Get Off Facebook!

Like a Vision by Mister Thomas

A few years ago I ditched Facebook for the seductive promises of Twitter. I took the distinction between the two to be fundamental, that we were plagued by the ignorance of our friends on Facebook, but benefited from the wit of strangers on Twitter instead. However, in time this distinction turned out to be merely skin-deep. It took me a while to admit that both forms of social media were already compromised by the very nature of digital communication. Continue reading Get Off Facebook!

The Great Philosophical Divide in Science Fiction

TomorrowLand Concept art

Life without utopia is suffocating, for the multitude at least: threatened otherwise with petrifaction, the world must have a new madness. — Cioran, History and Utopia

There’s a fault line running in science fiction that predates it: the Great Optimism -Pessimism divide. The most obvious trope of each is the role of utopia/dystopia in the science fiction work, but that is slightly more complicated than it appears.

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