Teeming Links – July 11, 2014
Apologies for the dearth of posts during the week leading up to now. I have reached crunch time on both the mummy encyclopedia and the paranormal encyclopedia, and, in combination with the fact that...
View ArticleTeeming Links – July 25, 2014
What happens in a world where war has become perpetual, live-reported popcorn entertainment? Answer: we’re as far as we ever were from understanding anything about it. “Far from offering insights into...
View Article“A web of flesh spun over a void”
“The Madhouse” by Francisco Goya [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons So brilliant: an implicitly ironic but outwardly straight-faced reading of the DSM-5 as a dystopian horror novel, complete with a...
View ArticleDehumanized in a dark age
“Fire of Troy” by Kerstiaen de Keuninck (Coninck), 17th cent. [Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons NOTE: This post was originally published in January 2007 in a different form. Based on various...
View ArticleUtopia, dystopia, and the eternal present of Amish time
Traditional Amish Buggy. By Ad Meskens (Own work) [CC BY-SA 3.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0) or GFDL (http://www.gnu.org/copyleft/fdl.html)], via Wikimedia Commons When I was a...
View ArticleShort Film: ‘2084’
Remember: You must conform. Better yet: Doughnut thing. (Watch for explanation.) The post Short Film: ‘2084’ appeared first on The Teeming Brain.
View ArticleBig Data, Artificial Intelligence, and Dehumanization: Surrendering to the...
Greetings, Teeming Brainers. I’m just peeking in from the digital wings, amid much ongoing blog silence, to observe that many of the issues and developments — sociocultural, technological, and more —...
View ArticleOrwell Meets Frankenstein: The Internet as a Monster of Mass Surveillance and...
The following paragraphs are from a talk delivered by Pinboard founder Maciej Cegłowski at the recent Emerging Technologies for the Enterprise conference in Philadelphia. Citing as Exhibit A the...
View ArticleOur Craving for Apocalypse: ‘Dispatches from the Ruins’ (short video)
This brief video essay on the source of our collective craving for “the awful futures of apocalyptic fiction” is really well done. Skillfully executed and thought-provoking. A worthwhile investment of...
View ArticleOur smartphone apocalypse, animated by Steve Cutts
This remarkable animation comes from the hand (or computer) of illustrator and animator Steve Cutts, famed for such things as 2012’s Man, which packs an unbelievable punch. So does the one I’ve chosen...
View ArticleThe Sad Failure of ‘Fahrenheit 451’ to Prevent the Future
Teeming Brain readers are familiar with my longtime focus on Fahrenheit 451 and my abiding sense that we’re currently caught up in a real-world version of its dystopian vision. This is not, of course,...
View ArticleArt, creativity, and what Google doesn’t know
From an essay by Ed Finn, founding director of the Center for Science and the Imagination at Arizona State University: We are all centaurs now, our aesthetics continuously enhanced by computation....
View ArticleYour smartphone is built to hijack and harvest your mind
At the beginning of each semester I tell my students the very thing that journalist Zat Rana gets at in a recent article for Quartz when I deliver a mini-sermon about my complete ban on phones — and...
View ArticleInstagram and the memeification of human experience
Courtesy of The Guardian, here’s another way the Internet is making life better and more fulfilling for all of us (by which I mean worse and more soullessly unsatisfying for a great many of us):...
View ArticleHow Google replaced God
NYU marketing professor Scott Galloway, writing for Esquire: Our brains are sophisticated enough to ask very complex questions but not sophisticated enough to answer them. Since Homo sapiens emerged...
View ArticleYou will be assimilated: Our future of tech-enhanced brains to keep up with AI
Here’s renowned neuroscientist Christopher Koch explaining in a Wall Street Journal piece that our future will be a dystopian nightmare in which humans will necessarily become ever more completely...
View ArticleThe man who invented the Internet didn’t foresee our Neuromancer/Black Mirror...
The following insights are excerpted from a brief but engaging NPR piece that traces the cultural arc from Vint Cerf (the “inventor of the Internet”) and his early naive optimism about this new...
View ArticleTeeming Links – March 15, 2019
In light of yesterday’s awful mosque attacks in New Zealand, I feel led to start with this except from a 2003 PBS interview with Thich Nhat Hanh. After an extensive conversation about Buddhism,...
View ArticleUneasy thoughts on our bookless future
Mark Bauerlein in Claremont Review of Books, in a perceptive review essay on Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, with additional consideration of Leah Price’s What...
View Article“It’s an Alien Life Form”: David Bowie on the Internet’s Exhilarating and...
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential...
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