reading for 1/16/18

the stanford experiment is a notorious example of how prone people are to losing their shit when put in positions of power/lack-of-power.

Jack’s choice for the reading is here.
It’s Philip Zimbardo’s account of the experiment, who was the lead in the experiment. He’s caught a lot of criticism for both the experiment and his presentation of it… so it should be a good starting point for discussion.

Jack proposes the following questions:
What’s more surprising, how guards abused their power or how prisoners complied?
Is your life more like that of a prisoner, or a guard?
Do liberals, conservatives, socialists, etc. see themselves as prisoners or guards?

ps: the piece i mentioned about artificial intelligence and corporations is here.

reading for 1.9.18

an essay by timothy morton from the book object-oriented feminism.

Timothy Morton, philosopher of Object Oriented Ontology, claims it is relevant to anarchists. He is the author of Dark Ecology: For a Logic of Future Coexistence; Ecology Without Nature: Rethinking Environmental Aesthetics; Humankind: Solidarity with Nonhuman People; Hyperobjects: Philosophy and Ecology after the End of the World; The Ecological Thought; Realist Magic: Objects, Ontology, Causality, etc. He contributed to Nothing: Three Inquiries in Buddhism.