Digital Nihilism

Digital Nihilism PDF Author: Ryan Night
Publisher:
ISBN: 9780999857519
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 62

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Book Description
Do you feel lost? Going through life without meaning or purpose? Slaving away at a desk job... for what? Yearning for an answer to life's biggest questions: why am I here? Where do I belong? What should I do? Digital Nihilism provides the answers for the dreariness of the modern age, and the consuming anomie that so many currently experience. ---------------------------------------------------------- In this book, the philosophies of various forms of nihilism (passive & active nihilism, optimistic nihilism, existentialism, absurdism) are introduced and tied together with man's quest for meaning. This is the book that describes and introduces what you need to know to join in the Digital Nihilism movement, which is spreading rapidly across the internet. You will be introduced to the concepts of Digital & Spiritual Nihilism, including layman introductions to nihilism (Nietzsche, Sartre, Camus), Jungian psychology (Jung, Campbell), various forms of spirituality (Kabbalah, Buddhism, Hinduism). You will learn about the goals of Digital & Spiritual Nihilism -- deep space exploration, radical self-expression, breaking reality, autonomy over time and freedom of access. You will learn about the metaphysics and quantum physics that describe the future Digital Nihilism hopes to achieve. Finally, you will learn about the symbols commonly used by those associated with the Digital Nihilism movement.

Sad by Design

Sad by Design PDF Author: Geert Lovink
Publisher: Digital Barricades
ISBN: 9780745339344
Category : Melancholy
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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Book Description
We live in a time of engineered intimacy, toxic memes and online addiction. Can we ever break free?

Nihilism

Nihilism PDF Author: Nolen Gertz
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 0262537176
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 226

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Book Description
An examination of the meaning of meaninglessness: why it matters that nothing matters. When someone is labeled a nihilist, it's not usually meant as a compliment. Most of us associate nihilism with destructiveness and violence. Nihilism means, literally, “an ideology of nothing. “ Is nihilism, then, believing in nothing? Or is it the belief that life is nothing? Or the belief that the beliefs we have amount to nothing? If we can learn to recognize the many varieties of nihilism, Nolen Gertz writes, then we can learn to distinguish what is meaningful from what is meaningless. In this addition to the MIT Press Essential Knowledge series, Gertz traces the history of nihilism in Western philosophy from Socrates through Hannah Arendt and Jean-Paul Sartre. Although the term “nihilism” was first used by Friedrich Jacobi to criticize the philosophy of Immanuel Kant, Gertz shows that the concept can illuminate the thinking of Socrates, Descartes, and others. It is Nietzsche, however, who is most associated with nihilism, and Gertz focuses on Nietzsche's thought. Gertz goes on to consider what is not nihilism—pessimism, cynicism, and apathy—and why; he explores theories of nihilism, including those associated with Existentialism and Postmodernism; he considers nihilism as a way of understanding aspects of everyday life, calling on Adorno, Arendt, Marx, and prestige television, among other sources; and he reflects on the future of nihilism. We need to understand nihilism not only from an individual perspective, Gertz tells us, but also from a political one.

Medical Nihilism

Medical Nihilism PDF Author: Jacob Stegenga
Publisher: Oxford University Press
ISBN: 0198747047
Category : Medical
Languages : en
Pages : 242

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Book Description
Medical nihilism is the view that we should have little confidence in the effectiveness of medical interventions. Jacob Stegenga argues persuasively that this is how we should see modern medicine, and suggests that medical research must be modified, clinical practice should be less aggressive, and regulatory standards should be enhanced.

The Sunny Nihilist

The Sunny Nihilist PDF Author: Wendy Syfret
Publisher: Souvenir Press
ISBN: 178283804X
Category : Self-Help
Languages : en
Pages : 151

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Book Description
'Mindful nihilism is all about seeing yourself as an insignificant cog in the universe - and it works' Evening Standard In an era defined by stress and selfishness, self-care, and obsessive individuality, emptiness can offer peace. A balm for the soul of burnt-out Millennials - disillusioned with the search for meaning through career success, a beautiful life and a beautiful Instagram account - The Sunny Nihilist explains why achievement has not made us happy. Looking anew at a philosophy usually associated with grumpy pessimists, writer Wendy Syfret examines our modern experience of work, love, religion and wider society, and asks whether a touch of upbeat nihilism could actually lighten our loads. Making the case for rejecting the cult of purpose and accepting our un-importance in the universe as a positive reality, The Sunny Nihilist urges us to be cheerful in the face of it - because if nothing matters, we might as well be happy and good to each other.

The Literature of Exclusion

The Literature of Exclusion PDF Author: Andrew C. Wenaus
Publisher: Rowman & Littlefield
ISBN: 1793614644
Category : Literary Criticism
Languages : en
Pages : 325

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Book Description
In the early twentieth century, the Dadaists protested against art, nationalism, the individual subject, and technologized war. With their automatic anti-art and cultural disruptiveness, Dadaists sought to “signify no thing.” Today, data also operates autonomously. However, rather than dismantling tradition, data organizes, selects, combines, quantifies, and simplifies the complexity of actuality. Like Dada, data also signifies nothing. While Dadaists protest with purpose, data proceeds without intention. The individual in the early twentieth century agonizes over the alienation from daily life and the fear of being converted into a cog in a machine. Today, however, the individual in twenty-first-century supermodernity merges, not with large industrial machinery, but with the processual and procedural logic of programming with innocuous ease. Both exclude human agency from self-narration but to differing degrees of abstraction. Examining the work of B.R. Yeager, Samuel Beckett, Jeff Noon, Kenji Siratori, Mike Bonsall, Allison Parrish, and narratives written by artificial intelligence, Wenaus considers the threshold of sensible narration and the effects that the shift from a culture of language to a culture of digital code has on lived experience. While data offers a closed system, Dadaist literature of exclusion, he suggests, promises a future of open, hyper-contingent, unprescribed alternatives for self-narration.

