1. Pier Paolo Pasolini and Jonas Mekas.

"That summer, that hot Roman summer afternoon, I see you sitting on the curb, waiting for the door to open, & seeing all those movies, yes, that hot Roman summer day. Later.  'Will there be a revolution?' you said, you asked. You stood by the window, in one of those workers' apartment buildings built by Mussolini that you filmed in Mamma Roma. 'Will there be a revolution? 'Yes,' I said, 'we'll do it with our cameras. We'll surround the world with our cameras, the streets, the offices, factories, prisons—everything will be revealed, yes,' I said. You stood, you still stood by the window, looking out. A pause. Then: 'Yes,' you said, 'but for how many years now, for how many years have we had typewriters ... But did the typewriters produce a revolution?'"

2. Hopes for robot service workers are a bit too high.

"Restaurant owners all share the same headaches－customers complaining about errors made by waiters in taking their orders, slow service because the waiters are too busy, and the high cost of hiring staff. These problems simply will not happen with robots. They are designed to provide services strictly according to the orders they have received and will never complain about being exhausted. More importantly, they are a good way for promotion as robot-themed restaurants are still rare although there have been media reports about robot-themed restaurants in Chengdu, capital of Southwest China's Sichuan province and in Harbin, capital of Northeast China's Heilongjiang province."

+ I love the assumption that robot-themed restaurants are/will be a thing.

3. 50 years after the publication of his landmark work, re-evaluating the anti-Marc Andreessen, Jacques Ellul. (With special reference to his Christianity.)

"Ellul made clear earlier in the book that human adaptation to technique is certainly possible and is in fact constantly occurring. He does not argue, as some critics of technology do, that people are always subject to various techniques — we do often govern them: we operate machines, we construct roads, we print newspapers. But even in governing techniques, we adapt to their demands and structures, and our activities are gradually shaped by them. The Technological Society raises the question of whether this social adaptation is as desirable as we tend to assume it will be."

4. Why 19th-century newspapers did listicles.

"The information literature in American newspapers stems from and contributes to the industrialization of knowledge during the nineteenth-century. Editors frequently introduce these pieces as potentially 'useful' to their readers or some subset thereof (e.g. 'useful to our female readers'). This formulation of usefulness brings to mind Franco Moretti’s theorization of usefulness in The Bourgeois—useful knowledge can be operationalized. The informational snippets in newspapers operate in diverse ways. In some cases, they direct physical work, as with the recipe for paste. In other cases, they provide functional signals of broad education, as in the historical tidbits. They are useful, in other words, as aids to the rhetoric and appropriate interests of middle-class social and professional life."

5. One reason the military might use humans in Iron Man-like suits instead of robots: they are less hackable.

"The use of remotely controlled systems tends to limit the situational awareness of the human directing the system and leads to slower operation. One observer described the DARPA competition as looking like “extremely slow tai chi.” Remote control also adds the requirement for reliable communications, which are a challenge on a ship and would only be exacerbated in a damage-control situation. Additionally, while network vulnerability will be of concern to both exosuit and robotic approaches, an exosuit-enabled human could be outfitted with the ability to physically sever any compromised connections and regain local control."

debonair. Genial, gay, affable. Archaic in Brit. but still current in US.

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But Did the Typewriters Produce a Revolution