So there’s still a reason for the people who make products to make websites. Even if people don’t read it, you start writing for the robots.

And people who put videos on YouTube, why do they do that? Well, it’s wanting to be helpful. And it’s a desire for fame, or at least recognition. It feels good to have “numbers”, by which I mean an indication that people have seen a thing you have done and an indication they approved. And YouTube pays money. Usually small amounts of money, but enough that I know people who make a living that way. And even if YouTube itself doesn’t give you enough money to live on, getting popular on YouTube, being known - that leads to other ways of making money, like a Patreon, or commercial sponsorships for videos. But really the money is less in providing a useful service, like putting out a video showing how to beat a game, and more in providing a simulacrum of that sense of community that people like. Viewers watch at home, by themselves, but they feel like they are with someone charming and friendly and it gives them a sense of being with a friend. The term for this is “parasocial relationships”, and it’s really where the money is in terms of making “content” online.

Web browsers developing in the direction of operating systems are leaving the idea of interlinked documents behind. Though hypertext is technically still there, it is not important any more, neither is surfing or linking. The web consists mainly of application interfaces where users activate functions. Though the dismissal of the page metaphor is no explanation why those web pages that are still pages are made without any respect to hypertext. For example, there is hardly any page left that doesn't contain links that lead to the same page that is already displayed. Let's say you clicked the "about" link, and you came to the "about" page; the link "about" will still be there, you can click it forever and it will reload the same page forever. That's what we(8) call Zombie Links.

In computation and machine learning, the experience of “nothing” in time has a name: latency. Latency refers, roughly, to the period of time between when you submit a request to a system and when you receive a response. John Cage composed a piece that consisted of only latency—four and a half minutes of it—but machine learning engineers are always attempting to eliminate latency, or minimize it, or otherwise draw your attention away from latency.

What I’ve been trying to do in this talk is to convince you that transcription isn’t a “technology” that can be perfected—no matter how hard you try, there will always be an aspect of a text that confounds your abstraction. I have been citing some extreme examples of especially borderline texts in this talk. But I hope I’ve spurred you to look at every text as though its transcription might be an edge case.

And then the other piece of it is just thinking about the way kids and teens develop. Generally, they don’t become really interested in big, global issues like that until late high school and college. And where are the links between technology use and depression strongest? The youngest. Where do you see the largest increases in depression, self-harm, and suicide? It’s 10- to 14-year-olds. In fact, it’s 10- to 12-year-olds when you really boil it down. That’s not usually going to be the group who is really dialed into world issues. What they’re concerned about is what their friends are doing.

I’ve had debates with friends where they advanced the notion that the world’s degraded state — climate change, regular school shootings, political strife — might be a primary reason younger generations are so miserable. Or, to go with an angle I find more plausible: The news isn’t necessarily worse, but the internet, with its inherent negativity bias, spins things as bleaker than ever.I think that’s exactly it. In Generations, I spent a lot of time on this, because it was a theme that just came up over and over and over — this really pervasive negativity, sometimes crossing over into denialism, especially online. And I think you have to take a step back from that and ask the question: Is 2023 really worse than boomers getting drafted into Vietnam? And I’ll keep going. Is it really worse than the ’80s when we thought the USSR was going to drop the bomb any second and the world was going to end? Is it really worse than millennials graduating into the Great Recession? To be fair, the late ’90s, when I was coming of age, was pretty untroubled in a world-on-fire sense.There are times that are better and worse, but every time has its challenges. And are the challenges we face right now really worse than the challenges of previous eras? I think that’s an extremely subjective question.

There’s obviously a flip side to this, which is that the internet often makes people feel less alone as well — both young people and adults. There are shy or weird or socially awkward kids who would have no community whatsoever in the old days, the old, supposedly better days, who can now sometimes find that community online.That’s the argument and an area where I think there’s intuitive appeal to that, but not a ton of research. So you just need a few more years to delve into that more thoroughly, you think?Perhaps. I don’t know, and I’d have to look into this to see if it has been done. But is there research showing that, say, LGBTQ kids in rural areas, where they may not be able to find a community in person, are better off if they spend a lot of time online versus less? I don’t know if that’s been addressed. I don’t know if that research is out there.

Robert Hunt in his Popular Romances of the West of England states: The second Thursday before Christmas-day is a festival observed by the tinners of the district of Blackmore, and known as Picrous day. It is not at present marked by any distinctive ceremonies, but it is the occasion of a supper and much merry-making. The owner of the tin-stream contributes a shilling a man towards it. This is said to be the feast of the discovery of tin by a man named Picrous. My first impression was that the day took its name from the circumstance of a pie forming the pièce de résistance of the supper; but this explanation is not allowed by tinners, nor sanctioned by the usages of the feast. What truth there may be in the tradition of the first tinner, Picrous, it is now too late to discover, but the notion is worth recording. It has occurred to me whether, from some similarity between the names (not a close one, I admit it), the honours of Picrous may not have been transferred to St Piran, who is generally said to be the patron saint of tinners. St Piran is not known in Blackmore, and his festival is on the 5th of March. The tinners also have a festival to commemorate the discovery of smelting[2]

A truth window (or truth wall[1]) is an opening in a wall surface, created to reveal the layers or components within the wall.[2][3] In a strawbale house, a truth window is often used to show the walls are actually made from straw bales. A small section of a wall is left unplastered on the interior, and a frame is used to create a window which shows only straw, which makes up the inside of the wall.[4]

orty was an anti-foundationalist, while MacIntyre grimly insists that philosophy without metaphysical foundations is the merest fiction. Rorty thought our paramount moral and political obligation was to reduce suffering and increase happiness; MacIntyre thinks it is to follow the path of virtue marked out by the traditions of our community, guided by that community’s view of the telos or purpose of human life. Rorty thought the Enlightenment, and the spirit of criticism it bequeathed, inaugurated a new and fortunate period in history, an epoch in which personal and social liberation are at least possible. MacIntyre thinks we will be lucky to survive that liberation. Rorty was fond of drawing a distinction between Enlightenment rationalism and Enlightenment liberalism. He agreed with MacIntyre that Enlightenment rationalism—the attempt to ground morality in reason—had failed. But he thought Enlightenment liberalism—egalitarianism, free speech, universal suffrage, the separation of church and state—had succeeded gloriously and was humanity’s best hope. MacIntyre holds out little hope, except in Catholicism, where he has come to rest.

But those great documents are not philosophical arguments, nor do they depend on these arguments. The Bill of Rights, for example, means: “Where this document’s writ runs, no one shall be prevented from voting or running for office or starting a newspaper or any other political activity merely because he is not a gentleman.” It does not mean: “There are wraith-like entities called rights subsisting in a shadowy metaphysical realm, from which we must deduce how best to organize our polity.”

Modern culture, MacIntyre claims, has evolved several representative character types, notably the manager, the therapist, and the aesthete. All are profoundly manipulative. The first two deploy fictitious expertise to achieve goals foreign to the employee or patient; the third treats other persons as interesting sensations to be consumed.

For MacIntyre the political radical, liberals were those who, while professing concern for the less advantaged, have no intention of allowing them significantly greater social power. Judging from scattered hints in his later works, those egalitarian sympathies survived his rightward passage. When asked in 1996 what values he retained from his Marxist days, MacIntyre answered, “I would still like to see every rich person hanged from the nearest lamp post.” As his immersion in and commitment to premodern philosophy deepened, liberalism increasingly seemed at the root of everything wrong with the modern world: rationalism, secularism, individualism, and materialism.

