标签：information

The whole world has erupted into a shouting match—what right does a museum have to step in and play peacemaker?

Culture & Public Commentary2026.05.17
The whole world has erupted into a shouting match—what right does a museum have to step in and play peacemaker?
Published in Science Times (2026-05-15, p. 4, Culture); here is the original draft. You may be scrolling on your phone at this very moment, have seen this astonishing title, and clicked in to have a look. If you saw this article in the printed newspaper, that is quite rare, but even then you must have first noticed these eye-catching headlines. In this age of mass media, this age of information explosion, this age of the attention economy, the foremost question for information providers is not whether the content can withstand scrutiny from every angle, or whether it can withstand the test of time, or whether the author has deep accumulations,…
culture commentary history tradition
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2026年5月17日
Common Knowledge as Life

Chinese Civilization & the Way of Chinese2024.11.16
Common Knowledge as Life
A while back I went to Chiang Mai to attend ckcon, where I read Simondon to the ckb community and also gave the somewhat endorsement-like talk below. Of course I have a personal relationship with ckb and also a stake in it, but what I said was indeed sincere. ckb’s distinctive design really does fit quite closely with my own entrepreneurial direction: digital artistic creation that fuses life, culture (history), and information (blockchain). Both my ideas about “a new history of the blockchain” and “an AI life with individuality” can be done on ckb; moreover, the new “Common Sense” (from Common Sense to Common Knowledge) can serve as the foundation…
culture Bitcoin knowledge blockchain
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2024年11月16日
Memory Replacing Computation—A Review of Stiegler’s Technics and Time

Phenomenology & Heidegger2024.02.02
Memory Replacing Computation—A Review of Stiegler’s Technics and Time
This article was published in Science and Technology Daily (2024-02-02, p. 3, Book Reviews), and retitled “Memory Is More Important Than Function; Richness Is More Important Than Efficiency” Bernard Stiegler was one of the most important philosophers of technology from the late twentieth century to the early twenty-first; in my view, one could even dispense with both “technology” and “one of.” His magnum opus is the three-volume Technics and Time, which has long been translated into Chinese, and Yilin Press has recently published a collected edition. The collected edition improves upon the old translation, especially by resolving inconsistent renderings of individual terms and by providing a unified index, making it…
philosophy technology book reading history of technology
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2024年2月2日
Introduction to “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile”

AI & Scholarship2023.04.29
Introduction to “Cybernetic Revolutionaries: Technology and Politics in Allende’s Chile”
This article was published in issue 87 of Xinrui Weekly (it came out last year, but I forgot to repost it), under the title A “Failed” Social Experiment in Cybernetics—A Review of The Cybernetic Revolutionaries. It was slightly abridged at the time of publication (mainly the parts about involution were cut); here is the original text. Allende was elected president of Chile by a large margin in 1970. After taking office, he immediately launched a series of socialist reforms, including banning foreign enterprises, striking at landlords, and establishing a state-owned economy, among other measures. During this period, in order to effectively manage the nationalized economic system, Allende invited the British…
China book reading history of technology politics
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2023年4月29日
Do We Still Need to “Read” in the Age of “Swiping”?

AI & Scholarship2023.04.21
Do We Still Need to “Read” in the Age of “Swiping”?
The original title of this article was “Does the Age of Artificial Intelligence Still Need Reading?”, published in China Science Daily (2023-04-21, p. 1, News, the title was changed to “Do We Still Need to ‘Read’ in the Age of ‘Scrolling’?”》, and on the WeChat public account the title was changed again to Just for This Reason, in the Age of “Scrolling” We Still Need to “Read”. I myself think the newspaper title is better, so I use it here. What follows is the original draft; it was lightly polished for publication, and when citing it, please use the newspaper version. World Book Day is coming again soon. Books are…
culture scholarship freedom AI
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2023年4月21日
Freedom of Speech and Social Media

Culture & Public Commentary2021.01.11
Freedom of Speech and Social Media
This article was written spontaneously, as a stream-of-consciousness piece prompted by my own feelings; it is shared only on Suixuan, and please do not reprint it. Trump’s social media accounts being banned set off a discussion about freedom of speech. Aside from the arguments that have never reached consensus, today’s discussions of freedom of speech do in fact involve some new conditions that have only emerged in the past decade or so. This is the rise of large social media websites. They have carved out an autonomous space in the network world, and in many cases have replaced what used to be understood as public space. Whether, and how, the…
culture freedom media commentary
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2021年1月11日
The Unification of Information Technology and Information Science in the History of Information — A Review of Wu Jun’s Information Transmission

History of Science & Scholarship2020.12.30
The Unification of Information Technology and Information Science in the History of Information — A Review of Wu Jun’s Information Transmission
Published in Science News of China (2020-12-10, p. 7, Book Review), with the title changed to “Seeing Information from the Perspective of an Entrepreneur” “We happen to live in an information society, and we need to understand information,” Wu Jun says at the beginning of Information Biography: “Although we all live in the information age, very few people can clearly say what information is, or how it determines and affects our lives. That is the reason I wrote Information Biography.” Wu Jun believes that information can be approached from the following three dimensions: 1. What information is; 2. The essence of information technology; 3. The history of information. The first…
book reading history of technology book review information
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2020年12月30日
Can This Really Count as a General History? — The Publication of Extension of Man: A General History of Technology

Life & Notes2020.06.09
Can This Really Count as a General History? — The Publication of Extension of Man: A General History of Technology
This year I have at least two new books coming out, and the first to appear is Shanghai Education Press’s 人的延伸——技术通史, or The Extension of Man: A General History of Technology. This book was part of a writing plan I signed at the same time back when Outdated Wisdom was published, but I dragged my feet for three years before it finally saw the light of day this year. This book is still transitional in nature. I am writing a more substantial monograph on the history of technology, and if all goes well I should finish it early next year. The reason I brought out this miniature version of the…
history of technology Introduction to Philosophy of Technology General History of Technology Liu Huajie
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2020年6月9日
On Cities (1): What Is a City?

AI & the Future of Technology2016.02.02
On Cities (1): What Is a City?
Mumford’s many specific views on the history of cities and urban planning may perhaps have become outdated, but his insights into the essence of the city and its meaning are something we cannot get around. Mumford has discussed what a city is from two angles. He pointed out that a city is “a special container for storing and transmitting information” and “the theater of social activity.” By way of comparison, we can look at how modern dictionaries explain the word city. The Oxford Dictionary, for example, says that a city is a large and important town; as for town, it refers to a place with many houses, shops/stores, etc. where…
technology modernity Mumford industry
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2016年2月2日
Winter Vacation Essays, No. 4: Green Dam—The Taboo of Eating Beef or the Taboo of Eating Pork

Culture & Public Commentary2010.02.08
Winter Vacation Essays, No. 4: Green Dam—The Taboo of Eating Beef or the Taboo of Eating Pork
I just bought a new laptop, ASUS’s new UL30V. A 13-inch widescreen, much lighter and more portable than my old laptop. ASUS’s biggest selling point is its super-durable battery: in power-saving mode, it is said to last 12 hours. It has both discrete and integrated graphics; when saving power, you can switch off the discrete card, and it still plays games just fine. All in all, I’m pretty satisfied. I bought it at a nearby computer market. The first shop quoted 6,000; after bargaining, I got it down to 5,750. The second shop opened at 5,250, and after haggling for ages I finally closed the deal at 5,000—yet it still…
technology culture children information
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2010年2月8日