Tag Archives: Technology

Economics, Essays, Opinion, Society, Technology

ADVANCING TOWARDS A NEW DEFINITION OF “PROGRESS”

By Michael Cummins, Editor, August 9, 2025

The very notion of “progress” has long been a compass for humanity. Yet, what we consider an improved state is a question whose answer has shifted dramatically over time. As the Cambridge Dictionary defines it, progress is simply “movement to an improved or more developed state.” But whose state is being improved? And toward what future are we truly moving? The illusion of progress is perhaps most evident in technology, where breathtaking innovation often masks a troubling truth: the benefits are frequently unevenly shared, concentrating power and wealth while leaving many behind.

Historically, the definition of progress was a reflection of the era’s dominant ideology. The medieval period saw it as a spiritual journey toward salvation. The Enlightenment shattered this, replacing it with the ascent of humanity through reason, science, and the triumph over superstition. This optimism fueled the Industrial Revolution, where thinkers like Auguste Comte and Herbert Spencer saw progress as an unstoppable climb toward knowledge and material prosperity. But this vision was a mirage for many. The same steam engines that powered unprecedented economic growth subjected workers to brutal, dehumanizing conditions. The Gilded Age enriched railroad magnates and steel barons while workers struggled in poverty and faced violent crackdowns.

Today, a similar paradox haunts our digital age. Meet Maria, a fictional yet representative 40-year-old factory worker in Flint, Michigan. For decades, her livelihood was a steady source of income. But last year, the factory where she worked introduced an AI-powered assembly line, and her job, along with hundreds of others, was automated away. Maria’s story is not an isolated incident; it’s a global narrative that reflects the experiences of billions. Technologies like the microchip and generative AI promise to solve complex problems, yet they often deepen inequality in their wake. Her story is a poignant call to arms, demanding that we re-examine our collective understanding of progress.

This essay argues for a new, more deliberate definition of progress—one that moves beyond the historical optimism rooted in automatic technological gains and instead prioritizes equity, empathy, and sustainability. We will explore the clash between techno-optimism—a blind faith in technology’s ability to solve all problems—and techno-realism—a balanced approach that seeks inclusive and ethical innovation. Drawing on the lessons of history and the urgent struggles of individuals like Maria, we will chart a course toward a progress that uplifts all, not just the powerful and the privileged.

The Myth of Automatic Progress

The allure of technology is a siren’s song, promising a frictionless world of convenience, abundance, and unlimited potential. Marc Andreessen’s 2023 “Techno-Optimist Manifesto” captured this spirit perfectly, a rallying cry for the belief that technology is the engine of all good and that any critique is a form of “demoralization.” However, this viewpoint ignores the central lesson of history: innovation is not inherently a force for equality.

The Industrial Revolution, while a monumental leap for humanity, was a masterclass in how progress can widen the chasm between the rich and the poor. Factory owners, the Andreessens of their day, amassed immense wealth, while the ancestors of today’s factory workers faced dangerous, low-wage jobs and lived in squalor. Today, the same forces are at play. A 2023 McKinsey report projected that up to 30% of U.S. jobs could be automated by 2030, a seismic shift that will disproportionately affect low-income workers, the very demographic to which Maria belongs.

Progress, therefore, is not an automatic outcome of innovation; it is a result of conscious choices. As economists Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson argue in their pivotal 2023 book Power and Progress, the distribution of a technology’s benefits is not predetermined.

“The distribution of a technology’s benefits is not predetermined but rather a result of governance and societal choices.” — Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress: Our Thousand-Year Struggle Over Technology and Prosperity

Redefining progress means moving beyond the naive assumption that technology’s gains will eventually “trickle down” to everyone. It means choosing policies and systems that uplift workers like Maria, ensuring that the benefits of automation are shared broadly rather than being captured solely as corporate profits.

The Uneven Pace of Progress

Our perception of progress is often skewed by the dizzying pace of digital advancements. We see the exponential growth of computing power and the rapid development of generative AI and mistakenly believe this is the universal pace of all human progress. But as Vaclav Smil, a renowned scholar on technology and development, reminds us, this is a dangerous illusion.

“We are misled by the hype of digital advances, mistaking them for universal progress.” — Vaclav Smil, The Illusion of Progress: The Promise and Peril of Technology

A look at the data confirms Smil’s point. According to the International Energy Agency (IEA), the global share of fossil fuels in the primary energy mix only dropped from 85% to 80% between 2000 and 2022—a change so slow it’s almost imperceptible. Simultaneously, global crop yields for staples like wheat have largely plateaued since 2010, and an estimated 735 million people were undernourished in 2022, a stark reminder that our most fundamental challenges aren’t being solved by the same pace of innovation we see in Silicon Valley.

Even the very tools of the digital revolution can be a source of regression. Social media, once heralded as a democratizing force, has become a powerful engine for division and misinformation. For example, a 2023 BBC report documented how WhatsApp was used to fuel ethnic violence during the Kenyan elections. These platforms, while distracting us with their endless streams of content, often divert our attention from the deeper, more systemic issues squeezing families like Maria’s, such as stagnant wages and rising food prices. Yet, progress is possible when innovation is directed toward systemic challenges. The rise of microgrid solar systems in Bangladesh, which has provided electricity to millions of households, demonstrates how targeted technology can bridge gaps and empower communities. Redefining progress means prioritizing these systemic solutions over the next shiny gadget.

Echoes of History in Today’s World

Maria’s job loss in Flint isn’t a modern anomaly; it’s an echo of historical patterns of inequality and division. It resonates with the Gilded Age of the late 19th century, when railroad monopolies and steel magnates amassed colossal fortunes while workers faced brutal, 12-hour days in unsafe factories. The violent Homestead Strike of 1892, where workers fought against wage cuts, is a testament to the bitter class struggle of that era. Today, wealth inequality rivals that gilded age, with a recent Oxfam report showing that the world’s richest 1% have captured almost two-thirds of all new wealth created since 2020. Families like Maria’s are left to struggle with rising rents and stagnant wages, a reality far removed from the promise of prosperity.