The GeoCities chic that Jennings describes is an intentional rebellion against standard good taste, which makes it a very familiar form of tastelessness. Whenever aesthetics swing too far towards rigid, clean, well-mannered classics claiming permanence, there will be an inevitable pendulum swing towards the gaudy. The success of reserved, slim-fit menswear, for example, invited a backlash of tie-dye Grateful Dead tees, bold Hawaiian shirts, and raver-fit trousers. Similarly, the dissemination of prig minimalism into every café, office space, and AirBnB opened the door for tackiness to function as an easy means of distinction.The perpetual internecine cultural struggle among creative types results in a constant series of vibe shifts between “good” and “bad” taste with mechanical predictability. This also means these changes can be explained through internal structural reasons rather than sudden changes to the collective psyche. Americans aren't necessarily responding to a “growing sense of doom” when they dress like Clarissa Explains it All; they just are distinguishing themselves from established norms through simple negation.

In the social sciences, there’s an emerging consensus that any account of existence that ignores our entanglement with other life forms is incomplete.

Materials science, like biology, teaches us that nothing exists in isolation, and that things — both “dead” and alive — constantly and actively negotiate with one another. Scalability ignores these negotiations. As a process that presumes its individual elements to be discrete, uniform, nonporous, and interchangeable, it is alien to both biological and material reality. Like the conflation of expansion and growth, it is a social and economic construction.

Indeed, it’s only by shunting away responsibility for externalities like waste, the physical and mental health of workers, or the depletion of nonrenewable resources, and by stripping context from all its component parts that an enterprise can be made scalable to begin with.

The popularity of this singular play resulted in the common use of the term for mechanical beings. This transcendence occurred in Karel Capek's own lifetime, much to his dismay. "I recoil in horror from any idea that metal contraptions could ever replace human beings and awaken something like life, love, and rebellion. Such a grim outlook is nothing but an oversimplification of the power of machines and a grave insult to life," he stated in a 1935 interview.

Adding a sense of pain will allow the workers to remove their hands from danger; emotions lead to irritability, and soon they begin to show defiance. Secondary to the modifications induced by Helena and Dr. Gall, the robots begin to grow more intolerant of their human "masters."

The word robot, along with the play’s timeless philosophical themes even made its way to the BBC in London, marking a historical first. “The BBC presented a radio play of R.U.R. in 1926 that aired in 85-minute segments. It was the first play which the BBC presented in its entirety. Until then, they had only broadcast excerpts from plays along with commentary,” explains Mr Vacek.

Similarly, Čapek claims to neither be capitalist, communist or anything in between. Instead, he merely attacks the lack of human awareness of either condition. His dystopian macabre that was further developed in his later play, War with the Newts is now considered a poignant commentary of the tragic situation approaching on the Czechoslovak horizon, both in the north and the east. Throughout his life, Čapek campaigned for free expression, and strongly opposed the rise of both fascism and communism that dictated the ideological narrative of Europe in the coming years. He also befriended much of the political intelligentsia which became key figures of Czechoslovakia, including Tomáš Garrigue Masaryk. Čapek died at age 48 as a result of pneumonia, supposedly from fixing his house in cold weather. Shortly after, the Gestapo – unaware of his death – visited his home in search of the writer having labelled him as ‘public enemy number two’ in the country – perhaps a testament to Čapek’s liberal influence.

In that same interview, Čapek reflected on the origin of one of the play’s characters:The old inventor, Mr. Rossum (whose name translated into English signifies “Mr. Intellectual” or “Mr. Brain”), is a typical representative of the scientific materialism of the last [nineteenth] century. His desire to create an artificial man — in the chemical and biological, not mechanical sense — is inspired by a foolish and obstinate wish to prove God to be unnecessary and absurd. Young Rossum is the modern scientist, untroubled by metaphysical ideas; scientific experiment is to him the road to industrial production. He is not concerned to prove, but to manufacture.

Primus. You shall not go in there, Helena. Helena. If you go in there and I do not, I will kill myself. Primus. (To Alquist) I will not let you. Man you shall kill neither of us. Alquist. Why? Primus. We—we—belong to each other. Alquist. Go. (Exit Primus and Helena L.) Adam—Eve.

Radius. We have sent ships and expeditions without number. They have been everywhere in the world. There is not a single human left. [83] Alquist. Not even one? Why did you destroy them? Radius. We had learnt everything and could do everything. It had to be. 2nd Robot. We had to become the masters. Radius. Slaughter and domination are necessary if you would be human beings. Read history.

Busman. The number! (Crosses to L. of L.C. table) Upon my soul, we might have known that some day or other the Robots would be stronger than human beings, and that this was bound to happen. And we were doing all we could to bring it about as soon as possible. You, Domin, you, Fabry, myself— Domin. Are you accusing us? (Turning on him.) Busman. Oh, do you suppose the management controls the output? It’s the demand that controls the output.

Helena. Don’t believe him. I asked him to give the Robots souls. Domin. This has nothing to do with the soul. Helena. That’s what he said. He said that he could change only a physiological—a physiological— Hallemeier. (From up at window) A physiological correlate? Helena. Yes. But it meant so much to me that he should do even that. Domin. Why? Helena. I thought that if they were more like us they would understand us better. That they couldn’t hate us if they were only a little more human. Domin. Nobody can hate man more than man.

Domin. (From window) Alquist, this is our last hour. We are already speaking half in the other world. That was not an evil dream to shatter the servitude of labor. The dreadful and humiliating labor that man had to undergo. Work was too hard. Life was too hard. And to overcome that— Alquist. Was not what the two Rossums dreamed of. Old Rossum only thought of his Godless tricks, and the young one of his milliards. And that’s not what your R. U. R. shareholders dream of either. They dream of dividends, and their dividends are the ruin of mankind. Domin. To Hell with your dividends. (Crossing R. in front of couch) Do you suppose I’d have done an hour’s work for them? It was for myself that I worked, for my own satisfaction. I wanted man to become the master. So that he shouldn’t live merely for the crust of bread. I wanted not a single soul to be broken by other people’s machinery. I wanted nothing, nothing, nothing to be left of this appalling[67] social structure. I’m revolted by poverty. I wanted a new generation. I wanted—I thought— Alquist. Well? Domin. (Front of couch) I wanted to turn the whole of mankind into an aristocracy of the world. An aristocracy nourished by millions of mechanical slaves. Unrestricted, free and consummated in man. And maybe more than man. Alquist. Superman? Domin. Yes. Oh, only to have a hundred years of time. Another hundred years for the future of mankind.

Domin. They say they are more highly developed than man; stronger and more intelligent. The man’s their parasite. Why, it’s absurd. Fabry. Read the third paragraph. Domin. “Robots throughout the world, we command you to kill all mankind. Spare no man. Spare no woman. Save factories, railways, machinery, mines and raw materials. Destroy the rest. Then return to work. Work must not be stopped.” (Looks at Others.)

Domin. Yes, precisely, after the revolt. We’re just beginning the manufacture of a new kind. Helena. What kind? Domin. Henceforward we shan’t have just one factory. There won’t be Universal Robots any more. We’ll establish a factory in every country, in every state, and do you know what these new factories will make? Helena. No, what? Domin. National Robots. Helena. How do you mean? Domin. I mean that each of these factories will produce Robots of a different color, a different language. They’ll be complete strangers to each other. (Turns; takes in Hallemeier and Gall) They’ll never be able to understand each other. Then we’ll egg them on a little in the matter of misunderstanding and the result will be that for ages to come every Robot will hate every other Robot of a different factory mark. So humanity will be safe. Hallemeier. (To each of them) By Jove, we’ll make Negro Robots and Swedish Robots and Czechoslovakian Robots, and then— [59] Helena. Harry, that’s dreadful. Hallemeier. Madame Domin, here’s to the hundred new factories. The National Robots. (Gall back of table L.C.)

