Pack Experience


Interesting article on how we navigate through life in packs or small group of people.

Look around. Packs of humans are everywhere. Clusters of people riding escalators. People standing in for groups in ticket queues. Mothers ordering meals for children at restaurants. Families clearing immigration together at airports. Groups of people playing sports. Packs backstop all of social reality. When other levels of social reality unravel and fail, pack realities get stronger. Your emergency preparedness plan — for floods, earthquakes, hurricanes or whatever is the big risk in your neck of the woods — is almost certainly a pack-level plan that includes family, neighbors, and friends. Pack realities are much stronger in countries, like India, where higher levels of social reality are particularly weak.

The complete article

Venkatesh Rao — Ribbonfarm

HOW TO KILL PEOPLE: A PROBLEM OF DESIGN


Disruptive innovation is causing social polarization through the decimation of jobs, mass surveillance, and algorithmic confusion. It facilitates the fragmentation of societies by creating antisocial tech monopolies that spread bubbled resentment, change cities, magnify shade, and maximize poorly paid freelance work. The effects of these social and technological disruptions include nationalist, sometimes
nativist, fascist, or ultra-religious mass movements.[10] Creative disruption, fueled by automation and cybernetic control, runs in parallel with an age of political fragmentation. The forces of extreme capital, turbocharged with tribal and fundamentalist hatred, reorganize within financials and filter bubbles.

The complete article

Hito Steyerl — R/D

The Most Multilingual Countries?


multilingualism20pic

How many languages can you speak?
How many languages your country speaks?
Okay, keep it by yourself.
I believe most of world’s people are at least bilingual, either naturally or academically, even many are also polyglots. You can speak two, three or more languages depend on individual basis. Some are monolingual by various reasons, such as, he or she think that everybody learns their language, so that they don’t need effort to master other languages or another reason is little or almost no contact with other languages. In my opinion, being at least bilingual is important as it will give you plus score and getting more opportunities in many fields.

Many countries basically have multilingual societies, but some are sadly monolingual as I ever read like the US, around 75% of its population speak English only, and maybe others say they are in sad state of affairs. Speaking at least two languages are believed to improve brain efficiency and performance, and luckily more than half people on the world are bilingual.

Read the complete article here

Image source