“History shows that technological progress often concentrates wealth unless society intervenes.” — Daron Acemoglu and Simon Johnson, Power and Progress

Another powerful historical parallel is the Dust Bowl of the 1930s. Decades of poor agricultural practices and corporate greed led to an environmental catastrophe that displaced 2.5 million people. This is an eerie precursor to our current climate crisis. A recent NOAA report on California’s wildfires shows how a similar failure to prioritize long-term well-being is now displacing millions more, just as it did nearly a century ago.

In Flint, the social fabric is strained, with some residents blaming immigrants for economic woes—a classic scapegoat tactic that ignores the significant contributions of immigrants to the U.S. economy. This echoes the xenophobic sentiment of the 1920s Red Scare. Unchecked AI-driven misinformation and viral “deepfakes” are the modern equivalent of 1930s radio propaganda, amplifying fear and division.

“We shape our tools, and thereafter our tools shape us, often reviving old divisions.” — Yuval Noah Harari, Homo Deus: A Brief History of Tomorrow

Yet, history is also a source of hope. Germany’s proactive refugee integration programs in the mid-2010s, which trained and helped integrate hundreds of thousands of migrants into the workforce, show that societies can choose inclusion over exclusion. A new definition of progress demands that we confront these cycles of inequality, fear, and division. By choosing empathy and equity, we can ensure that technology serves to bridge divides and uplift communities like Maria’s, rather than fracturing them further.

The Perils of Techno-Optimism

The belief that technology will, on its own, solve our most pressing problems is a seductive but dangerous trap. It promises a quick fix while delaying the difficult, structural changes needed to address crises like climate change and social inequality. In their analysis of climate discourse, scholars Sofia Ribeiro and Viriato Soromenho-Marques argue that techno-optimism is a distraction from necessary action.

“Techno-optimism distracts from the structural changes needed to address climate crises.” — Sofia Ribeiro and Viriato Soromenho-Marques, The Techno-Optimists of Climate Change

The Arctic’s indigenous communities, like the Inuit, face the existential threat of melting permafrost. Meanwhile, some oil companies tout expensive and unproven technologies like direct air capture to justify continued fossil fuel extraction, all while delaying the real solutions—a massive investment in renewable energy. This is not progress; it is a corporate strategy to delay accountability, echoing the tobacco industry’s denialism of the 1980s. As Nathan J. Robinson’s 2023 critique in Current Affairs notes, techno-optimism is a form of “blind faith” that ignores the need for regulation and ethical oversight, risking a repeat of catastrophes like the 2008 financial crisis.

The gig economy is a perfect microcosm of this peril. Driven by AI platforms like Uber, it exemplifies how technology can optimize for profits at the expense of fairness. A recent study from UC Berkeley found that a significant portion of gig workers earn below the minimum wage, as algorithms prioritize efficiency over worker well-being. Today, unchecked AI is amplifying these harms, with a 2023 Reuters study finding that a large percentage of content on platforms like X is misleading, fueling division and distrust.

“Technology without politics is a recipe for inequality and instability.” — Evgeny Morozov, The Net Delusion: The Dark Side of Internet Freedom

Yet, rejecting blind techno-optimism is not a rejection of technology itself. It is a demand for a more responsible, regulated approach. Denmark’s wind energy strategy, which has made it a global leader in renewables, is a testament to how pragmatic government regulation and public investment can outpace the empty promises of technowashing. Redefining progress means embracing this kind of techno-realism.

Choosing a Techno-Realist Path

To forge a new definition of progress, we must embrace techno-realism—a balanced approach that harnesses innovation’s potential while grounding it in ethics, transparency, and human needs. As Margaret Gould Stewart, a prominent designer, argues, this is an approach that asks us to design technology that serves society, not just markets.

This path is not about rejecting technology, but about guiding it. Think of the nurses in rural Rwanda, where drones zip through the sky, delivering life-saving blood and vaccines to remote clinics. This is technology not as a shiny, frivolous toy, but as a lifeline, guided by a clear human need. History and current events show us that this path is possible. The Luddites of 1811 were not fighting against technology; they were fighting for fairness in the face of automation’s threat to their livelihoods. Their spirit lives on in the European Union’s landmark AI Act, which mandates transparency and safety standards to protect workers like Maria from biased algorithms. In Chile, a national program is retraining former coal miners to become renewable energy technicians, demonstrating that a just transition to a sustainable future is possible.

The heart of this vision is empathy. Finland’s national media literacy curriculum, which has been shown to be effective in combating misinformation, is a powerful model for equipping citizens to navigate the digital world. In Mexico, indigenous-led conservation projects are blending traditional knowledge with modern science to heal the land. As Nobel laureate Amartya Sen wrote, true progress is about a fundamental expansion of human freedom.

“Development is about expanding the freedoms of the disadvantaged, not just advancing technology.” — Amartya Sen, Development as Freedom

Costa Rica’s incredible achievement of powering its grid with nearly 100% renewable energy is a beacon of what is possible when a nation aligns innovation with ethics. These stories—from Rwanda’s drones to Mexico’s forests—prove that technology, when guided by history, regulation, and empathy, can serve all.

Conclusion: A Progress We Can All Shape

Maria’s story—her job lost to automation, her family struggling in a community beset by historical inequities—is not a verdict on progress but a powerful, clear-eyed challenge. It forces us to confront the fact that progress is not an inevitable, linear march toward a better future. It is a series of deliberate choices, a constant negotiation between what is technologically possible and what is ethically and socially responsible. The historical echoes of inequality, environmental neglect, and division are loud, but they are not our destiny.

Imagine Maria today, no longer a victim of technological displacement but a beneficiary of a new, more inclusive model. Picture her retrained as a solar technician, her hands wiring a community-owned energy grid that powers Flint’s homes with clean energy. Imagine her voice, once drowned out by economic hardship, now rising on social media to share stories of unity and resilience. This vision—where technology is harnessed for all, guided by ethics and empathy—is the progress we must pursue.

The path forward lies in action, not just in promises. It requires us to engage in our communities, pushing for policies that protect and empower workers. It demands that we hold our leaders accountable, advocating for a future where investments in renewable energy and green infrastructure are prioritized over short-term profits. It requires us to support initiatives that teach media literacy, allowing us to discern truth from the fog of misinformation. It is in these steps, grounded in the lessons of history, that we turn a noble vision into a tangible reality.

