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The Unstealable Education: Why the University Will Bury Its Undertakers

The undertakers are circulating again, and this time they have given the university five years to live. The argument runs like this: when a machine can answer any question in any field at any hour, why would anyone pay tuition, or sit four years for a credential a chatbot renders quaint? Close the campuses, the prophets say. Sell the quads for condominiums. The library is now a login. I have been hearing this prophecy, in one costume or another, for my entire working life, and the prophecy is older than the university itself. In the Phaedrus, written around 370 BC, Socrates warns that the new technology of writing will plant forgetfulness in the soul, because men who trust marks on papyrus will stop exercising memory and will carry the appearance of wisdom rather than the thing itself. He was describing the alphabet. He might as well have been describing a data center.

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The Corner Store at the End of the World

Every local prepper carries the same private film in his head. He is the survivor. The neighbors who laughed at the Costco pallets and the propane tanks and the blue tarp over the generator are huddled in their cold houses while his basement lights still burn through week three of the outage. He sits on the front porch with a rifle across his knees, finally vindicated, the man on the block who saw it coming. The film has a hero, a moral, and a clean ending. What it leaves out, what eight years of YouTube channels and bug-out videos have trained him to leave out, is the crowd.

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This Is Not the World I Wanted to Leave for You: Reflections on Legacy, Loss, and the Future We Shape

I have been thinking a great deal lately about living and dying, and about the strange, stubborn human hunger to leave something meaningful behind. The faces of those I have known who have already passed return to me in quiet moments, and I find myself watching those who are, even now, nearing the end of their own stories. I also include my final braided prairie knot in that wondering. In the background of these thoughts runs a deeper worry, a shadow that lengthens each day: the growing political instability that presses in on the goodness of life and threatens the fragile hope we carry in our personal lives. I wonder, in darker hours, if all the labor, all the love, all the sacrifice we invest in this world will ever prove to be worth it. And then, as if called back from the edge of despair, I remember what my friend, mentor, and teacher, Dr. Howard Stein, told me as he lay dying at age 91.

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Scratch My Twitch on Boles.tv

The future now is here and you can watch it live, weekdays, on Boles.tv! Yes, Janna and I have taken the deep leap into the world of live streaming and we’re here to tell you all about it. The most interesting thing about going live each day is the idea that social media is really nothing compared to social broadcasting. You are your own station. You are your own dream stream.

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As Holidays Fade, Culture Disappears

As we step into, and away from, malleable malfeasance, we cannot but help to linger on what is, and what has been lost. In the United States, we have cheapened our culture with vulgarity, and purposeful misfortune, and cunning, evil, unrest. We have also abandoned a right celebration of our most beloved holidays.

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American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland (The Script)

I started a new podcast on July 18, 2016 called “David Boles: Human Meme” and I have had some great luck with episodes like Of Wealth and the Starless Eye and Omne Trium Perfectum: The Rule of Three and De Anima and the Demon Soul, but today’s podcast — American Gargoyle: A Cloven Hoof in the Homeland — has taken off on a life of its own, and that’s precisely what you hope to have happen in a podcast about human memetics and the how and why we learn and share knowledge!

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Never Speak to the Actors!

There’s an old, weary, chestnut in the theatre — that deserves to be burned alive, eaten whole, pooped out and buried in the deep blue sea and then never spoken of again — that goes a little something like this, when directors say to Playwrights: “Never Speak to the Actors!”

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