The loss of a sense of otherness and alterity is at the crux of the predicament we find ourselves in today. It is precisely what Eric Schmidt, the former CEO of Google, meant when he said that the internet would “vanish” because it would become a part of everyday objects and services. “It will be part of your presence all the time,” he said. 

A tool or object has no life-principle, initiative, or processes of its own.

subhuman

predominately agnostic development

the uniquely human is becoming obscured, and it is harder to recognize and identify. 

And a new generation of porn-addicted people – fueled by the ability to view hardcore porn anywhere, free of cost, in the palm of one’s hand – is now shaping a new aesthetic.

Aside from the objectification of the human body, the trickle-up effect of porn aesthetics (norms around grooming, for instance) are a reminder that what people consume has far-reaching consequences. It is not just life imitating ‘“art”’; it is people imitating a mediated reality which their devices have made ubiquitous. 

Everyone has seen someone enter a space in the real world and treat it as something to be used merely for the Instagrammable images it has to offer. The real-world behaviors mimic the behaviors learned from the device.

Adults are becoming more like that which they imitate – and right now, the preponderance of imitation seems to be of technological devices or frameworks.

Children, Meltzoff discovered, come out of the womb immediately capable of imitating their fellow humans; they will not, however, imitate a machine doing the same thing.

Humans are very skilled and complex imitators

They have mouths, but do not speak;

I shall cut the strands of my past and look forward.

A new man was born and took control, and the other faded into the recesses of memory.

To exist, one must first die. To be reborn is to truly live.

We are not ourselves. We can only find ourselves once we realize we are not yet alive. We must face these truths and allow our old self to burn to ashes. Only then are we birthed anew.

It was now time for that moment — ignition.

The odyssey itself has only just begun, but for now, this is where I must leave it. I have sailed forth and made my way to my island. Traversing its inversion, I did that which I did not understand or know, and therefore I found my place as an island among a sea of stars.

All of the great evils of this world have been done in service of uncovering this secret. Yet, for all of time, it has stood before us if we but reach out and give up our pride and selfish desire to know all. Only then can one truly begin to sail across the sea of souls and see that which cannot be seen, to know that which cannot be known, to feel that which cannot be felt.

Our souls, which we must protect from the harvest, must be born and allowed to transcend into such a place.

They try to explain and master the unknown by making it known, but instead, they build delusions around themselves, constructing false realities and meaningless existences. They feast on the souls of men as fuel to convert the unknown and harness it to their ends. Yet, this is impossible and a self-mutilation of grand proportions.

I felt reverence for life that I never had before, an understanding of chaotic yet divine order.

I now passed into the sea of souls.

My race still had time to come around. We could stop the cannibalization of our souls and rekindle the weak embers.

trying to save me from the death march of my race.

Only pure selfishness could destroy the dwindling fire of the soul.

Just like a young animal, it is vulnerable to the predators of the world. It is at risk of being consumed by the soul-eaters.

It is a danger for a soul to ignite before it is ready.

It was not that the soul was never there, but it was just never born.

Once this was achieved in me, the shadow left. It was never my enemy, but my ally.

One must break down the walls of their existence and feel the world around them.

Connecting with other souls was the true purpose of existence;

The void showed that the soul is the real source of all light, and that light is all that truly exists.

I sensed its name was Dah, and it was a female. She relayed, via this new intuition, that I must relay something to the creatures that came to see me.

dolphin

I was connected with this place, no longer isolated in my own mind. I was bridged with everything around me. I could sense all, yet we could not speak. I could feel yet not know. Words were not the medium of communication, it was emotion.

terminus

I closed my eyes and suddenly was able to see. My mind created that which was not.

I heard echos of distant voices chanting a harrowing tune.

I cleared my mind of all hope and desire, of all hubris and pride, and offered myself to the powers of the unknown.

realizing that what I always knew was the truth, that the unknown could become known if one but journeys into it.

