Extra
4 years ago in Quotes
Itâs about quality. Itâs about sound. Itâs about museum quality. Itâs about the real thing. The facts. The real sound. What happened when you opened your mouth and sang? What went into the air? Thatâs what weâre not getting with the new technology.
The older technology used to give you a reflection of it so that you could still feel it. Today, itâs reconstituted. Itâs poorly sampled. Itâs garbage that has less bits to save people memory, which is not even relevant anymore. We have so much memory weâve got it coming out of our ears. Yet weâre still saving memory, saving quality, so we can store more crap. Itâs just weâve gone down this bad street, and weâre way down.
4 years ago in Quotes
Q: Iâm looking at the new 16-inch MacBook Pro. Apple gave me a review unit. They said, âLook at all of the artists who use this thing with GarageBand to start.â But youâre saying that shouldnât be where the recording starts?
A: Itâs a piece of crap. Are you kidding? Thatâs Fisher-Price quality. Thatâs like Captain Kangaroo, your new engineer. A MacBook Pro? What are you talking about? You canât get anything out of that thing. The only way you can get it out is if you put it in. And if you put it in, you canât get it out because the DAC is no good in the MacBook Pro. So you have to use an external DAC and do a bunch of stuff to make up for the problems that the MacBook Pro has because theyâre not aimed at quality. Theyâre aimed at consumerism.
4 years ago in Quotes
We just need to grow up and stop blaming the geeks for the utter manure shoveled at us by ignorant jocks on golf courses determined to exclude anyone with actual understanding, insight and knowledge. And the manure shoveled by the actual geeks with a massive risk appetite and zero care for externalities beyond their startup making cash.
4 years ago in Zitate
Die Deutschnationalen schlieĂlich, die konservativen Rechtskreise, die "Ehre" und "Heroismus" geradezu als ihr Parteiprogramm vindizierten - o Gott, wie ĂŒberaus ehrlos und feige war das Schauspiel, das ihre FĂŒhrer ihren AnhĂ€ngern im Jahre 1933 und seither vorfĂŒhrten! Nachdern sich die Erwartung des 30. Januar, daĂ sie die Nazis "eingefangen" hĂ€tten und "unschĂ€dlich machen" wĂŒrden, enttĂ€uscht hatten, erwartete man wenigstens von ihnen, daĂ sie "bremsen" und "das Schlimmste verhĂŒten" wĂŒrden. Nichts da; sie machten alles mit, den Terror, die Judenverfolgungen, die Christenverfolgungen, ja sie lieĂen sich nicht dadurch stören, daĂ man ihre Partei verbot, ihre AnhĂ€nger verhaftete. Sozialistische FunktionĂ€re, die ihre WĂ€hler und AnhĂ€nger im Stich lassen und fliehen, sind, als Erscheinung, trĂŒbselig genug. Was aber soll man zu adligen Offizieren sagen, die zusehen, wie ihre nĂ€chsten Freunde und Mitarbeiter erschossen werden - wie der Herr von Papen - und weiter im Amt bleiben und "Heil Hitler" rufen?!
