NYSee Radar

Tag: society

  • The pessimist who became a prophet

    The pessimist who became a prophet

    Martin Sandbu · FT Magazine

    Michael Sandel was ignored by a generation of political optimists. Now he is searching for a way out of the mess he saw coming

    “One way of seeing how a toleration of avoidance leads to conflict is that when we give up on engaging with moral disagreements . . . we create a moral void at the heart of public discourse.” That, in his view, has been the cost of the politics we have seen since the 1990s. “Democratic citizens can’t abide for long a public discourse empty of larger moral meaning.” Sooner or later that void would have to be filled by “narrow, intolerant, dangerous moralisms of two kinds: religious fundamentalism or hypernationalism. And that’s exactly what we’ve seen.”

    FT Gift Link

  • Kurt Vonnegut on Us Dancing Animals

    Kurt Vonnegut on Us Dancing Animals

    Kurt Vonnegut tells his wife he’s going out to buy an envelope:

    “Oh, she says, well, you’re not a poor man. You know, why don’t you go online and buy a hundred envelopes and put them in the closet? And so I pretend not to hear her. And go out to get an envelope because I’m going to have a hell of a good time in the process of buying one envelope.

    I meet a lot of people. And see some great looking babes*. And a fire engine goes by. And I give them the thumbs up. And I’ll ask a woman what kind of dog that is. And, and I don’t know.

    The moral of the story is -we’re here on Earth to fart around.

    And, of course, the computers will do us out of that. And what the computer people don’t realize, or they don’t care, is we’re dancing animals. You know, we love to move around. And it’s like we’re not supposed to dance at all anymore.

    Let’s all get up and move around a bit right now… or at least dance.

    *In one retelling I see Vonnegut quoted as saying, “and see some great looking babes.” In another, “some great looking babies.” Both are great. But if I’m forced to choose, well …

    As shared by friend, Fiche.

  • Joshua Citarella — A Multipolar Artworld, Friday January 16

    Rhizome · Zoom

    Citarella will give a presentation on his recent text A Multipolar Art World?, in which he argues that the era of globalization underpinning contemporary art as we know it is ending, giving way to a location-specific, multipolar art world. 

    2026-01-16 2PM – 3PM EST
    Online via Zoom
    https://luma.com/aw_Joshua_Citarella

  • 39C3 – A post-American, enshittification-resistant internet

    Cory Doctorow · 39C3

    Trump has staged an unscheduled, midair rapid disassembly of the global system of trade. Ironically, it is this system that prevented all of America’s trading partners from disenshittifying their internet: the US trade representative threatened the world with tariffs unless they passed laws that criminalized reverse-engineering and modding. By banning “adversarial interoperability,” America handcuffed the world’s technologists, banning them from creating the mods, hacks, alt clients, scrapers, and other tools needed to liberate their neighbours from the enshittificatory predations of the ketamine-addled zuckermuskian tyrants of US Big Tech.

    Well, when life gives you SARS, you make sarsaparilla. The Trump tariffs are here, and it’s time to pick the locks on the those handcuffs and set the world’s hackers loose on Big Tech. Happy Liberation Day, everyone!

    We’re very much aware of Cory’s Enshittification concept. With everyone up to speed in this audience he’s able to chart the path out with the people who will take us there.