That rhymes, at least, with the patterns of generational disdain toward the people born into financial systems that strip away stabilities (affordable education, affordable housing, retirement funds, seasons with weather) their parents could take for granted, if they were white enough and within spitting range of middle class.

nor pretending that a pantomime of a return to a pristine and ungoverned state will solve any problems at all.

Decades down the road, I think the notion that a pack of mostly-American mega-corporations could ever have stood in for the complexities of governing a new layer of global public life, with all the opportunities and dangers it brings, will be obviously laughable. I think it already is.

For people with the ability and willingness to work on network problems, the real choice isn't between staying on the wasteland surfaces of the internet and going underground, but between making safer and better places for human sociability and not doing that

And also when previously good products of the social internet are lost, as when it becomes impossible for people to find sustaining work, learn from one another, or organize responses to the rolling crises in which we live.

The last and most most dangerous weakness of the Dark Internet Forest as a frame is that it positions the broad landscape of connection as something that “we” can simply do without—and without which we will indeed feel better and be more productive.

Meanwhile the actually-hip kids, like effortlessly cool Dasha and Anna of the buzzy and transgressive Red Scare podcast,

Maybe this is simply the generational turnover of slang. But it may represent more than that. Gen Z, having tasted the bitter fruit of rationalism, are far less interested in debating or clapping back on Twitter. Even more strikingly, they’re returning to God, and seeking a reenchantment of the world.

I call this posting style “Snot,” which is now so totalizing that it’s hard to imagine what a liberal even is without this voice.

Political conflict, to the modern liberal, is not about struggle for finite resources, insoluble moral differences, or fundamental divergences in our conception of what America ought to be. It’s only a failure of half the country – a bunch of dumb hicks – to know what’s good for them.

The rationalistic millennial lib therefore hopes to deal only in policy, regulation, and governance, not in myths, heroes, or transcendent values. But this leaves him unable to make absolute moral assertions. Authority now flows from science and data – from the status of being correct. The truth, uncertain as it always is, becomes a matter of rhetorical prowess – a game of owning and dunking. In this game, nothing is capital-T True, and opinions need only be validated by The ScienceTM – that is to say the managerial consensus

So the Dems gradually pivoted away from labor concerns toward issues that mattered to the feminized PMC, like education, climate change, and, most importantly, identity politics (Note that these causes don’t require the PMC to relinquish substantial resources or power, they are simply about believing, knowing, feeling, and affirming the right things).

Maybe writing like a sassy teenager is just another expression of this desire to stay young at all costs.

A lot of this boils down to an inability to age with grace.

Remember, Biden is “Joebi Wan Kenobi.”

Excessive use of “like,” uptalk, and vocal fry – these were once considered unprofessional ways of speaking. But in the early 2010s a handful feminist linguists with Tumblr accounts wrote opinion pieces arguing that the way teen girls talk is actually like, totally valid. “Like” isn’t just a crutch, a semantically empty filler word for someone who’s not in command of her ideas, it’s a “lexical hedge.” Talking like a teen girl or catty gay became a way for boring straight white people to reposition themselves as youthful rebels.

They especially enjoy doing the high-low thing where they pair a beefy vocab word like “unreconstructed,” with a snippy teengirl-ism like “creepy,” or a working-class swear like “dipshit” or “shitheel.” This is supposed to say, I’m smart, but I’m also cool.

even if they’re saying it with a wink.

But guys like Carville have long since been swapped out for spreadsheet nerds who were born with a silver lanyard around their neck. People who think that “joy” is a compelling message to families who are eating hot dogs on Wonderbread for dinner because dad’s been feeding an oxy habit since the forklift accident. It’s OK, he probably deserves it – he once told a woman on the street that she should smile more often.

Whenever I am struck by someone’s taste, I love seeing how little influence our current moment has on them. As though this person’s world lives in a vacuum that without them couldn’t exist and it was never done for anyone but themselves.

“Now I’m starting to feel guilty in some weird way about playing a role in a big deal that cost taxpayers money,” Wu said.

Instead of opting out of social media, how can we use it to connect and form relationships with figures or ideas we never before had access to?

Further, unplugging — or the failure to do so — now installs shame. The more we preach “better habits,” and the less we adopt them, the worse off we feel. Starting the day checking email in bed somehow feels even worse when the world is telling we’re a loser for doing so. Judgement compounds our predicament.

This isn’t an all or nothing deal. Unplugging is a false binary.

I suppose these orgs don’t have an issue with cave paintings, which are just another form of social media. Books? Ok. eBooks? Ok. Book reviews? Ok. A book review on a social platform? Someone’s comment on a book review? A number which represents the number of people who agree with that book review?Where exactly would you like to draw the line between kosher and caustic?

But as an attitudinal foundation for relating to society and technology, Waldenponding is, I am convinced, a terrible philosophy at both a personal and collective level.It's a world-and-life negation. A kind of selfish free-riding, tragedy of the commons: not learning to handle your share of the increased attention-management load...”

Unplugging is a short-term, unsustainable, selfish and frankly, privileged approach to the downsides of our everyday technological struggles.While billions of “bad” dollars are spent hooking, billions of “good” dollars are spent onboarding more and more and more people around our planet online. Countries, states, townships, schools, hospitals and non-profits are all ensuring that every facet of society is accessible via a smartphone. This includes countries, which have historically been left behind — connection begets prosperity whether we like it or not. As a result, employment, banking, housing, education, dating, healthcare, you name it — the foundations of any functioning society are now only accessible online.

This is visual density. A visually dense software interface puts a lot of stuff on the screen. A visually sparse interface puts less stuff on the screen.

You should not ask, it is wrong to know, what end the gods will have given to me or to you, O Leuconoe, and do not try Babylonian calculations. How much better it is to endure whatever will be, whether Jupiter has allotted more winters or the last, which now weakens the Tyrrhenian Sea against opposing rocks: be wise. Strain your wines, and because of brief life cut short long-term hopes. While we are speaking, envious life will have fled: seize the day, trusting the future as little as possible. Tū nē quaesierīs, scīre nefās, quem mihi, quem tibī fīnem dī dederint, Leuconoē, nec Babylōniōs temptāris numerōs. Ut melius quidquid erit patī, seu plūrīs hiemēs seu tribuit Iuppiter ultimam, quae nunc oppositīs dēbilitat pūmicibus mare Tyrrhēnum: sapiās, vīna liquēs, et spatiō brevī spem longam resecēs. Dum loquimur, fūgerit invida aetās: carpe diem, quam minimum crēdula posterō.

miseri, quibus   intemptata nites.

The celebrated historian of the novel’s rise, Ian Watt, counted the Faustian bargain, along with the tales of Robinson Crusoe, Don Juan, and Don Quixote, as four great “myths of modern individualism,” in a book of that title published in 1996. Watt’s emphasis falls on the Faustian myth as a religious culture’s way of maintaining theological and social order. He makes the point that Protestantism (and, of course, Christianity generally) had a need to enforce the discipline of delayed gratification. Since “one had to make people believe that pleasure in this world must bring pain in the next,” what better than a popular story that taught the ultimate dangers of sacrificing the eternal afterlife for the fleeting pleasures of this worldly existence?

In my own relatively limited experience lecturing on group tours, I have often been struck by the energy, enthusiasm, and curiosity of those travelers—regardless of their level of prior knowledge or experience—most willing to sacrifice their autonomy, not because (as “authentic traveler” lore would have it) they demand an inordinate degree of comfort, luxury, or safety, but because they would like to see and do as much as possible in a place, in the limited time available.

Central, too, is the notion that the true (and implicitly untethered) self is in some sense purer and morally superior to the self that, say, runs errands, buys groceries, and changes diapers. Travel, in this schema, is a spiritualized act of bravery, of self-assertion against repressive demands, a quest for self-knowledge that can only come through the willful rejection of embeddedness in one’s own home.

Travel qua travel, as an experience of self-transcendence through alienation, is not about the visited place itself but the traveler’s own interior journey: one made possible less by a particular encounter with a city, a church, or a historic site, but simply by the mere fact of being away from home.

