I’d characterize black mirror as half twilight zone, half drunk glaswegian in a room positing hypotheticals like “what if you had to charge your dog instead of walk it” while the netflix writers take notes.
Does draw some thematic elements from the genre, but it’s approaching parody in how those themes are handled.
Giving Language, Truth, and Logic a re-read since it’s been a while, highly recommended if you want to read the mistakes of a very smart man. Approx 50 years after he wrote this he denounced it, but it’s still a great read and it’s a good exercise to find what’s wrong with it.
This book has been used to teach business ethics
“Seek mutually beneficial relationships”
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Examine what it means to be human as taught by an intelligent talking gorilla.
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This is my current read. I am taking my time, because it is such an important book.
The bad news from Sally Kohn: We all hate, and if we think we don’t, we’re lying to ourselves. Kohn’s good news: With fearless scrutiny of our personal histories, motives and prejudices, and by connecting with those who are different, we can hate less. To launch this growth, she insists, we must be willing to admit to the biases that fuel our hatred.
Washington Post book review
Learn to love your trolls, so one can understand them and then find one point of common ground.
Only then one can start to heal the hatred that pervades the internet.
Sure, that might work in a respectful environment. In regards to political argumentation I always try to find an “out”. For example if a bully is just going on and on and pressuring everyone with his ‘brilliant’ opinions during a company outing or event, I will wait for the right moment to strike and expose a simple lapse in his logic and embarrass him in front of everyone. After that I simply announce to the audience that I am ordering a round of drinks to lighten the mood and get everyone on my side so I won’t be stuck talking to him for the rest of the night.
This one is good if you want an overview of modernity for greater context without trying to piece it all together yourself from dozens of dense, translated books.
The author is a Marxist, but the books is (I would say) an apolitical account of how modernity developed. I think it would be a good precursor to The Gulag Archipelago (mentioned earlier by @SesameStreetThug) since it provides some context for the Communist Manifesto.
Interesting. Yeah, it seems to be the more work does that the more I want to put it down because I don’t have access to some of the obscure texts they reference.
I haven’t tackled political texts recently but this will be on the top of my list when I return to it.
The majority of books written by Greg Egan.
He is on the diamond end of the sci-fi hardness scale, his books feature transhumanism, mind uploading, acorporeality, generating minds from random noise, mind cloning and more.
Arguably his books are not philosophy, per se, but I would still recommend the vast majority of them, and they do prod you to think about philosophical questions.
Special recommendations for Diaspora, Schild’s Ladder, Permutation City and Distress. (not sure if they are still in print, if not you can grab an EPUB copy from Libgen (dot) io)
Also might add some novels from Peter Watts here, although I have my reservations about his works, they have been memorable.