#lewis-mumford — Public Fediverse posts

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Civilization #TheFuture

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Guangxi #China #LiRiver #LiJiang #TowerKarst #Geology

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Civilization #TheFuture

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Guangxi #China #LiRiver #LiJiang #TowerKarst #Geology

Homo Hortus
Mécanismes de contrôle oligarchique dans la mégamachine moderne : de Mumford à Scheidler
https://mcinformactions.net/mecanismes-de-controle-oligarchique-dans-la-megamachine-moderne-de-mumford-a
#systemique #Mégamachine #Oligarchie #Technocratie #Capitalisme #ContrôleSocial #LewisMumford #FabianScheidler

To know a thing by its parts is science, to feel it as a whole is art.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Art #Science

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #360panorama #NewMexico

To know a thing by its parts is science, to feel it as a whole is art.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Art #Science

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #ChacoCanyon #PuebloBonito #Ruins #360panorama #NewMexico

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Civilization #TheFuture

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #BWCA #RoseFalls #Minnesota

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Civilization #TheFuture

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #BWCA #RoseFalls #Minnesota

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Civilization #TheFuture

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Kayaks #Everglades #Florida

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Wisdom #Quotes #LewisMumford #Civilization #TheFuture

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Sunset #Kayaks #Everglades #Florida

I'm no expert on the history of technology, but the quotation from one of the few books in that field I have read makes me keen to explore this site.

Creatures of Thought

https://technicshistory.com/about/

#HistoryOfTechnology #ChrisMcDonald #CreaturesOfThought #LewisMumford

Recomiendo muy muy fuerte este libro de #lewismumford a todes les que estén pensando en utopías posibles para salir de este caos. Un recorrido por utopías pasadas y muchas ideas interesantes (hasta 1922)! Imaginar es el primer paso para construir otro mundo mejor 😊 #pepitasdecalabaza #pepitaseditorial #utopia #imaginacion #solarpunk

« The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. A society that gives to one class all the opportunities… »

— Lewis Mumford

https://poligraf.tumblr.com/post/748042402633285632/the-aggregation-of-the-spiritual-life-from-the

#quotes #LewisMumford #Spirit #society

#TheArtisticImpulse #quotes #arts #paintings #music #videos #poetry #poems #Tumblr #blog #blogpost #art #poligraf #artshare 🎨 🎧

« The aggregation of the spiritual life from the practical life is a curse that falls impartially upon both sides of our existence. A society that gives to one class all the opportunities… »

— Lewis Mumford

https://poligraf.tumblr.com/post/748042402633285632/the-aggregation-of-the-spiritual-life-from-the

#quotes #LewisMumford #Spirit #society

#TheArtisticImpulse #quotes #arts #paintings #music #videos #poetry #poems #Tumblr #blog #blogpost #art #poligraf #artshare 🎨 🎧

> "... agriculture brings cumulative improvements to the landscape and a finer adaptation of it to human needs; while mines as a rule pass quickly from riches to exhaustion, from exhaustion to desertion, often within a few generations. Mining thus presents the very image of human discontinuity, here today and gone tomorrow, now feverish with gain, now depleted and vacant.”
#LewisMumford #CityInHistory on #Mining and #TheMiner quoted by #BradWilson #IowaCornFarmer
https://znetwork.org/zblogs/the-culture-of-corn-farming-two-paradigms-by-brad-wilson/

> The other great benefit of the transformation of the industrial process is the fact that its outcome need not be a plethora of material goods and gadgets, nor yet of instruments of warfare and genocide. Once we revamp the institutions of the market, and distribute goods mainly on the basis of need, rather than in proportion to toil or sacrifice or privileged status, our gains will be gains in leisure.
#LewisMumford #TransformationsOfMan 1957
#IndustrialProcess #ToEachAccordingToNeed

Reading "The City in History" by #lewismumford and loved the way he describes the suburban way of life:

