Pilgrim, Breakout!

In a portrait of the “meaning crisis” by way of exegesis of the zombie film genre, John Vervaeke, Christopher Mastropietro, and Filip Miscevic relate the notion of Christian apocalypse to that of the film genre’s zombie apocalypse.

While it is crucial for us to have a grasp on the world, it is also crucial for the world to escape that grasp so that our mapping of reality can be recast and recaptured. The feeling that there is more to reality than what we know of it strengthens its integrity, and its independence from our subjectivity makes it more trustworthy. While it is necessary, as discussed above, to feel that the world is consistently intelligible, it is also necessary to have our sense of the world pulled periodically from underneath us. Insight emerges from the wreckage of this

Yesterday I jumped into a conversation on reddit’s /r/programming sub by writing about my thought on the Open Source/Free Software distinction. It goes to show that I haven’t participated in this side of the tech culture for a long time because I was unprepared for the arguments I encountered, and what I wrote apparently didn’t get to the core of what the crowd apparently thought the argument was. I’m definitely out of touch—my posts are both upvoted and buried into the negatives, so apparently I’m all over the map. The fast pace of arguing online got the better of me, and I actually had a pretty busy day such that I couldn’t really spend the time to address everyone and everything properly.

If you read the sidebar of this blog, you’ll see that I launched this site a few …

As close readers of this blog know, I attended the Free Software Foundation’s annual convention, LibrePlanet 2023, last month owing to the generous sponsorship of my readers, friends, and family.

Clinton Ignatov is presenting "The long history of metrics before and after cybernetics" right now in the Saturn room. Check this out and more via https://t.co/6kK0pWXBlw at #LibrePlanet pic.twitter.com/uw7VbG7ORr

— Free Software Foundation (FSF) (@fsf) March 19, 2023

The video of my presentation is not yet out, and so I was waiting for its release to do a write-up here. However, a reddit thread on a blog post by programmer Drew DeVault titled “The Free Software Foundation is dying” has hit a nerve with me. So here’s a counter-thread linking to this blog post. Having only just flown back from Boston, MA, where I encountered a very, very …

I’ve been, and will continue to be tied up with some personal family stuff. But in the meantime, my friend Katherine Dee has released a new piece by me, the second in a series trying to dig beneath the surface and open new avenues to talking about and analyzing the flame-war that never died: 2014’s #GamerGate, which many believe permanently altered the terrain of social media and ushered in our perpetual meme-war. All the noise and surface issues, I think, obscure what the really important messages underlying the spectacle. It can’t be said enough: the media themselves were the real message here.

Part One: “Gaming is Leaving Gamers Behind”
Part Two: Gamers vs. Academics…

On the tail of Ezra Klein’s NYT mini-McLuhan media-blitz last month, I wrote a piece that got some currency, including the attention of author and Professor of Media Theory and Digital Economics at SUNY, Douglas Rushkoff.

His book Survival of the Richest has just been released (it’s very good!) and yet somehow, amidst all that hubub, Prof. Rushkoff had the time and inclination to host me for an hour on his Team Human podcast. I’m humbled and gratified to share it here today—thanks, Doug!

Click Here to Listen!…

Another post I’ve written exclusively for Default Friend‘s excellent Substack.

Last article, I insisted that nearly everyone who popularizes McLuhan mangles him and his message. Why? If you want to think of causality in the sequential terms of linear cause-and-effect, then there are many causes. (Of course, when you read Laws of Media and Media and Formal Cause, you learn that cause-and-effect account for only a fourth of what causality is… but that formality would be a huge digression at this point.)

So, ahem….

🫴Click here to read more over on her Substack!👈…