In a memorable quote from Deschooling Society, he refers to the “pedagogical hubris” that is “our belief that man can do what God cannot, namely, manipulate others for their own salvation.”

Modern humans have created instruments of such immense power that hyperregulation has become necessary to circumvent catastrophic harm. Since we have cars, most people would prefer that those permitted to drive them pass a test demonstrating their ability to do so without causing damage or injury.

Meanwhile, employment in the formal economy can only be sustained by “shadow work,” a term Illich coined for unpaid tasks like domestic labor, grocery shopping, and car maintenance that drain people of time and energy for other pursuits.

Whereas people used to build their own homes according to their unique specifications, today such an undertaking is discouraged, or even illegal. Instead, plans are drawn up by a licensed architect, and construction carried out by a team of wage workers. “When dwelling by people is transformed into housing for people,” Illich writes, paraphrasing architect John Turner, “housing is changed from an activity into a commodity.”

Arguably, as careers have become increasingly specialized, we have ceded too many spheres of activity to experts, institutions, and markets.

Illich connects the creation of scarcity and the loss of specificity to the rise of professional authority on which we have become overly reliant.

By erasing specificity — which encapsulates the history of each thing, its kinship with other beings, and its participation in a community that defines it according to its own cultural and social norms — the world can be reconfigured in terms of resources amenable to any and every use, and which are always in limited supply.

You know you’re at least supposed to try to establish a sense of unity and proportion for the overall composition of your memory palace, right? Do you think your enemies have been going in there when you’re not looking and making it worse? Because that’s honestly the only explanation I can think of that makes sense. You know why it’s called a primary organizing detail? Because there’s just one. You can’t just slap a bunch of bell towers and colonnades wherever and think it’s going to result in a memorably-arranged, discretely-distinct floor plan. It’s not. I mean, it is memorable, but not at the level of detail. I remember that your memory palace is a fucking mess, but I wouldn’t put, like, a premise in there fore safekeeping. Great job cultivating a genteel retreat for your most private self inside your fucking mind, dude. I wouldn’t even put a fucking inference in there. Have some self-respect.

Before reading any farther on this site, This website is not made for poser vamps, close-minded people, or those who think that they are, or claim to be a vampire because they think the spirit of a vampire entered them at some time making them a vampire. We call these people posers, which they are; they are confused lost children. This site is not here for them in any way! It is for real vampires, curious people, and open-minded skeptics.

Fashion and the public space upon which it depends are both participatory zones in which culture is created, and neither is meant to be consumed individualistically. Fashion can be understood as a collective experience of the zeitgeist in which everyone can participate, which is open to innovations from outsiders. The tech industry would like to reimagine it as a series of fully instrumentalized status signifiers that attest to our social rank and are always already integrated into branded “universes” of intellectual property.

Like its disdain for fashion, tech’s myopically optimistic take on the metaverse exposes its contempt for public space.

Fashion on platforms is simply an informational commodity that translates into algorithmic rankings, ad valuations, and cash transactions. Those platforms monetize what was previously more difficult to cash in on: the everyday value in looking and being looked at — the process that constitutes Arendt’s reality. In digitally mediated or augmented spaces, the benefits created by fashion can be more readily captured by the wearer: The views, likes, and followers that accrue to an influencer or a brand equate to potential advertising revenue or direct merchandise sales, with less spillover. The value of that data also accrues to the platform itself, which can synthesize the behavior of its aggregate user base into far more valuable information products, such as ad targeting, trend identification, and other marketing efforts. Social media platforms thus structure a reality in which all “shared appearances” are also implicit transactions that can and should be priced. As long as fashion is happening in public, from this perspective, it is essentially a waste.

In other words, fashion conveys not just specific trends or an individual’s personal style but a sense of the public itself, of shared space. Fashion implies a desire to see and be seen while affirming the need for public spaces and occasions where that seeing can occur. The manner in which fashion circulates and evolves speaks to the kind of shared reality that we are constituting for one another. To the tech world, however, those positive externalities look suspiciously inefficient. These unpaid-for pleasures are externalities that could, with the right technological fixes, be reinternalized and made into someone’s property again.

And it gets worse: recommendation algorithms are also known to have an anchoring effect, in which their output reinforces users’ unconscious biases and can even change their preferences over time.

An algorithm that interprets your behavior inside such a filter bubble might assume that you dislike people with darker skin.

“In China, the beauty standard is more homogeneous,” she says, adding that the filters “erase lots of differences to our faces” and reinforce one particular look. 

Amy Niu researches selfie-editing behavior as part of her PhD in psychology at the University of Wisconsin, Madison. In 2019, she conducted a study to determine the effect of beauty filters on self-image for American and Chinese women. She took pictures of 325 college-aged women and, without telling them, applied a filter to some photos. She then surveyed the women to measure their emotions and self-esteem when they saw edited or unedited photos. Her results, which have not yet been published, found that Chinese women viewing edited photos felt better about themselves, while American women (87% of whom were white) felt about the same whether their photos were edited or not.

Historically, when African-Americans were enslaved, those with lighter skin were often given more domestic tasks where those with darker skin were more likely to work in the fields.

I argue that these more feminized, pink-collar corners of the internet are also part of broader gig and piecework economies and help broaden the definition of “tech worker,” which is still often perceived in narrow, masculinist terms.

AGAMEMNON How are women to master men? HECUBA Numbers are a fearful thing, and joined to craft a desperate foe. AGAMEMNON True; still I have a mean opinion of the female race.

I had always avoided writing about my sister’s death. At first, in my reticence, I offered GPT-3 only one brief, somewhat rote sentence about it. The AI matched my canned language; clichés abounded. But as I tried to write more honestly, the AI seemed to be doing the same. It made sense, given that GPT-3 generates its own text based on the language it has been fed: Candor, apparently, begat candor.