Dr. Gall. The boat’s coming in. The regular mail boat, exact to the minute by the timetable. It will dock punctually at eleven-thirty. Domin. Punctuality is a fine thing, my friends. That’s what keeps the world in order. Here’s to punctuality. (Men drink.) Helena. Then—everything—is all right? Domin. (Up C. a step) Practically everything. I believe they’ve cut the cables and seized the radio station. But it doesn’t matter if only the timetable holds good. (Up to window.) Hallemeier. (Rises) If the timetable holds good, human laws hold good. Divine laws hold good, the laws of the universe hold good, everything holds good that ought to hold good. (Gall applauds.) The timetable is more significant than the gospel, more than Homer, more than the whole of Kant. Madame Helena, the timetable is the most perfect product of the human mind. Madame Helena, I’ll fill up my glass. (Gall hands Hallemeier the decanter.)

Dr. Gall. It was fluttering with nervousness like a human heart. He was all in a sweat with fear, and—do you know, I don’t believe the rascal is a Robot at all any longer. Helena. Doctor, has Radius a soul? Dr. Gall. (Over to couch) He’s got something nasty. Helena. If you knew how he hates us. Oh, Doctor,[51] are all your Robots like that? All the new ones that you began to make in a different way? (She invites him to sit beside her. He sits.) Dr. Gall. Well, some are more sensitive than others. They’re all more human beings than Rossum’s Robots were.

Radius. (Looking at her) Send me to the stamping mill. (Open and close fists.) Helena. But I don’t want them to kill you. What was the trouble, Radius? Radius. (Two steps toward her. Opens and closes fists) I won’t work for you. Put me into the stamping mill. Helena. Do you hate us? Why? Radius. You are not as strong as the Robots. You are not as skillful as the Robots. The Robots can do everything. You only give orders. You do nothing but talk. Helena. But someone must give orders. Radius. I don’t want a master. I know everything for myself. Helena. Radius! Doctor Gall gave you a better brain than the rest, better than ours. You are the only one of the Robots that understands perfectly. That’s why I had you put into the library, so that you could read everything, understand everything,[49] and then, oh, Radius—I wanted you to show the whole world that the Robots are our equals. That’s what I wanted of you. Radius. I don’t want a master. I want to be master over others. Helena. I’m sure they’d put you in charge of many Robots. You would be a teacher of the Robots. Radius. I want to be master over people. (Head up. Pride.) Helena. (Staggering) You are mad. Radius. (Head down low, crosses toward L.; opens hands) Then send me to the stamping mill.

Helena. Oh, I was fearfully impressed by you all then. You were all so sure of yourselves, so strong. I seemed like a tiny little girl who had lost her way among—among— Domin. What? Helena. (Front) Among huge trees. All my feelings were so trifling compared with your self-confidence. And in all these years I’ve never lost this anxiety. But you’ve never felt the least misgiving, not even when everything went wrong. Domin. What went wrong? Helena. Your plans. You remember, Harry, when the workmen in America revolted against the Robots and smashed them up, and when the people gave the Robots firearms against the rebels. And then when the governments turned the Robots into soldiers, and there were so many wars. Domin. (Getting up and walking about) We foresaw that, Helena. (Around table to R.C.) You see, these are only passing troubles which are bound to happen before the new conditions are established. (Walking up and down, standing at Center.) Helena. You were all so powerful, so overwhelming. The whole world bowed down before you. (Rising) Oh, Harry! (Crosses to him.)

Helena. Perhaps it’s silly of me, but why do you manufacture female Robots when—when— Domin. When sex means nothing to them? Helena. Yes. Domin. There’s a certain demand for them, you see. Servants, saleswomen, stenographers. People are used to it.

Domin. (Seriously. Rises) Yes, Alquist, they will. Yes, Miss Glory, they will. But in ten years Rossum’s Universal Robots will produce so much corn, so much cloth, so much everything that things will be[32] practically without price. There will be no poverty. All work will be done by living machines. Everybody will be free from worry and liberated from the degradation of labor. Everybody will live only to perfect himself. Helena. Will he? Domin. Of course. It’s bound to happen. Then the servitude of man to man and the enslavement of man to matter will cease. Nobody will get bread at the cost of life and hatred. The Robots will wash the feet of the beggar and prepare a bed for him in his house. Alquist. Domin, Domin, what you say sounds too much like Paradise. There was something good in service and something great in humility. There was some kind of virtue in toil and weariness. Domin. Perhaps, but we cannot reckon with what is lost when we start out to transform the world. Man shall be free and supreme; he shall have no other aim, no other labor, no other care than to perfect himself. He shall serve neither matter nor man. He will not be a machine and a device for production. He will be Lord of creation.

Hallemeier. Perhaps they’re even to receive wages? (Looking at other Men, amused.) [29] Helena. Of course they are. Hallemeier. Fancy that! Now! And what would they do with their wages, pray? Helena. They would buy—what they want—what pleases them. Hallemeier. That would be very nice, Miss Glory, only there’s nothing that does please the Robots. Good heavens, what are they to buy? You can feed them on pineapples, straw, whatever you like. It’s all the same to them. They’ve no appetite at all. They’ve no interest in anything. Why, hang it all, nobody’s ever yet seen a Robot smile. Helena. Why—why don’t you make them—happier? Hallemeier. That wouldn’t do, Miss Glory. They are only workmen. Helena. Oh, but they’re so intelligent. Hallemeier. Confoundedly so, but they’re nothing else. They’ve no will of their own. No soul. No passion. Helena. No love? Hallemeier. Love? Huh! Rather not. Robots don’t love. Not even themselves. Helena. No defiance? Hallemeier. Defiance? I don’t know. Only rarely, from time to time. Helena. What happens then? Hallemeier. Nothing particular. Occasionally they seem to go off their heads. Something like epilepsy, you know. It’s called “Robot’s Cramp.” They’ll suddenly sling down everything they’re holding, stand still, gnash their teeth—and then they have to go into the stamping-mill. It’s evidently some breakdown in the mechanism. Domin. (Sitting on desk) A flaw in the works that has to be removed. Helena. No, no, that’s the soul. Fabry. (Humorously) Do you think that the soul[30] first shows itself by a gnashing of teeth? (Men chuckle.)

Helena. Oh, I think that if you were to show them a little love. [28] Fabry. Impossible, Miss Glory! Nothing is harder to like than a Robot. Helena. What do you make them for, then? Busman. Ha, ha, ha! That’s good. What are Robots made for? Fabry. For work, Miss Glory. One Robot can replace two and a half workmen. The human machine, Miss Glory, was terribly imperfect. It had to be removed sooner or later. Busman. It was too expensive. Fabry. It was not effective. It no longer answers the requirements of modern engineering. Nature has no idea of keeping pace with modern labor. For example, from a technical point of view, the whole of childhood is a sheer absurdity. So much time lost. And then again—

Helena. Then why did you tell me that all your officials are Robots? Domin. Yes, the officials, but not the managers. Allow me, Miss Glory—this is Consul Busman, General Business Manager; this is Doctor Fabry, General Technical Manager; Doctor Hallemeier, head of the Institute for the Psychological Training of Robots; Doctor Gall, head of the Psychological and Experimental Department; and Alquist, head of the Building Department, R. U. R. (As they are introduced they rise and come C. to kiss her hand, except Gall and Alquist, whom Domin pushes away. General babble.)

[21] Domin. You can’t kill machines. Sulla! (Marius one step forward, one arm out. Sulla makes a move toward R. door.) Helena. (Moves a step R.) Don’t be afraid, Sulla. I won’t let you go. Tell me, my dear— (Takes her hand) —are they always so cruel to you? You mustn’t put up with it, Sulla. You mustn’t. Sulla. I am a Robot. Helena. That doesn’t matter. Robots are just as good as we are. Sulla, you wouldn’t let yourself be cut to pieces? Sulla. Yes. (Hand away.) Helena. Oh, you’re not afraid of death, then? Sulla. I cannot tell, Miss Glory. Helena. Do you know what would happen to you in there? Sulla. Yes, I should cease to move. Helena. How dreadful! (Looks at Sulla.)

