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• March 26th, 2021

  Now I have something to do with books: I make highlights. And I even have something to do with the highlights. They go into the Roam graph where I expect to use them in the future. So there's a little economy, a Machine with flows and drives and purposes.

• 📰 A Creative Multiplicity

  Instead of Lacan’s commitment to the unconscious as a kind of theatre, where individual Desires are staged, Guattari took up the idea that it was more like a Machine or factory, constantly producing Desire.

• 📰 Anarchy Is Not Utopia

  We shall not use our victory to return mankind to a primitive condition. Taking production in our hands, we shall destroy not a single Machine nor damage a single lever. We shall not abandon our factories and plants nor replace them with an idyllic life in huts in fields and forests under the open sky.

  On the contrary, we shall bring our liberated energy to the factory. We shall imbue our Machines with new power. We shall build as yet unheard-of giants from concrete, glass and steel. We shall raise industry to new and untouched heights. Our cities shall not be broken up and dispersed. Rather they will blossom with gardens, and additional millions of people will joyously fill their sunlit streets.

• 📰 Conceptual Engineering: The Revolution in Philosophy You've Never Heard of - LessWrong

  CogSci's current best guess about human intelligence, a guess popularly known as predictive processing, theorizes that the brain is a Machine for detecting regularities in the world—think similarities of property or effect, rhythms in the sense of sequence, conjunction e.g. temporal or spatial—and compressing them

• 📰 Shop Class as Soulcraft

  As Lears tells the story, the great irony is that antimodernist sentiments of aesthetic revolt against the Machine paved the way for certain unattractive features of late-modern culture: therapeutic self-absorption and the hankering after “authenticity,” precisely those psychic hooks now relied upon by advertisers. Such spiritualized, symbolic modes of craft practice and craft consumption represented a kind of compensation for, and therefore an accommodation to, new modes of routinized, bureaucratic work.

• 📙 Alien Phenomenology, or What It's Like to Be a Thing

  The phenomenologist who performs carpentry creates a Machine that tries to replicate the unit operation of another’s experience. Like a space probe sent out to record, process, and report information, the alien phenomenologist’s carpentry seeks to capture and characterize an experience it can never fully understand, offering a rendering satisfactory enough to allow the artifact’s operator to gain some insight into an alien thing’s experience. Again I turn to computation for examples.

• 📙 Hyperobjects

  Causality does not churn underneath objects like a Machine in the basement, but rather floats in front of them.

• 📙 Play Anything

  Play is not only fun, not only a child’s activity, but also exploring the free movement present in a system of any kind, where system might refer to a social situation as much as a Machine assembly.

• 📙 Scattered Minds

  The individual with ADD experiences the Mind as a perpetual-motion Machine. An intense aversion to boredom, an abhorrence of it, takes hold as soon as there is no ready focus of activity, distraction or attention.