Those healed, or who wished to be healed, made their way to Canterbury, the seat of his bishopric and site of his martyrdom, to give thanks or pray for intercession, wearing pilgrims’ badges and carrying bottles containing what was known as St. Thomas’s Water, so called because it was reputed to be mixed with the disintegrated remains of the clothing Thomas was wearing at the time of his death, still stained with his venerated blood.

Jewish people have enjoyed fresh bread at their Friday Sabbath, or Shabbat, meal since antiquity, but, according to Gil Marks’ Encyclopedia of Jewish Food, it wasn’t until the 1400s that “Jews in Austria and Southern Germany adopted…an oval, braided loaf, modeled on a popular Teutonic bread.” The stranded bread, with its resemblance to braided hair, was said to ward off a demon-witch named Berchta, or Holle (the similarity between “challah” and “Holle” is coincidental, from what I can tell). Marks is quick to point out that “Although European Jews certainly did not worship or even to a large extent know anything about Berchta or Holle, they [nevertheless] assimilated the attractive bread.”

People associate longer shapes with greater quantity, which is why we find bar charts and other chart types that are based on that principle to be intuitive. In a box plot, however, longer box or whisker segments don’t represent greater quantities. The four segments in a box plot each represent the same quantity, i.e., they each contain the same number of values, regardless of how long or short they are. In fact, shorter segments in box plots actually represent higher densities of values, so there’s a “mismatch” between what our eyes are telling us and the underlying data.

In some texts we see the initial form v and the medial/final form u, as in vniuersi for universi — although "Some Alphabetical Notes" indicates that things weren't terribly vniform in practice. (This is complicated by the fact that u upper-cases to V.)

we see the same final j all over the place in old Latin texts. I see "radij" (for "radii"), "vadij," "monarchij" — but also "radijs," "socijs," "petijt" (for "petiit"), indicating that it's not simply about the j appearing at the end of the word but something a little more like a digraph or ligature, where the last i in a run of two or more is turns into a j.

In the sixteenth century it became the fashion to tail the last i when Roman numerals were used, as in viij, for 8, or xij, for 12. An example from 1547 is as follows: "For j li of ffrangensence, iiijd." [That is, "for 1 pound of frankincense, 4 pence."]

Show activity on this post. The letter j originated as a "swash" (florish) character at the end of Roman numerals, and only later became useful as a separate character. A j was used for the final i, to make it clear the number had ended.

Let's say we have a function and we want to approximate it

When I was a young teenager on tumblr, basically everyone I followed and looked up to adhered to the following archetypes:A woman who just wanted to buy a bra and ended up becoming an expert on Edwardian corsetry (and, by extension, early 20th century sartorial techniques, the labor struggles of the English garment industry, and all kinds of vaguely related topics)Someone who started off posting scans of obscure Japanese fashion magazines and ended up, essentially, becoming an amateur archivist of 1990s fashion editorials that are exclusively preserved on an obscure tumblr or LivejournalI truly think that autodidacts are responsible for all that is good and great about alternative culture.

Research requires understanding

Research begins with a desire to ask and answer questions, thereby contributing to the greater sum of human knowledge and culture.

the interrupter was Eric Weinstein. I knew who Weinstein was because, at the time, I was a masochistic listener of The Joe Rogan Experience (JRE). I had recently discovered that all men are insane and was doing my part to get to the bottom of their intentions and aspirations straight from the source.

n criticizing critique, Felski, much like Van Duyne, points to its essential irony: that the posture of cool impersonality and critical distance is itself a “mood” and a “form of attachment.” But this, after all, is not such an original observation. Even T.S. Eliot well knew that critics are always writing from a particular subject position. His line about poetry as “an escape from personality” is followed by a qualification: “But, of course, only those who have personality and emotions know what it means to want to escape from these things.” Impersonality can only ever exist in relation to personality; writing comes not from one or another of the two, but from the interaction between them.

The method of reading on display in these books not only risks a vast oversimplification of a writer’s particular literary achievement, but also comes at the expense of interpretive possibility, which lives precisely in the space of difference between a reader and a writer, and between the writer and her text.

I found out that you can find camaraderie in the strangest places and that people, as a whole, are actually trustworthy, social, and cooperative. One thing I really can’t emphasize enough here is that mosh pits are not free-for-alls. On the contrary, there exist all sorts of unspoken rules and etiquette moshers must follow if they wish to participate. For starters, violent acts such as kicking, punching, wrestling, and slapping are strictly prohibited. If you see someone fall over? You stop and pick them up. And if someone looks distressed? You work together, and you get them out. Moshing is not a fight, and it’s not everyone out for themselves. Instead, it’s a collective experience where the ultimate aim is joy, not violence. In this sense, moshing is like a trust-building exercise. Naturally, your nerves assume it won’t work out and that individuals will take liberties. Of course, there’s always that one drunken asshole (as with any group situation). And there’s always the chance (as with any physical activity) that an accident might occur. But time and time again, the hive mind takes over, the losers get kicked out, and social cooperation wins the day.

This is how the hawk addressed the dapple-throated nightingale as he carried her high into the clouds, holding her tightly in his talons. As the nightingale sobbed pitifully, pierced by the hawk's crooked talons, the hawk pronounced these words of power, 'Wretched creature, what are you prattling about? You are in the grip of one who is far stronger than you, and you will go wherever I may lead you, even if you are a singer. You will be my dinner, if that's what I want, or I might decide to let you go.' It is a foolish man who thinks he can oppose people who are more powerful he is: he will be defeated in the contest, suffering both pain and humiliation.

When an eagle seized a sleek and glossy lamb from the flock and carried it off in his talons as a feast for his chicks, the jackdaw decided to do the same thing. Accordingly, he swooped down and clutched at a lamb but his claws got tangled in the wool on the lamb's back and he could not escape. The jackdaw said, 'It serves me right for being such a fool! Why should I, who am only a jackdaw, try to imitate eagles?'

Ut quamvis sublimes sint opibus, tamen humiles metuere debent.

Robust to the inclusion of other features of culture such as individualism and residential mobility in the statistical models, the findings revealed that display rules in heterogeneous cultures favor higher emotion expressivity than in homogeneous cultures

Results revealed that the heterogeneity of the country of the expresser (but not the perceiver) was related to emotion recognition accuracy, such that expressers from historically heterogeneous cultures made displays that were easier to recognize across cultures. This finding supports the idea that a boost in the signal value of emotion in the face and the voice may constitute an adaptation to the pressure of interacting with individuals with whom one shares few expectations about emotions, and no nuanced emotion language. In other words, the intermingling of people from diverse cultural backgrounds over an extended time period appears to be associated with the use of facial and vocal expressions that are relatively unambiguous and easily decoded by unfamiliar others.

There is a conceit in musical theater that when a character becomes too emotional to talk, that’s when they begin to sing, and when they become too emotional still, that is when they dance. This concept applies to blogging as well; when you become too emotional to simply write, you write a screed, and when you become too exasperated to screed, then and only then do you write a hate read.

But science is a social process; the AI folks under­stand this very well. How would AI-generated “raw theory” be channeled into the real world of science and tech­nology? How would you know when your virtual Pauli had a theory worth testing? What if it spat out a million theories, and you had good reason to believe one of them was correct — a real paradigm-buster — but you didn’t know which?

This is what digi­ti­za­tion does, again and again: by removing friction, by collapsing time and space, it under­mines our intu­itions about produc­tion and exchange.

All of this means that ALT tags are not so much descriptions of image contents as they are artifacts of the web’s workings and of creators’ retail ambitions.

The importance of this difference is underscored by the early history of safety efforts in anesthesia. The earliest work conducted in the 1950s (e.g., Beecher) used a traditional epidemiological approach, and got nowhere. (Other early efforts outside of anesthesia similarly foundered.) Progress came only after a fundamental and unremarked shift in the investigative approach, one focusing on the specific circumstances surrounding an accident—the “messy details” that the heavy siege guns of the epidemiological approach averaged out or bounded out. These “messy details,” rather than being treated as an irrelevant nuisance, became instead the focus of investigation for Cooper and colleagues and led to progress on safety.