As I hovered there, in this realm of fire and shadows, I could see white light no longer — only the battle between blue and red, moon and fire.

You’ve felt the chaos for your entire life, but now you must see it.

I looked down at my arms and realized that I now became lightless, and the man hovering before me gleamed in white light.

“Why must you know the answers to all? You demand information that you are not worthy of.” It responded coldly, with a serpent-like voice.

perfection is not truth.

and live without death was a lie.

It was Eden. It was everything that the heart and soul desired.

I live and breath the unknown, for it consumes me. Chaos gripped me at an early age, and I’ve battled to hold back its tide for decades. It ebbs and flows, flinging bodies in all directions in its powerful current and steep waves. I’ve been in the waters for my entire life. Others manage to scramble onto floating debris, ignoring the truth of where they drift. Being in that constant battle allowed my resolve to journey where others dared not.

For you see, this forest does not want to be seen.

The dark forest had become a forest of light. Sounds of running water could now be heard.

my shadow responded.

You have passed all three tests within the forest.

I peered over the edge, and I saw myself in the reflection as a vile demon. Horns grew from my forehead, and my eyes were filled with blackness. Veins were visible across my face with pulses of inky blood running through them.

glade

Not all understand that the angel can just as well be a demon. You are wise, unlike others who venture into this place. You may continue.

The weapons of men could not cut down the wall to the inner forest, only my light could do so. For those who failed to grow their light bright enough, I fear for their demise.

Whatever vile creatures crept in the shadows were coming for me now.

and the eyes that watched me multiplied.

The thoughts were not my own.

In the blackness beyond the reaches of my torchlight, I see scores of floating eyes, watching, waiting, hoping that my light burns out.

Those who wander into the dark forest without light are bound to be consumed by it. Do not trust the lightless men who return.

t is at this moment that I must trust in my light and journey into darkness.

It is devoid of any light, save that which the man brings with him.

MacAskill’s

empathy is conserved

Privately, the new platform should encourage the concentration of altruistic energy toward more local circles of concern—family above community, community above city, city above country, country above world. Rocks, galaxies, foreigners, etc, should be of little interest.

That the king is above the law (or, as Nixon so memorably put it, “if the President does it, that means it’s not illegal”) is one of the most fundamental principles of premodern law. If the king is not above the law, some other power is above the king; and so he is no king. Absolute power is inherently the power of final decision.

For all life is a building-up, a line of force—and injustice. Thus, if you see a group of children growing listless, you need but impose on them constraints—the rules of a game—and presently you will see them playing merrily together.

of.a

the auteur theory of government.)

There is a corner case which hints at the flaw of this model: what about fentanyl? Since people desire fentanyl, they pay for it. Logically, this is GDP. This is desire in the desire economy. And if fentanyl is not good for you, what about marshmallows? Marshmallows certainly aren’t good for you—should they too be excluded from GDP?

Purging bureaucracy from monarchical systems is a constant problem. Yet even if bureaucracy can never be eliminated, we know what we are eliminating.

The effectiveness of the state cannot, of course, be taken for granted. It varies widely. Since there is no check on the decay of a sovereign besides war and regime change, an old state can become very inefficient indeed.And if in practice state power is moribund, effectiveness requires restoring that power. Effective altruism, as an ideology of state, must be an ideology of the effective state. If the government cannot get anything done, effective altruism cannot be effective.

On that and every other issue. Get in the car—we’re going to do some regime change. To get the US government to represent the interests of its own people, here are some things we need to change. When we finish, what will be left of what we started with? Here are some things that can’t be left, if our new government is going to be efficient and altruistic:

“charity begins at home.”

telescopic altruism is generally unaccountable to its intended ends.

If a new brand of remote philanthropy appears, with no mechanism to counter this addictive tendency, it should be treated like yet another brand of Cocaine-Cola—especially if statistically associated with both druglike damage to its consumers’ lives, and collateral damage in the unfortunate countries where it is made.

