#modernity — Public Fediverse posts

“Planetary salutogenesis proposes that planetary health is the fundamental condition out of which durable human health emerges.
#Holistic #health #relationality #intersectionality #coherence #kinship #community #modernity.
https://www.noemamag.com/cultivating-well-being-on-a-damaged-earth

“Planetary salutogenesis proposes that planetary health is the fundamental condition out of which durable human health emerges.
#Holistic #health #relationality #intersectionality #coherence #kinship #community #modernity.
https://www.noemamag.com/cultivating-well-being-on-a-damaged-earth

“Planetary salutogenesis proposes that planetary health is the fundamental condition out of which durable human health emerges.
#Holistic #health #relationality #intersectionality #coherence #kinship #community #modernity.
https://www.noemamag.com/cultivating-well-being-on-a-damaged-earth

“Planetary salutogenesis proposes that planetary health is the fundamental condition out of which durable human health emerges.
#Holistic #health #relationality #intersectionality #coherence #kinship #community #modernity.
https://www.noemamag.com/cultivating-well-being-on-a-damaged-earth

“Planetary salutogenesis proposes that planetary health is the fundamental condition out of which durable human health emerges.
#Holistic #health #relationality #intersectionality #coherence #kinship #community #modernity.
https://www.noemamag.com/cultivating-well-being-on-a-damaged-earth

Reject modernity, embrace postironic PCM

https://piefed.social/c/politicalcompassmemes/p/2043980/reject-modernity-embrace-postironic-pcm

" ... More importantly, [equating #capitalism with #modernity - "the organization of #society around #technology, formal #institutions, and rational criteria"] means that 99% of the #policy #proposals #activists put on the table to correct the problems of “capitalism” are doomed to fail because they do not understand where the #root #cause of the phenomena they complain about lies."

https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/04/capitalism-and-modernity.html

Francis remains troublingly himself — a married father of a small child, reluctant to leave his family, however much he is in love with Clara: “He did love her, and he did want to be with her. … But he already had reality elsewhere, reality which he sometimes felt trapped by, he would admit, but which he could not truly imagine cutting loose.”
#adultery #relationships #lust #sin #morals #ethics #marriage #bookreview #fiction #culture #modernity #decisionmaking
https://www.nytimes.com/2026/04/21/books/review/permanence-sophie-mackintosh.html

Make Korra Great Again: My Journey Through Ethnography, Deconstruction, and Redemption

https://heiansenlin.wordpress.com/2026/04/26/make-korra-great-again-my-journey-through-ethnography-deconstruction-and-redemption/

A Trip to the Moon

History, Artemis, and Humanity’s Space Junk

There is something almost innocent, at first glance, about Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon. The painted sets, the theatrical gestures, the famous image of the capsule lodged in the eye of the moon — all of it feels whimsical, handmade, full of wonder. It bears the marks of ingenuity in their freshest form. Cinema is still young. Imagination is learning what machinery can do. Human beings are discovering that they can build not only devices, but dreams.

And yet, to watch the film closely is to feel a disturbance beneath the delight.

The voyage is not simply a journey. It is an invasion. The moon is not approached with humility or reverence, but penetrated, subdued, and turned into a stage for conquest. The lunar beings are encountered not as neighbors in wonder but as hostile “natives,” there to be struck, shattered, and overcome. The travelers return not merely with experience, but with a captive and a triumphal procession. What looks at first like fantasy reveals itself as a little parable of empire.

That is why the film still matters. It is not only an early science-fiction spectacle. It is an early warning.

Read the full essay at PeaceGrooves.

A Trip to the Moon

History, Artemis, and Humanity’s Space Junk

There is something almost innocent, at first glance, about Georges Méliès’s A Trip to the Moon. The painted sets, the theatrical gestures, the famous image of the capsule lodged in the eye of the moon — all of it feels whimsical, handmade, full of wonder. It bears the marks of ingenuity in their freshest form. Cinema is still young. Imagination is learning what machinery can do. Human beings are discovering that they can build not only devices, but dreams.

And yet, to watch the film closely is to feel a disturbance beneath the delight.

The voyage is not simply a journey. It is an invasion. The moon is not approached with humility or reverence, but penetrated, subdued, and turned into a stage for conquest. The lunar beings are encountered not as neighbors in wonder but as hostile “natives,” there to be struck, shattered, and overcome. The travelers return not merely with experience, but with a captive and a triumphal procession. What looks at first like fantasy reveals itself as a little parable of empire.