The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century

The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century PDF Author: Arvydas Grišinas
Publisher: Taylor & Francis
ISBN: 1040271758
Category : Social Science
Languages : en
Pages : 160

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Book Description
The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century explores the symbolic, experiential, and associative side of contemporary political culture, arguing that phenomena such as ‘post-truth’, digitalization, mediatization, propaganda, illiberalism, or populism, far from being curiosities, have in fact come to represent a uniform aspect of political culture – a challenge to the ‘enlightened’, ‘developed’, and ‘progressive’ world that we believed ourselves to be inhabiting. Through analyses of visual and textual material such as internet memes, academic discourse, news articles, videos, and other media, it considers truth-making in the epoch of Russia’s war in Ukraine, Donald Trump, the hyper-rationalist ritualism of managing the COVID-19 pandemic and the shifting realities on the Eastern border of the West, in order to shed light on the transfiguration of the western intellectual tradition by the global political, technological, and intellectual dynamics of a world that is far from approaching the end of history. Asking what is to be done in the face of this new reality, The Western Crisis of Truth in the Early 21st Century considers whether the dissident literature of Central and Eastern Europe, which has already lived through a period of disenlightenment under the Soviet Union, as well as other Eastern European movements of dignity and independence might offer answers. A study of the dimming of the Enlightenment, this volume will appeal to scholars of social and political theory and political anthropology.

The Stack

The Stack PDF Author: Benjamin H. Bratton
Publisher: MIT Press
ISBN: 026202957X
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 523

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Book Description
A comprehensive political and design theory of planetary-scale computation proposing that The Stack—an accidental megastructure—is both a technological apparatus and a model for a new geopolitical architecture. What has planetary-scale computation done to our geopolitical realities? It takes different forms at different scales—from energy and mineral sourcing and subterranean cloud infrastructure to urban software and massive universal addressing systems; from interfaces drawn by the augmentation of the hand and eye to users identified by self—quantification and the arrival of legions of sensors, algorithms, and robots. Together, how do these distort and deform modern political geographies and produce new territories in their own image? In The Stack, Benjamin Bratton proposes that these different genres of computation—smart grids, cloud platforms, mobile apps, smart cities, the Internet of Things, automation—can be seen not as so many species evolving on their own, but as forming a coherent whole: an accidental megastructure called The Stack that is both a computational apparatus and a new governing architecture. We are inside The Stack and it is inside of us. In an account that is both theoretical and technical, drawing on political philosophy, architectural theory, and software studies, Bratton explores six layers of The Stack: Earth, Cloud, City, Address, Interface, User. Each is mapped on its own terms and understood as a component within the larger whole built from hard and soft systems intermingling—not only computational forms but also social, human, and physical forces. This model, informed by the logic of the multilayered structure of protocol “stacks,” in which network technologies operate within a modular and vertical order, offers a comprehensive image of our emerging infrastructure and a platform for its ongoing reinvention. The Stack is an interdisciplinary design brief for a new geopolitics that works with and for planetary-scale computation. Interweaving the continental, urban, and perceptual scales, it shows how we can better build, dwell within, communicate with, and govern our worlds. thestack.org

On Extinction

On Extinction PDF Author: Ben Ware
Publisher: Verso Books
ISBN: 1839760672
Category : Philosophy
Languages : en
Pages : 185

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Book Description
On Extinction takes us on a breathtaking philosophical journey through desperate territory. As we face 'the end of all things', Ben Ware argues we must face our apocalyptic future without flinching. In fact, extinction is the very lens through which we should examine our current reality. Radical politics today should not be concerned with merely averting the worst but rather with beginning again at the end. To think about the future in this way is itself a form of liberation that might incubate the necessary radical solutions we need. Combining lessons from Kant, Hegel, Adorno, and Lacan, as well as drawing on popular culture and ecology, Ware recasts the most urgent issue of our times and resolves that we can only consider our collective end by treating it as a starting point.

Born of Resistance

Born of Resistance PDF Author: Scott L. Baugh
Publisher: University of Arizona Press
ISBN: 0816532222
Category : Art
Languages : en
Pages : 353

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Book Description
This collection of essays interrogates the most contested social, political, and aesthetic concept in Chicana/o cultural studies—resistance. If Chicana/o culture was born of resistance amid assimilation and nationalistic forces, how has it evolved into the twenty-first century? This groundbreaking volume redresses the central idea of resistance in Chicana/o visual cultural expression through nine clustered discussions, each coordinating scholarly, critical, curatorial, and historical contextualizations alongside artist statements and interviews. Landmark artistic works—illustrations, paintings, sculpture, photography, film, and television—anchor each section. Contributors include David Avalos, Mel Casas, Ester Hernández, Nicholas Herrera, Luis Jiménez, Ellen Landis, Yolanda López, Richard Lou, Delilah Montoya, Laura Pérez, Lourdes Portillo, Luis Tapia, Chuy Treviño, Willie Varela, Kathy Vargas, René Yañez, Yvonne Yarbro-Bejarano, and more. Cara a cara, face-to-face, encounters across the collection reveal the varied richness of resistant strategies, movidas, as they position crucial terms of debate surrounding resistance, including subversion, oppression, affirmation, and identification. The essays in the collection represent a wide array of perspectives on Chicana/o visual culture. Editors Scott L. Baugh and Víctor A. Sorell have curated a dialog among the many voices, creating an important new volume that redefines the role of resistance in Chicana/o visual arts and cultural expression.