“The greatest risk we face is not aging itself, but the unwillingness or inability to adapt,” said Laura Tuck, the World Bank’s vice president for the Europe and Central Asia region. As the planet’s population gets older, there are fears that a gray tsunami may make the possibility of golden aging more remote. But a […]
Against Waldenponding
waldenponding, a broad tendency to retreat from, and artificially limit, digital life – the near-religious reactionary movement against digital life – a primitivist, fetishistic fear of screens as demonic objects. A way of relating to digital devices that seems shaped by a fearmongering vision of them as soul-sucking pumps, and their designers as Dark Lords […]
The Agenbite of Outwit
Evidently written in 1963, a year before McLuhan was to publish The Medium is the Message, this important article brings together in one place a number of the ideas that would appear in his most important book a year later: technology as human extensions, the Narcissus myth, psychic numbness that derives from our extensions, our unawareness […]
Is the world really better than ever?
The headlines have never been worse. But an increasingly influential group of thinkers insists that humankind has never had it so good – and only our pessimism is holding us back. By the end of last year, anyone who had been paying even passing attention to the news headlines was highly likely to conclude […]