That is why the film still matters. It is not only an early science-fiction spectacle. It is an early warning.

Read the full essay at PeaceGrooves.

At this time of year, our solar panels produce more energy each day, as the sun moves more directly overhead. We just got our first check from the electric company! #solar #solarpower #solarpanel #solarpanels #solarenergy #cleanenergy #electricenergy #energy #producingenergy #roof #rooftop #modernhome #modernity #future #futuristic #sun #sunworship #sunworshipper #sunny #sunnydays #axialtilt #axialtiltoftheearth #spring #springtime #changingseasons

Capitalism’s defenders like to boast that it rewards talent. What capitalism actually rewards is saleability, compliance, stamina, inheritance, and the ability to endure long periods of spiritual self-betrayal without becoming visibly troublesome.

https://philosophics.blog/2026/03/08/capitalism-doesnt-merely-exploit-labour/?utm_source=masto

#philosophy #capitalism #labour #art #employment #artists #culture #Kafka #modernity, #exploitation #creativity #patronage #work #society #politics #enlightenment #civilisation #potential #opportunitycosts #parasites #blog

welcome to your 15 minute city https://snuggleduck.com/welcome-to-your-15-minute-city/ #worldeconomicforum #Modernity

In part 9 of 13 discussions with Claude about the parables of the two valleys, the topic is David Graeber (and Wenrow's) evolution of domination.
👉https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/28/comrade-claude-9-david-graeber/?utm_source=masto
As usual, with a touch of Foucault.
#philosophy #blog #podcast #graeber #critique #power # ##subjugation #contracts #Locke #modernity #freedom #control

In part 9 of 13 discussions with Claude about the parables of the two valleys, the topic is David Graeber (and Wenrow's) evolution of domination.
👉https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/28/comrade-claude-9-david-graeber/?utm_source=masto
As usual, with a touch of Foucault.
#philosophy #blog #podcast #graeber #critique #power # ##subjugation #contracts #Locke #modernity #freedom #control

In part 9 of 13 discussions with Claude about the parables of the two valleys, the topic is David Graeber (and Wenrow's) evolution of domination.
👉https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/28/comrade-claude-9-david-graeber/?utm_source=masto
As usual, with a touch of Foucault.
#philosophy #blog #podcast #graeber #critique #power # ##subjugation #contracts #Locke #modernity #freedom #control

In part 9 of 13 discussions with Claude about the parables of the two valleys, the topic is David Graeber (and Wenrow's) evolution of domination.
👉https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/28/comrade-claude-9-david-graeber/?utm_source=masto
As usual, with a touch of Foucault.
#philosophy #blog #podcast #graeber #critique #power # ##subjugation #contracts #Locke #modernity #freedom #control

In part 9 of 13 discussions with Claude about the parables of the two valleys, the topic is David Graeber (and Wenrow's) evolution of domination.
👉https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/28/comrade-claude-9-david-graeber/?utm_source=masto
As usual, with a touch of Foucault.
#philosophy #blog #podcast #graeber #critique #power # ##subjugation #contracts #Locke #modernity #freedom #control

Using the parables of the valley, I look at extraction by proximity.

🌵https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/03/assessment-how-cohabitation-becomes-extraction/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

I look at how a Modernist lens creates exploitation of neighbours in a critical experiment with Claude AI, with summary detail by NotebookLM.

#philosophy #economics #extraction #modernity #critique #cohabitation #justice #contracts #laws #morality #ontology #progress #predation #dilemma #markets #ideology #inventory #integration #exchange #liberalism #opportunity #constraints #blog #podcast

welcome to your 15 minute city https://snuggleduck.com/welcome-to-your-15-minute-city/ #worldeconomicforum #Modernity

Part 2 of a triptych modern parable on a divided culture no longer divided by geography.

⛰️ https://philosophics.blog/2026/02/02/the-tunnel-or-how-modernity-solves-precisely-nothing/?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social

#philosophy #culture #modernity #Enlightenment #property #markets #economics #blog #podcast #parable #humancondition #surplus #abundancy #scarcity #critique #reason #writing

* The White Nationalist Agenda, the "missing white voter" and hate mongering
https://www.abc.net.au/news/2026-02-01/stephen-miller-donald-trumps-immigration-policy-architect/106272938

* "Jean Guerrero, Hate Monger, a book that investigated the making of Miller. Miller has been seen as a link between the white nationalist agenda and the Trump White House."
https://www.npr.org/2020/08/24/905403716/hatemonger-paints-trump-advisor-stephen-miller-as-a-case-study-in-radicalization

* The Apparatus of Whiteness, Linda Martín Alcoff »Cultural Racism« (2/3) Adorno Lecture >>
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RhUu9nCzxvs
#hate #immigration #WhiteRage #Whiteness #settlersociety #EthnoNationalism #TheWest #modernity #whitesupremacists #CulturalRacism #EthnoEssentialism #SocialCohesion #SocialFabric

Response to the alien: Corporeal experience between selfhood and otherness

"The topographical enquiries that Waldenfels presents assume that the Other not only has its own times, but its own locations as well."