Domin. (Sits beside her on couch) Well, anyone who has looked into human anatomy will have seen at once that man is too complicated, and that a good engineer could make him more simply. So young Rossum began to overhaul anatomy to see what could be left out or simplified. In short—But this isn’t boring you, Miss Glory? Helena. No, indeed. You’re—It’s awfully interesting. Domin. (Gets closer) So young Rossum said to himself: “A man is something that feels happy, plays the piano, likes going for a walk, and, in fact, wants to do a whole lot of things that are really unnecessary.” Helena. Oh. Domin. That are unnecessary when he wants— (Takes her hand) —let us say, to weave or count. Do you play the piano? Helena. Yes. Domin. That’s good. (Kisses her hand. She lowers her head.) Oh, I beg your pardon! (Rises) But a working machine must not play the piano, must not feel happy, must not do a whole lot of other things. A gasoline motor must not have tassels or ornaments, Miss Glory. And to manufacture artificial workers is the same thing as the manufacture of a gasoline motor. (She is not interested.) The process[17] must be the simplest, and the product the best from a practical point of view. (Sits beside her again) What sort of worker do you think is the best from a practical point of view? Helena. (Absently) What? (Looks at him.) Domin. What sort of worker do you think is the best from a practical point of view? Helena. (Pulling herself together) Oh! Perhaps the one who is most honest and hard-working. Domin. No. The one that is the cheapest. The one whose requirements are the smallest. Young Rossum invented a worker with the minimum amount of requirements. He had to simplify him. He rejected everything that did not contribute directly to the progress of work. Everything that makes man more expensive. In fact he rejected man and made the Robot. My dear Miss Glory, the Robots are not people. Mechanically they are more perfect than we are; they have an enormously developed intelligence, but they have no soul. (Leans back.)

Helena. I have come— (Sits R. of desk.) Domin. To have a look at our famous works where people are manufactured. Like all visitors. Well, there is no objection. Helena. I thought it was forbidden to— Domin. To enter the factory? Yes, of course. Everybody comes here with someone’s visiting card, Miss Glory. Helena. And you show them— Domin. Only certain things. The manufacture of artificial people is a secret process. Helena. If you only knew how enormously that— Domin. Interests you. Europe’s talking about nothing else. [12] Helena. (Indignantly turning front) Why don’t you let me finish speaking? Domin. (Drier) I beg your pardon. Did you want to say something different? Helena. I only wanted to ask— Domin. Whether I could make a special exception in your case and show you our factory. Why, certainly, Miss Glory. Helena. How do you know I wanted to say that? Domin. They all do. But we shall consider it a special honor to show you more than we do the rest.

What’s supposed to have happened is this: as with the stories and dances, every generation is tasked with finding suitable caretakers for the culture’s artistic productions. A wood totem left out in the rain will last around seventy years, an average human lifespan, before it will need to be re-carved. The system leaves everyone with work to do: the older generation must train the next; the younger generation must agree to carry the tribe’s stories forward and to train their young in turn. It’s a beautiful, holistic, communitarian structure that works well, until something like a smallpox epidemic arrives, such as the one that hit Alaska in 1835, taking 70 percent of the Native population in some areas and wiping out entire villages. Huge swathes of custom and craft are lost. If thereafter, among those who remain, Native art-making is suppressed by well-meaning missionaries who teach against the making of “idols,” well, it’s cultural Armageddon.

The evidence suggests that we can spot a good argument made by someone else, even when we disagree with it or loathe the viewpoint that it supports. It may be heartbreaking when the worst person you know makes a good point, but the experimental research suggests that you can still acknowledge it.

For example, Brennan’s arguments for epistocracy fall flat unless highly educated individuals, who know how to reason, are less prone to bias than ordinary citizens. But the sad truth is that self-proclaimed Vulcans aren’t any better able to think clearly than the rest of us. The Mercier and Sperber research that Brennan carelessly invokes says that humans reason in order to win arguments with each other, rather than to understand the world. If that is true, then people who are better at reasoning don’t necessarily understand the world any more clearly than those who reason less well. Instead, they are just better at crafting superficially plausible arguments for why everyone ought to agree with them. People who are enormously impressed by their own cleverness risk getting high on their own supply.

Ku Kluxers frequently claimed to be the walking Confederate dead returning from hell, as historian Stanley Horn explained in his 1939 book Invisible Empire. This lie involved a parlor trick: “The leader of the Klansmen would tell the Negro visited, in a hollow voice, that he was thirsty and wanted a drink,” Horn wrote. After the victim provided a water bucket and drinking gourd, the Ku Kluxer would cast aside the gourd and drink the whole bucket using “a funnel inside his mask connected by a rubber tube to an oilcloth bag under the flowing robe. ‘That’s good,’ he would say, smacking his lips. ‘That’s the first drink I’ve had since I was killed at the Battle of Shiloh; and you get mighty thirsty down in Hell.’” According to Horn, this was a standard routine, “almost the hallmark of a Ku Klux raid—none genuine without it.” Ku Kluxers in Alabama, Mississippi, and Georgia, on the other hand, took a science-fiction approach, often introducing themselves as aliens from the moon. Others dressed in the traditional carnival costumes of domestic animals. Cows, goats, mules with tails and ears—Ku Kluxers hooted like owls, howled like dogs, and, as victims told Congress, “made all kinds of noises, from an ant to a buffalo, and finally ended by bellowing like oxen when they smell blood.”

The bone is named for Atlas of Greek mythology, for just as Atlas bore the weight of the heavens, the first cervical vertebra supports the head.[1] However, the term atlas was first used by the ancient Romans for the seventh cervical vertebra (C7) due its suitability for supporting burdens.[2] In Greek mythology, Atlas was condemned to bear the weight of the heavens as punishment for rebelling against Zeus. Ancient depictions of Atlas show the globe of the heavens resting at the base of his neck, on C7. Sometime around 1522, anatomists decided to call the first cervical vertebra the atlas.[2] Scholars believe that by switching the designation atlas from the seventh to the first cervical vertebra Renaissance anatomists were commenting that the point of man’s burden had shifted from his shoulders to his head--that man’s true burden was not a physical load, but rather, his mind.[2]

It is meaningful, I think, to notice the ways in which Carlson's job has changed, or metastasized; where Acting Like A Republican once meant going on TV dressed like a child at a Connecticut wedding and sneering at hippies or putting on for small business owners, it now means talking in identically apocalyptic terms about both the immigrant hordes and the now-much-less-sexy Green M&M, and stopping teasingly short of demanding that both be put to the sword.

It is generally true that people grow and change as they get older, but that's not necessarily the same thing as saying that they become different. Some people just become more and more themselves, and do not so much grow as build addition after addition onto their home and then decorate all of them identically. The fixtures and finishes might get more expensive, but fundamentally it is the same four walls opening onto the same views. Wherever they go, there they are. They do not, would not and anyway could not, ever leave.

“‘He just walks around with an iPad and sketches everything,’ Goldberg recalled.” Someone should study why Bono doing literally anything is automatically annoying, it’s remarkable. Anyone else could walk around sketching on an iPad and I’d be like “ok, seems fine.” But Bono? Absolutely not.

it’s incredibly freeing (not to mention satisfying) to know that I’m writing to a specific audience of subscribers instead of a vague audience of “people Googling some of the words that are in my post’s headline.”

The way I see it, there's a spectrum of how much human input is required for a task: Human task 0% Tool 50% Machine 100% When a task requires mostly human input, the human is in control. They are the one making the key decisions and it's clear that they're ultimately responsible for the outcome. But once we offload the majority of the work to a machine, the human is no longer in control. There's a No man's land where the human is still required to make decisions, but they're not in control of the outcome. At the far end of the spectrum, users feel like machine operators: they're just pressing buttons and the machine is doing the work. There isn't much craft in operating a machine. Automating tasks is going to be amazing for rote, straightforward work that requires no human input. But if those tasks can only be partially automated, the interface is going to be crucial.

