Foucault, /Discipline and Punish/, and voluntary panopticism, part 1
Listen now
Description
Part 1 is a synopsis of Foucault's claim that the societal attitude toward punishment of criminals changed radically over a period of about 80 years, starting in the mid-1700s: from punishment as vengeance, to punishment as persuading the minds of many, to punishment as correcting the personality of one.  Books Michel Foucault, Discipline and Punish: the Birth of the Prison, 1975 C.G. Prado, Starting With Foucault (2/e), 2000  Random other stuff Brian Marick, "Artisanal Retro-Futurism Crossed with Team-Scale Anarcho-Syndicalism" (text and video), 2009 The environment of evolutionary adaptedness Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, 1962 N.W. Mogensen, "Crimes and Punishments in Eighteenth-Century France", 1977 Ada Palmer, Too Like the Lightning, 2016 Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776 Kieran Healy, "Escaping the Malthusian Trap", an animated graph showing the relationship between the population of Britain and its GDP over time, illustrating the discontinuity caused by the industrial revolution. Wikipedia article about the cult horror movie "Cube" Credits The image is of Adam Smith's pin factory, possibly from Encyclopédie ou Dictionnaire raisonné des sciences, des arts et des métiers (1751–1780). D. Diderot & J. d’Alembert.
More Episodes
In this episode, I ask the question: what would a software design style inspired by ecological and embodied cognition be like? I sketch some tentative ideas. I plan to explore this further at nh.oddly-influenced.dev, a blog that will document an app I'm beginning to write. In my implementation,...
Published 12/31/23
Published 12/31/23
In the '80s, David Chapman and Phil Agre were doing work within AI that was very compatible with the ecological and embodied cognition approach I've been describing. They produced a program, Pengi, that played a video game well enough (given the technology of the time) even though it had nothing...
Published 12/04/23