As Marketing Overwhelms University Life, It Generates Documents About Fostering Imagination And Creativity
As marketing overwhelms university life, it generates documents about fostering imagination and creativity that might just as well have been designed to strangle imagination and creativity in the cradle. No major new works of social theory have emerged in the United States in the last thirty years. We have been reduced to the equivalent of medieval scholastics, writing endless annotations of French theory from the seventies, despite the guilty awareness that if new incarnations of Gilles Deleuze, Michel Foucault, or Pierre Bourdieu were to appear in the academy today, we would deny them tenure. There was a time when academia was society’s refuge for the eccentric, brilliant, and impractical. No longer. It is now the domain of professional self-marketers. As a result, in one of the most bizarre fits of social self-destructiveness in history, we seem to have decided we have no place for our eccentric, brilliant, and impractical citizens. Most languish in their mothers’ basements, at best making the occasional, acute intervention on the Internet. It is proverbial that original ideas are the kiss of death for a proposal, because they have not yet been proved to work.
David Graeber
More Posts from Dclcq and Others
That subsidizing capital accumulation has become the only readily available way for most to act on compassion for others is perverse.
Mathew Snow ‘Against Charity’
Any social entrepreneurs worth their (fair-trade, alder-smoked) sea salt will have an "our story" section on their website, explaining how a college trip to Guatemala or a grandmother's devotion to fresh produce inspired the company's current mission. "It's not just 'my candles are great', it's 'and then I went to Java and discovered this wax and this is a part of my journey, here's a picture,'" says Deresiewicz. "Goods now all have to be experiences.
Elizabeth Nolan Brown aka. "smoothie catharsis will solve your existential crisis"
Finnish bread advertisement, hinted to me by anonymous submitter. “Only in this country you can avertise bread this way.” This piece has no subtitles but here’s translation:
Father: “Well are you hungry or not?” KOVAA KUIN ELÄMÄ (HARD AS LIFE)
(And if you’re interested in the last part the guy says that you can get jälkiuunileipä or after-oven-bread in smaller bits too)
Human cognition is only one species of intelligence, one with built-in impulses like empathy that colour the way we see the world, and limit what we are willing to do to accomplish our goals. But these biochemical impulses aren’t essential components of intelligence. They’re incidental software applications, installed by aeons of evolution and culture. ‘The basic problem is that the strong realisation of most motivations is incompatible with human existence,’ Dewey told me. The idea that we might have moral obligations to the humans of the far future is a difficult one to process. After all, we humans are seasonal creatures, not stewards of deep time.
Ross Anderson, Omens
Fine Art of the Forest
(c) riverwindphotography, August 2024
jensenacklesmishacollins:
Ei talupoegadele - No to peasants.
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The majority speaks Sense.
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