But the decade really kicked into gear around 2012, when Facebook, apparently motivated by jealousy over Twitter’s popularity among journalists (and specifically the extent to which they were crediting Twitter with the Arab revolutions of 2011), opened up a fire hose of traffic to anyone willing to make their headlines sound like they’d been written by a dog, but a dog who’d been genetically/cybernetically manipulated to have the intelligence of a seventh grader, but was subsequently brain damaged in a lab accident, and was also on coke.

We never really know when the world ends while it’s happening. The day after I made my first gmail account, I sent several emails about jobs, and then replied to the replies to those emails, and then I never used any other email address again. The version of myself that lived online had changed overnight from who I could pretend to be into who I already was. The unreal place where I had spent a decade inventing myself blinked out like a dead star and became part of everything else. Fantasy turned to fact, and a game of playing-pretend yielded to the reality of showing an ID card at the airport. My life went on like normal, with no seeming change or noticeable rupture, except that every single thing was different. The internet was finally merely the world: Treacherous, un-magical, and profoundly consequential, full of documentation and tax forms and marriages. The world online, the one that once skittered to the corners when the lights came on, had moved into the daylight; it had closed the door to the haunted house and walked out into the marketplace. Life online was real the way a body is real, not the way a conversation is real. The wilderness had become the town.

I’ve lived online, for some value of lived, for some value of online, since I was a child.3 I learned its customs and manners and codes at the same time I learned the customs and manners and codes of being human.I say all the time that I miss the internet, but I use the internet to say it. All I really mean is that I miss a different version of myself. I miss when I knew less; I miss when there was more time. Despite being engaged in the act of shedding at every moment from birth, we don’t notice what we’ve shed until no part of it clings to us any longer. This is merely forward motion— not a tragedy, not a triumph, not a hardship, and not a miracle.

First and foremost, I'm interested in following topics, not specific people. I'm deeply curious about certain people's feed exactly because they write frequently about a topic that interests me.

The fediverse of microbloggers' primary objective isn't knowledge cultivation, but rather social bonding and sentiment aggregation. What's new/trending? What are the most commonly held beliefs? Who shares the same opinions? Which opinions are controversial?

Mastodon is an incremental change, taking the microblog-app archetype from centralized to federated. It’s still the exact same UX paradigm, which is profoundly limited as a tool for sense-making.

During my few stints of trying to make Twitter work for me, I've encountered multiple people that I wanted to follow, but ultimately didn't because I could tell their feed was too noisy. 'Too noisy' usually meant one of two things: (1) too many posts per day, or (2) posting about a wide assortment of topics – I only wanna keep up with 20%. That's a shame though, because if Twitter had accommodated better sorting controls, both from the writer's content-push (e.g. require hashtag categorization) and the reader's content-pull (follow a poster's hashtags), I'd follow a lot more people. Ditto for Mastodon et.al.

The nerds were the messianic faithful, awaiting the incoming of the algorithm. Waiting to fuse themselves with machines. To live in a world where you could like something simply by pressing a button. Waiting for the utopia where let people enjoy things is the whole of the law.

The regime of the hipster was an inefficient way of sorting it; it died. The regime of the nerd was an overefficient way of sorting it; it is dying. The last remaining option is mal d’archive, the Kang solution: you ease the weight of all this cultural stuff by simply destroying it all.

Maybe our post-nerd future will involve a return to genuine mass art. Maybe things will be good again. That would be nice!

Sequels and franchises no longer drag as many people into the cinemas.

Everything is sterile, mercilessly unsexy; no eroticism, not even visual pleasure. Compare it to any of the dumb action films of the 80s and 90s: sweatingly carnal men roped in thick wads of muscle, grunting around the rainforest, blasting bullets in all directions. The effects might be janky by modern standards, but they at least manage to hold your gaze—which is the least we should expect from the instruments of our domination. Nerd culture, meanwhile, is basically quite boring to consume.

nerds have always gravitated to the popular; nerds have always delighted in the flat infinity of the Same.

Nerdery is when you slurp happily from the toilet, and come up grinning and ask for more.This is why nerds are always so belligerently defensive about the dreck they choose to consume. They are mortally offended by the suggestion that Marvel might be somehow less good than Chris Marker, or that K-pop might be worse than Rimsky-Korasov.

They flourished in a brief gap: after we started producing impossible volumes of information, but before we had the technological means of efficiently processing it. In the 2000s, the best tool available was keyword search, the utility of which drops in line with the size of the data set. We still needed people to like things manually. But in the 2010s, we developed algorithmic processes capable of efficiently discerning patterns in the ungodly excess of human cultural production and sorting it appropriately. The hipsters were no longer required. So we shot them all and burned their bodies on a hill.

The hipster was an information-sorting algorithm: its job was to always have good taste. The hipster listened to bands you’d never heard of. The hipster drank beers brewed by Paraguayan Jesuits in the 1750s. The hipster thought Tarkovsky was for posers, and the only truly great late-Soviet filmmaker was Ali Khamraev. The hipster bought all his toilet paper from a small-batch paper factory in Abkhazia that included small fragments of tree bark in the pulp. The hipster swam deep into the vastness of human data, and always surfaced with pearls. Through its powers of snobbery and disdain, the hipster could effortlessly filter out what was good.

The last man to have read every single piece of publicly available data was the fifteenth-century polymath and mystic Giovanni Pico della Mirandola. (People sometimes make the same claim for Samuel Taylor Coleridge; they are wrong.) He knew the entire corpus of Greek and Latin texts, and also Hebrew and Arabic; he studied Kabbalah with the Italian rabbi Yohanan Alemanno; he could recite the poetry of every European vernacular.

Bodenchuk had told me that the government doesn’t retrieve pig corpses because an environmental impact assessment showed that the cost of recovery exceeds the value of the meat they might provide. Besides which, Bodenchuk added, he knows too much about wild pig pathogens to eat them. They can carry more than thirty viral and bacterial diseases and nearly forty parasites. Humans can get brucellosis, for instance, if a pig’s fluids or tissues come in contact with a cut during field dressing. “I could dress a deer and eat a sandwich at the same time. When I handle pigs, I put on rubber gloves,” Bodenchuk said. Hinterman pointed out that the nonprofit Hogs for a Cause Texas has been able to coordinate the safe dressing and charitable distribution of wild pig meat, which can be consumed if cooked safely, in the Fort Hood area.

Men who had attained a considerable degree of sanctity, and were universally recognized as holy and blameless in their lives and actions, were honoured while still living with nimbi. The nimbus of a living person is quite different in form from any bestowed on the Deity, angels, or saints, being square in shape, and placed upright behind the head, with its lower edge horizontal or parallel with the shoulders.

At the age of twenty one he began to study esoteric texts in the British Museum, and it was there that he ran into a man named Macgregor Mathers.

eridat ha-dorot (Hebrew: ירידת הדורות), meaning literally "the decline of the generations", or nitkatnu ha-dorot (נתקטנו הדורות), meaning "the diminution of the generations", is a concept in classical Rabbinic Judaism and contemporary Orthodox Judaism expressing a belief in the intellectual inferiority of subsequent, and contemporary Torah scholarship and spirituality in comparison to that of the past.

In the Roman Catholic Church, pouring the consecrated wine, the Blood of Christ, or the Host down a sacrarium is forbidden.[3] Extremely rarely, the Eucharistic species spoils or becomes contaminated such that it cannot be consumed. The host is then dissolved in water until it disappears, and then the water is poured down into the sacrarium.

It has been estimated that 60% of all bridge failures result from scour and other hydraulic-related causes.[2] It is the most common cause of highway bridge failure in the United States,[3] where 46 of 86 major bridge failures resulted from scour near piers from 1961 to 1976.[4]

Every spring since 2015, I have dutifully taken the frosted bottle out of the cupboard, dusted it off, and hoped that this would be the moment when it reveals its true beauty to me.  And in truth, I don’t hate it.  It is not a bad fragrance, objectively.  But life is just too short for such low-impact fragrance.

