Creatively Advancing into Novelty
“Notably, tech giants today are able to wield the law against interoperators: new technologies that plug into their services, systems and platforms. That’s a privilege that none of yesterday’s easily toppled tech giants had—if IBM wanted to prevent its competitors (the “seven dwarfs” of the mainframe era) from making software, printers, keyboards and storage for…
“Millions of items of the outward order are present to my senses which never properly enter into my experience. Why? Because they have no interest for me. My experience is what I agree to attend to. Only those items which I notice shape my mind—without selective interest, experience is an utter chaos. Interest alone gives…
“…human retinas are hardwired to spot edges and differences. When we look around a room, our retinal ganglion cells fire more strongly when they see borders and contours than when they see the blank middle areas of uniform color. As the information gets bumped up through higher levels of brain cells, those edges yield more…
“Improvising is all about human relationship. It is about listening, responding, connecting, and being generous. When a group of free players gets together and unfolds a coherent and interesting piece without a prior plan or template, it is like watching separate beings become integrated into a single nervous system. It is a partnership, with each…
“…branding animals ‘invasive’ is not only unethical, but it is also based on a confused understanding of species migrations over time. The reason that the rhetoric of invasive species has become so popular is because it provides a simplistic account of what are in fact very complicated biological processes. As such, the invasive species discourse…
”Indeed, when the world presents as a force field of violence, the task of nonviolence is to find ways of living and acting in that world such that violence is checked or ameliorated, or its direction turned, precisely at moments when it seems to saturate that world and offer no way out. The body can…
“But how did these households come together in such numbers to form the great concentric arrangements which give the Ukrainian mega-sites their distinctive plan? […] To understand how the citizens put this mental image into effect, translating it into a workable social reality at such enormous scales, we cannot rely on archaeology alone. Fortunately, the…
“In the enfolded [or implicate] order, space and time are no longer the dominant factors determining the relationships of dependence or independence of different elements. Rather, an entirely different sort of basic connection of elements is possible, from which our ordinary notions of space and time, along with those of separately existent material particles, are…
“The actions of billiard players, people in general, nonhuman animals, and even plants when seen in the right time frame, are patently intentional, both in the more precise sense used by philosophers in the line of Husserl and Merleau-Ponty, and in the more everyday sense referring to an act carried out for some purpose, something…
“A few banal fantasies float across white evangelicalism. It seldom tires of arguing over hell, substitutionary atonement, or biblical inerrancy, and it never misses an opportunity to judge women or non-heteronormative sexuality. But if my claim is that white evangelicalism (as a political project) is quite recent, then I’m also claiming these older ideas are…