Brilliantly put. Also, the very fact that there are millions of underfed people in the richest country in the world, is itself evidence of the economic failure of markets. As Richard Wolff put it: in a milk shortage, markets allocate milk to the people with the most money - i.e. the least need for milk. That's not efficient.
OK, maybe. But how many programmers will know this in 10 years' time as use of LLMs is normalized? I like to hear what employers are saying already about recent graduates.
I can only say that, in my own experience, you can't. Traveling pre- and post-smartphone are two completely different realities. The thing tethering you to a gigantic global faceless 'community' has the cost of weakening or blocking your engagement with real immediate physical people, and chance events and immediate experience. There is definitely a trade-off, no matter where your preferences lie. The last time I stayed in a hostel it was in Lima, Peru. It was mostly young people traveling. On every bunk in the room, a guest staring silently into their glowing palms. The joy of traveling used to be having very intense and focused encounters with completely new people who you would probably never speak to again...
I think the central message of that article is precisely that he is completing the adventure only because of community encouragement - but that that is the assistance of all the incredible people he met along the way, strangers on the ground who supported him and helped him on his way, and his friends and family at home. The community is the real people on the ground, and it is the real and living community of the humans who inhabit the entire world. The commercial transmissions with you as TV star are totally unnecessary, and actually only get in the way... Thesiger said that the greatest thing about his adventure across the Arabian Desert was his comradeship with the Bedouin. You just can't have that while waiving a selfie-stick and grinning into the camera...
There is nothing so wonderful that it cannot be ruined by turning it into a youtube channel... The really brilliant people I've met doing things like this always absolutely refused to mediafy their experience. Turning your adventure into a continuous TV show is great way to kill the adventure. We're now so used to everyone running their own shopping channel we don't even notice it. Read Thesiger's books for an account of real experience. The film I urge everyone to watch is Cronenberg's Videodrome - truly the film of our times.
Disingenuous is making a bald statement like that about a very long and involved debate in philosophy. Suggest you read around the subject a bit first before making such haughty comments... Could start here:
A very jovial discussion of systems that have killed millions of innocent people. Maybe you could do the same treatment of Nazi gas chambers or something for the next video?
Good. Given Keir Starmer's abysmal behaviour, this is about the only chance there is of keeping a Tory/Reform coalition out at the next election. I would like to see voting age capped also, at 70. Increasingly senile and racist pensioners in comfortable homes are dominating British politics with horrific consequences.
Articles like this always start with such radical criticism, and end with such dismally modest proposals: "try not to look at your phone for 1 hour after you wake up", "before you pick up your phone, try counting to 100 first", "move 'instagram' away from your homescreen", etc. What about just getting rid of your smartphone? Who really needs anything beyond calls and text messages...? You can get a GPS map, and a camera. Complete freedom is right there for the taking.
Great work, and great to hear about Echoplayer. Sorely needed. I currently use a Cowon Plenue D2 and have an iPod Video running Rockbox. The iPod looks nice, but is flaky and outdated, and can't utilize 24-bit flacs. The Cowon is pretty good, but the UI has a load of irritating elements and proprietary nonsense.
Good short survey of an interesting and strange writer.
I don't agree with the last paragraph however, and the sentence about "hyper-liberals" is embarassing.
A truly great film, but always spoiled imho by the fans who won't stop quoting lines from it. The lines are funny because of the context, and delivery, chaps. As Wittenstein put it: raisins may be the best part of a cake, but a cake is much better than a bag of raisins...