“If the microphysics of power instantiated through the martial drill of Frederick the Great’s soldiers had as their primary object the kinematics of the human body and sought to govern its posture, gait and articulations, technoscientific developments now allow this power to penetrate and shape the brain’s electro-chemical structure and cognitive processes.” — All Your Brain Are Belong To Us: Neuroscience Goes To War « The Disorder Of Things
“The Hayekian argument of dispersed knowledge and its importance in seeking equilibrium is not as important as it seems in explaining why the Soviet project failed. As Joseph Berliner has illustrated, the Soviet economy did not fail to reach local equilibria. Where it failed so spectacularly was in extracting itself out of these equilibria. The dispersed knowledge argument is open to the riposte that better implementation of the control revolution will eventually overcome these problems – indeed much of the current techno-utopian version of the control revolution is based on this assumption. It is a weak argument for free enterprise, a much stronger argument for which is the need to maintain a system that retains the ability to reinvent itself and find a new, hitherto unknown trajectory via the destruction of the incumbents combined with the emergence of the new. Where the Soviet experiment failed is that it eliminated the possibility of failure, that Berliner called the ‘invisible foot’. The success of the free enterprise system has been built not upon the positive incentive of the invisible hand but the negative incentive of the invisible foot to counter the visible hand of the control revolution. It is this threat and occasional realisation of failure and disorder that is the key to maintaining system resilience and evolvability.” —
The Control Revolution And Its Discontents at Macroeconomic Resilience
A long and dazzling post by Ashwin Parameswaran.
(via Subsupermen (Intro) | HiLobrow)
Presidents’ Day
“Whether you are an expert in a striking-based art—boxing, karate, tae kwon do, etc.—or just naturally tough, a return to childlike humility awaits you: Simply step onto the mat with a BJJ black belt. There are few experiences as startling as being effortlessly controlled by someone your size or smaller and, despite your full resistance, placed in a choke hold, an arm lock, or some other “submission.” A few minutes of this and, whatever your previous training, your incompetence will become so glaring and intolerable that you will want to learn whatever this person has to teach. Empowerment begins only moments later, when you are shown how to escape the various traps that were set for you—and to set them yourself. Each increment of knowledge imparted in this way is so satisfying—and one’s ignorance at every stage so consequential—that the process of learning BJJ can become remarkably addictive. I have never experienced anything quite like it.” —
The Pleasures of Drowning : Sam Harris
This is extraordinarily well put.
“Today our point of view is so remote from that of Rabelais that it requires a special effort of will to even know what he is talking about. Our science of the mind is founded on the study of the behavior of the mentally ill; our Public Health on epidemiology; our practical sociology on a kind of social worker’s criminology; our economics on Marx. It has been said of America that its philosophy of life, like that of the ancient Greeks, is medically oriented. The ethics or the politics or the psychology of Aristotle or Plato is founded on the clear concept of the fully healthy man. Our parallel disciplines begin with pathology. Psychiatrists say we are all neurotics. Rabelais would not have known what they are talking about.” — Kenneth Rexroth’s Classics Revisited
Having twins has not gotten any less eerie since this photo was taken.
“While Romney’s victory speeches are polished tedium, Santorum’s sound like they’re being shouted angrily at a terrified prom date running for his life down the asphalt drive.” — Santorum, the ‘coulda, shoulda, woulda’ candidate - Tim Stanley at CNN.com
Rick GoodingTitle: Subterranea S-39
graphite on paper 36”x48”
Iqaluit, the capital of Nunavut, is snow-covered in its Google satellite images.
[video]
“
“The popularity of cupcakes directly tracks the rise in cultural narcissism that has resulted from the Internet’s impact on our individual and cultural psyche,” he says.
“Through our over-reliance on the Internet, we’ve become a culture of emotionally disconnected individuals who live in socially isolated cyber-fantasy worlds. The fantasy worlds we create for ourselves on the Internet are an equivalent of the modern myth of Narcissus where we spend hours in an isolated aggrandizement of self.”
Cupcakes represent the mythical pool into which Narcissus fell and drowned, Hokemeyer says.
“Through cupcakes, seemingly innocent little ‘treats,’ we can project fantasies of who and what we desire to be. Instead of connecting us to others, however, cupcakes keep us separate and add to our sense of isolation.
“In addition, cupcakes evidence the narcissism born of the Internet by feeding us in shallow and un-nutritious ways. Similar to the way we cruise the Internet looking for bite-size and delicious bits of information, cupcakes enable us to cruise the sugary world of self-indulgence.”
” —The psychology of cupcakes - The Washington Post
I am in awe.