“In the midst of loss and death and suffering, our charge is to figure out what freedom really means—and how we take steps to get there. Join Marc Lamont Hill, phillip agnew, and Keeanga-Yamahtta Taylor for an urgent conversation about the ongoing struggle for freedom in the wake of the 2020 election. The uprising of 2020 marked a new phase in the unfolding Movement for Black Lives. The brutal killings of Ahmaud Arbery, George Floyd, and Breonna Taylor, and countless other injustices large and small, lit the spark of the largest protest movement in US history, a historic uprising against racism and the politics of disposability that the Covid-19 pandemic lays bare. In his urgent and incisive new book We Still Here: Pandemic, Policing, Protest, and Possibility, Marc Lamont Hill critically examines the “pre-existing conditions” that have led us to this moment of crisis and upheaval, guiding us through both the perils and possibilities, and helping us imagine an abolitionist future.”
Tag: Humanity
brilliant discussion on meaning
“Sheldon Solomon is a social psychologist, a philosopher, co-developer of Terror Management Theory, co-author of The Worm at the Core.”
“Fairness matters … to both people and primates. Sharing priceless footage of capuchin monkeys responding to perceived injustice, primatologist Sarah Brosnan explores why humans and monkeys evolved to care about equality — and emphasizes the connection between a healthy, cooperative society and everyone getting their fair share.”
this seems useful in helping people understand that we’re all one big human family <3
“It’s tough to know what happened on Earth thousands of years before anyone started writing anything down. But thanks to the amazing work of anthropologists and paleontologists like those working on National Geographic’s Genographic Project, we can begin to piece together the story of our ancestors. Here’s how early humans spread from East Africa all around the world.”
❝ In their bestseller Wikinomics, Don Tapscott and Anthony Williams showed the world how mass collaboration was changing the way businesses communicate, create value, and compete in the new global marketplace.
This sequel shows that in more than a dozen fields—from finance to health care, science to education, the media to the environment—we have reached a historic turning point. Collaborative innovation is revolutionizing not only the way we work, but how we live, learn, create, govern, and care for one another. The wiki revolutions of the Arab Spring were only one example of how rebuilding civilization was not only possible but necessary.
With vivid examples from diverse sectors, Macrowikinomics is a handbook for people everywhere seeking a transformation of industry and institutions by embracing a new set of guiding principles, including openness and interdependence. Tapscott and Williams argue that this new communications medium, like the printing press before it, is enabling nothing less than the birth of a new civilization. ❞
❝ Does the science of evolution really prove that life, humanity, and the universe as a whole are meaningless accidents? On the contrary, as science has shown how everything in the universe is subject to evolution, including matter, life, and human culture, these very facts reveal that the process of evolution is unmistakably progressive. And, as Steve McIntosh demonstrates, when we come to see how evolution progresses, this reveals evolution’s purpose-to grow toward ever-widening realizations of beauty, truth, and goodness. McIntosh argues that the purpose of evolution is not intelligently designed or otherwise externally controlled; rather, its purpose is being creatively and originally discerned through the choices of the evolutionary creatures themselves. Without relying on spiritual authorities, the author shows how the scientific story of our origins is actually a profound and sacred teaching compatible with many forms of contemporary spirituality. Evolution’s Purpose: An Integral Interpretation of the Scientific Story of Our Origins presents a fresh and compelling view of evolutionary science and philosophy, and shows how a deeper understanding of evolution itself can lead directly to a more evolved world. ❞
Computers & Society, NYU. Following is the foreword, by Douglas Alexander, to Rushkoff’s paper on the same topic:
“The internet has become an integral part of our lives because it is interactive. That means people are senders of information, rather than simply passive receivers of ‘old’ media. Most importantly of all, we can talk to each other without gatekeepers or editors. This offers exciting possibilities for new social networks, which are enabled – but not determined – by digital technology.
