sectors that operate on freelance and insecure labor, in which individuals take on a slate of unremunerated promotional work in lieu of job security

self-optimization for platforms (organizing one’s content to be recognizable by algorithmic systems)

consistent self-branding (defined by sociologist Alison Hearn as “self-conscious construction of a meta-narrative and meta-image of self)

Q: Why do you have a semicolon in your name? On raccoon typewriters, the semicolon was originally on the 2 key, where the @ symbol is now. It's a visual pun that only raccoons get, but m; is still pronounced "mat". Also, raccoons traditionally put punctuation in their names because they don't like to be tracked, and it foils government databases.

The readymades of Duchamp were art because of their audacity, because of the context of the other art around them, and because of their arrangements—when everything is a readymade, it’s not an art gallery, it’s a scrapyard.

The response of AI-art enthusiasts, like those at the tech companies standing to make trillions off AI, or those who simply enjoy nerding out over new technological toys, will be to suggest that what matters in art is solely its extrinsic properties. That is, a painting is a painting, an image an image—in this view the definition of art is expanded to be such that if an image strikes someone as art, then it’s art. Case closed.Consider the banality of this view, a view that reduces art to merely what’s in front of us. Without taking into account the consciousness of the artist, the word “art” loses all meaning, becoming merely a synonym for “beautiful.” We may find something pretty, or interesting, or striking, or pleasing, but none of these mean that it is art. We may find a natural vista affecting, we may even weep, but to say that it is “art” implies a cosmic consciousness working behind the scenes, an intrinsic property like a teleological origin, or a purpose that goes beyond the mere material. Without the intentionality of the artist taken into account, the definition of “art” is bled of all meaning, all differentiation, all usefulness as a term—such a move is really a defeat claimed in the name of victory. This is why deflationary theories of art, like how art is “whatever is in an art gallery” or “whatever anyone says” or “whatever pleases the senses” are all unsatisfying as definitions, for they strip the word “art” of all capacity to do the job of a word, which is to differentiate.

n the space below, please provide an example of each listed cognitive bias. Reactance When I thought you didn’t want me, I would have done anything.

Patrick Fermor’s A Time of Gifts. In the middle of describing (many decades after the fact) walking though Swabia in between Stuttgart and Ulm as a teenager in early 1934, he gets into a digression about what sorts of poetry in what languages he had memorized at various points in his life, which leads to a further digression about the time he was an SOE officer in German-occupied Crete in 1944 and he and his colleagues and some local Cretan guerillas kidnapped the German commander (General Heinrich Kreipe, 1895-1976). They spent some time moving around the mountains with their captive while evading pursuing German forces before they were able to get the captive to a beach where a British boat picked him up and took him to Egypt and thence into POW camps. One morning during this process, as the sun was rising rather spectacularly over Mt. Ida, the captive general murmured to himself a bit of memorized Horace: Vides ut alta stet nive candidum Soracte … Fermor, who was 20 years younger then his captive, then picked up from memory where the general had stopped: …nec jam sustineant onus Silvae laborantes geluque Flumina constiterant acuto (etc etc etc.) The general looked at his young captor and said “Ach so, Herr Major.” “It was very strange. As if, for a long moment, the war had ceased to exist. We had both drunk from the same fountains long before; and things were different between us for the rest of our time together.”

Because nobody but me would notice it, I feel weird about opening an issue on github. I know it's a bug, I know it's something the developer would want to fix if he knew about it, but something about it feels entitled, like "excuse me, you broke my toy, wtf are you doing." The new issue is, at least for awhile, right at the top of the issue page, implying that it's the most important. It feels like I'm making work for someone, for a completely trivial reason. I can live without the favimoji. Why make a big deal about it?

XMLHttpRequest — named for the fact that nobody has ever once used it to request XML

In the past generation, concern about social values has moved from an eccentric hobby, pursued by Malcolm Muggeridge, Mary Whitehouse and their ilk, to the mainstream.

When the Austrian general von Haynau visited Britain in 1850, he was chased down Borough High Street by a mob of draymen, who objected to his brutal repression of the Hungarian uprising the previous year. By 1861, London street-singers had recorded the event in ballads. More typically, poor people took action against rule-breakers in their own communities. Across Europe, there were institutions of public shaming, with names like “rough music,” “charivari” or “skimmington”. If you slept with someone else's spouse, married an older woman, or beat your wife, you might wake to see a procession coming past your house, beating pans and bearing an effigy. You might then be captured and ridden backwards on a donkey, or thrown into a ditch.

Spotify gives you an automatically generated playlist: Try Anything Once, Twice If You Like It.

…look at a menu, run Scatter/Gather on any list. The words swim and reorganise into categories; I pick one, focus, they re-categorise.

What if it were law to name the algorithm according to its reward function? Little Miss Reverse-Chronological Little Miss I-Make-You-Click Mr I-Reinforce-Your-Prejudices And you would get to choose.

What if you discovered a secret toggle, deep in the Settings of your phone, and it was labelled “Routine” – and one morning you tapped “Turn off until tomorrow.” Then your Citymapper ranks a route at the top which is almost as quick, but you never take it. Your Priority Inbox makes sure it shows you emails from people you typically don’t read. Your alarms are all late; you get breaking news notifications from publications you don’t read. A klaxon goes off if you get the same darn sandwich from the same darn place for lunch. Your phone rings but actually it has spontaneously placed an outbound call and is just letting you know. It has called your father. He doesn’t have a blue underline in your contacts, which your phone knows. “Hello,” he says, picking up, “What a surprise! I was just thinking about you.”

My reading of this study would be that it isn’t that we live in a ‘post-fact’ political climate. Rather it is that attempts to take facts out of their social context won’t work. For me and my friends it seems incomprehensible to ignore the facts, whether about the science of vaccination, or the law and economics of leaving the EU. But me and my friends do very well from the status quo- the Treasury, the Bar, the University work well for us. We know who these people are, we know how they work, and we trust them because we feel they are working for us, in some wider sense.

The recommendation algorithms in these platforms are great at showing me more of what I like, but are there any which try and identify gaps in my experience and surprise me?

Pandemonium is another model of social intelligence. An early and influential model of computation, proposed by Oliver Selfridge in 1959. The pandemonium model assumes that problems can be solved by a legion of specialised demons. Each demon, like their underworld counterparts, has a very specialised task. In hell, a particular demon might be responsible for stoking the fires at the feet of a particular sinner. In Pandemonium, if the problem is word reading, a particular demon might be responsible for recognising the letter A, and another responsible for recognising the letter R. Each demon shrieks, with a volume related to their confidence about what they’re seeing. At the top sits a decision demon whose job is to judge the loudness of shrieks. In this way, via interactive connections, the myopic and stupid demons generate an emergent solution to the greater task

Companies design and deploy the epistemic agents and we buy their services, based on them “just working” - in other words, accurately guessing what will make us happy.

