Best of aeon.co on Kiwi News
Most upvoted by Kiwi News readers
5 stories from aeon.co have been shared on Kiwi News since 18 October 2023, with 13 upvotes and 4 comments in total. The latest was shared on 25 August 2025. They are listed below, most upvoted first.
Text under a title is an AI summary of the linked article.
- Does capitalism make ‘non-playable characters’ of us all? An uncanny exploration
The Austrian art collective Total Refusal makes short films using visuals taken entirely from popular video games, and its film Hardly Working focuses on non-playable characters in Red Dead Redemption 2 (2018). The film centers on background figures such as carpenters, laundresses, stable boys and street sweepers, whose repetitive tasks barely leave a mark on the game world. Its narrator invites viewers to consider the "infinite loop of labour performance" under capitalism, and the mood shifts from dryly humorous to disquieting as it goes on.
- The sovereign individual and the paradox of the digital age | Aeon Essays
Digital platforms now link ordinary individual choices into systems that classify, rank and modulate people, producing a paradox between personal freedom and social control. The IBM Model 650, sold from 1953 to 1962, is presented as an early example, with its first installation at John Hancock in Boston in 1954 calculating sales commissions for about 7,000 insurance agents. Unlike Friedrich Hayek's 1944 warning in The Road to Serfdom that state control would bring tyranny, the danger now may come from platforms that erode the "interstitial liberty" granted by gaps between systems that do not integrate, a road to "selfdom."
- What the Ju/’hoansi can tell us about group decision-making
The article argues that Ju/'hoansi and G/wi hunter-gatherer bands reached good group decisions through consensus, avoiding both groupthink and fragmentation. It describes the Dilemma of the Deserted Husband, which George Silberbauer observed in the late 1950s, where a band resolved a months-long dispute by accepting a polyandrous marriage proposed by a "lateral thinker." Megan Biesele's observations in the 1970s show the Ju/'hoansi keeping leadership temporary, withholding ideas from attribution, and avoiding votes, which they see as polarising.
- Mathematics as thought
Mathematics should be integrated into intellectual history, which the text says has largely neglected it in favour of political thought. Francis Galton's discovery of regression to the mean, first formulated in his studies of heredity, shows how a mathematical idea can make hidden features of the world visible. The text cites Paul Lockhart's *A Mathematician's Lament* (2009), which describes mathematics as a creative pursuit like poetry, and quotes John von Neumann's view that mathematical rigour has changed over time. Quentin Skinner and Michel Foucault are faulted for portraying intellectual history mainly through politics and power, leaving out the role of mathematics and technology.
- Why main character syndrome is philosophically dangerous | Aeon Essays
The author argues that main character syndrome, a tendency to see oneself as the star of a life story with everyone else as background figures, is morally dangerous because it undermines the relational and interdependent nature of human identity. Lindemann's view that some narratives cause moral damage is cited to support treating MCS narratives as harmful, isolating and amoral. The essay points to social media, films such as The Hunger Games and Divergent, and an audience-seeking culture as sources of the phenomenon, with Michael G Wetter and Ashley Ward quoted on its causes and appeal.