Wie die Parteien, so die BĂŒnde. Es gab einen "Kommunistischen FrontkĂ€mpferbund", es gab ein "Reichsbanner Schwarz-Rot-Gold", militĂ€risch organisiert, nicht ganz waffenlos, mit Millionen Angehöriger, ausdrĂŒcklich dazu bestimmt, im Notfall die SA in Schach zu halten. Man bemerkte die ganze Zeit ĂŒber nichts von diesem "Reichsbanner", ĂŒberhaupt nichts, nicht das Geringste. Es verschwand spurlos, als wĂ€re es nie dagewesen. Widerstand gab es in ganz Deutschland höchstens als individuelle Verzweiflungstat - wie bei jenem Gewerkschaftsmann aus Cöpenick. Die Reichsbanneroffiziere schwangen sich nirgends auch nur zu einer Spur von Gegenwehr auf, wenn ihre VerbandshĂ€user von der SA "ĂŒbernommen" wurden. Der "Stahlhelm", die Armee der Deutschnationalen, lieĂ sich gleichschalten und spĂ€ter stĂŒckweise auflösen, murrend aber widerstandslos. Es gab nicht *ein* Beispiel von Verteidigungsenergie, Mannhaftigkeit, Haltung. Es gab nur Panik, Flucht und Ăberlauferei. Millionen waren im MĂ€rz 1933 noch kampfbereit. Sie fanden sich ĂŒber Nacht fĂŒhrerlos, waffenlos und verraten. Ein Teil von ihnen suchte noch, verzweifelt, AnschluĂ beim "Stahlhelm" und bei den Deutschnationalen, als sich zeigte, daĂ die andern nicht kĂ€mpften. Deren Mitgliederzahlen schwollen ein paar Wochen lang unheimlich an. Dann wurden auch sie aufgelöst - und kapitulierten kampflos.
Dieses furchtbare moralische Versagen der gegnerischen FĂŒhrung ist ein Grundzug der "Revolution" vom MĂ€rz 1933. Es machte den Nazis den Sieg sehr leicht. Es stellt freilich auch den Wert und die Dauerhaftigkeit dieses Sieges in Frage. Das Hakenkreuz ist in die deutsche Masse nicht hineingeprĂ€gt worden wie in eine widerstrebende, aber dafĂŒr auch formfĂ€hige, feste Substanz, sondern wie in einen formlos-nachgiebigen, breiigen Teig. Der Teig mag ebenso leicht und widerstandslos eine andere Form annehmen, wenn der Tag kommt. Freilich besteht seit MĂ€rz 1933 die unbeantwortete Frage, ob es ĂŒberhaupt lohnt, ihn zu formen. Denn die moralische WesensschwĂ€che Deutschlands, die damals zutagegetreten ist, ist zu ungeheuerlich, als daĂ nicht die Geschichte eines Tages Konsequenzen aus ihr ziehen sollte.
Jede Revolution bei anderen Völkern hat, wieviel Blutverlust und momentane SchwĂ€chung sie immer mit sich bringen mochte, zu einer ungeheuren Steigerung aller moralischen Energien auf beiden kĂ€mpfenden Seiten gefĂŒhrt - und damit, auf lange Sicht, zu einer ungeheuren StĂ€rkung der Nation. Man betrachte die ungeheure Menge von Heldenmut, Todesverachtung und menschlicher GröĂe, die - gewiĂ neben Ausschreitung, Grausamkeit und Gewalt - von Jakobinern wie Royalisten im revolutionĂ€ren Frankreich, von Francoleuten wie von Republikanern im heutigen Spanien entfaltet worden ist! Wie immer der Ausgang sein mag - die Tapferkeit, mit der um ihn gerungen wurde, bleibt als unerschöpflicher Kraftquell im BewuĂtsein der Nation. Die heutigen Deutschen haben an der Stelle, wo dieser Kraftquell entspringen mĂŒĂte, nur die Erinnerung an Schande, Feigheit und SchwĂ€che. Das wird unfehlbar eines Tages seine Wirkungen zeigen; sehr möglicherweise in der Auflösung der deutschen Nation und ihrer staatlichen Form.
