Aurora is primarily set on an inter-solar generational starship. What makes the book worth reading (beyond the regular high quality science fiction drama) is KSR’s focus on the emergence of true AI. Fascinating to think about in this era where we seem to be on the cusp of the so-called Singularity, KSR’s approach to AI is […]
Category Archives: Enthusiasm
Drones in the Cloud: Attending to Snapchat
I don’t know enough about you To be kind, to be kind to you Don’t you even think about me — Cymbals, “The Natural World” The Cymbals’ electro-pop lament of unrequited attention (‘love’) has the same furtively repetitive energetics of yearning through ‘refresh’. Refresh the inbox, refresh the stream, refresh the wall. Repeat. Has the […]
Nihilist Pop Culture: Consumed by the Insignificant
What I am now going to relate is the history of the next two centuries. I shall describe what will happen, what must necessarily happen: the triumph of Nihilism. (Friedrich Nietzsche, Will to Power) One of my goals for the course is to render students incapable of watching TV and film in the passive, mildly […]
Appification of Fitness and Technics of the Body
I modified my recent Code2K12 paper while at was at the conference to introduce a TEDx or ‘Virilio’ moment. By this I mean speculating on the future scenario of present tendencies. I wanted to isolate a tendency in the ways various functions of the magazine are not only repeated in different ways online now (my previous paper), […]
Modulating Appetite
From Mary Wyman’s 1960 book on Whitehead is this example of creativity as part of a general process of concrescence (as becoming): This actualization of potentiality as an ingredient in something real might be illustrated by the experience of Otto Lilienthal, pioneer inventor of the flying glider. Process here is obviously considered on a scale […]