”Here domesticity could flourish, forgetful of the exploitation on which so much of it was based. Here individuality could prosper, oblivious of the pervasive regimentation beyond. this was not merely a child-centered environment: it was based on a childish view of the world, in which reality was sacrificed to the pleasure principle.” pg. 494

#urbanism #suburbanlife #suburban #suburb #cities

Limits:
> Plato defined the limits of the size of a city as the number of people who could hear the voice of a single orator: today those limits do not define a city but a civilization..
Media:
> As with all instruments of multiplication the.. question is as to the function and quality of the object.. multiplying. There is no satisfactory answer to this..[from] #technics .. nothing to indicate.. [that] #InstantaneousCommunication.. will.. be favorable to the community.
#LewisMumford in 1934

Lewis Mumford's _Technics and Civilization_ on the camera's influence brought this to mind:
> If #Instagram showed us what a world without art looks like, #TikTok shows us what a world without shame looks like. The old virtues of restraint — prudence, discretion, tact — are gone. There is only one virtue: to be seen.

https://www.roughtype.com/?paged=3

#NicolasCarr #CarrOnTikTok #TikTok #TechnicsAndCivilization #LewisMumford #MumfordOnTheCamera #SelfExposure
#GDM #EP3 #EP2 #EPGDM #IARichardsOnMedia

The English Through Pictures Book 3 page 47 makes me think of a line from Lewis Mumford:
> Mechanical instruments, potentially a vehicle of rational human purposes, are scarcely a blessing when they enable the gossip of the village idiot and the deeds of the thug to be broadcast to a million people each day.
#LewisMumford in #TechnicsAndCivilization p.301
#VillageIdiot #TownThug
Trump comes to mind...

Machines

If you fall in love with a machine there is something wrong with your love-life. If you worship a machine there is something wrong with your religion.

~ Lewis Mumford

slip:4a1364.

> The End of the Megamachine brings to light the roots of the destructive forces threatening the future of humankind today. While the first part leads us to the very origins of economic, military and ideological power 5000 years ago, the second and key part retraces the formation and expansion of the modern world-system through the last 500 years. Dismantling Western progress mythologies, #FabianScheidler shows..
https://www.megamaschine.org/en/
#MegaMachine #EndOfTheMegaMachine #LewisMumford?

It is mind blowing to be reading #CorneliusCastoriadis, #JosephWeizenbaum, and #LewisMumford at the same time.

A lot of shared, complex ideas it takes time to understand. If I even can.

I've been thinking about #artificialintelligence, calls for its #regulation & some previous cases of #technological determinism.

As I've said here before, perhaps the best way of thinking about all this is to return to the work of #LewisMumford who makes the distinction between Authoritarian Technics & Democratic Technics... which encourages us to focus not on the characteristic(s) of #technology, but rather the #political interests of those who deploy & promote it.

https://northwestbylines.co.uk/business/technology/is-artificial-intelligence-out-of-our-control/

I've been thinking about #artificialintelligence, calls for its #regulation & some previous cases of #technological determinism.

As I've said here before, perhaps the best way of thinking about all this is to return to the work of #LewisMumford who makes the distinction between Authoritarian Technics & Democratic Technics... which encourages us to focus not on the characteristic(s) of #technology, but rather the #political interests of those who deploy & promote it.

https://northwestbylines.co.uk/business/technology/is-artificial-intelligence-out-of-our-control/

The future of our civilization depends upon our ability to select and control our heritage from the past, to alter our present attitudes and habits, and to project fresh forms into which our energies may be freely poured.
-- Lewis Mumford (1895-1990)

