for people not having a home calling job, get a glimpse by peering into people's cars. you will see horrors beyond comprehension.
2,506 karma · joined July 19, 2013
it's end user software that's absolutely getting crushed.
as an aside, for the longest time i have thought modernity was fully understood by the 60s (ellul, debord, macluhan, ...). but maybe there the focus was too narrowly political, sociological. it has been revealing to see this ethos (and it is an ethos, make no mistake) recently linked to autism. high modernists are uniform, monomaniacal people. like machines. and the world they fashion, is therefore one that is uniform, principled. how the unsociable autist colleague cannot distinguish between is and ought, so will modern architecture barrel down deductively to its unpleasant conclusion.
modernisn is the commodification of all spheres of existence, it is an unprecedented evolution, how to break out of this, how to get of this train with only a single endpoint.
temporal centralizes all the error handling, retry handling, ... some web pages to manage failed, pending tasks.
it's been good for us, but a real step function in complexity of the app.
the into the wild fate i agree with, it does seem like the drive for some personal reconnection with nature, reality almost logically must end up there. 21st century man cannot become a collection of vagrants striking into the wilderness (at the extreme), but even on the spectrum leading up there there's many wavelengths that seem unworkable (e.g. we also cannot be cabin in the woods vagrants, and maybe all striving for some more pastoral mode de vie, that too, cannot be a shared ethos).
it's incredibly frustrating. I've been somewhat captured by the idea, that while we may not be able to rebuild a localized terroir as an ecosystem for a 21st century knowledge worker, we may be able to reclaim city life. not the degraged mechanized city experiecne of today. but think more of the paris as an outdoor palace for the bourgeois in the 19th century, or vienna as a gay and vivacious center filled with art and music in the 18th, or bruges centuries before that as a intimate verdant cradle, yet also center of world commerce. that is, find that communion again with tactile reality, not in nature, but in the most perfect expressions of the city, its arts. nature then becomes distilled, the beautiful park, the well tended garden, the bonsai tree in the living room, etc etc... the lush spacious city as a sublimation of the the wilderness, the country side.
berry is in the same lineage as somebody like muir, and it really pains me to say, but i really wonder how relevant those individualist back to nature (and i dont say this necessarily dismissively, just dont know how to put it) imperatives really are. the world is technological, the necessities of life are commoditized, production and markets are global. how can there be any turning away from it, apart from it being a fetishistic practice, or just eccentric affectation. just think, portable nuclear reactors next to every data center soon. the march goes on.
i had similar feeling with kaczinsky, who had similar views on sanctity of nature and impact of modernity, in a way the diagnosis is incredibly correct, but the regimen ~ a return to a more anarchic, hyperlocal, individualistic relation with it ~ completely misplaced.
the terroir, does it even exist, has it ever even existed in america?
a very postnational view, humanist in a way, lipsius or erasmus would recognize it.
that sort of individuated cosmopolitanism only works for educated men and women with means, who have or have the capacity to self-actualize.
not for the masses. the nation is still a cradle to protect and nurture the commonwealth, and given that they took hundreds to sometimes thousands of years to form, i don't think borders are artificial in the least.
The first because a lower supply of labor is going to create breathing space for an entire working population who will see tremendous job upheaval due to AI automation. A lower aggregate demand on houses, services will also be welcome to take the fuel out of inflation, and maybe we'll regain some of that experience of true affluence, where scarce things (e.g. access to cabin in the woods, a rowhome in a walkable city, ...) are in abundance. There is also the import of an idle, criminal element that has very clearly reduced quality of life and safety in many places.
Birthright citizen should be abolished because birth tourism and illegally crossing the border to have anchor babies are a vector for foreigners to participate politically and claim imho undeserved welfare benefits.
I think largely these are the stated reasons of the administration too.
modern art (the cubes etc) always had a cerebral, iconoclastic, anti-bourgeois element. and i think those are just markers and categories that have no meaning anymore in 2026. everybody's smart now, watching ted talks, with their college degrees. iconoclasm is just corporate branding now at best, and we've all witnessed its literal expression since 9/11 and blm, which is quite vile and steeped in mass hysteria. and the bourgeois, where are they, these decorous, self-confident and self-actualized burghers? i haven't seen them in a long time, what is there to rage against.
the substrate is gone for modern art. i'm not saying some of the aesthetics can't prevail, e.g. the minimalism, an interest in geometry, ...
It's not the only reason. I think that traffic engineers lack/lacked a feel, a certain gut understanding , an inability to feel through the skin. Just look around you. See and hear them at municipal meetings. They are unable to sensually experience the effects of their work, their praxis.
100%, and just to give an example, she finds good art is excreted (her words - perfectly chosen) rather than created, and I think her example was how the immaculate constructions of somebody like Flaubert lose a certain impact and potency, precisely because they betrays some sort of methodological process. And this cannot yield Truth.
To me, reading this now, that sort of analysis struck me rather as very much dated, and an example of that flippant iconoclasm of modern literary criticism, basically, of the hippies.
Because, really, who is she to throw Flaubert so casually under the bus? (im joking) Mme bovary is perfect, in a way a classical music composition is perfect, it is the oppressive knowledge that perfection can be willed into the world and it's the artist who has the task to will it in the world, no matter the devotion and commitment required. Causally dismissing this, is at its base adolescent posturing (like the hippies). But more importantly, and this is why I say "dated", is that we now, after 60-80 years very much have witnessed what sort of art we get when creating art should be more akin to some physiological evacuation. It's just no good, and it's being rejected more and more.
it's this that AI is stripping. the work is becoming systems thinking. not bad per se, but removing the small scale puzzle aspect of the job
It never really caught on, completed got clobbered by free text search, now AI chat interfaces I guess.
Am glad to see it bubble up again, because have good memories working on this stuff.