A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Create Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age PDF Download

Author: Jeffrey Tucker
Publisher: Laissez Faire Books
ISBN: 1621290409
Category : Communication
Languages : en
Pages : 373

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Book Description
"A Beautiful Anarchy: How to Create Your Own Civilization in the Digital Age is Jeffrey Tucker's rhapsodic hymn to the digital age, and a call to use the tools it has granted us to enhance human freedom. and reduce and end intellectual dependency on the state. It shows that every truly valuable aspect of our lives extends not from politics and the regime, but from our own voluntary choices. The aims of A Beautiful Anarchy are: 1) to draw attention to the reality that surrounds us but we hardly ever bother to notice, much less celebrate; 2) to urge a willingness to embrace this new world as a means of improving our lives regardless of what the anachronistic institutions of power wish us to do; 3) to elucidate the causes and effects that have created this new world; and 4) to urge more of the good institutions that have created this beautiful anarchy. This books covers the uses of social media, the blessed end of the nation-state, the way the government is destroying the physical world, the role of commerce in saving humanity, the depredations of nation-state monetary policy, the evil of war and the lie of national security, and private societies as agents of liberation. And it offers a hopeful prognosis for a creative and productive world without central control. The book is topical, pithy, and anecdotal, yet points to the big ideas and the larger picture to help frame the great economic and political debates of our time."--Book description, Amazon.com.

Author: Eric Schmidt
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781848546226
Category : Business & Economics
Languages : en
Pages : 0

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'This is the most important - and fascinating - book yet written about how the digital age will affect our world' Walter Isaacson, author of Steve Jobs From two leading thinkers, the widely anticipated book that describes a new, hugely connected world of the future, full of challenges and benefits which are ours to meet and harness. The New Digital Age is the product of an unparalleled collaboration: full of the brilliant insights of one of Silicon Valley's great innovators - what Bill Gates was to Microsoft and Steve Jobs was to Apple, Schmidt (along with Larry Page and Sergey Brin) was to Google - and the Director of Google Ideas, Jared Cohen, formerly an advisor to both Secretaries of State Condoleezza Rice and Hillary Clinton. Never before has the future been so vividly and transparently imagined. From technologies that will change lives (information systems that greatly increase productivity, safety and our quality of life, thought-controlled motion technology that can revolutionise medical procedures, and near-perfect translation technology that allows us to have more diversified interactions) to our most important future considerations (curating our online identity and fighting those who would do harm with it) to the widespread political change that will transform the globe (through transformations in conflict, increasingly active and global citizenries, a new wave of cyber-terrorism and states operating simultaneously in the physical and virtual realms) to the ever present threats to our privacy and security, Schmidt and Cohen outline in great detail and scope all the promise and peril awaiting us in the coming decades. A breakthrough book - pragmatic, inspirational and totally fascinating. Whether a government, a business or an individual, we must understand technology if we want to understand the future. 'A brilliant guidebook for the next century . . . Schmidt and Cohen offer a dazzling glimpse into how the new digital revolution is changing our lives' Richard Branson

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category :
Languages : en
Pages : 88

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The Bulletin of the Atomic Scientists is the premier public resource on scientific and technological developments that impact global security. Founded by Manhattan Project Scientists, the Bulletin's iconic "Doomsday Clock" stimulates solutions for a safer world.

Author: Robert D. Kaplan
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 0399591060
Category : Political Science
Languages : en
Pages : 369

