She says so eloquently what is such an obvious crime against consumers that we tolerate because we must. Modern serfdom is when “trust” turns to “must”.
In that context, what leads you call yourself and the rest of humanity primarily "consumers" in response to an essay? I think this has become uncomfortably (to me) normalized, and it begs the same question that Le Guin asks about whether we understand what we are doing when we are defining ourselves. A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?
> A citizen and a person doesn't have to be defined as what they consume, do they?
I find this is at the core of Stallman's criticism of the term "content". We speak of media "content", of "content authors", etc, as if movies, articles, books, etc were just that: content, ready to be commoditized, packaged and sold. And some of it is! But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.
Haven't read Stallman on it, but it's funny how vague & generic the term is, and how it requires the existence of a container. Content is simply "that which is contained." Seems to me it's a word you use when your primary interest is the container. Like you're the managing editor of a news website or the like. Metaphorically you have a mouth you need to fill with words, any words, or else people will stop paying attention. But I don't look at the world that way. I appreciate something good and call it whatever it is. The only time I use "content" is as an ironic and derisive synonym for cynical low-quality crap.
You should read Stallman, because what you said (container vs content) is his actual beef with it. It's looking at it from the perspective of companies who own the platform (the container) rather than from the more human perspective of artists and authors.
Less and less people have the option to male "art" and need to make "content" to simply survive. Art has historically been reserved for the elite privileged and it seems the world is heading back towards old norms as wealth consolidates.
In a similar breath, that may be why we don't heat much of the next generation of Stallman's and instead hear of a looming crisis in FOSS as the old guard retires. Less devs (if they are even pursuing that path down the line) will have the free time to choose FOSS as a path, unless big tech is paying for it to bend ot to their will.
>But we've conditioned to think of everything as "content" to be "consumed", which is depressing.
Specialization pretty much requires it, and our adherence to capitalism demands it.
You specialize to get paid, and by getting paid you can pay others that specialize to create. And you're right, it's a depressing system, but it's no less depressing than what came before that.
I have started to read "The Dawn of Everything" by David Graeber and David Wengrow and while I cannot speak to most of the book, even in the first hundred or so of (ebook) pages, it challenges that frame of reference in a way that is clarifying, in the sense of being a palate cleanser, admitting different ways of thinking about these things.
>but it's no less depressing than what came before that.
You can make an argument that it is more depressing when the compartmentalization of everything also isolates off community. No amount of individual riches can repair a trusted community to engage with. We're definitely getting lonlier in the process.
Have to? No, there are other options. But to twist this question a little bit - does a child that grows up in the United States have to speak English? They do not, technically. And in fact some small percentage don’t, but the vast, vast majority do. And not because they chose to, but because that is the overwhelming tendency of the environment they live in. I think much the same happens with consumerism.
I think I hear you, but you're phrasing your twist as a choice made by individuals or made by their circumstances, e.g. choices that you are not a party to. However I'm asking about you in this case, alongside the "us" that comprise the people taking the time to observe and hypothesize about the world we're living in by discussing in on HN. Maybe after that it'll lead elsewhere.
A person doesn't have to be defined as a citizen either, even though membership in a community is as fundamental a part of being human as consuming goods is.
Anecdotally I’ve felt this shift over the past few years. I am 33 and have always been a huge proponent of personal growth, change, pushing yourself to be better. In the past few years Ive felt the opposite urge, an urge to accept myself, flaws and all, as the hand I’ve been dealt and I must merely play that hand, not focus so much on what-ifs, etc. Perhaps this is my brain solidifying.
There is wisdom both in trying to change what you can, and realizing that you maybe can't change everything. If you've been trying to change things, by 33 you may have a fair idea of what you in fact cannot change.
29 and feeling the same. It's kind frustrating and freeing at the same time. I feel like I'm making less progress, but at the same time don't feel the pressure to make progress.
I'd also like to add anecdotally that a lot of people develop burnout at that age, probably because they keep pushing themselves and/or get sucked into their own enthusiasm / passion instead of set limits and the like. But then, I also think people get less resilient to stress and the like after 30, less able to compartimentalize or bounce back quickly.
What you end up getting is people ~10 years into an exciting career where suddenly they can't perform or cope as well as they used to. But they can also be in a pretty senior position by then and be pushed out of their comfort zone.
True, I think this happened to my partner, she had to face the hard limits on her working style and therefore had to shift careers. Thankfully I changed careers 6 years ago preemptive of burnout, etc so I'm still growing skills-wise and motivated by that challenge
He’s projecting his own guilt about his actions onto another. As the article implies, he is a top candidate for Antichrist if there is such a thing, and on some level he’s trying to avoid that truth.
We have life-saving allergy treatments that also can target digestive issues that we did not 5 years ago. We have vastly expanded research into chronic illnesses thanks to long covid putting viral fatigue syndrome on the map. Autism diagnosis has risen because research has expanded drastically. There have been major improvements because of existing systems, they do not require entire dismantling
The existing state of society, economics, and governance in the US has led to many people and communities being left behind. Rather than support our people, we call them addicts and jail them for mental health issues. The US is an experiment in replacing true deep community bonds enjoyed by older nations with our purely fiscal bonds. A side-effect of this is that problems without lucrative solutions remain unsolved.
The humanities are why the internet exists. Coding is linguistics, writing is the key aspect of most software creation. Why then do we devalue this critical skill and those who wish to pursue its excellence? It seems most of ya’ll are content to make a fat check working a bs job in a marketing/business capacity where no real things of substance are being learned or progressed other than “how do i squeeze the utmost money out of the system”. Is this the world you continue to want to promote?
