Posts tagged critique
“A critique is not a matter of saying that things are not right as they are. It is a matter of pointing out on what kinds of assumptions, what kinds of familiar, unchallenged, unconsidered modes of thought the practices that we accept rest… We must free ourselves from the sacralization of the social as the only reality and stop regarding as superfluous something so essential in human life and human relations as thought.”
–Michel Foucault, “Practicing Criticism,” or “Is it really important to think?” May 30–31, 1981. Didier Eribon interview. In Lawrence Kritzman, Foucault, Politics, Philosophy, Culture. New York and London: Routledge, 1988. p. 155.
I don’t have hundreds of unpopular opinions on blockchain/cryptocurrency, or anything for that matter. I did manage to rant for over sixty tweets. At the suggestion of multiple people I have compiled the tweets into this post. I tried to organize them thematically as best I could.
via https://medium.com/@nelsonmrosario/unpopular-blockchain-opinions-d6221804ef44
A pair of chatbots have been taken offline in China after turning on the country’s governing Chinese Communist Party (CCP). Chinese messenger app QQ introduced two chatbots — BabyQ and XiaoBing — in March but they were removed by media company Tencent after social media users shared conversations in which the bots appeared to criticise the CCP.
via http://www.abc.net.au/news/2017–08–04/chinese-chatbots-deleted-after-questioning-communist-party/8773766
“The dominant culture tolerates parasitic counter-cultures as more or less innocuous deviations, but it cannot accept critical manifestations which call it [the dominant culture] into question. Counter-culture comes about when those who transform the culture in which they live become critically conscious of what they are doing and elaborate a theory of their deviation from the dominant model, offering a model that is capable of sustaining itself.”
–
Umberto Eco
Last week entrepreneur Amanda Chantal Bacon was in the news for her unbelievable lifestyle. She sells something at Urban Outfitters called “Moon Juice Brain Dust.” The product is described thusly: “Moon Juice Brain Dust is an adaptogenic potion that lights up your brain and increases mental flow by feeding neurotransmitters and brain tissue. Neuron velocity and vision are fine tuned by toning the brain waves, in particular the alpha waves that connect to creativity.”
http://www.thedailybeast.com/articles/2016/02/11/what-if-the-onion-made-drones-and-sex-toys.html
Although his critique of Buddhism is somewhat uninformed, Zizek does offer, in his own way, a good insight into the danger of misunderstanding Buddhist practice and the techniques of mindfulness altogether. What fascinates me is that his critique parallels – in the language of cultural theory – the personal wariness that most beginning meditators have about the practice of meditation, especially regarding 1) how mindfulness actually works, 2) what acceptance really means, and 3) how genuine transformation comes about.
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/ethan-nichtern/radical-buddhism_b_671972.html
This is something that has struck me time and time again: The transhumanoids and singularitarians and online futurists love to congratulate themselves over their unflappability at the prospects of shatteringly onrushing changed futures. They literally have a whole “shock level” calculator, which is kinda sorta like a Cosmo sex quiz for pasty futurological males who think diddling themselves over cartoons of space elevators or descriptions of traversable wormholes demonstrates the awesomeness of their humanity-plus brains as compared to mehum (mere human) sheeple types.
https://www.wfs.org/blogs/dale-carrico/unbearable-stasis-accelerating-change
For the past six months my research group has been looking into an app that explores social dissonance on Facebook. Today we are announcing the public release of EnemyGraph. The project was developed principally by graduate student Bradley Griffith with invaluable help from undergraduate Harrison Massey.
EnemyGraph is an application that allows you to list your “enemies”. Any Facebook friend or user of the app can be an enemy. More importantly, you can also make any page or group on Facebook an “enemy”. This covers almost everything including people, places and things. During our testing testing triangles and q-tips were trending, along with politicians, music groups, and math.
http://bit.ly/H5yEjZ