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“[An] elegantly layered exploration of Europe’s past and future . . . a multifaceted masterpiece.”—The Wall Street Journal “A lovely, personal journey around the Adriatic, in which Robert Kaplan revisits places and peoples he first encountered decades ago.”—Peter Frankopan, author of The Silk Roads ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR: The New Yorker In this insightful travelogue, Robert D. Kaplan, geopolitical expert and bestselling author of Balkan Ghosts and The Revenge of Geography, turns his perceptive eye to a region that for centuries has been a meeting point of cultures, trade, and ideas. He undertakes a journey around the Adriatic Sea, through Italy, Slovenia, Croatia, Montenegro, Albania, and Greece, to reveal that far more is happening in the region than most news stories let on. Often overlooked, the Adriatic is in fact at the center of the most significant challenges of our time, including the rise of populist politics, the refugee crisis, and battles over the control of energy resources. And it is once again becoming a global trading hub that will determine Europe’s relationship with the rest of the world as China and Russia compete for dominance in its ports. Kaplan explores how the region has changed over his three decades of observing it as a journalist. He finds that to understand both the historical and contemporary Adriatic is to gain a window on the future of Europe as a whole, and he unearths a stark truth: The era of populism is an epiphenomenon—a symptom of the age of nationalism coming to an end. Instead, the continent is returning to alignments of the early modern era as distinctions between East and West meet and break down within the Adriatic countries and ultimately throughout Europe. With a brilliant cross-pollination of history, literature, art, architecture, and current events, in Adriatic, Kaplan demonstrates that this unique region that exists at the intersection of civilizations holds revelatory truths for the future of global affairs.

Author: Roy Scranton
Publisher: City Lights Publishers
ISBN: 087286670X
Category : Science
Languages : en
Pages : 146

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"In Learning to Die in the Anthropocene, Roy Scranton draws on his experiences in Iraq to confront the grim realities of climate change. The result is a fierce and provocative book."--Elizabeth Kolbert, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of The Sixth Extinction: An Unnatural History "Roy Scranton's Learning to Die in the Anthropocene presents, without extraneous bullshit, what we must do to survive on Earth. It's a powerful, useful, and ultimately hopeful book that more than any other I've read has the ability to change people's minds and create change. For me, it crystallizes and expresses what I've been thinking about and trying to get a grasp on. The economical way it does so, with such clarity, sets the book apart from most others on the subject."--Jeff VanderMeer, author of the Southern Reach trilogy "Roy Scranton lucidly articulates the depth of the climate crisis with an honesty that is all too rare, then calls for a reimagined humanism that will help us meet our stormy future with as much decency as we can muster. While I don't share his conclusions about the potential for social movements to drive ambitious mitigation, this is a wise and important challenge from an elegant writer and original thinker. A critical intervention."--Naomi Klein, author of This Changes Everything: Capitalism vs. the Climate "Concise, elegant, erudite, heartfelt & wise."--Amitav Ghosh, author of Flood of Fire "War veteran and journalist Roy Scranton combines memoir, philosophy, and science writing to craft one of the definitive documents of the modern era."--The Believer Best Books of 2015 Coming home from the war in Iraq, US Army private Roy Scranton thought he'd left the world of strife behind. Then he watched as new calamities struck America, heralding a threat far more dangerous than ISIS or Al Qaeda: Hurricane Katrina, Superstorm Sandy, megadrought--the shock and awe of global warming. Our world is changing. Rising seas, spiking temperatures, and extreme weather imperil global infrastructure, crops, and water supplies. Conflict, famine, plagues, and riots menace from every quarter. From war-stricken Baghdad to the melting Arctic, human-caused climate change poses a danger not only to political and economic stability, but to civilization itself . . . and to what it means to be human. Our greatest enemy, it turns out, is ourselves. The warmer, wetter, more chaotic world we now live in--the Anthropocene--demands a radical new vision of human life. In this bracing response to climate change, Roy Scranton combines memoir, reportage, philosophy, and Zen wisdom to explore what it means to be human in a rapidly evolving world, taking readers on a journey through street protests, the latest findings of earth scientists, a historic UN summit, millennia of geological history, and the persistent vitality of ancient literature. Expanding on his influential New York Times essay (the #1 most-emailed article the day it appeared, and selected for Best American Science and Nature Writing 2014), Scranton responds to the existential problem of global warming by arguing that in order to survive, we must come to terms with our mortality. Plato argued that to philosophize is to learn to die. If that’s true, says Scranton, then we have entered humanity’s most philosophical age--for this is precisely the problem of the Anthropocene. The trouble now is that we must learn to die not as individuals, but as a civilization. Roy Scranton has published in the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, Rolling Stone, Boston Review, and Theory and Event, and has been interviewed on NPR's Fresh Air, among other media.

