“Except in the rural South, daily life for every American changed beyond recognition between 1870 and 1940.” Electric lights replaced candles and whale oil, flush toilets replaced outhouses, cars and electric trains replaced horses. (In the 1880s, parts of New York’s financial district were seven feet deep in manure.)

In “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” Gordon doubles down on that theme, declaring that the kind of rapid economic growth we still consider our due, and expect to continue forever, was in fact a one-time-only event. First came the Great Inventions, almost all dating from the late 19th century. Then came refinement and exploitation of those inventions — a process that took time, and exerted its peak effect on economic growth between 1920 and 1970. Everything since has at best been a faint echo of that great wave, and Gordon doesn’t expect us ever to see anything similar.

Robert J. Gordon, a distinguished macro­economist and economic historian at Northwestern, has been arguing for a long time against the techno-optimism that saturates our culture, with its constant assertion that we’re in the midst of revolutionary change. Starting at the height of the dot-com frenzy, he has repeatedly called for perspective: Developments in information and communication technology, he has insisted, just don’t measure up to past achievements. Specifically, he has argued that the I.T. revolution is less important than any one of the five Great Inventions that powered economic growth from 1870 to 1970: electricity, urban sanitation, chemicals and pharmaceuticals, the internal combustion engine and modern communication.

At the end of my reflections a few years back, I suggested that a humanist critique of technology entails a preference for technology that (1) operates at a human scale, (2) works toward human ends, (3) allows for the fullest possible flourishing of a person’s capabilities, (4) does not obfuscate moral responsibility, and (5) acknowledges and respects certain limits inherent to the human condition.

There are two ranges in the growth of tools: the range within which machines are used to extend human capability and the range in which they are used to contract, eliminate, or replace human functions. In the first, man as an individual can exercise authority on his own behalf and therefore assume responsibility. In the second, the machine takes over—first reducing the range of choice and motivation in both the operator and the client, and second imposing its own logic and demand on both.

When a system becomes sufficiently complex, the human element more often than not becomes a problem to be solved. The solution is to either remove the human element or otherwise re-train the person to conform and recalibrate their behavior to the specifications of the machine. Alternatively, society develops a variety of therapies to sustain the person who must now live within a techno-economic milieu that is hostile to human flourishing.

There are lots of ways to identify “Jobs To Be Done,” but among them we discuss a number of important questions to ask yourself in the book. Here are five of them: The first is to look in the mirror and ask yourself, “do you have a job that needs to be done?” If you identify a job, it’s likely that others will have that job, too. The second is, “where do you see non-consumption?”  You can learn as much from people who aren’t hiring any product as from those who are. Non-consumption is often where the most fertile opportunities lie. Another is, “what workarounds have people invented?” If you see consumers struggling to get something done by cobbling together workarounds, then pay attention to that. They’re probably deeply unhappy with the available solutions—and are a promising base of new business. The fourth is, “what tasks do people want to avoid?” There are plenty of jobs in daily life that we’d just as soon get out of. We call these “negative jobs.” Finally there is, “what surprising uses have customers invented for existing products?”

We define a “Job to Be Done” as the progress a customer seeks in particular circumstances. Both parts of that definition are important: A customer is looking to achieve something that she has been struggling with, and the circumstances in which she is trying to achieve that matter in how she’ll try to solve that struggle. A well-defined job, which should have not only functional, but emotional and social dimensions, offers a kind of innovation blueprint. This is very different from the traditional marketing concept of “needs” because it entails a much higher degree of specificity about what you’re solving for. Needs are ever present and that makes them necessarily more generic. “I need to eat” is a statement that is almost always true. “I need to feel healthy.” “I need to save for retirement.” Those needs are important to consumers, but their generality provides only the vaguest of direction to innovators as to how to satisfy them. Needs are analogous to trends—directionally useful, but totally insufficient for defining exactly what will cause a customer to choose one product or service over another. Jobs take into account a far more complex picture: The circumstances in which I need to eat can vary widely.

Yet even with all its excesses of content, our era of algorithmic feeds might herald the actual death of the collector, because the algorithm itself is the collector, curator, and arbiter of culture. Not only does that represent a loss of agency and control, it’s also a loss of feeling.

While we have the advantage of freedom of choice, the endless array of options often instills a sense of meaninglessness: I could be listening to anything, so why should any one thing be important to me?

As I’ve used Spotify longer and the interface has changed shape, I’ve found myself becoming a more passive user, saving fewer albums; thinking less about the specifics of the albums or artists I’m hearing; and losing track of my library.

Algorithmic feeds are by their nature impersonal, though they promise personalized recommendations. The more automated a feed is, the less we users feel the need to gather a collection, to preserve what’s important to us. If we can always rely on Instagram’s Discover page or the TikTok For You feed to show us something that we’re interested in, then we have less impetus to decide for ourselves what to look for, follow, and save. The responsibility of collecting has been removed, but that means we offload it to the black box of the automatic recommendation system. Over the past two decades, the collecting of culture — like maintaining a personal library — has moved from being a necessity to a seemingly indulgent luxury.

For Benjamin, the importance of collecting stemmed from its endurance and persistence, a longterm commitment that the collector makes to the collection. “A collector’s attitude toward his possessions stems from an owner’s feeling of responsibility toward his property,” he wrote in his library essay. Benjamin would have detested the era of algorithmic platforms not because they’re so all-encompassing and overwhelming — Benjamin had no problem with infinite copies — but because they’re so ephemeral. It’s very difficult to be responsible for what we collect on the internet; we can’t be stewards of the culture we appreciate in the same way. We very literally don’t own it.

“Ownership is the most intimate relationship that one can have to objects,” Benjamin wrote. “Not that they have come alive in him; it is he who lives in them.” In other words, we often discover ourselves in what we keep around us.

For Benjamin, the very possession of these books formed his identity as a reader, writer, and human being — even if he hadn’t read all of them. They sat proudly on his shelves as symbols, representing the knowledge that he still aspired to gain or the cities he had traveled, where he encountered a book in a previously unknown shop. Collecting books was his way of interacting with the world, of building a worldview.

In the digital era, when everything seems to be a single click away, it’s easy to forget that we have long had physical relationships with the pieces of culture we consume. We store books on bookshelves, mount art on our living-room walls, and keep stacks of vinyl records. When we want to experience something, we seek it out, finding a book by its spine, pulling an album from its case, or opening an app. The way we interact with something — where we store it — also changes the way we consume it, as Spotify’s update made me realize. Where we store something can even outweigh the way we consume it.

The sudden lack of spatial logic was like a form of aphasia, as if someone had moved around all the furniture in my living room and I was still trying to navigate it as I always had. Spotify’s new “Your Library” tab, which implied everything I was looking for, opened up a window of automatically generated playlists that I didn’t recognize. The next tab over offered podcasts, which I never listened to on the app. Nothing made sense.

In the opposing corner, we have the "hot mess" info slop bucket that is the contemporary internet. As a point of comparison, let's say a social media post (or "message") is the equivalent of a book in this brave new world and a social media platform, let's say Facebook, is the equivalent of a library (an archive where our externalized memories are stored and organized). How are Facebook posts organized? Who's organizing them? And, to return to your essay, how does that impact how humans conceptualize knowledge and understand our sense of self?

I’ve found it helpful to think about this development by recalling how Katherine Hayles phrased one of the themes of How We Became Posthuman. She sought to show, in her words, “how information lost its body.” Illich is here doing something very similar. The text is information that has lost its body, i.e. the book. According to Illich, until these textual innovations took hold in the 12th century, it was very hard to imagine a text apart from its particular embodiment in a book, a book that would’ve born the marks of its long history—in the form, for example, of marginalia accruing around the main text.

If we imagine the book as an information storage technology (something we can do only on the other side of this revolution) then what these new tools do is solve the problems of sorting and access. They help organize the information in such a way that readers can now dip in and out of what now can be imagined as a text independent of the book.

So, perhaps it is the case that the metaphor has simply broken down in the way so many other metaphors do over time when the experiences upon which they depended are lost due to changes in material culture.

Home prices continued to surge in virtually every corner of the U.S. during the first quarter as mortgage rates rose rapidly, according to a Tuesday report from the National Association of Realtors. Many buyers rushed to lock in purchases in the first quarter before rates climbed even higher, according to real-estate agents.

An aggressive QT will both rapidly increase the supply of duration to the market while at the same time rapidly reduce the cash balances of banks, a key marginal buyer. The combination of a positive supply shock and negative demand shock can eventually again lead to violent dislocations.

