Standup Comedy As Liminality

Go onstage and tell jokes to receptive audiences when your life falls apart.

A. I can relate to the trailer for Bradley Cooper’s new film Is This Thing On?

B. The new documentary Orwell: 2+2=5 considers how political language is destroying our intersubjective sense of objective reality and morality. It is made with the Orwell Estate’s cooperation.

C. Today’s MIT OCW free course is on Literature and Ethical Values.

D. Productivity is a major challenge for Australia. We continue to be in per capita recessions with bureaucratic legacy industries; rentier-based wealth extraction; and regulatory capture that knows these problems exist and yet does nothing significant to intervene in solving the growing economic and social inequality.

E. Generative Artificial Intelligence is likely to lead to major problems for other industries in terms of delaying its full disruptive innovation potential. This fits with S-Curve models and with Nick Srnicek's observations in his book Platform Capitalism (London: Polity, 2016).