Author: Kurt Andersen
Publisher: Random House
ISBN: 1588366871
Category : History
Languages : en
Pages : 481

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NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER • “The single most important explanation, and the fullest explanation, of how Donald Trump became president of the United States . . . nothing less than the most important book that I have read this year.”—Lawrence O’Donnell How did we get here? In this sweeping, eloquent history of America, Kurt Andersen shows that what’s happening in our country today—this post-factual, “fake news” moment we’re all living through—is not something new, but rather the ultimate expression of our national character. America was founded by wishful dreamers, magical thinkers, and true believers, by hucksters and their suckers. Fantasy is deeply embedded in our DNA. Over the course of five centuries—from the Salem witch trials to Scientology to the Satanic Panic of the 1980s, from P. T. Barnum to Hollywood and the anything-goes, wild-and-crazy sixties, from conspiracy theories to our fetish for guns and obsession with extraterrestrials—our love of the fantastic has made America exceptional in a way that we've never fully acknowledged. From the start, our ultra-individualism was attached to epic dreams and epic fantasies—every citizen was free to believe absolutely anything, or to pretend to be absolutely anybody. With the gleeful erudition and tell-it-like-it-is ferocity of a Christopher Hitchens, Andersen explores whether the great American experiment in liberty has gone off the rails. Fantasyland could not appear at a more perfect moment. If you want to understand Donald Trump and the culture of twenty-first-century America, if you want to know how the lines between reality and illusion have become dangerously blurred, you must read this book. NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF THE YEAR BY THE SAN FRANCISCO CHRONICLE “This is a blockbuster of a book. Take a deep breath and dive in.”—Tom Brokaw “[An] absorbing, must-read polemic . . . a provocative new study of America’s cultural history.”—Newsday “Compelling and totally unnerving.”—The Village Voice “A frighteningly convincing and sometimes uproarious picture of a country in steep, perhaps terminal decline that would have the founding fathers weeping into their beards.”—The Guardian “This is an important book—the indispensable book—for understanding America in the age of Trump.”—Walter Isaacson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of Leonardo da Vinci

Author: Sand Sheff
Publisher: Lulu.com
ISBN: 1257639625
Category : Computers
Languages : en
Pages : 133

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"This book presents a provocative argument of how we came to accept computers into our daily lives, and what the future of this relationship might hold."--Cover [p.4]

Author: Jostein Gaarder
Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
ISBN: 1466804270
Category : Fiction
Languages : en
Pages : 735

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A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Jostein Gaarder's Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrolls in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning—but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

Author: Enrico Manicardi
Publisher:
ISBN: 9781620490174
Category : Civilization
Languages : en
Pages : 337

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Book Description
In clear, impassioned prose, Enrico Manicardi analyzes the evils of our age from their genesis. This or that economic, technological or cultural model is not to blame for our current crisis; the blame lies with economics, technology and culture as such. It is the ideology of fear that makes us afraid. It is the mentality of domination that jeopardizes all of our relationships. In short, the problem is civilization. Through its oppressive classes, values and processes that pervade everyone's life, civilization domesticates us, weakens our perceptiveness and distances us from the living world. We must radically change our way of thinking, feeling and behaving before it's too late-we must dam the flood of devitalization that is washing over us, and return to our wilder natures, both inside and outside ourselves. Manicardi's appeal is crystal clear: if we are to survive we must begin to search inside ourselves, not to celebrate the distant past as if it were a cult, but to return to ourselves, to grip life with our own two hands, and build upon that earlier ecocentric conscience which once held the place of the egocentric conscience now leading us astray. Enrico Manicardi was born in 1966 and is a member of La Scintilla, the Society for Libertarian Culture of Modena. A lawyer and founder of the antiauthoritarian media project "Infection," he has also played guitar and written music for an eponymous band since the 1980s. His lifelong wish has been to live in a free, radically off-kilter, ecologically sound world, one characterized by warm, spontaneous, non-hierarchical relationships rather than those consecrated by the cult of technology. Troubled by the way people have succumbed to a civilization that estranges, domesticates and regulates everything and everyone, he continues to protest against the modern world's project to enslave us. This book augurs the rise of an increasingly harmonious chorus loud enough to put an end to that project.

Author:
Publisher:
ISBN:
Category : Alternative rock music
Languages : en
Pages : 672

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