Banks and foreigners (and Fed) have been the key marginal investors in Treasuries, but they are unlikely to increase their holdings going forward. Foreign private investors fund their purchases in the FX swap market, where rising borrowing costs from rate hikes are making dollar assets less attractive. Certain large foreign sovereigns may hesitate to further increase dollar exposure out of prudent risk management. With respect to banks, some large banks have indicated a shift in preference from securities to loans due to strengthening loan growth. QT will also mechanically shrink bank balance sheets so banks will no longer need to optimize returns by swapping reserves for Treasures.

The Fed’s maturity profile for Treasury coupons is front loaded and for Agency MBS is an estimated $25b a month pace. An aggregate cap that begins at $50b and ramps up to $80b would achieve $3t in QT in around 3 years. The Fed’s Treasury bill holdings are not strictly part of a QE program and may be managed separately.

A conservative estimate based on the pre-pandemic Fed balance sheet size, and taking into account growth in nominal GDP and currency, arrives at a normalized balance sheet of around $6t. This would imply QT at rate of ~$1t a year, roughly twice the annual pace of the prior QT.

Recent remarks from Chair Powell suggest quantitative tightening will proceed at a pace of $1t a year, double the annual pace of the prior QT. That could imply a process that quickly ramps up to around $700b in Treasuries and $300b in Agency MBS in annual run-off. At the same time, Treasury net issuance is expected to remain historically high at ~$1.5t a year. This implies that non-Fed investors will have to absorb ~$2t in issuance each year for 3 years in the context of rising inflation and rising financing costs from rate hikes. Even the most ardent bond bulls will not have enough money to absorb the flood of issuance, so prices must drop to draw new buyers.

The price of any asset is not so much determined by perceived economic fundamentals as by supply and demand. This is particularly the case for safe assets like Treasuries, where vast swaths of issuance is absorbed by investors who are either not interested in returns or highly constrained in their investment options. The remaining discretionary managers live in a post-GFC world where balance sheet is scarce. When balance sheet is scarce, then there is only so much bank credit or repo financing available to fund positions and shape prices.

The mere prospect of rate hikes mechanically reduces the market value of Treasuries, which are widely held as money like safe assets. The declines in value are net losses to the financial system that are also unevenly distributed and cannot be hedged system wide. The losses are further transmitted across asset classes as diversified investors rebalance their portfolios by selling other assets. When investors are leveraged and markets are fragile, the rebalancing can lead to significant market volatility.

The repo market quickly stabilized, but it was difficult to tell if the spike was actually caused by an insufficient level of reserve balances. In any case, the repo spike marked the end of the Fed’s QT experiment.

QT gradually drained bank reserve balances (and the RRP) until it was ended late 2019 after a sudden spike in repo rates. The Fed frequently surveyed banks throughout QT to gauge their minimum level of required reserves. Banks widely reported that they had a lot more reserves than they needed. A rough estimate based on the surveys suggested that the banking system as a whole needed about $600b in reserves, which implied that QT could’ve continued all to way to 2021.

Maturing principal that is in excess of the QT pace is rolled over at auction. For example: if the Fed receives $20b in maturing principal but is capping the pace of QT at $15b a month, then it will rollover $5b into next auction. The $5b will be rolled over in proportion to the offering sizes being auctioned. For example: if $40b of 3-year and $60b of 10-year were being offered, then $2b would be rolled into the 3-year (40%) and $3b would be rolled into the 10-year (60%). (For detailed rollover mechanics see here).

Note the maximum amount of QT the Fed can conduct each month is limited by the amount of maturing principal it receives that month. The amount maturing varies significantly each month and is largely a function of past policy choices.

Note that the Treasury may alter its issuance patters during QT – such as issuing more short-term debt since longer dated debt may become more expensive in the absence of QE. QT can thus indirectly impact curve shape.

Mechanically, QT reduces the level of cash held by Banks (reserves) and changes the composition of money held by Non-Banks (more Treasuries and fewer bank deposits). The Fed is unsure how low Bank reserve levels can fall before impacting the financial system, so it executes QT at a measured monthly pace. The prior QT experiment began in late 2017 and ended in September 2019, when a sudden spike in repo rates panicked the Fed into restarting quantitative easing.

As with holism, there is a version of relativism anthropologists have repudiated, (at least since the Second World War) associated with a plural concept of cultures that implied pure internal homogeneity and pure external heterogeneity. These perspectives took cultural differences as essentially historical and a priori based on the independent evolution of societies. By contrast, more contemporary anthropology recognises that within our political economy one region remains linked to low income agriculture and conservatism precisely because that suits the interests of a wealthier and dominant region. That is to say, differences are often constructed rather than merely given by history.

Postill's discussion of the digital citizen reveals how while democracy is officially secured by an occasional vote, mobile digital governance is imagined as creating conditions for a much more integrated and constant relationship between governance and an active participatory or community citizenship that deals embracing much wider aspects of people's lives. Though often this is based on assuming that previously it was only the lack of appropriate technology that prevented the realisation of such political ideals, ignoring the possibility that people may not actually want to be bothered with this degree of political involvement. Political holism thereby approximates what Postill calls a normative ideal. He shows that the actual impact of the digital is an expansion of involvement but still, for most people, largely contained within familiar points of participation such as elections, or communication amongst established activists.

Curiously the much earlier writings of Turkle (1984) were amongst the most potent in refuting these presumptions of prior authenticity. The context was the emergence of the idea of the virtual and the avatar in role-playing games. As she pointed out, issues of role-play and presentation were just as much the basis of pre-digital life, something very evident from even a cursory reading of Goffman (1959, 1975). Social science had demonstrated how the real world was virtual long before we came to realise how the virtual world is real. One of the most insightful anthropological discussions of this notion of authenticity is Humphrey's (2009) study of Russian chat rooms. The avatar does not merely reproduce the offline person; it is on the internet that these Russian players feel able, perhaps for the first time, to more fully express their `soul' and passion. Online they can bring out the person they feel they `really' are, which was previously constrained in mere offline worlds. For these players, just as for the disabled discussed by Ginsburg, it is only on the internet that a person can finally become real.

In summary, an anthropological perspective on mediation is largely concerned to understand why some media are perceived as mediating and others are not. Rather than seeing pre-digital worlds less mediated, we need to study how the rise of digital technologies has created the illusion that they were.

But in all these cases it is not that media simply mediates a fixed element called religion. Religion itself is a highly committed form of mediation that remains very concerned with controlling the use and consequences of specific media.

To spell out this second principle, then, digital anthropology will be insightful to the degree it reveals the mediated and framed nature of the non-digital world. Digital anthropology fails to the degree it makes the non-digital world appear in retrospect as unmediated and unframed.

at least as much effort was expended upon trying to understand the Filipina concept of motherhood because being a mother is just as much a form of mediation as being on the internet.

Potentially one of the major contributions of a digital anthropology would be the degree to which it finally explodes the illusions we retain of a non-mediated non-cultural, pre-digital world. A good example would be Van Dijck (2007) who uses new digital memorialisation such as photography to show that memory was always a cultural rather than individual construction. Photography as a normative material mediation (Drazin and Frohlich 2007), reveals how memory is not an individual psychological mechanism, but consists largely of that which it is appropriate for us to recall.

In anthropology there is no such thing as pure human immediacy; interacting face-to-face is just as culturally inflected as digitally mediated communication but, as Goffman (1959, 1975) pointed out again and again, we fail to see the framed nature of face-to-face interaction because these frames work so effectively. The impact of a digital technologies, such as webcams, are sometimes unsettling largely because they makes us aware and newly self-conscious about those taken for granted frames around direct face to face encounters.

In the discipline of anthropology all people are equally cultural, that is the products of objectification.

The example of money shows that we can find both clear positives in new accessibility and banking for the poor, but also negatives such as body shopping or new possibilities of financial chicanery found in high finance (Lewis 1989) which contributed to the dot.com debacle (Cassidy 2002), and the more recent banking crisis. This suggests that the new political economy of the digital world is really not that different from the older political economy.

Following Hegel, European political traditions tend to see individual freedom as a contradiction in terms; ultimately freedom can only derive from law and governance. Anarchism suits wide-eyed students with little responsibility, but social-democratic egalitarianism requires systems of regulation and bureaucracy, high taxation and redistribution to actually work as human welfare.

What is clear in Karanovic and others' contributions is that, just as Simmel saw that money was not just a new medium, but also one that allowed humanity to advance in conceptualisation and philosophy towards a new imagination of itself, so open source does not simply change coding.

In effect, the digital is producing too much culture, which because we cannot manage and engage with it, renders us thereby superficial or shallow or alienated.

Money was also behind the commodification that led to a vast quantitative increase in material culture. This also created a potential source of alienation as we are deluged by the vast mass of differentiated stuff that surpasses our capacity to appropriate it as culture.

For Hart, the digital not only exacerbates the problems of money, but also can form part of the solution since new money-like schemes based on the internet may allow us to create more democratised and personalised systems of exchange outside of mainstream capitalism.