The “truth seeking” part needs to be explicit, according to Goldman, as a defence against fashionable post-modernisms which deny the existence of truth and pretend to build an account of knowledge based on some other feature, such as consensus.

I have concluded that the epistemic argument for markets needs to be heavily qualified, if not put on its head: it is not an argument for “free” markets but for the careful regulation of markets. The “invisible hand” can only, if ever, do its work on material that has been diligently prepared, and continues to be monitored, by many visible hands. Otherwise, the result may be a mere chimera of the epistemic mechanism that I learned about when studying economics: it may seem to work fine on the surface but fail to realize the goals it is supposed to achieve, such as genuine preference satisfaction and the avoidance of inefficient economic behavior.

Twitter, I want to suggest, is a machine made for intimate jokes. The central fact of the medium is its brevity. A single tweet is 280 characters. This is barely enough for a coherent thought, let alone a full story. And the gold standard of tweeting isn’t a thread—it’s a single tweet that does the job all in one.

Jokes, then, are intimacy pumps. The teller gambles on a presumption of intimacy, and when the joke succeeds, it accentuates that intimacy. The practice of joking highlights the fragility of the relationship: of the teller’s leap and the audience’s catch. Every joke is a trust fall. And every laugh is a direct experience of connection.

Jokes, says Cohen, have an essential structure. All jokes require that the joke-teller and audience share some background knowledge. And that background knowledge needs to be unstated for the joke to work. A joke will absolutely fail if the teller tries to prepare the audience with an explicit declaration of the necessary background knowledge. We need to be surprised by the sudden emergence of that shared background knowledge, mid-joke.

At the end of the day, I’m the user. I want to be convinced that the approach is better. Sell me on it. Prove it to me. Don’t do it by telling me about the moral worth of open source or federation or any of those things. Care about my use case. Value how I value my time.

Even if you look at the “Guide for ActivityPub users,” it tells people to “spread the word,” saying, “the most effective way to promote a decentralized internet is by using it and encouraging others to do likewise.” This may be the case, but what this ends up as is people trying to sell me on a service because it is decentralized and not people trying to make decentralized services the obvious and easy choice for users.

Static site generators are like candy for nerds. Every serious writer I know uses Substack or Medium or Wordpress.

It doesn’t really understand how people use Twitter.

was developed for developers who really enjoy designing and implementing standards

This means that for the most basic, out-of-the-box setup, I would have to pay more to host my own instance on the cloud than I would pay for Spotify in the end.

I would control my own data; no algorithm would be siphoning off my listening habits and constructing some profile of who some AI believes me to be.

I took a look at my 2021 Spotify Wrapped, the streaming service’s year-in-review feature that tells you exactly how many times you hurt your own feelings with a song.

In recent months, Sidechat, a buzzy new app, where users log in with university-affiliated email addresses and write anonymous posts that are visible only within their school community, has racked up downloads at universities including Harvard, Cornell, Tufts and Columbia. Campus newspapers have documented the app’s fast-paced growth. In March, The Cornell Daily Sun wrote that “the app has quickly become a hallmark of Cornell social life.” In April, The Harvard Crimson reported that Sidechat “is taking campus by storm.” The premise isn’t new but is irresistible for many students: an opportunity to chat about what’s happening on campus with peers, without having their names attached to what they say. Posts go live without any prior approval and are only removed later if a message is deemed to be in violation of platform guidelines. While some students find the secrecy to be harmless fun, others seem to be emboldened by the anonymity and, as is common online, post caustic and hurtful comments. Now, some students, many already jaded by past experiences with similar platforms, say they are souring on Sidechat, but they are still signing on.

On the internet, fighting about what has happened is far easier than imagining what could happen.

On the internet, there is no present, only variously organized fragments of the past.

These inscriptions include verbal expressions as well as images, audio, videos, memes, likes, shares, buttons hovered over, forms filled but never submitted, location data, etc. The inscriptions are legible either to humans or to machines, or to both.

Alongside monastic practice, recent scholarship has identified another tradition that scholars such as Taft call a “cathedral office” of prayer, which would have been intended for the laity. Unlike monasticism, which established a pattern of obligatory prayer at set hours throughout the day, this cathedral office centered on dawn and dusk. Like its precursors, it engaged in daily prayer as expectation of Christ, and saw him present in the sign of the rising and setting sun. Vespers, the evening liturgy, expressed this in a unique way. At the hour of dusk, as the shadows set in, a lamp would be brought into the congregation to be blessed. The practice, called the Lucernarium, was a long-established custom throughout the Mediterranean world, in various religious and cultural persuasions. And yet Christians transformed the convention into a potent sign of worship: in that flame they recognized Christ, the true light of the world, whose light would, in time, replace even the sun itself. And the response to that sign, the means through which Christians might participate in that light and make its meaning real in their lives, was to sing.

Early Christians expected Christ to return soon and restore the world. The Incarnation initiated a new relationship between world and God, and in Christ’s paschal sacrifice on the cross the curtain of the temple was torn asunder. The rites and rituals reserved for the holy of holies now seeped out into the world, and every activity within creation, from the patterns of prayer to the movement of the sun and moon, became imbued with liturgical significance. Robert Taft writes that in the worship of the early church, “all of creation is a cosmic sacrament of our saving God. … For the Christian everything, including the morning and evening, the day and the night, the sun and its setting, can be a means of communication with God.”

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Politicians do not worry that thousands of toilets may suddenly start spewing water because goods like that have to "follow code" and adhere to product liability standards. In contrast to this, lawyers for today's 200-plus affected corporations will find out that the full and complete extent of the third-party software vendors' liability is that they will send a new CD if the first one is unreadable.

7. Indie music and alt music are marginalized.

2. Alt Weeklies disappear in every city—along with everything else that’s alternative or outside the norm.

Movies, music, and other creative pursuits are increasingly evaluated on financial and corporate metrics, with all other considerations having little influence

9. The experts who ‘explain’ the culture to us all seem to be insiders with identical backgrounds.

14. All those nasty, rebellious songs that defy authorities are now owned by hedge funds.

13. Everybody is encouraged to watch the same TV shows and movies—with niche options gradually removed from the dominant platforms.

12. Five companies have almost complete control over the book business—where, in an earlier day, dozens of indie publishers thrived.

11. Even elite awards for creativity are dominated by reboots and remakes.

10. This year’s movies look a lot like last year’s movies.

8. Telling jokes becomes a dangerous profession.

6. The dominant company in the creative culture views everything as a brand extension.

5. There are lots of journalists, but they all seem to be working for the same corporations.

4. The banal word ‘content’ is used to describe every type of creative work, implying that artistry is generic and interchangeable.

3. The most popular song doesn’t change for three years in a row.

This is a deep matter, and I won’t try to unlock all the nuances here.

