{"id":54551,"date":"2025-04-18T14:49:50","date_gmt":"2025-04-18T13:49:50","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=54551"},"modified":"2025-04-27T14:25:39","modified_gmt":"2025-04-27T13:25:39","slug":"into-the-archives-with-you","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/urbanmole.is\/?p=54551","title":{"rendered":"Into the Archives with You!"},"content":{"rendered":"\n
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Copyright CC0 Public Domain<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n

Everything earlier than this post is a voice from the vault. It\u2019s the old Mole. Which isn\u2019t to say obsolete \u2014 browse the sporadic work of 4 years and see for yourself. <\/span><\/p>\n

But before you do, you might want to read the old \u2018About\u2019 section below. It\u2019ll give you a sprinkling of gist. <\/span><\/p>\n

 <\/p>\n

About the Urban Mole (2016-2020)<\/span><\/strong><\/p>\n

At the hub of our network of contributors is an ungainly word: dealgorithmisation. We have no subject or medium bias — articles on integrals, images of Underwings, and audio of caf\u00e9 interviews all make the cut — but dealgorithmisation will be the explicit or implicit motivation. So what is it?<\/span><\/p>\n

(De) (Algorithm) (Isation): (Removal from) (The set of rules) (You have become), in a parenthetical nutshell. The long drive home you don’t remember having, the conversation stuffed with too much filling, the inability to fully focus; these are all artefacts of algorithms. Human automation is recognised, and the desire to break it realised, as early as Socrates’s unconsidered life (not being worth living). The breaking of automatisation, perhaps without the recognition of having done so, is much older than that: as old as our species — older, perhaps going back to the first germ of consciousness, the orienting response and the subsequent introspection. Today the recognition and desire to break from automatisation is repackaged as flow, as being in the zone.<\/span><\/p>\n

Dealgorithmisation takes computers as a metaphor for brains, and human consciousness as a property of emergence. By doing so, it makes more explicit the processes of automatisation. But Urban Mole is not a journal of consciousness studies — we want to bring about, not talk about, dealgorithmisation. Let’s move on to post-humanism, then.<\/span><\/p>\n

This isn’t as apocalyptic as it sounds. If we imagine modern humans as animals with an evolved faculty for creative intelligence but a proclivity for a comfortable chair and a distraction, post humans, the humans that are on the evolutionary horizon, are those that spend more time in a state of flow, questioning, scrutinising, and innovating; making Socrates proud. This version of the future of humanity we’ll label “optimistic”, and there are multiple paths to its realisation. There are pessimistic versions too, whereby we die out because we a) kill each other; b) kill the planet and thereby kill ourselves; or c) are killed by aliens and\/or a superintelligence we helped to create. Some people choose to label these eventualities “realistic”.<\/span><\/p>\n

Should you be in the zone all the time, if such a thing were possible? Are automated routines inherently bad? No, and no. The issue is not the extent to which our biological processes are automatically regulated, but how much of our latitude for free thought we willingly hand over, either to an increasingly small group of innovators and creators whose ideas we are happy to adopt, or worse, to media whose purpose is to ease away those troubling, stressful hours between the job and the bed in immersive sound and colour.<\/span><\/p>\n

Urban Mole is an act of provocation then, aiming to influence by the smallest of degrees the course of our accelerating evolution. It’s a project that’s meant to be as challenging for its contributors as for its readers, the former of whom are united by the understanding that freedom from automatisation is not obtained without effort, no matter how small the work produced. We believe that if you wish to be a citizen of the world, you have a duty to mindfully engage with it.<\/span><\/p>\n

In closing: dealgorithmisation is a mouthful and you (probably) won’t see it mentioned anywhere else on the site. “The Art of the Interstitial” is Urban Mole’s more catchy casual wear; we just wanted to give you a glimpse of our underpants.<\/span><\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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