""Our capacity to make memories is most affected by this kind of divided attention. We can - just about - attend to several things at once, but we do them badly. In the midst of all the overstimulation we are unable to lay down new memories, which means we don't remember much of what we are doing, either.

A new kind of human behaviour then emerges under this influence, a semi-automated for-profit personality which is being constantly nudged and notified and prompted; which is always seeking attention, always available, often anxious, often angry, afraid, jealous, paranoid, unsure of what of who to believe. The user cannot look up from the screen and notice their surroundings, because this personality, looped in a cycle of primitive fears and instincts, must always exist at peace with the algorithm. The information rewards supplant sensory attention to the actual physical body in the world. We are automating not just out actions, but also our personalities.""

— Julia Bell: Radical Attention, pp. 74-74

Alecs Ștefănescu wants to read The Cultural Politics of Emotion

Alecs Ștefănescu started reading Late Fascism

Review of "Breathing": "Civilization is not crumbling, it is only diverging from civility"

https://bookwyrm.social/user/catileptic/review/8238979

This book makes the critical claim that care is work, and that care is inscribed in political struggle. The authors use the metaphor of "pirate care" to explain how to resist the tendency to see "caring for others" as an unprofessional, private act, that "comes natural" to some and, thus, justifies burdening and confining certain people to free, unrecognized and depoliticized labor.

The figure of the pirate stands for resisting the unjust laws and the ideology of privatization, private property and individualism. Instead, the pirate, as a symbolic figure used in this book, find their own language to create kinship, to practice solidarity and to expand their network of care.

There are numerous historical and present day "pirate care" practices to draw inspiration from. The book documents such practices in education, healthcare, migration, in digital technologies and even in the sphere of establishing bonds and connections outside of blood-bound kinship and "the family".

The authors of this book, alongside their network, have also published a free and open Pirate Care Syllabus: syllabus.pirate.care/

(comment on Pirate Care)

Why have I waited so long to read my first Pynchon novel?

Coming from an affinity for the "new weird", his novel feels like post-modernism, yes, but with prefigurative "new weird" sprinkled all over.

The prose slips in and out of being descriptive about the world, about actual things the characters do, and then being descriptive of the meta, the feelings and intuitions, and musings that belong to nobody safe for, perhaps, the eye that watches all of it. The novel reads like interiority. I loved it.

(comment on The Crying of Lot 49)