The framers of the US Constitution, for example, were quiteexplicitly anti-democratic and made clear in their own publicstatements that they designed the Federal Government in largepart to head off the risk of ‘democracy’ breaking out in one ofthe former colonies (they were particularly worried aboutPennsylvania). Meanwhile, actual direct democratic decision-making had been practised regularly in various parts of Africaor Amazonia, or for that matter in Russian or French peasantassemblies, for thousands of years; see Graeber 2007b.

We are projects of collective self-creation. What if we approached human history that way? What if wetreat people, from the beginning, as imaginative, intelligent, playfulcreatures who deserve to be understood as such? What if, instead oftelling a story about how our species fell from some idyllic state ofequality, we ask how we came to be trapped in such tight conceptualshackles that we can no longer even imagine the possibility ofreinventing ourselves?

Yet the existence of an independent and goodwill-based web is endangered : threatened by the never-ending technology race which makes the websites more difficult and expensive to set up, by the overwhelming commercial advertising pressure, and soon by dissymetric networks, Network Computers, proprietary networks, broadcasting, all aiming at the transformation of the citizen into a basic consumer.

there's an expectation that in "good history" (or probably good anything else) reading and understanding primary sources precedes interpretation.

“That’s one of the exciting things about math,” said Jack Morava, a mathematician at Johns Hopkins University and the inventor of Morava K-theory. “You can go through a door and you wind up in a completely different universe. It’s very much like Alice in Wonderland.”

Postmodernism is not a license to shoplift.

And the well-known jurist Jacques Cujas stated that ‘hee is a Learned Man non qui multa legit sed qui can fitly turne to Authors et use them according to his occasions. Non qui multa memoria teneat sed qui optima in libris optimis posset inve-nire’ (he is a learned man not the one who reads a number of books but the one who can fitly turn to authors and use them according to his occasion. [He is a learned man] not the one who keeps in mind a number of things but the one who can find the best passages in the best books).21

Johannes Sturm, for example, admitted that it was not important after all to remember; it was far more important to know how to retrieve what in the meantime had been forgotten.20

Drexel, for instance, held those teach-ers ridiculous who taught students to build up houses and rooms by means of imagination and stock them with images of memorable subjects (imagines agentes).16 According to the German Jesuit, the effort was not only huge but students wasted their time because images escape from these artificial places

an inquiry into filing systems is an inquiry into how society manages its own memory.11

Through an inner structure of recursive links and semantic pointers, a card index achieves a proper autonomy; it behaves as a ‘communication partner’ who can recommend unexpected associations among different ideas. I suggest that in this respect pre-adaptive advances took root in early modern Europe, and that this basic requisite for information pro-cessing machines was formulated largely by the keyword ‘order’.

The card index appeared to be simply what it was: a wooden box for paper slips. On one of these file cards, Luhmann once summarized his own reflections on just such an experience: ‘People come, they see everything and nothing more than that, just like in porn movies; consequently, they leave disappointed’ (Figure 1).8

“It does illustrate a good point,” he said. “Which is that all drama is about wanting something very badly and not getting what you want.”

Recently, Strong, concerned about press reports suggesting that he was “difficult,” sent me a text message saying, “I don’t particularly think ease or even accord are virtues in creative work, and sometimes there must even be room for necessary roughness, within the boundaries dictated by the work.”

“ The library is the treasury of all wealth of the human mind in which one takes refuge, ” Leibniz writes in a letter to Friedrich of Steinberg in October 1696. 5

“ There are so many books that we lack the time even to read the titles, ” notes the Italian bibliographer Anton Francesco Doni in 1550, already pointing toward the increasing reading of titles and footnotes as a principal reaction to too many texts.

appropriate metaphors open our eyes to more than denotation: they produce a surplus of meaning that stimulates thought.

“ Card catalogs can do anything ” — this is the slogan Fortschritt GmbH

books are a means of listening to the thoughts of others so that you can hear your own thoughts more clearly.

