View on Issuu // Email us to request a printed copy
We’re pleased to share the fourth issue of Post-X, a zine produced by University of Chicago undergraduate students as part of 3CT’s Future Café series. You can view the publication online at the link above, and a limited number of printed copies are available by request. They’re free, and we’ll send you one if you email us with your name and mailing address.
Big thanks to Post-X contributors: Katie Ambrose, Arnie Campa, Aidan Cessor, Ellie Gilbert-Bair, Natalie Hoge, Sarah Hopkins, Natalie Jenkins, Sarah Kim, Annie Leonard, Courtney McDermott, Ronan O’Callaghan, Stephanie Ulloa Sahagun, Natalia Serrano-Chavez, Micah Wilcox, and 3CT associate director Anna Searle Jones.
“Spirit is a concept as elusive as it is essential. It is as real as it is immaterial and as personal as it is social. It is a force that seems to guide us through the mists of our own confusion or one which plunges us deeper into them.
Spirit is seemingly timeless. Recent developments in the world of artificial intelligence technology, however, inspired us to think about its importance. Advanced language learning models like ChatGPT challenge our understanding of consciousness, human identity, and the essence of labor, leading to questions about how inimitable our notions of spirit really are.
With the rise of self-entrepreneurship in a neoliberal age, projecting a sense of internality becomes all the more important to continuing accumulation. Digital capitalism, further, tries to discern and manipulate the core drivers of our behavior via predictive content algorithms and data analytics. Faced with these radical reconstitutions of identity and selfhood, we ask: What role can concepts of spirit play in changing our individual relations to systems beyond a human scale?”
—Katie Ambrose and Courtney McDermott, September 2023
