Archive

Interventions for Individuals to Fight Spin

I will tell to you a few things about the first Twitter bomb that with my col­league we found a cou­ple years ago. And there it was a case in which some­body was attack­ing the can­di­date Martha Coakley in the last Massachusetts elec­tions. We found out that actu­al­ly it was easy to detect this kind of attack.

A Brief History of Industrial Revolutions: Hannah Dawson

The ques­tion that philoso­phers have asked since antiq­ui­ty is how should you live? What is the good life for a human being? And the two answers that have repeat­ed­ly come back time and time again are that there are two things that mat­ter. One is agency. That’s to say being in con­trol of your life, active­ly, cre­ative­ly engag­ing with the world. And the oth­er is community.

Reading the Riots on Twitter

One of the things that was hap­pen­ing at the time is that one of the accu­sa­tions that was being made, or that was being prof­fered by peo­ple who made sort of snap, knee-jerk respons­es to what was going on is that social media is being blamed. Social media was blamed for the worst civ­il unrest that England had seen in recent years. 

Agri-tech and the Arts: From Barns to D‑Space

I’m going to be talk­ing about how the arts engage eth­i­cal­ly and polit­i­cal­ly with the tech­niza­tion of the food chain, the chain or flow of sus­te­nance from field to din­ner plate. This is an inter-disciplinary talk but don’t wor­ry, I won’t be claim­ing quite that poems and paint­ings are com­pu­ta­tion­al machines for work­ing out social pol­i­cy, because that would be crazy. But if I’m not will­ful­ly mis­un­der­stand­ing Joscha’s excel­lent talk on the com­pu­ta­tion­al uni­verse, it seems that a like­ly can­di­date for the sub­strate of con­scious­ness is the numi­nal, the realm of ideas, and that’s pre­cise­ly where art and lit­er­a­ture lives. So it’s the ide­al place for deep pro­cess­ing of eth­i­cal issues, the big issues like food and tech.