And the fourth market failure is the exploitation of public goods. So we have the ocean in common, and we don’t want people destroying it for profit. Sidewalks are also a kind of common good. We don’t let restaurants expand onto the sidewalk without some sort of regulation. And all of human attention is kind of a public good. What happened in just a few years is that a few companies, especially Google and Facebook, basically monopolized human attention for billions and billions of people. They took huge amounts of it, and we don’t have it back.

There's no faster way to totally sink my credibility, as a new team member, by making a huge fuss over something that's not a problem, or that the team doesn't see as a problem, or that there's already an effort to fix, or that there's a really simple way to fix that I just didn't see at first. There are always so many problems on a team, so many things that could be better, that I'm only ever going to solve a handful of them. Working on problems in the order I noticed them is rarely the most effective order. So the WTF Notebook gives me a place to park the impulse to fix it now, damn it! until I have more context for deciding what to work on first.

Generally, I'll find out that the things that problems I've noticed are around for one of a few reasons.The team hasn't noticed itThe team has gotten used to itThe problem is relatively new, and the old problem it replaced was much worseThey don't know how to fix the problemThey've tried to fix the problem before and failed

Once I've got a nice big list, I start crossing things off. There are four reasons at this point that I might cross off something I've put on that list:There's actually a good reason for itThe team is already working on a fixThe team doesn't care about itIt's really easy to fix

Every time I join a new team, I go to the next fresh page, and on top of that page I write: "WTF - [Team Name]." Then I make a note every time I run into something that makes me go "wtf," and a task every time I come up with something I want to change.For two weeks, that's all I do. I just write it down. I don't tell the team everything that I think they're doing wrong. I don't show up at retro with all the stuff I think they need to change. I just watch, and listen, and I write down everything that seems deeply weird.

Meaninglessness inhibits fullness of life and is therefore equivalent to illness. Meaning makes a great many things endurable — perhaps everything. No science will ever replace myth, and a myth cannot be made out of any science. For it is not that “God” is a myth, but that myth is the revelation of a divine life in man. It is not we who invent myth; rather, it speaks to us as a Word of God. The Word of God comes to us, and we have no way of distinguishing whether and to what extent it is different from God. There is nothing about this Word that could not be considered known and human, except for the manner in which it confronts us spontaneously and places obligations upon us. It is not affected by the arbitrary operation of our will. We cannot explain an inspiration. Our chief feeling about it is that it is not the result of our own ratiocinations, but that it came to us from elsewhere.

A further development of myth might well begin with the outpouring of the Holy Spirit upon the apostles, by which they were made into sons of God, and not only they, but all others who through them and after them received the filiatio — sonship of God — and thus partook of the certainty that they were more than autochthonous animalia sprung from the earth, that as the twice-born they had their roots in the divinity itself. Their visible, physical life was on this earth; but the invisible inner man had come from and would return to the primordial image of wholeness, to the eternal Father, as the Christian myth of salvation puts it.

The third and decisive stage of the myth, however, is the self-realization of God in human form, in fulfillment of the Old Testament idea of the divine marriage and its consequences. As early as the period of primitive Christianity, the idea of the incarnation had been refined to include the intuition of “Christ within us.” Thus the unconscious wholeness penetrated into the psychic realm of inner experience, and man was made aware of all that entered into his true configuration. This was a decisive step, not only for man, but also for the Creator — who, in the eyes of those who had been delivered from darkness, cast off His dark qualities and became the summum bonum.This myth remained unassailably vital for a millennium, until the first signs of a further transformation of consciousness began appearing in the eleventh century. From then on, the symptoms of unrest and doubt increased, until at the end of the second millennium the outlines of a universal catastrophe became apparent, at first in the form of a threat to consciousness. This threat consists in giantism — in other words, a hubris of consciousness— in the assertion: “Nothing is greater than man and his deeds.” The otherworldliness, the transcendence of the Christian myth was lost, and with it the view that wholeness is achieved in the other world.

ANY biography of myself must, I think, take account of the following reflections. It is true that they may well strike others as highly theoretical, but making theory of this sort is as much a part of me, as vital a function of mine, as eating and drinking.

“One of the purposes a transsexual identity serves is to make the rest of us look contented and well-adjusted by comparison,” wrote Patrick Califia. “There are many levels of gender dysphoria, many aberrant accommodations other than a sex change. Feminism, for example.” I basically never agree with Patrick Califia, and Patrick Califia definitely never agreed with Andrea Dworkin, but he’s right. The trans experience is not some bizarre and isolated silo. The patriarchal gender binary is coercive and violent and unjust for everyone — it’s just that trans people are in a situation that requires thinking about it consciously, and coming up with some kind of livable accommodation.

There is no distinction between woman and Girl online. We must throw out any binary thinking. Online, we are all Girls. Girl exists as a condition rather than a fixed gender or age. “Girl” is a valuable marketing term in the same way that “authenticity” is. It is performed, refined, but never able to be perfected—hoisted upon us and impossible to embody.

Huxley, as it turns out, was mostly right about the ability of drivel to entomb dissent in a way that heavy-handed censorship never could. What he couldn’t anticipate was the form that this would take. Today, we live with the irony that the intense pitch and total saturation of political conversation in every part of our lives—simply pick up your phone and rejoin the fray—create the illusion that important ideas are right on the verge of being actualized or rejected. But the form of that political discourse—millions of little arguments—is actually what makes it impossible to process and follow what should be an evolving and responsive conversation. We mistake volume for weight; how could there be so many posts about something with no acknowledgment from the people in charge? Don’t they see how many of us are expressing our anger? These questions elicit despair, because the poster believes that no amount of dissent will actually be heard.

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The battles today are still essentially between the three big families of ideas which have structured the political battles since the 18th century: liberalism, nationalism, and socialism. Today, we’re in an era where neoliberalism hasn’t collapsed but has reached its limits. What is going to come next? It is a confrontation between some form of neo-nationalism and some form of new democratic socialism, which is still very weak. This is to the advantage of neo-nationalism, which we’ve seen enjoy electoral success around the world, from the US to India. The only priority now is to construct a socialist alternative.

To be deliberately provocative, I would say that the kind of societies we live in, at least in the core capitalist countries of Western Europe, North America, Japan and Korea, are still best characterised as social democratic. The economic and social systems in these regions are now so different from the capitalist systems of the past. When I talk about participatory socialism or a new form of democratic socialism for the 21st century, people counter that these notions are unrealistic and have nothing to do with the world today. What I want to stress, however, is that what I try to describe for the future is different from what we have today, but it is less different from what we have today compared to the difference between the system now and the form of capitalism that existed around 1910 – colonial, patriarchal, authoritarian.

THE GATES OF DREAMLAND It's a lonely road through bogland to the lake at Carrowmore, And a sleeper there lies dreaming where the water laps the shore; Though the moth-wings of the twilight in their purples are unfurled, Yet his sleep is filled with music by the masters of the world. There's a hand is white as silver that is fondling with his hair: There are glimmering feet of sunshine that are dancing by him there: And half-open lips of faery that were dyed a faery red In their revels where the Hazel Tree its holy clusters shed. "Come away," the red lips whisper, "all the world is weary now; 'Tis the twilight of the ages and it's time to quit the plough. Oh, the very sunlight's weary ere it lightens up the dew, And its gold is changed and faded before it falls to you. "Though your colleen's heart be tender, a tenderer heart is near. What's the starlight in her glances when the stars are shining clear? Who would kiss the fading shadow when the flower-face glows above? 'Tis the Beauty of all Beauty that is calling for your love." Oh, the great gates of the mountain have opened once again, And the sound of song and dancing falls upon the ears of men, And the Land of Youth lies gleaming flushed with rainbow light and mirth, And the old enchantment lingers in the honey-heart of earth.

