Notes on ‘The Complacent Class’
Tyler Cowen’s “The Complacent Class” isn’t a big book, but it is spawling, touching on a thousand different angles on the same idea. Subtitled “The Self-Defeating Quest for the American Dream”, it’s easy to draw a clear line from Cowen’s previous book, The Great Stagnation. You can think of this book as detailing the social roots for more »
Text Dump: Maneuverability, StarCraft, and human override
Post-heavy week this week- Unit Operations excerpts tomorrow and Wednesday, and then if I can clean them up, maybe some more coherent posts at the end of the week. — Below, some loosely related threads that are incubating. Posts like these are an opportunity to share some recent thoughts/readings and to use bits as fodder for later more »
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy IV
(Tomorrow I post my first post on Unit Operations. I’ll probably be reading it at a slower pace, though.) This is Part 4, on “Virtuality and the Laws of Physics”. Part 1 (on “The Mathematics of the Virtual”) Part 2 (on “The Actualization of the Virtual in Space”) Part 3 (on “The Actualization of the Virtual more »
Mulling: Multivocality, Cities, Currency
This might not seem like the kind of urgent material that would require immediate posting, but I prefer to record my readings and reactions roughly as they occur, in whatever incomplete form they take. I might make prettier, denser posts if I collected myself first and edited longer after, but that hasn’t been how I’ve more »
Seven Fundamental Laws of Spiritual Ecology
Two posts in one day- This breaks one of my unwritten rules, but I need to clean house and I’m not going to store a post for a rainy day, because on that rainy day the post may no longer seem relevant. Below: Some quotes+notes on Greer’s Seven Laws, from Mystery Teachings From the Living more »
Why DeLanda
My backlog is huge. It’s much easier for me to type than it is to edit. Hm. It’s also easier to type on the plane than it is to read sometimes, too- bumpy flight. I’ll wrap up Intensive Science shortly. I wanted to give a brief account of what, exactly, I find interesting in DeLandan/Deleuzian thought, because more »
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy III
Also, it’s the Year of the Horse! That’s my year. It doesn’t mean anything to me but I’ll own anything if I’m told that it’s mine. — This is Part 3 of 4, on “The Actualization of the Virtual in Time”. (The final chapter will be “Virtuality and the Laws of Physics”). In Part 1 (based more »
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy II
Yesterday I accidentally published this alongside my scenes post. Sorry about that. More non-DeLanda posts next week. — The last post on this topic attempted to define Deleuze’s three ontological dimensions by following DeLanda’s examples for the logic behind it. These three ontological levels: Apparent actual things with extensive properties (e.g. “metric” measurements) Morphogenetic processes with intensive properties (e.g. temperature, pressure, more »
Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy I
These are notes on Manuel De Landa’s Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy, which is a refactoring of Gilles Deleuze’s ontology (specifically, it’s intended as an introduction to Deleuzian thought for analytical philosophers or scientific-minded readers unfamiliar to Deleuze and his very continental methodologies: this dude has two very different, very important concepts called “differentiation” and “differenciation”. That’s more »
The Lives of a Cell
I’m flying to and from Orlando these weeks, guaranteeing several hours of undisturbed reading. I read Lewis Thomas’ book of essays in the air last week, The Lives of a Cell: Notes from a Biology Watcher (1974) [pdf]. It was quoted by a friend-of-a-friend on Facebook, and I recognized something in the quote and began reading the more »