In the software industry, the open source movement emphasises collective cooperation over private ownership. This radical idea may provide the biggest challenge to the dominance of Microsoft. Open source enthusiasts have found a more efficient way of working by pooling their knowledge to encourage innovation.
All this is happening at a time when participation in mainstream electoral politics is declining in many Western countries, including the US and Britain. Our democracies are increasingly resembling old media, with fewer real opportunities for interaction.
What, asks Douglas Rushkoff in this original essay for Demos, would happen if the ‘source code’ of our democratic systems was opened up to the people they are meant to serve? ‘An open source model for participatory, bottom-up and emergent policy will force us to confront the issues of our time,’ he answers.
That’s a profound thought at a time when governments are recognising the limits of centralised political institutions. The open source community recognises that solutions to problems emerge from the interaction and participation of lots of people, not by central planning.
Rushkoff challenges us all to participate in the redesign of political institutions in a way which enables new solutions to social problems to emerge as the result of millions interactions. In this way, online communication may indeed be able to change offline politics.”
❝ A provocative work by medical ethicist James Hughes, Citizen Cyborg argues that technologies pushing the boundaries of humanness can radically improve our quality of life if they are controlled democratically. Hughes challenges both the technophobia of Leon Kass and Francis Fukuyama and the unchecked enthusiasm of others for limitless human enhancement. He argues instead for a third way, “democratic transhumanism,” by asking the question destined to become a fundamental issue of the twenty-first century: How can we use new cybernetic and biomedical technologies to make life better for everyone? These technologies hold great promise, but they also pose profound challenges to our health, our culture, and our liberal democratic political system. By allowing humans to become more than human – “posthuman” or “transhuman” – the new technologies will require new answers for the enduring issues of liberty and the common good. What limits should we place on the freedom of people to control their own bodies? Who should own genes and other living things? Which technologies should be mandatory, which voluntary, and which forbidden? For answers to these challenges, Citizen Cyborg proposes a radical return to a faith in the resilience of our democratic institutions. ❞
“Mckenna discusses the evolutionary theories surrounding our emergence out of the hominid line, how the development of human egos has been disempowering and how global values based on archaic systems can be recognised as the gaian mind of the planet through the medium of the internet. The gaia hypothesis now has a solid scientific underpinning, inspired by James Lovelocks work”
❝ (Excerpt) In addition, there were the politics that plagued our ecstatic enterprises themselves, no matter how we twisted and squirmed to escape it. Many a commune, demonstration, or love-in wrecked on the twin shoals of property and control. Then, too, there were the political fires kindled by the friction of latter-day ecstasy cults rubbing up against the stiff hide of the old iguana-brained Establishment.
It is an understatement to write that Timothy Leary was privy to this stormy marriage of the mundane and the rapturous. Simultaneously observer and participant, Dr. Leary analyzed events around him even as he helped make them happen. Boundlessly energetic, keenly insightful, he was uniquely qualified to work both sides of Heisenberg Street. Imagine him studiously taking notes even as he skated on one foot along the vibrating rim of an indole ring. ❞
❝ When first published, Marshall McLuhan’s Understanding Media made history with its radical view of the effects of electronic communications upon man and life in the twentieth century. This edition of McLuhan’s best-known book both enhances its accessibility to a general audience and provides the full critical apparatus necessary for scholars. In Terrence Gordon’s own words, “McLuhan is in full flight already in the introduction, challenging us to plunge with him into what he calls ‘the creative process of knowing.'” Much to the chagrin of his contemporary critics McLuhan’s preference was for a prose style that explored rather than explained. Probes, or aphorisms, were an indispensable tool with which he sought to prompt and prod the reader into an “understanding of how media operates” and to provoke reflection.
In the 1960s McLuhan s theories aroused both wrath and admiration. It is intriguing to speculate what he might have to say 40 years later on subjects to which he devoted whole chapters such as Television, The Telephone, Weapons, Housing and Money. Today few would dispute that mass media have indeed decentralized modern living and turned the world into a global village. ❞