Progress, in its most meaningful sense, is not about the speed of a microchip or the efficiency of an algorithm. It is about the deliberate, collective movement toward a society where the benefits of innovation are shared broadly, where the most vulnerable are protected, and where our shared future is built on the foundations of empathy, community, and sustainability. It is a journey we must embark on together, a progress we can all shape.

Progress: movement to a collectively improved and more inclusively developed state, resulting in a lessening of economic, political, and legal inequality, a strengthening of community, and a furthering of environmental sustainability.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED UTILIZING AI

Children, Education, Essays, Motherhood, Society

Reclaiming Intellectual Life Within Motherhood

By Renee Dellar, Founder, The Learning Studio, Newport Beach, CA

In homes filled with toy-strewn floors, half-read bedtime stories, and the quiet rituals of care, another kind of cultivation is quietly unfolding: a woman tending both her children and her own mind. For centuries, motherhood has been framed as noble sacrifice—an often invisible labor etched into the margins of cultural discourse. But in 2025, a growing chorus of voices is reviving a different vision. One in which caregiving is not a detour from intellectual life, but its fertile ground.

Two works lead this revival: Karen Andreola’s Mother Culture and Laura Fabrycky’s Motherhood and the Intellectual Life. Each, in their own way, reshapes how we understand the maternal vocation—not as a trade-off between thought and nurture, but as a textured synthesis of both. The intellect, they argue, can live among the ordinary. It can thrive there.

The Domestic as Intellectual Soil

Andreola’s Mother Culture is a quiet revolution disguised as a homemaking guide. Rooted in the Charlotte Mason tradition, an educational philosophy that relies on living stories, literature and engaging with nature, the book encourages mothers to nurture their spiritual and intellectual lives alongside the children they raise. The term “mother culture” describes this practice of personal cultivation within caregiving: reading short chapters, journaling reflections, taking time for beauty and prayer—not as indulgence, but as daily nourishment.

Fabrycky’s Motherhood and the Intellectual Life deepens and broadens the premise. Drawing inspiration from A.G. Sertillanges’s The Intellectual Life, she proposes that intellectual formation is not incompatible with diapers and dinner prep—it may, in fact, be refined by them. Maternal knowing, she argues, is less linear and more contemplative: “a slow epistemology,” where insight emerges through relational rhythms, interruptions, and quiet repetition.

Taken together, these texts offer a radical proposition: that raising children can coexist with the pursuit of meaningful thought—and even become its crucible.

Growth Through the Tension

This vision is not utopian. Fabrycky grapples openly with the fragmented time, emotional exhaustion, and cultural myths that haunt modern motherhood. The notion that one must be endlessly available and self-effacing to be “good” creates a psychic double bind—especially for those who also feel called to write, study, or lead.

A 2025 GBH essay titled “What Does It Mean to Be a Good Mom in 2025?” critiques these cultural pressures and calls for relational authenticity over performative self-sacrifice. Similarly, Amy Shoenthal, writing in Forbes, identifies five emerging trends in maternal identity, including the recognition of unpaid caregiving and the reframing of “career pauses” as formative, not deficient. Both voices echo Andreola’s and Fabrycky’s reframing of homemaking and child-rearing as reflective, generative domains.

Matthew Crawford, in The Hedgehog Review, adds philosophical weight by critiquing the hyper-individualism that isolates mothers from communal meaning. He exposes the autonomy trap—a false promise of liberation that, in practice, leaves caregivers unsupported and intellectually adrift.

Andreola’s response to this fragmentation is practical and merciful. She doesn’t ask for hours of solitude, but twenty minutes a day—a chapter read, a line copied, a prayer whispered. Her method is cumulative, not competitive. Fabrycky reinforces this by insisting that intellectual life shaped by interruptions isn’t inferior—it’s simply different. Perhaps even deeper. A mind accustomed to chaos may grow uniquely capable of synthesis, perception, and grace.

Maternal Knowledge As Intellect

Both authors offer a profound challenge to prevailing epistemologies. Motherhood, in their telling, is not only a form of care, but a form of knowledge—a way of seeing, sensing, and interpreting the world through embodied, relational experience.

Fabrycky names this “maternal knowing,” a quiet but potent resistance to systems that privilege abstraction, quantification, and speed. It is its own category of intellect.

This view finds broader support. In The Journal of Futures Studies, the 2025 essay “Mother, Motherhood, Mothering” uses the Futures Triangle framework to propose mothering as a disruptive force within systems of power. It highlights interdependence, memory, and ancestral wisdom, and calls for “care-full academic spaces” that honor the knowledge generated in relationship.

Andreola, while less overtly political, participates in this resistance through recovery. Her invitation to read poetry, observe nature, and write in stolen moments is not escapism—it is restoration. She sees the home not merely as a workplace, but as a sanctuary of moral imagination.

Kate Lucky’s Comment essay, “Consider the Zoo,” resonates deeply here. Reflecting on containment and longing, Lucky honors domestic life as sacred terrain. Through metaphor and meditation, she illustrates how the architecture of the home—though often confining—can also be spiritually expansive. She, like Andreola, affirms that a richly cultivated mother begets a richly cultivated home.

Motherhood And The Technological Bind

In 2025, new tools offer both hope and hazard. AI tutors, digital reading groups, and remote learning platforms create flexible ways for mothers to remain intellectually engaged. But they also threaten to erode the quiet margins in which thought can truly root.

Editorialge’s “Motherhood in 2025” outlines this double bind. Technology promises convenience, but also expects omnipresence. It can enable, but it can also overwhelm. The modern mother may feel pressure not only to mother well, but to optimize the experience—socially, intellectually, emotionally, and aesthetically.

Andreola responds with a counter-rhythm. Her practice of “mother culture” requires no devices, no tracking apps, no metrics—just twenty minutes and an open soul. Fabrycky, too, advocates what she calls “sacred margins”: spaces where rest and contemplation are guarded from digital encroachment. Whether reading a psalm or journaling in twilight, these acts reclaim time not as commodity, but as communion.

This is an intellectual life that resists acceleration. One rooted not in productivity, but in attention.