- Aus diesem Verrat der Gegner und dem GefĂŒhl der Hilflosigkeit, der SchwĂ€che und des Ekels, das er erzeugte, wurde das Dritte Reich geboren. Am 5. MĂ€rz waren die Nazis noch in der Minderheit geblieben. Drei Wochen spĂ€ter hatten sie, wĂ€re noch einmal gewĂ€hlt worden, wahrscheinlich wirklich die Mehrheit gehabt. Nicht nur der Terror hatte inzwischen seine Wirkung getan, nicht nur die Feste hatten viele berauscht (die Deutschen berauschen sich so gern an patriotischen Festen). Entscheidend war, daĂ die Wut und der Ekel gegen die eigene feig-verrĂ€terische FĂŒhrung ihm Augenblick stĂ€rker wurde als die Wut und der HaĂ gegen den eigentlichen Feind. Zu Hunderttausenden traten auf einmal wĂ€hrend des MĂ€rz 1933 Leute der Nazipartei bei, die bis dahin gegen sie gestanden hatten - die sogenannten "MĂ€rzgefallenen", beargwöhnt und verachtet von den Nazis selbst. Zu Hunderttausenden gingen, jetzt zu allererst, auch Arbeiter aus ihren sozialdemokratischen oder kommunistischen Organisationen hinĂŒber in die nazistischen "Betriebszellen" oder in die SA. Die GrĂŒnde, aus denen sie es taten, waren verschieden, und oft war es ein ganzer KnĂ€uel von GrĂŒnden. Aber wie lange man auch sucht, man wird nicht *einen* starken, stichfesten, haltbaren und positiven darunter finden - nicht einen, der sich sehen lassen kann. Der Vorgang trug, in jedem Einzelfall, unverkennbar alle Merkmale eines Nervenzusammenbruchs."Geschichte eines Deutschen"
4 years ago in Quotes
There's a time and a place to dig in your heels and say NO to something. It usually comes when someone else has been reckless. If you do it for everything, then either you're the problem, or you're surrounded by recklessness. I think you can figure out what to do then.
4 years ago in Quotes
If enough of us had worked like Noam to try to force American leaders to stop killing and exploiting the innocent these past 40 years, after all, countless people would have been saved, and America and the world would not only be far richer, more peaceful and more just. It would not be presently heading toward the collapse of civilization as we know it from climate change. Noam believes the major responsibility for this lies with a short-term driven corporate system that regards climate change as an "externality," i.e., a problem for someone else to worry about. But it is also clear that the fact that not enough of the rest of us, certainly including myself, respond appropriately to civilization's looming death is a major part of the problem as well.
And, I thus finally realized, the important question was not why Noam responds the way he does to the suffering of the innocent around the planet.
It was why so many of the rest of us do not.
4 years ago in Zitate
Die Einsamkeit macht uns hĂ€rter gegen uns und sehnsĂŒchtiger gegen die Menschen: in beidem verbessert sie den Charakter.
4 years ago in Zitate
Ein edler Charakter unterscheidet sich von einem gemeinen dadurch, dass er eine Anzahl Gewohnheiten nicht zur Hand hat.
4 years ago in Quotes
I learned a few years ago that lawns used to be something only aristocrats could afford because it showed your wealth that you could afford to not have land for the use of food production. Now you get fined if your neighbor rats you out to the local government for letting it get to high.
4 years ago in Meta Collection
node #3919 & node #5919
From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.
As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth."Men in Dark Times"
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany/Traditional values are to be `debunkedâ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent `ideologiesâ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere Ï Î»Î·, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are `potential officer materialâ. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.
The true significance of what is going on has been concealed by the use of the abstraction Man.
[..]
What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Manâs conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.
[..]
The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation.
[..]
Perhaps I am asking impossibilities. Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. But if the scientists themselves cannot arrest this process before it reaches the common Reason and kills that too, then someone else must arrest it. What I most fear is the reply that I am `only one moreâ obscurantist, that this barrier, like all previous barriers set up against the advance of science, can be safely passed. Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of the modern imaginationâthe image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Because we have to use numbers so much we tend to think of every process as if it must be like the numeral series, where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before.
[..]
But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.