No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Humanities came late to the game and try to claim the honor without actually having done anything. Except whine and complain about the demise of X because of this new fangled internet thingy. For X you may insert "reading", "writing", "critical thinking", "books", "education", "manners", "discussions" and another 50 things at least. I'd say the humanities hindered the progress of humanity more than they promoted it over the last 50 years.
> No. Coding is mathematics. The internet exists because of engineering. The web was invented because of physics.
Maybe, only maybe, getting to know the history of the internet (oh, and of mathematics, too), of the people that designed and built it, would inform a little more your stance.
Separating so bluntly maths, physics, biology, from humanities (and reciprocally) is precisely a trait that is telling of an unbalanced understanding of the world humanity built around itself with all these languages and abstractions to describe it.
I am not accusing, I am perceiving that from your stance.
No. You should derive from that that human life, and humanities being part of that, are a matter of experience, more than of argument/convincing. I could spend some time to argue with you about that, but you're showing you are not open to such a discussion, and my time is more valuable (and yours) than that.
It's like sex, intimacy, sight, smell, touch: you can't argue about it or explain it to someone who never experienced it.
It's definitely hard to argue or demonstrate how sometimes a book, a painting, a music can turn around your whole perspective on things.
So you argue that humanities are like art, cooking, literature, sexual preferences: a matter of personal taste, which I supposedly lack. The general consensus about matters of taste is that it is pointless to argue about those. And that matters of taste are an indulgence, important only to fans of that particular variety.
Which means that humanities cannot be important to mankind as a whole, because most won't appreciate them, as they are a matter of taste. And they are as arbitrary as other matters of taste, lacking the universality that is necessary for usefulness. Good riddance!
Ah. So you determine I'm not in the in-group for the magic circle that is humanities, so I can never appreciate or evaluate them. And you place any evaluation entirely in the subjective realm, such that no objectivity is possible anyways.
So it's not just a matter of taste, humanities are a cult.
You are stating that a specific segment of human experience and knowledge is a cult, without a sensible argument, and as displaying a very astute contempt and seeming lack of experience towards this segment. With an absolutist stance. And then, ask people to prove you wrong. What do you expect?
Coding is not mathematics. If you'll recall from your philosophy courses (irony of ironies), Russell's project in the Principia Mathematica failed. Mathematics is not just logic, and vice-versa.
Also, the "p exists because of q" form of argument puts philosophy causally "before" these other disciplines.
No, you should re-read and understand what exactly failed in the Principia Mathematica. Goedel-Incompleteness only means that either the Principia is short an axiom, or it will produce a contradiction because it already has an axiom too many. Nothing there separates mathematics from logic in any way. Nothing separates coding from mathematics in any way. The only failure the incompleteness proof gives us is that we now know that the Principia will either be found contradictory or incomplete. But that doesn't make it useless at all, our mathematics, coding and logic is still based on the axioms from the Principia and derived proofs. Science works very well with this, our physical description of nature by principia-derived mathematics also didn't turn up any kinds of problems there. The only real failure is the philosophical expectation of being able to generate all mathematical truth from that one set of axioms.
Yes, if you go back to antiquity, there were only philosophy and religion. Science and mathematics were once sub-branches of philosophy. But that's a few thousand years before the internet, and the renaissance at the latest was where philosophy was fully separate from sciences and mathematics.
Coding does not equal logic. Language precedes every discipline and even the concept of rational rigor. The study of language, and the stabilization of its form, is what laid the groundwork for every discipline after including religion, math, philosophy, etc
In addition to these points we also have a handful of weaker-than-arithmetic but provably-decidable theories, which jointly encompass almost everything done on a finite computer.
Coding is not mathematics, mathematics is a deterministic axiomatic system for describing quanta. Coding is the creation of instructions for computational logic that then is persisted in non-absolute matter as state. “Engineering” did not create the internet, the desire to communicate in new ways, as humans have wished to do for millennia, led to the internet. I honestly don’t even know how physics created the web when it was literally created to share text documents
Philosophy split off mathematical logic 200 years ago. Boole and Bolzano lived around 1800 to 1850 or something. There were no contributions from philosophy after that.
Chomsky is one I grant you, he was influential in both computer science as well as linguistics. But his success in linguistics was even more revolutionary than his influence on CS, exactly because he introduced abstraction, rigor and various ideas from computer science and mathematics into linguistics.
What it actually seems like is that Humanities are trying to retain/gain power in this new world where it's increasingly apparent that rigor is far more valuable.
If humanities taught logic, and actually rigorous analytic capabilities that were on par with STEM, I don't think we'd be in the situation we're in now.
Instead it's the opposite. The departments have made humanities increasingly easier, thereby devaluing them even more.
Rigor is only valuable because the nuance of our existence, captured in the humanities and beyond the dichotomy of true or false, has been erroded away by an entire society built on top of abstract economic concepts in place of true communal bonds that sustained humanity since our inception. This is why Europe and many countries other than the US have healthier humanities, they still have some vestiges of true community that is the heart of humanity, not merely the honor among thieves we see in the US that unites us.
Hi, Phil major here. I did math. I did logic, which was required. My peers in other humanities generally did not. But Phil might be the only exception.
Further I ended up taking a class that actually read original Greek texts, which isn't all that common even within the department I was at.
One can graduate in philosophy without having heard a formal logic lecture. Philosophy only has rigor in some branches, most modern ones are less rigorous and more social, political or economical.
So far the entire field of "AI safety" is one big grift that has never produced anything of value. The people who work in that field have vivid imaginations but lack the practical writing skills to become published sci-fi authors.
People who agree with this happening take for granted the critical ways humanities education contextualizes and guides stem research and progress. By studying the humanities you peer past the present and all of its trappings in the capitalistic race to the bottom. Shame on you humanities graduates that believe there being zero English, History, English, etc majors will lead to a better world.