Money was always virtual to the degree that it extended the possibilities of abstraction. Exchange became more distant from face-to-face transaction, and focused on equivalence, calculation and the quantitative as opposed to human and social consequence. Hart recognised that digital technologies align with these virtual properties; indeed, they make money itself still more abstract, more deterritorialised, cheaper, more efficient and closer to the nature of information or communication.

As an abstraction, money gives rise to various forms of capital and their inherent tendency to aggrandizement. As particularity money threatens our humanity through the sheer scale and diversity of commoditized culture. We take such arguments to be sufficiently well established as to not require further elucidation here.

Dialectical thinking, as developed by Hegel, theorised this relationship between the simultaneous growth of the universal and of the particular, as dependent upon each other rather than in opposition to each other.

Just like the digital, money represented a new phase in human abstraction where, for the first time, practically anything could be reduced to the same common element. This reduction of quality to quantity was in turn the foundation for an explosion of differentiated things, especially the huge expansion of commoditisation linked to industrialisation. In both cases, the more we reduce to the same the more we can thereby create difference. This is what makes money the best precedent for understanding digital culture and leads to our first principle of the dialectic.

One advantage of defining the digital as binary is that this definition also helps us identify a possible historical precedent. If the digital is defined as our ability to reduce so much of the world to the commonality of a binary, a sort of base line 2, then we can also reflect upon humanity's ability to previously reduce much of the world to base line 10, the decimal foundation for systems of modern money.

Rather than a general distinction between the digital and the analogue we define the digital as everything that has been developed by, or can be reduced to, the binary, that is bits consisting of 0s and 1s. The development of binary code radically simplified information and communication creating new possibilities of convergence between what were previously disparate technologies or content.

We shall argue that it is this drive to the normative that that makes attempts to understand the impact of the digital in the absence of anthropology unviable.

Our final principle acknowledges the materiality of digital worlds, which are neither more nor less material than the worlds that preceded them.

The fifth principle is concerned with the essential ambiguity of digital culture with regard to its increasing openness and closure, which emerge in matters ranging from politics and privacy to the authenticity of ambivalence.

The fourth principle re-asserts the importance of cultural relativism and the global nature of our encounter with the digital, negating assumptions that the digital is necessarily homogenising and also giving voice and visibility to those who are peripheralised by modernist and similar perspectives.

The commitment to holism, the foundation of anthropological perspectives on humanity, represents a third principle.

Our second principle suggests that humanity is not one iota more mediated by the rise of the digital. Rather, we suggest that that digital anthropology will progress to the degree that the digital enables us to understand and exposes the framed nature of analogue or pre-digital life as culture and fails when we fall victim to a broader and romanticized discourse that presupposes a greater authenticity or reality to the pre digital.

The first principle is that the digital itself intensifies the dialectical nature of culture.

we need to be clear as to what we mean by words such as digital, culture and anthropology and what we believe represents practices that are new and unprecedented and what remains the same or merely slightly changed. We need to find a way to ensure that the vast generalisations required in such tasks do not obscure differences, distinctions and relativism which we view as remaining amongst the most important contributions of an anthropological perspective to understanding human life and culture.

The digital should and can be a highly effective means for reflecting upon what it means to be human, the ultimate task of Anthropology as a discipline.

Like spilled ink politics has oozed over culture in the past half a decade, absorbing more and more territory as the years pass by. You will find mixed reactions to this advance. Some are heartened by this new reality, their eyes sparkling at what they deem progressive success. “Technically, everything is political,” they muse. By this logic, a political veneer translates to a veneer of enlightenment.Others, however, do not share the same comfort and worry that the encroachment of politics into culture is a bad omen, stunting and blunting society rather than advancing it.

Essentially, we study culture at an “on the ground" level – looking for the individual stories, rich details, particular nuances, and thick description you can only find by spending extended time with people in their daily lives. As opposed to pointing a telescope at them from afar, bringing them into labs to run hypothetical experiments, or amassing troves of personal data and analysing it for the 'big trends'.

What defines Anthropologists is that we study culture through participant observation Anthropologists use all manner of other methods too – surveys, data collection, interviews, mapping, and historical research. But active participant observation is at the heart of the discipline – the act of completely immersing yourself in another culture for a long period of time as both an active participant in it, and an observer of it. You join in the dance, and then analyse what the dance means.

One of the more compelling bits of evidence Illich marshals in his historical investigations involves the shrinking diversity of words to designate varieties of sense experience. Summarizing the work of a variety of scholars, Illich noted,Dozens of words for shades of perception have disappeared from usage. For what the nose does, someone has counted the victims: Of 158 German words that indicate variations of smell, which Dürer's contemporaries used, only thirty-two are still in use. Equally, the linguistic register for touch has shriveled. The see-words fare no better.Sadly, this accords with my own experience, and I wonder whether it rings true for you. Upon reflection, I have a paucity of words at my disposal with which to name the remarkable variety of experiences and sensations that the world offers. 

Further on in the paper Illich writes, “I argue that ‘show’ stands for the transducer or program that enables the interface between systems, while ‘image’ has been used for an entity brought forth by the imagination. Show stands for the momentary state of a cybernetic program, while image always implies poiesis. Used in this way, image and show are the labels for two heterogeneous categories of mediation.”My sense, deriving from the passing reference to cybernetics, is that the distinction between the image and the show tracks with the distinction, critical to Illich’s later work, which he drew between the age of instruments and the age of systems. While I don’t think that Illich rigorously developed this distinction anywhere in writing, one key element involved the manner in which the system, as opposed to the mere instrument, enveloped the user. It was possible to stand apart from the instrument and thus to attain a level of mastery over it. It was not possible to likewise stand apart from the system. Which may explain why Illich, as we’ll see shortly, concluded, “There can be rules for exposure to visually appropriating pictures; exposure to show may demand a reasoned stance of resistance.” 

He goes on to explain how “until quite recently, the guard of the eyes was not looked upon as a fad, nor written off as internalized repression. Our taste was trained to judge all forms of gazing on the other. Today, things have changed. The shameless gaze is in.” Illich was quick to add that he was not speaking of gazing at pornographic images. He was interested in recovering the idea that seeing was an action and not merely a passive activity on the model of a lens receiving visual data. And, as an action, it had an ethical dimension (Illich was very much indebted to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on these matters).

I’m not suggesting that attention is anything less than this, only that we might improve our understanding of what is happening when we attend to the world if we also attend to what our senses are up to when we do so. A determination to see may only get us so far if we do not also think about how we see or, and this will be a critical point, recognize that our seeing can be trained. Moreover, James’s definition of attention leaves little room for the role that beauty or desire or ethics might play in the dance between our consciousness and the world. Attention is reduced to the exercise of raw mental will-power. 

He goes on to explain how “until quite recently, the guard of the eyes was not looked upon as a fad, nor written off as internalized repression. Our taste was trained to judge all forms of gazing on the other. Today, things have changed. The shameless gaze is in.” Illich was quick to add that he was not speaking of gazing at pornographic images. He was interested in recovering the idea that seeing was an action and not merely a passive activity on the model of a lens receiving visual data. And, as an action, it had an ethical dimension (Illich was very much indebted to the philosopher Emmanuel Levinas on these matters).

As I thought about this and how digital media seems to encourage the myth of immateriality and disembodiment, it occurred to me that this might be an interesting clue as to the source of the worst elements of our digital public spacesTo forget the body is to forget our dependence, our frailty, our limitations.

We never leave our bodies when we are immersed in digitally mediated experiences, but we might be tempted to disregard our flesh and its significance.

Digital media seems to suggest immateriality, as does the language we use to talk about it: virtual reality, cyberspace, the cloud. Likewise, we are tempted to imagine that our use of digital media puts us in a state of disembodiment. There’s something to this, but the language of disembodiment is not the best way to describe what’s going on. After all, we never actually leave our bodies when we use digital media. Perhaps it’s best to think of it as a different mode of embodiment—one characterized by telepresence, a condition in which our immediate experience is not confined to the physical location of our bodies.

When the Timeline Becomes Our Sidewalk

“For Hugh, who uses Latin, the act of reading with the eyes implies an activity not unlike a search for firewood:  his eyes must pick up the letters of the alphabet and bundle these into syllables.  The eyes are at the service of the lungs, the throat, the tongue, and the lips that do not usually utter single letters but words.”  (58)

In a tradition of one and a half millennia, the sounding pages are echoed by the resonance  of the moving lips and tongue.  The reader’s ears pay attention, and strain to catch what the reader’s mouth gives forth.  In this manner the sequence of letters translates directly into body movements and patterns nerve impulses.  the lines are a sound track picked up by the mouth and voiced by the reader for his own ear.  By reading, the page is literally embodied, incorporated.

