Prose

Narrative writings: essays, reviews, polemics, short stories, etc

Burning further apart
Eucalyptus trees depend on fire to release their seeds. Plants need CO2 for their survival. The ignorant, as well as the evil, can point at facts like these to undergird their complacency and inaction in the face of climate change. The ease with which they appear to convince themselves that any worldview matching their lifestyle ...
Exodus 41
And Moses sayeth unto the LORD I implore you my LORD, could you give me a glass of water? The LORD, comfortably seated was holding in His hand a celestial glass of water. But His heart was capricious and on that day, He did not feel like charity, nor did the thought cross His mind ...
Corporate Social Responsibility also means: to manufacture the kind of desires in your customers that don't lead to the degradation of the ecosystem.
Profit maximization is a 'clean', strong forcing idea, i.e. one that allows for the abstraction from local context. It binds human actions together in a social structure that proves very hard to disentangle. Communal welfare cannot abstract from life in this way. The internal motivation hinges on local outcomes and thus erodes, leading either to societal collapse or suppression, which represent more primitive forcing ideas, namely following orders and immediate survival.
The your Work should be your Passion Trap
Almost every day, I read or listen to interviews with people who proudly proclaim that they have found the profitability in their passion. They no longer have to 'work' and have banned all tedium from their lives. Their message is, unequivocally, that we should aspire to do the same. If we just stick with our ...
“Can I talk to a real computer please?”
Culturally, the watershed moment will be when people begin to prefer AI over other people. Only if and when that happens, will there be something like a 4th industrial revolution - a revolution that ultimately overcomes homo sapiens itself. From: Kamiel Choi, our last century.  
It's not about what you do. It's about what you don't do because of it.