Theological Embodiment

Beneath both texts lies a theological current. Andreola’s work is explicitly faith-based, casting motherhood as a sacramental calling. She ties personal growth to spiritual rhythms, blending domesticity with liturgy. Fabrycky’s theology is more implicit, but no less rich. She draws on incarnational motifs—suggesting that just as Christ entered time, mothers enter it fully, redemptively, lovingly.

Paul Kingsnorth, writing in First Things, critiques empire-building models of Christianity and calls instead for mystical humility. It is a useful lens for understanding maternal life. In resisting the culture of achievement, mothers enact a kind of mysticism: the shaping of souls not through acclaim, but through sandwiches and lullabies.

Plough Quarterly’s “Autonomy Trap” extends this idea. The essay argues that liberal autonomy undermines moral formation and calls for renewed celebration of dependency and mutual obligation. Mothers, whose daily lives revolve around interdependence, know this deeply. Their labor is not a retreat from intellectual life—it is its lived expression.

Even empirical research backs this. A 2025 study published by the APA, titled “Nurturing Now, Thriving Later,” found that maternal warmth fosters personality traits associated with intellectual openness and conscientiousness. Far from being anti-intellectual, caregiving becomes a crucible of human formation—for both parent and child.

Reimagining Flourishing

The question, then, is not whether mothers can be intellectuals. It is whether society can reimagine what intellectual life actually looks like.

Both Andreola and Fabrycky challenge the false binary between academic scholarship and domesticity. Intellectual flourishing, they argue, need not wear robes or require citations. It can live in a threadbare armchair, beside a half-finished sketch, or in a whispered poem before lights-out.

Joseph Keegin, writing in Point Magazine, coined the term “commit lit” to describe literature that shapes the soul—not just the intellect. This is the literature of mothers: clarifying, sustaining, quietly transformative. It is what Andreola asks women to read—not for utility, but for delight and reflection. The habit itself becomes a philosophy.

Andreola’s readers praise her for practicality: short chapters, gentle prompts, and the conviction that the inner life matters—even if cultivated between errands and lunchboxes. Fabrycky echoes this, calling us to reject the tired binaries of ambition versus nurture, head versus heart. In doing so, she articulates a vision of womanhood that is fully integrated—thinking, feeling, forming, and formed.

Conclusion

To speak of motherhood as intellectually fruitful is not to romanticize its trials. It is to honor its inherent generativity.

A mother tends more than bodies and schedules. She tends minds, questions, values, and souls. Her daily life is strewn with philosophical inquiry: What does love require when exhausted? How should justice look between siblings? What is the rhythm of truth-telling in a bedtime ritual?

This is not incidental. It is profound.

Karen Andreola’s Mother Culture affirms the mother not only as caregiver, but as curator of wisdom. Through short chapters and gentle urgings, she equips women to reclaim the interior life—to read, think, pray, and study amidst the hum of the washing machine and the chaos of toddler negotiations. It is philosophy shelved among the laundry. Theology scribbled between school pick-ups.

Laura Fabrycky extends this sacred motif, framing motherhood as epistemology itself. In her vision, maternal knowledge is slow and embodied—shaped by noise, honed through disruption. It is knowledge with fingerprints, and fingerprints with knowledge.

Culture often demands a choice: between ambition and nurture, visibility and devotion. But this is a false binary. The intellectually vibrant mother is not the exception—she is the mirror. Her search for meaning, amid fractured time, is no less rigorous than that of the cloistered scholar. It may, in fact, be more so.

With new tools, communal voices, and literary recoveries blooming in 2025, the conditions are ripe for reframing. Writers, theologians, educators, and artists are clearing space for caregiving not as an interruption of intellect, but as its generative soil.

The mother who lights a candle for evening reading, who sketches thoughts between lessons, who whispers poetry over lunch—is not delaying her intellectual life. She is living it. And in doing so, she is cultivating a garden of wisdom whose fruits will shape families, culture, and the age to come.

She is, in every way, a thinker.

And the home—far from a site of confinement—is one of the most intellectually fertile landscapes of all.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN BY RENEE DELLAR UTILIZING AI

Artificial Intelligence, Arts & Literature, Essays, Technology

Why “Hamlet” Matters In Our Technological Age

“The time is out of joint: O cursed spite, / That ever I was born to set it right!” — Hamlet, Act I, Scene V

In 2025, William Shakespeare’s Hamlet no longer reads as a distant Renaissance relic but rather as a contemporary fever dream—a work that reflects our age of algorithmic anxiety, climate dread, and existential fatigue. The tragedy of the melancholic prince has become a diagnostic mirror for our present: grief-stricken, fragmented, hyper-mediated. Written in a time of religious upheaval and epistemological doubt, Hamlet now stands at the crossroads of collective trauma, ethical paralysis, and fractured memory.

As Jeremy McCarter writes in The New York Times essay Listen to ‘Hamlet.’ Feel Better., “We are Hamlet.” That refrain echoes across classrooms, podcasts, performance spaces, and peer-reviewed journals. It is not merely identification—it is diagnosis.

This essay weaves together recent scholarship, creative reinterpretations, and critical performance reviews to explore why Hamlet matters—right now, more than ever.

Grief and the Architecture of Memory

Hamlet begins in mourning. His father is dead. His mother has remarried too quickly. His place in the kingdom feels stolen. This grief—raw, intimate, but also national—is not resolved; it metastasizes. As McCarter observes, Hamlet’s sorrow mirrors our own in a post-pandemic, AI-disrupted society still reeling from dislocation, death, and unease.

In Hamlet, architecture itself becomes a mausoleum: Elsinore Castle feels less like a home and more like a prison of memory. Recent productions, including the Royal Shakespeare Company’s Hamlet: Hail to the Thief and the Mark Taper Forum’s 2025 staging, emphasize how space becomes a character. Set designs—minimalist, surveilled, hypermodern—render castles as cages, tightening Hamlet’s emotional claustrophobia.

This spatial reading finds further resonance in Jeffrey R. Wilson’s Essays on Hamlet (Harvard, 2021), where Elsinore is portrayed not just as a backdrop but as a haunted topography—a burial ground for language, loyalty, and truth. In a world where memories are curated by devices and forgotten in algorithms, Hamlet’s mourning becomes a radical act of remembrance.