Even avant-garde work often feels like a rehash of 50-60 years ago

Creative work is increasingly embedded in genres that feel rigid, not flexible

Every year the same stories are retold, and this sameness is considered a plus

Alternative voices exist—in fact, they are everywhere—but are rarely heard, and their cultural impact is negligible

The dominant themes feel static and repetitive, not dynamic and impactful

A sense of sameness pervades the creative world

Fairy kei tutorials used to be everywhere back in the day but it seems like they're not really being made anymore, so I am READY TO FIX THIS PROBLEM! If there's anything you'd like to see me make, leave me a comment and let me know!

“He used to come home every weekend, and one weekend he came to church and he saw me,” Gilda said. “I had cut my hair, I had a permanent. I looked a little different. So he wrote me a letter to say that I looked beautiful, that someday we [were] going to get together.” When Reverend Mother heard about the letter—because she heard about everything—she demanded that Gilda give it to her. “She took it from me. She took the letter,” Gilda said, tapping her fingers one, two, three, four, five times on her kitchen table. “But you know what I did before I gave it to her? I rewrote it.” She gave Reverend Mother the original and kept the copy.

The mainstream pundit class is never alarmed on its own behalf about the growth of the immigrant population. It is just very deeply worried about other people, who are alarmed by immigrants, and it wants to persuade the political class to get rid of the immigrants before those other people decide to get rid of the immigrants.

Nick Milo developed the LYT methodology6 during one of the most tumultuous political climates in recent US history. It was 2016 and the US was plunging into social and political polarization. Many of us, especially on the left, felt that Trump winning the election, along with the appointing of vocal white nationalists, was a wake-up call-to-action. It was also a time riddled with anxiety. To balance the confusion that came with social upheaval, each of us created our own version of stability. For Nick, that stability was found in the ancient, Western philosophical tradition.

I think we’re in a situation now in which people have a lot of [online] associations, but not many [physical] associations. And it feels a bit lopsided. It’s very easy to live in an American city, not know your neighbors, not really know anybody in your other community, not really have relationships with your coworkers, but live much of your social life through the internet with people you’ve never met. I wouldn’t moralize and say that’s bad — I think people create arrangements that work for them. But I think there is probably something to be said for creating a more balanced arrangement where in-person, place-based, workplace-based affiliations could be restored.

Under digitally re-enchanted conditions, policing the bounds of the community appears to overshadow the value of ostensibly objective, civil discourse. In other words, meta-positioning, from this perspective, might just a matter of making sure you are always playing for the right team, or at least not perceived to be playing for the wrong one. It’s not so much that we have something to say but that we have a social space we want to be seen to occupy.

The enchanted world, in Taylor’s view, yielded the experience of a porous, and thus vulnerable self.

To speak into the digital public sphere is to potentially invite an immediate and intense assault not simply upon your ideas but upon you and your livelihood and well-being because, after all, you and your ideas and your words are now more tightly bound together.

Not surprisingly, then, modern free speech ideals are historically correlated with emergence and internalization of print culture. Print encourages the notion that the content of ideas can easily be and, indeed, ought to be distinguished from the one who presents them. Print abstracts the act of communication from the lived experience of communicators and thus fosters the sense that words alone can do no harm. The well-known proverb about sticks and stones, for example, is most plausible in the context of print culture (and, in fact, seems to arise precisely in this context). The time and space necessary to the labor of communicating in print itself has a diminishing effect on the felt intensity of communication.

Nothing better illustrates these different attitudes to the word than when modern readers encounter the biblical narrative of Isaac and his two sons, Jacob and Esau. When Jacob deceives his father into conferring his spoken blessing on him rather than Esau, the eldest son, a modern reader is likely to ask, well, why not just take it back, they’re just words. But when the word is an event rather than a thing, you can’t just take them back just as you can’t undo an event.

It is absolutely true that you can find all manner of vitriolic and combative speech in print, as is evidenced, for example, in the political pamphleteering of the early republic. But, experientially, it is one thing to encounter this content in written form at a temporal and spatial remove from the author, whose very significance becomes dubious, and it is another to encounter these words directly and immediately from the mouth of the speaker, whose personal significance is unavoidable. In other words, even the plausibility of the claim that you should challenge the ideas and not the person, for example, is sustained by the conditions of print.

Sticky rice mortar was invented in ancient China utilizing organic materials in inorganic mortar. Hydraulic mortar was not available in ancient China, possibly due to a lack of volcanic ash. Around 500 CE, sticky rice soup was mixed with slaked lime to make an inorganic−organic composite mortar that had more strength and water resistance than lime mortar.

🌖

During the First Crusade, soldiers would have provided their own food stores, which they would have mortgaged their property or sold possessions to buy. Later, during crusades like those in the 14th century, called by Pope Innocent III, deals were made with the Venetian fleet and merchants to keep soldiers supplied. During battles, "if crusaders got to the Muslim camp they would stop fighting and start eating. And it would cost them the battle. It happened twice at the siege of Acre,” says John Hosler, associate professor of military history at the U.S. Army Command & General Staff College, a medievalist military expert and author of The Siege of Acre, 1189-1191.

We can set the waveform, the volume, and the frequency! So let’s build a theremin! :>

I decided to try to make 50 programs for the open-source retro fantasy console TIC-80!

Surprisingly, they did not totally exclude male gourmets. Each member was allowed to invite a male companion once a year, as long it was not her husband.

Then, a new institution appeared at the turn of the 20th century: gastronomic clubs. These loose brotherhoods of food lovers consisted of artists, politicians, and businessmen who knew their camembert from brie. They went by fancy names, such as “The Academy of Psychologists of Taste,” and organized unforgettable feasts that were often covered by the press. Club members enjoyed not only delicious meals, but also the privilege of tasting foods that were inaccessible to the lower classes, bumpkins from the provinces, and, of course, women. “It was thought that men wouldn’t be able to focus on their food if there were women around,” says Julia Csergo, an academic specializing in the history of French gastronomy. “With their sexual appeal and chatter, women would distract them. And their perfumes and make-up would allegedly distort the smell and taste of food.”

Her personality is better showcased on TikTok, where she combines humor and sincerity in self-deprecating posts that poke fun at her cosmetic surgery, depression, and even the origins of her fame. “My Instagram is maybe 25% women,” she says, “but TikTok is in the mid-40s. That’s why it’s such a safe and fun platform for me.” Users ask about her hair, makeup, eyelashes, and clothing, and she often answers. “There are videos where my entire comments section is just women, and I can sit in there and go back and forth with them.“

“It’s empowering, because people borrow these notions from marketing,” says Thorne. ​“People realised that they could empower themselves, that there’s actually no barrier between a commercial exploitative brand and a personal identity brand – the things operate in very similar ways. And, even, you can exploit both of them to make money. [Breaking] that barrier between brand commodification, which used to be done by governments or companies, and the commodification of ideas and trends is something that anybody can do.”

Where once a handful of standout trends might define a decade – say, skinheads, disco and metalheads in the ​‘70s, for instance – we’re now seeing just as many, if not more, take over TikTok in a single week.