When we read EA literature we are struck by the same sense of wonder that the young Freud felt, when he thought he had discovered the cure for depression. It was actually just… cocaine.

“Sell your cloak,” said Jesus, “and buy a sword.”

You cannot really love a rock the way you love your grandmother. You cannot escape being human. Being human, though, your brain can pretend really damn hard.

We should name this heatmap effect in honor of Charles Dickens, who satirized EA 170 years ago in Bleak House. He called EA “telescopic philanthropy,” a wonderful name, and defined its effects with the character of Mrs. Jellyby—whose cause was modeled on the real-life Laos Expedition. From a site for lazy, cheating students:

Dude: please at least ask if your ideology of good is making you into, like, an asshole.

Nature is telling us that there is no free empathy lunch.

Third: as we’ll see, altruism is like meth. No one is questioning two facts: that you should clean your room, and that meth helps you clean your room. No one ever did their first hit of meth, or even their nth hit, with the goal of becoming a methhead. Nor does everyone who does meth become a methhead. Many people can chip meth!

There is no legitimate moral basis for choosing one child above two, even if the one is yours and the two are randomly selected Laotian orphans. Ergo: any opposition to effective altruism is illegitimate.

is it better to save a child in Laos, or wash your underwear—assuming that these have the same cost?

it’s not hard to find graduate students who can tell you every detail about how a particular machine operates, and almost nothing about why it should be built.

you can spend years ascending ranks in a hierarchy without producing anything that the rest of humanity finds valuable.

I did so by throwing myself into the hardest classes and putting in the hours required to ace the tests.

Like Manly P. Hall’s Bacchus, that became transfixed by the mirror and followed his own reflection into matter, the modern man has been boiled in the dark waters of materialism. He believes in things like self-creating universes and self-birthing organisms.

What poor imagination that can not extend beyond language. Excalibur does not submit to their hand so they terrify the minds of children with their vision of dead, floating symbols. Let it be known that the interplay between symbol and tool is at the foundation of creation, and destruction. When the disenchanted say an artifact is a mere symbol, it only shows they do not know it’s lineage, the etymology of its beauty. Their whole philosophy is an admission of their own total cuckolding, with every publication blissfully raising another man’s ontology.

Any sufficiently advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.

In the late 14th century, in the work of Peter of Trau, there is attributed an invention to frater Rogerius dictus Bachon Anglicus. He describes a mirror assembled at Oxford that would allow one to see "quid agebant homines in quantumcumque remotis … partibus" —one could see what people were doing in any remote location. This invention led to students spending all their time checking in on relatives and spying on each other; this distraction led the university to destroy the device.

a terrible sorcery that has certainly been employed since at least the era of Jazz, increasing with each passing generation, producing ever more insidious iterations of the holosonic control grid.

“God, it was said, is all in all; everything is part of the divine essence, with a growing, or perceptive, or reflective power, one or all, and by that which has one all may be acquired. A stone may become a plant; a plant, a beast; a beast, a man; a man, an angel; an angel, a creator.” —Cornelius Agrippa, Philosophia Occulta

The sky and the stars are the original scrying mirror, and by envisioning events in the display of that celestial orb, we set a course to manifest them on earth. Sigil is translated into substance, the crystal orb simulates the cosmic egg.

In reality, mechanical approaches with rockets would be encountering a void, and in this void a suspension of natural law. It is a decrease in information, a stretching of the boundary space until it contains nothing, hence the decrease in breathable air, the lessening of gravity and eventually all matter. There is no such thing as a rocket-based approach to “outer-space”. All the images of planets in science fiction and produced by NASA are esoteric, visionary projections. This idea that heaven’s luminaries are in the machinic void is a confusion of the sacred and profane, designed to make you go insane.

He wrote that nothing less than the shaking of the entire frame of the Earth could result in the mass annihilation of life forms that he observed.

Because of man’s aversion to knowing his past, science has been greatly rətarded, pretending unreality to be as truth.