“The game speaks to a trend in younger people who want to avoid competitive games, instead favouring teamwork and collaboration working towards a fun goal together,” Brett Smitheram, the current UK number one Scrabble player and 2016 World Scrabble Champion, said in the statement.

Even the language we use to describe ourselves online needs prodding: those who tend websites as worlds, gardens, and rivers, might be invited to evaluate what they are looking to carry from these real-world spaces. If language is world-shaping, why limit ourselves to the borders and failures of the offline, where existing words and languages might exacerbate inequities? Why limit the mythology of the internet rather than write new ones?

In an unprecedented move, according to two of the sources, the army also decided during the first weeks of the war that, for every junior Hamas operative that Lavender marked, it was permissible to kill up to 15 or 20 civilians; in the past, the military did not authorize any “collateral damage” during assassinations of low-ranking militants. The sources added that, in the event that the target was a senior Hamas official with the rank of battalion or brigade commander, the army on several occasions authorized the killing of more than 100 civilians in the assassination of a single commander.

There’s the gaggle of Harvard millennials cold-shouldering people who went to state schools like some kind of Temu Avengers (you are literally pushing forty). All those eyes roving around in the middle of conversations, waiting for someone better to talk to. “Everything doubles as a networking event,” someone joked to me once at a book launch event. Wrong. Everything should double as an opportunity to take our nipples out. Anything else is a waste of time and, frankly, racially-charged hate bordering on a macro-aggression.

The fact that tech culture is torn between the two towers of accelerationism vs effective altruism is, in hindsight, a completely foreseeable scenario. Given absolute wealth, absolute power, and absolutely no contact with actual humans, the islanders will start erecting golden statues of Harry Potter fanfic. When you free people from the ‘distraction’ of living in the world, you create a microsociety of human-shaped aliens. You start seeing other people only as users, as wells of data, as sheeple, as walking blood-banks.

t is a powerful and catchy meme, although one that is offered in the best spirit.

Accordingly, Rieff writes that “a culture survives principally … by the power of institutions to bind and to loose men in the conduct of their affairs with reasons which sink so deep into the self that they become commonly and implicitly understood.” “Culture,” Rieff adds, “is another name for a design of motives directing the self outward, toward those communal purposes in which alone the self can be realized and satisfied.” But modern culture is different. “The systematic hunting down of all settled convictions represents the anti-cultural predicate upon which modern personality is being reorganized,” Rieff argued. This new anti-culture, he explained, “aims merely at an eternal interim ethic of release from the inherited controls.” Permissions all the way down. Which, it is absolutely worth noting, happens to correlate remarkably well with the demands of a consumer economy.

In any case, I’d go so far as to argue that the dopamine framing actually subsidizes the social imaginary that reduces the human being to the status of a machine, readily programmable by the manipulation of stimuli, which may itself be the deeper and more malignant problem.

“But take away their devices diversions,” Pascal observes, “and you will see them bored to extinction. Then they feel their nullity without recognizing it, for nothing could be more wretched than to be intolerably depressed as soon as one is reduced to introspection with no means of diversion.”

“The king is surrounded by persons whose only thought is to divert the king, and to prevent his thinking of self,” Pascal writes. “For he is unhappy, king though he be, if he think of himself.” We are all of us kings now surrounded by devices whose only purpose is to prevent us from thinking about ourselves.

Do we keep coming back because we are addicted or because we imagine that we have no better alternative or no good reason not to?

In other words, we’re still in the land of precise guesses built on weak evidence, but now the stakes are higher and the numbers are distant probabilities. Longtermism lays bare that the EAs’ method is really a way to maximize on looking clever while minimizing on expertise and accountability. Even if the thing you gave a 57 percent chance of happening never happens, you can still claim you were right. These expected value pronouncements thus fit the most philosophically rigorous definition of bullshit.

By not calling out Ricardo’s confusion of physical machinery with monetary capital, economics fell into what Schumpeter later called “the Ricardian Vice”: the practice of deriving logically watertight conclusions from impossible premises that today economists euphemistically call “simplifying assumptions.” Schumpeter eloquently characterized Ricardo’s method as follows: The comprehensive vision of the universal interdependence of all the elements of the economic system that haunted Thünen probably never cost Ricardo as much as an hour’s sleep. His interest was in the clear-cut result of direct, practical significance. In order to get this he cut that general system to pieces, bundled up as large parts of it as possible, and put them in cold storage—so that as many things as possible should be frozen and “given.” He then piled one simplifying assumption upon another until, having really settled everything by these assumptions, he was left with only a few aggregative variables between which, given these assumptions, he set up simple one-way relations so that, in the end, the desired results emerged almost as tautologies. . . . The habit of applying results of this character to the solution of practical problems we shall call the Ricardian Vice.9 The Ricardian Vice is well evidenced by Ricardo’s arithmetic example that became the foundation of international trade theory. If it were true that the machinery for producing wine could be converted (at no cost and with no loss of productivity) into machinery for producing cloth and vice versa, then it would also be true (assuming continued full employment, and less controversially the capacity for a vigneron to retrain as a shepherd, and vice versa) that the ending of autarky and the overnight opening up of free trade between England and Portugal would have increased the aggregate output of both industries across the two countries. Ricardo’s conclusions follow from his premises. But his premises are manifestly false.

The researchers used the measures of ubiquity and diversity to develop a composite index they called “complexity,” which quantified “the amount of productive knowledge” products and economies contain.23 This complexity metric correlated well with living standards—with countries like Japan and Switzerland at the head of the 2015 index (at 2.47 and 2.18 respectively) and Papua New Guinea and Nigeria at its tail (–1.81 and –2.18 respectively). But movements up the complexity scale also correlated strongly with improved growth performance: An increase of one standard deviation in complexity, which is something that Thailand achieved between 1970 and 1985, is associated with a subsequent acceleration of a country’s long-term growth rate of 1.6 percent  per year. This is over and above the growth that would have been expected from mineral wealth and global trends.24 The success of this index in predicting which countries are likely to outperform growth expectations in the future was related to the role of product diversity within a country, which enable new products to be invented. The authors of The Atlas found that a country was more likely to develop a new product if the country had other industries which were close to that product in a third metric they called “proximity.” Technically this was measured as the likelihood that a country exported one product given that it exported another; practically, it indicated that invention of new products required knowledge of existing, closely related products. A country with a diversified export profile (and by implication a diversified industrial base),25 rather than one with a specialized portfolio, is more likely to have the product proximity that allows new products to be invented and the economy to grow.

Their methodology was to classify products on the basis of their “ubiquity,” which they defined as how many countries exported the product, and countries on the basis of “diversity,” which they defined as how many products a given country exported. The theory of comparative advantage would lead you to expect that in a world with very low trade barriers—basically the modern globalized world—most countries would have specialized trade profiles, so that they would score low in both ubiquity and diversity. This proved to be true of underdeveloped economies like Ghana, in which the top three exported products—fuels, precious metals, and cocoa—make up 81 percent of its exports. But it was not true of advanced economies like Germany, where the top three products account for only 46 percent of its exports.

Chernoff faces, invented by applied mathematician, statistician and physicist Herman Chernoff in 1973, display multivariate data in the shape of a human face. The individual parts, such as eyes, ears, mouth and nose represent values of the variables by their shape, size, placement and orientation. The idea behind using faces is that humans easily recognize faces and notice small changes without difficulty. Chernoff faces handle each variable differently.

The Price Is Wrong illustrates a central problem of capitalism from the Keynesian perspective, which is that it features not one price system, but two. There is the price of goods (such as a megawatt of electricity) which is set by supply and demand today, and there is the price of financial assets (such as the right to a windfarm’s revenue stream) which is set by expectations for tomorrow. Those expectations are determined by sentiment, convention, politics and culture. All of these are malleable, but adjusting them requires centralised authorities willing to step up and shape them. The myths of the ‘free market’ and ‘entrepreneurship’ have been a gift to rentiers, enabling inordinately high profits to be presented as an accurate reflection of innovation and courage, rather than a political settlement that nobody dares challenge. There is no shortage of financial capital available to support the energy transition, just a debilitating insistence on the rewards demanded for doing so.