As I say, I’ve been thinking a lot about this transition, because I believe that we can’t understand where we are, culturally speaking, without understanding where we come from. And it’s not simply a matter of waving a hand and saying “The Sixties” — the transformation is more complex and gradual than that. Even a story like The Lord of the Rings seems to be ours in a way that nothing before the Thirties is. I’m trying to figure this out, and will continue to do so.

And even some progressives hate it because it is “elitist”, disqualifies low-skill workers, or is a “handout to big corporations.”

When a company works with subprime customers, there are two opposite tendencies you want to avoid. The first is to suspect that they're ruthlessly exploiting desperate people who have no other option but to borrow at high rates. The second reaction is contempt for those same customers, who are fixating on a) getting their stuff right now, and b) on monthly payments over APRs. There's a grain of truth to both, but one thing to keep in mind is that there are many people who are financially stressed not just because they don't have much money, but because they struggle to understand how bad some kinds of debt can be. Adult numeracy is probably worse than you think: "Over two in three (70 percent) U.S. adults have sufficient numeracy skills to make calculations with whole numbers and percentages, estimate numbers or quantity, and interpret simple statistics in text or tables." But understanding monthly payments is simpler; they pay rent or car loans, so it's a mandatory concept.

Silver Linings Playbook Jennifer Lawrence and Bradley Cooper were already stars by the time David O. Russell’s 2012 sleeper hit came out, but Silver Linings Playbook is what established them as capital-S Serious Actors.

To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before There may be no better endorsement for a rom-com than when the entire internet falls in love with your lead overnight.

Palm Springs Movie-watchers were lacking for good rom-coms in 2020, which is why it’s comforting that Palm Springs, at its core, uses a classic template: girl-meets-boy-who-has-some-growing-up-to-do.

10 Things I Hate About You It is so incredibly hard to make a movie about high school that’s actually cool, but 10 Things I Hate About You makes it seem easy.

Crazy, Stupid, Love When it comes to the scene-stealing chemistry between Ryan Gosling and Emma Stone, La La Land wants what Crazy, Stupid, Love has.

The Big Sick There are, in every genre, tentpole moments; times when a movie or a person or an idea lands with such measured gravity and brilliance that you know, from there going forward, everything is going to be different. With rom-coms, there have been five undeniable tentpole moments. There was Diane Keaton powering Annie Hall to four Oscar wins in 1977. There was Nora Ephron basically wholesale inventing the modern rom-com with When Harry Met Sally in 1989. There was Boomerang showing what it would look like if everyone but white people weren’t boxed out. There was Julia Roberts putting up untouchable numbers in the ’90s with Pretty Woman, My Best Friend’s Wedding, Notting Hill, and Runaway Bride. And then there was The Big Sick revitalizing and modernizing the rom-com again in 2017.

Boomerang You have Eddie Murphy, one of the funniest and most charming people to have ever walked across a Hollywood stage, playing an unstoppably suave bachelor intent on sexing his way toward finding what he deems to be a perfect woman.

High Fidelity

Hitch A film with prime Will Smith, Kevin James, and Eva Mendes; a fun and engaging story; and a baller soundtrack? Not only is Hitch one of the most underrated rom-coms of all time, I am a firm believer that it is Will Smith’s best performance as an actor, PERIOD.

While You Were Sleeping Lucy (Sandra Bullock) is a transit worker who counts tokens (not the non-fungible ones) for Chicago subway riders.

Something’s Gotta Give The only thing better than a Nancy Meyers kitchen is a Nancy Meyers kitchen in the Hamptons inhabited by Diane Keaton and Jack Nicholson making pancakes, just on the brink of realizing they’re falling in love.

My Best Friend’s Weddin

Notting Hill

Pretty Woman

In public discourse now, if the term appears, it is met with fervent opposition, often on a personal level from medievalists (myself included) as a reactionary impulse to want to prove that the period is misunderstood and/or inaccurately or dangerously romanticized.

There is a consistent pandering to a white feminist audience in this book.

While it is true that Western religions have origins outside of Europe, descriptions like this try to de-Christianize Christianity, making it seem ‘hip,’ international and inclusive, while erasing its present role in western imperialism.

They never mark white skin. Why is this so?

Gabriele and Perry reveal their core audience through specific words and phrases that most likely would not raise the collective eyebrow of a predominantly white audience.

Gabriele and Perry exclaim that, although she meets an unhappy demise, “Theodelinda matters” (54). This, I hope, is not a play on Black Lives Matters, but this does show how I, as a Black reader and scholar, might read a particular phrase (especially now) that feels trivializing or appropriative.

In pools set into the floor, at least five breeds of Japanese koi fish swim around customers sitting at tables sunk within large ponds. As people sip on typical Vietnamese beverages such as cà phê sữa đá, hundreds of koi flock tableside in hopes of getting a snack.

When it comes to parenting, the data tells us, moms and dads should put more thought into the neighbors they surround their children with—and lighten up about everything else.

The ultimate irony here is that the best evidence that ‘accumulation via innovation’ is—like capitalism itself—still very much alive, can be found in the same technology sector that Durand writes off as feudalist and rentierist. We can see as much when we abandon the overdetermined macro-narratives of these analytical frameworks—be it Harvey’s ‘neoliberalism’ as a political project or Vercellone’s ‘cognitive capitalism’. Thinking of technology firms the way Marx would have likely thought about them—that is, as capitalist producers—surely yields better results.

There were certainly good reasons to point out that the advance of democracy stopped at the factory gates; that rights granted in the political arena did not necessarily eliminate despotism in the economic sphere. Of course, much in this presumed separation was fictitious: as Ellen Meiksins Wood argued in her seminal article on the issue, it was bourgeois economic theory that had abstracted ‘the economy’ from its social and political content, and capitalism itself that had driven the wedge separating essentially political issues, such as the power ‘to control production and appropriation, or the allocation of social labour’, from the political arena, displacing them to the sphere of the economic. True socialist emancipation would require a full awareness that the separation between the two was artificial.

It is impossible to grasp the ascendancy of the American tech industry if one brackets out the Cold War and the War on Terror—with their military spending and surveillance technologies, as well as the global network of American military bases—as extraneous, non-capitalist factors, of little importance to understanding what ‘capital’ wants and what it does.

If one accepts that Google is in the business of producing search-result commodities

The difficulty of fitting Marx and Veblen into a single analytical framework here—something Durand also attempts in a recent essayfootnote49—is that Marx saw predation and sabotage as part and parcel of feudalism, not capitalism. For Veblen, these are instincts present in all capitalists, even if those with control over intangible assets may be better positioned to act upon them. Marx, however, ultimately saw capitalists as productive; if one could speak of sabotage, this would only be possible at the systemic level of capitalism as a whole and not at the level of individual capitalists.

What gives the digital economy its peculiar neo- and techno-feudal flavour is that, while workers are still being exploited in all the old capitalist ways, it is the new digital giants, armed with sophisticated means of predation, who benefit most. Analogously to the feudal lords, they manage to appropriate huge chunks of the global mass of surplus value without ever being directly involved in labour exploitation or the productive process.

