Rebecca Solnit
American writer; author of Wanderlust (2000), A Paradise Built in Hell (2009), Men Explain Things to Me (2014) and Hope in the Dark (2004). Columnist at The Guardian. Writes Meditations in an Emergency, a newsletter on climate, democracy and feminism.
Rebecca Solnit did not write this page.
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Their wordsThese will be crucial years because we are in a global and national battle between oligarchy and democracy.
↗The Democracy Vs. Oligarchy Showdown Is Heremeditationsinanemergency.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThis is the world big tech will build if we let it. We must not let it.
↗The Democracy Vs. Oligarchy Showdown Is Heremeditationsinanemergency.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsIn other words we have a money problem that is also an oligarchy problem that is an anti-democracy problem.
↗The Democracy Vs. Oligarchy Showdown Is Heremeditationsinanemergency.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 11 days earlier
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Their wordsPrevious technologies have expanded communication. But the last round may be contracting it.
↗"We're Breaking Up": On Communication Before and After the New Techmeditationsinanemergency.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThere is so much information that our ability to focus on any piece of it is interrupted by other information, so that we bathe in information but hardly absorb or analyse it.
↗"We're Breaking Up": On Communication Before and After the New Techmeditationsinanemergency.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Our reading
Corporations and governments are increasingly working together to monitor private communications.
Their wordsWe are moving into a world of unaccountable and secretive corporations that manage all our communications and work hand in hand with governments to make us visible to them.
↗"We're Breaking Up": On Communication Before and After the New Techmeditationsinanemergency.com 3rd of 3 in this piece
- 3 weeks earlier
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Their wordsInside the tech bubbles is a deeply flawed notion of our humanity that seems to reduce us to our brain functions, specifically brain functions that machines can do and maybe do better.
↗Yes They Want to Kill Us: The Worshippers of Machines Versus Human Beingsmeditationsinanemergency.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Our reading
The vision of a post-human future where machines replace biological life is dismal and barren.
Their wordsThe vision of machines clacking away on a post-human planet in the near future is, to me, dismal and barren.
↗Yes They Want to Kill Us: The Worshippers of Machines Versus Human Beingsmeditationsinanemergency.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 8 days earlier
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Their wordsHollywood movies and too many government pandemic plans still presume that most of us are cowards or brutes, that we panic, trample each other, rampage, or freeze helplessly in moments of crisis and chaos.
↗The Real 9/11: Citizens Succeeded, Institutions Failedmeditationsinanemergency.com 1st of 2 in this piece
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Our reading
Their wordsCareful research has led disaster sociologists to the conclude that panic is a vanishingly rare phenomenon in disasters, part of an elaborate mythology of our weakness.
↗The Real 9/11: Citizens Succeeded, Institutions Failedmeditationsinanemergency.com 2nd of 2 in this piece
- 5 weeks earlier
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Their wordsAs for the "no stopping it," it is actually possible to go carbon neutral or carbon negative (if not currently likely).
↗Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Firesmeditationsinanemergency.com 1st of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsThe simplest response to that is that there is no one human nature: we are a malleable species, much shaped by the beliefs and values of the society we're from, and the same society, even the same family, can produce wildly varying specimens of humanity.
↗Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Firesmeditationsinanemergency.com 2nd of 3 in this piece
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Their wordsGiven that reality, it's striking that in sudden disasters people seem to revert to a default setting of solidarity, generosity, bravery, and a glorious capacity for grassroots organizing to meet the needs of the moment.
↗Cynicism and Naïveté in the Summer of a Thousand Firesmeditationsinanemergency.com 3rd of 3 in this piece