RafaelFajardo

Soccer comes from kicking around the heads of human sacrificial victims; bowling from putting away the clubs of violence in order to enter upon the Christian transformation of sacrificial rite to self-sacrificial sacrament. girardianlectionary.net (via azspot)

Companies large and small now screen applicants using tools like “Wasabi Waiter,” an online game that requires players to identify the emotions of diners in a sushi restaurant, serve them the meals that best correspond with their moods and keep up with a steady stream of demands to clear plates and seat new customers. The…

As children, we view the world as fixed. In the US, kids learn that red means stop, Columbus had three ships, and the police are there to protect us. We learn culture as immobile and that we have a place in that culture, and this place is reiterated continually by our socioeconomic situation and the…

Bittanti says that it’s impossible to distinguish between videogames and America in the same way that Jean Baudrillard thought it was impossible to distinguish between Disneyland and America. The book, he told me, is about simulation and its discontents, the unexpected convergence and collapse between reality and simulation. “To me video games are the so-called…

In a new interview with Paradoxa, Pulitzer-winning author Junot Diaz speaks at length with Taryne Jade Taylor about the allure of genre fiction, colonialism disguised as sci-fi, writing, and immigrating to the U.S. at an early age (he refers to it as “a profound fracture of my reality, a temporal and spatial anomaly”). During the…

Mckenzie Wark: Bartleby is about a certain kind of labor: You can force people to do physical labor, but it’s very hard to get people to do mental labor. They have to be engaged. As someone who has gone to the dark side, who has been a manager for the last year, I really identify…