“But there is a check on all of this anxiety about information collection and Borgesian libraries. The threat that human knowledge will be lost—either through destruction, or by dilution due to sheer scale—is still the dominant cultural narrative about libraries, real and imagined. The Library of Alexandria, often described as a physical embodiment of the heart and mind of the ancient world, is so famous today in part because it was destroyed. In The Book of Sand, Borges describes an infinite book that nearly drives the narrator mad before he resolves to get rid of it. ‘I thought of fire, but I feared that the burning of an infinite book might likewise prove infinite and suffocate the planet with smoke,’ he writes. Instead, he opts to ‘hide a leaf in the forest’ and sets off for the Argentine National Library with the bizarre volume.”

"The Human Fear of total Knowledge" - http://theatln.tc/1UnzLfu

“-Hollywood Fixer: “Now Hail Caesar! is a prestige picture, our biggest release of the year and we’re devoting huge resources to its production in order to make it first-class in every respect. Gentlemen, given its enormous expense, we don’t want to send it to market except in the certainty that it will not offend any reasonable American regardless of faith or creed. Now that’s where you come in. You’ve read the script. We want to know if the theological elements of the story are up to snuff.... I’m not sure I follow, Padre.
-Rabbi: Young man, you don’t follow for a very simple reason. These men are screwballs. God has children? What, and a dog? A collie maybe? God doesn’t have children. He’s a bachelor. And very angry.
-Catholic Clergyman: No, no. He used to be angry!
-Rabbi: What, he got over it?
-Protestant Clergyman: You worship the God of another age!
-Catholic Clergyman: Who has no love!
-Rabbi: Not true! He likes Jews.
-Protestant Clergyman: God loves everyone!
-Catholic Clergyman: God is love.
-Orthodox Clergyman: God is who is.
-Rabbi: This is special? Who isn’t who is?
-Catholic Clergyman: But how should God be rendered in a motion picture?
-Rabbi: God isn’t in the motion picture!”

— Joel Coen and Ethan Coen, "Hail Caesar!" 2016.

Throughout the film the Coen's deftly juxtapose Hollywood's economic ideologies with the religious concern for idolatry. This scene provides a brief joke on religious aesthetics and metaphysics.

“Believing that free will is an illusion has been shown to make people less creative, more likely to conform, less willing to learn from their mistakes, and less grateful toward one another. In every regard, it seems, when we embrace determinism, we indulge our dark side... Philosophers and theologians are used to talking about free will as if it is either on or off; as if our consciousness floats, like a ghost, entirely above the causal chain, or as if we roll through life like a rock down a hill. But there might be another way of looking at human agency. Some scholars argue that we should think about freedom of choice in terms of our very real and sophisticated abilities to map out multiple potential responses to a particular situation. One of these is Bruce Waller, a philosophy professor at Youngstown State University. In his new book, Restorative Free Will, he writes that we should focus on our ability, in any given setting, to generate a wide range of options for ourselves, and to decide among them without external constraint.”

Stephen Cave, "There's No Such Thing as Free Will: But We're Better of Believing In It Anyway" - http://theatln.tc/1soYWYZ

“In the quest for a workable ideal of democracy, the systems approach has recently shifted its perspective on deliberative democratic theory. Instead of enquiring how institutionalized decision-making might mirror an ‘ideal deliberative procedure’, it asks how democracy might be construed as a ‘deliberative system’... This article argues that a deliberative system without a parliamentary legislature is tantamount to deliberation without democracy and that an elected parliamentary legislature is constitutive of democracy as a deliberative system – national or transnational. To substantiate this claim, the article suggests looking at Habermas’ discourse theory in a new light, as a sociological-reconstructive approach that aims to explicate the cognitive dimension of modern democratic decision-making.”

Daniel Gaus, Discourse Theory’s Sociological Claim: Reconstructing the Epistemic Meaning of Democracy as a Deliberative System," Philosophy and Social Criticism - http://m.psc.sagepub.com/content/42/6/503.abstract?rss=1. Interesting article on deliberative democratic practices, especially in light of the rise of decisionistic politics today.

“And with this, we could analyze the history of introspection in the ancient Greek tradition, for which we have the best available written record. So what we did is we took all the books — we just ordered them by time — for each book we take the words and we project them to the space, and then we ask for each word how close it is to introspection, and we just average that. And then we ask whether, as time goes on and on, these books get closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And this is exactly what happens in the ancient Greek tradition. So you can see that for the oldest books in the Homeric tradition, there is a small increase with books getting closer to introspection. But about four centuries before Christ, this starts ramping up very rapidly to an almost five-fold increase of books getting closer, and closer and closer to the concept of introspection. And one of the nice things about this is that now we can ask whether this is also true in a different, independent tradition.”