A Topography of the Other, Studies for a Phenomenology of the Other 1, Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/bernhard-waldenfels-a-topography-of-the-other-fr-9783518289204

Phenomenology of the Alien, Basic Concepts, by Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810127579/phenomenology-of-the-alien/
#interculturality #otherness #modernity #violence #experience #IntersubjectiveNormatively #alien #monolingualism #nationalism #foreigners #EthnoNationalism #phenomenology #EpistemicInjustice #dehumanisation #book

Response to the alien: Corporeal experience between selfhood and otherness

"The topographical enquiries that Waldenfels presents assume that the Other not only has its own times, but its own locations as well."

A Topography of the Other, Studies for a Phenomenology of the Other 1, Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/bernhard-waldenfels-a-topography-of-the-other-fr-9783518289204

Phenomenology of the Alien, Basic Concepts, by Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810127579/phenomenology-of-the-alien/
#interculturality #otherness #modernity #violence #experience #IntersubjectiveNormatively #alien #monolingualism #nationalism #foreigners #EthnoNationalism #phenomenology #EpistemicInjustice #dehumanisation #book

Response to the alien: Corporeal experience between selfhood and otherness

"The topographical enquiries that Waldenfels presents assume that the Other not only has its own times, but its own locations as well."

A Topography of the Other, Studies for a Phenomenology of the Other 1, Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/bernhard-waldenfels-a-topography-of-the-other-fr-9783518289204

Phenomenology of the Alien, Basic Concepts, by Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810127579/phenomenology-of-the-alien/
#interculturality #otherness #modernity #violence #experience #IntersubjectiveNormatively #alien #monolingualism #nationalism #foreigners #EthnoNationalism #phenomenology #EpistemicInjustice #dehumanisation #book

Response to the alien: Corporeal experience between selfhood and otherness

"The topographical enquiries that Waldenfels presents assume that the Other not only has its own times, but its own locations as well."

A Topography of the Other, Studies for a Phenomenology of the Other 1, Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/bernhard-waldenfels-a-topography-of-the-other-fr-9783518289204

Phenomenology of the Alien, Basic Concepts, by Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810127579/phenomenology-of-the-alien/
#interculturality #otherness #modernity #violence #experience #IntersubjectiveNormatively #alien #monolingualism #nationalism #foreigners #EthnoNationalism #phenomenology #EpistemicInjustice #dehumanisation #book

Response to the alien: Corporeal experience between selfhood and otherness

"The topographical enquiries that Waldenfels presents assume that the Other not only has its own times, but its own locations as well."

A Topography of the Other, Studies for a Phenomenology of the Other 1, Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://www.suhrkamp.de/rights/book/bernhard-waldenfels-a-topography-of-the-other-fr-9783518289204

Phenomenology of the Alien, Basic Concepts, by Bernhard Waldenfels >>
https://nupress.northwestern.edu/9780810127579/phenomenology-of-the-alien/
#interculturality #otherness #modernity #violence #experience #IntersubjectiveNormatively #alien #monolingualism #nationalism #foreigners #EthnoNationalism #phenomenology #EpistemicInjustice #dehumanisation #book

The Kernel and the Ark

I. The Wall and the Infinite

It is possible that the history of the modern West hinges on a single, melancholic misreading of Voltaire. When Candide, exhausted by the Lisbon earthquake and the brutalities of the Seven Years’ War, finally withdraws to the banks of the Propontis to utter his famous dictum—“Il faut cultiver notre jardin”—he is not proposing a program of agricultural management. He is issuing a plea for containment. To cultivate a garden, in the shadow of such overwhelming chaos, is an act of stoic resignation. It is an admission that the world is too vast, too violent, and too unintelligible to be governed by reason. One builds a wall against the infinite, and within that limited circumference, one tends to the soil. The garden is a refuge from nature.

