What a week. Whoever wins the US election is less of a question than what comes after. Plenty of pundits have weighed in that I do not feel the need to, however, in the next month or so I might, on the second- and third-order effects on the rest of the world.
Stay safe and healthy, friends. Winter is definitely coming.
Perhaps it was not that much of a wasteland as previously thought.
An oldie but goodie from Harold Jarche on meaningful work, especially relevant in a post-pandemic landscape – what is work? What is labour? What is value? What is production?
"This is perhaps most visible in politics. Political debate is supposed to be characterised by serious discussions about real issues concerning the good of society, and these discussions are supposed to be based on factual evidence that can be cited as support for one policy or another. This form of political debate has been replaced by appeals to emotions, produced by cynical attempts to mislead voters with lies and false information intended to cast a negative light on opposing candidates or policy views. Professional firms offer the service of explicitly creating distortions and disseminating falsehoods in order to sway public opinion in one direction or another. Apart from the given ideology that informs their specific political orientation, the justification that is given for this always returns to the claim that there is no objective truth anyway, and so one is at liberty to spread manufactured and strategically packaged misinformation. This is a disturbing tendency not just for politics but also for fields such as journalism, education and science. Examples of this readily come to mind when one thinks of deniers of climate change or the Holocaust. Things such as the scientific method, the verification of sources and fact-checking no longer seem to be particularly relevant."
Venkatesh Rao wrote about a contemporary dark ages back in 2013. Where are we now?
“It has always been much easier (because it has always seemed much safer) to give a name to the evil without than to locate the terror within.” – James Baldwin