Mariano Sigman, "Your Words May Predict Your Future Mental Health," Ted Talks - http://bit.ly/1OVoyXv. This is an interesting application of digital techniques to ancient texts, and with startling implications for contemporary life.

“Today’s philosophers are used to dancing to the tune of the Research Excellence Framework (Ref). They have to publish their articles in reputable journals and their books with university presses. They have to generate impact and contribute to their research environment. But how would the great philosophers of the past have fared under this system? Surely if they were truly great then they would have done well? Not necessarily... Ultimately, then, we can say that Leibniz probably would have thrived if the Ref had existed in his day, and in fact would have been a Ref superstar. But the irony, of course, is that he (and all of the other great philosophers) managed to achieve all that he did without the incentive provided by the Ref.”

"Which Philosopher Would Fare Best in a Present-day University," The Guardian - http://bit.ly/24Yzbwz

“Customi­sa­tion means having the world adapting to what we need, want, expect, fear, desire, hope, or wish. It is nice and enticing to receive the right discount, at the right time, for the right goods we are plan­ning to buy anyway. And recom­men­da­tions based on our inter­ests are better than random ones, based on anyone’s taste. The risk, however, is that our digital tech­nolo­gies may easily become defining tech­nolo­gies rather than mere iden­ti­fying ones... No wonder we become predictable: we have been made predictable. Nor do our tech­nolo­gies have any interest in our devel­op­ments and trans­for­ma­tions: quite the oppo­site. They would like to see a customer who likes some­thing to keep liking that some­thing and anything else that is similar to that some­thing. Cats lovers turning at most into kittens lovers, not dogs lovers. Amazon’s recom­men­da­tion system can only rein­force choices and tastes and make them more stable, and more predictable. So do the ‘smart’ algo­rithms behind the news­feeds of Face­book and Insta­gram. Our malleability is used to give ourselves a perma­nent shape not to enable us to change shape.”

Luciano Floridi, "The Self-Fulfilling Prophesy" - http://www.schirn.de/en/magazine/context/the_self_fulfilling_prophesy/

“What the troll is, and in what way he trolls and for what, has now been said. And it is clear from this that there can be trolling outside the internet. For every community of speakers holds certain goods in common, and with them the conversation [dialegesthai] as an end in itself; and the troll is one who seeks to damage it from within. So a questioner can troll a political meeting, and academics troll each other in committees when they are bored; and a newspaper columnist may be a profit-troll towards a whole city. But blogs and boards and forums and comments sections are where the troll dwells primarily and for the most part. For these are weak communities, and anyone may be part of them: and so their good is easily destroyed. Hence the saying, ‘Trolls not to be fed’. But though everyone knows this, everyone does it; for the desire to be right on the internet is natural and present to all.”

Rachel Barney, "[Aristotle] On Trolling," Journal of the American Philosophical Association - http://bit.ly/1TMuXA4

“As de waal recognizes, a better way to think about other creatures would be to ask ourselves how different species have developed different kinds of minds to solve different adaptive problems. Surely the important question is not whether an octopus or a crow can do the same things a human can, but how those animals solve the cognitive problems they face, like how to imitate the sea floor or make a tool with their beak. Children and chimps and crows and octopuses are ultimately so interesting not because they are mini-mes, but because they are aliens—not because they are smart like us, but because they are smart in ways we haven’t even considered. ”

"How Animals Think" - http://theatln.tc/23D8MSv

“Plenty of writers balked at the joys of word processing, for a host of reasons. Overwriting, in their view, became too easy; the labor of revision became undervalued, and noisy printers and plugged-in gadgets the norm. When Gore Vidal wrote in the mid-1980s that the ‘word processor is erasing literature,’ he expressed an uneasiness about technology’s proximity to creative writing (and the wider field of publishing) that persists. This too is the literary history of word processing, a snapshot of dread about gadget love, the seduction of the screen, and automation and the threats they pose to writers. This dread has taken various forms over the years. It lurks in the background of Sven Birkerts’s late-1990s jeremiads against the Web and Leon Wieseltier’s 2015 diatribe about what distraction was doing to the contemplative mind (and, by extension, the writer). Paradoxically, much of the hand-wringing over digital-era distraction as a mortal enemy to thinking has given rise to apps: Scrivener, or WriteRoom, or Write or Die, the last an online editor that promotes concentration by erasing your text if you pause too long between keystrokes.”

"The Program Era" - http://bookforum.com/inprint/023_01/15810