Reading Time: 9 minutes Jordan Peterson is one of the world’s foremost dividers of opinion. And recently he quit Twitter, much to the sadness of his 2.7 million followers, after a foray into the world of sporting swimwear and beauty. Or beauty in swimwear. Or, for him, not beauty in swimwear. The New York Times once described Peterson as “the […]
Tech
Posted inTech
Musk will bring Trump back to Twitter, calls the ban ‘foolish in the extreme’
Reading Time: 6 minutes Organisms generally need oxygen to survive and flourish. Certain organisms require more oxygen to reach their peak. In the social media ecosystem, whose habitats include the undrained swamps of the American elite, one apex predator once reigned supreme. And in the misinformation mudslinging and disinformation data-dumping, Trump’s famed Twitter rule came to an abrupt end. […]
Posted inTech
CounterSocial isn’t the ‘new Twitter’: It’s something much better
Reading Time: 13 minutes There’s a popular myth about a frog that stays in a pot of gradually heating water until it boils to death. It’s not true. The original frog takes a bit longer, but it does hop out. And yet, our fatalist belief in the myth of the dead frog makes a lot more sense after my […]
Posted inTech
Is social media the cigarette of the 21st century?
Reading Time: 5 minutes Like tobacco companies that made their products addictive on purpose, the drive for ever more “engagement” on social media pushes it to appeal to our worst tendencies.
Posted inTech
Elon Musk buys Twitter. What could possibly go wrong?
Reading Time: 7 minutes Everyone has their line. Even 4chan, a supposedly “anything-goes platform” that many think is the worst manifestation of the internet, had a line. It was an animated depiction of child pornography, as well as concerted attacks on female journalists and others associated with Gamergate. The result? 8chan was started as an even more “libertarian” vacuum […]
Posted inSpace
Can we still make peace in space?
Reading Time: 6 minutes What a year for symbols of peace and progress. On Thursday, April 7, the UN General Assembly removed Russia from the Human Rights Council on which it had sat for weeks while displacing 10 million Ukrainians, internally and abroad. In the inadequacy of an international organization formed after World War II to sustain peace among […]
Posted inTech
Why degrowth is (still) wrong
Reading Time: 6 minutes Earlier this month, I wrote an essay against degrowth, the position that drastic reductions to the modern lifestyle are our only hope of saving the planet. I argued that, to the contrary, renewable energy promises a future of greater abundance even as we tread more lightly on the Earth. It’s the very rare case where […]
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Virtual reality church: This tech isn’t just for gaming anymore
Reading Time: 12 minutes Imagine this: It’s the 6th century. You’re a peasant toiling in the fields outside of Constantinople. It’s a mean and simple life. Most of what you see, all day every day, is dirt. But four times a year, you make the trek into town to the Hagia Sophia, the center of Christian worship and the […]
Posted inTech
Heat pumps will bring secular victory
Reading Time: 3 minutes Fossil fuels pay for Vladimir Putin’s war. The oil and gas that Europe buys from Russia become the bombs and missiles falling on Ukraine. If we had a way to break this dependence, if Europeans no longer relied on Russian gas to heat their homes, we could choke off Putin’s revenue and bring his invasion […]
Posted inEnvironment
Solarpunk humanism: How we dream bigger than despair
Reading Time: 5 minutes One unspoken tenet of anti-theist discourse is that we are limited by the religious stories at the core of our culture. For that slice of the nonreligious spectrum, it’s not enough not to believe, personally, in a god. The nature of religion poses a narrative problem that anti-theists feel must be confronted at every turn. […]