Yet, as the industrial century unfolded, this sentiment underwent a strange inversion. The humility of the retreat was lost, replaced by a technocratic ambition that saw the wall not as a limit, but as a prototype. The imperative shifted: it was no longer enough to carve out a sanctuary from the planetary wild; the logic of the garden was to be extended until it covered the earth entirely. The garden ceased to be a refuge and became a replacement.

We might trace the genealogy of this hubris—the architectural drift from the bounded plot to the total interior. It is a lineage that moves from the Victorian parlor terrarium to the Amazonian plantation, and finally to the hermetically sealed domes of the American desert. It suggests that the dominant form of the Anthropocene is not the city or the factory, but the Greenhouse: a glass ark designed to optimize life by severing it from its context.

Against this transparent, frictionless interior, a different topology emerges. It is not the pristine wilderness, which is a romantic fiction, but something denser, more obscure, and paradoxically more vital. It resembles the “thicket”—a space of entanglement and opacity where the metabolic resistance to simplification can still be found. To understand why the thicket has become a necessary philosophical posture, one must first walk the perimeter of the glass house we have built around ourselves.

II. The Portable Climate

Control, it seems, begins with isolation. Before a system can be optimized, it must be severed from the noise of its environment. In the history of botany, this severance was achieved not by a grand theorist, but by a London surgeon named Nathaniel Bagshaw Ward, who, in 1829, found himself frustrated by the industrial smog of Whitechapel.

Ward’s ferns were dying, choked by the soot of the coal age. His discovery was accidental: while observing a sphinx moth pupa buried in a sealed glass jar containing damp soil, he noticed a quiet miracle. The fern spores within the soil had sprouted. Moisture evaporated from the earth, condensed on the cold glass, and wept back down in a closed hydrological loop. The fern thrived, suspended in a permanent, self-sufficient spring, protected from the London fog by a skin of glass.

This device, the Wardian Case, appears initially as a trivial curiosity of the Victorian parlor. Yet it functioned as the first space capsule. Before the glass case, the botanical world was defined by the tyranny of the local. Plants were bound to their terroir; they could not easily cross the climatic abyss of the oceans without perishing from salt spray or temperature shock. Nature was situated. The Wardian case smashed this locality. It created a portable micro-climate, a fragment of the English garden that could survive the equator, or a slice of the tropics that could endure the North Sea.

The British Empire, always attuned to the logistics of extraction, immediately recognized the power of this portable interior. The case allowed biological life to be stripped of its ecological web and transported as pure genetic capital. In 1848, Robert Fortune utilized these glass arks to smuggle twenty thousand tea plants from Shanghai to the Himalayas, breaking the Chinese monopoly and inaugurating the Indian tea industry. Decades later, Henry Wickham would carry Hevea brasiliensis seeds from Brazil to Kew Gardens, and thence to Malaya, an act of biological relocation that would collapse the Amazonian rubber boom and fuel the coming automobile age.

There is a profound shift in ontology here. The plant inside the case is no longer an organism in conversation with its environment; it has become a “generic input,” severed from the specificities of wind, soil, and insect life. This marks the onset of a biological imperialism where the “garden” is no longer a place one visits, but a box one ships. It represents the victory of the grid over the ocean, the smooth logistics of empire over the rough friction of the earth.

And yet, the closure was never complete. The soil inside those cases carried more than the intended crop; it held what historians call “portmanteau biota”—ants, fungi, earthworms, and weeds. The empire believed it was moving tea, but it was also moving the feral. The “crazy ant” (Paratrechina longicornis) hitched a ride in these portable interiors, beginning a global insurgency that persists to this day. The glass ark, designed to exclude the chaotic outside, had already smuggled the chaos within.

III. The Geometry of the Plantation

If the Wardian case was the molecular unit of this logic, the early twentieth century saw its expansion into a totalizing landscape. The ambition was no longer merely to transport plants, but to rationalize the very environment in which they grew—to smooth out the “thicket” of the world into a legible, productive surface. This is the logic of what Timothy Morton has termed agrilogistics: the ancient program to eliminate contradiction and enforce a monoculture of presence.

The apotheosis of this drive is found in Fordlandia. In 1928, Henry Ford, seeking to break the British rubber monopoly, purchased 2.5 million acres of the Amazon rainforest. He did not see a complex, metabolic web; he saw a disorder to be rectified. He attempted to overlay the industrial grid of Detroit onto the biological density of Brazil.