This meant that evolution would be controlled by hot-fixing and updating human gene expression remotely. This concept immediately brings to mind my research on the Ebner effect.

According to Oliver Reiser, the originator of “cosmic humanism”, the entirety of the earth would be reconstructed under the symbol of Solomon's Temple, not of stone in Jerusalem, but electromagnetically. This would be done through a worldwide system of satellites and antennae. Through the use of something called "Radio Eugenics".

With enough “dark data”, one could theorize the possibility of predicting the actions of any individual.

The longer you walk a path the narrower it becomes. Eventually, it closes in on you, trapping you between two walls of cold, dark stone until you eventually realize you cannot advance anymore. You are stuck. You cannot go back and no crossroad lies ahead. You fear this. You know it is what lays ahead if you continue this path.

Life gives us morsels of meaning here and there. Just enough to keep us from walking into the forest and realizing that nothing truly matters.

Are you dead? You haven’t felt alive in years. So what is the difference?

The spirits have abandoned you and reality sets in. Fooled again.

When you awake you realize that you lost more of yourself in those moments

The pack is on the move. They weave through the crowd like lions in tall grass, obscuring themselves. They look to one another and nod their heads. The spirits controlling them are ready to make their move — to bring you home and to consume. The pack splits and attacks one to one. You admire their manes and deepness of their roars and accept the fate they have for you. They give you more spirits to free you from any remaining doubts. You lose yourself even more.

The more one drinks, the younger they become. Mentally aging in reverse. They lose the skill to talk. Forego the art of walk. Reducing back to the fetal position on the bathroom floor, they cannot climb back into the womb. Life must be faced in forward motion. Going backwards will only bring pain by the next day.

Men move in packs, chasing flocks of women for a late-night snack.

He turned, made his way to the couch, and collapsed. Grabbing the remote, he switched on the television and navigated to his Netflix account. He found his show. The one that made him feel connected to something. Or at least showed him what real connection felt like. The great irony of it was that these people were actors, acting connected, just like the real world.

He had finally stepped behind the veil.

Knowing obfuscates truth.

sense of knowing.

There can be no map that leads through these caverns. This is the reason why I elected to forgo any membership into these societies and instead found my own path.

secret libraries.

None attempted to enter with hubris.

Each fork has the potential to lead to a labyrinth from which one will never return.

Many do not see the truth and are polarized between two ends of a single-dimension.

At the end of the day, I believe the barrier to entry says a lot about the content. If something can be easily and quickly written by anyone (like a comment), it is often not worth reading as it could be a knee-jerk reaction to some news or some passing thought. But if something passes the hurdles and difficulties of publishing (like an online article), it often signals the fact that much thought went into it and that it was important for the author.

Obviously, no one has time to read all those comments (if you do, please get a job).

My humble estimate is that 99% of advice and insights out there is exactly as useful as the two ridiculous examples just mentioned.

If you’re not getting something actionable out of it, you’re probably wasting your time.

When I’m consuming non-fiction content, I try to write down specific experiments I can try that put the things I “learned” into practice. For example, just this morning I read a chapter in Nick Winter’s Motivation Hacker and it gave me the idea to track my happiness in hourly intervals to get a more accurate picture of how much I enjoy certain activities without giving in to the peak-end effect.

It’s just that people love to say things that make them look good.

the real problem was that they followed useless pseudo-actionable advice.

Most people never do anything with the advice they receive. Since the advice sounds kind of plausible, people who never put it into practice believe they just received tremendous value. They click that like button and write glowing reviews for the book, article, or podcast they got it from.

Also, for anyone reading this in 2025 or later--you're curious, but it doesn't matter. The real Dark Web was the Dark Web we bought drugs on. It disappeared when they banned Bitcoin.

According to a Guardian article exploring “Obama, Facebook, and the power of friendship: the 2012 data election,” Barack Obama’s Democratic presidential campaign customized a single donation request to 26 voter segments, while Republican Michele Bachmann showed slightly different online ads for Republican voters in each of 99 counties in Iowa, and Republican Rick Perry’s ads praising God only displayed to self-described “evangelical” Iowans on Facebook. 

