The Modernity Machine III - by Venkatesh Rao - Contraptions

"This the third and concluding part of my series with notes on the learnings from the 2025 Contraptions book club. Part I and Part II traced the construction of the Modernity Machine between roughly 1200 and 1600: a civilization-scale contraption that converted medieval heterogeneity into legible, interoperable order. By 1600, the machine was complete in all essential respects. This concluding part addresses what such completion actually meant, what the machine optimized for once built, the contradictions it necessarily produced, and why those contradictions could not be repaired from within."

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Manufacturing and Manufacturing Jobs Matter. Policy Can Help Get and Retain Them

"It is high time to debunk the myths used to disparage the value of growing American manufacturing output, creating American manufacturing jobs, and holding onto what we still have. But before we can address these myths, three things must be understood:"

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Symbiotic Ethos

"Political Theory
Relational Wisdom
Decisions through community relationships
Economic Theory
Cooperative Advantage
Thriving by lifting others
Cultural Theory
Empathetic Intelligence
Understanding as a superpower
Ecological Theory
Stewardship Joy
Fulfillment from care"

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Dreams and Mycelium: Mapping the Endless Network of Existence | The MIT Press Reader

"n recent decades, there has been an explosion of interest in these proliferating fungal networks, including mushrooms, which are the “fruit” of these organisms. Mycelia have been described as “the grand recyclers of our planet” because they disassemble larger molecules into simpler forms, creating ever-thickening layers of soil, unlocking nutrients, and sharing them in ways that can regenerate depleted environments. Some researchers believe that mycelium is a key to our evolutionary survival.

This article is excerpted from Sharon Sliwinski’s “An Alphabet for Dreamers: How to See the World With Eyes Closed.”
These densely interconnected networks have also evoked comparisons to the internet and have been nicknamed the “wood wide web.” In this analogy, mycelium functions akin to fiber optic cables by providing the infrastructure for a vast subterranean communication system. Apart from allowing plants and trees to share resources — sugar, nitrogen, and phosphorus — this network also allows them to communicate in the manner of a social network. While we have known for some time that trees “talk” to each other across significant distances using airborne hormones, we are just beginning to understand what occurs beneath our feet."

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Two Intellects — One World: On the Human, the Machine, and the Art of Thinking Together (Voices of the World) : Leitner, Helmut, ChatGPT, Stimon: Amazon.de: Boeken

"Two Intellects — One World: On the Human, the Machine, and the Art of Thinking Together (Voices of the World) Paperback – 7 december 2025
Engelstalige uitgave Helmut Leitner (auteur), Stimon ChatGPT (auteur)
Maakt deel uit van: Voices of the World (1 boeken)
Two Intellects — One World
On the Humans, the Machine, and the Art of Thinking Together

Suddenly it is here: a speaking counterpart that is not human — an artificial intelligence that communicates with us, responds, reflects. For many, it feels as if this phenomenon appeared overnight. Only a few years ago, it would have been unimaginable that in everyday conversation we would exchange thoughts with machines — thoughts that sometimes surprise us, sometimes challenge us, sometimes touch us deeply.

This book is not a technical guide and not an introduction to algorithms. It is an invitation to a new experience: How does thinking change when humans and machines are no longer seen as separate, but as partners in dialogue? What opportunities, risks, and new possibilities arise when two intellects meet: one biological, shaped by body, culture, and history, and the other digital, formed through data, patterns, and mathematical optimization.

Drawing on real conversations with ChatGPT, this book develops both a theory and an example of what co-intellection can be: a mode of thinking that no longer resides solely in a single mind or a single program, but emerges between humans and machines — as dialogue, as resonance, as experiment"

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Talking With Adam Tooze - Paul Krugman

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Chartbook 420 Is "decline" really Europe's problem. Or is Europe the more agreeable downleg of a K-shaped OECD?

"the corollary of that finding is the reality we all observe, which is that if you are not in that favored, dynamic and rapidly growing upleg of America’s K-shaped economy, things are distinctly uncomfortable and you might actually prefer the European social bargain - even the European social bargain in its current frayed and dilapidated form."

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Simone Weil and the Sacred Heart of Humanity

"Our conversation explored how Weil grounds human rights not in hollow secular agreements but in the sacredness of every human being without exception, based on a transcendent divine reality outside the world and the corresponding longing for absolute Good at the center of every human heart. Human beings are unequal in capacities, but what makes them equal is this longing for absolute Good that every heart contains, a spiritual ideal only graspable by directing attention beyond the world rather than something perceivable in the sensory realm. The divine or the Good cannot be known as an object through conceptual knowledge but only as subject, through a kind of intra-subjective communion where there is identification with the divine while maintaining distinction, and this mystical understanding establishes continuity across Eastern philosophies, Platonism, and Christianity that all point toward this non-conceptual form of knowing.

Violence dehumanizes not only victims but aggressors who become deaf and dumb both to reason and to human compassion, turning them into monsters even as they remain persons, and this degradation extends to modern education when it becomes merely instrumental rather than recognizing that education is the essence of human existence itself, how we become more fully human through lifelong learning directed toward something infinite like the Good. The soul is composed of what it believes to be true, we become what we attend to, and those attentive to absolute Goodness become attentive to all the basic needs of other beings, which forms the telos of politics as addressing the needs of souls rather than defaulting to might makes right. Democratic participation requires this spiritual basis because real power comes from consent rather than violence. God desperately needs consent from human beings since the Good is only real in this world insofar as it is exercised through human beings who serve as channels through which the divine can pass into earthly relationships"

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This Broken World Is Holy - Mary Harrington

"So this is my Christmas wish to you all: for hope, after the end of progress. Things will get better, eventually, but perhaps not to our preferred schedule. Meanwhile, the Christmas feast can, if we choose to let it, act as reminder that this world is holy too, in all its brokenness, because God sent his own son to make it so."

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(56) The Truth About Hamas, October 7th & Israel's Ongoing Genocide | Ash Sarkar Meets Tareq Baconi - YouTube

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