⬆ #Quotes #LewisMumford #Civilization #TheFuture

⬇ #Photography #Panorama #Panopainting #Books

Gracias @Tefaa por mostrarnos a Langdon Winner y su escrito: "Los artefactos tienen política?", que, citando a Platón, Marx, Engels, Lewis Mumford y probablemente construyendo sobre el trabajo de Marshall Mcluhan, brinda un análisis sobre los medios tecnológicos que parece más relevante que nunca en el escenario del Capitalismo de Vigilancia que ha descrito Shoshana Zuboff.
#langdonwinner
#capitalismodevigilancia
#marshallmcluhan
#elmedioeselmensaje
#lewismumford

Gracias @Tefaa por mostrarnos a Langdon Winner y su escrito: "Los artefactos tienen política?", que, citando a Platón, Marx, Engels, Lewis Mumford y probablemente construyendo sobre el trabajo de Marshall Mcluhan, brinda un análisis sobre los medios tecnológicos que parece más relevante que nunca en el escenario del Capitalismo de Vigilancia que ha descrito Shoshana Zuboff.
#langdonwinner
#capitalismodevigilancia
#marshallmcluhan
#elmedioeselmensaje
#lewismumford

.> As an instrument for organizing large quantities of information, or performing extremely complex symbolic operations beyond human capabilities within a normal lifespan, the computer is an invaluable adjunct to the brain, though not a substitute for it. Since the computer is limited to handling only so much experience as can be abstracted in symbolic or numerical form, it is incapable of dealing directly, as organisms must, with the steady influx of concrete, unprogrammable experience. With respect to such experience, the computer is necessarily always out of date. The computer's lack of other human dimensions is of course no handicap to it as a labor-saving device, whether in astronomy or bookkeeping: but such creativity as the computer may simulate is always in the first place a contribution of the minds that formulate the program.

.> The utter absence of innate subjective potentialities in the computer makes the contemporary art exhibition shown here (top), in all its pervasive blankness and artful nullity, and ideal representation of its missing dimensions. Those who are so fascinated by the computer’s lifelike feats---it plays chess! it writes ‘poetry’!---that they would turn it[AISalami] into the voice of omniscience, betray how little understanding they have of either themselves, their mechanical-electronic agents, or the potentialities of life. A city of even three hundred thousand people, ten per cent of whom have access to regional or national libraries with as few as a million volumes, would actually have a total capacity for storing, transforming, integrating, and not least applying both symbolic information and concrete experience that no computer will ever rival.

> .. the absurdity of using the machine to explain the autonomous processes of organization and growth and reproduction comes out.. in the story #FrankOConnor tells of his mother’s effort to explain to him.. how babies are conceived, without going into embarrassing.. intimacies “mummies had an engine in their tummies and daddies had a starting handle that made it work, and once it started it went on until it made a baby.”.. [A] "natural,’.. mechanical.. ‘objective’ [explanation].
#LewisMumford

> ... [If] we now overvalue the machine, is it not because the mechanistic doctrine which has made us competent to design machines and control them also promises to give the scientist an equal hold over the living organisms he unfeelingly identifies with machines? In a world of machines, or of creatures that can be reduced to machines, technocrats would indeed be gods.
#LewisMumford in #MythOfTheMachine: #PentagonOfPower on #AI #ChatBot #ChatGPT #OverClaims and hype, but in 1970: same pattern

> ... [If after] four centuries.. we now overvalue the machine, is it not because the mechanistic doctrine which has made us competent to design machines and control them also promises to give the scientist an equal hold over the living organisms he unfeelingly identifies with machines? In a world of machines, or of creatures that can be reduced to machines, #technocrats would.. be gods. --- #LewisMumford, #MythOfTheMachine: #PentagonOfPower. p 72
1970 #Mumford on #Tech #RichGuy #AIHype

On p. 179
> .. the unity it[paideia] seeks must be sought in experience, and it demands a readiness to interchange roles, even at the sacrifice of expertness, for the sake of the greater gain to learning and life. #LewisMumford #TransformationsOfMan

got me thinking of #Laetitia@Work

> Learning something new means you can’t be productive. Conversely, if you’re productive, it’s because you’re not learning anything new. ^1 #Vitaud #LaëtitiaVitaud