Fordlandia was less a farm than a moral project. Ford, who despised the “messiness” of history and the disorderly lives of his workforce, sought a clean slate. His engineers cleared the jungle—a thicket of unimaginable complexity—and planted rubber trees in tight, geometric rows. They imposed the discipline of the factory clock, the nutritional regime of oatmeal, and the social ritual of square dancing upon indigenous workers. The land was treated as a terraformed plain, the rubber tree as a standardized cog that would function identically regardless of its context.

But Hevea has a specific terroir. In the wild, rubber trees space themselves out, a natural distancing that serves as an immune system against the South American Leaf Blight (Microcyclus ulei). The distance is the friction that stops the pathogen. By collapsing this distance, by planting the trees in the smooth, efficient rows of the industrial grid, Ford created a banquet for the fungus.

The thicket struck back. The blight moved effortlessly along the vectors of the plantation. The friction of biodiversity had been removed, leaving the path clear for the pathogen. Ford poured capital into pesticides, but the “liveness” of the fungus—its capacity to metabolize the static monoculture—was superior to the dead geometry of the plan.

Fordlandia stands as a parable of the “average.” It illustrates the failure of scaling. One cannot scale terroir without stripping it of its defenses. When a “kernel”—a specific life in a specific context—is treated as a “cog,” it becomes a zombie system: structurally fragile, waiting for the first shock to induce collapse. The attempt to average out the Amazon failed because liveness is inherently non-scalable; it relies on the very friction that the grid seeks to eliminate.

IV. The World Interior of Capital

The failure of the plantation did not arrest the desire for enclosure; it merely drove it indoors. In the post-war era, facing the twin specters of nuclear annihilation and ecological exhaustion, the West embraced the metaphor of “Spaceship Earth.” Popularized by Buckminster Fuller, this concept reimagined the planet not as a mother, but as a vehicle—a mechanical artifact with finite resources, an operating manual, and a need for a pilot.

Fuller’s architectural response was the geodesic dome. He envisioned domes spanning midtown Manhattan to regulate the weather, and “Cloud Nine” spheres floating in the sky, severing humanity entirely from the earth’s crust. This marks the transition to what Peter Sloterdijk calls the “World Interior of Capital.” We ceased to live on the earth and began to live inside a climate-controlled sphere. The shopping mall, the office tower, the sealed automobile—these are foams, interconnected bubbles of immunity where the atmosphere is conditioned and the outside is held at bay.

This logic reached its terminal velocity in 1991 with Biosphere 2. A literal attempt to build a total garden, it was a hermetically sealed glass box in the Arizona desert, containing a miniature rainforest, an ocean, and a desert, along with eight humans. It was designed to prove the viability of a “closed loop” system, a portable world for the colonization of Mars.

Its failure was instructive. The oxygen levels inside the dome plummeted, not because of a mechanical leak, but because the concrete structure itself began to absorb carbon dioxide, starving the plants. The dead matter of the architecture was eating the air. Simultaneously, the “noble” species—hummingbirds and bees—perished, while the feral species exploded. The same crazy ants that had traveled in the Wardian cases overran the facility. Cockroaches multiplied. Morning glory vines choked the curated rainforest.

The human element fared no better. The “crew,” trapped in the smooth proximity of the enclosure, devolved into factionalism. The psychological friction of a world without an “outside” proved unbearable. Biosphere 2 demonstrated that smoothness is chemically and socially unstable. The total interior is a death trap because it lacks the metabolic capacity of the outside. By attempting to eliminate the “weed,” the designers destroyed the immune system of the whole. The ants won because they were the only inhabitants adapted to the high-friction reality of the thicket.

V. The Monoculture of the Sky

We arrive, finally, at the present moment, where the ambition of enclosure has ascended to the stratosphere. Having failed to contain the world in a box, the technocratic impulse has turned to the project of turning the world itself into the box.

This is the logic underpinning geoengineering and Solar Radiation Management. Proposals to inject sulfate aerosols into the upper atmosphere to deflect sunlight represent the ultimate Wardian case. They treat the atmosphere not as a chaotic, sublime force, but as a glazing—a roof whose opacity can be adjusted like a dimmer switch. The planet becomes a single, managed interior.

The risks of such a project—”termination shock,” where a cessation of spraying unleashes accumulated heat in a sudden, lethal wave—are well documented. But the philosophical implication is perhaps even more chilling. As John von Neumann warned decades ago, weather control merges the affairs of every nation. It eliminates the “outside” entirely. There is no longer British weather or Brazilian weather; there is only The System.