Lexicographers often show more credulity in positing origins of phrases than they ever would in reporting the etymologies of individual words.

er the years, writers (and speakers) have experimented with numer- ous images in expressions with the same general structure and probable meaning as worse end of the staff and short end of the stick

Like Creation stories every where, cosmologies are a source of identity and orientation to the world. They tell us who we are. We are inevitably shaped by them no matter how distant they may be from our consciousness. One story leads to the generous embrace of the living world, the other to banish-ment. One woman is our ancestral gardener, a cocreator of the good green world that would be the home of her descendants. The other was an exile, just passing through an alien world on a rough road to her real home in heaven.

when I browse from someone’s blog over to their Substack it feels like going from a sweet little neighborhood into a staid corporate park. A little piece of joy dies in me when that happens because it’s another reminder of the corporatization of the web.

it must be acknowledged that conservatism is never more respectable than in education, for nowhere are the risks of change greater.

He goes on to warn that “the broader evangelical population has increasingly heeded populist leaders who dismiss the results of modern learning from whatever source.”

“There have always been mean people who cloak their unkindness in religious devotion,” one minister in a conservative denomination told me.

In his words, “The gentleness of Jesus was utterly discarded” by those who felt he wasn’t championing their cultural and political agendas aggressively enough.

“People come to believe what they are most thoroughly and intensively catechized to believe, and that catechesis comes not from the churches but from the media they consume, or rather the media that consume them. The churches have barely better than a snowball’s chance in hell of shaping most people’s lives.”

None of us can have as many virtues as the fountain-pen, or half its cussedness; but we can try. - Following the Equator, Pudd'nhead Wilson's New Calendar

I am, by calling, a dealer in words; and words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. Not only do words infect, ergotise, narcotise, and paralyse, but they enter into and colour the minutest cells of the brain, very much as madder mixed with a stag’s food at the Zoo colours the growth of the animal’s antlers.

Try your best to be right, but don't worry when you're wrong. Repeatedly. If you feel uncomfortable, or like an impostor, good. You're pushing yourself. Don't assume you know everything, but try your best anyway, and let the internet correct you when you are inevitably wrong. Wear your noobyness on your sleeve.

The liberal philosopher John Stuart Mill, writing at about the same time as Hawthorne, made a similar argument. Much of his most famous book, On Liberty, is dedicated not to governmental restraints on human liberty but to the threat posed by social conformism, by “the demand that all other people shall resemble ourselves.”

But the real, and nonpartisan, lesson is this: No one—of any age, in any profession—is safe. In the age of Zoom, cellphone cameras, miniature recorders, and other forms of cheap surveillance technology, anyone’s comments can be taken out of context; anyone’s story can become a rallying cry for Twitter mobs on the left or the right. Anyone can then fall victim to a bureaucracy terrified by the sudden eruption of anger. And once one set of people loses the right to due process, so does everybody else. Not just professors but students; not just editors of elite publications but random members of the public.

“It’s not that everybody’s famous for 15 minutes,” Tamar Gendler, the dean of the faculty of arts and sciences at Yale, told me. “It’s that everybody gets damned for 15 seconds.”

Twitter, the president of one major cultural institution told me, “is the new public sphere.” Yet Twitter is unforgiving, it is relentless, it doesn’t check facts or provide context.

The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are rather typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes, enforced by heavy peer pressure.

The censoriousness, the shunning, the ritualized apologies, the public sacrifices—these are typical behaviors in illiberal societies with rigid cultural codes.

Nobody is perfect; nobody is pure; and once people set out to interpret ambiguous incidents in a particular way, it’s not hard to find new evidence.

Nicholas Christakis, the Yale professor of medicine and sociology who was at the center of a campus and social-media storm in 2015, is also an expert on the functioning of human social groups. He reminded me that ostracism “was considered an enormous sanction in ancient times—to be cast out of your group was deadly.” It is unsurprising, he said, that people in these situations would consider suicide.

