Lahaina. Here in the Bay Area, sirens are actively being used in some areas but in San Francisco, the sirens are offline and not working.

This essay is a personal history of the $60+ million I allocated to metascience starting in 2012 while working for the Arnold Foundation (now Arnold Ventures). Click and keep reading if you want to know: How the Center for Open Science started How I accidentally up working with the John Oliver show

In a culture devoid of moral education, generations are growing up in a morally inarticulate, self-referential world.

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A prominent figure in tech makes a strong argument for why the public must take a stand against AI before it's too late.

When I describe bitcoin as a type of ponzi or pyramid , idealistic bitcoiners usually view this as an attack on the nobility of the bitcoin ...

The bestselling author, who joined the protest camp documented in the photographer’s new book, argues its spirit is more vital than ever

Data suggests prices are rising even though production costs are flat. Yet wages remain policymakers’ chief concern

Computer scientist Joseph Weizenbaum was there at the dawn of artificial intelligence – but he was also adamant that we must never confuse computers with humans

Today the risks of artificial intelligence are clear — but the warning signs have been there all along

I've just finished reading Foucault's Discipline and Punish in its original French (Surveiller et Punir), mostly because smart writers I like kept quoting and citing it and I had to see what it was about. I wasn't disappointed, although the structure makes it take a while before getting to the good stuff. Most of the material I've seen referenced is about disciplinary societies, which sandwiched between two book parts on pre-prison justice generally applied via corporal punishment and public torture, and on prison and how it is applied. There’s a point being made that modern society’s discipline, as derived from military roots, aims to create a normalizing set of pressures: abilities, performances, and acts are to be comparable to each other. Individuals are then ranked by that scale, which represents a model, a lowest acceptable boundary or an optimum to attain. Quantitatively measure people on the scale and assign them a rank, which values or de-values them. Discipline requires very little actual punishment because the penalization is structurally built into the hierarchy and constantly part of everyday life, turning justice’s punishments from power asserting itself into power making most effective use of the bodies it rules in its economic and social system. The organization of education and training is tightly regulated as well; instead of being the apprentice to a master and gaining your own master title by showing a work of art after having helped them in their craft for years, school (and life as a whole) is structured and cut up in more manageable, comparable, predictable, structured parts that are more productive, and more amenable to the normalizing forces that aim to make everyone comparable to each other. Other interesting bit, he compares how power is traditionally displayed: shows of force, parades, creations. It’s an act by which those who hold the power make themselves visible and present to others. Power is projected, asserted. In discipline, the relationship is turned upside-down: power is invisible, and it is the ruled (instead of the ruler) who makes themselves visible, observable, measurable: exams, examinations, tests, and so on. Power is applied by a mechanism of objectivation, and discipline demonstrates it works by having the targets of power showing themselves as meeting its desires, ready to be fitted within a wider mechanism. He states that this inversion is the precise mechanism by which power is uniformly transmitted from top to bottom. I think he compares the practice to a sort of social panopticon where the source of authority can’t be evaluated but constantly evaluates you. I think he’s also making the point that criminal justice is sort of just a side-show to the actual normalizing power of the modern state (school is a bigger one). And so any claims of reform or more humane punishment isn’t necessarily rooted in the purported reasons (being more humane), and instead emerges as a structured reinforcement of discipline (via prison and labour) of the most irreducible elements until they are either removed from or shaped back into following the structure. But by having the prison as the endcap of society, you define the final frontier of which behaviors are acceptable or not and turn the people who don't fit the norm into delinquents; it isn't the acts you punish but the individuals for who they are. Some crimes are defined as worth punishing by prison time (often those committed by lower classes or workers who threaten the structure itself) and some aren't (they align with the structure; white collar crimes). By shifting the boundary of acceptability, you both keep discipline working, and define an ordered world people live in, but which constantly reminds them of what is outside its limits as unacceptable and as a possible threat. The construction of delinquents who keep returning to prison to leave again on probation also provides surveillance and disciplining mechanisms in parts of society that are usually impenetrable, and is mentioned as a potential useful side-effect to people applying power. This, Foucault supposes, would explain why prison never managed to attain the objectives it had, and why every reform tries to meet the same objectives and always fails. The role it incidentally plays in maintaining a disciplined society that largely self-polices itself into higher productivity is simply a bigger benefit than asserting power directly. ---------------------------------------- Anyway, this is serious food for thought. I get why he's cited so much, and the inversion of power into the continuous self-reinforcement of a figurative structural panopticon to keep us all productive and well-behaved (as opposed to a society that is more contractualist or based on reciprocity) is wild in the context of the modern tech industry.

$35,000 will be awarded in this contest to create video games that "improve public knowledge of civics" while featuring the library's resources.

With its toppling book towers and rubble bags full of sheet music, Archive Books in central London is a rare treasure trove of hidden gems. But for ho...

From appearances on the red carpet to shows at international museums, the ancient garment is having a mainstream moment in the Western world.

Parties, catsup, and Michelangelo

I’ve been researching how science fiction evolved through studying the history of science fiction anthologies. As I studied I began to wonder when did the mundane world realized science ficti…

Morgan Smith: 80% of bosses say they regret earlier return-to-office plans: ‘A lot of executives have egg on their faces’ “Many companies are realizing they could have been a lot more measured in their approach, rather than making big, bold, very controversial decisions based on executives’ opinions rather than employee

Black workers have a drastically different core reason for wanting to work remotely than their white counterparts.