Globalization and digitization allowed top firms in the Global North—think Walmart—to leverage their positions at the apex of global commodity chains in order to extract lower prices for final or intermediate goods from the actors lower down the chain. On the other hand, when capitalists from the Global North were making investments, these increasingly went to the Global South. Thus, looking at profit-investment dynamics through the lens of individual countries of the Global North—the us, for example—doesn’t tell us much. One needed a global view to see how exactly profits map onto investments.

On Durand’s telling, the bailout measures following the 2008 financial crisis turbocharged the dynamics of dispossession and parasitism, suppressing those of innovation. ‘Is this still capitalism?’, he wondered, in the closing pages of Fictitious Capital. ‘This system’s death-agony has been heralded a thousand times. But now it may well have begun—almost as if by accident.’ This would not be the first ‘almost accidental’ transition to a new economic regime; Brenner once described the transition from feudalism to capitalism in England as ‘the unintended consequence of feudal actors pursuing feudal goals in feudal ways.’footnote39 So the idea that financiers, by taking the easy way out—dedicating themselves solely to politically organized upward redistribution and rent-supported parasitism—could accelerate the transition to a post-capitalist regime was not only highly intriguing but also theoretically plausible.

In pathologizing the ongoing extractivist side of contemporary digital capitalism, Zuboff’s critique completely normalizes its non-extractivist dimension. Her utopian horizon doesn’t stretch much beyond demanding a world in which Google, having abandoned advertising and the associated data-extraction, would simply start charging for its search services; an option that Facebook has been reportedly considering. That this would inadvertently normalize all the ‘digital dispossession’ that occurs at the indexing stage, cementing Google’s power and its hold on society’s institutional imagination, is of little concern to Zuboff. After all, for user-ism, the problem with ‘surveillance capitalism’ is the surveillance of user-consumers, not capitalism as such.

One could argue, with the cognitive-capitalism theorists, that users are actually workers, with technology platforms living off our ‘free digital labour’; without our interaction with all these digital objects, there wouldn’t be much digital advertising to sell and the making of artificial-intelligence products would become more expensive.footnote33 Another view, of which Shoshana Zuboff is the leading exponent, compares users’ lives to the pristine lands of a faraway, non-capitalist country, threatened by the extractivist operations of the digital giants. Condemned to ‘digital dispossession’, as she puts it in The Age of Surveillance Capitalism (2018), ‘we are the native peoples whose tacit claims to self-determination have vanished from the maps of our own experience.

In line with Marx’s own writings on the equalization of profits across differently automated firms and industries, the car wash is simply absorbing the surplus value generated elsewhere in the economy. To present these automated firms as ‘rentiers’ rather than as proper capitalists is to strip Marx’s account of capitalist competition of its substance; it is precisely the constant drive to automate—to cut costs and boost profitability—which accounts for the constant flow of capital towards more productive firms.

In some Marxian accounts, including that of Immanuel Wallerstein, ‘primitive accumulation’ refers to the use of extra-economic, political means to capture and transfer surplus, under the label of ‘unequal exchange’, from the poorer to the richer lands—or, as Wallerstein put it, from the periphery to the core.footnote18 The origins of capitalism could not be understood without taking into account this ability of the core to appropriate the surplus of the whole global economy. This is what explains why capitalism emerged and flourished where it did. The exploitation of (never fully proletarianized) wage-labour certainly boosted the fortunes of capitalists in the core, but this was only part of the story. Thus, to focus exclusively on exploitation and ignore the fact that the core-periphery dynamics of ‘unequal exchange’ and ‘primitive accumulation’ are still present today is to misunderstand the nature of capitalism.

Key to Supiot’s legal philosophy is the distinction between government by men—typical of the feudal period, with its personal allegiances and ties of dependence—and government by law—the achievement of the bourgeois state, which establishes itself as the objective third-party guarantor of rights and enforcer of rules. Because the state declared certain areas off-limits for private contracting—leaving them impervious to calculations of utility—a modicum of dignity could be enjoyed by all citizens, in the workplace and beyond it, regardless of their power and wealth differentials. In subjecting the state to utility- and efficiency-maximizing imperatives, neoliberalism once again opens it up to private contracting.

As a result, many Marxists—we can skip the internal disputes at this stage—held that, under feudalism, the means of surplus extraction are extra-economic, being largely political in nature; goods are expropriated under the threat of violence. Under capitalism, in contrast, the means of surplus extraction are entirely economic: nominally free agents are obliged to sell their labour power in order to survive in a cash economy, in which they no longer possess the means of subsistence—yet the highly exploitative nature of this ‘voluntary’ labour contract remains largely invisible. Thus, as we move from feudalism to capitalism, politically enabled expropriation gives way to economically enabled exploitation. The distinction between the extra-economic and the economic—one of many such dichotomies—suggests that, as a category in Marxist thought, ‘feudalism’ is intelligible only when examined through the prism of capitalism, commonly imagined as its more progressive, rational and innovation-friendly successor.

Yet for all these disclaimers, many on the left have found that calling Silicon Valley or Wall Street ‘feudal’ is simply irresistible, just as many pundits cannot resist calling Trump or Orbán ‘fascist’. The actual connection to historical fascism or feudalism might be tenuous, but the wager is that there is enough shock value in the proclamation to rouse the soporific public from its complacency.

There are universal principles of visual design that matter across time and in every cultural context. But also, there are certain processes and materials that are seen as premium. This is context-dependent; it changes over time based on technology and economics. When a design uses a premium material like an illustration or an intricate 3D rendering, it is seen as an honest “costly signal” that the company behind it has lots of resources to spare. This, more than grid alignment or proper typographic hierarchy, is the thing that sends a tingle down your spine and makes you think “I should sign up.”The weird thing is, what gives you goosebumps today might feel lame in 20 years. Just look at the “pre vibe shift” websites above—at the time I can promise you they made nerds like me drool. Today… not so much.

How could Fantasy Family B take revenge on Fantasy Family C for a slight without killing them?Lots of ways:-Refusal to vote on or otherwise support causes that Fantasy Family C comes to them about supporting.-Demanding an apology. If the slight was accidental, this would make much more sense than just assuming that Fantasy Family C would never apologize. The “Sorry” could, of course, take the form of money or information or political support for one of Fantasy Family B’s own schemes.-Tracking C’s interests and subtly getting in the way of them.-Blackmail.-Getting C in trouble completely legally, such as being able to prove or “prove” that they’re traitors to the king.-Spreading damaging gossip about C.-Watching for a weakness and taking advantage of one the moment it appears. Perhaps C’s family head makes a stupid remark, and while it would ordinarily cause little harm, it does an enormous amount because of the way that B’s family head spins it.-Moving into a high position, perhaps by doing an enormous service to the country, and using that to lever other factions or families into hurting C.-Hurting people attached to C. C’s family head and children might be sacrosanct, but burning down a business that C’s family head has promised to protect? That’s a pretty strong “Fuck you.”