Lily Hajdú-Gimes, a celebrated Hungarian psychoanalyst of that era, diagnosed the trauma of forced conformity in patients, as well as in herself. “I play the game that is offered by the regime,” she told friends, “though as soon as you accept that rule you are in a trap.”

Nuance and ambiguity are essential to good fiction. They are also essential to the rule of law: We have courts, juries, judges, and witnesses precisely so that the state can learn whether a crime has been committed before it administers punishment. We have a presumption of innocence for the accused. We have a right to self-defense. We have a statute of limitations.

Boehm: Professor Luhmann, which critics of your systems theory you fear the most? Luhmann: The stupid ones.

I want a [[community]], not an [[audience]]. Audience is stuff like reach, personality/celebrity, spectacle, anxiety, alienation, competition. Community is more like voice, discussion, comradery.

Order is a necessity, but it must serve us, not we it.

it is already clear in this case that the plan will spring from the materials, not the materials from the plan.

I am reflected in my work; J must also be reflected in the means I use, if I have adapted them wisely to the work and to my- self.

A new idea acts retrospectively; a torch throws its light behind as well as before. Materials that were laid aside take on a new aspect when they are classified by means of an idea. Then everything within us is reborn and animated with a new life. But for that to happen, the paths of light must be open, our thoughts must be in order and linked consecutively one with another.

Fifty data are no better than one, if they all stand only in the same relation to the fundamental idea; un- coordinated they remain fruitless,

On the pretext that you may have to catch any train, you do not learn the Railway Guide by heart.

We do not live by memory, we use our memory to live.

It might seem that St. Thomas recommends this, when he writes in his Sixteen Precepts: “Lay up in the treasury of your mind all that you can, like a man aiming at fill- ing a vessel.”

You need to use hope like a club to beat your opponent.

The movement against public shaming had gained momentum in 1787, when Benjamin Rush, a physician in Philadelphia and a signer of the Declaration of Independence, wrote a paper calling for its demise — the stocks, the pillory, the whipping post, the lot. “Ignominy is universally acknowledged to be a worse punishment than death,” he wrote.

"Consumer" is LITERALLY replacing "citizen" as an identity.

The willingness to trade other peoples' fundamental rights for preferential tax treatment fits neatly into all three of these, as does the delusion that somehow this can be resolved with sufficient "personal responsibility."

Steven Brust's (quoted in my novel Walkaway): "Ask what's more important, human rights or property rights. If they say 'property rights ARE human rights' they're on the right." https://craphound.com/category/walkaway/

n. Dickens saw the emblem of Thomas Gradgrind ("ready to weigh and measure any parcel of human nature, and tell you exactly what it comes to") as the "deadly statistical clock" in his observatory, "which measured every second with a beat like a rap upon a coffin-lid". B

em ? Puritanism, in its marriage of convenience with industrial capitalism, was the agent which converted men to new valuations of time; which taught children even in their infancy to improve each shining hour; and which saturated men's minds with the equation, time is money.128 O

ing world. What needs to be said is not that one way of life is better than the other, but that this is a place of the most far-reaching conflict; that the historical record is not a simple one of neutral and inevitable 124

ethodists, the Evangelicals took up the theme. Hannah More contributed her own imperishable lines on "Early Rising": Thou silent murderer, Sloth, no more My mind imprison'd keep; Nor let me waste another hour With thee, thou felon Sleep.10

Just like life, Minus has limits. Try it out today and see what online interaction feels like on a social network designed for less.

“I never understand anything until I have written about it.” Supposedly Horace Walpole (1717-1797) wrote that, but Google can't help me pin down where he might have done so. Frankly, it doesn't sound to me like a sentence written in the eighteenth century. But it may be a useful hyperbole.

“We don’t need to bend over backwards to give mathematics relevance. It has relevance in the same way that any art does: that of being a meaningful human experience.”