Companies such as Shell expect to make at least 15 per cent returns on their investments in fossil fuels, but only 5-8 per cent returns on their investments in renewables. The appeal of fossil fuels, from the vantage point of the ‘antimarket’, is that they continue to offer the kinds of monopoly rent that the far more competitive, more marketised industry of renewables does not.

Japan’s Ise Grand Shrine is an extraordinary example in that genre. Every 20 years, caretakers completely tear down the shrine and build it anew. The wooden shrine has been rebuilt again and again for 1,200 years. Locals want to make sure that they don’t ever forget the production knowledge that goes into constructing the shrine. There’s a very clear sense that the older generation wants to teach the building techniques to the younger generation: “I will leave these duties to you next time.” Regularly tearing down and rebuilding a wooden temple might not sound like a great use of time. But I’m not sure if local priorities are entirely screwed up here. These people understand that it’s too difficult to write down every instruction necessary for building even a single wooden structure; imagine how much more difficult it is to create instructions for a machinery part, or a chip. Every so often we discover ancient tools of which we have no idea how to use. These shrine caretakers have decided that preservation of production knowledge is important, and I find that admirable.

Anyone with detailed instructions but no experience actually fabricating chips is likely to make a mess. I believe that technology ultimately progresses because of people and the deepening of the process knowledge they possess. I see the creation of new tools and IP as certifications that we’ve accumulated process knowledge. Instead of seeing tools and IP as the ultimate ends of technological progress, I’d like to view them as milestones in the training of better scientists, engineers, and technicians.

Collegial relationships, where you’re all in it together and all have a common share price, reduce the psychological and emotional barriers to “betraying” your team or department by engaging in this sort of horizontal whistle-blowing. Conversely, the commercial relationship between a company and its subcontractor is governed by documents that will eventually be adjudicated in an adversarial legal system. This massively increases the personal and organizational stakes of any information leak.

There is no glory apart from sacrifice. That is what your strength is for. That is what you were made for. You were made for the glory of sacrifice, and when that sacrifice is obedient to the King, you can be sure that you are following your King into the very same grave He once went down into, and He is there waiting for you, to lead you out into a glory that will never fade.

And if ever he should wish to honor someone, it seemed to him fitting to call him by name. Those who think they are known by their ruler seemed to him both to have a greater yearning to be seen doing something noble and to be more inclined to refrain from doing anything shameful.

When you’re taught from textbooks, you quickly learn a set of false lessons that are very useful for completing homework assignments but very bad in the real world. For example: all problems in textbooks are solvable, all problems in textbooks are worth solving (if you care about your grade), all problems in textbooks are solvable by yourself, and all of the problems are solvable using the techniques in the chapter you just read. But in the real world, the most important skills are not solving a quadratic by completing the square or whatever, the most important skills are: recognizing whether it’s possible to solve a given problem, recognizing whether solving it is worthwhile, figuring out who can help you with the task, and figuring out which tools can be brought to bear on it. The all-important meta-skills are not only left undeveloped by textbook problems, they’re actively sabotaged and undermined. This is why so many people who got straight As in school never amount to anything.

Of all Cyrus’s many qualities: willpower, strength, charisma, glibness, intelligence, handsomeness; Xenophon makes a point of emphasizing one in particular, and his choice might strike some readers as strange. It is this: “He did not run from being defeated into the refuge of not doing that in which he had been defeated.” Cyrus learned to love the feeling of failure, because failure means you’re facing a worthy challenge, failure means you haven’t set your sights too low, failure means you’ve encountered a stone hard enough to sharpen your own edge.

This is a society which believes that men are more easily destroyed by luxury than by hardship, and that it’s especially important that the leaders be seen to scorn luxury, for “whenever people see that he is moderate for whom it is especially possible to be insolent, then the weaker are more unwilling to do anything insolent in the open.”8 What I love about Xenophon is that unlike many Greek authors, who would deliver that line completely straight, he instead subverts (or at least balances) it with the observation that any kind of suffering is easier to bear when you’re in charge, and even easier when you’re bearing it in order to be seen to be bearing it.

I am not well-read in the classics. My excuse ultimately boils down to the same argument that all the classicists give for why you should be well-read in the classics: reading a book that has been widely admired for a very long time isn’t just reading a book, it’s entering into a “great conversation” taking place across the aeons. I feel awkward reading a book like that without knowing something about the commentaries on the book, all the people it has influenced, all the people who influenced it, the commentaries on the commentaries, and so on. It’s exhausting and overwhelming, and when I ignore all that and plunge ahead, I often don’t enjoy the book and then I feel dumb. A “great conversation” sounds nice, but only if you’re one of the participants and you actually get the inside jokes and references. Otherwise it’s as alienating and isolating as showing up to a party where you don’t know anybody, and where everybody else has already been chatting for a few thousand years.

The Mariner, whose eye is bright, Whose beard with age is hoar, Is gone: and now the Wedding-Guest Turned from the bridegroom's door. He went like one that hath been stunned, And is of sense forlorn: A sadder and a wiser man, He rose the morrow morn.

The other was a softer voice, As soft as honey-dew: Quoth he, 'The man hath penance done, And penance more will do.'

The self-same moment I could pray; And from my neck so free The Albatross fell off, and sank Like lead into the sea.

The many men, so beautiful! And they all dead did lie: And a thousand thousand slimy things Lived on; and so did I.

Her lips were red, her looks were free, Her locks were yellow as gold: Her skin was as white as leprosy, The Night-mare LIFE-IN-DEATH was she, Who thicks man's blood with cold.

The very deep did rot: O Christ! That ever this should be! Yea, slimy things did crawl with legs Upon the slimy sea.

Water, water, every where, And all the boards did shrink; Water, water, every where, Nor any drop to drink.

In fact, public preferences often lean towards traditional or seemingly “worse” designs, so long as they’re backed by an appropriate connection to nostalgia. One notable example is the recent rebrand of Bahlsen, a renowned German biscuit manufacturer. In 2021, Bahlsen’s redesign was acclaimed by the design community for its clean, bold modernity (even winning them a D&AD award). Nonetheless, the rebrand resulted in a 12% drop in sales the following year. This decline was attributed to a variety of factors: low on-shelf recognition, reduced emotional resonance, and smaller, less appetising photos than the original, “dated” packaging. In other words, even if the branding was good, it didn’t feel right.

The purpose of this study was to determine the association between healthy lifestyle habits (eating 5 or more fruits and vegetables daily, exercising regularly, consuming alcohol in moderation, and not smoking) and mortality in a large, population-based sample stratified by body mass index (BMI).

In his major intellectual work, Observations on Man, His Frame, His Duty, and His Expectations (1749), Hartley proposed a harp-like theory of consciousness: vibrations in the environment generate sensations in the body, which then rattle around inside the body and generate ideas, which can then be expressed in language. It is a proto-neuroscientific theory—wherein consciousness is the product of sensations vibrating inside the human instrument—and many of Hartley’s Romantic critics accused him of reducing the human to mere mechanism. But Coleridge saw it differently. For him, Hartley’s vibrational theory suggested a vibrating, animate, poetic cosmos. The role of the poet was to tune into the cosmos and translate its many vibrations into beautiful verse, much like the harp translates the wind into music. Poetry was not dredging up internal, subjective emotion but attuning to one’s environment.

The idea struck Coleridge powerfully, prompting him to write a poem called “The Eolian Harp,” which is structured like the galaxy-brain meme, escalating in philosophical profundity with each stanza until it reaches its crescendo:      And what if all of animated nature Be but organic Harps diversely framed, That tremble into thought, as o’er them sweeps Plastic and vast, one intellectual breeze, At once the Soul of each, and God of all? In other words, what if we’re all just self-playing harps? *** There is something in this metaphor that seems distinctly un-Romantic. It figures the poet not as the paragon of humanness but an indolent plaything that generates verse via mechanistic and aleatory interactions with external forces.