Interruptions are great, but sometimes when they happen, authors just quash them with the Not-So-Witty Comeback. It is harder to quash someone leaping over the table at the hero in a towering rage. It's also hard to quash flying arrows; a personal, ugly shouting match; two members attacking each other when the majority's attention is turned elsewhere; someone having a seizure from the poison in their wine and dying; a character who keeps on giving your hero this really odd smile despite apparently losing; or the common people choosing that moment to try to enter the building and declare who they want for mayor.Council scenes can be as good as battles or riots. Mix them with battles or riots, and they can get even more interesting.

Read published fantasy council scenes (one of the best is in Kay's Sailing to Sarantium, but many of Terry Pratchett's scenes between Patrician Vetinari of Ankh-Morpork and his political opponents are also good). Note the way that the author doesn't give the victory to just one side automatically; the reader may suspect who's going to win, but it's not a case where the character can just lean back and be assured of his foes gaping at him foolishly.

Instead of applying enemies or people who hate your hero to the story, apply Murphy’s Law. This can function in numerous ways, but some of the most useful in the typical fantasy story would be:-weather (even snow and rain can slow travel, stop travel, ruin crops, kill people and animals, and cause secondary disasters, like mudslides).-pre-existing political factions and rivalries (thus the hero can be stepping into a hornet’s nest that has nothing to do with him).-waterskins (springing leaks, getting filled with dirty water and having to be thrown out, having an unnoticed rip or tear so that the leak is slow).-food (it can spoil, it can attract insects, it can already be full of insects, it can run out, it can poison someone accidentally, it can cause an allergic reaction).-animals (messenger birds that never appear, dogs that run off at the wrong moment, cats who are lurking about and making the hero trip over them, wandering animals like skunks or bears who get into the food. And do you know how fragile horses are?)-time (this may make bridges unstable, cause houses to fall down, make paths through the wilderness unrecognizable, or block certain passages with things like spring floods from the snowmelt).-money (it runs out, it gets lost, it provides a tempting target for thieves).

Who knows what can spin you a complicated plot in no time. And not by means of stupid, contrived things like infodumps or “intuition” or characters who keep silent when they have every reason to tell the truth. Simple, ordinary human error and simple, ordinary human greed will work quite nicely.

If your nobles can assassinate someone, and it isn't the kind of murder where they would feel guilt, why not have them do it? Or if it's a case of embarrassing someone publicly so that that person gets exiled, why not do that, instead of tangling themselves in labyrinthine intrigues?Always look for the simplest solution, and if there aren't legitimate reasons why your nobles can't follow it, then take it. Or think of some legitimate reasons.

Even the more "boring" parts of politics can provide good storylines. These include building roads, tax and tariff practices, relief for peasants with flooded fields or damaged crops, building cities or cathedrals or other grand projects, hosting councils, and so on. If nothing else, most of these can provide good motives for war. It's amazing how many Earth wars were caused by trade disagreements, or disagreements over tariffs.

Person A tries to introduce poison into Person B’s food, because Person B was indirectly responsible for the death of Person A’s youngest sister. Person A fails, instead causing Person B to have a minor choking spasm. Person C notes the choking spasm and a touch of blue around Person B’s lips, a well-known sign of the poison chyrdis, and goes researching to try and figure out if that’s what it is, and who would put it in Person B’s food, or if Person B, a well-known attention whore, did it to herself. Meanwhile, Person D, who is watching Person C for Person E, notes Person C’s burst of activity and snooping about and thinks it may mean that she’s been discovered. She hurries to Person E to give a full report, and is spotted on the way by Person F, who thinks it’s awfully weird that she’s hurrying up to Person E’s tower when Person E doesn’t give a shit about anyone…You see how it goes. People’s plans should affect each other, especially if they’re all in a fairly confined area, like a royal court or a single family. They don’t have to all tie back to each other, there doesn’t have to be a single villainous mastermind—perhaps in the case above, Person E and Person A don’t have a clue about each other—and they don’t all have to be equally threatening. But do show the interaction of webs and tangles and plans and schemes, hmmm? That’s what makes Byzantine plots fun.

The Holy Roman Empire was a highly decentralized state for most of its history, composed of hundreds of smaller states, most of which operated with some degree of independent sovereignty. Although in the earlier part of the Middle Ages, under the Salian and Hohenstaufen emperors, it was relatively centralized, as time went on the Emperor lost more and more power to the Princes.

It is generally recommended to provide the full content of your posts in the feed. This is what most readers prefer. Atom has both <summary> element for readers that prefer it. For RSS and the Atom <content> element the full article should be included.

Tea bags replace loose leaf tea. Allows for lower quality tea to be sold, diminishes the re-use of tea leaves. Also ludicrous product differentiation along the lines of 'we have a special shaped tea bag'.

Cooking equipment: essentially indestructible Cast Iron skillets transition into teflon pans. The newer pans perform worse, and must be replaced on a shockingly regular basis.

Rewriting articles somehow seems wrong. It feels dishonest. My writing will never be perfect, and trying to present it as a perfect finished product would be a futile lie.

Many who use RSS feed readers do not use them correctly. For this reason, I am forced to block them from accessing my website to preserve its tiny bandwidth for those who are actually reading articles. Some users are not aware that by downloading RSS feeds literally every two minutes, they are hogging Internet bandwidth and wasting resources. Just because this practice costs them nothing does not mean it costs nothing. By some estimates, 10% of the electricity produced on the planet is used to power the Internet, and a very large percentage of that is wasted. Blocking those who are knowingly or unknowingly wasting Internet resources saddens me, but I block them anyway.

As someone running a personal website, you are like the neighborhood cobbler competing against the national chain stores. You know your product is superior, but you still have no hope of prevailing. Your best possible outcome is merely surviving to continue the struggle.

The average established personal blog currently receives something like 2000 to 3000 unique visitors a month. This is for a blog that has been around for a number of years and puts out fairly regular content.

To those that fall more on the OCD side of the OCD-ADHD Smart People spectrum, which I assume most OTPGs do, it might be a relief, a soothing companion, to have a place where all one’s throwaway ideas and uncategorizable sparks of genius can be arranged neatly.

Scrolling months, years, back into my Keep archive brings up the bile: at any moment I might come across definitive proof that I was smarter years ago, that I have since then sundered my intellect with the twin weapons of idleness and vanity. Better to be inconstant in one’s archiving (or forgo it completely) than to constantly be faced with the dirty dishes, the nauseating, living “matter” of one’s past interests, pasts opinions, past genius lying guilelessly buried under strata of increasing idiocy.

The fact is, I fundamentally dislike being confronted with my own archive. It’s like that scene in Withnail & I, where they’re dealing with the horrible state of their kitchen sink. I think there may be something living in there. I think there may be something alive, Marwood says.

