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Sunday Reads

I think there’s a thread to be found in this fortnight’s selection of medium-long-form articles and essays for you to engage with on a lazy Sunday. They’re all about how we arrange, label and perceive the world around us, and how that in turn changes the world. And that’s why I found them all of interest.

Shoreline Maps of the World

One of my favourite maps was at a heritage site on the west coast of Ireland showing Celtic trading routes from Spain to Scotland. It was rotated 90 degrees, revealing how a sea-faring culture would perceive distance quite differently to us. Getting from Galway to, say, London would take forever, but a ship was always travelling to Brittany. It completely changed my perception of how Europe worked back then.

These shoreline maps (see above) take a resolutely ocean-first approach to flattering the globe, and the results are very disorienting. I love them.

Yuval Noah Harari on The Myth of Freedom

Harari is probably the pop-philosopher of the moment, which means one should be wary when his explanations of the world make perfect sense because clarity usually comes at the cost of nuance. All that said, I continue to love his way of piecing observations about the world together in novel ways.

This demolition of the notion of “free will” is quite something and fits with a lot of my thinking without falling into handwringing absolute determinism (“how can we punish evil is there is no free will!”). He simply puts forward that humans are programmable, which is why advertising works, and so in order to respect the will of the people you need to know who or what is programming them. It’s an interesting challenge for democratic systems that emerged when the people themselves were mostly in control of their own programming because experiences were mostly localised. Now we’re in a globally interconnected era it’s often hard to tell who’s nudging our brains.

How does liberal democracy function in an era when governments and corporations can hack humans? What’s left of the beliefs that “the voter knows best” and “the customer is always right”? How do you live when you realise that you are a hackable animal, that your heart might be a government agent, that your amygdala might be working for Putin, and that the next thought that emerges in your mind might well be the result of some algorithm that knows you better than you know yourself? These are the most interesting questions humanity now faces.

2018’s Cattiest Academic Fight Is Over the ‘Meghalayan’

Someone at The Atlantic is obsessed with furious geologists and keeps commissioning articles about them. I for one am happy about this.

How interesting!, you may think. I love science! And perhaps in an earlier era, that’s all you would have had to think. The dawn of the Meghalayan would have earned some wide-eyed headlines, made life slightly easier for a few researchers, and promptly been relegated to a second-round Jeopardy question.

Instead, the Meghalayan kicked off one of the cattiest, most intransigent fights among earth scientists that I can remember—a battle that now concerns some of the most profound questions up for scholarly debate today, including the importance of climate change, the likelihood of societal collapse, and the ultimate place of humanity in the universe.

Skim reading is the new normal. The effect on society is profound

As someone who has skim-read all his life, way before everything was read off screens, I found this fascinating. I’ve never really been able to read texts in depth. One of the reasons I didn’t actually get my philosophy degree back in the day was because I couldn’t do most of the heavy reading. But, as you’ll know from posts like this, I am a voracious reader and consumer of ideas and knowledge. The web was made for people like me, the knowledge dilettantes, and I honestly believe there’s a place for my approach to learning. But if everyone processes texts my way? That’s something else. The author, Maryanne Wolf, is from the intriguingly named Center for Dyslexia, Diverse Learners and Social Justice. Diverse learners for social justice is my new gang name.

Unlearning the Origins of Photography

Ask any photographer when photography started and they’ll say the 19th century, when the chemistry was developed to save images in a camera obscura. But it’s an illuminating exercise to go beyond the technical and explore when and where the idea of photography came about, especially as photography and cameras were employed to define the 20th century and all that it meant. Where did this mechanistic, systemic point of view originate?

Suggesting that the origins of photography go back to 1492 is an attempt to undermine the imperial temporality that was imposed at that time, enabling people to believe, experience, and describe interconnected things as if they were separate, each defined by newness. To put it another way, for photography to emerge as a new technology in the late 1830s, the centrality of the imperial rights on which photography was predicated had to be ignored, denied, or sublimated, or in any case pushed into the background and not perceived as constitutive of its operation as a technology.

How often, especially in the internet era, do wankers like me fetishise the new in ignorance of what the new is built upon? How often do we get away with it?

Sunday Video

A Short Tour of the Manufacturing Might of China

A mediative look at the front-line of hyper-duper consumer capitalism.

On the Deck

These may be featured next time, they may not. But they caught my eye, so they might catch yours.