That implies that investors still aren’t panicking. It also suggests that stocks could have farther to fall. During the Covid-19 stock-market selloff of 2020, for example, investors yanked out $61 for every $100 invested, Bank of America analysts found. During the financial crisis, it was even worse: Investors redeemed $113 for every $100 they invested.

A recent analysis from Bank of America Corp. shows outflows from stock funds have been relatively minuscule. The bank estimates that for every $100 poured into the stock market since the start of 2021, so far only $4 has been pulled out. That is based on data through Wednesday from EPFR, which tracks retail and institutional investors’ movement in exchange-traded and mutual funds.

Forward multiples climbed as high as 26.2 times earnings in March 2000. In the selloff that followed, they plummeted. By 2002, the S&P 500 traded at a low of 14.2 times its next year’s earnings. In 2008, when the country was in a severe recession, that figure hit 8.8.

The Treasury Department has said that current U.S. sanctions don’t prohibit Russia from making debt payments. Prices on the bonds rallied Thursday on hopes that the payments would go through. Russia’s bonds maturing in 2023 were quoted around 41 cents on the dollar Thursday, compared with 27 cents Wednesday, according to AdvantageData. Those maturing in 2043 were bought and sold for around 32 cents Thursday, up from about 22 cents Wednesday. They traded above 100 cents on the dollar before the war. Russian credit default swaps, which would pay out a windfall if Russia defaults, also rallied on news of the payments. The cost of a five year CDS contract dropped to 41% of the total value of the debt to be insured, compared to as high as 60% as of Tuesday, according to data from ICE Data Services. The last time Russia reneged on its foreign debts was after the Bolshevik Revolution in 1918. Russia defaulted on its local-government debt in 1998 as the post-Soviet economy struggled to find its feet.

In Japan, companies are raising prices not because consumers are eager to buy their products and willing to pay more, but because they say the cost of their materials leaves them no choice.

Policy makers have distinguished Japan’s situation from the U.S., where strong consumer demand has helped drive inflation above 8% and triggered rate increases by the Federal Reserve. Japan’s economy shrank slightly in the first quarter of this year and the central bank says it isn’t planning to raise interest rates.

The People’s Bank of China on Friday cut its benchmark rate for loans of five years or more to 4.45% from 4.6%, the biggest single reduction since the rate entered the bank’s policy armory in 2019. It had made a 0.1 percentage-point cut in early 2020.

The latest move “is an even stronger signal that instead of opting for a broad-based monetary easing they want to do more-targeted easing,” said Tommy Wu, lead China economist at Oxford Economics in Hong Kong.“We shouldn’t expect large-scale stimulus of the kind that we saw in 2020,” Julian Evans-Pritchard, senior China economist at Capital Economics in Singapore, said in a note to clients.

The venture-capital pullback is a correction from extraordinary heights. Investors poured $1.3 trillion into startups over a decade, producing hundreds of companies annually that attained billion-dollar-plus valuations, attracting interest from foreign governments and top-tier hedge funds. Venture-capital funds raised $132 billion to invest in startups in 2021, nearly double the amount from 2019 and six times the total raised a decade ago, when the number of funds was about a third of what it is today. In last year’s fourth quarter, venture capital investments reached a record $95 billion, according to PitchBook Data Inc.

Smith notes that conservatives “are adding to their long-held distrust of the state a new suspicion about the power of managerial and therapeutic experts over everyday life.” In light of these concerns, he writes, “Foucault’s work [offers] theoretical support to conservative critiques of the ‘new class’ of experts”—ironically, again, the class among which Foucault has been most widely celebrated.

For Foucault’s critics, the implication that there can exist no disinterested, apolitical pursuit of knowledge is scandalous. Conservatives, liberal defenders of science, and traditional humanists have all claimed that his work contributed to the politicization of universities in recent decades.

Perhaps Foucault’s most influential coinage is his related notion of “power-knowledge.” This must be distinguished from the better-known and less controversial dictum that “knowledge is power,” often attributed to Francis Bacon, which asserts that knowledge enables control of the world. For Foucault, in contrast, knowledge does not enable the exercise of power, but proceeds from it. This inversion comes about because power establishes the truth regimes that enable the production of knowledge. The resulting knowledge perpetuates and expands power—which produces more knowledge. In Foucault’s words, “‘Truth’ is linked in a circular relation with systems of power which produce and sustain it, and to effects of power which it induces and which extends it.”

Under the sway of this “postmodern” worldview, we are told, stu­dents learn to fault the West for the sins of racism, sexism, and colonialism, and to embrace both moral and epistemological relativism.

Over the following decades, a certain version of history has it, Strauss trained two generations of students in the United States as ‘philosophers’ capable of seeing through the weaknesses and falsehoods of American modernity, while transmitting to their own students a passionate attachment to their regime and their era, coupled with certain opinions and moral orientations that liberal democracy could not otherwise provide from within the matrix of its own premises. These latter students, who became political leaders rather than philosophers, acted in the horizon of the opinions their teachers had given them, bound to them by such noble lies as the infallibility of the Founding Fathers, the genius of Lincoln, or the sacredness of human rights. This project, celebrated in Allan Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, has perhaps now come to a miserable end. But something like it may be liberal democracy’s best hope for survival in the twenty-first century.

Instead, the modern philosopher tells citizens they can and must liberate themselves from conventions, but, as he exhorts them to exercize their freedom and critical faculties, reminds them that the ‘historical situation’ to which they belong has certain requirements, limitations, and paths towards the desired future. 

For Foucault as with Strauss, we learn how to read the author by seeing how he read others. Such a new reading of Foucault might allow us to understand him as moving, over the course of his career, towards a tactical accommodation with liberal democracy, the Enlightenment, and modernity — not because these are the best and truest structures, or even merely those we cannot in the present do without, but because they afford the modern philosopher possibilities for pursuing his private project of ‘ascesis’ while securing a minimally decent public order through the elaboration of a new ‘noble lie’. 

When the Enlightenment replaced the old cave of the city with the new cave of the historical situation, however, a new kind of philosopher appeared. Kant, Foucault argued, tried to bring about the unprecedented union of Diogenes and Plato, speaking truth to power in the public sphere while also covertly orienting political action. Of course, the enlightened public intellectual, who appears as the union of Diogenes’ shocking, iconoclastic rejection of contemporary pieties and Plato’s subtle, esoteric awakening of philosophical souls and education of the opinions of the holders of power, is Foucault himself. The modern philosopher seems to speak with heedless freedom, making bold critiques of our most cherished values and summoning to us overcome what Kant called our “self-imposed immaturity,” our childish dependence on traditional authority. Through this public parrhesia, however, the philosopher becomes an authority himself, shaping public opinion and guiding the decisions of elites. We might expect, in the spirit of Plato, that this philosopher will tell some noble lies.

Towards the end of his lecture series, Foucault claimed that all of Western philosophy has been structured by a tension between Diogenes and Plato. The former, living in his barrel, masturbating in front of passersby, mocking the great and good, performed “philosophy’s free speech… in the public sphere, in defiance, confrontation, derision and critique of the deeds of the Prince and of political action.” His was a philosophy free to speak truth to power because the philosopher that spoke it had no power himself, no respectable membership in the city. Plato, in contrast, went to the court of Dionysius the tyrant of Syracuse as an advisor, and articulated models of ideal states in his Republic and Laws. Such a philosopher who aspires to influence (or, really, to wield) power cannot speak freely in public, but only in intimate settings, in the ear of the Prince or among initiates. If he teaches in public, or writes, it will be in an esoteric mode, concealing his purposes beneath apparently acceptable and conventional ideas.

But Foucault would rather have us ask how the modern philosopher should live — and how he should disguise himself. 

Here Foucault defended himself against accusations of being a ‘historicist’ and ‘nihilist’. He suggested that the point of historicism and nihilism is not to give us a true vision of the world, but to contribute to a “transformation of value systems.” We should be asking, therefore, not if Foucault was a historicist and nihilist, but what he was doing with his historicism and nihilism, what ground he is clearing for what new foundations. 

Kant saw the Enlightenment as an ‘exit’ from humanity’s dependence on traditional structures of authority such as the Church. But, Foucault observed, this apparent exit from the cave of prejudice creates a new kind of cave around itself, one defined in temporal rather than spatial terms.

Foucault, I have argued, shows us that liberal democracy is inherently vulnerable to the vicious struggles of ‘identity politics’ because its political-philosophical foundation rests on an uneasy compromise between what he called ‘historicist’ claims about particular national and ethnic groups, on the one hand, and, on the other, ‘philosophical’ claims about universal human rights. 

Throughout his intellectual career, the French philosopher Michel Foucault pursued two goals: a critique of the Enlightenment, and a ‘return’ to the Greeks.

