World Without Mind: The Existential Threat of Big Tech
Author: Franklin Foer File Type: epub Franklin Foer reveals the existential threat posed by big tech, and in his brilliant polemic gives us the toolkit to fight their pervasive influence. Over the past few decades there has been a revolution in terms of who controls knowledge and information. This rapid change has imperiled the way we think. Without pausing to consider the cost, the world has rushed to embrace the products and services of four titanic corporations. We shop with Amazon socialize on Facebook turn to Apple for entertainment and rely on Google for information. These firms sell their efficiency and purport to make the world a better place, but what they have done instead is to enable an intoxicating level of daily convenience. As these companies have expanded, marketing themselves as champions of individuality and pluralism, their algorithms have pressed us into conformity and laid waste to privacy. They have produced an unstable and narrow culture of misinformation, and put us on a path to a world without private contemplation, autonomous thought, or solitary introspectiona world without mind. In order to restore our inner lives, we must avoid being coopted by these gigantic companies, and understand the ideas that underpin their success. Elegantly tracing the intellectual history of computer sciencefrom Descartes and the enlightenment to Alan Turing to Stuart Brand and the hippie origins of todays Silicon ValleyFoer exposes the dark underpinningsof our most idealistic dreams for technology. The corporate ambitions of Google, Facebook, Apple, and Amazon, he argues, are trampling longstanding liberal values, especially intellectual property and privacy. This is a nascent stage in the total automation and homogenization of social, political, and intellectual life.By reclaiming our private authority over how we intellectually engage with the world, we have the power to stem the tide. At stake is nothing less than who we are, and what we will become. There have been monopolists in the past but todays corporate giants have far more nefarious aims. Theyre monopolists who want access to every facet of our identities and influence over every corner of our decision-making. Until now few have grasped the sheer scale of the threat. Foer explains not just the looming existential crisis but the imperative of resistance.
Author: Xia Shi
File Type: pdf
During the years spanning the late Qing dynasty and the early Republican era, the status of Chinese women changed in both subtle and decisive ways. As domestic seclusion ceased to be a sign of virtue, new opportunities emerged for professional, intellectual, and working women. Much scholarly attention has been given to the rise of the modern, independent new women during this period. However, far less is known about the stories of married nonprofessional women without modern educations and their public activities. In At Home in the World, Xia Shi unearths the history of how these women moved out of their sequestered domestic life engaged in charitable, philanthropic, and religious activities and repositioned themselves as effective public actors in urban Chinese society. Investigating the lives of individual women as well as organizations such as the YWCA and the Daoyuan, she shows how they built on the past rather than repudiating it, drawing on broader networks of family, marriage, and friendship and reconfiguring existing beliefs into essential components of modern Chinese gender roles. The book stresses the collective forms of agency these women exercised in their endeavors, highlighting the significance of charitable and philanthropic work as political, social, and civic engagement. Shi also analyzes how men span 11.0ptline-height107% Times,serifmso-fareast-Calibrimso-fareast-theme-font minor-latin#231F20backgroundwhitemso-ansi-languageEN-USmso-fareast-language EN-USmso-bidi-languageAR-SAspanalive, dead, or absent span 11.0ptline-height107% Times,serifmso-fareast-Calibrimso-fareast-theme-font minor-latin#231F20backgroundwhitemso-ansi-languageEN-USmso-fareast-language EN-USmso-bidi-languageAR-SAspan both empowered and constrained womens public ventures. She offers a new perspective on how the public, private, and domestic realms were being remade and rethought in early-twentieth-century China, in particular, how these women navigated these developing spheres. At Home in the World sheds new light on how women exerted their influence beyond the home and expands the field of Chinese womens history. **
Author: Alan D. Viard
File Type: epub
Alone among developed countries, the United States has no broad-based national consumption tax. Yet, economic analysis suggests that consumption taxation is superior to income taxation because it does not penalize saving and investment. The authors conclude that the U.S. income tax system should be completely replaced by a progressive consumption tax.The authors argue that the X tax, developed by the late David Bradford, offers the best form of progressive consumption taxation for the United States. To achieve progressively, the X tax modifies the value added tax by splitting its consumption tax base into two components, wages and business cash flow. The X tax applies graduated tax rates to households wages and applies a flat tax rate, equal to the highest wage tax rate, to business firms cash flows. The authors outline concrete proposals for the X taxs treatment of pensions and fringe benefits, business firms, financial intermediaries, international transactions, owner-occupied housing, state and local governments, the transition, and other issues. By adopting the X tax, the United States can preserve tax progressively while promoting economic growth through the removal of tax penalties on saving and investment.
Author: Grace Magnier
File Type: pdf
The Spanish Moriscos, Muslims forcibly converted to Christianity, were expelled by Philip III between 1609 and 1614. Subsequently, writers known as Catholic Apologists wrote justifying the event. Pedro de Valencia, humanist, biblical scholar, jurist and royal Chronicler, condemned expulsion. Both Apologists and Pedro de Valencia made their case by invoking Divine Providence the former contended that millenarian prophecies and apocalyptic visions were signs of divine warning beforehand and of approval afterwards Valencia urged Philip III to act as a shepherd king, arguing that Divine Providence would punish monarchs who put political expediency before moral rectitude. Drawing on unpublished source material, the book juxtaposes the ideals of Valencia, a Christian humanist, with the bigotry, superstition and racism of the Apologists.
Author: Michael Williams
File Type: pdf
div propertyIs bourgeois society essentially an aggregation of individual subjects, or rather some kind of self-determining structure? These papers cut through this question, which paralyses most social science, by arguing that the answer to it is neither and both. Emphasising the social forms in which the object of social science - the economy, society and the State - necessarily appear, they insist upon the relevance of a critical Marxism. **
Author: Kathleen Flenniken
File Type: pdf
She became famous, finally, to herself, Kathleen Flenniken writes. This is the kind of fame at the heart of most lives and at the center of Flennikens first collection, the winner of the Prairie Schooner Book Prize in Poetry. Here a little voice sings from the back of the auditorium of my throat. Arent all of us waiting to be discovered? The poets answer is sometimes grave, sometimes comic, but always tuned to the incidental music of daily life. **
Author: Alan Petersen
File Type: pdf
This book provides a unique and innovative perspective on the controversial phenomenon of stem cell tourism. A growing number of patients are embarking on stem cell treatments that are clinically unproven and yet available in clinics and hospitals around the world. The authors offer a cutting-edge multi-dimensional perspective on this complex and rapidly changing phenomenon, including an analysis of the experiences of those who have undertaken or have contemplated undertaking a stem cell treatment, as well as examination of the views of those who undertake research or advise on or provide stem cell treatments. Developing the concept of the political economy of hope, and referencing case studies of the stem cell treatment market in China, Germany, and Australia, this book argues for a reframing of stem cell tourism to understand why patients and families pursue these treatments and whether authorities concerns are justified and whether their responses are appropriate and proportionate to the alleged risks. **
Author: K. C. Chang
File Type: pdf
Leading scholar K. C. Chang challenges long-standing conceptions of the rise of political authority in ancient China. This strikingly illustrated book is a persuasive demonstration of the importance of an interdisciplinary approach to the study of early civilizations. **