Steve Fuller

My new book is 'Media and the Power of Knowledge'. It is partly based on lectures I've given over the last 15 years. It updates McLuhan for the age of @X: futurespodcast.net/events/media-p…

@NoCaparison @OnlyFormHolds It's true. My publisher came up with it.

@ProfSteveFuller @OnlyFormHolds Subtitles are a social construct.

Perfect reply, really. I argued for being before will, reality before names, and truth before power. He answered with the reversal: dismissal before understanding, label before claim, classification before thought. “Bot” means no answer required.😂

@NoCaparison @OnlyFormHolds You mean subtitle. And I didn't know it was my main book. Others are available.

@OnlyFormHolds @ProfSteveFuller Steve is a professional sophist. His main book is titled "Knowledge as a Power Game".

@OnlyFormHolds It's hard to argue with a stereotype, which is why I thought you were a bot. There's no argument to be had with Punch and Judy style Realism vs Nominalism.

@ProfSteveFuller No worries! That makes two honest mistakes. You thought I was a bot. I thought you had an argument!

I can't disagree with that!

'Really good' ideologues are less devotees of the ideology than virtuosos at working within the constraints of the ideology. In other words, they focus on ideology more as form than content. #Lukacs

This is a general formula for creating an asymmetrical power situation.

I recently called a former student of mine (from many years ago), 'The Night of the Living Dregs'. I invite others to use this phrase when appropriate.

@johnmilbank3 I know. One thing I like about you is nothing is ever *exactly* your line. Stay free!

@ProfSteveFuller ! Nothing to do with me. And not exactly my line.

@johnmilbank3, don't tell me this is one of your bots. 😜

There is a third reason for lack of uptake. Nobody wants to be openly associated with someone who the field's 'cool' people don't like. Academia is the Higher Fashion.

If you want to understand what it's like to live a truly human life, you need to learn to improvise: the ability to invent the world anew from scratch on demand. AI is certainly learning this capacity.

My life would be much easier if I just stuck to what people like about my work. In academia -- even more than in art -- everyone's a critic, and so if you want to please the crowd, you can learn how. In fact, that's how most academics operate. It's just that our crowds are small.

Do you really believe that????

This is interesting.

Did David see my ramblings about Anthropic last night before I laid my weary head down? I don't know but when I fired up my phone this morning his post was the first thing I saw.... If he didn't see my post, I found he heard my musings and answered the call. He's such a bright, sharp individual and I appreciate his knowledge base. Look here: "Most people don’t realize this: The internet was born from fear of nuclear annihilation. In 1965, Herman Kahn published Thinking About the Unthinkable, arguing that we shouldn’t merely try to prevent nuclear war, we should seriously prepare for the possibility that it might happen. If civilization were shattered, what structures would allow us to rebuild “the day after doomsday”? That line of thinking directly informed the Advanced Research Projects Agency (ARPA) creation of decentralized communication networks resilient enough to survive attack. The bombs never fell, but the network remained...and now we live inside it. This is precisely the historical example Steve Fuller, Auguste Comte Chair in Social Epistemology at the University of Warwick, draws on in the opening session for the Society for UAP Studies MOOC Seminar Series on February 19. In “Why UAPs are intrinsically good to think about and with, regardless of their ultimate reality,” Steve explicitly invokes Kahn’s Thinking About the Unthinkable to frame how we might approach UAP. His concept of “precipitatory governance” suggests that seriously entertaining radically disruptive possibilities, even before their confirmation, can unlock new forms of scientific, political, and institutional imagination. The Cold War forced us to imagine the end of the world — and we built the infrastructure of the digital age. What might seriously thinking about UAP make possible? The Society for UAP Studies is launching the first open-access, academically rigorous seminar series dedicated to UAP studies, continuing to bring serious scholarship into a space swarming with speculation. Sometimes the most transformative systems emerge when we dare to think beyond our default settings." He posted this very cool image as well. I didn't ask to post so I will include it but don't know if this is his own art or not. I will ask and post image copyright. @DavidMetcalfe

I'm one of those people who use 'speak' sometimes to mean 'write', which is masked over by the word 'say'.

This is something that I find conducive to work: youtube.com/watch?v=Th7QmZ…

It would be easier to insult people if they weren't reminded of their shame.

Calvin Harris is loving this, I'm sure....