Real songwriting arises from the “internal human struggle of creation,” a process that “requires my humanness.” “Algorithms don’t feel” and cannot participate in this “authentic creative struggle.” Therefore, ChatGPT’s poetry will forever suck, because no matter how closely the lyrics replicate Cave’s own, they will always be deficient. In Cave’s weltanschauung, as laid out in the letter, the machine is a priori precluded from participating in the authentic creative act, because it is not, well, human. If this argument sounds hollow and slightly narcissistic, that’s because it is. It follows a circular logic: humans (and Nick Cave) are special because they alone make art, and art is special because it is alone made by humans (and Nick Cave).

According to a 17th century account, the Andalusian inventor Abbas ibn Firnas makes a tower jump in Córdoba. He wraps himself with vulture feathers and attaches two wings to his arms. The alleged attempt to fly is not recorded in earlier sources and is ultimately unsuccessful, but the garment slows his fall enough that he only sustains minor injuries.

The question to ask of trapsmay not be how to escape from them, but rather how to recapture them and turn them tonew ends in the service of new worlds.

Conflating satisfaction and retention helped mediate a tension between developers,who often expressed to me a strong desire to help users, and business people, who wantedto capture them. Appeals to user ‘satisfaction’ hold a moral power within the softwareindustry, and are thus turned to justify a variety of technical decisions (Van Couvering,2007). But they also express a basic ambivalence in technologies of enchantment: peopledesire and enjoy enchantment, and the tension between ‘satisfying’ users and capturingthem is not easily resolved.

As the research community’s center of gravity moved into industry andas companies shifted to streaming, they accumulated data that could replace the explicitratings that had previously defined the field. Logs of interaction data could be read as‘implicit’ ratings: users stopping a video partway through, skipping over recommendeditems, or listening to songs multiple times all became interpreted as ratings data. Thesedata were more plentiful than explicit ratings, being generated by any interaction a userhad with a system, and, in an interpretive move inherited from behaviorism, they werealso taken as more truthful than users’ explicit ratings.

And arguably the culmination of that is ChatGPT, which promises to give you exactly the information you’re looking for in an unobtrusive “neutral” prose style. Much as I hate ChatGPT — and I do hate it with all my heart, unconditionally, unchangeably, eternally — I do get why that fantasy is attractive. But it is a fantasy, because as the man says, there is nothing outside the text. There is no such thing as the raw information devoid of presentation and context. We can’t get at that raw information, and we certainly can’t program computers to do so, because it does not exist. It is a fantasy, and it is increasingly a willful lie.

Beer correctly diagnoses this impulse, one that I detest. It is moral narcissism for intellectuals to exhaust their human capital endowments debating about how they can minimize their own sins while the forces of technocapital grow stronger by the day. Beer’s now-quaint description of the threats we face illustrate just how badly we have been losing over the past fifty years—the “Electric Mafia” he fears is easily recognizable in the control technologies of algorithmic feeds and product recommendations “What is to be done with cybernetics, the science of effective organization? Should we all stand by complaining, and wait for someone malevolent to take it over and enslave us? An electronic mafia lurks around that corner.”“We allow publishers to file away electronically masses of information about ourselves—who we are, what are our interests—and to tie that in with mail order schemes, credit systems, and advertising campaigns that line us all up like a row of ducks to be picked off in the interests of conspicuous consumption.”

It happens that the Center for Information Technology and Policy, where I’m visiting at Princeton this year, shares a building with the Department of Operations Research and Financial Engineering (ORFE). I was excited to learn this – a chance to walk downstairs and talk to someone about Operations Research, this strange postwar discipline which seems to have absorbed the cybernetic impulse that had flourished across the social sciences and hidden it away in business schools? But one of the grad students told me that actually the name is somewhat anachronistic—no one really does Operations Research anymore, it’s all just financial engineering aka math and stats.

He’s absolutely correct that there is no “ongoing stasis” option—but we can still try to slow things down! In fact, this is the center of my political program! There is no possibility of democratic action if the speed of change eclipses the speed at which democracy functions. I am still a liberal — and the only way to be be a liberal today is to be a conservative, to try to slow down technological change.

But Cowen’s “maximizing economic growth subject to avoiding collapse” is also merely haggling over the price. There is a strong positive commitment in this nominally normative statement. By outlining this principle, Cowen is arguing that at the margin, we are too worried about avoiding collapse and not enough about maximizing economic growth.

Before linear history came the eternal recurrence of magical time: the sun caused the moon and the moon caused the sun, the seasons cycled through, and human experience was terrifying and strange. Nothing was explained in the sense of a historical causal chain, the familiar scientific “tides are caused by the moon.” History is this attitude applied to human societies, and is co-extensive with concept of progress. The current temporality, what I call cybernetic time, is once again circular. But this circularity, of the feedback loop, combines the circle with the line in what Flusser calls “circular progress.” Each time through the feedback loop intensifies the action, so that we return to the same place but with everything amplified. This is what Flusser calls “the circularity not of the wheel, but of the whirlpool.” Hayek’s optimism was premised on humans existing within history, within time, within the world. If that ceases to be the case, if we produce a runaway feedback loop which overwhelms any dialectical response, then we are post-historical. We continue to go, and indeed we go faster than ever before, but we lose both the past and the future; we don’t know where we are going.

Internet culture writing can surely fight the opacity that conceals abuses of power by connecting moments in culture to strains of ideology and changes in technology. But more interestingly, I look forward to seeing how internet culture writing can help us metabolize changes in hierarchies and cultural values – and transform how we write in general.

When she writes about the mommy bloggers of the 2000s, Lorenz credits WordPress, the blogging and content management service, for turning ‘media consumers into media producers’. However, a more interdisciplinary and historically attuned approach can be found in Lisa Nakamura’s 2007 book, Digitizing Race: Visual Cultures of the Internet. Instead of baptising the mommy bloggers as users-turned-creators, Nakamura finds their spaces to be a prime example of how the social internet collapses these categories. She describes how pregnancy puts women in positions where they interact with sonograms and other medical technologies that create images of them as background for the newly prioritised foetus. ‘The internet,’ however, ‘provides a space in which women use pregnancy Web sites’ modes of visuality and digital graphic production to become subjects, rather than objects, of interactivity.’

On the internet we’re users, subscribers, creators, commenters, customers and commodities. Algorithmic feeds collect and metabolise hoards of our personal data, so no matter what we’re doing – posting or scrolling – we are always doing two things: using and being used. As such, it’s never as simple as traditional media and entertainment writing or cultural criticism, where the creating side is clearly demarcated and the audience can be placed at a distance. The work of internet culture writing is to outline how we all vacillate in our roles as subjects and objects.

The use (or abuse) or the passive voice produces a sense of doomerism, a neoliberal helplessness where companies can’t change, capitalism rages on, nobody is unique and the user (and writer) is helpless in it all.

Marketing is not new, nor is its deleterious effect on young women’s self-image. To acknowledge this historical continuity is not to undermine the above statistics.

Mothers control up to 85 percent of household spending in the United States, and white women have been the face of this market and its targeted consumers since the nineteenth century. Algorithmic recom­mendation systems are changing things; targeted advertising is no doubt offering companies finer tools with which to capture “niche” demographics and hawk products For You. But the fine line between aspiration and relatability that has always fueled the American entertainment and advertising industries—and that has always been most available to white Americans for toeing—remains their stimulus for sales.

To imagine one’s recommendations as wholesale “generic,” rather than generic to one’s demographic, is a step stranger. It may be a tacit acknowledgment of one’s own claim to cultural domi­nance—the world might look flat if you are looking at it from above—or a concession to one’s own frictionless passage through space, online and off. A U.S. passport, white skin, straightness, cis-masculinity: it is easy enough to attach these characteristics to the internet itself, along with its cultural output. Most histories of the internet do, aligning The Algorithm with its most famous found­ers and profiteers: Bill Gates, Steve Jobs, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, Mark Zuckerberg, Jack Dorsey, Elon Musk, and so on and so on.

