Oil, Humanism and Postmodernis
Neologism #11, 08.05.2022
Oil is the New Data
Startups have long been the biggest early adopters of the public cloud. They are an obvious fit: they do not own their own data centers, so the opportunity cost of switching to the public cloud is low. By contrast, it is much harder for large companies that do run their own data centers to make the leap, since it would require selling or retiring those centers.
This helps explain why cloud providers have only captured about 30 percent of the total addressable market. While cloud technology has matured considerably over the past half-decade, big corporations that run their own data centers still dominate the majority of the world’s IT infrastructure. For Amazon, Google, and Microsoft, as well as a few smaller cloud competitors like Oracle and IBM, winning the IT spend of the Fortune 500 is where most of the money in the public cloud market will be made. And among those large companies, Big Oil sits at the top. Out of the biggest ten companies in the world by revenue, six are in the business of oil production. In order words, the success of Big Oil, and the production of fossil fuels, are key to winning the cloud race.
A classic article worth recalling.
Oil is the New Data in Logic Mag
Art, Technology, and Humanism
According to Heidegger, the goal of technology is precisely to immunize man against change, to liberate man from his dependency on physis, on fate, on accident. Heidegger obviously sees this development as extremely dangerous.
Heidegger explains this in the following way: If everything becomes a resource that is stored and made available, then the human being also begins to be regarded as a resource—as human capital, we would now say, as a collection of energies, capabilities, and skills. In this way, man becomes degraded; through a search for stability and security, man turns himself into a thing.
Heidegger asserts that in our world, things exist as tools. For Heidegger, becoming objectified, commodified, etc., means becoming used.
The protection of art objects can be compared to the sociopolitical protection of the human body—that is, the protection afforded by human rights, which were also introduced by the French Revolution. There is a close relationship between art and humanism. According to the principles of humanism, human beings can only be contemplated, not actively used—not killed, violated, enslaved, etc.
Art is about storage and conservation—this is why art is deeply conservative.
Art, Technology, and Humanism in e-Flux
How postmodernism became the universal scapegoat of the era
In the philosophy of science, realists assert that scientific theories are not just workable explanations for the data but are likely to be approximately true. And, as scientific endeavour progresses, these theories get ever closer to the truth.
Anti-realists, such as the US philosopher Hilary Putnam, dispute this. They argue that all scientific theories are “underdetermined” by the data, particularly when they relate to non-observable objects such as genes, so there is no good reason to assume they are correct. Moreover, they draw a pessimistic inference from the fact that past scientific theories have usually been in some important ways false, to suggest that current theories are probably false too. Far from being an inherently unreasonable view, this position is usually grounded in empiricism and a historicist reading of scientific practices.
How postmodernism became the universal scapegoat of the era in New Statesman
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