‘The long history of Sanskrit has many faces, including voices of protest and revolt’: David Shulman
Dec 30, 2018 · 07:39 am Veena Muthuraman in Scroll Continue reading
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What happened when I walked into the world’s quietest place
My time in the anechoic chamber was a forceful reminder that most of the sounds we hear come to us indirectly; reflected into our ears by the things and people around us. Sound is a shared experience, formed as much by the environment we live in as it is by whatever happens to produce it in the first place. The anechoic chamber shows us what it would be like to live in a world that gives nothing back: a lonely world where sounds simply evaporate without returning.
Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us
The long read: Google’s Earth: how the tech giant is helping the state spy on us
TL;DR The G in Google stands for Government and the Os are its eyes
India – the State of Independence
India celebrates its independence from Britain on 15 August. However, the system of British colonial dominance has been replaced by a new hegemony based on the systemic rule of transnational capital, enforced by global institutions like the World Bank and WTO. At the same time, global agribusiness corporations are stepping into the boots of the former East India Company.
Alex Jones isn’t the censorship crisis that should scare us
Amitav Ghosh on V.S. Naipaul’s Pitiless Mirror
After his turn to non-fiction, he would never again look at life outside the West on its own terms: India, the Caribbean and Africa would become faded backdrops on which to project a vision of the West, England in particular.
China’s social credit system ‘could interfere in other nations’ sovereignty’
China’s social credit system ‘could interfere in other nations’ sovereignty’
While Indians worry about the Aadhaar, which is creating a really insecure central database of its 1.32 billion citizens’ biometric and demographic data, China is creating a much more ambitious social credit system for total state control of its’ own 1.35 billion.
Series of lectures on genocide
Online communities before the web
The woman who taught internet strangers to actually care for one another
Founded before the first web browser, Echo still exists today, nurturing a small but devoted family of users. This makes it among the oldest continuously operating online communities in history.
“Social Media Has Hijacked Our Brains and Threatens Global Democracy”
https://motherboard.vice.com/en_us/article/bjy7ez/social-media-threatens-global-democracy
“Those who celebrated the Facebook revolution and the Twitter revolution were celebrating the replacement of (relatively) calm reflection with the politics of reactivity and passion… The question that remains is whether democracies have both the will, and the means to bring considered thought back to politics, or, whether digital technology has made politics impossible.”