The Zohar comments on this verse that the word eleh, i.e., “these,” implies multiplicity, whereas the word mi, i.e., “who,” refers to the Creator. If we put these two words together and rearrange the order of the letters, it will read Elokim,[20] implying that Elokim is the source of multiplicity in the world. The name Elokim acts as an “interface” between the absolute oneness of the Creator and the multiplicity of the creation. If its modus operandi is from-one-to-many, it is the role of humanity to do the reverse—to sublimate the multiplicity of the creation into its source in the one Creator, from many-to-one. This is done by uncovering the underlying godly nature of the physical world and by revealing its hidden unity. The Tzemach Tzedek stresses that “even after multiplicity is created by the name Elokim, everything is included in the unity of Havayah just as before the creation of the world; and, in truth, there is no separate existence—all is one seamless unity.”

By abstracting our interactions into a placeless world of symbolic interchange, which generates the conditions of what Jay Bolter has labelled digital plenitude, digital media appears to undermine rather than sustain our capacity to experience a common world, which in turn sustains a common sense.

Illich believed that we need to rediscover modes of perception and a richness of sensory experience, which had been lost to us by our encasement in a human-built world.

Humans are incapable of true multi-tasking, and as a species we have trouble keeping much at all in our active memories. Depending on the language you speak, there's somewhere between five and thirteen items you can keep in your head at once. The introduction of tabs into the toolbox of Web users single-handedly destroyed any hopes we may once have had of the Web being a source of infinite, global potential that could reach across borders and create a better, more meritocratic society.

At-home vet care

Write on a post-it note affixed to a greeting card rather than on the greeting card itself, so the recipient can throw away the post-it and reuse your card Employ similar logic for any disposable/consumable item

Treat fines like payments E.g. park illegally and let yourself think of the (expected value of the) fine as a parking fee

Engage a human productivity monitor I know two people who have hired people to sit next to them or frequently contact them to keep them on-task Examples: focusmate.com and coding-pal.com

Travel to friends just to visit them Move close to friends

The choiceless mode of relating to meaningness has no “becauses.” In the systematic mode, when you ask “why,” a system answers “because…”. The “becauses” hang together in ways that make everything make sense. In the choiceless, or pre-systematic mode, that’s not necessary—or even conceivable.

a Westerner concerned about Islamic expansionism globally

Genuine traditions have no defense against modernity. Modernity asks “why would you believe that?” and tradition has no answer (besides, perhaps, “we always have”). Modernity’s innovation was to construct systems of justification that answer all questions of meaning. Fundamentalisms try to rebuild their traditions into systems—in imitation of modernity.

Holding this bone, you have an extraordinarily intimate connection with its original owner, now dead. You will probably never touch the bones even of the people closest to you.

You probably already have at least a couple of femurs around the house. However, it is usually best to find one whose original owner no longer has any use for it. This can be something of a challenge.

According to Greg Woolf, “One of the things Mary has taught is to look at the window, not through it, because there isn’t really anything behind it.”

This is also how she teaches – with an unusually sincere attachment to the principle that the pedagogical process should be rooted in an encounter, a relationship and a dialogue.

It was an unlikely project for a young classics don, but was an example of Beard’s pedagogical instinct in action: reading it, you can sense she didn’t want to waste painfully acquired knowledge if it could be useful to others.

The learned but approachable figure you see on TV translating Latin inscriptions, carving up a pizza to explain the division of the Roman empire, or arguing about public services on Question Time, is precisely the Beard you encounter in private, except that in real life, she swears magnificently and often. (“She’s always spoken fluent Anglo-Saxon,” said Woolf.)

the eyes of faith, which are the eyes of love

Interestingly, this watershed did not receive wastewater treatment plant effluent, so it’s likely these compounds are coming from leaky sewer pipes. Improvements to aging infrastructure could reduce this source of harmful compounds to urban streams and other waterways, the researchers say.

That would probably be this article, which incorrectly states that there is somehow a lack of available dogs for adoption in New York City (there are a lot)

When they’re around you, non-gifted friends never want to discern their own spirits. “Can you tell me whether this is good or evil?” “Uhh, sorry, is this the influence of God, Satan, or the flesh?” I know it will take you a bit longer than it would take me, but you should at least try to figure it out for yourself.

When in Wilmington, he mostly stays at home, though he sometimes leaves to attend Catholic Mass or to play golf.

The Biden administration has approved a significant and permanent increase in the levels of food stamp assistance available to needy families — the largest single increase in the program's history.

Farmers in Arizona will be the first to feel the pain of the cuts. In one county, farmers will receive 65 percent less water next year. The desert state continues to grow water-intensive crops like cotton and alfalfa in part because of the Central Arizona Project, a 336-mile long series of canals, pumping stations, and reservoirs that was completed in 1993 and draws from the Colorado River. The aqueduct has encouraged farmers to stop pumping groundwater, though many will undoubtedly restart the unsustainable practice as their fields begin to run dry. Others will have to switch to lower-water crops or let their fields lie fallow. Dry, fallow fields contribute to dust storms that envelop the region.

As we sat in traffic and drove through Manhattan, one thing stuck out: the people in front of me only consumed content created within the last 24 hours. No exceptions. The structure of our social media feeds place us in a Never-Ending Now. It sucks us into a temporal myopia

Soon, I will experiment with “atemporality.” For days or weeks at a time, I will escape the present moment and only consume content published in a different decade.

By doing so, I’ll embody the mindset of people in a bygone era and gain new perspectives on the here and now.

I’d love to hear your feedback. Send me your thoughts, criticisms, and ideas in a direct message on Twitter. When you do, please don’t nitpick. Constructive feedback will lead to a more productive dialogue that’ll be better for both of us.

which substance(s) are you using, to what end, and how much range is there in your spectrum?

Clubs are currently designed for drug use and are terrible places to be in when they’re empty or when you’re sober.

In the traditional Alcoholics Anonymous model, sobriety is seen as a type of chastity, with purity and cleanliness achieved through total abstinence.

There’s no idealised level of fun that you’re missing out on, and that you need to achieve through drinking or doing drugs. This feeling of not being »enough« presupposes deficiency as a starting point, which is a capitalist logic leading to a market-based solution: you need to exchange money for a drink or a drug to make yourself better.