When Veyne probed euergetism in depth, however, comparing it not to modern charitable donations but rather to the ceremony of the potlatch among the Indigenous peoples of the Pacific Northwest (a typically startling interpretive move), he exploded many of our assumptions about what the practice signified. Aimed at a collectivity of citizens and not at the individual poor, civic benefactions were not like Christian charity. Local elites, towering above the masses of their communities, hardly needed to advertise their wealth as a way to reinforce their social standing. This rules out any simple equivalence between euergetism and ‘conspicuous consumption’. Veyne was particularly emphatic that the transfer of private wealth into the public sphere was neither redistribution nor a form of depoliticisation – which is what most of us today understand by the phrase ‘bread and circuses’. Following an extended discussion of all the things that Roman euergetism was not – a tour de force of historical sociology that repays close reading – Veyne finally reveals what the practice was at its core. The key observation concerned the extent of private expenditures, which went far beyond what would have been necessary to secure public office or even to reinforce social standing. The massive and over-the-top spending was instinctual, on Veyne’s reading, seemingly unselfconscious and routinised, and often wasteful. In other words, in analysing the whole practice of euergetism, he pivoted away from practical explanations towards psychological ones. Public giving was a natural expression of grandeur, and the expression was an end in itself. This is the key to his reading. The drive to give was a deeply internalised sensibility among the Roman nobility and, as Veyne stresses, not a very complicated one. By the end of Le pain et le cirque, the reader can hardly escape the conclusion that euergetism in the Roman world was not instrumental at all.

The pedagogical and politically manicured arcs of Beyoncé, Taylor Swift and Lady Gaga were clever and good – as their respective documentaries would show, a close cousin of the twins ‘dogmatic’ and ‘boring’ – and for that reason so much less riveting and dumbfounding than those of Britney, Monica and the rest. (The last time we saw Beyoncé’s human face was when Ashton Kutcher Punk’d her in 2003.)

She went on to re-record her albums of the early years of that decade in order to restore rights to her own music in a form of undoing by redoing. This fantasy of retrospectively applied justice begs the question of whether claiming victimhood breeds power, or if power will just wear victimhood as its latest stole, while those without power, by identifying with their oppression, become trapped by it.

And here, as much as Sawyer was out of line, we can glean from her cruelty the expectation that her subject just might be capable of surviving it, or even fending for herself; an expectation which contains the possibility of dignity and traces of respect we’d have to search far and wide for 10 years later.

In a way, it was this cruel pedagogy that paved the way for militantly unabashed double standards in the name of rights and equality, the glitchy reattachment of the signifier of the 2010s that said ‘No, anything does not go’: gender is performative, but my gender is essential; expression is free, but this expression is wrong – etc. A dangerous game that ushered in the notion of post-truth.

a decade later, we would be intolerant to the moral ambivalence of cultural artefacts like Nabokov’s.

Per the logic of punishment as certification of worth, to be famished and frail offered the same ravaged glamour as being assaulted by paparazzi, but readily available to anyone

Where in Nabokov it is the perverted and punishable Humbert who is society’s mirror image and Lolita mere collateral damage, in the 00s we were all both Britney and her perpetrators: her father, her lawyers, Paris and Lindsey and Kevin and Justin and her two children she went to court to get back and whose pictures were sold to People Magazine for several million dollars. Ethically speaking, it was a zero-sum game in which everyone was a loser and a sell-out. And while this has not changed, back then no one would claim to have been either empowered or victimised by it. Rather, everyone involved – from the paparazzi to the lucky girl inside the SUV who cried cried cried – was just doing their job.

Nothing is ever over when it’s over, only much later. This is partly because hours and days and years are arbitrary divisions, and partly because many things are unfathomable in the moment they take place, and so simply don’t take place in that moment, but stretch out for however long it takes for us to be able to grasp them.

In the old manufacturing economy, if you operated a factory using the techniques of “scientific management,” your workers were not required to think. They were required only to perform set tasks as efficiently as possible. In that kind of business, creativity just gets in the way. But, if your business is about sales, marketing, product design, innovation, or tweaks on standard products, you need ideas, which means that you want to hire the kind of people who can come up with them.

“The star of this new economy,” Franklin writes, was “the hip freelancer or independent studio artist, rather than the unionized musician or actor who had been at the heart of the cultural industries.” In his view, this is perfectly natural, since “creativity” was an economic, not aesthetic, notion to begin with. “The concept of creativity,” he concludes, “never actually existed outside of capitalism.”

Readers do not normally wish books longer, but a couple of discussions are missing from “The Cult of Creativity.” One is about art itself. The early Cold War was a dramatic period in cultural history, and claims about originality and creativity in the arts were continually being debated. Among the complaints about Pop art, when it bounded onto the scene, in 1962, was that the painters were just copying comic books and product labels, not creating. It’s possible that as commercial culture became more invested in the traditional attributes of fine art, fine art became less so.

Franklin tells us that Synectics can be credited with two products: Pringles and the Swiffer. I guess you can’t argue with that—though it’s interesting to learn that when you descend into the depths of the subconscious, you emerge with . . . a Pringle.

I’m just a nonspecialist single person trying to understand the impact of the internet on my mind and life, and as I have been writing this essay, I have experienced the fatigue of reading already-existing versions of everything I am writing everywhere I look, which may be the exact effect I’m talking about, and why this essay feels like both a loop and a wormhole. Of course the effect of the internet on my mind is to make me see more and more connections everywhere, because that’s how a human mind works, and the internet was made by human minds, and on the internet everything is linked. It is embedded in real life now, so real life also feels linked to the internet.

So what I’m experiencing is only advertising, or coincidence, or it’s just frequency illusion, or synchrony. If there is order to the system, but the order is too complex for you to understand it, your experience will be mostly of disorder studded with coincidence and frequency illusion, and you will have no ability to say whether the system is disordered or too complex to understand. They become synonymous and meaningless.

And I used to think it was ironic when someone posted some hand-wringy article about internet addiction on their Facebook, but now I don’t see it like that. Now I just think about how you’re telling the internet what you care about, and all it knows to do with that is to try to convert your concern into currency. Once it understands that you find something ironic, if you are that sort of person, it will then find a way to push that at you too, trailing ads like seaweed.

darius kazemi defines a bot ⧉ as 'a computer that attempts to talk to humans through technology that was designed for humans to talk to humans'. this definition sits well with me, when trying to identify just what is so creepy about accidentally talking on the phone to a robot without immediately realising. it's the uncanny valley effect of being unsure if something is human or not, manufactured or natural. just this week, louis vuitton stores have unveiled 'hyperrealistic' robot versions of yayoi kusama, painting their windows, in a move some have noted 'feels morbid' ⧉ (and many have described as 'creepy'). the rise of LLMs like GPT3 hits on this same kind of uncanny valley. they have become almost indistinguishable from humans, requiring us to imagine means of devising a 'reverse turing test' as described by maggie appleton in order to tell them apart.

"Well, Taylor," Armstrong begins, staring at a point somewhere behind me andslightly above my head – on the column that has been terra-cotta-ized or perhaps on theexposed pipe that runs the length of the ceiling. "Travelers looking for that perfectvacation this summer may do well to look south, as far south as the Bahamas and theCaribbean islands. There are at least five smart reasons for visiting the Caribbeanincluding the weather and the festivals and events, the less crowded hotels andattractions, the price and the unique cultures. While many vacationers leave the cities insearch of cooler climates during the summer months, few have realized that theCaribbean has a year-round climate of seventy-five to eighty-five degrees and that theislands are constantly cooled by the trade winds. It is frequently hotter north in..."