I was discussing with Sam the “genre,” so to speak, of the Online Techno-Polymath Guy. You know this guy. He (and it’s usually a he) has his own website, probably hand-crafted in Kirby, Github, or Wordpress, as well as a well-regarded, personable Twitter presence. He keeps track of everything he reads, writes pithy blog posts on esoteric subjects. His personal philosophy is progressive with a futurist bent.  He has worked in a variety of fields, though you are unsure what he actually currently does for a living. He is knowledgeable, authoritative, but eccentric, which you can tell by the fun colors he’s used to design his fun little homepage. You can have fun clicking around his carefully maintained archive, witnessing the dynamic interplay of his disparate areas of interest. You can ooh and ahh at his reading lists, his quirky, inventive stances on issues like quantum computing and social media moderation. It’s all very inspirational. 

datasette]] https://datasette.io/

You can use well-established, thoroughly-tested existing technologies and build a modern, high-performance, healthy and responsible large-scale community online. Many have done so, for years.

By shifting to clearer methods of monetization, and de-emphasizing coercive or extractive models like surveillance-based advertising, an innovative platform can align the needs of the business with what's best for users and for the internet at large.

It is crazy we allow TikTok in this country. It is an easily replicable service, it is not complex technology

Most of the light and heat in the debate is over Musk’s content moderation choices. But that problem can be addressed by removing Section 230 of the Communications Decency Act, and restoring the traditional role of courts as regulators of illegal speech.

Over the last ten years, a firm called Diamond Select Toys has sought to monopolize collectibles, specifically, American vinyl toys. Diamond took over shelf space and then excluded competitors, eventually overrunning the landscape with plastic crap.

Dogs who fall into the pit-bull category are a famous, and particularly controversial, example of this: Bred to fight other animals, they’ve acquired a reputation for violence and unpredictability, a stigma worsened, scholars have argued, by racism against America’s urban Black and Latino communities, to which the dogs were culturally linked in the mid-20th century. Some experts argue that caution around pit bulls is warranted, given their history; people who look at pictures of the dogs tend to rate them unfavorably. And yet, studies done by Alvarez, Zapata, and others have found that pit bulls don’t seem to be more aggressive or volatile than other dogs.

In the UMass-Broad study, purebred golden and Labrador retrievers “tended to score exceptionally,” Karlsson told me, on people-friendly metrics—exactly as the AKC website says they should. But those effects evaporated when her team turned their lens to mutts with retriever ancestry, who are harder to typecast by appearance alone. (Most people, by the way, aren’t actually that good at correctly guessing a dog’s lineage.) Even after the researchers accounted for the mutts’ mixed heritage, they found that the part-retrievers weren’t any more eager to mingle than the average pooch.

According to Morrill’s team, breed explains just a small fraction of the mind-boggling variation in behavior seen in the species that is dog—less than 10 percent. Which is to say, most of the mishmash can be attributed to something else.

If a baby pigeon is found within 50 cubits of a coop, it is presumed to belong to the owner of that coop. If it is found further away than 50 cubits, it belongs to the finder. Ever keen to push the limits of rabbinic law, Rabbi Yirmiyah asked “if one foot of the pigeon is within the fifty cubits and one foot is outside, to whom does it belong?” This apparently was one question too many. The rabbis (rather unfairly in my opinion) expelled Rabbi Yirmiyah from the Yeshivah for asking it.

First, a great proportion of the variance in “knowledge management” effectiveness across individuals is genetic.

“I was not treated with respect,” Scott told me. “At every single workplace I’ve been in, there've been several situations where people commented on my height to discredit me entirely as a person.” One disagreement at work led to a colleague snapping at him and rebutting, “Don’t be so sure of yourself, short man!” Over the years, the insults began to take their toll. “I was waking up two hours before my alarm every day just to walk around the neighborhood and cry,” he said.

These uncertainties have been expressed through the ‘ding dong chicken’ (叮咚鸡, ding dong ji) meme, which puns the expression ‘wait for [further] notification’ because every official post remains provisional. Although notices include official data and the city’s response to the situation at the time of posting, they also include an open-ended statement that there will be further notification when and if the situation changes. Many communications from institutions, groups, and individuals now humorously include a chicken or the expression ‘ding dong ji’ precisely because it is difficult to plan beyond the day, let alone the following week or month.

The connection between keeping one’s place and moral geography is as commonsensical in Chinese as it is in English. However, in Chinese, saying someone ‘knows their place’ (很本分) is a compliment, while in English the phrase is often used to insult a person’s lack of independence.

The anthropologist Mary Douglas famously based her analysis of purity and danger on quotidian hygiene; dirt, she argued, is simply matter out of place. Human ideas of pollution and taboo, she continued, may be imaginative elaborations of spiritual worlds, but in practice, ‘separating, purifying, demarcating and punishing transgressions have as their main function to impose system on an inherently untidy experience’ (Douglas 1984: 4); ordering space and spatial order are fundamental to the construction and maintenance of a recognisable (and often taken for granted) world system. As a system, moral geography is one in which people know their place, correctly reading and responding to the normative expectations that are coded through the built environment and its use. In practice, these expectations become apparent through actions that are recognised as transgressive. In other words, transgressions reveal what was previously invisible or taken for granted, requiring ongoing physical and ideological work to contain transgressive effects and maintain and/or restore the expected order. In this sense, a moral geography can only be reconstructed through public debates about which actions are transgressive and the status of those transgressions. Were they intentional or not? Is this action acceptable for some and not for others? In turn, how those transgressions are punished (or not) may reinforce the moral geography, but may also undermine it, shifting expectations both about how space is to be properly used and about how stable those expectations are (Cresswell 1996).

Harm-reduction activists make sure residents always have access to free needles, pipes, and foil, but never promote free recovery assistance such as Narcotics Anonymous.

It is not true, after all, that the crisis of postmodernity has left us without any functioning system of shared values. What currently fills the space left by the waning or absence of traditional authority, for the most part, is the ideology and logic of the market. Market reasoning is deeply, essentially smarmy. We live, it insists, in a world that is optimized by the invisible hand. The conditions under which we live have been created by rational needs and preferences, producing an economicist Panglossianism: What thrives deserves to thrive, be it Nike or sprawl or the finance industry or Upworthy; what fails deserves to have failed.

One of the silliest or most misguided notions that David Denby frets about, in denouncing snark, is that "the lowest, most insinuating and insulting side threatens to win national political campaigns." This is more or less the opposite of the case. What carries contemporary American political campaigns along is a thick flow of opaque smarm.

Smarm hopes to fill the cultural or political or religious void left by the collapse of authority, undermined by modernity and postmodernity. It's not enough anymore to point to God or the Western tradition or the civilized consensus for a definitive value judgment. Yet a person can still gesture in the direction of things that resemble those values, vaguely.

That is, detecting a change off of a 1% baseline ends up requiring about a hundred times as many observations as detecting the same relative change off of a 50% baseline.

There might be a next life, there might be a remade world in which none of this matters

We plant trees and have children and write books and paint and sculpt and compose and we hope for all of these things a life that is more than fleeting.

Something strange but true is that for all their similarities, the worlds of academic and public writing mostly have contempt for each other. Trying to win at both games is quite possible, but it means, also, feeling judged.