For some reason, a lot of smart college students end up with the idea that “solving hard technical problems” is the best thing they can do with their life. It’s a common refrain in Hacker News comments, job ads and interview questions. Why does this happen? Probably because that’s the only thing they’ve been rewarded for over the past 15 years. School is a closed-world domain—you are solving crisply-defined puzzles (multiply these two numbers, implement this algorithm, write a book report by this rubric), your solution is evaluated on one dimension (letter grade), and the performance ceiling (an A+) is low. The only form of progression is to take harder courses. If you try to maximize your rewards under this reward function, you’ll end up looking for trickier and trickier puzzles that you can get an A+ on.

(6) Speak to the healthy part of the person. Maybe your audience has bought some propaganda, or maybe they are wounded and acting out a trauma. Don't talk to those parts.

You may feel alone, but that just means that you haven't found your community yet. Although you are surely unique in many ways, you are also human, and you are a product of places and times. Whatever you care about, no matter how personal it feels, lots of other people care about it too. Your job is to imagine that community of practice out there, its members all thinking together, however quietly, about the topic that most concerns you. Your community needs a language, it needs an association, it needs a clubhouse, and it needs a voice. Your voice. That's how it works. Your zine is your hook in the ocean, your magnet attracting all of the other people who share your values. As you hear from them, you will have the interlocutors you need to develop your voice. You'll never hear from most of them, but you can imagine them. Imagining your community also prevents burnout: your community's members are all out there doing great things, and so the whole weight of the world is not on your shoulders. Burnout helps no one.

Caring about something is a big deal, and it's hard for some people. It's not just being against something, and it's not just wanting to have a community. It means having values that make the world make sense. Once you know what you care about, then you can hunt for a community. Maybe that community already exists, or maybe you have to build it.

When speaking in public, you do not have the same immediate feedback from your audience. The public audience is diverse, you only hear from a few of them, the ones you hear from are not representative, and you don't get their responses in real time. As a result, where the internalized interlocutor in your head should be, instead you have a vacuum. The natural mechanisms for internalizing an audience don't work, and the results can be painful. You may sit down to write an op-ed column for the newspaper, and find that nothing comes out, or what comes out sounds nothing like an op-ed column. You aim, but you shoot wide, and the result doesn't even sound like you. You *feel* that vacuum, and it sucks all kinds of paranoid fantasies into it. That is where stage fright comes from, or freezing up at the idea of contributing to an online forum.

To have a public voice, you must learn to combine two seemingly contradictory goals: being true to your own experience and values while also serving as a consciously designed intervention in an ongoing public debate.

Paper-based zines have been limited by the limitations of the medium. The Internet, however, promises a new world of popular cultural production -- webzines.

This is a draft. Please do not quote from it.

In Lewisham, a 9-year-old girl had seizures for three years before dying as a result of a polluted road nearby. And I hear that and ask, would it be so bad to get rid of cars entirely. Which sounds like a huge loss of life and pleasure to people who are accustomed to a driving way of life, who like getting about; but had Lewisham council proposed we sacrifice a 9-year-old and scatter her blood on the site of the road ahead of building, it would have been shocking. But the child would be no less dead.

But the reality is that, most of the innovations of modern living don't benefit me

But buried in Internet Kraken’s analysis is an unconscious proposition that we’ll call the “Systemic Stability Principle”:If the change in the systems outputs can be explained by a change to the systems inputs, then the system itself didn’t change, only the inputs.The mistake Internet Kraken (and the rest of us, implicitly) made was assuming that because experience with Cheibriados characters could explain Brannock’s sudden improvement in winrate, then it must be the whole explanation; when, in fact, it was experience plus the double damage bug. The Systemic Stability Principle is clearly false. But why did we make this unspoken assumption? Answer: because believing in the Systemic Stability Principle makes you good at Dungeon Crawl: Stone Soup, and many other things besides. In fact, it’s almost a prerequisite to improving in highly formal domains! If you die of more damage than you were expecting and tell yourself “that one must have been double damage”, then you can’t learn anything. All of that stuff I said earlier about rigor and self-improvement starts with you holding the system constant enough that you can evaluate your changes over time. In a well-designed roguelike, it’s hardly an exaggeration to say that the more you can internalize the Systemic Stability Principle, the better you’ll be.

A major survey in the UK six years ago found one in three young women considered garments “old” if they had been worn just twice. 

The first sees Americans as victims of past injustices in need of redress, which implies an inferior status by group.

In defining and calculating fairness by ethnicity, race, gender, sexuality, disability, and other categories, equity divides Americans along exactly these lines.

It would diminish the all-or-nothing stakes of obtaining a degree from the right college by, for example, raising the status and improving the conditions of jobs that don’t require one.

“You can’t expect civic virtue from a disfranchised class,” Walter Lippmann wrote in 1914. And also: “The first item in the program of self-government is to drag the whole population well above the misery line.”

Equality also leads to the individualism that always threatens to tear apart our social bonds and make this country ungovernable. In a society of equals, people focus on their own affairs as if they owe nothing to others and expect nothing from them.

His out-of-touchness has allowed him to avoid most of the traps that lie in wait for Democratic politicians. When it comes to the culture wars over issues like race and gender, crime and policing, and immigration, Biden comes down on the side of common decency and common sense, then he moves on.

Instead, Free America answers the ambitions of the business class and corporations; Smart America describes the utopia of educated professionals; Real America voices the resentments of the white Christian heartland; Just America believes in a metaphysics of group identity that divides the working class.

But I’m interested in this as a sort of lifecycle of information. An idea starts out with what it means to you, the “I” in this situation. Then it pings around a social network and is discussed (the “you” phase). And then in the final phase it sort of transcends that conversation, and becomes more expository, more timeless, less personal, more accessible to conversational outsiders.

Something similar has happened to the Internet. Transcending its original playful identity, it’s no longer a place for strolling — it’s a place for getting things done. Hardly anyone “surfs” the Web anymore.

While I quickly found other contemporaneous commentators who believed that flânerie would flourish online, the sad state of today’s Internet suggests that they couldn’t have been more wrong. Cyberflâneurs are few and far between, while the very practice of cyberflânerie seems at odds with the world of social media.

