Frank Pasquale
@frankpasquale
Law professor; author (The Black Box Society; New Laws of Robotics). Interested in law & technology, AI, political economy, art, and social theory.
Runaway inequality in the US. (Chart is from from realtimeinequality.org)
Very good conversation on the collapse of self-reported well-being in the U.S.; a few clips below. podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/p...
Justifying anti-poverty programs with technocratic calculations of beneficiaries’ productivity is not ideal. But it is infinitely more moral and wiser than the reckless authoritarian populism that destroyed USAID. (Text below from www.ft.com/content/8e87...)
Bentham’s “pushpin is as good as poetry,” but now in LARB. lareviewofbooks.org/article/nove...
Yes, it’s often the literary minds that are most prophetic. What a great writer & thinker. But perhaps the expertise doesn’t disappear; it moves…as Walter Benjamin put it, on this score, “there is hope, but not for us.”
A telling anecdote from the article on how technology firms are reshaping college students’ lives:
Evergreen take on anti-system, anti-government, “let’s just shake things” up ideology. screenrant.com/webcomic-nam...
I’m not super-familiar with their work, but I will say that some academics’ passionate denials of any net negative effects of social media remind me of some forms of climate denial. Agnotological interventions, as Cohen suggests below.