Redu is a village in the south of Belgium that's famous for its many bookshops. As physical book sales die, the village is dying alongside them. Some locals are trying new things though.
“Obesity is not a medical epidemic – it’s a social epidemic. We have bad food, for example, and so people are getting fat.” The way we live changed dramatically – our food supply changed, and we built cities that are hard to walk or cycle around, and those changes in our environment led to changes in our bodies. We gained mass, en masse. Something similar, he said, might be happening with the changes in our attention.
Johann Hari believes we now need an attention movement to reclaim our minds and I definitely agree. I've felt this theft of my attention too.
An interesting look at the hype cycle in the tech world using the Theranos story as a starting point.
More generally, many of us have become ground down by tech’s promise to radically rewrite our future, only to find that it’s little more than a rebranding of the past imbalances, designed to supplant one controlling power with another.
Fawkes is a piece of software that modifies your photos in a non-visible way to stop facial recognition models from indexing them and associating them with you. Basically poisoning the machine-learning well.
An interesting project that takes books from the public domain and cleans up formatting, typography and more. So if you're looking for some free classic reads for your eReader, it looks like a great source. I have my eye on a few.
There are many things to abhor about Mark Zuckerberg and his works, but the fundamental mediocrity of it all—the lack of vision, the absence of any moral sense or shame, the inability and unwillingness not just to fix but even reckon with the dangerous and ungovernable thing he’s made—is what feels both most egregious and most of this moment. It is embarrassing and not a little enraging to realize that you are subject to the whims of an amoral and incurious capitalist posing as a visionary optimist. It is especially humiliating when the all-bestriding and inevitable figure in question is such a dim, dull nullity.
An excellent assessment of Marc Zuckerberg and his complete lack of character and morality.