By the early 1970s, habitat destruction and the pet trade had reduced the golden lion tamarin population to as few as 200 individuals. Captive breeding, overseen by 43 institutions in eight countries, increased their numbers to the point that conservationists were able to reintroduce the tamarins into the wild from 1984. But initially, the reintroduced tamarins had a low survival rate, with problems with adaptation to the new environment causing the majority of losses. High casualties are typical of such efforts, says Brakes.So the tamarin researchers developed an intensive post-release programme, including supplementary feeding and the provision of nest sites, giving the monkeys time to learn necessary survival skills for the jungle. This helping hand doubled survival rates, which was a good start. However, it was not until the next generation that the species began to thrive. “By giving them the opportunity to learn individually in the wild and share that knowledge, the next generation of tamarins had a survival rate of 70%, which is just amazing,” says Brakes. The intensive conservation efforts paid off, and in 2003 the golden lion tamarin was upgraded from critically endangered to endangered.

All our animals are raised in a secure compound in Idaho and fed a diet enriched with epimedium, to boost sex drive; Soviet-developed molting insect hormone, to maximize growth; and bacon, to counteract the socialism. From birth, they’re schooled in stoicism and the art of self-restraint: we play Epictitus audiobooks on loop in the barn 24/7—at triple speed.

Stop wasting your time and money and start amplifying your beast potential. Get ready to see serious gains. Get ready to Biff. Biff-TEK’s signature line of meat-based protein powders will help you develop muscle, improve your cognitive function, and facilitate key personal development growth metrics. It’s made with real beef and a proprietary blend of neuro-enhancers.

Persons of a reflective bent all too often underestimate the enormous strength that truly abysmal ignorance can bring. Knowledge is power, of course, but—measured by a purely Darwinian calculus—too much knowledge can be a dangerous weakness. At the level of the social phenotype (so to speak), the qualities often most conducive to survival are prejudice, simplemindedness, blind loyalty, and a militant want of curiosity. These are the virtues that fortify us against doubt or fatal hesitation in moments of crisis. Subtlety and imagination, by contrast, often enfeeble the will; ambiguities dull the instincts. So while it is true that American political thought in the main encompasses a ludicrously minuscule range of live options and consists principally in slogans rather than ideas, this is not necessarily a defect. In a nation’s struggle to endure and thrive, unthinking obduracy can be a precious advantage. Even so, I think we occasionally take it all a little too far.

Salvation is not in our hands anyway. Ours is in the trying; the rest isn’t our business. That’s T. S. Eliot. He’s right about that.

I think the jump is not from sin to salvation. There’s a mediating stage of conversion and transformation. I’m with Augustine here, that we are forever in an endless battle of trying to become better Christians. Even as we convert, sin is still persisting. But we are making progress because the grace available to us is a gift that empowers us to try to make better choices.

My hunch is that those younger brothers and sisters and comrades are deeply spiritual, but many of them have distanced themselves from the churches and the mosques and the synagogues.Green: Why is that?West: Because they failed. Mainstream Christianity is a colossal failure in terms of standing up for poor people. You get prophetic Christians, Catholic Workers, certain nuns. You get Black churches concerned about prisons. But for the most part, mainstream Christianity has been concerned with what American culture has been concerned with, which is success. And success has never been the same as spiritual greatness.

- Bleed-resistant and fountain-pen friendly

Similar to anime and manga, the overhead is low

free downloadable software called Live2D Cubism, originally created by Japanese programmer Tetsuya Nakajo, means that anyone with a decent avatar illustration can become a VTuber for less than $100.

The soft-sell sex appeal of both entertainment models is rooted in moe, a vague Japanese term that, in the pop culture idiom, refers to an attraction to physical beings that exist beyond the bounds of reality and often implies the allure of unsullied youth. That the objects of affection in manga and anime sometimes border on the childlike can make them uncomfortable viewing.

He used to follow a handful of YouTubers and Twitch influencers and gamers, but sometime during the pandemic he switched to virtual entertainment, after he got sick of “thirst traps” and “e-thots” (electronic that ho over theres) — people who post photos or host video streams that lure viewers in with their bodies, only to take their money and rebuff them when they try to build a relationship. “Real women with hot bodies are always showing off, getting naked in a bathtub or little swimming pool, trying to get you to lust after them,” he explains. “They don’t really care about you. They just want your money. A lot of people have gotten their hearts broken by 3D women on streaming, but with a 2D character, she can’t really break your heart. You don’t really know what she looks like, you just see this cute anime girl with this really cute voice.”

Things in this worldview don’t have moral standing, and so to objectify a thing is to deprive it of its moral standing and whatever rights might come from that. And I think it certainly is a lot easier to do that when the process itself has veiled the fullness of the reality of the animal, for example, from view. If we’ve isolated ourselves enough through the different layers of artificiality that we have built up around us, we lose sight of what those layers of artificiality depend upon, whether it’s the land or the non-human world. And so to become attentive to these again, I think, would be certainly, probably very important, morally significant.

part of what I think permits the kind of industrial-scale cruelty we now have — which is not just about the question of eating animals, which we’ve done for human history, but it’s about treating them simply as inputs to an industrial process, and having the technology to do that.

Somebody on a flight is sort of narrating on their Twitter feed the discussion a couple in front of them is having, and it goes viral. That’s just one example, but there are various aspects of what used to be considered private segments of our life, of our experience, that are increasingly made publicly available. And I wonder if some of those aspects of our own lives might not be better left private, that I have no business — I have to learn to avert my eyes, I think, sometimes from those kinds of examples.Not in a prudish sense, but just because there’s a kind of imposition in the autonomy of the people involved. When these aspects of their lives are captured, especially without their consent, and are made accessible to me, I need to learn to look away. It’s not good for me to know that, right?

A Chinese philosopher, Yi-Fu Tuan, in the late ’70s has a book on place, and he has this interesting little observation about how place used to structure time.Because the longer it took for information to get to me, the farther away it was, and thus theoretically, the farther away from my own lived experience and what was important to me it might have been. And so once electronic media kind of collapsed that ordering function of distance, then now, we have to become active in deciding what is it important for me to give my attention to right now. I mean, that itself, just having to make that decision, can be very taxing.

But even in our homes, the ordering of this material space through these various artifacts can be more or less conducive to encouraging connection, human relationship, conversation.