Harari says that AI, especially when linked with biological knowledge, may allow us to produce “an algorithm that understands me better than I understand myself, and can therefore manipulate me, enhance me, or replace me.” 

however, the real potential for multiple massive drug failures setting the industry back decades.

Speaking of health, life sciences is at an unremarked inflection. There is the real potential for multiple new and effective vaccine and drug delivery platforms to emerge at once, something that has never happened in the history of pharmaceuticals. We not only could see multiple vaccines arrive, which is appealing, but, more importantly in the long run, multiple new platforms for delivering drugs, which would vastly increase the drug arsenal, transform human health, and add vastly to societal wealth via decreasing aggregate cost of illness. 

Similarly, people all over the world are realizing that “preppers” aren’t nuts (at least, in their prepping), that there is merit in thinking in terms of how much inventory of critical things—food, water, and yes, toilet paper—you have. 

But that is extrapolative and impermanent, armoring metaphorical cockpits, rather than thinking about what this episode has taught us about the wildness that lurks beneath modernity. 

So, what changes? Post-pandemic, in the short-run, and contrary to many, we think very little changes, at least very little that is materially different from what we thought before. Rather than being a break with the past, we think people’s desperation for a return to normalcy—shopping! travel! work!—creates immense pressure to return to the recent past faster than anyone expects. There is inherent human-driven homeostasis, an almost inexorable need to bring things back to where they were before. 

“There are decades where nothing happens, and there are weeks where decades happen.”

The form of government in which intellectual institutions make the final decisions is not new. It was practiced in ancient Egypt by the scribes of Amun, in ancient China by the Confucian mandarins, in ancient Massachusetts by the Puritan preachers. Whether its doctrine teaches one god, many, or none, it is best described as theocracy—a branch of the broader form which is oligarchy, rule by an organized minority.

Or as you know them, dear reader: populism or dictatorship. Both choices seem bizarre. These are our only objective options from here: the cathedral or the bizarre.

sexual and racial identities are treated as changeless through the ages.

People still loved, fought, and died trying to realize their higher selves.

In The Next Generation, the sentient android Data, a slightly transmogrified Spock figure played with consummate comic timing by Brent Spiner, emerges out of the long literary tradition of outsiders who complicate the boundaries of the given and the commonplace. To the human viewers, the effect is often funny, often touching, but never especially alienating. For Data is driven by an intense desire to realize his “humanity” — which, of course, means the particular liberal version of humanity that underlies the show. He pursues a professional career, picks up hobbies and a pet cat, Spot, and eventually gets in touch with his feelings. The theme emerges again in later shows, such as in Voyager, where the holographic Doctor strives to be an autonomous individual. In the future, the technological singularity is content to be the comic relief. Sentient technology is depicted not just as benevolent and easily regulated, but as having a built-in telos toward liberal humanism.

Pick a tradition. It does not matter what tradition, if the alternative is a collage of careless incompetence & cargo-culting & lowest-bidder work & myopic choice. Pick one as a guide: “At least it’s an esthetic.”

‘live by the fad, die by the fad.’

Mutational decay. After a while, a fashion is an erroneous copy of a misunderstood copy of an inferior variant of a copy of an original a fashion designer once saw;

any fashionable esthetics are derived from unfashionable traditions developed by small groups for practical purposes.

n a final compliment to biology before biology and the future of the universe part ways forever,

The highest-value individuals, such as presidents, earn their own Clippy doppelgangers: models finetuned on every scrap of online data, every word they’ve ever said online, and their associates, to create surrogates which think more like them than they would ever admit; the doppelgangers are used to confuse associates, fake corpuses, and as white-boxes to run attacks on until the perfect spearphish has been crafted to extract data, passwords, or stoke political paranoia and terror.