This is the realization of the terraformed plain. It is a world where the “dark forest” has been illuminated and managed, where the sun itself is converted into a utility, and where the planet becomes a monoculture of the sky.

VI. The Strategy of the Briar Patch

If the trajectory of modernity is the construction of a fragile, optimized glass ark, where does one find a footing? We cannot return to Voltaire’s garden; the walls are too brittle to hold back the flood. Nor can we resign ourselves to the suffocating interior of Fuller’s dome.

The alternative lies in the texture of the thicket.

In the folklore of the American South, there is the story of Br’er Rabbit and the Briar Patch. When captured by the Fox, the Rabbit pleads, “Don’t throw me in the briar patch!” The Fox, operating on the logic of the predator who prefers the open field, views the briar patch as a torture device—thorny, messy, illegible. He throws the Rabbit in, expecting him to be shredded. But the Rabbit was born in the briar patch. The thorns that cut the Fox are the Rabbit’s defense system.

The modern Fox is the algorithm, the market, the scraper seeking legible data. It desires smoothness. The briar patch represents the local context, the dense history, the “terroir” that resists easy summarization. The thicket is not a retreat into nature, but a strategic niche. It suggests that to survive the simplifying gaze of the machine, one must become “high-friction.”

This requires a redefinition of “liveness.” Liveness is not mere novelty; it is metabolic capacity. The glass ark is a zombie system—a closed loop where inputs equal outputs, preserving form but preventing transformation. The thicket, by contrast, is a fermenter. It takes generic energy—shocks, news, pain—and metabolizes it through a specific kernel to produce something singular.

We see this in the difference between a product and a practice. If one moves a global franchise from Seattle to Singapore, it functions perfectly because it is dead; it is a product, severed from place. If one attempts to move a philosophy like Fichte’s from the salons of Jena to a corporate boardroom, it withers. It requires the nutrient density of its specific scene to survive. It is alive because it is entangled.

Gilles Clément, the French gardener, offers a vocabulary for this posture. He speaks of the “Planetary Garden” not as a machine to be controlled, but as a “Garden in Motion.” He directs our attention to the “Third Landscape”—the roadside verges, the abandoned lots, the scrublands. These are the thickets. They are the reservoirs of genetic diversity where the unscripted life, banished from the monoculture, continues to evolve.

VII. A Gesture Toward the Weed

The history of the West has been a long war against the weed. We built glass cases to distinguish the valuable specimen from the unwanted intruder. We cleared the Amazon to impose the average. We networked the globe to smooth out the friction of distance.

Yet the weed—the superweed that drinks poison and thrives—remains the victor. The thicket is the inevitable return of complexity to a system that tries to simplify it.

The task, then, is not to build a better glass house, but to learn the habits of the briar patch. It is a call to abandon the pursuit of the fragile, legible career or identity—the “glass ark” of the self—and to cultivate a life of density and opacity. To be a fermenter rather than a node. To seek resonance rather than scale.

In a world that seeks to turn every subject into a cog within a planetary spaceship, the most radical act is to become an un-weedingable root—a kernel of such high-dimensional specificity that the algorithm chokes trying to digest it. We should not simply cultivate our garden. We should allow the fence to rot, and watch what grows in the clearing.

#Agrologistics #AI #AlgorithmicResistance #Anthropocene #ArchitectureTheory #Art #artificialIntelligence #Biosphere2 #BuckminsterFuller #Business #ClimatePhilosophy #ComplexityTheory #DeepEcology #DesignFiction #DigitalResistance #EcologicalGrief #Enclosure #EnvironmentalHistory #Fordlandia #futureOfWork #Garden #Geoengineering #GillesClément #Leadership #Liveness #MetabolicRift #Metabolism #Modernity #Permaculture #PeterSloterdijk #philosophy #PhilosophyOfNature #PostIndustrialism #Rewilding #SpaceshipEarth #systemsThinking #Technocracy #Terroir #TheAnthropocene #TheGarden #TheKernel #TheThicket #TheWorldInterior #ThirdLandscape #VictorianBotany #WardianCase #WorldInterior #writing

“ #Yeats was a strange #modernist: an #anti-modern man nevertheless too intellectual, honest, and rigorous to deny the necessity of coming to some terms with #modernity” daily.jstor.org/yeats-and-th...

Yeats and the Occult Imaginati...

"Manufactured risks are the product of human activity." Ulrich Beck

" A "risk society"
is a sociological concept describing a stage of modernity where society is increasingly defined by and organized around managing the hazards and insecurities it has produced itself through modernization and industrialization.