Toward the end of their lives, both men turned to the theme of religion, arguing that it provided critical cultural and psychological resources necessary for individuals to become meaningfully autonomous. They moved toward an understanding that, in order to become the sort of independent selves on whom liberal democracy depends, we need what Foucault called “discipline” or “ascesis”—the ability to bind ourselves to other people who help us both to keep our commitments and to remake ourselves.

Foucault attributed their inspiration to Lasch’s Culture of Narcissism (1979), in which Lasch had argued that anxious individuals, deprived of economic security and cultural bonds, were investing their self-image, and therapeutic projects of self-discovery, with unprecedented importance.

Viktor Shvets

Ukraine has a relatively small number — and it's not saying how many. Russia has apparently taken some of them out — and desperately want to eliminate all of them, but it hasn't been able to do so. "Those are incredibly important to Ukraine," said Obrien. "They don't threaten every Russian flight. They can't threaten every flight. But they can make the pilots jumpy enough that anywhere they want to fly there's a potential threat."

Yes, but their air defenses were relatively limited, especially when the war began. The Americans have helped with large numbers of Stinger missiles. A single soldier fires these missiles from his shoulder, and they're very effective at taking down low-flying helicopters. But perhaps Ukraine's most under-appreciated weapon in this war is the S-300 surface-to-air missile system. This is a hulking, Soviet-era air defense system that fires missiles from the ground that take down jet fighters.

But market participants say the recent blow-out of bid-ask spreads for older Treasurys is not so much a reflection of funding pressures, and more a reflection of how dealers were struggling to handle unprecedented daily volatility in the bond-market.

Trading costs for off-the-run Treasurys tend to blow up when strains arise in short-term funding markets as they did when the 1998 implosion of the hedge fund Long-Term Capital Management, which had borrowed from short-term funding markets to scale up its billion-dollar wagers on bond-market spreads such as those between older and newer Treasurys to narrow. In 1998 a lack of illiquidity amid worries over financial crises in Europe and emerging markets saw demand for the most liquid on-the-run Treasurys soar and appetite for off-the-run bonds dwindle. Advertisement This blew up the price difference between the two buckets of bonds, forcing LTCM to unwind and liquidate its positions, and freezing funding markets as banks realized one of their biggest borrowers was at the risk of collapsing.

Though traders have been able to move in and out of on-the-run Treasurys with relative smoothness, it’s the less liquid and much bigger off-the-run portion of the market that has seen a sharp erosion of liquidity. This has led to a sharp widening of the price difference between the two buckets of bonds, know as the basis, in recent sessions.

In calm trading, the difference in prices between newer and older Treasurys is usually slim.

During times of intense volatility like this week, dealers, however, will demand a hefty premium to trade off-the-run Treasurys, as it could be difficult to take them onto their balance sheet and offload them again to a willing buyer.

The consolidation of banks in the aftermath of 2008 means the bond market is now relying on a narrower group of broker-dealers to connect market participants who want to buy and sell their bonds. In addition, dealers have been saddled with post-crisis regulations that mean they cannot lever up their balance sheet to trade at a much larger capacity like they could in the past. “Pre-crisis, on-the-runs and off-the-runs were indistinguishable as pools of liquidity,” said Estes.

Yield-curve inversion in bond and funding markets is a recession indicator primarily because it reveals long-term investors are not confident enough in long-term growth prospects to bet their capital on riskier investments with potentially much greater rewards, such as growth companies, infrastructure and capital equipment-related projects.Instead, there is a tendency to park billions of dollars of capital in long-bonds, despite central bank rate hikes, with the strong demand depressing yields.

Companies issued bonds at record-shattering rates in 2020 but are increasingly staying away from debt markets now as rates rise. Issuance of BBB-rated bonds fell 36% in 2021 and is down 37.1% year over year in 2022 as of March 22. Eventually, the mass of debt will have to be repaid or, more likely, refinanced at whatever are the prevailing rates. The good news is that companies have time on their side. Typically, the maturity wall for non-investment-grade-rated companies peaks at four-to-five years out, but in 2021 that was extended until 2028, when $573 billion in debt is set to mature, according to Ratings.

U.S. companies took advantage of low rates and quantitative easing in 2020 and 2021 to take on cheap debt and refinance old, costlier debt. In doing so, they reduced their leverage and pushed out the maturity wall of their outstanding bonds.

The rate of fallen angels has been historically low in the last decade, with companies supported by access to cheap finance. After a mini-spike in COVID-19-affected 2020, the number of U.S. fallen angels fell to an eight-year low of 12 in 2021.

In recent history, rising corporate bond spreads have dealt setbacks to the Fed's plans. The Fed halted policy tightening in early 2019 after corporate credit spreads widened by 50 bps, eventually cutting rates when the pandemic arrived, while a spike in spreads in the aftermath of a rate hike in late 2015 delayed further increases by 12 months.

Ongoing higher borrowing costs pose even greater challenges to heavily indebted and vulnerable companies sitting just above junk rating status. Nonfinancial corporations ended 2021 with a record $11.65 trillion in debt.

In the past, the Fed has paused rate hikes in the face of wider credit spreads, which translate to slower economic growth and higher borrowing costs for companies. This time around, the Fed has less reason to alter its course, given low bond yields, companies' healthy corporate balance sheets and a big reduction in corporate demand for debt.

In addition to spreads, the relative performance of different tiers of debt are important barometers to track as well, according to Dan Sorid, Citigroup Inc.’s head of U.S. investment grade credit strategy. If companies with lower credit ratings start performing much worse than those with higher ratings, it’s another sign that the flow of credit might be getting too constrained.  

The average investment-grade U.S. corporate bond traded with 109 basis points of extra interest above Treasuries on Monday, according to Bloomberg index data. When that spread reaches closer to 150 basis points, the Fed might start to get worried, according to analysts and investors informally polled by Bloomberg.  #lazy-img-384027322:before{padding-top:56.25%;}

Commercial paper—short-term corporate loans that form the core of prime money-market fund holdings—rarely trades in normal times since it is repaid relatively quickly. But when investors are asking for cash back, money-market funds have to sell that paper. In times of stress, banks, which broker commercial paper deals, don’t want to step in and help. Banks are less willing or able to broker trades because of the wave of reforms and demands for higher capital directed at them after the 2008 crisis. These reforms made banks much less vulnerable in March 2020, but put more of the strain of sudden demands for liquidity on market-based finance, such as money funds, instead.

For now, there is so much money sloshing around the financial system that a repeat of 2020’s dash for cash seems a distant prospect. Also, investors have further reduced their exposure to prime funds. However, the volume of spare cash in the financial system could drop quickly, with the economy reopening and people starting to spend their savings, as the U.S. government sells more Treasurys and the Fed starts to think about ending its vast bond-buying programs.

That is what happened in March 2020. In the U.S., investors rushed to pull money from so-called prime money funds, which own lots of corporate short-term debt. They instead sent their cash to safer government money funds, which hold exclusively government-backed debt. Assets in prime funds fell by nearly one-fifth to $652 billion by the end of March from $791 billion a month earlier, according to the Investment Company Institute, sapping companies of a key source of funding.

Money funds offer investors instant access to their cash, and invest in short-term debt issued by governments and companies that will be repaid somewhere between a few days and a few months. If lots of investors want their money back at the same time, that can cause problems because fund managers might need to sell this short-term debt—and there are typically few buyers.

Guessing the final destination of interest rates is extremely difficult, he said, but one sign that the Fed might need to do more than currently expected is that stocks, as a whole, have only experienced modest declines, with the S&P 500 down 7.8% year-to-date. Right now interest-rate derivatives show that investors expect the Fed to raise its benchmark federal-funds rate from its current level between 0.25% and 0.5% to just above 3% next year. If the market starts pricing in a 3.5% fed-funds rate and stocks fall another 10%, that might suggest that the Fed will stop at 3.5%. But if stocks barely budge, “That tells you [Fed officials] have to do more,” Mr. Ren said.

It is possible that Russia will try to “break Ukraine into parts and leave Western Ukraine alone,” said Angela Stent, a specialist in Russia affairs at Georgetown University. But because that would leave a West-leaning government in Kyiv that Mr. Putin has previously depicted as illegitimate, she said, “I find it hard to imagine that.”More likely, analysts said, is for Russia, at a minimum, to seek a constitution of Ukraine that grants significant independence to the east of the country, and an effective veto over Ukrainian government action.The Ukrainians could agree to further elections—but the risk for Russia is that, even in the east, it wouldn’t like the outcome.Mr. Clarke said one model of Ukrainian neutrality that might appeal to Russia is that of Austria in 1955. The Soviets pulled out of Austria in return for a constitutional guarantee of neutrality that exists today.Rather than persuade Ukrainians that neutrality is an attractive option, the invasion is likely to harden opinion in the opposite direction.

