Rifkin's sale pitch is a leaky vessel (not a road map for the future)

Compelling at first, a neoliberal Baby Boomer unpacks the horrors of the first two industrial revolutions, then amazingly offers us a third, requiring even more extractions. This, Jeremy Rifkin claims, is a "sharing economy." The manipulation of 'sharing' here is interesting to note. Governments and big businesses are requiring their subjects to become greater actors for two reasons: to share the responsibility of maintaining endless growth on an evermore finite planet, and to share the responsibility for the consequences of such economic idiocy.

This beautiful essay, Magic and the Machine (prepared as a podcast), can be considered an apt critique of Rifkin's fantastical Third Industrial Revolution managed by an autonomous and tumorous Internet of Things. But unlike Rifkin's sell, David Abram's is not a simple fix, it requires deeper listening, contemplation and a radical decoupling from salesmen.

Read more...

A scientific justification of nonscientific 'slow text'

Just as I was finishing a slow text treatment of a Bernard Stiegler transcript (below), my friend Ian sent through a link to an article that states “The reason that the unusual fonts are effective is that it causes us to think more deeply about the material,” a co-author of the study, Daniel M. Oppenheimer, a psychologist at Princeton, wrote in an e-mail. “But we are capable of thinking deeply without being subjected to unusual fonts. Think of it this way, you can’t skim material in a hard to read font, so putting text in a hard-to-read font will force you to read more carefully.”

Read more...