4 years ago in Quotes
The process which, if not checked, will abolish Man goes on apace among Communists and Democrats no less than among Fascists. The methods may (at first) differ in brutality. But many a mild-eyed scientist in pince-nez, many a popular dramatist, many an amateur philosopher in our midst, means in the long run just the same as the Nazi rulers of Germany/Traditional values are to be `debunkedâ and mankind to be cut out into some fresh shape at the will (which must, by hypothesis, be an arbitrary will) of some few lucky people in one lucky generation which has learned how to do it. The belief that we can invent `ideologiesâ at pleasure, and the consequent treatment of mankind as mere Ï Î»Î·, specimens, preparations, begins to affect our very language. Once we killed bad men: now we liquidate unsocial elements. Virtue has become integration and diligence dynamism, and boys likely to be worthy of a commission are `potential officer materialâ. Most wonderful of all, the virtues of thrift and temperance, and even of ordinary intelligence, are sales-resistance.
The true significance of what is going on has been concealed by the use of the abstraction Man.
[..]
What is now common to all men is a mere abstract universal, an H.C.F. [Highest Common Factor], and Manâs conquest of himself means simply the rule of the Conditioners over the conditioned human material, the world of post-humanity which, some knowingly and some unknowingly, nearly all men in all nations are at present labouring to produce.
[..]
The regenerate science which I have in mind would not do even to minerals and vegetables what modern science threatens to do to man himself. When it explained it would not explain away. When it spoke of the parts it would remember the whole. While studying the It it would not lose what Martin Buber calls the Thou-situation.
[..]
Perhaps I am asking impossibilities. Perhaps, in the nature of things, analytical understanding must always be a basilisk which kills what it sees and only sees by killing. But if the scientists themselves cannot arrest this process before it reaches the common Reason and kills that too, then someone else must arrest it. What I most fear is the reply that I am `only one moreâ obscurantist, that this barrier, like all previous barriers set up against the advance of science, can be safely passed. Such a reply springs from the fatal serialism of the modern imaginationâthe image of infinite unilinear progression which so haunts our minds. Because we have to use numbers so much we tend to think of every process as if it must be like the numeral series, where every step, to all eternity, is the same kind of step as the one before.
[..]
But you cannot go on 'explaining away' for ever: you will find that you have explained explanation itself away. You cannot go on 'seeing through' things for ever. The whole point of seeing through something is to see something through it. It is good that the window should be transparent, because the street or garden beyond it is opaque. How if you saw through the garden too? It is no use trying to 'see through' first principles. If you see through everything, then everything is transparent. But a wholly transparent world is an invisible world. To 'see through' all things is the same as not to see.
4 years ago in Quotes
It is not the greatest of modern scientists who feel most sure that the object, stripped of its qualitative properties and reduced to mere quantity, is wholly real. Little scientists, and little unscientific followers of science, may think so. The great minds know very well that the object, so treated, is an artificial abstraction, that something of its reality has been lost.
4 years ago in Quotes
I saw my life branching out before me like the green fig tree in the story. From the tip of every branch, like a fat purple fig, a wonderful future beckoned and winked. One fig was a husband and a happy home and children, and another fig was a famous poet and another fig was a brilliant professor, and another fig was Ee Gee, the amazing editor, and another fig was Europe and Africa and South America, and another fig was Constantin and Socrates and Attila and a pack of other lovers with queer names and offbeat professions, and another fig was an Olympic lady crew champion, and beyond and above these figs were many more figs I couldn't quite make out. I saw myself sitting in the crotch of this fig tree, starving to death, just because I couldn't make up my mind which of the figs I would choose. I wanted each and every one of them, but choosing one meant losing all the rest, and, as I sat there, unable to decide, the figs began to wrinkle and go black, and, one by one, they plopped to the ground at my feet.
