Mark Seely's Blog

Space. Extension. The increasingly nonlocal. Not distance. Distance is merely hypothetical travel time—the time it takes to get from here to there. I’m talking about beyond-ness, the compelling delusion of out-there-ness that has an even more compelling delusion of me at its center. “It is all in your head,” she said. “The world that stretches … Continue reading "A bony cornucopia"

A 1958 Disney “True-Life Adventure” nature documentary titled White Wilderness is infamous for its scene depicting a mass migration of lemmings, small tundra-dwelling rodents, that ends with the furry creatures committing mass suicide by following each other over a cliff where they subsequently drown in the Arctic Ocean. Virtually nothing about this part of the … Continue reading "More lemming than lemming"

There is a paradox embedded in consumer capitalism involving the distinction between the personal and the nonpersonal. All interactions with the economic system, from ordering fast food at a drive-up window to filing income taxes are assumed to operate in the realm of the nonpersonal. There is nothing about the interaction that is meant to … Continue reading "It’s not personal, and other lies of power"

Q: Why has the US been reticent to demand a ceasefire in Gaza? A: US corporations supply an enormous amount of arms to Israel, which means massive profits for weapons manufacturers when the weapons they produce are used and need to be replaced (in November of last year, the US pledged 14.3 billion in military … Continue reading "A couple questions (and answers) regarding the US strategy in Gaza"

There is a traditional Japanese Buddhist ritual called Segaki in which ghosts and monsters are offered food and drink to address their insatiable hunger and reduce their restless wandering. The ghosts, unfortunately, are unable to get any relief because, being ghosts, they have no way to ingest the offerings presented to them. One might think … Continue reading "Feeding hungry ghosts"

The form of the word, civilization, with its -ization suffix, carries entailments that both assume and perpetuate a particularly pernicious set of thought-forms. Consider the grammatical distinction between -ize and -ization suffixes. The former, as a verb form, entails the action of a subject: a person can rationalize; a group of laborers can unionize; a … Continue reading "What’s in a word?"

I opened up my email today to find the following important message about a workshop that I apparently must attend if I don’t want to be left behind in the fossilized digital dust:   Escape the Stone Age! Don’t be a Dinosaur! Quickly Learn ChatGPT Tools! I’m pretty sure the marketing geniuses who crafted this … Continue reading "This is an AI free, 100% authentically human-generated post"

I stepped into the daylight and started across the concrete-paved courtyard in the center of the small urban college campus. The courtyard contains several trees—literally “contains” them, sequesters them, seals them in bricks and cement, allowing just slightly more exposed earth than is necessary to accommodate their trunk girth—Japanese maple and ornamental crabapple, but also … Continue reading "The lost language of leaves"

The media have been all abuzz about the latest AI language platforms. It is clear that these systems are going to have a dramatic impact on just about everything, perhaps greater than the impact smartphones had a couple decades ago. It is also clear that the net impact will be negative: these platforms represent a … Continue reading "It’s robots all the way down"

Football season has started, apparently. Professional football, of all of the so-called sports, is perhaps the clearest example of successful corporate exploitation of male fragility. But civilized males are not fragile by nature. They have been rendered fragile by intentional design. Marketing 101: create the perception of a deficit and then offer your product as … Continue reading "Another sportsball season begins"