In simple terms, the world has gotten big. Since I was a child in the early 1970s, the population of the planet has doubled. Imagine a “Shaft”-era earth, with all the chaos, all the strife, […]
Category: Thought
Let Them Fight: Godzilla and Mythic Symbolism
I grew up on Godzilla movies. Well, I grew up on a lot of TV, but those too. As a kid, I often didn’t understand them — some of the plots are pretty outrageous — […]
(Sunday Thought) Same As The Old War
“With an enemy committed to fascism, advocacy—the threats, the words—are not mere dogma. They are themselves weapons—weapons of incitement and intimidation, often as effective in achieving their ends as would be firearms and explosives brandished […]
Cyberpunk III: We Will Not Invade Cyberspace
Like the early internet, AR is mostly a novelty at this point, such as the London art project in the video below, but the applications are legion. Almost anything humans manipulate in the world, from […]
(Art) The Girl in the Glass Tube
If you were a young woman between 1930 and 1960, there was apparently a worrying non-zero chance you’d end up as an experiment inside a giant glass tube. As a visual trope, the glass tube […]
Cyberpunk I: Cyberpunk as Retrofuturism
Cyberpunk and its offshoots (biopunk, solarpunk, etc.) are still our significant cultural vision of the future. And yet, it hasn’t aged particularly well. This is the vid-phone from Blade Runner (1980), which was supposed to […]
On Perversion
Pervert can be noun or verb. When we pervert something, we alter it from its intended course — we distort or corrupt — while a pervert is the thing distorted or corrupted. As a noun, […]
Textbook Examples
It’s never the theory that trips people. By now, anyone who’s spent a decent amount of time on the internet can explain confirmation bias, or Dunning-Kruger. Rather, it’s the application — not just what those […]
The Curious Tragedy of the Batavia
The Batavia was a merchant ship which set sail on its maiden voyage in 1628 from the Netherlands to Java under the command of Dutch East Asia Company official, Francisco Pelsaert. The ship, for its […]
The Social Dilemma
We watched The Social Dilemma on Netflix last night, which is totally worth the time. At one point, Tristan Harris plays off a quote from Steve Jobs, who famously remarked that computers should be “a […]
