society items › MachineMachine /stream

Religion may have lost much of its power to explain our modern world but we still crave its emotional satisfactions

January 28 2012, 11:35am | Comments

Link Kids, unlike adults, think technology is fundamentally human

With children so easy to embrace robotics, it’s clear that there’s a ton of potential for integrating intelligent technologies into learning environments. Besides, the idea of “exploring and creating” sounds…

January 19 2012, 3:13am | Comments

Link On Science Transfer

“Faster.” Could any other word better capture the reigning paradox of our age? The world today—whether measured in technological or ecological terms—appears to be changing more rapidly than ever before.…

September 29 2011, 4:01am | Comments

Link The Battle Over Zomia

Over the past two millennia, "runaway" communities have put the "friction of terrain" between themselves and the people who remained in the lowlands, he writes. The highland groups adopted a…

September 5 2011, 5:20am | Comments

Link Our Emergent Digital Future

What will the digital world look like in ten years? The trends are already clear. Capacities in bandwidth and storage will continue on their exponential path. The explosion in the…

August 14 2011, 4:32am | Comments

Link Secularism and Its Discontents

These are theological questions without theological answers, and, if the atheist is not supposed to entertain them, then, for slightly different reasons, neither is the religious believer. Religion assumes that…

August 9 2011, 3:57pm | Comments

Link Violence at the Edge: Tottenham, Athens, Paris

"The everyday experience of liberal capitalism rests upon the violent defence of the boundaries against the other that the system itself produces. That banal and pacifying phrase ‘social exclusion’ allows…

August 9 2011, 4:39am | Comments

Link In Free Fall: A Thought Experiment on Vertical…

Imagine you are falling. But there is no ground. Many contemporary philosophers have pointed out that the present moment is distinguished by a prevailing condition of groundlessness.1 We cannot assume…

July 19 2011, 2:49am | Comments

Link Technology Provides an Alternative to Love

Let me toss out the idea that, as our markets discover and respond to what consumers most want, our technology has become extremely adept at creating products that correspond to…

May 30 2011, 2:03am | Comments

Link Capitalism's Dismal Future

A remarkable feature of the commentary on today's economic troubles is that, despite constant reference to the Great Depression of the 1930s, as well as to the many downturns since…

March 30 2011, 2:30am | Comments

Video

March 11 2011, 10:35am | Comments

Link Narcissus Regards a Book

Who is the common reader now? I do not think there is any way to evade a simple answer to this question. Common readers—which is to say the great majority…

February 1 2011, 4:26pm | Comments

Link The New Atheists' Narrow Worldview

With tongues in cheeks, Richard Dawkins, Christopher Hitchens, Sam Harris, and Daniel Dennett are embracing their reputation as the "Four Horsemen." Lampooning the anxieties of evangelicals, these best-selling atheists are…

January 24 2011, 3:58am | Comments

Link The Temporary Autonomous Zone

I believe that by extrapolating from past and future stories about "islands in the net" we may collect evidence to suggest that a certain kind of "free enclave" is not…

January 22 2011, 6:43am | Comments

Link Of Other Spaces: Heterotopias

(Michel Foucault, 1967) The great obsession of the nineteenth century was, as we know, history: with its themes of development and of suspension, of crisis, and cycle, themes of the…

January 19 2011, 5:32am | Comments

Link When Art Goes Disruptive: The A/Moral Dis/Order of…

Although the analysis of geek community as a recursive public sharing social imaginary of openness, and a moral order of freedom, is a valid frame to understand geek culture through…

January 10 2011, 4:22am | Comments

Link The decline of the serial killer

The number of serial murders seems to be dwindling, as does the public's fascination with them. "It does seem the golden age of serial murderers is probably past," says Harold…

January 6 2011, 8:55pm | Comments

Link How Video Games Are Infiltrating—and Improving—Every Part of…

Games are sneaking into every part of our lives -- at home, school, and work. Cisco, IBM, Microsoft, and even the Army depend on games. and Pretty soon, you'll be…

December 8 2010, 8:46am | Comments

Link Is there a secular body?

Is there a secular body? Or, in somewhat different terms, is there a particular configuration of the human sensorium—of sensibilities, affects, embodied dispositions—specific to secular subjects, and thus constitutive of…

December 3 2010, 9:47am | Comments

Link The Men Who Stole the World

A decade ago, four young men changed the way the world works. They did this not with laws or guns or money but with software: they had radical, disruptive ideas,…

December 1 2010, 5:22am | Comments

Video

November 19 2010, 5:53am | Comments

Link Conflict or Cooperation?