I think about how in even just a directly embodied context, we have the capacity to be silent. And that silence becomes meaningful. But we can’t really do that online, which I think is often the source of a lot of our angst.

Not that everything should necessarily bring joy or happiness in a sense, but I think I would oppose the conviviality of the table, the way it relates us and brings us together, to the table-less world of the internet, where we’re all thrown together.

And so with regards to the earth, the digital realm depends upon material resources that need to be collected. It depends on the energy grid. It leaves a footprint on the environment.

So Facebook had a commercial a few years back, where a young girl was sitting at a table with her family. Maybe it was a holiday dinner or something. And all of the relatives are portrayed in kind of stereotypically negative ways, and this young lady is able to escape that world through all of what Facebook brings to her on her smartphone as she’s holding it underneath the table, beneath everybody’s view.And the world sometimes can’t quite compete, if looked at from a certain perspective, with the immediate satisfactions and pleasures and distractions that we can call forth immediately on our smartphones. But it has its own kind of richness that requires a kind of attentiveness. And sometimes it requires us to look very carefully and very patiently to listen, to engage our senses in a more genuine way.

And there’s a very, very funny anecdote in there of a woman who ended up on a date with a guy whose profile was all about how much he hated the rich, about how much he wanted to abolish billionaires, and so on.And then, when they met, after a couple times — and he just kept ranting about how he hated the rich — he’d be like, listen, I’m actually rich. And she was like, oh, well, I still like you. [LAUGHTER] Let’s keep dating.I think a lot of the way we display who we are in flattened profiles is wrong about who we are, what tradeoffs we really make.

And if we come to know a person chiefly, initially, through a profile by looking them up, we’ll bring those preconceptions to the table when we meet them, and it will have the tendency, I would say, to reduce our understanding.

It has displaced certain rituals or roles within a family, certain interactions within a family or within a network of friends, even, who might gather for a meal. That might be a felt loss.Again, not necessarily morally wrong or morally right, but consequential with regards to what is binding that family or that network of friends together. There was a kind of labor involved in putting that meal together, and that labor itself had an important role to play in the dynamics of the relationship that are outsourced when we change the practice by finding technological shortcuts around it to get to the same end, but through different means.

How many times when my map of knowledge to fill something in would simply require, and did require when I was younger, just asking. Do you know? What do you think?Where should I go to dinner? Do you know this person’s phone number? Have you heard of? Do you remember that president? Do you know when this happened?And on the one hand, the information I got from those conversations was probably much less precise. And on the other hand, there was a lot of other information, and there was relationship building that happened in those conversations.

Because if we rely on the search engine, for example, to form our picture of the world, our idea of what others are like, when we try to understand those that are not immediately in our network of friends or colleagues, then it filters a picture of the world of others to us.How are those search results being determined? What is being included? What is being excluded? How is the algorithm calibrating the kind of information I’m going to receive?

An example of this resonates what you just described. I found myself reading a book a couple of days ago, and underlining some passages of note. And immediately, my first thought was, I’ve got to put this on Twitter.And I had to resist the urge, and I consciously thought of, how would I have done this if I didn’t have Twitter? How would my experience of reading have been a little bit different? And why do I feel compelled to share this? Do I feel compelled to share this because I think, oh, this will play really well within my networks?And I think that sense of approval, of — it’s sometimes described as a kind of dopamine hit that you get — and then, we begin to crave that, and then that bending of the self to the perceptions of the audience, that feedback loop, I think, can become really powerful.

And I think part of the point that I often try to make is that something can be morally significant without necessarily being good or bad by itself.

There’s a tendency to just become absorbed in what we’re doing and to forget the needs of the body, right? I’m thinking, for example, of this idea of email apnea, which was coined by Linda Stone, a researcher with Microsoft many years ago.You know, you essentially kind of catch your breath when you’re focusing on what you’re reading online. It’s one way in which it kind of upsets the ordinary rhythms of our bodily existence.

The UK competition regulator has called for Facebook to sell online image platform Giphy, which it bought for $400 million last year, after provisionally finding competition concerns following an in-depth investigation.

Somewhere around then, mothers stopped teaching their daughters how to sew or make clothes—I think less because of any feminism and more because it no longer seems like a particularly worthwhile skill to learn, especially given pressure from other uses of time like sports or homework.

the Shipping Cost of goods has plummeted the Shipping Speeds have dramatically improved, especially for low-cost tiers: consider Christmas shopping from a mail-order company or website in 1999 vs 2019—you used to have to order in early December to hope to get something by Christmas (25 December) without spending $53$301999 extra on fast shipping, but now you can get free shipping as late as 19 December! (“‘Same-day delivery’—what the hell is that?”)

it is now reasonably safe and feasible to live in (most) big cities like NYC, Chicago, or DC

reducing environmental pollution thanks to de-industrialization & eliminating things like dye contaminant waste (see the environmental Kuznets curve & general improvement in US environmental quality)—eg the idea of, say, darning socks is completely alien14⁠, and clothing companies routinely discard millions of pounds of clothes because it’s cheaper than wasting scarce human labor reprocessing & selling them for a song, flooding Africa with discards.

airplane flights no longer cost an appreciable fraction of your annual income12⁠, and people can afford multiple trips a year.

the logical extension of this narrow way of defining language learning.

In fact, CAPTCHA’s old site overtly names Duolingo as existing principally as a tool to help computer systems improve their natural language processing and machine learning, meaning that language “learners” on Duolingo are actually just performing the free labor—or even paying for the privilege—of helping the company improve its proprietary algorithms. In this sense, it is much like Amazon’s Mechanical Turk, another model of exploitative human-assisted computer labor critiqued extensively in Mary L. Gray and Siddharth Suri’s Ghost Work (2019).

“The Millionaire Next Door” elevated self-abnegation to an investment rule -- what Thomas Frank, another critic of their book, termed the authors’ “militantly Calvinist attitude toward consumption” in which “saving and investing are ends in themselves, evidence of moral virtue, while spending is empty dissipation.”