4 years ago in Quotes
How long are you going to wait before you demand the best for yourself and in no instance bypass the discriminations of reason? You have been given the principles that you ought to endorse, and you have endorsed them. What kind of teacher, then, are you still waiting for in order to refer your self-improvement to him? You are no longer a boy but a full-grown man. If you are careless and lazy now and keep putting things off and always deferring the day after which you will attend to yourself, you will not notice that you are making no progress but you will live and die as someone quite ordinary. From now on, then, resolve to live as a grown-up who is making progress, and make whatever you think best a law that you never set aside. And whenever you encounter anything that is difficult or pleasurable or highly or lowly regarded, remember that the contest is now, you are at the Olympic games, you cannot wait any longer, and that your progress is wrecked or preserved by a single day and a single event. This is how Socrates fulfilled himself by attending to nothing except reason in everything he encountered. And you, although you are not yet Socrates, should live as someone who at least wants to be Socrates.
4 years ago in Meta Collection
"progress"
Order is the tide of creation, but yours is a species that worships the one over the many. You glorify your intelligence because it allows you to believe anything. That you have a destiny. That you have a right. That you have a cause. That you are special. That you are great. But in truth... you are born insane."Starship Troopers 2"
To ravage, to slaughter, to usurp under false titles, they call empire; and where they make a desert, they call it peace.
Since Hobbes was a philosopher, he could already detect in the rise of the bourgeoisie all those antitraditionalist qualities of the new class which would take more than three hundred years to develop fully. His Leviathan was not concerned with idle speculation about new political principles or the old search for reason as it governs the community of men; it was strictly a "reckoning of the consequences" that follow from the rise of a new class in society whose existence is essentially tied up with property as a dynamic, new property-producing device. The so-called accumulation of capital which gave birth to the bourgeoisie changed the very conception of property and wealth: they were no longer considered to be the results of accumulation and acquisition but their beginnings; wealth became a never-ending process of getting wealthier. The classification of the bourgeoisie as an owning class is only superficially correct, for a characteristic of this class has been that everybody could belong to it who conceived of life as a process of perpetually becoming wealthier, and considered money as something sacrosanct which under no circumstances should be a mere commodity for consumption.
Property by itself, however, is subject to use and consumption and therefore diminishes constantly. The most radical and the only secure form of possession is destruction, for only what we have destroyed is safely and forever ours. Property owners who do not consume but strive to enlarge their holdings continually find one very inconvenient limitation, the unfortunate fact that men must die. Death is the real reason why property and acquisition can never become a true political principle. A social system based essentially on property cannot possibly proceed toward anything but the final destruction of all property. The finiteness of personal life is as serious a challenge to property as the foundation of society, as the limits of the globe are a challenge to expansion as the foundation of the body politic. By transcending the limits of human life in planning for an automatic continuous growth of wealth beyond all personal needs and possibilities of consumption, individual property is made a public affair and taken out of the sphere of mere private life. Private interests which by their very nature are temporary, limited by man's natural span of life, can now escape into the sphere of public affairs and borrow from them that infinite length of time which is needed for continuous accumulation. This seems to create a society very similar to that of the ants and bees where "the Common good differeth not from the Private; and being by nature enclined to their private, they procure thereby the common benefit."
Since, however, men are neither ants nor bees, the whole thing is a delusion. Public life takes on the deceptive aspect of a total of private interests as though these interests could create a new quality through sheer addition. All the so-called liberal concepts of politics (that is, all the pre-imperialist political notions of the bourgeoisie)-such as unlimited competition regulated by a secret balance which comes mysteriously from the sum total of competing activities, the pursuit of "enlightened self-interest" as an adequate political virtue, unlimited progress inherent in the mere succession of events -have this in common: they simply add up private lives and personal behavior patterns and present the sum as laws of history, or economics, or politics. Liberal concepts, however, while they express the bourgeoisie's instinctive distrust of and its innate hostility to public affairs, are only a temporary compromise between the old standards of Western culture and the new class's faith in property as a dynamic, self-moving principle. The old standards give way to the extent that automatically growing wealth actually replaces political action.
