🔗 My web this week - W42

knowledge of the world isn’t the same as experiencing the world

Knowledge of the world isn’t the same as experiencing the world.  Why does online connection so often seem to lack aliveness, as compared to encounters with the world of flesh-and-blood people, nature, and material things? This paragraph from Karl Ove Knausgaard struck me as eloquent: “It feels as if the whole world has been transformed into images of the world,” he writes, “and has thus been drawn into the human realm, which now encompasses everything. There is no place, no thing, no person or phenomenon that I cannot obtain as image or information. One might think this adds substance to the world, since one knows more about it, not less, but the opposite is true: it empties the world, it becomes thinner. That’s because knowledge of the world and experience of the world are two fundamentally different things. While knowledge has no particular time or place and can be transmitted, experience is tied to a specific time and place and can never be repeated. For the same reason, it also can’t be predicted. Exactly those two dimensions – the unrepeatable and the unpredictable – are what technology abolishes. The feeling is one of loss of the world.” Apart from anything else, another good reason to get outside, and soon.

Original post: gurupanguji.com

crisis has a way of stripping everything to its essential

There’s something kind of cruel about the way wisdom works. It refuses to arrive during the easy seasons, when we have space to receive it gracefully. Instead, it waits. It lurks in the margins of our carefully constructed lives, patient as winter, until the moment when everything we thought we knew begins to fracture—and then, only then, does it step forward with its terrible gifts. … There’s a reason for this strange timing, I think. When life is smooth, when our systems are working, when the ground beneath us feels solid, we have the luxury of operating on autopilot. We can live in our assumptions, our inherited patterns, our comfortable half-truths. We mistake familiarity for wisdom, routine for purpose. We don’t question what we don’t need to question. But crisis has a way of stripping everything down to what’s actually essential. When the scaffolding falls away—when we lose the job, the relationship, the version of ourselves we thought was permanent—suddenly we’re forced to examine what remains. What we reach for when everything else is gone. What we protect when we can’t protect everything. What we discover we can survive without, and what we learn we cannot.

Original post: gurupanguji.com

passkeys are good for us, really. even when I am wary of the future…

I don’t know. I am both a user of passkeys and generally wary of making myself overly dependent on tech giants and complex solutions. I’m noticing an increased reliance and potential loss of access to my own data. This does abstractly concern me. Not to the degree that it changes anything I’m doing, but still. As annoying as managing usernames and passwords was, I don’t think I have ever spent so much time authenticating on a daily basis. The systems that we now need to interface with for authentication are vast and complex. This might just be the path we’re going. However, it is also one where we maybe want to reflect a little bit on whether this is really what we want.

Original post: gurupanguji.com