David Spurrett
LightNews LightNews
banner
doctorspurt.bsky.social
David Spurrett
@doctorspurt.bsky.social
1.9K followers 1.3K following 620 posts
Philosopher, working on evolution of mechanisms of action selection, and their variously situated subversion. https://davidspurrett.com/
Posts Replies Media Videos
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I just read and enjoyed "Blood in the Machine: : The origins of the rebellion against big tech" by @bcmerchant.bsky.social
I didn't know enough about the Luddites, and this was a good start. The parallels between industrial revolution & Silicon Valley are striking.
Book cover of "Blood in the Machine: The origins of the rebellion against big tech" by Brian Merchant.
November 6, 2025 at 5:28 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I just finished Glenn Harrison and Don Ross's "The Gambling Animal" (2025). It's a banger, about the evolution of life and mind from the perspective of risk and risk management. @don-rosseconomist.bsky.social profilebooks.com/work/the-gam...
Cover image of "The Gambling Animal", a book by Glenn Harrison and Don Ross.
October 28, 2025 at 7:10 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Inspired by the great 'Chump Chomps Champ' headline from years ago...
Image from Trump's AI video of himself dropping feces on No Kings protestors. Overlaid text says "Breaking News: Perp Poops on Polis"
October 20, 2025 at 9:15 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I re-read Lewis Mumford's 1964 "On Authoritarian and Democratic Technics". (It was one of those 'set out to fix a footnote, emerge hours later' expeditions for me...)
Let us fool ourselves no longer. At the very moment Western nations threw off the ancient regime of absolute government, operating under a once-divine king, they were restoring this same system in a far more effective form in their technology, reintroducing coercions of a military character no less strict in the organization of a factory than in that of the new drilled, uniformed, and regimented army. During the transitional stages of the last two centuries, the ultimate tendency of this system might be in doubt, for in many areas there were strong democratic reactions; but with the knitting together of a scientific ideology, itself liberated from theological restrictions or humanistic purposes, authoritarian technics found an instrument at hand that has now given it absolute command of physical energies of cosmic dimensions. The inventors of nuclear bombs, space rockets, and computers are the pyramid builders of our own age: psychologically inflated by a similar myth of unqualified power, boasting through their science of their increasing omnipotence, if not omniscience, moved by obsessions and compulsions no less irrational than those of earlier absolute systems: particularly the notion that the system itself must be expanded, at whatever eventual cost to life.
September 29, 2025 at 10:41 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
The closing sentences of Zadie Smith's "On Optimism and Despair" (from November 2016). Full text in her book "Feel Free" and here on NY Review: www.nybooks.com/articles/201...
If novelists know anything it’s that individual citizens are internally plural: they have within them the full range of behavioral possibilities. They are like complex musical scores from which certain melodies can be teased out and others ignored or suppressed, depending, at least in part, on who is doing the conducting. At this moment, all over the world—and most recently in America—the conductors standing in front of this human orchestra have only the meanest and most banal melodies in mind. Here in Germany you will remember these martial songs; they are not a very distant memory. But there is no place on earth where they have not been played at one time or another. Those of us who remember, too, a finer music must try now to play it, and encourage others, if we can, to sing along.
September 14, 2025 at 1:14 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I emptied the inbox of an email account that shouldn't exist any more. (It contained nothing but generic notices to all users, since the project it was linked to ended 2 years ago.) When I had done so, the fatuous descendant of the paperclip popped up to say this.
Image of automated message saying "What a productive day! You've accomplished a lot".
July 14, 2025 at 1:13 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I made this for a previous Ted Cruz vacation ruckus. I am too lazy (and not pretentious enough, maybe) to update it to say "Straight off to Cecropia".
Pastiche album cover with picture of Ted Cruz in an airport. The band name is "Straight off to Cancun" and the title is "Fuck the Polis".
July 10, 2025 at 12:46 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
This fudge will mess you right up.
Package labelled "Mind Crisp Fudge".
June 28, 2025 at 2:47 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Kilimanjaro national park. (Walking down from the ghastly scree on the upper slopes into the greenery and life below, as the air got thicker.)
Landscape from Kilimanjaro national park.
June 22, 2025 at 10:40 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Well, keep on awaiting, suckers.
Screen grab of email header with subject line "Awaiting for your valuable submission - The Journal of Hepatology".
