taboo symposium 15 | social media: friend(s) or foe?
the agenda This month we’re going to revisit the question of whether or not social media (including all the usual suspects and more) is (or has become) a scam. Team A: we are autonomous beings, who bear sole responsibility for the stupidity of using all the apps being fed to us by tech giants.Team B: […]
taboo symposium 14 | binaryThinking
the agenda TLDR: B/W thinking: Not ideal in today’s world. Let’s discuss. Old school detailed description:In a world of too much everything, we curate selectively: what we need to know, what we want to do, who we want to be around, what we believe. With regards to other people, we want to feel safe, and […]
taboo symposium 13 | strangers
the agenda We simply cannot trust that sides of our deep selves will have counterparts in those we meet, and so remain silent and shy, struggling to believe that the imposing, competent strangers we encounter can have any of the vulnerabilities, perversions, and idiocies we’re so intimately familiar with inside our own characters. – Alain […]
taboo symposium 12 | mental health
the agenda The DSM (Diagnostic and Statistical Manual of Mental Disorders) is the American bible of mental disorders, used by most of the Western world for diagnosing mental illness. In the DSM-IV there was a clause called ‘the bereavement exclusion’ which stated that those suffering from the death of a loved one exhibited symptoms synonymous […]
taboo symposium 11 | relationships
the agenda This is not a singles evening, nor is it couples therapy. Or maybe it’s a bit of both. Whatever the case, the subject is relationships, single and otherwise. I’m grouping both ‘categories’ because I’m pretty tired of the pervasive ‘us-and-them’ mentality of singles and couples. Any of us could at any time be […]
RSVP Robot
RSVP Robot AI has arrived, by gum. But what does this mean? Will we all lose our jobs? Will human experience/feelings become irrelevant? Are algorithms the new doctors/teachers/programmers/artists of our time? In short, is this the beginning of the end of humanity as we know it? It seems to me that rather than wasting all […]
taboo symposium 10 | educated
“The structure of [many of the top] professions, with their steep educational barriers, seems to assure that no outsider has anything to offer. The autodidact, the talented amateur, have been so thoroughly excluded that the possibility of their existence—in large numbers— has been virtually forgotten. Within its fortress of “expertise”, the middle class imagines it […]
taboo symposium 9 | self-esteem
“Self-respect is a discipline, a habit of mind that can never be faked but can be developed, trained, coaxed forth. It was once suggested to me that, as an antidote to crying, I put my head in a paper bag. As it happens, there is a sound physiological reason, something to do with oxygen, for […]
taboo symposium 8 | religion 2.0 (?)
the agenda Since God kicked it (as it were), those of us who didn’t believe in him/her/them anyhow have been provided with little else in the way of ritual and emotional consolation, except perhaps the endless selection of books on the self-help shelves of the (proverbial) local bookshop. Capitalism’s attempt to address these very problems […]