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A solitary fisherman’s home keeps watch on quiet Placentia Bay in Newfoundland, Canada, 1974.Photograph by Sam Abell, National Geographic Creative
Political parties are organizations that are publicly and officially designed for the purpose of killing in all souls the sense of truth and of justice.
Inevitably, I looked around for help; I’ve done enough liturgical work to know that there are always riches from which to borrow. That said, the Humanist material I discovered surprised me – although on reflection the problem was predictable. Like most contemporary ‘humanism’, it all failed rather badly to be nonreligious. I looked at half-a-dozen or more published patterns for a humanist funeral; every one borrowed central Christian texts, deleted the obvious references to God, and then used the filleted remains to shape the service. (Even Scripture was not immune; Eccl. 3 was several times in evidence. John Donne’s Divine Meditation XVII was also referenced more than once.) This of course reflects the reality – and the tedious banality – of too much contemporary Western atheism: take a philosophically-rich account of things; delete surface references to the divine; and assume that what is left will be meaningful or coherent or interesting. Nietzsche, the world hath need of thee…
I have been saying for a while that creativity has taken the place of salvation and divine grace, which have lost credibility with the wane of religious faith. It has become the secular equivalent of hope in the afterlife. And in the process the whole phenomenon of creativity has become mystified, as behooves a concept that people use to reassure themselves about the future.
There’s a scene in the 1961 movie The Hustler in which Paul Newman, as a wild and talented young pool player called Fast Eddie Felson, gets his first chance to play against the legendary Minnesota Fats. They’re evenly matched. The games last through the night. At a certain point, Fats, who’s portrayed by Jackie Gleason, goes into the bathroom and puts himself back together — washes his face, reknots his tie, combs his hair. Fast Eddie stays out in the bar, cracking jokes and throwing down shots. Eventually, Eddie runs out of steam. Fats prevails. The point is that Fast Eddie needs to learn to pace himself, and eventually he does; when he meets Fats again, things go differently. What’s happened in the meantime is that Eddie has suffered. He’s grown up.Against the calm, clearheaded veteran Robredo, Kyrgios sometimes looked like he was out there throwing down bourbon shots. He didn’t look grown up. Well, maybe one day the sports psychologists will get hold of him, teach him to self-regulate. Maybe he’ll live up to his potential and win a handful of majors. But I don’t know. It’s that first scene against Fats that stays with you from The Hustler. It’s the image of talent in its most raw, most unapologetic state. If you think winning is everything in sports, you may find that hard to celebrate. But it’s a joy to watch. It’s a joy even when it loses. It’s a joy even when it burns itself up.
But some have suggested that companies like Twitter have more nefarious motivations for refusing to address Internet harassment than a simple lack of empathy for women. Video game developer Brendan Vance has suggested that Twitter “has far more to gain from permitting this sort of bullying” in terms of increasing user engagement “than it does from preventing it.” Twitter, Vance notes, postures as a “neutral third party” while simultaneously profiting both from its marginalized users and from the “thousands of people” who “enjoy harassing” them daily. By shifting the responsibility for ending harassment to its users by including a half-hearted block function, Twitter silently collects data and revenue from serial abusers of women and minorities while being able to claim that users can prevent harassment themselves. As games journalist Ben Kuchera puts it on Polygon, pointing toward Twitter’s “soaring stock price,” this is a “tacit statement that profit comes before people.” Jezebel’s editors too, had the impression that “Gawker’s leadership [was] prioritizing theoretical anonymous tipsters over a very real and immediate threat to the mental health of Jezebel’s staff and readers.”
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Cover by the strange and gifted Ethel Reed. From the collection of the Museu Nacional d’Art de Catalunya.
COBOL, a language first introduced in 1959 by Grace Hopper (‘Grandma COBOL’), still processes 90 per cent of the planet’s financial transactions, and 75 per cent of all business data. You can make a comfortable living maintaining code in languages like COBOL, the computing equivalents of Mesopotamian cuneiform dialects. These ancient applications—too expensive to replace, sometimes too tangled to fix or improve—run on, serving up the data that appears on the chromed-up surface of your browser, which gives you the illusion that your bank and your local utility companies live on the technological cutting edge. But as always, the past lives on under the shiny surface of the present, and often, it is too densely tangled to comprehend.
1 Yan
2 Tan
3 Tethera
4 Pethera
5 Pimp
6 Sethera
7 Lethera
8 Hovera
9 Covera
10 Dik
11 Yan-a-dik
12 Tan-a-dik
13 Tethera-dik
14 Pethera-dik
15 Bumfit
16 Yan-a-bumfit
17 Tan-a-bumfit
18 Tethera-bumfit
19 Pethera-bumfit
20 Figgot
Create systems that are ambivalent about the open or closed web. If I create a tool that’s good at posting content to Facebook and Twitter, it should also post to RSS feeds, which exist outside the context of any corporation. Now other generous and innovative people can build systems that work differently from Facebook and Twitter, using these feeds as the basis, and the investors will have another pile of technology they can monetize.If you don’t like the way the algorithms in Twitter and Facebook work, then this is how to counteract that. Re-create the level playing field we used to have. Stimulate the open web. Give us something new to play with. It isn’t “either/or” – it’s “and.”
The key point is this – in everything we do we must treat the open web as equal to the private networks. Maybe we don’t have to depend on the government to do this for us, maybe we can be a bit more systematic about encouraging the wild chaos of the open network, knowing that it leads to new tools and new opportunity to profit.