By Eric Le Roy
El Conejito
I guess the frenzy is fading now, but (as usual, a day late and a dollar short) I would like to record a few belated thoughts on the recent Super Bowl in America. Not the game itself, mind you, which by all accounts was as boring as an argument between two dead people, but the Half Time Show, featuring an enterprising dude with … Read the rest
They’ll sell it to you as “wellness.”
Not the soft kind with yoga mats and playlists. The corporate kind: a sterile smile stapled to a spreadsheet, the kind of wellness where your nervous system becomes an underperforming asset and your burnout is a “capacity planning issue.” They won’t call it slavery, obviously. Slavery is a word with history. They’ll call it optimisation, which is slavery with a product manager and … Read the rest
Sometimes, late at night, when the city finally remembers that it is allowed to be quiet, I catch myself staring at the ceiling and thinking about the strange future we are building with our own hands. Not just faster phones, not just more clever recommendation engines that push us more cat videos and more outrage, but something else. Something like the Minds from Iain Banks’ Culture novels: artificial intelligences so … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
“The world is a comedy for those who think, and a tragedy for those who feel” – Horace Walpole
“Only the Lonely” was the signature song of a guy named Roy Orbison, a star in the early rock’ n’ roll era. Orbison died in 1988 of a heart attack at the age of 52. Songs are full of lonely guys; they were back … Read the rest
By Eric Le Roy
Content 18+ It strikes me increasingly as ironic that the same people who revel in the onslaught of technology, AI, and the advanced capabilities of genetic engineering are often the same ones who cling to the supposedly inviolable sanctity of the ‘human spirit’, and – even worse in my book – of human ‘dignity’. It’s as if ‘love will find a way’ or Batman … Read the rest