Our own moment—where memories are stored in cloud servers and memorialized through stylized posts—finds its counter-image in Hamlet’s obsession with unfiltered grief. His mourning is not just personal; it is archival. To remember is to resist forgetting—and to mourn is to hold meaning against its erasure.

Madness and the Diseased Imagination

Angus Gowland’s 2024 article Hamlet’s Melancholic Imagination for Renaissance Studies draws a provocative bridge between early modern melancholy and twenty-first-century neuropsychology. He interprets Hamlet’s unraveling not as madness in the theatrical sense, but as a collapse of imaginative coherence—a spiritual and cognitive rupture born of familial betrayal, political corruption, and metaphysical doubt.

This reading finds echoes in trauma studies and clinical psychology, where Hamlet’s soliloquies—“O that this too too solid flesh would melt” and “To be, or not to be”—become diagnostic utterances. Hamlet is not feigning madness; he is metabolizing a disordered world through diseased thought.

McCarter’s audio adaptation of the play captures this inner turmoil viscerally. Told entirely through Hamlet’s auditory perception, the production renders the world as he hears it: fragmented, conspiratorial, haunted. The sound design enacts the “nutshell” of Hamlet’s consciousness—a sonic echo chamber where lucidity and delusion merge.

Gowland’s interdisciplinary approach, melding humoral theory with neurocognitive frameworks, reveals why Hamlet remains so psychologically contemporary. His imagination is ours—splintered by grief, reshaped by loss, and destabilized by unreliable truths.

Existentialism and Ethical Procrastination

Boris Kriger’s Hamlet: An Existential Study (2024) reframes Hamlet’s paralysis not as cowardice but as ethical resistance. Hamlet delays because he must. His world demands swift vengeance, but his soul demands understanding. His refusal to kill without clarity becomes an act of defiance in a world of urgency.

Kriger aligns Hamlet with Sartre’s Roquentin, Camus’s Meursault, and Kierkegaard’s Knight of Faith—figures who suspend action not out of fear, but out of fidelity to a higher moral logic. Hamlet’s breakthrough—“The readiness is all”—is not triumph but transformation. He who once resisted fate now accepts contingency.

This reading gains traction in modern performances that linger in silence. At the Mark Taper Forum, Hamlet’s soliloquies are not rushed; they are inhabited. Pauses become ethical thresholds. Audiences are not asked to agree with Hamlet—but to wait with him.

In an era seduced by velocity—AI speed, breaking news, endless scrolling—Hamlet’s slowness is sacred. He does not react. He reflects. In 2025, this makes him revolutionary.

Isolation and the Politics of Listening

Hamlet’s isolation is not a quirk—it is structural. The Denmark of the play is crowded with spies, deceivers, and echo chambers. Amid this din, Hamlet is alone in his need for meaning.

Jeffrey Wilson’s essay Horatio as Author casts listening—not speaking—as the play’s moral act. While most characters surveil or strategize, Horatio listens. He offers Hamlet not solutions, but presence. In an age of constant commentary and digital noise, Horatio becomes radical.

McCarter’s audio adaptation emphasizes this loneliness. Hamlet’s soliloquies become inner conversations. Listeners enter his psyche not through spectacle, but through headphones—alone, vulnerable, searching.

This theme echoes in retellings like Matt Haig’s The Dead Father’s Club, where an eleven-year-old grapples with his father’s ghost and the loneliness of unresolved grief. Alienation begins early. And in our culture of atomized communication, Hamlet’s solitude feels painfully modern.

We live in a world full of voices but starved of listeners. Hamlet exposes that silence—and models how to endure it.

Gender, Power, and Counter-Narratives

If Hamlet’s madness is philosophical, Ophelia’s is political. Lisa Klein’s novel Ophelia and its 2018 film adaptation give the silenced character voice and interiority. Through Ophelia’s eyes, Hamlet’s descent appears not noble, but damaging. Her own breakdown is less theatrical than systemic—borne from patriarchy, dismissal, and grief.

Wilson’s essays and Yan Brailowsky’s edited volume Hamlet in the Twenty-First Century (2023) expose the structural misogyny of the play. Hamlet’s world is not just corrupt—it is patriarchally decayed. To understand Hamlet, one must understand Ophelia. And to grieve with Ophelia is to indict the systems that broke her.

Contemporary productions have embraced this feminist lens. Lighting, costuming, and directorial choices now cast Ophelia as a prophet—her madness not as weakness but as indictment. Her flowers become emblems of political rot, and her drowning a refusal to play the script.

Where Hamlet delays, Ophelia is dismissed. Where he soliloquizes, she sings. And in this contrast lies a deeper truth: the cost of male introspection is often paid by silenced women.

Hamlet Reimagined for New Media

Adaptations like Alli Malone’s Hamlet: A Modern Retelling podcast transpose Hamlet into “Denmark Inc.”—a corrupt corporate empire riddled with PR manipulation and psychological gamesmanship. In this world, grief is bad optics, and revenge is rebranded as compliance.

Malone’s immersive audio design aligns with McCarter’s view: Hamlet becomes even more intimate when filtered through first-person sensory experience. Technology doesn’t dilute Shakespeare—it intensifies him.

Even popular culture—The Lion King, Sons of Anarchy, countless memes—draws from Hamlet’s genetic code. Betrayal, grief, existential inquiry—these are not niche themes. They are universal templates.

Social media itself channels Hamlet. Soliloquies become captions. Madness becomes branding. Audiences become voyeurs. Hamlet’s fragmentation mirrors our own feeds—brilliant, performative, and crumbling at the edges.

Why Hamlet Still Matters

In classrooms and comment sections, on platforms like Bartleby.com or IOSR Journal, Hamlet remains a fixture of moral inquiry. He endures not because he has answers, but because he never stops asking.

What is the moral cost of revenge?
Can grief distort perception?
Is madness a form of clarity?
How do we live when meaning collapses?

These are not just literary questions. They are existential ones—and in 2025, they feel acute. As AI reconfigures cognition, climate collapse reconfigures survival, and surveillance reconfigures identity, Hamlet feels uncannily familiar. His Denmark is our planet—rotted, observed, and desperate for ethical reawakening.

Hamlet endures because he interrogates. He listens. He doubts. He evolves.

A Final Benediction: Readiness Is All

Near the end of the play, Hamlet offers a quiet benediction to Horatio:

“If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now… The readiness is all.”