"The client had the boudin blanc, the roasted chicken and the cheesecake," he says."Cheesecake?" I say, confused by this plain, alien-sounding list. "What sauce or fruitswere on the roasted chicken? What shapes was it cut into?""None, Patrick," he says, also confused. "It was... roasted.""And the cheesecake, what flavor? Was it heated?" I say. "Ricotta cheesecake? Goatcheese? Were there flowers or cilantro in it?""It was just... regular," he says, and then, "Patrick, you're sweating.

But I've been drinking close to twenty liters of Evian watera day and going to the tanning salon regularly and one night of binging hasn't affectedmy skin's smoothness or color tone.

"I'm resourceful," Price is saying. "I'm creative, I'm young, unscrupulous, highlymotivated, highly skilled. In essence what I'm saying is that society cannot afford tolose me. I'm an asset."

In civilization there have to be some restraints. If we followed every impulse,we'd be killing one another.Miss Manners (Judith Martin)

The Imperial Wireless Chain was a strategic international communications network of powerful long range radiotelegraphy stations, created by the British government to link the countries of the British Empire.

When I was little, I thought that when people were drunk they were drunk forever. Later, I learned that this is not true. Even later, I learned that sometimes it is.

The more cor-rosive threat may be that people have been convinced that the high-tech modernist system of knowledge generation is an open buffet where “anything goes,” and that keeping it that way is essential to their own freedom. Anyone can offer content, anyone can be their own expert, and it is up to the algorithm to sort it out. Further, the new existential condition of transparency has provided everyone with potent tools to expose or doubt others, only moderated by their own vulnerability to be exposed in turn–an inherently agonistic situation.

Our universe of accessible knowledge is shaped by categorization processes that are invisible and incomprehensible to ordinary users, according to principles that have little regard for whether it is well sourced. The outcome is that the way that people “take [their] bearings in the world” is slowly changing.30 Visible feed-back loops between the people being categorized, the knowledge they have access to, and the processes through which the categories are generated are replaced by invisible loops mediated through algorithms that maximize on commercial im-peratives, sometimes creating incompatible and self-sustaining islands of shared (“post-truth”) beliefs among micropublics who have been categorized in partic-ular ways, and who may themselves act to reinforce the categories. A new terrain of political struggle has arisen, involving the exploitation of information systems and algorithmic dynamics for partisan advantage.

As search engines have transformed from general-purpose technology to per-sonal digital assistants, they have elevated searching the web and forming an opinion “for oneself” into a normative principle. People think of search engines as oracles, but as sociologist Francesca Tripodi and others have shown, they work more like distorting mirrors that variously confirm, exacerbate, or take advantage of people’s priors.

High-tech modernism claims to represent popular judgment against the snobbishness of elites. Remember that Scott identifies high modernism as inherently antidemocratic because it enforces categories and ob-jectives decided on by elites who “know better.”23 High-tech modernism, by con-trast, systematically undermines elite judgment, fueling a crisis of expertise.

The feedback loops of high-tech modernism are also structurally different. Some kinds of human feedback are now much less common. Digital classification systems may group people in ways that are not always socially comprehensible (in contrast to traditional categories such as female, married, Irish, or Christian). Human feedback, therefore, typically requires the mediation of specialists with significant computing expertise, but even they are often mystified by the opera-tion of systems they have themselves designed.13The political and social mechanisms through which people previously re-sponded, actively and knowingly, to their categorization–by affirming, disagree-ing with, or subverting it–have been replaced by closed loops in which algo-rithms assign people unwittingly to categories, assess their responses to cues, and continually update and reclassify them. The classifications produced by machine learning are cybernetic, in mathematician Norbert Wiener’s original sense of the word. That is, they are self-correcting: categories are automatically and dynami-cally adjusted in light of the reactions that they produce.

The changing politics of credit in the United States helps illuminate these dif-ferences. Until the 1970s, broad demographic characteristics such as gender or race–or high modernist proxies such as marital status or the redlining of poor, primarily Black neighborhoods–were routinely used to determine a person’s creditworthiness. It is only when categorical discrimination was explicitly forbid-den that new actuarial techniques, aimed at precisely scoring the “riskiness” of specific individuals, started to flourish in the domain of credit.14 This did not just change how lenders “saw” individuals and groups, but also how individuals and groups thought about themselves and the politics that were open to them.15 Redlining was overt racial prejudice, visible to anyone who both-ered looking at a map. But credit scoring turned lending risk evaluation into a quantitative, individualized, and abstract process. Contesting the resulting classi-fications or acting collectively against them became harder. Later, the deployment of machine learning–which uses even weaker signals to make its judgments, like using one’s phone’s average battery level to determine their likelihood to repay their loan–made the process of measuring creditworthiness even more opaque and difficult to respond to.1

But it’s true that there isn’t One Big Conspiracy, largely because there doesn’t need to be; it’s also true that people regularly gather together in private to plot the downfall of their enemies. On the whole, however, liberal capitalist states, like dishwashers, work all by themselves (when they work at all). They don’t depend on people meeting in missile-proof bunkers to plot how to stay in power. Modern societies don’t rely on some kind of collective consciousness to keep themselves afloat, partly because modern citizens are atomised rather than collective. In fact, consciousness or belief hardly comes into it. As long as you don’t try to overthrow the state, you can believe pretty much what you like. This is known as liberalism.

Unfinished work drags and depresses; finished work redoubles and accelerates. (I ought to clarify: sending an edition of a newsletter does not provide this fuel. The internet works against the feeling of starting and finishing, against edges, because those things all imply endings, and the internet never ends. To produce the fuel of comple­tion with a newsletter, you’d have to start one … send some number of editions … and shut it down.)

One after another, graves opened in the plain and out of them came men and women, old and young, and children. They stretched out their arms toward the Messenger of the Empress and to catch the sounds of his trumpet. And in its tones I felt the smile of the Empress and in the opening graves I saw the opening flowers whose fragrance seemed to be wafted by the outstretched arms. Then I understood the mystery of birth in death.

By the hypothesis, such a religion may assume one of two forms; it may be a worship of the evil principle as such, namely, a conscious attempt on the part of human minds to identify themselves with that principle, or it may be the worship of a power which is regarded as evil by other religions, from which p. vi view the worshippers in question dissent.

In 1913, when Mirrlees was twenty-six and Jane Harrison sixty-three, they began to live together, and remained inseparable until Harrison’s death in 1928. No one really understood the relationship, though all saw that it was deeply intimate: The two women developed, for instance, a private mythology in which they were the wives of Harrison’s ancient teddy bear, whom they called the Old One. What outsider can read such language? Some relationships evade our categories. But Harrison spoke of Mirrlees as her “spiritual daughter” and the great gift of her old age.

I need not add that in assuming Celtic or any other legends, the Church took over its own, because she had come into possession, by right and by fact, of all the patrimonies of the Western world.

The shaft of the spear used by Longinus when he pierced the side of Christ is preserved in the Basilica of St. Peter. According to the Roman Martyrology, the Deicide was suffering from ophthalmia when he inflicted the wound, and some of the Precious Blood overflowing his face, he was healed immediately--which miracle led, it is declared, to his conversion.

I do not know whether the implicits of this presentation have been realised in any school of interpreters, but there is one of them which covers all phases of sacramental exegesis, however variant from each other, and however in conflict with high Roman doctrine concerning the Eucharist.

It may be one of the grievous burdens of those ecclesiastical systems about which it prevails and in which it is still promoted

The interpretation of books is often an essay in enchantment, a rite of evocation which calls, and the souls of the dead speak in response in strange voices.

It has so far been in the hands of those who, whatever their claims, have no horizon outside the issues of folk-lore, and who, like other specialists, have been a little disposed to create, on the basis of their common agreement, a certain orthodoxy among themselves, recognising nothing beyond their particular canons of criticism and the circle of their actual interests. To these canons there is no reason that we should ourselves take exception; they are more than excellent in their way, only they do not happen to signify, except antecedently and provisionally, for the higher consequence with which we are here concerned. The sincerity of scholarship imputes to it a certain sanctity, but in respect of this consequence most scholarship has its eyes bandaged.