“What other subject is routinely taught without any mention of its history, philosophy, thematic development, aesthetic criteria, and current status? What other subject shuns its primary sources—beautiful works of art by some of the most creative minds in history—in favor of third-rate textbook bastardizations?”

There are two types of people in the world: those who enjoyed mathematics class in school, and the other 98% of the population.

Schopenhauer made easy

I was walking down Fifth Avenue today and I found a wallet, and I was gonna keep it, rather than return it, but I thought: ‘Well, if I lost a hundred and fifty dollars, how would I feel?’ And I realized I would want to be taught a lesson. —Emo Phillips

I did all the major vices—gambling, drugs, pornography and public schools. —Bernard Williams ( speaking of the government committees he served on)

What motivates the characters or the author? What are they seeking? What is their purpose? Here’s how Kurt Vonnegut described the importance of incentives in books: “When I used to teach creative writing, I would tell the students to make their characters want something right away—even if it’s only a glass of water. Characters paralyzed by the meaninglessness of modern life still have to drink water from time to time.”

“The things you’re looking for, Montag, are in the world, but the only way the average chap will ever see ninety-nine percent of them is in a book.” —Ray Bradbury, Fahrenheit 451

“Think before you speak. Read before you think.” —Fran Lebowitz

‘Assert nothing audaciously, deny nothing frivolously.’

Zweig continues: “This weakness, which Montaigne endlessly bemoans, is in fact his strength. An inability to remain fixed at a certain point allows him always to go further. With him nothing is ever set in stone. He never stops at the boundary of past experiences; he does not rest on his empiricism; he amasses no capital; before properly consuming them his spirit must acquire experiences over and again. So his life becomes an operation of perpetual renewal: ‘Unremittingly we begin our lives anew.’

Let us take down one of those old notebooks which we have all, at one time or another, had a passion for beginning. Most of the pages are blank, it is true; but at the beginning we shall find a certain number very beautifully covered with a strikingly legible handwriting….here we have copied out fine passages from the classics;…here, most interesting of all, lists of books that have actually been read, as the reader testifies with some youthful vanity by a dash of red ink. ~ Virginia Woolf, “Hours in a Library”

the pain of avoiding the unavoidable, which so many of us do, can actually be worse than the fear of surrendering to the inevitable

A wiki allows one to build increasingly more complex relationships between what might appear to be at first unrelated bits and pieces of information. The motto that characterizes this approch is: "It's not the data, it's the relationship" and it certainly rings true for me in the context of note-taking.

“Just because you’re winning a game doesn’t mean it’s a good game.” Seth Godin, Icarus Deception (Life)

“It is a curious thing, but the ideas of one generation become the instincts of the next,” D. H. Lawrence wrote.

“If we have to give up either religion or education, we should give up education,” said Bryan, in whom populist democracy and fundamentalist Christianity were joined until they broke him apart at the Scopes “monkey trial” in 1925.

Making money didn’t violate the spirit of equality, but an air of superior knowledge did, especially when it cloaked special privileges.

In April 2000, Clinton hosted a celebration called the White House Conference on the New Economy. Earnest purpose mingled with self-congratulation; virtue and success high-fived—the distinctive atmosphere of Smart America. At one point Clinton informed the participants that Congress was about to pass a bill to establish permanent trade relations with China, which would make both countries more prosperous and China more free. “I believe the computer and the internet give us a chance to move more people out of poverty more quickly than at any time in all of human history,” he exulted.

The most durable narratives are not the ones that stand up best to fact-checking.

Reading and listening are thought of as receiving communication from someone who is actively engaged in giving or sending it. The mistake here is to suppose that re­ceiving communication is like receiving a blow or a legacy or a judgment from the court. On the contrary, the reader or listener is much more like the catcher in a game of baseball. Catching the ball is just as much an activity as pitching or hitting it. The pitcher or batter is the sender in the sense that his activity initiates the motion of the ball. The catcher or fielder is the receiver in the sense that his activity terminates it. Both are active, though the activities are different.

