Twitteretter

Great social, political and philosophical ideas used to be brewed at meeting venues where intellectually engaged people would gather regularly to debate and discuss. My father, a philosophy teacher and political activist, used to have one such group, where philosophy, ethics and sociology would be discussed, providing fuel for the books and articles that several members were regularly publishing. Ideas are developed, shaped and tuned by debate and presentation, even hearing yourself present your own thinking to others allows you to further it. These environments are fertile ground on which the Marxist understanding of capitalism, neoliberalism and many philosophical and ethical currents were sowed and harvested. I am missing this custom with our generation, and certainly with millennials, more used to communicating and dialogue via apps. They may exist, and I may just not be aware. If they do not, we will struggle to develop new thinking with a potential to change the society we live i...

Science fiction books have frequently featured gadgets which would translate different languages in real time. This was a cool idea (the weirdest would most likely be the Babel fish you insert in your ear in Douglas Adams’ ‘Hitchhiker Guide to the Galaxy’). Today, it is no longer an idea, and the technology is already available. It combines voice recognition and text translation and it is deployed through several hardware set ups, typically earpieces with a mic. It does not work perfectly yet, as anyone who uses Google Translate will imagine, but it is improving all the time. Our first reaction, when reading about it, is to imagine how helpful it would be on holidays, or even business meetings. But what I am really interested in is seeing whether it will foster understanding between cultures by allowing us to go directly to the source without mediation, to discuss politics, economy, etc. without language barriers. How much more informative would an unmediated Putin or Qi Jinping be? Le...