Hobbes was the true, though never fully recognized, philosopher of the bourgeoisie because he realized that acquisition of wealth conceived as a never-ending process can be guaranteed only by the seizure of political power, for the accumulating process must sooner or later force open all existing territorial limits. He foresaw that a society which had entered the path of never-ending acquisition had to engineer a dynamic political organization capable of a corresponding never-ending process of power generation. He even, through sheer force of imagination, was able to outline the main psychological traits of the new type of man who would fit into such a society and its tyrannical body politic. He foresaw the necessary idolatry of power itself by this new human type, that he would be flattered at being called a power-thirsty animal, although actually society would force him to surrender all his natural forces, his virtues and his vices, and would make him the poor meek little fellow who has not even the right to rise against tyranny, and who, far from striving for power, submits to any existing government and does not stir even when his best friend falls an innocent victim to an incomprehensible raison d'etat.
For a Commonwealth based on the accumulated and monopolized power of all its individual members necessarily leaves each person powerless, deprived of his natural and human capacities. It leaves him degraded into a cog in the power-accumulating machine, free to console himself with sublime thoughts about the ultimate destiny of this machine, which itself is constructed in such a way that it can devour the globe simply by following its own inherent law.
The ultimate destructive purpose of this Commonwealth is at least indicated in the philosophical interpretation of human equality as an "equality of ability" to kill. Living with all other nations "in the condition of a perpetual war, and upon the confines of battle, with their frontiers armed. and canons planted against their neighbors round about," it has no other law of conduct but the "most conducing to [its] benefit" and will gradually devour weaker structures until it comes to a last war "which provideth for every man, by Victory, or Death.
By "Victory or Death," the Leviathan can indeed overcome all political limitations that go with the existence of other peoples and can envelop the whole earth in its tyranny. But when the last war has come and every man has been provided for, no ultimate peace is established on earth: the power-accumulating machine, without which continual expansion would not have been achieved, needs more material to devour in its never-ending process. If the last victorious Commonwealth cannot proceed to "annex the planets," it can only proceed to destroy itself in order to begin anew the never-ending process of power generation."The Origins of Totalitarianism"
From a philosophical viewpoint, the danger inherent in the new reality of mankind seems to be that this unity, based on the technical means of communication and violence, destroys all national traditions and buries the authentic origins of all human existence. This destructive process can even be considered a necessary prerequisite for ultimate understanding between men of all cultures, civilizations, races, and nations. Its result would be a shallowness that would transform man, as we have known him in five thousand years of recorded history, beyond recognition. It would be more than mere superficiality; it would be as though the whole dimension of depth, without which human thought, even on the mere level of technical invention, could not exist, would simply disappear. This leveling down would be much more radical than the leveling to the lowest common denominator; it would ultimately arrive at a denominator of which we have hardly any notion today.
As long as one conceives of truth as separate and distinct from its expression, as something which by itself is uncommunicative and neither communicates itself to reason nor appeals to "existential" experience, it is almost impossible not to believe that this destructive process will inevitably be triggered off by the sheer automatism of technology which made the world one and, in a sense, united mankind. It looks as though the historical pasts of the-nations, in their utter diversity and disparity, in their confusing variety and bewildering strangeness for each other, are nothing but obstacles on the road to a horridly shallow unity. This, of course, is a delusion; if the dimension of depth out of which modern science and technology have developed ever were destroyed, the probability is that the new unity of mankind could not even technically survive. Everything then seems to depend upon the possibility of bringing the national pasts, in their original disparateness, into communication with each other as the only way to catch up with the global system of communication which covers the surface of the earth."Men in Dark Times"
We are humans, living in a human society, with human values and purposes, and the associated processes and conflicts, at every point of social scale. Furthermore, we are a process, with a past and an unguessable future, at every point of social scale.
It is patently an act of incredible destruction to increasingly, globally and inescapably âcontrolâ important domains of human lives, relationships and society with extremely superficial centralized mathematical models of what humanity is.
There will be unintended consequences. They will be horrifying, and we may not even grasp what we've lost.