One reader is better than another in proportion as he is capable of a greater range of activity in reading and exerts more effort. He is better if he demands more of himself and of the text before him.

As Berry says, “We arespeaking where we stand, and we shall stand afterwards in thepresence of what we have said.”

“Substack is longform media Twitter, for good and for ill,” wrote Ashley Feinberg in the first installment of her Substack.

Offline we exist by default; online we have to post our way into selfhood.

Society can’t understand itself if it can’t be honest with itself, and it can’t be honest with itself if it can only live in the present moment.

“When I give food to the poor, they call me a saint. When I ask why the poor have no food, they call me a communist.” ― Dom Helder Camara, Dom Helder Camara: Essential Writings

Ohne zu schreiben, kann man nicht denken; jedenfalls nicht in anspruchsvoller, anschlussfähiger Weise.

Dafür spricht das Credo des Literaten Walter Benjamin: Und heute schon ist das Buch, wie die aktuelle wissenschaftliche Produktionsweise lehrt, eine veraltete Vermittlung zwischen zwei verschiedenen Kartotheksystemen. Denn alles Wesentliche findet sich im Zettelkasten des Forschers, der's verfaßte, und der Gelehrte, der darin studiert, assimiliert es seiner eigenen Kartothek.

Seeing how his system worked is enough to inspire anyone not to let thoughts go to waste, notes Carlin estate archivist Logan Heftel. “A good idea,” Heftel says Carlin learned early, “is not of any use if you can’t find it.”

“A good idea is not of any use if you can’t find it.” —Logan Heftel

a good friend of mine says i don't answer questions i kind of respond to them

The garden helps us move away from time-bound streams and into contextual knowledge spaces.

So the truth is that the influencer economy is just a garish accentuation of the economy writ large. As our culture continues to conflate the private and public realms—as the pandemic has transformed our homes into offices and our bedrooms into backdrops, as public institutions increasingly fall prey to the mandates of the market—we’ve become cheerfully indentured to the idea that our worth as individuals isn’t our personal integrity or sense of virtue, but our ability to advertise our relevance on the platforms of multinational tech corporations.

A few years ago, our Republican governor proposed amending the Wisconsin state system’s mission statement to suggest that the university’s purpose wasn’t to “seek the truth” or “improve the human condition,” but was instead, according to the legislature, “to meet the state’s workforce needs.”

Lezing: De eigen blik door Margo Neale Tijdens deze editie van Framer Framer mede georganiseerd door de Australische tijdschrift Artlink ter gelegenheid van de publicatie van de speciale uitgave Blak op blak, hield dr. Margo Neale, Senior Research Fellow van het National Museum of Australia, een inleiding over de historische positie van de Aboriginal kunstenaars in Australië. Deze lezing werd gehouden tijdens het programma De eigen blik / Blak op blak bij het ​​AAMU – Museum voor hedendaagse Aboriginal kunst in Utrecht, 30 mei 2010. Links Artlink Magazine AAMU - Museum voor Hedendaagse Aboriginal Kunst Netwerk Margo Neale Onderzoeker, adjunct-professor Magazine Hedendaagse Aboriginal kunst / Videoverslag: The view of Self / Blak on blak

As one of the authors recently pointed out [2], the cognitive demands on a person in a low-tech, paleolithic environment equal or exceed the cognitive loads placed on members of industrialized societies.

students found both the training and the technique enjoyable, interesting, and more useful than rote memorization.

Code is law, and that code is misogyny.

The palest ink is better than the best memory - Chinese proverb.

“Sibi scribere: The reasonable author writes for no other posterity than his own, for his own old age, in order to take pleasure in himself even then,” Blumenberg quotes Nietzsche (here, 83).

“He who hasn’t lost anything in his head can’t find anything in there either,” Lichtenberg joyfully declared (a few days after praising the word ‘nonsense’ over weightier notions such as ‘chaos’ or ‘eternity’).