If you plan to write across decades, you simply must own the interfaces to your content.

For folks who invest a great deal of time into creating content online, I think this ultimately means that you need to own your content, own your DNS records that connect readers to your content, and own your mailing list.

In theory you can simply replatform every five or six years, but cool URIs don’t change and replatforming significantly harms content discovery and distribution.

To believe in the innocence of Mark Zuckerberg, while fretting about how Americans have lost the trust in institutions necessary to hold a democratic society together, is far more consequentially stupid than any stupid tendency Haidt may have lamented in anyone else. 

this sort of shift was a conscious, top-down business decision by Facebook, when it unilaterally reversed the basic terms of its user experience from being private by default to being public by default, as it transformed itself from a user-driven social network to a data-mining and advertising company selling its users as commodities. 

life's work is to reduce the contested values and dynamic politics of a demographically, geographically, and culturally diverse nation into a set of lowest-common-denominator talking points that reassure a powerful and non-representative faction that it and its interests are politically neutral and objectively correct

Miscellaneous: joke less, laugh less,

Here are some simple ways to be less divisive in the workplace: If you agree with an idea X that Bob said, say “I agree with the idea X”, don’t say “I agree with Bob”. The former states your advocacy; the latter is dividing the group into teams.

Long-time Macintosh users likely remember HyperCard, Apple's strange hypermedia system that was sorta like a cross between index cards, web pages, and 90s interactive edutainment software. HyperCard left a pretty big legacy for the Web to come, influencing everything from JavaScript to wikis to the pointing finger thing for links on pages to fuckin' Myst. Apple packaged in some sample HyperCard stacks to get people up to speed with the software, including one called "Art Bits", which included a ton of sample clip art for use in your own stacks. This stack is fantastic for showing off just how much Apple could do with two colors.

Anatoly Liberman, a linguist at the University of Minnesota, told me about how child started off as a gender-neutral word in Old English, remained so for several centuries, took on a male meaning in Northern England and Scotland, took on a female meaning in other English dialects, and then mostly converged on a neutral meaning again.

If your company worked really hard and spent a lot of money acquiring particular pieces of talent, they notice when those pieces of talent leave the company. Scenarios like a nightmare manager who drives off good people are less likely to be allowed to be permanent problems.

They will become obsessed with *~innovation~* and effective altruism and long-termism and X-risk and all of this other shit that is just catnip for nerds. 

If you want to produce popular things, and you can easily tell from the internet what’s already popular, you’re simply more likely to produce more of that thing. This mimetic pressure is part of human nature. But perhaps the internet supercharges this trait and, in the process, makes people more hesitant about sharing ideas that aren’t already demonstrably pre-approved, which reduces novelty across many domains.

This modern obsession with progress is just a sign of our decadence, of our creative exhaustion and inability to innovate in any meaningful way. Einstein wasn’t reading fucking blog posts about geniuses and he definitely wasn’t writing them. He was thinking. 

I also refuse to believe that Bezos gives a shit about any of this—it’s just virtue signaling for nerds. If he actually cared he would put his money where his mouth is and start a program that sponsors countless would-be miracle years, but instead his cheapskate ass has only donated 1% of his wealth while his ex-wife has donated 18%.

Progress Studies (and effective altruism and AI safety for that matter) have become so popular because they fill the religion-shaped hole in the hearts of frustrated nerds who are desperately searching for something to make their lives feel meaningful.”

It’s why I’m writing in this excessively combative tone that doesn’t totally reflect how I feel. It’s why I, too, write articles about how we can cultivate more creativity in science. I want motherfucking Jeff Bezos to follow me. Jealousy is the ugliest emotion and it’s coursing through my veins. I feel it corrupting my mind like a zombie virus. 

Analysis of Nobel Prize winners supports the notion that it is getting harder and harder to innovate in your 20s. 

Liberties, a Journal of Culture and Politics

rebranding important body parts with gender neutral language (“front hole” for vagina), not to mention poisoning innocent children with cross-sex hormones and puberty blockers.

Laura Kipnis

We’re happy to take cholesterol blockers, mood elevators, and erection enhancers as needed without worrying whether it’s what nature intended.

But if we’re getting empirical, let’s acknowledge that childbirth has killed far more women than murderous trans women ever did, though I suppose the sentimental premise is that all those dead mothers died fulfilling their gender destiny, not defying it.

Obviously women are subject to violence by men, frequently their husbands, boyfriends, and exes, but men are vulnerable to violence by men, too. (As are trans women, especially sex workers, assaulted by straight men who can’t own up to attractions that might make them, in their minds, “gay.”) Somehow we prefer telling stories about endangered cis women.

Nothing is less stable (or empirical) than social stereotypes about gender, as anyone who reads a work of history or anthropology knows. The traits associated with one or another gender bounce around and reverse over the centuries and between cultures: sometimes men are the more sentimental ones, elsewhere women; men are the lustier ones, no actually it’s women (amoral and multi-orgasmic); and so on.

Gilder obviously wasn’t wrong that paychecks and the sexual revolution gave women more access to what had traditionally been male prerogatives. (As to whether these were or are “freedoms” is a more complicated discussion.)

In other words: if endocrinology makes bodies malleable, and families instill (slightly) less repression this century than in previous ones, why not explore those possibilities instead of bemoaning the situation?

Maybe the rising reports of gender dysphoria and plummeting birth rates aren’t separate stories either. There have always been people who did not fit easily into normative categories but were herded in by threat and force, and who are increasingly breaking loose.

The majority of those recently surveyed in the United States cite childcare costs as the foremost reason not to procreate, along with climate change, another of free market capitalism’s great accomplishments. (France, the EU country with the highest birthrate, also funds eighty percent of childcare.) Obviously blaming women, homosexuals, and pornographers for macroeconomic shifts is a better yarn.

if both envision nature-defying creatures (feminists, hermaphrodites) snapping at them from the abyss, then we’re in the realm of what the fairy tale expert Marina Warner calls the monstrous imagination. Aroused by scenes of chaos and emergence, it mirrors our lack of understanding back to us in the form of menacing hybrids, typically depicted as scary inhabitants of dark underworlds. Among the chaotic emergent things no one much understands (especially these days) is gender, despite everyone supposedly having one. Yet what is it, where does it come from?

How vulnerable the “primacy of the biological realm” would turn out to be, how tenuous its hold on the species if each of us had to pledge fealty to the gender binary to keep civilization afloat. How confident can nature’s defenders really be in the selling power of this story?

This allows Puck to operate independently as they do today, but also build out the greater collective, that creates some economies of scale, building their own little media collective/conglomerate where the writers are the owners a la Defector.

when I mention that I am reporting on “cryptocurrencies,” his demeanor changes. “Don’t say that word,” he says. Knowing I will regret it, I ask him why, and find myself in yet another half-hour-long conversation about how Bitcoin is superior and how all other tokens aren’t really cryptocurrencies at all.