The bottom line is that high-percentile latency is a bad way to measure efficiency, but a good (leading) indicator of pending overload. If you must use latency to measure efficiency, use mean (avg) latency. Yes, average latency

Some of Shein’s major rivals, including H&M, Zara-parent Inditex, ASOS (ASOS.L), Boohoo (BOOH.L) and Zalando (ZALG.DE), publish statements, as well as more detailed information on their supply chain such as factory lists and codes of conduct, on their websites.H&M’s website includes a downloadable spreadsheet with specific names and addresses of thousands of its factories and processing facilities. Inditex has an eight-page, downloadable code of conduct and a map showing the number of its factories and suppliers in each country.

A new constitutional amendment could bar state and local laws that have the effect of limiting interstate population mobility, freeing the national economy from protectionist and not-in-my-backyard state and local legislation. Such an amendment could be used to invalidate unreasonable land use regulations — such as excessive minimum lot size rules and unjustified density limits — and labor regulations that discriminate in their effects against out-of-state workers.

geographically uniform manner

Some argue that these people benefit from gaining work experience. But those benefits do not require subminimum-wage forced labor.

their data and the metadata created by their actions

the American people declare that international law is part of our law

Nothing in this Constitution shall be construed as conferring or protecting a right to abortion.

But a unique human life begins at the moment of fertilization

The absence of strong unions harms not only the workplace and the economy but also American democracy. Without countervailing organizations of workers, big corporations and the wealthy exercise vastly more influence in politics at every level of government.

What does this process resemble? It actually sounds a lot like a legal proceeding, albeit one that’s entirely one-sided, devoid of any semblance of due process or legal protection under the law, and probably carried out by teams of purple-haired Millennials with nose hoops and personal pronoun mood-rings.

Mail providers should care about two things and two things only: The list is clean (opt-in and confirmed)  The mailings aren’t infected with any kind of malware. That’s it. Beyond that it really isn’t their business and it’s the height of grandiosity and hubris to think that it is.

Mailchimp, an email list provider, is known for doing this. You effectively pay Mailchimp to curate what you can or cannot say to your own email subscribers.  You’re using their mailservers, and in their mind that’s what gives them the right and the moral authority to monitor the content of your communications to your own audience.

So much of religious life remains physical, such as sacraments or the laying on of hands for healing prayer.

They decided to try two Facebook tools: subscriptions where users pay, for example, $9.99 per month and receive exclusive content, like messages from the bishop; and another tool for worshipers watching services online to send donations in real time.

A Facebook spokeswoman said the data it collected from religious communities would be handled the same way as that of other users

Bishop Robert Barron, founder of an influential Catholic media company, said Facebook “gave people kind of an intimate experience of the Mass that they wouldn’t normally have.”

“Faith organizations and social media are a natural fit because fundamentally both are about connection,” Ms. Sandberg said.

“I just want people to know that Facebook is a place where, when they do feel discouraged or depressed or isolated, that they could go to Facebook and they could immediately connect with a group of people that care about them,” Nona Jones, the company’s director for global faith partnerships and a nondenominational minister, said in an interview.

When it came time for Hillsong’s grand opening in June, the church issued a news release saying it was “partnering with Facebook” and began streaming its services exclusively on the platform.Beyond that, Mr. Collier could not share many specifics — he had signed a nondisclosure agreement.

What are these titles providing to the narrative, then; how does it impact the way we think about monarchy in real life, as well as ourselves when we identify ourselves with it, when we jump straight to prince or king for "a person who is very good at their specialism, and that others have recognised for their success, and consequently rewarded".

to allegorize like Milton is “to shock the mind by ascribing effects to non-entity,” like labelling figures in a photo with aggressively absurd abstract nouns and posting it on Twitter. This subjection of sex to allegory, horrifically violent content begotten by a violently constrictive form, is one reason why Milton’s Hell is less like the liberatory queer space offered by “Montero” and more like our own hell, by which I mean “the hellsite,” by which I mean Twitter. Or rather, “this hellsite,” because when people are saying that Twitter is a hellsite, it is likely that they are doing so on Twitter, where everything, and especially Hell, can be made into a blunt allegory for Twitter.

I have limited focus as it is. Social media operant conditioning has made it worse. Yet at the same time it is a pillar of modern civic participation, and with the pandemic it has become a vital communication flow for people that were once able to communicate in person easily.

“There aren’t many unique key pieces and trends we can attribute to Gen Z/2020. It’s more so the fusion of trends from multiple eras that makes it Gen Z, you know?” she continues via email. “It’s coming to a point where we may no longer have names or genres in terms of style; style is so much more personalized, especially in the digital space I occupy.”

But middle-class people like myself have far less innocent motivations for choosing the things we like, namely, to gain social and cultural capital. Funnily enough, this contradicts developing a true sense of self and personality. Who we are is enough without commodities and other people, but in-group admission and approval — and the sense of safety and belonging that comes with it — feels like the estimable thing we need to gain in order to self-actualize.

He calls this “secular faith,” i.e. faith that is worldly or temporal, rooted in what we do and how we do it in the time that we have here. “Secular faith is the form of faith that we all sustain in caring for someone or something that is vulnerable to loss,” he says. Finitude, then, is a prerequisite for care.

What if Avi and I hadn’t spent the entire pandemic saying “look” every time Bug moved a paw, or fell asleep, or looked like he always looked, but in a way that hit different this time? We’re not just in love with this stupid little flat-faced cat, he’s the texture of our lives.

He’s just a cat, is what I tell myself when things feel particularly dark. It never feels particularly true.

Underneath the right-wing outrage against Big Tech is the angry recognition that America’s most dynamic and fastest-growing companies all recognize that, when they must choose, choosing the values of metropolitan America is just better business. The Pride flag is more lucrative than the Confederate flag, and nobody knows that better than the Confederate flag’s last standard-bearers.

there's something about standing in a room with someone, sharing a beer, knowing they're your community and you can't just put them on blast, and knowing that what you're doing together cannot really be sold that feels so reassuring

But scenes are crafts honed over time - listening to what your friends make, and then going one better. You know, that remix culture, that - I want to start with someone else's song, but build on it as well. Those kinds of knowledge and development that can only take place in temporal locations. Can they form on a twitter which is chopped up, competitive, and propelled by rage? Does twitter exist in linear time? When the format of where we exist requires me to produce content every day and rewards me for making confident hot takes and never forgets when I fuck up: we lose that gestation time and doubt and room to experiment.

