I saw that I had absorbed from my family and my upbringing a specific brand of individualism, valorizing and transmitting it unknowingly. I’d done this throughout my entire life, but especially in How to Do Nothing. Around my favored versions of contemplative solitude, so similar to Emerson’s, a whole suite of circumstances appeared in full relief, like something coming into focus. The women in the kitchen made the mens’ conversation possible, just as my trip to the mountain—and really all of my time spent walking, observing, and courting the “over-soul”—rested upon a long list of privileges, from the specific (owning a car, having the time), to the general (able-bodied, upper-middle-class, half white and half “model minority,” a walkable neighborhood in a desirable city, and more). There was an entire infrastructure around my experience of freedom, and I’d been so busy chasing it that I hadn’t seen it.

There is no accurate Map of the Territory. That we can’t see the Territory as it is is not the only reason for impossible accuracy. We would also fail in creating the perfect Map because the most accurate Map of the Territory can only be the Territory itself.

Eleanor recognizes that only in The Bad Place would people be forced to treat others as disposable…so they must be in The Bad Place. And when she makes decisions on the assumption that she isn’t in an ideal world, this throws a wrench in Michael’s plan. He has to reboot that world because Eleanor’s behavior has become incompatible with it. Eventually (in “Team Cockroach” S2E4) Michael joins them, realizing that he needs their help if he himself is to escape the ultimately punitive and carceral regime of which he is a part. That’s what the show spends the rest of season 2 doing: season 2 is about mostly white women and people of color (and one white male accomplice who literally is a mostly(?) reformed demon…plus Janet, who I’ll get to later) collectively practicing philosophy on the assumption that the world they live in is not in fact equal but designed to harm and oppress them. [...] Beginning from the assumption that everyone’s on more or less an equal playing field and thus entitled to equal weight in the conversation (and that people generally want to do the right thing, which Mills calls the assumption of “strict compliance”), this is the same “both sides” liberalism that Mills critiques as ideal theory. Despite what Schur tells us the show’s message is, season 2 shows us a very different message, one about the importance of beginning from the assumption that you—especially if you are a white woman, person of color, or non-human person—are in The Bad Place. And you’re there not because of anything you did, but because White Men engineered it that way for their benefit.

Academic theorists weren’t looking to destroy truth, but to diagnose its collapse.

The spectres are textural. The surface noise of the sample unsettles the illusion of presence in at least two ways: first, temporally, by alerting us to the fact that what we are listening to is a phonographic revenant, and second, ontologically, by introducing the technical frame, the unheard material pre-condition of the recording, on the level of content. We're now so accustomed to this violation of ontological hierarchy that it goes unnoticed. But in his Wire piece, Simon refers to the shock he experienced when he first heard records constructed entirely out of samples. I vividly recall the first time I went into studio and heard vocal samples played through a mixing desk; I really do remember saying, 'It's like hearing ghosts...'

This is a kind of neo-liberalism of the emotions, in which happiness is seen not as a response to our circumstances but as a result of our own individual mental effort, a reward for the deserving. The problem is not your sky-high rent or meager paycheck, your cheating spouse or unfair boss or teetering pile of dirty dishes. The problem is you. It is, of course, easier and cheaper to blame the individual for thinking the wrong thoughts than it is to tackle the thorny causes of his unhappiness. So we give inner-city schoolchildren mindfulness classes rather than engage with education inequality, and instruct exhausted office workers in mindful breathing rather than giving them paid vacation or better health care benefits.

In an account of designing one of these litanizers for an OOO symposium website, Bogost writes how it inadvertently shocked a visitor to the site by randomly generating a sexist image of a scantily clad woman on the symposium’s main page. Bogost’s response to the visitor’s complaint was to modify the code for his litanizer so as to exclude these kinds of images. For me, this encounter and subsequent compromise is where carpentry becomes most interesting. If carpentry is about exploring how things playfully hang together, the point where this hanging breaks down or encounters resistance would seem to me to be of particular interest. Instead of recognising this disruption and attempting to develop a means through which carpentry can address this challenge, Bogost is happy to have the litanizer simply raise thorny questions ‘in a unique way’ and vents his frustration that resolving the complaint means compromising its flat ontology of objects.

I think Hegel’s dialectic of sense-certainty can illuminate the concept of “the mainstream.” It unpacks the concept’s paradoxical locality and generality, and it shows how the concept of the mainstream produces its own constituent population.

Just do it! Go and do it! There are no valid excuses [not to]. We see our excuses as real things, but they’re just a barrier you built between you and what you want to do because you are afraid to try it and fail. No one wants to fail, but you will never know if you don’t try it. Maybe the first few times, you’ll have a bad time…but then you won’t.

Regarding Patricia Lockwood’s appreciation of @graeyalien’s tweet about Aaliyah. ‘when aaliyah "makes the decision" to engage in the bestial behavior of reaching compulsively for the first thing to appear in front of the field of her sensory organs, the bread of the material world, she ultimately dooms the flight.’

Transparent data itself is not empowering.

"He was condemned to death for telling the ancient Greeks things they didn't want to hear, but his views on consumerism and trial by media are just as relevant today."

A video by fiilmaker Andrea Dorfman and poet/singer/songwriter Tanya Davis. "Society is afraid of alonedom, like lonely hearts are wasting away in basements, like people must have problems if, after a while, nobody is dating them. but lonely is a freedom that breaths easy and weightless and lonely is healing if you make it."

Great, of course.

Another one of these "How to Be Productive and Creative" lists, but they're good as inspiration/affirmations.

Jim Carrey as a genius, the "representative jester of our time." "Carrey’s dream sequence of movies is a prophecy, a warning that this clanking ego-apparatus in which each of us walks around, this fissured, monumental self, half Job and half Bertie Wooster, cannot be sustained. Out of his own seemingly bottomless disquiet, Carrey writhes and reaches into the bottomless disquiet of his audience."

"…also known as the Theseus' paradox, is a paradox which raises the question of whether an object which has had all its component parts replaced remains fundamentally the same object."

Andy Rutlege on the difference between creativity and self-expression, and the importance of a professional approach to creativity in design.

Or so says this guy. Basically, stop feeling sorry for yourself and getting wrapped up in your moods -- just go go go!

My thoughts on Clay Shirky's "Arrogance and Humility." Kottke's ping struck up a shared link storm today, two weeks later.

Can we ever truly know ourselves? No, and it would be awful if we did. "I think that life will continue to bewilder us for as long as we are self-conscious, thinking, feeling beings. "

"Ambigrams. Logos. Words as art. As both an artist and a graphic designer, I specialize in the visual presentation of words. Language, philosophy, and science are interwoven into the design of words, which are manipulated to create surprising illusions."

"Over one hundred worthwhile dilemmas." A collection of short sayings designed to break a deadlock or dilemma situation.

"Condensed and abridged to keep the substance, the style and the quotes, but ditching all that irritating verbiage."

The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin. Complete text.

"Tibetan Buddhist Internet Radio"

"John Searle's thought experiment and associated derivation is one of the best known and widely credited counters to claims of artificial intelligence."