Whatever culture is to Chayka—whether individual “pieces” or dominant aesthetics—it seems to exist outside of politics, which is why it can be said to grow “organically” or to be debased by a technological invention, rather than by the social and institutional forces guiding its development and distribution.

Why should any of us trust a black box to define our tastes? One could argue that taste has always been a black box and that having it has always depended less on liking the right things than on aligning oneself with the right peo­ple. But even though Chayka spends a chapter on theories of taste that passes through Pierre Bourdieu, he does not seem to believe this.

The “social media” frame allows us to see how The Apparatus transforms existing communication technologies. Yelp makes restaurants more social, sure. But higher education is more social thanks to the efforts of the U.S. News & World Report. And books are more social thanks to Goodreads, sure, but this is simply an intensification of a trend that includes the New York Times Bestseller List.

The most important technological component of social media is quantified audience feedback. Indeed, I think this is the correct definition of “social media.” It’s not a binary—media is more social the more the audience is present, the more that the media object facing the consumer is co-created by the original author and their audience.

This is an ideological explanation for why “The Algorithm” is a bad answer. Ideological explanations are red meat for the kind of people who read Substacks, tweets, and The New Yorker, which is why I led with that. But the problem is more fundamental.

But sometimes, uncharitably, I imagine that what’s at the bottom of the consumption of this kind of writing is a desire not to overcome one’s apparent helplessness in the face of “the algorithm” but to affirm it--a compulsion to wallow in one’s perceived estrangement from the motions of culture and commerce and politics in the 21st century, to have one’s learned helplessness excused. Articles and books in this vein (and I have written plenty of them!) tend to emphasize the power, scale, novelty, and opacity of the platform giants, and to de-emphasize user agency, statistical context, historical precedent, and even little things like “the economy” and “the world outside.”

the genuinely contradictory movement of globalization: Not a second-law-of-thermodynamics-style constant and unvaried overall increase in homogeneity, but an unpredictable and spiky process in which difference emerges from uniformity and uniformity from difference. Chayka is extremely attentive to the narrow and often class-bound domains in which “algorithms” hasten and expand homogenization. But he is less interested in the ways in which they complicate and redirect it, or even retard and reverse it.

making the paint is easy - you add binder to the pigment and mull it and pour it where you want it to dry. the drying process takes a couple of days. don't ask me for actual measurements because i'm an italian american not otherwise categorized.

The Cimicidae family, to which bed bugs belong, comprises about 100 species. Almost all prefer to bite animals other than humans, often birds. Biologists have observed cliff swallow chicks jumping to their deaths from heavily infested nests rather than enduring the bites.

The problem is that all human preference and pleasure, even flavor, are contingent on context and experience. And one important context is that we like some cultural products more when we work to acquire them. This is likely related to status: at an unconscious level we connect the belabored discovery process with scarcity. Time is an important signaling cost. Algorithmic culture that effortlessly pushes culture to you, therefore, is bound to create less meaningful and valuable culture. Chayka writes, “I worry that [lean-back consumption’s] fundamental passivity is devaluing cultural innovation as a whole, as well as degrading our enjoyment of art.” That’s correct! So what will we do about it?

Summerson called his second category of ornament subjunctive architecture—that is, “as if something were otherwise than it is.” Among the oldest examples of such ornament are the leafy column capitals that originated in ancient Egypt (palm fronds and lotus buds), were adopted by the Greeks (acanthus leaves), and were further refined by the Byzantines, whose diaphanous marble capitals are so delicately carved that they appear to be made of lace. Whether palm fronds or flowers, such insubstantial forms have the effect of making the beams above seem to float. Pilasters, which are flattened columns with no structural function, are another example of subjunctive architecture. So are Renaissance frescoes, which often include putative arches and columns. This was partly a question of cost—painted columns were cheaper than the real thing—but it also had to do with the curious appeal of trompe-l’oeil, literally “tricking the eye.” We see one thing, yet we intellectually know another. I’m not sure why this is so beguiling, but it is.

If you’re a regular reader of The Verge, you might have noticed some changes to our author bylines in recent months: they’re a lot longer, with more details, name-dropping, and quantifying our professional experiences. You can thank Google for that.

To understand what pure SEO-optimized writing looks like, I put my recent story about Google-optimized local businesses through an SEO tool called Semrush that’s reportedly used by 10 million people.  Among its suggestions: write a longer headline; split a six-sentence paragraph up because it’s “too long”; and replace “too complex” words like “invariably,” “notoriety,” and “modification.” Dozens of sentences were flagged as being confusing (I disagree) — and it really hated em dashes. I rewrote my prose over and over, but it didn’t seem to satisfy my robot grader. I finally chose one thought per sentence, broke up paragraphs, and replaced words with suggested keywords to get rid of the red dots signaling problems.  The result feels like an AI summary of my story — at any moment, a paragraph could start with “In conclusion…” or “The next thing to consider is…” The nuance, voice, and unexpected twists and turns have been snuffed out. I’m sure some people would prefer this uncomplicated, beat-by-beat version of the story, but it’s gone from being a story written by a real person to a clinical, stiff series of sentences. Now imagine thousands of website operators all using this same plug-in to rewrite content. No wonder people feel like the answers are increasingly robotic and say nothing.

Companies like Mediavine, a popular ad-management company, released web design frameworks optimized for this new Google metric and Stimac Bailey, like many others, switched and redesigned her site. But she found the new theme “sterile,” she tells me, and it lacked customization options. It didn’t feel like part of her brand.

Let a dude lift weights and hit a heavy bag for a while and then put him in a room full of unathletic people and he will be seized by an almost paralyzing desire to assert his own will, because he knows that he could kick everyone’s ass in there. Put that same dude in a room full of New York Jets linebackers, and he will suddenly come to feel that reasonable discussion is the only humane method of solving disagreements. This is essentially what you will learn in a college Introduction to Ethics class, although it’s possible the professor would have some additional details.

The Survey of Adult Skills, a product of the OECD Programme for the International Assessment of Adult Competencies (PIAAC)

The Reply merges the public and private lives of the internet into something unruly and unstable. Among friends, it is a performance: bantering on the timeline instead of in private messages is saying, “Look at us. Wouldn’t you like to join?” Among strangers, the Reply begs to be noticed, and thus bleeds into abjection. The Reply is a cry for attention, a voice in the wilderness, a shout into the void.

Once a comedian I used to follow tweeted that she was looking for suggestions for “breakfast soup” and then spent hours in the reply section belittling anyone who suggested either Asian soups commonly eaten for breakfast (because she wanted “American” breakfast) or soups featuring eggs (because she didn’t like eggs). I read the entire thread. I couldn’t look away. It was incredible to watch a person behave, in real time, as if the failure of strangers to perfectly intuit her unstated preferences was an affront that merited rudeness in reply. I kept thinking—but you asked! You asked about the breakfast soup!

What goes into a work is selected and by virtue of its selection becomes necessary to the work. It is not unnecessary. It is not nonessential. For some experiences and reads of a given text, those things are critical.

This feels like something that is wrong with the way we read or conceptualize our reading rather than a thing that is wrong with a text or a story or a movie or a novel or even a relationship with another human being.

Often, what feels necessary or unnecessary in art is as simple as our own preferences and whatever agenda governs our engagement with a given work. And what feels necessary to you on this read might not feel necessary on the next because your attention has shifted slightly. When someone says that something was not necessary to the text, I imagine that what they are saying is that they personally found it boring as a reader or they found it disengaging or alienating and are unable to consider that alienation is an aspect of engagement. It's like a long conversation with someone you are getting to know. There are these pockets of inattention, sure, moments when your focus goes soft and slack, when you are less receptive to what they are saying and so you let them blur slightly. But that doesn’t mean that those moments are unnecessary. They are just places where you stop paying attention, and where, upon reflection or revisitation, you might actually find a lot of value or insight.