Can't I just like watching films and collecting cheap ceramic? Why does it have to be a career choice. How do we resist capitalism in the world when we cannot even resist it in our souls?

The point at which something becomes commodifiable is the end of innovation; it becomes a tightening noose of fewer and fewer visual/social signifiers.

In a magical context, this could be disagreeing with someone's theory of magic they're trying to sell - that can't be a conversation, because they can't ever approach you as an equal instead of a threat to their dominance.

You're attempting to building an income on the blurring between shopping spaces and social spaces, but simultaneously quite angry when people try to treat it as social spaces.

doing the emotional labour of running an online business (which is degrading to everyone and everything involved).

The children of well-off, well-educated meritocrats are thus perfectly situated to predominate at the elite colleges that produced their parents’ social standing in the first place.

More broadly, changing this sorting mechanism requires transforming our whole moral ecology, such that possession of a Stanford degree is no longer seen as signifying a higher level of being.

Both embrace the symbolic class markers of the sociologically low—pickup trucks, guns, country music, Christian nationalism.

We’ve pulled these parties further left on cultural issues (prizing cosmopolitanism and questions of identity) while watering down or reversing traditional Democratic positions on trade and unions. As creative-class people enter left-leaning parties, working-class people tend to leave.

A sensible society would not celebrate the skills of a corporate consultant while slighting the skills of a home nurse.

the caring class and rural working class, unheard and unseen

the red one-percenters have economic power, but scant cultural power

A level below the people of the populist regatta, you find the rural working class. Members of this class have highly supervised jobs in manufacturing, transportation, construction. Their jobs tend to be repetitive and may involve some physical danger.

Yet they too have been reshaped by the creative class’s cultural dominance. When I interview members of the GOP donor class, they tell me they often feel they cannot share their true opinions without being scorned.

On the lowest rung of the blue ladder is the caring class, the largest in America (nearly half of all workers, by some measures), and one that in most respects sits quite far from the three above it.

Yet wokeness is not just a social philosophy, but an elite status marker, a strategy for personal advancement. You have to possess copious amounts of cultural capital to feel comfortable using words like intersectionality, heteronormativity, cisgender, problematize, triggering, and Latinx. By navigating a fluid progressive cultural frontier more skillfully than their hapless Boomer bosses and by calling out the privilege and moral failings of those above them, young, educated elites seek power within elite institutions. Wokeness becomes a way to intimidate Boomer administrators and wrest power from them.

In a study for The Atlantic, Amanda Ripley found that the most politically intolerant Americans “tend to be whiter, more highly educated, older, more urban, and more partisan themselves.” The most politically intolerant county in the country, Ripley found, is liberal Suffolk County, Massachusetts, which includes Boston.

Members of the younger generation see the Clinton-to-Obama era—the formative years for the creative class’s sensibility—as the peak of neoliberal bankruptcy.

The working class today vehemently rejects not just the creative class but the epistemic regime that it controls.

When you tell a large chunk of the country that their voices are not worth hearing, they are going to react badly—and they have.

And I underestimated our intolerance of ideological diversity. Over the past five decades, the number of working-class and conservative voices in universities, the mainstream media, and other institutions of elite culture has shrunk to a sprinkling.

I didn’t anticipate how aggressively we would move to assert our cultural dominance, the way we would seek to impose elite values through speech and thought codes.

A student with ease knows when irony is appropriate, what historical quotations are overused, how to be unselfconscious in a crowd. These practices, as Khan writes in Privilege, his book about St. Paul, can be absorbed only through long experience within elite social circles and institutions.

We tend to like open floor plans, casual dress, and eclectic “localist” tastes that are willfully unpretentious. This seems radically egalitarian, because there are no formal hierarchies of taste or social position. But only the most culturally privileged person knows how to navigate a space in which the social rules are mysterious and hidden.

Members of the creative class see their career as the defining feature of their identity, and place a high value on intelligence.

Most of all, it possesses the power of consecration; it determines what gets recognized and esteemed, and what gets disdained and dismissed. The web, of course, has democratized tastemaking, giving more people access to megaphones. But the setters of elite taste still tend to be graduates of selective universities living in creative-class enclaves. If you feel seen in society, that’s because the creative class sees you; if you feel unseen, that’s because this class does not.

An analysis by Brookings and The Wall Street Journal found that just 13 years ago, Democratic and Republican areas were at near parity on prosperity and income measures. Now they are divergent and getting more so. If Republicans and Democrats talk as though they are living in different realities, it’s because they are.

The 50 largest metro areas around the world house 7 percent of the world’s population but generate 40 percent of global wealth.

Enormous wealth was being generated by these highly educated people, who could turn new ideas into software, entertainment, retail concepts, and more.

These days, your education level and political values are as important in defining your class status as your income is.

Still, some worry that the pass will be a financial windfall for people from privileged backgrounds while doing little to help others expand their cultural horizons.“A kid from the projects will lean toward what he already knows,” said Pierre Ouzoulias, a senator for the French Communist Party who has pushed to scrap the pass. “I can’t for one moment imagine a kid using the pass to go listen to Baroque opera.”

It was the women’s suffrage movement that coined the idea of “bread and roses.” Humans are not entitled to basic needs only, but to joy and beauty and the abundance that God embodies. James Oppenheim’s poem notes: “Hearts starve as well as bodies. Give us bread, but give us roses.” Is this not what LGBTQ+ Catholics need from their church? Rather than lip service of welcome, we need to find ways to truly affirm the fullness of people’s multifaceted identities, to discard the rhetoric and embrace the difficult and messy work of creating the kin-dom of God.

Experts have identified the species of animals used for British legal documents dating from the 13th to 20th century, and have discovered they were almost always written on sheepskin, rather than goatskin or calfskin vellum. This may have been because the structure of sheepskin made attempts to remove or modify text obvious. Sheep deposit fat in-between the various layers of their skin. During parchment manufacture, the skin is submerged in lime, which draws out the fat leaving voids between the layers. Attempts to scrape off the ink would result in these layers detaching—known as delamination—leaving a visible blemish highlighting any attempts to change any writing. Sheepskin has a very high fat content, accounting for as much as 30 to 50 percent, compared to 3 to 10 percent in goatskin and just 2 to 3 percent in cattle. Consequently, the potential for scraping to detach these layers is considerably greater in sheepskin than those of other animals.

