mot juste (n) the exactly right word or phrasing
—Merriam Webster

The most important benefit of reading and listening at length is to develop more felicity with using words. Ways of phrasing and thinking rub off on you with exposure to language as wielded by other people. More so than just acquiring new clichés and newly coined buzzwords, I’m thinking of all the ways which thoughts and perceptions can be ordered and built up and expressed so as to bring you, the reader or listener, into a new relation to the world and everything in it. We learn language every time we partake in it. The reward, in turn, is that one’s own speech and writing and thinking becomes enriched. Our thoughts and utterances become more nimble and nuanced and precise—or, just as importantly, direct and coarse and vague—as required.…

It’s the same with all these authors—are they all falling into the same pit on purpose?

After my deep dive into as much McLuhan as I could lay a finger on, I started digging into the larger Media Ecology scene in 2018. Soon I began charting constellations of intellectuals and writers out of the reoccurring references to their each other across books; the sort of study analogized by hyperlinks on the web.

Out of what I’ve read, I’ll say now that popular books in the ’90s about “cyberspace”—the world behind your screen—had its capstone with Erik Davis’ TechGnosis, most recently updated and reissued in 2015. It’s a wonderful, encyclopedic book—and the reason it so disastrously crashes and burns in the final chapter is very instructive.

Davis references and builds upon the works by nearly all the other ‘90s authors …

Read it at the Default Wisdom Substack: https://default.blog/p/on-jonathan-haidts-anxious-generation

Figures without Ground

As it’s usually understood, post-modernism is a wildly relativistic cultural state of nihilism and social constructivism. Put simply, modernism was when we thought we figured out everything, and post-modernism is when that empowered us to start changing making up everything and we ended up knowing nothing. It’s basically all of “society” Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff while not looking down.

All the books from the ’90s which I read on the subject of media and internet culture referenced the same guy, Kenneth Gergen, as spokesman for social constructivism as a hopeful means for reconciling differences and creating a more tolerant and peaceful world. And so, back in the summer of 2018 or so, I read his most cited book, The Saturated Self, written in 1991. You’ll find this cited in a lot of books—which …

Acting the Age

Competent people are mature people. Competent people are surrounded by incompetence, but they understand why everyone around them is so incompetent. Furthermore, they have means of redressing that incompetence, and faith in their process. And so they aren’t so liable to get angry or upset about that incompetence. That is maturity.

Competent people are necessarily paternalistic in many senses. But with eloquence, grace, and faith in the processes which can reproduce more competence, they can be paternalistic without being condescending or judgemental in a non-constructive way..

By “processes which can reproduce more competence,” I am of course referring to the processes of maturation. Paternalism, of course, means being father-like. We can’t fault kids for being kids. But when it comes to incompetent adults, we also can’t be exactly like their fathers, except that we wish maturation for …

Pilgrim, Breakout!

In a portrait of the “meaning crisis” by way of exegesis of the zombie film genre, John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic relate the notion of Christian apocalypse to that of the film genre’s zombie apocalypse.

While it is crucial for us to have a grasp on the world, it is also crucial for the world to escape that grasp so that our mapping of reality can be recast and recaptured. The feeling that there is more to reality than what we know of it strengthens its integrity, and its independence from our subjectivity makes it more trustworthy. While it is necessary, as discussed above, to feel that the world is consistently intelligible, it is also necessary to have our sense of the world pulled periodically from underneath us. Insight emerges from the wreckage of this

Yesterday I jumped into a conversation on reddit’s /r/programming sub by writing about my thought on the Open Source/Free Software distinction. It goes to show that I haven’t participated in this side of the tech culture for a long time because I was unprepared for the arguments I encountered, and what I wrote apparently didn’t get to the core of what the crowd apparently thought the argument was. I’m definitely out of touch—my posts are both upvoted and buried into the negatives, so apparently I’m all over the map. The fast pace of arguing online got the better of me, and I actually had a pretty busy day such that I couldn’t really spend the time to address everyone and everything properly.

If you read the sidebar of this blog, you’ll see that I launched this site a few …

As close readers of this blog know, I attended the Free Software Foundation’s annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023, last month owing to the generous sponsorship of my readers, friends, and family.

Clinton Ignatov is presenting "The long history of metrics before and after cybernetics" right now in the Saturn room. Check this out and more via https://t.co/6kK0pWXBlw at #LibrePlanet pic.twitter.com/uw7VbG7ORr

— Free Software Foundation (FSF) (@fsf) March 19, 2023

The video of my presentation is not yet out, and so I was waiting for its release to do a write-up here. However, a reddit thread on a blog post by programmer Drew DeVault titled “The Free Software Foundation is dying” has hit a nerve with me. So here’s a counter-thread linking to this blog post. Having only just flown back from Boston, MA, where I encountered a very, very …