Explicit secunda pars The second part ends ____________________________ Sequitur pars tercia The third part follows

That oon of you, al be hym looth or lief,                    That one of you, whether he likes it or not, 1838        He moot go pipen in an yvy leef;                    He must go whistle in an ivy leaf;

She woot namoore of al this hoote fare,                    She knows no more of all this passionate business, 1810        By God, than woot a cokkow or an hare!                    By God, than knows a cuckoo or a hare!

And softe unto hymself he seyde, "Fy                    And softly to himself he said, "Fie 1774        Upon a lord that wol have no mercy,                    Upon a lord that will have no mercy, 1775        But been a leon, bothe in word and dede,                    But be a lion, both in word and deed, 1776        To hem that been in repentaunce and drede,                    To those who are in repentance and fear, 1777        As wel as to a proud despitous man                    As well as to a proud, spiteful man 1778        That wol mayntene that he first bigan.                    Who will persist in what he first began. 1779        That lord hath litel of discrecioun,                    That lord has little sound judgment, 1780        That in swich cas kan no divisioun                    That in such cases knows no distinctions 1781        But weyeth pride and humblesse after oon."                    But considers pride and humility equal."

Two woful wrecches been we, two caytyves,                    Two woeful wretches are we, two miserable people, 1718        That been encombred of oure owene lyves;                    Who are burdened down by our own lives;

Whan ech of hem had leyd his feith to borwe.                    When each of them had laid his faith as a pledge.

Nere it that thou art sik and wood for love,                    Were it not that thou art sick and mad for love,

For ire he quook; no lenger wolde he byde.                    For anger he trembled; no longer would he wait.

And now I am so caytyf and so thral,                    And now I am so wretched and so enslaved,

Whan that Arcite hadde romed al his fille,                    When Arcite had roamed all his fill, 1529        And songen al the roundel lustily,                    And sung all the rondel cheerfully, 1530        Into a studie he fil sodeynly, nbsp;                  He fell suddenly into a state of anxiety, 1531        As doon thise loveres in hir queynte geres,                    As these lovers do in their strange manners, 1532        Now in the crope, now doun in the breres,                    Now in the tree top, now down in the briars, 1533        Now up, now doun, as boket in a welle.                    Now up, now down, like a bucket in a well. 1534        Right as the Friday, soothly for to telle,                    Exactly like the Friday, truly for to tell, 1535        Now it shyneth, now it reyneth faste,                    Now it shines, now it rains hard, 1536        Right so kan geery Venus overcaste                    Just so can fickle Venus sadden 1537        The hertes of hir folk; right as hir day                    The hearts of her folk; just as her day 1538        Is gereful, right so chaungeth she array.                    Is changeable, just so she changes her array. 1539        Selde is the Friday al the wowke ylike.                    Friday is seldom like all the rest of the week.

But sooth is seyd, go sithen many yeres,                    But truly it is said, since many years ago, 1522        That "feeld hath eyen and the wode hath eres."                    That "field has eyes and the wood has ears." 1523        It is ful fair a man to bere hym evene,                    It is very good for a man to act calmly, 1524        For al day meeteth men at unset stevene.                    For every day people meet at unexpected times.

Welcome be thou, faire, fresshe May,                    Welcome be thou, fair, fresh May, 1512        In hope that I som grene gete may."                    In hope that I can get something green."

Who koude ryme in Englyssh proprely                    Who could rime in English properly 1460        His martirdom? For sothe it am nat I;                    His martyrdom? In truth it is not I; 1461        Therfore I passe as lightly as I may.                    Therefore I pass on as quickly as I can.

That wood out of his wit he goth for wo?                    That he goes mad, out of his wits because of woe?

For he was yong and myghty for the nones,                    For he was young and mighty indeed, 1424        And therto he was long and big of bones                    And moreover he was tall and strong of bones

Nat oonly lik the loveris maladye                    Not only like the lover's malady 1374        Of Hereos, but rather lyk manye,                    Of Hereos, but rather like mania, 1375        Engendred of humour malencolik                    Engendered by the melancholic humor 1376        Biforen, in his celle fantastik.                    In the front lobe, in his imagination.

His slep, his mete, his drynke, is hym biraft,                    He is bereft of his sleep, his food, his drink 1362        That lene he wex and drye as is a shaft;                    So that he became lean and dry as is a stick;

So muche sorwe hadde nevere creature                    So much sorrow never had creature 1360        That is, or shal, whil that the world may dure.                    That is, or shall (be), while the world may endure.

I noot which hath the wofuller mester.                    I know not which has the more woeful task.

1319          And whan a beest is deed he hath no peyne;                    And when a beast is dead he has no pain; 1320          But man after his deeth moot wepe and pleyne,                    But man after his death must weep and lament, 1321          Though in this world he have care and wo.                    Though in this world he may have (had) care and woe. 1322          Withouten doute it may stonden so.                    Without doubt such is the case.

1259          Infinite harmes been in this mateere.                    Infinite harms are in this matter. 1260          We witen nat what thing we preyen heere;                    We know not what thing we pray for here

Why cridestow? Who hath thee doon offence?                    Why didst thou cry out? Who has done thee offence?

Bright was the sonne and cleer that morwenynge,                    The sun was bright and clear that morning

1039          I noot which was the fyner of hem two --                    I do not know which was the finer of them two --

The pilours diden bisynesse and cure                    The scavengers took great pains and worked hard

And rente adoun bothe wall and sparre and rafter;                And tore down both wall and beam and rafter;

He wolde doon so ferforthly his myght                (That) he would do his might so completely

945        And wol nat suffren hem, by noon assent,                And will not allow them, not at all, 946        Neither to been yburyed nor ybrent,                Neither to be buried nor burned,

That she ne hath been

And of this cry they nolde nevere stenten                And of this cry they would not ever stop

But al that thyng I moot as now forbere.                But all that matter I must now forgo. 886        I have, God woot, a large feeld to ere,                I have, God knows, a large field to till, 887        And wayke been the oxen in my plough.                And the oxen in my plow are weak. 888        The remenant of the tale is long ynough.                The remnant of the tale is long enough.

If even-song and morwe-song accorde,                  If what you said last night agrees with what you say this morning,

766         Fayn wolde I doon yow myrthe, wiste I how.                  I would gladly make you happy, if I knew how

741         Eek Plato seith, whoso kan hym rede,                  Also Plato says, whosoever knows how to read him, 742         The wordes moote be cosyn to the dede.                  The words must be closely related to the deed.

But alderbest he song an offertorie;                  But best of all he sang an Offertory;

637         And whan that he wel dronken hadde the wyn,                  And when he had drunk deeply of the wine, 638         Thanne wolde he speke no word but Latyn.                  Then he would speak no word but Latin.

582         In honour dettelees (but if he were wood),                  In honor and debtless (unless he were crazy

573         Now is nat that of God a ful fair grace                  Now is not that a very fair grace of God 574         That swich a lewed mannes wit shal pace                  That such an unlearned man's wit shall surpass 575         The wisdom of an heep of lerned men?                  The wisdom of a heap of learned men?

At wrastlynge he wolde have alwey the ram.                  At wrestling he would always take the the prize.

Bothe of his propre swynk and his catel.                  Both of his own labor and of his possessions.

510         To seken hym a chaunterie for soules,                  To seek an appointment as a chantry priest (praying for a patron)

Boold was hir face, and fair, and reed of hewe.                  Bold was her face, and fair, and red of hue.

But she was somdel deef, and that was scathe.                  But she was somewhat deaf, and that was a pity

441         And yet he was but esy of dispence;                  And yet he was moderate in spending; 442         He kepte that he wan in pestilence.                  He kept what he earned in (times of) plague.

In sangwyn and in pers he clad was al,                  He was clad all in red and in blue,

The cause yknowe, and of his harm the roote,                  The cause known, and the source of his (patient's) harm, 424         Anon he yaf the sike man his boote.                  Straightway he gave the sick man his remedy.

If that he faught and hadde the hyer hond,                  If he fought and had the upper hand,

He rood upon a rouncy, as he kouthe,                  He rode upon a cart horse, insofar as he knew how,