Self-produced risks: The primary source of risk is not nature, but human actions and the unintended consequences of modernization itself.

Individualization: Individuals are increasingly forced to confront these risks personally, with a greater emphasis on individual choice and responsibility in the face of larger, systemic problems

Ulrich Beck defines it as "a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself". "
>>
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Risk_society

" The Study of Existential Risk
frames the rises and falls of civilisation around the idea of the “Goliath”, a hierarchy that dominates labour and energy through coercion and violence."

"Our research shows how there are nascent attempts to embed citizens into decision making by re-plumbing democracy, flattening hierarchies and constructing more dynamic feedback loops that have real consequence."
>>
https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/commentisfree/2025/nov/26/climate-disasters-devastating-planet-collective-action-against-corporations
#risks #diy #FossilFuels #energy #extinctions #climate #PlanetaryBoundaries #SafeLimits #guardrails #pollution #waste #catastrophe #ExistentialRisk #ManufacturedRisks #uncertainty #insecurity #individualisation #modernity #crisis #austerity #democracy #indifference

How to avoid reading – and how to avoid finishing a book.
👉 https://philosophics.blog?utm_source=masto&utm_medium=social/2025/11/05/how-to-avoid-reading/
Whilst mired in adminstrivia, I happened upon The Intellectual Origins of Modernity – a favourite whipping boy (or girl, lest I come across as sexist).

I asked ChatGPT to parse it for me, and it told me – despite it is well structured and written – to skip it.

#books #reading #amwriting #technology #chatgpt #ai #critique #philosophy #history #modernity #society #origins Publishing #tenure #academia #blog

Alasdair MacIntyre’s After Virtue dismantles the Enlightenment scaffolding of modern moral discourse. Unfortunately, like Descartes before him, he tries to rebuild—first on God, now on Aristotle’s teleology. Different crutch, same collapse.

https://philosophics.blog/2025/09/17/je-pense-donc-jai-raison/

#Philosophy #Ethics #CriticalThinking #Modernity #Postmodernism #MoralPhilosophy #AfterVirtue #ThoughtLeadership #Books #AmReading #AmWriting

A quotation from George Bernard Shaw

FANNY: I don’t mind this play shocking my father morally. It’s good for him to be shocked morally. It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish playwright and critic
Fanny’s First Play, “Induction” (1911)

More info about this quote: wist.info/shaw-george-bernard/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #shaw #georgebernardshaw #age #change #currency #elderly #elders #maturity #modernity #morality #oldage #shocking #statusquo #updating #upsetting #youth

A quotation from Shaw

FANNY: I don’t mind this play shocking my father morally. It’s good for him to be shocked morally. It’s all that the young can do for the old, to shock them and keep them up to date.

George Bernard Shaw (1856-1950) Irish playwright and critic
Fanny’s First Play, “Induction” (1911)

More info about this quote: wist.info/shaw-george-bernard/…

#quote #quotes #quotation #qotd #shaw #georgebernardshaw #age #change #currency #maturity #modernity #morality #shocking #statusquo #updating #upsetting #youth #oldage #elderly

"The Zionist produces and defines itself through the animalization of the Palestinian."

"Palestinian liberation is an impossibility in the current ordering of knowledge and being, similarly demanding through its realization the end of […] this world, and modernity."

This paper "posits that Palestinian freedom necessitates the creation of new worlds and [the getting rid of encumbering] constructs such as modernity and the Human."

https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/ by Scott Campbell @susurros

@philosophy 🧶

#pessimism #epistemology #grievability #othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #PalestinianLivesMatter #Zionism #intellectualHistory #colonialism #genocide #ongoingNakba #brutalization #philosophy #europe #europeIsrael #coloniality #proZionism #StandWithIsrael #SylviaWynter #praxis #raceMaking #entanglement

"Freedom can be granted, but it remains a “legal fiction”. […] Rights cannot be bestowed upon those constructed as Slaves, non-Humans, or property, especially when such a status is the contingent basis of the worldview through which rights are given their coherence."
by Scott Campbell @susurros

“Peace, within an antiblack world, is a fallacy (much like freedom). The metaphysical infrastructure that supports the fiction of the white human is sustained by antiblack violence.”
by Calvin Warren, in Ontological Terror

(continued) 🧶

#othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #antiBlackness #slavery #BlackMastodon #AfroPessimism #beliefs #institutionsDeceive #justice #judicialBias #legality #legitimacy #IHL #internationalLaw #law #OPT #WestBank #JewishSupremacy #liberation #israelPalestine #raceMaking