Those sanctions can be ratcheted up or down depending on Russian actions. They aren’t without cost for the West. They are likely to intensify an existing inflation problem and, if Russia retaliates by cutting off energy supplies, could lead to electricity rationing in Europe.Mr. Sherr of the Estonian Foreign Policy Institute doesn’t expect those measures to change Mr. Putin’s mind. “Putin and the people around him, at least the political and security people around him, have never bowed to the logic of sanctions,” he said.

Russia’s air force, navy and nuclear force have been partly or completely modernized, he said, but the army looks as though it hasn’t overcome past weaknesses.

“We’ve all been astonished that this new Russian army looks like the old Red Army—not very well trained, not very well commanded, with really quite poor logistics—which implies either a big failure of planning or…a big underestimation of the enemy,” said Mr. Clarke, the former director of the Royal United Services Institute.

The full scale of this Russian setback is emerging only now, with satellite imagery showing more than 70 Russian tanks, armored personnel carriers and other armor destroyed after Ukrainian artillery and airstrikes sank three pontoon bridges and shelled the Russian beachhead in Bilohorivka.“We have never seen such dumb stubbornness, going with a frontal assault and trying to build pontoons in the same place three times in a row. But they still keep trying,” said Luhansk Gov. Serhiy Haidai. He added that Ukrainian artillery keeps shelling the area and, according to intelligence intercepts, an entire Russian battalion is refusing orders to attempt yet another crossing in Bilohorivka. That claim couldn’t be independently confirmed.

The Fed’s antidote to repo market dysfunction is stepping in as a key transactor, with the U.S. central bank conducting both repo and reverse repo operations to keep the federal funds rate in its target range. That process is spearheaded by the New York Fed, which leads the U.S. central bank’s open market operations.When the repo market saga first began last fall, the New York Fed in September 2019 injected $53 billion worth of cash in exchange for short-term Treasury bills, its first overnight repo market operation since the financial crisis. Those purchases were then listed as assets on the Fed’s balance sheet until they’re paid back.And when the coronavirus crisis came along and Treasury markets started seizing up even more, the Fed’s intervened in a way that would make those operations look like breadcrumbs. On March 12, 2020, the Fed said it would offer $500 billion in a three-month operation. The following day, the Fed planned to inject $1 trillion more, split between a three-month operation and a one-month operation. It was prepared to offer up to $1 trillion every subsequent week.“These changes are being made to address highly unusual disruptions in Treasury financing markets associated with the coronavirus outbreak,” the New York Fed said in a statement.In more extreme circumstances, the Fed can also decide to start organically growing its balance sheet again to help calm the dysfunction. That’s exactly what it did in October 2019, long before the coronavirus pandemic was on anyone’s mind, when U.S. central bankers feared that they’d taken their balance sheet drawdown too far.

Just as quantitative easing (Q.E.) increases the amount of bank reserves in the system, the opposite process of selling off assets vacuums them out. All in all, the Fed took about a trillion dollars out of the system. The repo market’s dysfunction showed that officials might’ve taken the process too far.

All of that worked to cause a cash crunch, and the repo rate soared — reaching as high as 10 percent intraday on Sept. 17. In other words, banks didn’t want to part with their cash for anything lower than that rate. It pushed up the federal funds rate along with it, which was supposed to be trading in a target range between 2-2.25 percent at the time. The Fed was also days away from making a second rate cut.

The Fed’s involvement in the repo market as we know it can be traced back to Sept. 16, 2019, when a traffic jam occurred at the intersection of cash and securities. Experts say that piles of cash flowed out of the system because corporate tax payments came due. That happened right as new Treasury debt settled onto the markets. Financial institutions wanted to borrow cash to purchase those securities, but supply didn’t match those demands.

The first quarter data show that the net leverage of the median non-financial company in the US IG and HY index increased to a record high of 2.8x and 4.4x respectively. Furthermore, a bigger hit to earnings will come in the second quarter as economic disruption peaked in April and May. It will be some time before it is possible to gauge the full damage on corporate balance sheets.

Moody’s expects the US HY default rate to peak at 12% at the end of 2020. This forecast implies a significant volume of defaults in the second half of 2020. Investors can find some comfort in the fact that spreads have normally peaked well before defaults, as markets tend to look forward to the potential for improving prospects of companies. An exception to this rule is the early 2000s recession when credit spreads peaked four months after defaults in October 2002. By that time, the US economy was already a year into recovery. The current situation bears some similarities, as the default cycle follows a long period of uninterrupted growth and large build up in corporate debt.

On 23 March, the Federal Reserve (Fed) announced that is would start purchasing corporate bonds for the first time ever, both in the primary (direct from the issuer) and the secondary market. Credit spreads peaked on the day of the announcement. In a second announcement on 9 April, the Fed stated that it will also buy HY bonds that had an investment grade rating before 22 March and HY exchange-traded funds (ETFs). The irony is that the newly-created corporate bond facilities only became operational in mid-May and as of 12 June , the Fed has purchased just $5.5 billion of IG and HY ETFs, a drop in the ocean compared to the $750 billion maximum size of the programme. Instead, investors, emboldened by the implicit central bank backstop, have done the job for the Fed.

Apple’s trailing price-to-earnings, or P/E, ratio steadily climbed this year alongside its stock price. Apple began the year with a trailing P/E ratio just over 13, according to FactSet, below its five-year average of 16.2, before finishing 2019 at 24.7, its highest point since 2010.

With data collection, facial-recognition technology, and questions of bias in mind, consider this artifact discussed in a handout produced by Jim Strickland of the Computer History Museum. It is a rail ticket with a primitive facial recognition feature: “punched photographs,” generic faces to be punched by the conductor according to their similarity to the ticket holder. These inspired the Hollerith machine, which was used to tabulate census data from 1890 to the mid-20th century.

The philosopher Charles Taylor has called this tendency in modern liberal societies “code fetishism,” and it ought to be judiciously resisted. According to Taylor, code fetishism “tends to forget the background which makes sense of any code—the variety of goods which rules and norms are meant to realize—as well as the vertical dimension which arises above all of these.” Code fetishism in this sense is not unlike what Jacques Ellul called technique, a relentless drive toward efficiency that eventually became an end in itself having lost sight of the goods for the sake of which efficiency was pursued in the first place.

The scale and speed of communication on social media platforms generate infamously vexing issues related to speech and expression, which are especially evident during a volatile election season or a global pandemic. These issues do not, in my view, admit of obvious solutions beyond shutting down the platforms altogether. That not being a presently viable option, companies and law makers are increasingly pressured to apply ever more vigilant and stringent forms of moderation, often with counterproductive results

Perhaps this explains the recent interest in stoicism, although, we do well to remember Pascal’s pointed criticism of the stoics: “They conclude that we can always do what we can sometimes do.

The point is not that our digital media environment necessarily generates vice, rather it’s that it constitutes an ever-present field of temptation, which can require, in turn, monastic degrees of self-discipline to manage.

It seems unrealistic, for example, to expect that someone, who is likely already swamped by the demands of living in a complex, fast-paced, and precarious social milieu, will have the leisure and resources to thoroughly “do their own research” about every dubious or contested claim they encounter online, or to adjudicate the competing claims made by those who are supposed to know what they are talking about.

In lines he composed for a play in the mid-1930s, T. S. Eliot wrote of those who“constantly try to escape From the darkness outside and within By dreaming of systems so perfect that no one will need to be good.”That last line has always struck me as a rather apt characterization of a certain technocratic impulse, which presumes that techno-bureaucratic structures and processes can eliminate the necessity of virtue, or maybe even human involvement altogether. We might just as easily speak of systems so perfect that no one will need to be wise or temperate or just. Just adhere to the code or the technique with unbending consistency and all will be well.

Whether strictly necessary or not, these systems introduce a paradox: in order to ostensibly serve human society, they must eliminate or displace elements of human experience. Of course, what becomes evident eventually is that the systems are not, in fact, serving human ends, at least not necessarily so.

European countries such as Germany might need to resort to rationing and closing factories if Russian gas deliveries are cut off, other energy analysts have said. Germany would enter a sharp recession if Russian natural-gas deliveries are cut off, the country’s leading economic think tanks said in a report earlier in April.

The action sets a worrisome precedent for the broader Europe Union, which before the war in Ukraine sourced as much as 40% of its gas from Russia. That gas heats European homes and powers factories, especially in Germany and Austria, which source more than half of their supplies from Moscow.

The move marks a major escalation by Russia, which has tried to bolster its currency by insisting customers pay for gas in rubles, and introduces the possibility that more economies in Europe, deeply dependent on Russian gas, could be targeted. Gas prices in Europe rose by more than 10% late Tuesday as traders weighed risks to already tight supplies.