No longer raging against fate, Hamlet surrenders not with defeat, but with clarity. This line—stripped of poetic flourish—crystallizes his journey: from revenge to awareness, from chaos to ethical stillness.

“The readiness is all” can be read as a secular echo of faith—not in divine reward, but in moral perception. It is not resignation. It is steadiness.

McCarter’s audio finale invites listeners into this silence. Through Hamlet’s ear, through memory’s last echo, we sense peace—not because Hamlet wins, but because he understands. Readiness, in this telling, is not strategy. It is grace.

Conclusion: Hamlet’s Sacred Relevance

Why does Hamlet endure in the twenty-first century?

Because it doesn’t offer comfort. It offers courage.
Because it doesn’t resolve grief. It honors it.
Because it doesn’t prescribe truth. It wrestles with it.

Whether through feminist retellings like Ophelia, existential essays by Kriger, cognitive studies by Gowland, or immersive audio dramas by McCarter and Malone, Hamlet adapts. It survives. And in those adaptations, it speaks louder than ever.

In an age where memory is automated, grief is privatized, and moral decisions are outsourced to algorithms, Hamlet teaches us how to live through disorder. It reminds us that delay is not cowardice. That doubt is not weakness. That mourning is not a flaw.

We are Hamlet.
Not because we are doomed.
But because we are still searching.
Because we still ask what it means to be.
And what it means—to be ready.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN USING AI

Culture, Essays, Immigration, Philosophy, Poetry

The Curated Persona vs. The Cultivated Spirit

“There is pleasure in the pathless woods,
There is rapture on the lonely shore,
There is society where none intrudes,
By the deep sea, and music in its roar.”
— Lord Byron, Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage

We are living in a time when almost nothing reaches us untouched. Our playlists, our emotions, our faces, our thoughts—all curated, filtered, reassembled. Life itself has been stylized and presented as a gallery: a mosaic of moments arranged not by meaning, but by preference. We scroll instead of wander. We select instead of receive. Even grief and solitude are now captioned.

Curation is no longer a method. It is a worldview. It tells us what to see, how to feel, and increasingly, who to be. What once began as a reverent gesture—a monk illuminating a manuscript, a poet capturing awe in verse—has become an omnipresent architecture of control. Curation promises freedom, clarity, and taste. But what if it now functions as a closed system—resisting mystery, filtering out surprise, and sterilizing transformation?

This essay explores the spiritual consequences of that system: how the curated life may be closing us off from the wildness within, the creative rupture, and the deeper architecture of meaning—the kind once accessed by walking, wandering, and waiting.

Taste and the Machinery of Belonging

Taste used to be cultivated: a long apprenticeship shaped by contradiction and immersion. One learned to appreciate Bach or Baldwin not through immediate alignment, but through dedicated effort and often, difficulty. This wasn’t effortless consumption; it was opening oneself to a demanding process of intellectual and emotional growth, engaging with works that pushed against comfort and forced a recalibration of understanding.

Now, taste has transformed. It’s no longer a deep internal process but a signal—displayed, performed, weaponized. Curation, once an act of careful selection, has devolved into a badge of self-justification, less about genuine appreciation and more about broadcasting allegiance.

What we like becomes who we are, flattened into an easily digestible profile. What we reject becomes our political tribe, a litmus test for inclusion. What we curate becomes our moral signature, a selective display designed to prove our sensibility—and to explicitly exclude others who don’t share it. This aesthetic alignment replaces genuine shared values.

This system is inherently brittle. It leaves little room for the tension, rupture, or revision essential for genuine growth. We curate for coherence, not depth—for likability, not truth. We present a seamless, unblemished self, a brand identity without flaw. The more consistent the aesthetic, the more brittle the soul becomes, unable to withstand the complexities of real life.

Friedrich Nietzsche, aware of human fragility, urged us in The Gay Science to “Become who you are.” But authentic becoming requires wandering, failing, and recalibrating. The curated life demands you remain fixed—an unchanging exhibit, perpetually “on brand.” There’s no space for the messy, contradictory process of self-discovery; each deviation is a brand inconsistency.

We have replaced moral formation with aesthetic positioning. Do you quote Simone Weil or wear linen neutrals? Your tastes become your ethics, a shortcut to moral authority. But what happens when we are judged not by our love or actions, but by our mood boards? Identity then becomes a container, rigidly defined by external markers, rather than an expansive horizon of limitless potential.

James Baldwin reminds us that identity, much like love, must be earned anew each day. It’s arduous labor. Curation offers no such labor—only the performative declaration of arrival. In the curated world, to contradict oneself is a failure of brand, not a deepening of the human story.

Interruption as Spiritual Gesture

Transformation—real transformation—arrives uninvited. It’s never strategic or trendy. It arrives as a breach, a profound disruption to our constructed realities. It might be a dream that disturbs, a silence that clarifies, or a stranger who speaks what you needed to hear. These are ruptures that stubbornly refuse to be styled or neatly categorized.

These are not curated moments. They are interruptions, raw and unmediated. And they demand surrender. They ask that we be fundamentally changed, not merely improved. Improvement often implies incremental adjustments; change implies a complete paradigm shift, a dismantling and rebuilding of perception.

Simone Weil wrote, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.” To give genuine attention—not to social media feeds, but to the world’s unformatted texture—is a profoundly spiritual act. It makes the soul porous, receptive to insights that transcend the superficial. It demands we quiet internal noise and truly behold.

Interruption, when received rightly, becomes revelation. It breaks the insidious feedback loop of curated content. It reclaims our precious time from the relentless scroll. It reminds us that meaning is not a product, but an inherent presence. It calls us out of the familiar, comfortable loop of our curated lives and into the fertile, often uncomfortable, unknown.

Attention is not surveillance. Surveillance consumes and controls. Attention, by contrast, consecrates; it honors sacredness. It is not monitoring. It is beholding, allowing oneself to be transformed by what is perceived. In an age saturated with infinite feeds, sacred attention becomes a truly countercultural act of resistance.

Wilderness as Revelation

Before curation became the metaphor for selfhood, wilderness was. For millennia, human consciousness was shaped by raw, untamed nature. Prophets were formed not in temples, but in the harsh crucible of the wild.