May 6, 2025 at 12:04 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Lovely:
(“Justice Alito dissents” is a welcome legal phrase in any supreme court judgment, and it perhaps should be set to music to the tune of “Miss Otis Regrets”.)
April 22, 2025 at 12:53 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Actually reading Thorstein Veblen. (Easy to think you have the general idea of a 'leisure class' and 'conspicuous consumption' and not to bother looking at the details.) The chapter on "Dress as an Expression of the Pecuniary Culture" is ... lively.
At the stage of economic development at which the women were still in the full sense the property of the men, the performance of conspicuous leisure and consumption came to be part of the services required of them. The women being not their own masters, obvious expenditure and leisure on their part would redound to the credit of their master rather than to their own credit; and therefore the more expensive and the more obviously unproductive the women of the household are, the more creditable and more effective for the purpose of reputability of the household or its head will their life be. So much so that the women have been required not only to afford evidence of a life of leisure, but even to disable themselves for useful activity.
March 31, 2025 at 10:45 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
My timeline be like...
The 'Ermagherd Sner' meme, but with Saul Kripke's face in place of the leaping animal in the original.
January 5, 2025 at 8:57 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I'm slack-jawed in awe here. Need a break before I can start the third book.
Cover of Elana Ferrante's novel "The Story of a New Name".
December 19, 2024 at 8:49 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Oh my word. Just shatteringly excellent. (Happily I have all four volumes with me.)
Cover of Elena Ferrante's novel "My Brilliant Friend".
December 16, 2024 at 11:10 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
And then there were four (Draft chapters of 'Engines of Hostility')...
Photograph of four stacks of printed paper on a wooden table.
December 6, 2024 at 3:06 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I just read (and really liked) Elena Ferrante's "The Lying Life of Adults". I'm getting excited about my plan to start her four Neapolitan novels as the summer vacation begins.
Book cover for Elena Ferrante's novel "The Lying Life of Adults".
December 3, 2024 at 2:49 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Frank gives it the full 2% (on a warm day).
Cat lying stretched out on his back on a sofa.
November 22, 2024 at 1:09 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
I started reading Arthur Miller's memoir "Timebends", published in 1987. This paragraph is in his introduction.
“It is different now, of course; despair has become a veritable obligatory style, the American future lost in its past. The armies of the right call up a “Christian” outrage at a government that they see as elitist, secular, and liberal, and the left struggles with a confused distrust of government that seems destined to corruption by big business; these two mutually hostile camps leave any conceivable coexistence within an organized society in question. One did not imagine that so much of social existence and even lawfulness depended so heavily on mere good faith. Not since the sectarian fights within the radical left wing movements of the thirties has such violent hatred and paranoid suspicion ruled mainstream political intercourse, this time presided over by right wing radicals calling themselves conservatives, and liberals trying to sound as conservative as possible.”
November 6, 2024 at 5:36 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Advertise your account with just one image.
Me at a student party wearing a bear suit, with a bright orange and green necktie, sunglasses and holding a drink.
October 20, 2024 at 5:22 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
The 'girl explaining' meme image, with text quoting the final sentence of Quine's 'Two Dogmas of Empiricism'.
October 20, 2024 at 4:22 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Clip of Kenneth Williams with a surprised face.
October 18, 2024 at 10:28 AM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
On AI tools that can trawl LinkedIn and submit job applications on your behalf.
www.404media.co/email/df2c73...
The sudden explosion in popularity of AI Hawk means that we now live in a world where people are using AI-generated resumes and cover letters to automatically apply for jobs, many of which will be reviewed by automated AI software (and where people are sometimes interviewed by AI), creating a bizarre loop where humans have essentially been removed from the job application and hiring process. Essentially, robots are writing cover letters for other robots to read, with uncertain effects for human beings who apply to jobs the old fashioned way.
October 10, 2024 at 6:39 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Is this ... *impact*?
Notification that "we found a recent chapter that cited you". The work that supposedly cites me is a chapter titled "An economic framework for discussing antimicrobial agent use in shrimp farming".
October 10, 2024 at 3:14 PM
doctorspurt.bsky.social
Still of Bambi, a cartoon deer, lying on the ground with a beatific smile. Text added says "dude wut".
October 6, 2024 at 1:38 PM