Among the theorists who jumped into the market for models of the future, three stood out: Francis Fukuyama, Samuel Huntington, and John Mearsheimer. Each made a splash with a controversial…

November 5 2010, 5:54am | Comments

Link “Escape the Overcode”

by Brian Holmes ===> INTRODUCTIONS -The Affectivist Manifesto: Artistic Critique for the 21st Century -Toward the New Body: Marcelo Expósito’s “Entre Sueños“ -Recapturing Subversion: Twenty Twisted Rules for the Culture…

October 20 2010, 4:46pm | Comments

Link Matters of life and death

Trolleyology encapsulates the deepest tensions in our moral outlook. To tease out our moral intuitions, philosophers have come up with ever more ingenious scenarios. The trolley is usually racing towards…

October 11 2010, 3:39am | Comments

Link An Amoral Manifesto (Part I)

Hard Atheism or What Shall I Name This Column? Hold onto your hats, folks. Although it is perhaps fitting that the actual day on which I sit here at my…

August 30 2010, 10:12am | Comments

Link Reading in a Whole New Way

As digital screens proliferate and people move from print to pixel, how will the act of reading change? America was founded on the written word. Its roots spring from documents—the…

July 9 2010, 3:24am | Comments

Link The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could…

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

June 6 2010, 3:54am | Comments

Link The Smart List: 12 Shocking Ideas That Could…

Warning: The ideas expressed here may be dangerous. For this year's list, we walked right past the usual suspects and went looking for trouble. We wanted radicals, heretics, agitators—big thinkers…

June 6 2010, 3:54am | Comments

Link Evolution and Creativity: Why Humans Triumphed

Human evolution presents a puzzle. Nothing seems to explain the sudden takeoff of the last 45,000 years—the conversion of just another rare predatory ape into a planet dominator with rapidly…

June 1 2010, 2:53am | Comments

Link How Slate Edited History

To test the effects of photographic editing on memory, Slate altered the content or context of five images. The first was a TV screen shot from President Clinton's 1999 impeachment…

May 28 2010, 4:30am | Comments

Link Beware, your imagination leaves digital traces

by Bruno Latour ’Who would know how to love without having read novels?” This saying seems to take on a new meaning with the multiplication of virtual worlds, even though…

May 19 2010, 7:18am | Comments

Link What did Jesus do? (Reading and Unreading the…

When we meet Jesus of Nazareth at the beginning of the Gospel of Mark, almost surely the oldest of the four, he’s a full-grown man. He comes down from Galilee,…

May 19 2010, 3:52am | Comments

Link Theses on Sustainability

[1] THE TERM HAS BECOME so widely used that it is in danger of meaning nothing. It has been applied to all manner of activities in an effort to give…

May 15 2010, 4:25am | Comments

Wikipedia The Game (mind game) There are three rules to The Game: Everyone in the world is playing The Game. (Sometimes narrowed to: "Everybody in the world who knows about The Game is…

April 27 2010, 7:11am | Comments

Link Christopher Hitchens re-reads Animal Farm

Animal Farm, as its author later wrote, "was the first book in which I tried, with full consciousness of what I was doing, to fuse political purpose and artistic purpose…

April 26 2010, 4:49am | Comments

Link Ignoring the mainstream, spreading enthusiasm for difficult music…

Chris Bohn is the editor of London-based monthly music magazine The Wire. Subtitled “Adventures in Modern Music”, the magazine has covered the alternative, the underground, the experimental, the avant-garde and…

March 29 2010, 8:51am | Comments

Link Are Animals People?

The recent fatal attack of a SeaWorld trainer by the orca Tilikum has led to renewed questions about how humans should deal with potentially intelligent animals. Was Tilikum’s action premeditated,…

March 27 2010, 5:18pm | Comments

Link 'A Thousand Years of Non Linear History' :…

A Thousand Years of Nonlinear History is one the most intelligent, stimulating, and rewarding books I have read in a long time - it even surpasses De Landa's previous War…

March 24 2010, 10:25am | Comments

Link Is "Science Fiction Humanism" A Contradiction In Terms?

People talk about science fiction as the literature of humanism. But actually, science fiction's explorations put it into conflict with humanism's tenets. The best science fiction questions the nature of…

March 10 2010, 10:54am | Comments