Scoring systems are everywhere. Underpinning our daily lives – whether it’s the fit bits on our wrists, likes on social media, and even school rankings – they have become pervasive and increasingly dangerous, warping our desires and outsourcing our values to external institutions. Instead of encouraging us to be more playful, to take pleasure in the journey of striving towards a goal, institutions, corporations and bureaucracies weaponize scoring systems to impose their own interests. No matter what, we always seem to be playing by someone else’s rules.

In The Score, philosopher C. Thi Nguyen shows us how this newly ‘gamified’ world has fundamentally captured our value systems, turning what might be moral or personal life choices into numerical data, and forcing us to prioritise what can be measured and monetized over what is truly meaningful to us.

A life-long lover of online and board games himself, Nguyen argues that we should not stop playing games but rather take a step back and become more aware of their immersive and profound power, so that we might chart a way towards more creative and joyful lives. To start playing our own game.

About C. Thi Nguyen

C. Thi Nguyen is Associate Professor of Philosophy at the University of Utah, and a specialist in the philosophy of games, the philosophy of technology, and the theory of value. A former food writer for the Los Angeles Times, Nguyen is active in public philosophy, writing for the New York Times, Washington Post, New Statesman, and elsewhere.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/457380/the-score-by-nguyen-c-thi/9780241653975

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How do we understand the world and our place in it? Do our lives consist of a small number of dramatic turning points, or is there nothing but a series of gradual changes from infancy to old age? Are political elections genuinely transformational, or merely arbitrary points along a shifting cultural timeline? And in physics, how can the continuities of general relativity coexist with the discontinuities of quantum theory?

In Waves and Stones, Graham Harman shows that this paradoxical interaction – the question of whether reality is made up of sudden jumps, or is laid out along a gentle gradient with no clear divisions between the various things in the world – permeates every area of human life. What’s more, this paradox is as old as human thought itself. In exploring how the continuous and discrete relate to each other, he takes us on a kaleidoscopic journey from the philosophers of ancient Greece, through the writings of the great Arab historian Ibn Khaldun, through architectural and evolutionary theory, the compatibility of religion with science, and the wave-particle duality of matter.

To explore the relationship between the continuous and the discrete, Harman shows, is to consider the very fabric of reality. With this dazzling new book, he proposes a new way of thinking about this ancient problem, with profound implications for our understanding of ourselves and the bewilderingly complex world in which we live.

https://www.penguin.co.uk/books/313185/waves-and-stones-by-harman-graham/9780241392867

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As usual the boys find themselves somewhat at odds with the officially sanctioned narratives on everything from NATO, Greenland, Ukraine and Qatar to who exactly is cutting the undersea cables, and what might be going on with Elon Musk, the dollar, American debt and crypto.

And we end with a brief look at the bond market’s reaction to Labour’s budget and what that tells us about the fiction of national sovereignty.

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https://substack.com/profile/126815820-david-malone

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Music by HYPERLAND

Graphics by Caroline Large

Image NASA ID: PIA12348 Secondary Creator Credit: NASA/JPL-Caltech/ESA/CXC/STScI

Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.