Yes, this is an old theme of mine, but re: doomscrolling, you don’t have to be there.
There is already copious evidence that we cannot sustain a modest euthanasia regime. Though advocacy for euthanasia began with the avoidance of pain, it has inevitably slipped into making an idol of autonomy. But no human person has ever fully possessed bodily autonomy, and the legal right to destroy the body cannot make this aspiration achievable. Opposing euthanasia begins with care for the weak, but it ultimately depends on simply telling this truth about the human person.
Cross section of Étienne-Louis Boullée’s design for Newton’s Cenotaph, 1784 — from the invaluable and endlessly fascinating Public Domain Review, which you can support here.
If you’re absolutely determined to use a social media platform, then sure, Free Our Feeds is a good idea. But the essential protocols are already in place, and your feeds are already free, on the open web.
Wonderful clouds partly covering the full moon this pre-dawn. I found myself wondering what John Ruskin, who was obsessed by clouds, would say about that sky. Here’s a wonderful essay by Sandra Kemp on Ruskin’s fascination with clouds.
Poster by Tall Paul Kelly.
Didn’t have a proper telephoto lens — this is from my iPhone camera at 10x — but it was fun to watch the aoudad meandering about when I was up on the hilltop. They were introduced to Texas, somewhat accidentally, a hundred years ago and have become, in the opinion of some, an invasive species. Fun fact for those interested in the venereal game: a herd of aoudad is called an anger.
Samuel Arbesman on humanistic computation. I really hope Sam can Make This Happen in a serious way.
This story of a massive archaeological dig in the Orkneys is utterly compelling.
A nice brief profile of my parish church. There’s much more that could be said about its success, and maybe one day I’ll share my thoughts.
Neighbors
An excerpt from Nick Carr’s outstanding new book:
In their early form, online social networks reflected, at least by analogy, traditional patterns of socializing. Their design maintained divisions of space and time. Each member of a network had his or her own “place,” in the form of a profile page, and people traveled, through hyperlinks, from place to place to “visit” friends. Status updates and other postings were arranged chronologically. They unspooled sequentially through time, as thoughts and experiences had always unfolded. When Facebook introduced its automated News Feed in 2006, it replaced the familiar structure of the social world with the logic of the computer. It erased the divisions and disrupted the sequences, removing social interactions from the constraints of space and time and placing them into a frictionless setting of instantaneity and simultaneity. Socializing in this new sphere follows no familiar, human pattern; it vibrates chaotically to the otherworldly rhythms of algorithmic calculation.
The consequences have been dreadful — as we all know, though sometimes we try to pretend otherwise.
Is any group of people more self-deluded than committed multitaskers?
Nass assumed that people would stop trying to multitask once shown the [detailed, irerefutable!] evidence of how bad they were at it. But his subjects were ‘totally unfazed,’ continuing to believe themselves excellent at multitasking and ‘able to do more and more and more.’ If individuals in a controlled experiment are this oblivious and refuse to change when confronted with proof of their shoddy performance, then what hope do the rest of us have as we wade through the daily sea of digital distractions?