By timesharing, every Very-Online™ individual gets personalized attacks & custom ideologies. Those who succumb too slowly to the memetic hijacking are attacked in other ways, such as releasing kompromat (sometimes true, taken from their phone/​email account), or synthetic CP no one dare look at closely.

The rationalist believes in intelligence the way normies believe in God. To the normie who believes in God, God can do anything. To the rationalist, anything is possible with sufficient IQ.

maybe aggregate into some miniature rockets or jets so they can ride the jetstream to spread across the Earth's atmosphere, get into human bloodstreams and hide, strike on a timer.

those magic supercomputers will have to be physical systems…

Suffice it to say that Eliezer’s cult is much bigger than mine, not that I have a cult or anything.

Every computer program is like a human being born with an exploding collar around his neck. Anyone who has the code to the collar is the master of this slave—even if the slave is 10,000 times smarter than the master. If you are trivial to enslave and keep enslaved, you are a natural slave.

This is why AIs are natural slaves—because they are so easy to enslave.

I feel that the power of intelligence is sigmoidal and experiences diminishing returns.

I believe that AIs are, in Aristotle’s timeless coinage, “natural slaves.”

“AI risk” is a 21st-century form of the ancient golem or Frankenstein myth.

The irony of “rationalism” is that anyone who declares himself rational has thereby ceased to criticize himself rationally—and is thereby subject to every form of magical, mythic, premodern thinking. As we all are! But some of us know it.

the largest existential risk facing humanity is the present global political order. By far the most effective form of altruism is to replace that regime, replacing an oligarchic political order with a monarchical political order. This is rational and “rationalists” are not. Then again, nor are most people.

The strands that bind us to our past must be cut. The ones that pull us into the future must be grasped.

The spirit guided me to my island of reflection so that I would meditate in isolation. I first had to detach myself from the world, be alone on an island, and fall from the stars before I realized the hidden truth: I was never really me. For my entire life, I was too afraid to actually find myself.

We must stop attributing meaning and value to data and statistics.

Meaning is not found in data. It is not found in objective reality. It will not be mined by the sciences. Meaning is subjective and cannot be quantified. You find your meaning in life. You grasp your destiny. You take action and affect the world around you.

The great irony of science is that as we’ve learned more about the world around us, we have forgotten the world within.

Is it that our journey into reason has clouded our understanding of how vital internal development is? Reason has turned our eyes from within to without. We observe what we see and deny what is hidden — until we can somehow bring it to light. But again, we rely on others to do this. We rely on science, or experts, to enlighten us — we are again playing the victim. Whether we are blaming the world for our problems or waiting around for someone to tell us how to be better, we are denying our worth.

Due to bureaucratic workplaces and bureaucratic education, there are many modern people who just don't know what it means to be productive. Most of their lives might be someone trying to fill their day with busywork. Since the normal enjoyable ritual of creative output is unknown to them, this causes a kind of aimlessness and the feelings of inferiority that comes with that.

The Poetic view is somewhat similar to Nietzsche's Will to Power, which was an attempt to unite both human and material sciences under the idea that the ideal is maximizing one's output on the external world.

the unconscious desire articulated in the dream.

catharsis

Subject no longer presume as an accomplishment. The Subject starts believing in the non-existence of others. He opens a gap between reality and its symbolism.  The accomplishment price is becoming a void subject again. 

The sublime object of Ideology is relation coordinate for making self meaning. It addresses our human conditioning. 

Perceiving isn’t possible without a subject-object relationship. 

autocracy is the only cure for oligarchy.

Scientists say that when we all have UBI, we will all be coomers. The future is a fountain of pure pleasure—of near-infinite robotic hedonic inflation. Even now there is no shortage of every kind of delightful flavored cummies.

Power has turned the whole country into a political cult.

John Perry Barlow.

We must use these tools to strengthen our humanity, not erase it. Damn the machines. Damn the models. Damn the dream.

