Hack the World

[northrop_fried]

Alan Liu's Laws of Cool: Knowledge Work and the Culture of Information, (2004), p.7-8:

Wherever the academy looks in the new millennium, it sees the prospect of a world given over to one knowledge-- a single dominant mode of knowledge associated with the information economy and apparently destined to make all other knowledges, especially

Comments

[max_ambiguity]

Ages ago I saw him give a talk about "cool" that was part of his research for this book. I never got around to reading the book, though.

[northrop_fried]

I'm trying to frame my work on the formation of subjectivity among over-literate courtiers in the twelfth-century as being about the "first knowledge workers of Western Europe." They were hired and promoted at court particularly for their learning and communication skills, and they brought to this task the literary values learned at the cathedral schools and early universities. So the fact that he's familiar to you and Knut makes me think that he could be a good point of reference in interview situations to make my dusty, sepulchral philology seem "relevant" and even "edgy."

Although it seems like a strange argument; let's surrender wholly to the machine, and imagine we're a virus subverting it from within!

That's fine with me. Why have your cake if you're not gonna eat it?

[knut_hamson]

He's the keynote speaker at NeMLA this year.