Coinbase, under co-founder and chief executive Brian Armstrong, on Tuesday posted a first-quarter loss of $429.7 million, or $1.98 a share, on revenue of $1.2 billion. That compared with earnings of $387.7 million, or $3.05 a share, on $1.8 billion in revenue a year earlier. Analysts had projected a loss of 1 cent a share on revenue of $1.5 billion, according to FactSet.

“It’s important we have a good crop for food prices,” he said. “We need to have a good crop especially with what’s happening in Ukraine.”

Over 68% of the winter-wheat crop in the U.S. is in a severe drought, while spring-wheat states are stuck with excessive moisture, said Chandler Goule, chief executive of the National Association of Wheat Growers. In Minnesota, one of the largest spring-wheat growing states, 2% of the spring wheat is planted compared with 93% last year.“The lack of moisture in the winter wheat and excessive moisture in the spring will affect yields and quality if we don’t see an immediate change in the weather,” he said.

Some corn-producing states—such as Illinois, Indiana, Minnesota and North Dakota—have seen above-average precipitation over the past three months, according to data from the U.S. National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Wet soils in Corn Belt states have prevented farmers from getting their machinery into their fields.

On Monday, the U.S. Department of Agriculture said 22% of corn was planted, compared with 50% for the previous-five-year average. For soybeans, 12% was planted, compared with the previous-five-year average of 24%, and 27% of spring wheat was in the ground compared with a typical 47%, according to the USDA.

Melissa Gregg who observed that “personal productivity is an epistemology without an ontology, a framework for knowing what to do in the absence of a guiding principle for doing it.”

As Ellul saw it, technique colonized realms of life to which it did not properly belong. The key, then, is to recognize where and when it is appropriate to allow technique (or quantification or optimization) a place and where and when it would be good to circumscribe its scope. In order to do so we must have before us a clear sense of the good we seek. But, as Ellul warned, technique becomes a problem precisely when it becomes and end in itself.

To me, this contrast illustrates the paradox of civilization: its charms are due essentially to the various residues it carries along with it, although this does not absolve us of the obligation to purify the stream. By being doubly in the right, we are admitting our mistake. We are right to be rational and to try to increase our production and so keep manufacturing costs down. But we are also right to cherish those very imperfections we are endeavouring to eliminate. Social life consists in destroying that which gives it its savour.

On an earlier occasion, Jacobs’s analysis also recalled a distinction drawn by one philosopher between what is correct and what is true. What is correct may fall short of truth because it is partial or inadequate, and may for that reason be, in fact, misleading. It seemed to me that we might, in similar fashion, draw a distinction between what is right and what is good. It was right for the Baltimore Orioles in the 70s and the A’s in the early 2000’s to optimize their team strategies and tactics as they did. Moreover, it is right (meaning rational and in keeping with the competitive nature of the sport) for all other teams to do so. It is not, however, good for baseball that they do so, or so Jacobs and others who take his view of things would argue.

It’s worth pausing to consider wherein the purported rationality lies. It is the logic of competition. Within the sporting world, of course, the point is to win, and to do so in a way that can be clearly determined quantitatively. There are no grounds for anyone to ask a manager or a player to pursue a strategy that will diminish their competitive edge. Most of life, however, is not a game with quantifiable outcomes, and probably shouldn’t be treated as such. However, the triumph of technique in Ellul’s sense encourages the competitive mode of experience. Indeed, quantification itself invites it. This dynamic can be put to beneficial use, and, in clearly delineated circumstances, is perfectly appropriate. But applied uncritically and indiscriminately or even nefariously (see e.g. social media metrics) it can introduce destructive tendencies and eclipse qualitative or otherwise unquantifiable values. Generally speaking, quantification and the logic of optimization which it encourages tend to transform our field of experience into points of aggression, as the sociologist Hartmut Rosa has aptly put it. Data-driven optimization is, in this sense, a way of perceiving the world. And what may matter most about this is not necessarily what it allows us to see, but it keeps us from perceiving: in short, all that cannot be quantified or measured.

The tendency remains, and, as Ellul predicted, it has only intensified. The power of digital computation—still nascent when Ellul published his best known work, The Technological Society—radically widened the scope of technique, understood as the drive toward efficiency in all realms of human experience.

Technique became the defining force, the ultimate value, of a new social order in which efficiency was no longer an option but a necessity imposed on all human activity. Technique became universally totalitarian in modern society as rationalistic proceduralism imposed an artificial value system of measuring and organizing everything quantitatively rather than qualitatively.

Ellul’s issue was not with technological machines but with a society necessarily caught up in efficient methodological techniques. Technology, then, is but an expression and by-product of the underlying reliance on technique, on the proceduralization whereby everything is organized and managed to function most efficiently, and directed toward the most expedient end of the highest productivity. Ellul’s own comprehensive definition is found in the preface of The Technological Society: “Technique is the totality of methods, rationally arrived at and having absolute efficiency (for a given stage of development) in every field of human activity.”

About 40 million people owe roughly $1.6 trillion in federal student debt. But because student-loan rates are generally fixed, higher rates won’t affect much of the existing debt.

The most common kind of federal student loan, known as a direct loan, is offered at a new interest rate every July. The rate is calculated by adding the yield on the 10-year Treasury note in the May auction to a fixed premium, set by Congress, of 2.05 percentage points. Last year, the May auction resulted in 10-year yields of 1.684%, setting a student-loan rate of 3.73% through this June. That rate could move above 5% starting in July. If the rate tops 5.05%, it would be the highest since 2013, according to Education Department data.

For many, the companies they work for have closed down in the lockdown, including boarding up worker dormitories. Some have chosen to join the tens of thousands who zip around Shanghai on bikes or scooters for food-delivery platforms like Alibaba Group Holding Ltd.’s Ele.me and Meituan’s namesake service.But with the income comes the stigma of a higher Covid risk. While the Shanghai government has granted special lockdown exemption for food-delivery workers, residential compounds have their own rules barring them from returning to their apartments for fear they will bring the virus back with them.

Lenders issued about $859 billion in mortgages in the first quarter, down 25% from the previous year, according to data released by the Federal Reserve Bank of New York on Tuesday. The quarter also marked the first time since early 2020 that originations fell below $1 trillion The main cause was a sizable drop in refinancings, which fell about 40% from a year ago. Purchase mortgages were roughly flat, a turnaround from two years of double-digit gains.

The combination of higher rates plus continually rising home prices has pushed monthly mortgage payments to their least affordable level since 2008, according to the Federal Reserve Bank of Atlanta. A median American household needed 34.9% of its income to cover payments on a median-priced home in February, up from 29.2% a year earlier.

With the climate turning, SoftBank has turned to debt to fuel the fund—a risky strategy that venture firms usually avoid—while slowing down its overall pace of new bets.  As SoftBank has sold its older investments, the company has increasingly become dependent on profits from the funds, as well as growing debt tied to other holdings, to fund the broader company.  It is a formula that has caused increasing anxiety over SoftBank’s rising debt levels compared with the value of its holdings for analysts and some investors.  The bull case for SoftBank “relies on one basic premise, and that is that the stock market always goes up,” said Amir Anvarzadeh, a strategist at Asymmetric Advisors who advises short sellers to bet against SoftBank’s stock. 

Small investors plowed $114 billion into U.S. stock funds through March as the S&P 500 tumbled into a correction, falling at least 10% from its high, according to Goldman Sachs Group. That marks a sharp shift in the group’s strategy for much of the past two decades. Typically, individual investors have sold about $10 billion in the 12 weeks after a market peak when the S&P 500 has tumbled that much.

For a fleet owner the value proposition is super compelling: 30% or more in immediate Opex savings through a combination of reduced fuel and maintenance cost. Shift turns this into a no risk proposition by guaranteeing a cost/mile model, with the batteries offered as a subscription.

Transportation is the sector with the largest CO2 emissions, accounting for 37% of total CO2 emissions from end-use sectors globally. A crucial strategy for the reduction of those emissions is the electrification of transportation. In that regard it is exciting to see Tesla dramatically increasing their production volume and Rivian starting to ship. Still these new vehicles amount to a drop in the bucket compared to the globally active fleet of internal combustion cars and trucks. Also producing a completely new vehicle takes time and comes with its own set of emissions. One compelling alternative is to retrofit existing vehicles instead. When done at scale this approach dramatically reduces the time, cost and carbon footprint of electrification.

A radical alternative to a schooled society requires not only new formal mechanisms for the formal acquisition of skills and their educational use. A deschooled society implies a new approach to incidental or informal education

3. Peer-matching – a communications network which permits persons to describe the learning activity in which they wish to engage, in the hope of finding a partner for the inquiry.