Moses wandered for forty years in the desert before wisdom arrived. Henry David Thoreau withdrew to Walden Pond not to escape, but to immerse himself in fundamental realities. Friedrich Nietzsche walked—often alone and ill—through the Alps, where he conceived eternal recurrence, famously declaring: “All truly great thoughts are conceived by walking.”

The Romantic poets powerfully echoed this truth. William Wordsworth, in Tintern Abbey, describes a profound connection to nature, sensing:

“A sense sublime / Of something far more deeply interfused, / Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns…”

John Keats saw nature as a portal to the eternal.

Yet now, even wilderness is relentlessly curated. Instagrammable hikes. Hashtagged retreats. Silence, commodified. We pose at the edge of cliffs, captioning our solitude for public consumption, turning introspection into performance.

But true wilderness resists framing. It is not aesthetic. It is initiatory. It demands discomfort, challenges complacency, and strips away pretense. It dismantles the ego rather than decorating it, forcing us to confront vulnerabilities. It gives us back our edges—the raw, unpolished contours of our authentic selves—by rubbing away the smooth veneers of curated identity.

In Taoism, the sage follows the path of the uncarved block. In Sufi tradition, the Beloved is glimpsed in the desert wind. Both understand: the wild is not a brand. It is a baptism, a transformative immersion that purifies and reveals.

Wandering as Spiritual Practice

The Romantics knew intuitively that walking is soulwork. John Keats often wandered through fields for the sheer presence of the moment. Lord Byron fled confining salons for pathless woods, declaring: “I love not Man the less, but Nature more.” His escape was a deliberate choice for raw experience.

William Wordsworth’s daffodils become companions, flashing upon “that inward eye / Which is the bliss of solitude.” Walking allows a convergence of external observation and internal reflection.

Walking, in its purest form, breaks pattern. It refuses the algorithm. It is an act of defiance against pre-determined routes. It offers revelation in exchange for rhythm, the unexpected insight found in the meandering journey. Each footstep draws us deeper into the uncurated now.

Bashō, the haiku master, offered a profound directive:

“Do not seek to follow in the footsteps of the wise. Seek what they sought.”

The pilgrim walks not primarily to arrive at a fixed destination, but to be undone, to allow the journey itself to dismantle old assumptions. The act of walking is the destination.

Wandering is not a detour. It is, in its deepest sense, a vocation, a calling to explore the contours of one’s own being and the world without the pressure of predetermined outcomes. It is where the soul regains its shape, shedding rigid molds imposed by external expectations.

Creation as Resistance

To create—freely, imperfectly, urgently—is the ultimate spiritual defiance against the tyranny of curation. The blank page is not optimized; it is sacred ground. The first sketch is not for immediate approval. It is for the artist’s own discovery.

Samuel Taylor Coleridge defined poetry as “the best words in the best order.” Rainer Maria Rilke declared, “You must change your life.” Friedrich Nietzsche articulated art’s existential necessity: “We have art so that we do not perish from the truth.” These are not calls to produce content for an audience; they are invitations to profound engagement with truth and self.

Even creation is now heavily curated by metrics. Poems are optimized for engagement. Music is tailored to specific moods. But art, in its essence, is not engagement; it is invocation. It seeks to summon deeper truths, to ask questions the algorithm can’t answer, to connect us to something beyond the measurable.

To make art is to stand barefoot in mystery—and to respond with courage. To write is to risk being misunderstood. To draw is to embrace the unpolished. This is not inefficiency. This is incarnation—the messy, beautiful process of bringing spirit into form.

Memory and the Refusal to Forget

The curated life often edits memory for coherence. It aestheticizes ancestry, reducing complex family histories to appealing narratives. It arranges sentiment, smoothing over rough edges. But real memory is a covenant with contradiction. It embraces the paradoxical coexistence of joy and sorrow.

John Keats, in his Ode to a Nightingale, confronts the painful reality of transience and loss: “Where youth grows pale, and spectre-thin, and dies…” Memory, in its authentic form, invites this depth, this uncomfortable reckoning with mortality. It is not a mood board. It is a profound reckoning, where pain and glory are allowed to dwell together.

In Jewish tradition, memory is deeply embodied. To remember is not merely to recall a fact; it is to retell, to reenact, to immerse oneself in the experience of the past, remaining in covenant with it. Memory is the very architecture of belonging. It does not simplify complex histories. Instead, it deepens understanding, allowing generations to draw wisdom and resilience from their heritage.

Curation flattens, reducing multifaceted experiences to digestible snippets. Memory expands, connecting us to the vast tapestry of time. And in the sacred act of memory, we remember how grace once broke into our lives, how hope emerged from despair. We remember so we can genuinely hope again, with a resilient awareness of past struggles and unexpected mercies.

The Wilderness Within

The final frontier of uncuration is profoundly internal: the wilderness within. This is the unmapped territory of our own consciousness, the unruly depths that resist control.

Søren Kierkegaard called it dread—not fear, but the trembling before the abyss of possibility. Nietzsche called it becoming—not progression, but metamorphosis. This inner wilderness resists styling, yearns for presence instead of performance, and asks for silence instead of applause.

Even our inner lives are at risk of being paved over. Advertisements and algorithmic suggestions speak to us in our own voice, subtly shaping desires. Choices feel like intuition—but are often mere inference. The landscape of our interiority, once a refuge for untamed thought, is being meticulously mapped and paved over for commercial exploitation, leaving little room for genuine self-discovery.

Simone Weil observed: “We do not obtain the most precious gifts by going in search of them, but by waiting for them.” The uncurated life begins in this waiting—in the ache of not knowing, in the quiet margins where true signals can penetrate. It’s in the embrace of uncertainty that authentic selfhood can emerge.

Let the Soul Wander

“Imagination may be compared to Adam’s dream—he awoke and found it truth.” — Keats

To live beyond curation is to choose vulnerability. It is to walk toward complexity, to embrace nuances. It is to let the soul wander freely and to cultivate patience for genuine waiting. It is to choose mystery over mastery, acknowledging truths revealed in surrender, not control.

Lord Byron found joy in pathless woods. Percy Bysshe Shelley sang alone, discovering his creative spirit. William Wordsworth found holiness in leaves. John Keats touched eternity through birdsong. Friedrich Nietzsche walked, disrupted, and lived with intensity.

