Joseph

“What I think I’ve come to understand, more deeply than ever before, is that the enemy is not technology itself, but rather inequality and centralization of power and knowledge, and that the answer to these threats are education, diversity and justice. You don’t need artificial intelligence to work that out. You need actual intelligence. But more importantly, you need all the actual intelligences – every person, animal, plant and bug; every critter, every stone and every natural and unnatural system. You need a crab computer the size of the world. The problem is never technology itself; after all, remember, the computer is like the world.

I remain as excited as ever about the power and possibilities of computers and networks as I have ever been; I just abhor the structures of power, injustice, extractive industry and computational thinking in which they are currently embedded. But I hope I’ve shown, to some degree, that it doesn’t need to be this way. There are always other ways of doing technology, just as there are other ways of doing intelligence and politics. Technology, after all, is what we can learn to do.”
― James Bridle, Ways of Being: Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence

“That which can be asserted without evidence, can be dismissed without evidence.”
― Christopher Hitchens

“Fired by historical grievances and a sense of civilizational destiny, Xi’s China is brash but brittle, intrepid yet insecure. It is a would-be superpower in a hurry, eager to take on the world while wary of what may come. It demands to be seen, heard, and respected, but obstructs outsiders who try to peer past the pomp and propaganda. It exerts a global reach with economic and military might, even as its ruling party retreats into an ideological cocoon. Its choices are reshaping the world, and it behooves us to grasp why and how. Understanding this powerful, opaque, and restless China has become harder than ever, but this is why we must try.”
― Chun Han Wong, Party of One: The Rise of Xi Jinping and China's Superpower Future

“The professional elite also values hard work, of course—but it’s different. To working-class members of all races, valuing hard work means having the rigid self-discipline to do a menial job you hate for 40 years, and reining yourself in so you don’t “have an attitude” (i.e., so that you can submit to authority). Hard work for elites is associated with self-actualization; “disruption” means founding a successful start-up. Disruption, in working-class jobs, just gets you fired.”
― Joan C. Williams, White Working Class: Overcoming Class Cluelessness in America