Category Archives: Uncategorized

Beyond satisfying our physical needs, we are evolved to desperately desire Positive Human Feedback (#PHF). It’s the baby monkey choosing to cuddle a box wrapped in fur. It drives all our social interactions, at both the level of personal relationships and every creative endeavor. The question becomes what kinds of actions our culture generally teaches […]

Trump’s election exposes the limits of a politics of persuasion. Instead of trying to convince people to vote for someone, we should be helping them to see through attempts to manipulate them, doing our best to get the general public the most good information possible and providing a political system where people can vote their […]

This is a post to my site https://culturewar.us. But it’s also an #ActivityPub post, meaning it shows up directly in the #fediverse. Like a toot (like a tweet on #mastodon). It’s not perfect, but we’re getting there. Thanks to the Pterotype plugin for WordPress from @jdormit@mastodon.technology.

The movement has a website and there appears to be 3 sections that make demands: Mission Statement Not one more. We cannot allow one more child to be shot at school. We cannot allow one more teacher to make a choice to jump in front of an assault rifle to save the lives of students. […]

I took a trip with my brothers this weekend to Houston and the Lone Star motorcycle rally in Galveston. During my travels, I thought I figured something out. And then I heard a podcast about DFW and his post post-modernist understanding of language (52 minutes in…), which reinforced some of the same thoughts. Then I […]

Life is complicated. As far as we can tell, there is an objective reality outside of our consciousness. It still exists when we’re sleeping, dead etc. But everything we know must be filtered through our consciousness, which is shaped by our experiences. And science still doesn’t understand how it arises out of the biology of […]

Our problem is not with free speech, but instead, we are now deeply concerned about all the issues around access to attention. Whether people know it or will admit to it, the key concern is which ideas deserve to be heard and discussed. Most of the time, control over attention is exerted in such a […]

Empathy is natural and serves as the foundation for all of our other values. The advantage here is it means we have an inner guide for how to live, but our problem is that translating those values into action can take a lot of thought. Sometimes those values conflict, or we don’t have the time […]

My sketch of what a free culture media consumption model would look like: It starts with something like #mastodonsocial – distributed social media with no ads & no algorithm. No outside control of what shows up in your feed, cause that is now solely determined by who you follow and what they share. Perhaps there […]

We are mentally lazy. Of course it is easier to be entertained, but more stimulating thought is just like exercise. Once you know both the rewards of the work and make it a pattern in your life, you can feel that critical thinking muscle atrophy. Once you have it, you see others and culture differently. […]