None of these lives were curated. They were entered—fully, messily, without a predefined script. They were lives lived in engagement with the raw, untamed forces of self and world.

“Perhaps / The truth depends on a walk around a lake, / A composing as the body tires, a stop. // To see hepatica, a stop to watch. / A definition growing certain…” Wallace Stevens

So let us make pilgrimage, not cultivate a profile. Let us write without audience, prioritizing authentic expression. Let us wander into ambiguity, embracing the unknown. And let us courageously welcome rupture, contradiction, and depth, for these are the crucibles of genuine transformation.

And there—at the edge of control, in the sacred wilderness within, where algorithms cannot reach—
Let us find what no curated feed can ever give.
And be profoundly changed by it.

THIS ESSAY WAS WRITTEN AND EDITED BY INTELLICUREAN USING AI

Book Reviews, Business, Economics, Reviews, Technology

‘It’s Time To Question The Relationship Between Technology & Capitalism’

The Mechanic and the Luddite book cover

LSE REVIEW OF BOOKS (March 24, 2025):

With the ongoing dismantling of the US administrative state by a handful of ill-informed programmers, I would like to declare the current moment a failure of tech criticism. For decades, academics in the social sciences and humanities have built a critical edifice that challenged the cultural hegemony propping up the US tech industry, an industry grounded in science fiction parables, speculative fiction, “rationalist” dreaming, and an endless stream of technological solutionism. We can now count “AI safety” as a new field of knowledge production about technology captured by industry interests. I do not attribute blame to tech critics for this state, but now is a good moment to stop and reflect: what are we doing? In being so caught up in cataloguing new horrors of the digital age, we have been unable to stop its worst excesses. We need a new way of thinking about that project, of how we catalogue the problems of technology and hope that corporate appeals or policymaking will address them.  

While there is plenty of tech criticism around, much of it is not comfortable explicitly labelling itself as anti-capitalist tout court.

In his new book, The Mechanic and the Luddite, Jathan Sadowski provides a model of “ruthless criticism” that might meet that requirement. As he explains, many academics have created criticism isolated from the source of its complaints: “Too much of the tech criticism that exists today is happy to ignore, if not remain ignorant of, the links between technology and capitalism. We can see this anodyne style in the sudden burst of work on “AI ethics,” which is content with offering superficial tweaks to, say, the training data for an algorithm without ever challenging how that algorithm will be used or why it should exist at all” (24). In contrast, he calls for more materialist analysis of technology and the internet – that is, Marxism.  

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The Mechanic and the Luddite: A Ruthless Criticism of Technology and Capitalism. Jathan Sadowski. University of California Press. 2025.

Jathan Sadowski’s The Mechanic and the Luddite critiques technology’s entanglement with capitalism, advocating for “ruthless criticism” of this dual system in order to dismantle it. Sadowski’s forthright materialist approach and argument for actionable, anti-capitalist tech critique make the book an original and vital read for our times, writes Sam DiBella.

Essays, Technology

Technology Essay: ‘The Unbelievable Scale Of AI’s Pirated-Books Problem’

THE ATLANTIC (March 20, 2025):

When employees at Meta started developing their flagship AI model, Llama 3, they faced a simple ethical question. The program would need to be trained on a huge amount of high-quality writing to be competitive with products such as ChatGPT, and acquiring all of that text legally could take time. Should they just pirate it instead?

Meta employees spoke with multiple companies about licensing books and research papers, but they weren’t thrilled with their options. This “seems unreasonably expensive,” wrote one research scientist on an internal company chat, in reference to one potential deal, according to court records. A Llama-team senior manager added that this would also be an “incredibly slow” process: “They take like 4+ weeks to deliver data.” In a message found in another legal filing, a director of engineering noted another downside to this approach: “The problem is that people don’t realize that if we license one single book, we won’t be able to lean into fair use strategy,” a reference to a possible legal defense for using copyrighted books to train AI.

‘…generative-AI chatbots are presented as oracles that have “learned” from their training data and often don’t cite sources (or cite imaginary sources). This decontextualizes knowledge, prevents humans from collaborating, and makes it harder for writers and researchers to build a reputation and engage in healthy intellectual debate.”

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One of the biggest questions of the digital age is how to manage the flow of knowledge and creative work in a way that benefits society the most. LibGen and other such pirated libraries make information more accessible, allowing people to read original work without paying for it. Yet generative-AI companies such as Meta have gone a step further: Their goal is to absorb the work into profitable technology products that compete with the originals. Will these be better for society than the human dialogue they are already starting to replace?

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Alex Reisner is a contributing writer at The Atlantic.

Book Reviews, Social Media, Technology

Book Reviews: ‘How Big Tech Mined Our Attention And Broke Our Politics’

THE NEW YORK TIMES BOOK REVIEW , February 9, 2025 Issue (By Jennifer Szalai)

On April 15, 1912, shortly after the Titanic collided with an iceberg off the coast of Newfoundland, the ship’s radio operator issued a distress call — a formidable display of the power of the radio, a new technology. But a lack of regulation in the United States meant that a cascade of amateur radio messages clogged the airwaves with speculation and rumors, and official transmissions had a hard time getting through. It was an early-20th-century form of information overload. “The false reports sowed confusion among would-be rescuers,” Nicholas Carr writes in “Superbloom.” “Fifteen hundred people died.”

SUPERBLOOM: How Technologies of Connection Tear Us Apart, by Nicholas Carr

THE SIRENS’ CALL: How Attention Became the World’s Most Endangered Resource, by Chris Hayes

Carr has been sounding the alarm over new information technology for years, most famously in “The Shallows” (2010), in which he warned about what the internet was doing to our brains. “Superbloom” is an extension of his jeremiad into the social media era.

Carr’s new book happens to be published the same day as “The Sirens’ Call,” by the MSNBC host Chris Hayes, which traces how big tech has made enormous profits and transformed our politics by harvesting our attention. Both authors argue that something fundamental to us, as humans, is being exploited for inhuman ends. We are primed to seek out new information; yet our relentless curiosity makes us ill equipped for the infinite scroll of the information age, which we indulge in to our detriment.

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