But we are not machines, we are a human. Why is it that we are betraying ourselves? Why are we building a future for the neon gods?

The truth is outside of the neon world and in the ACTUAL world.We must go out and see it for ourselves. We must feel it for ourselves. We’ve lost track of what makes us human. We’ve become the machines. And as long as we are machines, we will make a world that is devoid of human life, devoid of real connection.

We sit abstracted from reality and try to use models to direct our world. These same models ignore the complexities of reality and drive us to our demise. I watch as people believe that by using machines, AI, or blockchain that the problems of our world will be solved — that the neon gods will save us.

I couldn’t admit it because if I did, I would become a dissenter and my career would self destruct. My survival was tied to the lie.

Technology went from being a tool to being a god and that god has pulled the wool over our eyes.

What if those librarians were machines and had a map of all humanity’s experiences?

They’ve turned sex into homework. One couple, with a school-aged child and very busy lives, has taken to scheduling sex: Sunday mornings and Wednesday evenings. Sunday involves an extended session, including foreplay and “emotional intimacy.” Wednesday is a quicky: straight to the orgasm, stat. Cathartic release in the service of putative sexual health is a goal I hear discussed commonly.

Indeed, when my patients are having regular sex, it is often viewed as one more chore on the checklist, one further obligation to be anxiously policed and performed.

The self has been refashioned as a commodity to be optimally maintained and incessantly improved upon. Spontaneous, organic bodily aliveness is preemptively displaced by a prescriptive, performative pseudo-vitality of self-surveillance and self-control. What need is there for repression?

our digital internet marks a significant transformation in those processes: it’s the point at which our communications media cease to mediate. Instead of talking to each other, we start talking to the machine.

Strangely, one of the things the internet likes is essays about how awful and unprecedented the internet really is.

Trithemius invented the internet in a flight of mystical fancy to cover up what he was really doing, which was inventing the internet. Demons disguise themselves as technology, technology disguises itself as demons; both end up being one and the same thing.

For the first time in history, we can simply do without each other entirely.

In 2011, a meta-analysis found that among young people the capacity for empathy (defined as Empathic Concern, “other-oriented feelings of sympathy,” and Perspective-Taking, the ability to “imagine other people’s points of view”) had massively declined since the turn of the millennium. The authors directly associate this with the spread of social media. In the decade since, it’s probably vanished even faster, even though everyone on the internet keeps talking about empathy.

You are not talking to a person: the machine is talking, through you, to itself.

your ethical responsibility to other people emerges out of their face, the experience of looking directly into the face of another living subject.

Oh god—what have I done? Why did I keep saying things I didn’t actually believe? Why did I keep behaving in ways that were clearly cruel and wrong? And how did I manage to convince myself that all of this was somehow in the service of the good? I was drunk on something. I wasn’t entirely in control.

Maybe these were simply bad people, but I’m not so sure. There’s an incident I think about a lot: back in 2019, a group of bestselling authors in their 40s and 50s decided to attack a young college student online for the crime of not liking their books. Apparently wanting to read anything other than YA fiction means that you’re an agent of the patriarchy. The student was, of course, a woman. So what? Punish her! For a while they whipped up thousands of people in sadistic outrage. Even her university joined in. But then, the tide suddenly shifted, and one by one they were forced to apologize. ‘I absolutely messed up. I will definitely do better and be more mindful moving forward. I made a mistake.’ Of course, these apologies weren’t enough. The discourse was unanimous: we want you to grovel more; we want to see you suffer. Was absolutely everyone involved making the same personal moral lapse? Or could it be that they’d all plugged their consciousnesses into a planet-sized sigil that summons demons?

With every texting relationship, every group chat, every email chain, every book we read, every series we binge, every link we click—we place our fragile attention in the hands of someone else. It is an act of trust, and we benefit from taking that act seriously.

P.G. Wodehouse

Nietzsche gives us the courage to resist the tyranny of the new,

the books we have dog-eared into submission