^1 https://laetitiaatwork.substack.com/p/5-reasons-why-i-dont-want-to-be-productive

@fencoul
yes I've talked about that in reference to #LewisMumford & the distinction between democratic & authoritarian technics.... the same #technology but difference political context(s) - see post on Dec30th last year

Since finding the _Towards Liberal Education_ (1948-1962) collection I've been trying to read some of the writers of the most memorable essays. #LewisMumford is mentioned by Neil Postman and Nicolas Carr so I binged his work, some of the smaller books. I haven't really read the big #MythOfTheMachine books but reading that captions of the photos has been rewarding. It feels like he's talking about AI and Satellites: recent #TechExhibitionism. Compare #CharlesBlondin with #vonWeizsacker

Winona LaDuke's tone, chiding a little boy, in her open letter to Shopping-Car-Space-Guy (SNS-buyer) seems appropriate. An illustration and it's description, an astronaut as capsule-man, came to mind from Lewis Mumford's #MythOfTheMachine #PentagonOfPower(1971)

#Mumford #LewisMumford #MythOfTheMachine #PentagonOfPower #SpaceGuy #Astrounauts #ElonMusk

_Towards Liberal Education_, (TLA) a collection of writings, was in the library. It's calming to read it, usually, like Mathew Arnold on the influence of reading "the ancients." #TLA started in 1948. I write in books as I read so I ordered books on-line. I have 3 editions, all different that the library's 3rd ed. But that book ends with _The #BasisOfRenewal_ and got me into #LewisMumford, #TheConditionOfMan and this #TransformationsOfMan pp178-180, (#TransMan?) #Mumford #人間過去現在未来 p.206~ #人類変身歴

Den Vergleich mit dem Abnehmen, den @SheDrivesMobility gerade bei #AnneWill gebracht hat, ist übrigens eine Abwandlung eines Zitats, welches #LewisMumford bereits in den 1950er Jahren formuliert hat.

“Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity”

Den Vergleich mit dem Abnehmen, den @SheDrivesMobility gerade bei #AnneWill gebracht hat, ist übrigens eine Abwandlung eines Zitats, welches #LewisMumford bereits in den 1950er Jahren formuliert hat.

“Building more roads to prevent congestion is like a fat man loosening his belt to prevent obesity”

The Clock!! as shown by Lewis Mumford in Technics and Civilization (1934) via Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves to Death (1984)

... with the invention of the clock, Eternity ceased to serve as the measure and focus of human events. And thus, though few would have imagined the connection, the inexorable ticking of the clock may have had more to do with the weakening of God’s supremacy than all the treatises produced by the philosophers of the Enlightenment; that is to say, the clock introduced a new form of conversation between man and God, in which God appears to have been the loser. Perhaps Moses should have included another Commandment: Thou shalt not make mechanical representations of time.
In Mumford’s great book Technics and Civilization, he shows how, beginning in the fourteenth century, the clock made us into time-keepers, and then time-savers, and now time-servers. In the process, we have learned irreverence toward the sun and the seasons, for in a world made up of seconds and minutes, the authority of nature is superseded.
“The clock,” Mumford has concluded, “is a piece of power machinery whose ‘product’ is seconds and minutes.” In manufacturing such a product, the clock has the effect of disassociating time from human events and thus nourishes the belief in an independent world of mathematically measurable sequences. Moment to moment, it turns out, is not God’s conception, or nature’s. It is man conversing with himself about and through a piece of machinery he created.

So I've been on #Mastodon for 2 months & have pretty much completely shifted my #socialmedia activity over to here (with the occasional tweet just to keep that a/c alive & the name/identity unavailable for re-use);

here, while I have still had some fraught exchanges, in the vast majority of cases these have been more civil & constructive... so thank you to everyone for making this a much better place & for continuing to build a more 'democratic technics' (see #LewisMumford post on 30 Dec)