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Designing for Beauty, Sufficiency, and Collective Care – Part 1a: The Designed Object as Comrade in Constructivist Russia

This is Part 1a of my recent grad school design paper, the introduction can be read here. … “Rodchenko names a new kind of emotionally affective object: the comradely object of socialist modernity. Unlike the commodities he encounters on his visit to capitalist Paris, which elicit a possessive relation that makes the objects into “slaves,”…

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The Pluribus Problem: On Freedom, Face Scans, Anti-Circumvention Laws, and Persuasive Love vs. Imposed Morality

“This creates the series of questions Pluribus forces us to confront in every episode: Is our freedom—our autonomy—really too high a price to pay in exchange for global happiness and organized, respectful survival on our planet? If we accept the implied thesis that a free human will inevitably destroy the planet and themselves, is the alternative…

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Losing Oneself: Brief Reflections on Identity, Roles, and Alienation

“Although the social structures in the contemporary world are less rigid than in ancient cultures, there are still many pre-established functions or roles that people readily identify with and which thus become part of the ego. This causes human interactions to become inauthentic, dehumanized, alienating. Those pre-established roles may give you a somewhat comforting sense…

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The Creation of Noninteroperable Computers Is A Fool’s Errand: Corey Doctorow and Seizing the Means of Computation

“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…

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Henry Nelson Wieman and Divine Omnisenstivity

“Ultimately, Henry Nelson Wieman identified the “creative event” with “God,” emphasizing that “God, according to this interpretation is immediately accessible to human living and human feeling in all the fullness of God’s concrete reality.” The divine creative process, he stresses, “makes qualities more appreciable by creative sensitive organisms; by making them progressively more sensitive; by…

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