"Palestinians despise the courts. We hate the sight of a judge, knowing all too well that they are no different from the interrogator. We loathe the law and all it stands for in our context—a tool for oppression cloaked in legality. Even the lawyers, perhaps universally disliked, evoke our mistrust. But for us, the courts represent more than frustration; they are the place where our oppressive conditions are translated into legal language, where the weight of colonial domination is formalized with a veneer of legitimacy."
by Abdaljawad Omar, in “The ICC warrants: Palestinian skepticism and the glimpse of justice,” 2024, https://mondoweiss.net/2024/11/the-icc-warrants-palestinian-skepticism-and-the-glimpse-of-justice/

cited in https://fallingintoincandescence.com/2025/05/18/afropessimism-and-palestinian-liberation-an-essay/

@palestine 🧶

#othering #modernity #whiteness #whiteFragility #whiteSupremacy #quotes #antiBlackness #slavery #BlackMastodon #AfroPessimism #beliefs #institutionsDeceive #justice #judicialBias #legality #legitimacy #IHL #internationalLaw #law #OPT #WestBank #JewishSupremacy #Mondoweiss

In Marronage Lies the Search of a World

by Malcom Ferdinand: https://read.dukeupress.edu/environmental-humanities/article/14/1/182/294316

#reservations #silenciation #responsibility #emancipation #religions #whiteness #coloniality #modernity #separation #ecology #environmentalism #natives #indigènes #autochtones #maroon #marronage #MalcomFerdinand #AndreasMalm #Malm #wilderness #nature #decolonial #GreenSpaces #Maroons #colonization #imaginaries #systemicRacism #lynching #BLM #BlackLivesMatter #BlackMastodon #plantation #plantationism #agroForestry #structuralRacism #decolonialRead #longRead #gardening #Antilles #Caribbean #environmentalJustice

The monotheistic religions made it normal to squash people: "I think there is something really special about the Bible [...] which is precisely this idea that the revelation of truth comes through the suffering of the weak." (Matthieu Poupart)

Then the Renaissance made it easier to blame the victim: With modernity, "it is the person who takes no initiative who is seen as responsible for the emergence of sexual promiscuity." (Matthieu Poupart)

#EstelleSays #longThread 🧶

#truth #revelation #believe #beliefs #empathy #feminism #quotes #blameTheVictim #maleSupremacy #manliness #patriarchy #misogyny #relationships #sociology #religion #catholic #christianity #jewishness #jewish #squash #flatten #crush #agressions #agressive #agressivity #supremacy #rapeCulture #brutalization #modernity #Renaissance #history #intellectualHistory #historyOfHumanThought #historyOfPhilosophy #normal #normality #heteronormativity #weak #weakness #incest #incestCulture

OnlineFirst - "Disavowing history" by Miranda Johnson:

#QuinnSlobodian #capitalism #modernity #historicism #decolonization

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X241285292

OnlineFirst - "Disavowing history" by Miranda Johnson:

#QuinnSlobodian #capitalism #modernity #historicism #decolonization

https://journals.sagepub.com/doi/full/10.1177/0308518X241285292

🗣 The call for papers for the workshop “Global Infrastructures: Aesthetic Power and Affective Networks in the (Post-)colonial Present” is open.

📌 We will be hosting the international workshop in Lisbon on 28 November.

ℹ️ https://ihc.fcsh.unl.pt/en/events/global-infrastructures-2024/

@histodons
@histodon

#Histodons #Infrastructures #Modernity #Aesthetics #CFP #Imperialism #ClimateChange #DigitalPlatforms #Infrastruturas #Modernidade #Estética #Imperialismo #AlteraçõesClimáticas #PlataformasDigitais

#oneabstractaday #justpublished

The diversity of #modernities that can be observed in our world is linked to the claim of living in a global #modernity, in a world society. The book underpins this claim with numerous excursions into Islamic history. It criticises the view that #modernisation can be equated with westernisation and considers different projects of specifically Islamic modernities as integral parts of world society.

From this perspective, the study contributes to the "provincialisation" of European history in contemporary social scientific thought. Contrary to the theories of #postcolonialism associated with the call for the provincialisation of Europe, however, this book adheres to essential traditions of classical sociology. It thus aims to make a contribution to the social theoretical discussion on modernity.

https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-658-39954-2

@islamicstudies @sociology #globalhistory #islamicstudies #sociology