Upon completion of harvest in some parts of Germany during medieval times, farmers preserved the last remaining grain as “Wödin’s Share” (Vergodendeel, Vergodenstruss), an offering to the ancient pagan Allfather (Norse Odin, Slavic Volos). To solicit Wödin’s favor for the coming year, the cuttings were left for his thundering herd of horses sometimes glimpsed swirling aloft as heaps of roiling clouds. Four-wheeled “Wödin’s Wagon” was known in some German traditions as the four stars of Ursa Major with the three that descend from the corner forming the wain’s tongue. German folklorist-philologist Jacob Grimm (1785-1863) found evidence of these traditions persisting well into the nineteenth century.

This is what happened with the introduction of household appliances. Instead of spending less time doing laundry, for example, we do laundry more often.

At a time when demand for transport fuel is under pressure from government vehicle-efficiency mandates and the rise of electric cars, the oil industry is doubling down on plastics. Plastic production – which industry analysts forecast to double by 2040 – will be the biggest growth market for oil demand over the next decade, according to the Paris-based International Energy Agency.

I made it through the entirety of the Trump presidency without once having to meet Bannon but here he was, recording his War Room podcast with Lindell. Bannon has been decomposing in front of our eyes for some years now, and I can report that this process continues to take its course.

Since last March, Midge and I have been testing the bounds of what it means to live in my very small apartment together. In many ways, she’s been a perfect pandemic pal: She hates interacting with others; she loves to sit on the couch; she long ago assessed sneezes as an existential threat.

The first pets tended to be tiny, manicured lapdogs, and were an extravagance of the wealthy

A lot of subsidized and low-income housing refuses pets or limits the type and number that residents can have, and homeless shelters generally require people to abandon their pets to get a place to sleep.

They’re a class marker and a way of coping with deep status anxiety. Dogs broadcast stability—Midge is not nearly as expensive as a child or a single-family home, but she is an indicator that I have mastered enough elements of my own life to introduce some joyful chaos into it.

People without kids adopt pets not only as a dry run for eventual children but for lots of other reasons, too, including as an outlet for caring impulses that have nothing to do with parenthood.

Dogs are, for some of us, a perfect balm for purgatorial anxieties. If you have time and care to give, they love freely, they put you on a schedule, they direct your attention and affection and idle thoughts toward something outside yourself.

As I looked around for an opening through which to push my life forward, the gap that was available to me was roughly the size of a hefty chihuahua.

After commenting on how we’ve idealized the early web, McNeil writes that “when I think I feel nostalgic for the internet before social media consolidation, what I am actually experiencing is a longing for an internet that is better, for internet communities that haven’t come into being yet.”

It also had monetization built into its design. When a user connected to a service — users could access news, games, sports updates, topical message boards, and much more — they were charged for every minute of access, creating a revenue stream for the service provider and the telephone company, which took a cut. This business model incentivized companies to keep people on their services as long as possible without having to turn to advertising or tracking. In fact, Minitel had a certain privacy built in; when a user’s bill arrived, it would not identify which services had been used.

Amazon recently launched its own “distributed” network consisting of its own products

platforms drive a superstar economy that hollows out the “middle class” of professions. A small number of people with huge followings can leverage the new tools to generate more revenue, while a vast pool is left playing the virality lottery.

Despite all that she mines from alchemical manuscripts, Rampling nevertheless implies that for her reader-practitioners, the manuscript was only a fallback format, second to the printed book. The absence of English alchemy in print is presumed to have driven this “active culture of sharing and copying alchemical books.” To me, the whole of The Experimental Fire suggests an opposite explanation: that reader-practitioners cultivated this subculture of reading and writing alchemica in manuscript to evade the publicity and impersonality inherent in print. Consider Norton, who appoints himself to write the Key only after stumbling on a precious, “secret” copy of Ripley; or the books of Robert Greene, with the accumulating signatures made by successive owners. The very title of Ripley’s Bosome Book suggests an intimacy between the owner and their book, hugged close. Old manuscripts, as Rampling acknowledges, were valued because they preserved English alchemy to be rediscovered. But newly copied manuscripts, too, had their advantages. Privately produced and circulated, they bespoke the owner’s special access to networks of alchemical knowledge in ways that mass-produced printed copies of the same text could not. Rampling gleans so many of her discoveries from manuscript sources but declines to take up alchemy’s peculiar attachments to the medium as a subject of much analysis or speculation.

Alchemy comes down to us already encrypted by its own conventions: those elisions of proximate sources, misattributions, a fondness for codewords, and attempts to recycle the old as new and pass off the new as old.

Concrete, rebar, and other building materials also have massive footprints and contribute to a range of complex ecological problems. Geofoam’s artificiality is in no way unique. It’s just visually striking,

Most large scale engineering projects have a number of competing requirements to solve for when choosing a building or fill material. Project budgets should be affordable, materials should be readily available, labor costs should be minimized, and substrate should be stable and unlikely to decay. With its light weight (11 to 45 kg per cubic meter), ease of installation, and stability, geofoam checks a whole bunch of these boxes.

(flame retardant chemicals used to treat geofoam were shown to be accumulating in the ground, which led to their discontinuation in Europe but not the US)

And you look around the internet, and itʼs all like this:  How would you change Facebookʼs design?  Twitterʼs?  Instagramʼs?  I donʼt fucking know.  Fuck, I donʼt even want to touch it.  Maybe Iʼd break something. I donʼt think itʼs very surprising, then, that most people donʼt have any desire to go out and make websites of their own.  Browsing the Internet of today, one sees little reason to make more of the same, and little inspiration for anything different.

to give Web 2.0 its due:  At first, « millions of users all collaborating on a single site » seemed pretty awe‐some. But what we now know was so awe‐ful was the manner in which it enshrined platform ownersʼ dominance and control.  One single organization having complete, unfettered access and control over millions of peopleʼs social interactions isnʼt a good thing, after all.