Personal site & digital garden
Paulo Pinto
Writing, thinking, and tinkering at the intersection of philosophy, culture, and technology.
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The cloud has an address. It is in Lisbon, or in New York, or in Silicon Valley. It consumes water to cool itself. It needs electricity. The meteorological metaphor conceals a factory. A vast factory that transforms files into a new self. #technology
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Addiction is not the pursuit of pleasure. It is the refusal to feel its absence. The difference seems small. It isn’t.
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The Ontology of Presence
Hans Gadamer (art & design school collaboration between Llotja and Amical Wikimedia) - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 3.0There is a necessary “voice” that is shaped by principles of an ontological nature and that renders us, as human beings, privileged entities. This Heideggerian being-there [Dasein] places us before a world that presents itself to us as radical, originary, and that reveals to us at every moment the evidence of our own existence. Thus, our need for interpretation is great—the need to try to understand what surrounds us, ourselves, the other, the fellow being. This dialogical relation is, above all, a relation established within us at a level of universality that, as Gadamer defines it in Truth and Method, “(…) overtakes our willing and doing; it comes upon us, or happens to us” (Gadamer, 1999: 14). We stand, perhaps, before the essential act of human thought, the space in which language acts as the primary form of human life, constructing cultural values and giving shape to a humanity grounded in a profound common accord.
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We are being replaced by machines in what we do. Ultimately, I believe the greatest temptation is to let ourselves be replaced in who we are.
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From Cyberculture to Cultural Industries
Hualien Cultural & Creative Industries Park, Taiwan - Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0In today’s digital abundance, shaped by the network society, the virtual hungers for the real. Cyberculture’s manifestations increasingly spill beyond their binary borders, gradually establishing themselves as levers of a physical visibility that fuels social intervention, creativity, and protest. The citizen - now in an emancipated, postmodern version, networked through the reconfiguration of space and time - interacts with peers and drives knowledge networks that assert themselves ever more forcefully in the public sphere.