You really should read this. It’s The … Easiest thing in the world to get in. But try to get out. They have made it practically the only game in town. It could be deployed as an astonishing educational resource, for research and reference, minus so much that is obviously harmful to the body, soul… Read More Corralled Into The Digital Panopticon. Being Farmed.
An impressive look at our assumptions about Mainstream Media sources versus the new burgeoning superstars. “The term “mainstream media” has long been used to refer to established journalism outlets in the United States. In recent years, it has also been used in a more critical context, including by former President Donald Trump, other politicians and members of the media… Read More The Fall of the Mainstream Media? By What Metric?
Digital media analyst Hito Steyerl in another context has stumbled onto important, undeniable truths. She writes, In this new age of artificial stupidity, technological disruption has turned destructive. Its greatest victim is reality itself. “This rise of artificial stupidity is the antithesis of, or rather the millions of shabby little cousins to, artificial intelligence. Just… Read More The rise of artificial stupidity
+ Where they would take us. Ingenious in ephemeral things and foolish in Eternal things. By Msgr. Charles Pope. We live in times of great ingenuity. We have a lot of clever smarts. We have been to the moon and back. Our computers never cease to amaze, as we make them smaller and more powerful.… Read More Technological Giants, Moral Psychopaths
“The television screen [or, similarly, Internet / Netflix ‘entertainment’] has become the retina of the mind’s eye…the battle for the mind of North America will be fought in the video arena, the Videodrome. “Whatever appears on the television screen emerges as raw experience for those who watch it. Therefore television is reality and reality is… Read More Perception, Reality and the Videodrome
Loneliness in the West. “Once we bowled in leagues, usually after work — but no longer. This seemingly small phenomenon symbolizes a significant social change that Robert Putnam has identified in this brilliant volume, Bowling Alone, which The Economist hailed as “a prodigious achievement.” Drawing on vast new data that reveal Americans’ changing behavior, Putnam shows how we have… Read More Bowling Alone
Thomas Hobbs writes. “In the introductory voice-over to Woody Allen’s film You Will Meet a Tall Dark Stranger (2010), the narrator quotes Macbeth’s lines: “Life is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.” In an interview with Commonweal just after the release of the film Whatever Works (2009) and… Read More Nihilism and Guilt American Style Revisited
For some reason I thought it was another book about our frivolous TV shows and general culture (Seinfeld, Larry David’s vicious Curb Your Enthusiasm —pick your nonsense— and I already knew this about the culture. But then things got darker. Very recently I somehow bumped into this reading. I listened. I couldn’t have been more… Read More I’ve had the book for decades. But I never read it. “Shows About Nothing.”
David Halberstam’s The Fifties: “Selling The American Way” “The Fifties is a sweeping social, political, economic, and cultural history of the 10 years that Halberstam regards as seminal in determining what our nation is today. Halberstam offers portraits of not only the titans of the age: Eisenhower, Dulles, Oppenheimer, MacArthur, Hoover, and Nixon; but also of… Read More Videodrome. When the Seven Deadly Sins of Excess Morphed Into “Progress”
by John Waters 4.29.22.First Things Magazine Elon Musk is typically the object of considerable masculine envy, and so, in the interests of avoiding accusations of green-eye, it would be nice to be able to declare him unequivocally as on the side of the angels. But, for all his legendary space-adventuring, this is by no means clear.… Read More Elon Musk And the Post Humanist Threat — First Things Magazine
This documentary shows only one tragic instance of the proficient use of propaganda in the 20th century. Of course, the Communists did the same, even if a little more clumsily. But what about us today in the 21st century? Western people today live, move and think in a 24×7 media hall of mirrors. George Orwell,… Read More The Propaganda Machines of Yesterday Should Give Us Pause Today
Ireland’s John Waters writes, “As things stand, it appears that artificial intelligence, while capable of outperforming humans in certain tasks and reckonings, still requires human supervision. Being neither sentient nor self-aware, AI cannot reflect on its own processes. It gets things wrong, mainly due to insufficient, poor, or confusing inputs, albeit less so than before.… Read More Morality in the Age of Machines.
Major cultural transformation. James Lindsay writes, “We are in the process of transitioning from an analog, objective, real, physical world into a digital, subjective, surreal world. In that transition into a digital subjective world, we are experiencing a transformation of what is accepted as reality, when it isn’t reality: it is synthetic. In this discussion… Read More Synthetic ‘Reality’ Made Flesh
“Have you ever noticed how television and print media will scream themselves hoarse in news documentaries, editorials and heavy analytical pieces about “rising pornography, crime, violence, gunplay” etc.? And yet in the same TV Guide announcing the latest special on “The Crisis of Sex and Violence in America,” there will appear an advertisement for “Miami… Read More Media Inducing the Double-Mind
Catholic Critique 