Faculty Lounge Chatter

I'm assembling this posting from my contributions to one of the Telegram faculty lounge channels.

Cultagory Studies

Required viewing in my neck of the woods, if you're studying Cultagory Theory the way I do. We study the meaning of the word "spin doctor" (which is open to all genders by the way).

For example, we study "mad men" (Madison Avenue advertising gurus) in connection with The Hunger Project, the 1980s attempt to break through crufty programming. As I wrote in an email recently (earlier today):

What few understood about Erhard's Hunger Project, B. Fuller on the advisory board, was that it was all about using Mad Man brainwashing techniques (aka commercial advertising) to put on ads (like NFL ads, big TV) talking about how we had it within our means, physically and logistically, to end world hunger by the year 2000, and all that we lacked was the political will.

In other words, we were gonna hire the best and the brightest advertising firms to turn the brainwashing cannons in a different direction, to "pivot" if you will.

I thought that sounded bold and innovative and it appealed to my spin doctor side. "Yeah, that could work" I was thinking. This was around the early 1980s.

But lets not imagine all the pro advertiser pioneers were New York based. On the contrary, some argue that the real headquarters for this art (and science?) was (and is?) in Chicago.

Quakernomics

Radio Voice Synergetics

AI-generated; Made with NotebookLM

Geek Lore

:: TempleOS in 100 Seconds ::

more with less

home of open source software

:: ASCII art ::

Big Brains

excerpt and link to Substack

Silicon Forest != Silicon Valley