Filed on a card under the key word cogitare, Blumenberg quotes Kant: “Thinking is conversation with oneself… Listening inside.”

to re-phrase a famous line from Zach Davis, “Behind every EDUPUNK is a frazzled web developer.”

"My biggest mistake is probably weighing too much on someone's talent and not someone's personality. I think it matters whether someone has a good heart."

"I don't spend my time pontificating about high-concept things; I spend my time solving engineering and manufacturing problems."

In "A Letter of Advice to a Young Poet" from 1721, Jonathan Swift remarked that a commonplace book is something that “a provident poet cannot subsist without, for this proverbial reason, that great wits have short memories”.

Joyce was influenced by French novelist Gustave Flaubert, inventor of Madame Bovary. Flaubert is famous for his nuanced style and cool distance from characters, whose flaws play out without pity or remark. However Flaubert once broke this glacier demeanour by commenting abruptly in the midst of a story: “Language is a cracked kettle on which we beat out tunes for bears to dance to, while all the time we long to move the stars to pity.”

“Reading is an honor and a gift,” he explains, “from a warrior or a historian who—a decade or a thousand decades ago—set aside time to write.” Yet many people spurn this gift and still consider themselves educated. “If you haven’t read hundreds of books,” Mattis says, “you’re functionally illiterate.”

Scientists too, as J. Robert Oppenheimer once remarked, “live always at the ‘edge of mystery’ — the boundary of the unknown.”

“How will you go about finding that thing the nature of which is totally unknown to you?”

“The fate of the world depends on the Selves of human beings,” pioneering educator Annemarie Roeper wrote in her meditation on how poorly we understand the self.

“John Stuart Mill explains it very well. He said, ‘The source of everything respectable in man, either as an intellectual or as a moral being, is that his errors are corrigible.’

"Iechyd da i bob Cymro, twll tin i bob Saes" Good health to every Welshmen, asshole to every Englishman

Your life today is essentially the sum of your habits.

I have a number of ideas about enriching my home site and getting more into the delights of the IndieWeb

Personal websites are a conversation. We've just forgotten that simple truth for, oh, about two decades. It's time to relearn some good habits.

But as I thought more about what I wanted for my blog, and read more about the IndieWeb movement, I realized my idea of what a blog could be was incredibly limited.

Tagging systems were “folksonomies:” chaotic, self-organizing categorization schemes that grew from the bottom up.

I want no part of such elec-trickery.

All the dreams you show up in are not your own.

It was George Steiner, the literary critic, who once suggested an intellectual was “quite simply, a human being who has a pencil in his or her hand when reading a book.”

James Bronterre O’Brien, told the people:‘Knaves will tell you that it is because you have no property, you are unrepresented. I tell you on the contrary, it is because you are unrepresented that you have no property …’16

there’s nothing like knowing that you’re going to have to justify your decision to a bunch of mathematicians.

Our work, said Campbell, is not to graduate more students, but to enable students to graduate themselves.

"There’s one great quote that’s attributed to Confucius: 'I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand,'" says Case. "I really believe in the potential of the interactive mediums."

There are in history what you could call ‘plastic hours,’” the philosopher Gershom Scholem once said. “Namely, crucial moments when it is possible to act. If you move then, something happens.”

“Inviting people to laugh with you while you are laughing at yourself is a good thing to do. You may be a fool but you’re the fool in charge.”

The web is an amazing tool in bringing us together. Yet some of the best and brightest minds of our generation are working on how to get more people to click on ads. Imagine what technology could be capable of if it focused all that energy on the problems in our communities instead.

I n 1791, Quaker Moses Brown pointed to Black exhibits f rom his Providence school a s proof of “ their being Men capable of Every Improvement with ourselves where they [are] under the Same Advantages.”

manically inventive figure—really brilliant in many ways—with no particular training in design, but an intense interest in how people work.

"At the company's headquarters they created the bureaucracy to process information and make decisions about things that were taking place thousands of miles away."