1. Reference services to educational objects – which facilitate access to things or processes used for formal learning. Some of these things can be reserved for this purpose, stored in libraries, rental agencies, laboratories and showrooms like museums and theatres; others can be in daily use in factories, airports or on farms, but made available to students as apprentices or on off-hours.

In Deschooling Society Ivan Illich argued that a good education system should have three purposes: to provide all that want to learn with access to resources at any time in their lives; make it possible for all who want to share knowledge etc. to find those who want to learn it from them; and to create opportunities for those who want to present an issue to the public to make their arguments known (1973a: 78). He suggests that four (possibly even three, he says) distinct channels or learning exchanges could facilitate this. These he calls educational or learning webs.

In many respects, Ivan Illich is echoing here the arguments of earlier writers like Basil Yeaxlee who recognized the power of association and the importance of local groups and networks in opening up and sustaining learning. However, he takes this a stage further by explicitly advocating new forms of formal educational institutions. He also recognizes that the character of other institutions and arrangements need to be changed if the ‘radical monopoly’ of schooling is to be overturned.

I consider conviviality to be individual freedom realized in personal interdependence and, as such, an intrinsic ethical value. I believe that, in any society, as conviviality is reduced below a certain level, no amount of industrial productivity can effectively satisfy the needs it creates among society’s members.

perhaps the most significant problem with the analysis is the extent to which Illich’s critique ‘overrated the possibilities of schools, particularly compared with the influence of families, television and advertising, and job and housing structures’ (Lister 1976: 10-11). This was something that Ivan Illich recognized himself when he was later to write of schools as being ‘too easy targets’ (1976: 42).

His criticism evolves in a theoretical vacuum’. Gajardo goes on to suggest that this may explain the limited acceptance of his educational theories and proposals.

The principle of counterproductivity. Finger and Asún (2001: 11) describe this as ‘probably Illich’s most original contribution’. Counterproductivity is the means by which a fundamentally beneficial process or arrangement is turned into a negative one. ‘Once it reaches a certain threshold, the process of institutionalization becomes counterproductive’ (op. cit.). It is an idea that Ivan Illich applies to different contexts. For example, with respect to travel he argues that beyond a critical speed, ‘no one can save time without forcing another to lose it…[and] motorized vehicles create the remoteness which they alone can shrink’ (1974: 42).

Schooling – the production of knowledge, the marketing of knowledge, which is what the school amounts to, draws society into the trap of thinking that knowledge is hygienic, pure, respectable, deodorized, produced by human heads and amassed in stock….. [B]y making school compulsory, [people] are schooled to believe that the self-taught individual is to be discriminated against; that learning and the growth of cognitive capacity, require a process of consumption of services presented in an industrial, a planned, a professional form;… that learning is a thing rather than an activity. A thing that can be amassed and measured, the possession of which is a measure of the productivity of the individual within the society. That is, of his social value. (quoted by Gajardo 1994: 715)

Interest in his ideas within education began to wane. Invitations to speak and to write slackened, and as the numbers of missionaries headed for Latin America fell away, CIDOC began to fade. Illich’s thinking did not resonate with dominant mood in the discourses of northern education systems. At a time when there was increasing centralized control, an emphasis on nationalized curricula, and a concern to increase the spread of the bureaucratic accreditation of learning, his advocacy of deinstitutionalization (deschooling) and more convivial forms of education was hardly likely to make much ground.

In 1951 he completed his PhD at the University of Salzburg (an exploration of the nature of historical knowledge). One of the intellectual legacies of this period was a developing understanding of the institutionalization of the church in the 13th century – and this helped to form and inform his later critique.

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once these become blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security, the rat race for productive work. Health, learning, dignity, independence, and creative endeavour are defined as little more than the performance of the institutions which claim to serve these ends, and their improvement is made to depend on allocating more resources to the management of hospitals, schools, and other agencies in question. Ivan Illich Deschooling Society (1973: 9)

Predicting the effect of these headwinds is complicated by the unusual nature of this cycle. Much of the surge in demand and inflation in the last two years has been concentrated on goods. Some of that might reflect a once-only spending spree as consumers equipped home offices, bought exercise equipment or replaced appliances. This could leave businesses vulnerable to the “Peloton effect,” a sudden drop off in orders as consumers conclude they have enough stuff, as Peloton Interactive, which sells web-connected exercise bikes, experienced last year.

But since December 2021, the Fed has been pivoting hard, revising up how much rates will rise and laying plans to shed its bondholdings. The two-year Treasury yield, a proxy for how much the markets expect the Fed to raise interest rates, is still relatively low, at 2.4%. But its two-percentage point rise in the last six months is the steepest since 1994. The 30-year mortgage rate has reached 5.13%, the Mortgage Bankers Association reported Wednesday, up 2.1 points in the past six months—also the fastest since 1994. This translates into an even sharper rise in monthly mortgage payments: The National Association of Realtors’ housing affordability index was at a 13-year low in February, before the latest leg up in mortgage rates.

Even after recent drawdowns, though, the S&P 500 still looks expensive relative to its valuations over the past decade. The S&P 500 traded last week at 17.7 times its projected earnings over the next 12 months, according to FactSet, above its 10-year average of 17.1 times earnings. With the Fed poised to continue tightening monetary conditions, many investors say stocks still don’t look cheap. Created with Highcharts 9.0.1S&P 500 price/earnings, next 12 monthsSource: FactSetCreated with Highcharts 9.0.1.highcharts-tooltip-3{filter:url(#drop-shadow-3)}

What Illich and Ellul would have us consider is that the human-built world is not, in fact, built for humans. And, of course, this is to say nothing of what the human-built world has meant for the non-human world. What’s more, it may be paradoxically the case that the human-built world will prove finally inhospitable to human beings precisely to the degree that it was built for humans without regard for humanity’s continuity with the other animals and the world we inhabit together.

I find that my vision tends to be too narrowly focused on surface-level symptoms. And it is too easy to take refuge in the thought that a few tweaks here and a little regulation there will make all things well, or at least significantly better. Meanwhile, nothing quite changes. Then along comes someone like Illich or Ellul claiming that maybe the whole modern techno-social order, whatever its relative merits, is broken and malignant. That the roots of our problems run much deeper than we had assumed. That we are, in truth, doing it all wrong and should revisit some of our most fundamental assumptions.

Modern citizens who want to pursue a successful career face a situation that is without clear boundaries or limits, and this prevents them from recognizing an alternative to their self-directed ‘lifelong learning and decision-making.’ Their comings and goings, their progress and well-being, their flourishing and ruination depend on their adaptation to diverse systems. In particular, they have to learn to function and compete in symbiosis with current economic conditions. A tolerant acceptance of these conditions is no longer enough. One has to learn to identify with them. In the mills of the new economy, where positioning is all, the grit is supposed to grind itself so fine that it becomes grease for the gears.

Each time I’ve read something about how we will all have to wear sensors to survive the envisioned future transportation environment, a particular paragraph from Illich’s Deschooling Society has come to mind: “Contemporary man,” Illich wrote, “attempts to create the world in his image, to build a totally man-made environment, and then discovers that he can do so only on the condition of constantly remaking himself to fit it.”

We know that our words often fail us and prove inadequate in the face of the most profound human experiences, whether tragic, ecstatic, or sublime. And yet it is in those moments, perhaps especially in those moments, that we feel the need to exist (for lack of a better word), either to comfort or to share or to participate. But the medium best suited for doing so is the body, and it is the body that is, of necessity, abstracted from so much of our digital interaction with the world. With our bodies we may communicate without speaking. It is a communication by being and perhaps also doing, rather than by speaking.

But, and here again is the point I’ve been driving at throughout this post, such silences can take shape only when we are in the presence of another, although even then, of course, they may fail to materialize. They seem to me to be the kind of silences that are mutually felt and acknowledged, that are a function not merely of the ceasing of sound but of a body at ease or eyes that remain fixed. These are silences which assure the other they are being heard not ignored. Silences that, if attended to closely and with care disclose rather than veil, clarify rather than obfuscate. They gather rather than alienate.

A second kind of silence is the silence that precedes words, a silence that is a preparation for speech. It involves a patience that deeply considers what ought to be said and how, one that troubles itself over the meaning of the words to be used and proceeds with great care. This silence is opposed, according to Illich, by all that would have us rush to speak.

Here Illich is encouraging a silence grounded in humility, a silence that arises not from a desire to be heard but from a desire to hear and to understand.

“First among the classification of silences,” Illich tells his students, “is the silence of the pure listener … the silence through which the message of the other becomes ‘he in us,’ the silence of deep interest.”

“The learning of the grammar of silence is an art much more difficult to learn than the grammar of sounds.”