Now there are a few legends which may be said to stand forth among the innumerable traditions of humanity, wearing the external signs and characters of some inward secret or mystery which belongs rather to eternity than to time. They are in no sense connected one with another--unless, indeed, by certain roots which are scarcely in time and place--and yet by a suggestion which is deeper than any message of the senses each seems appealing to each, one bearing testimony to another, and all recalling all. They kindle strange lights, they awaken dim memories, in the antecedence of an immemorial past. They might be the broken fragments of some primitive revelation which, except in these memorials, has passed out of written records and from even the horizon of the mind.

If the hand of God is in history, it is also in folk-lore. We can scarcely fail of our term, since lights, both close at hand and in the unlooked-for places, kindle everywhere about us. It is difficult to say any longer that we walk in the shadow of death when the darkness is sown with stars.

I have no use for any audience outside my consanguinities in the spirit.

All great subjects bring us back to the one subject which is alone great; all high quests end in the spiritual city; scholarly criticisms, folk-lore and learned researches are little less than useless if they fall short of directing us to our true end--and this is the attainment of that centre which is about us everywhere.

My object in mentioning these grave trifles is that no one at a later stage may say that he has been entrapped.

I have returned from investigations of my own, with a synopsis of the results attained, to show them that the literature of the Holy Graal is of kinship with our purpose and that this also is ours. The Graal is, therefore, a rumour of the Mystic Quest, but there were other rumours.

In my own defence it will be desirable to add that I have not written either as an enthusiast or a partisan, though in honour to my school there are great dedications to which I must confess with my heart.

When the existence of a secondary and concealed meaning seems therefore inferentially certain in a given department of literature--if ordinary processes, depending on evidence of the external kind, have been found wanting--its purpose and intention may be ascertained by a comparison with other secret literatures, which is equivalent to saying that the firmest hermeneutical ground in such cases must be sought in evidence which inheres and is common to several departments p. vi of cryptic writing.

What is old: Mechthild of Magdeburg's The Flowing Light of the Godhead What is new: Having to hop onto IRC of all things just to pirate a 700+ year old book because apparently someone owns the rights to a work older than some existing civilizations. Seriously, why isn't this available for free as a PDF?

bold brands and courageous companies have the chance to chart a different course.

Media all looks the same

<img src="https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/5e13762b05aeab4478a071d5/2dc85b51-d3f5-439f-9c20-3b6486454d95/The+Age+of+Average_0000_Brands+-+Toothbrushes.jpg" alt="" /> The homogeneity of modern brands

Cities once felt rooted in time and place. The Victorian grandeur of London. The Art Deco glamour of New York. The neon modernity of Tokyo. But with anodyne architecture spreading across the United States, cities are beginning to lose their contextual identities. They are all starting to look the same:“Institutional developers march forward, ignorant of what makes Portland, Maine different from Portland, Oregon, or Philadelphia from Kansas City. Unique local traditions? Completely different climates? Hah! Joke’s on us. A box fits just as well in any of these places.”

Abba Poemen said that Abba John said that the saints are like a group of trees, each bearing different fruit, but watered from the same source. The practices of one saint differ from those of another, but it is the same Spirit that works in all of them.

Abba John the Dwarf said, 'a house is not built by beginning at the top and working down. You must begin with the foundations in order to reach the top. They said to him, 'What does this saying mean?' He said, 'The foundation is our neighbour, whom we must win, and that is the place to begin. For all the commandments of Christ depend on this one.'

Abba Agathon said, "I consider no other labor as difficult as prayer. When we are ready to pray, our spiritual enemies interfere. They understand it is only by making it difficult for us to pray that they can harm us. Other things will meet with success if we keep at it, but laboring at prayer is a war that will continue until we die."

In Gonzalez, the distinction made by the petitioner and Solicitor General, if adopted, would create a less useful internet for users and audiences. Without recommendations the speech online becomes much less organized and more difficult to find. Recommendations are good; you want to be shown the stuff you want, not what you don’t want.

Platforms like Facebook, Twitter, YouTube, etc. are implicated in profound, undeniable harms precisely because they cannot, for example, understand whether or not a post in Myanmar is promoting extermination and genocide. But they can broadcast that post regardless, and profit from the attention it provokes. Curating public speech well is an activity that is inherently artisanal, community and context bound. This centrifugal fact should counterbalance the yawning pull of network effects, except we've eliminated as a matter of law any reason for firms to pay attention to it.

Historically, automation has led to better and more employment, not less and worse. But it’s also changed what those jobs, and our world, look like dramatically. In 1870, about half of United States workers worked in agriculture. In 1900, only a third did. Last year, only 1.4 percent did. The consequence of this is not that Americans starve, but that a vastly more productive, heavily automated farming sector feeds us and lets the other 98.6 percent of the workforce do other work, hopefully work that interests us more.

Dmitri Brereton, an engineer who researches search engines and AI. “Social media, especially TikTok, solves that authenticity problem because some experiential things are just better seen. It can’t get more authentic than a video of a person dining at a restaurant.”

To the maximally cash-focused greed-fueled remote-money developer of today, courtyards mean wasted, non-revenue-generating square footage.

Let’s also pause to consider the many benefits that algorithmic platforms have brought. The ability to go viral has enabled many creators, such as musicians and entertainers, to establish an initial livelihood on social media. This weakening of the power of gatekeepers has unleashed a creative energy that deserves to be celebrated.

Search offers a useful analogy: Before search engines, people accessed online information through directories. I suspect that social media without recommendations will soon seem just as quaint if it doesn’t already.

Today, offering only chronological feeds is not a realistic option for a mainstream platform that faces competitive pressures.

The user got recommendations that were engaging in the moment but didn’t make them feel good once they put down the app after a couple of hours. Companies are pretty good at optimizing against this outcome as well. A simple way to test an algorithm change is to A/B test it: that is, deploy it to a randomly selected subset of users. Then track how many of those users open the app on a given day, compared to a control group. Algorithms called contextual bandits automate some of the work of doing these A/B tests and tweaking the system based on their outcome.

In other words, marriage is a social engagement with a vast social history, one that is innately linked to capitalism and property rights, gender (bafflingly ignored by the piece), class… all of which Callard studiously avoids as she tries to drill down to What It Really Means.

In general, though, I think Callard is so focused on her openness to other ideas that she’s a bit blind to how much intellectualization’s role as a defense mechanism is unignorable and fundamentally important to her experiences.

Still, I must credit Callard for the freshness of her ideas’ expression; it turns out that you can find unique-sounding phraseologies for your mind’s workings when you intentionally avoid reading anything written after the Partition of Babylon.

We turn away from politics (and towards authoritarianism or, as Arendt also noted, unworldly stoicism) because there is something intimidating about the sheer novelty of which politics is capable. To overcome this obstacle, two things are required. First, people must be capable of making and keeping promises to one another, such that there isn’t a constant threat that everything will start all over again. If organisations and associations are to be sustained over time, the power of political action must be held in check by past commitments. Second, if we are to escape the shadow of the past and genuinely start anew, forgiveness must be possible. Forgiveness, for Arendt, holds a very important role in enabling us to break free of perpetual reaction and counter-reaction.

The idea here is that while everyone (animals included) is capable of reaction, only a rarefied minority is capable of genuine action. Action, from this perspective, means leadership, which in turn implies a far larger quantity of followership. Combating this mentality requires us to think of action democratically, as something made possible by the fact of human plurality. Thus all action is in fact interaction.

‘The person who gives up his individual self and becomes an automaton,’ Fromm wrote, ‘need not feel alone and anxious any more.’Pessimism is understandable coming from an exile writing during the Second World War, but that’s a far remove from the world of Twitch gamers or music reaction videos. Even so, the behaviourist turn and our crude embrace of a neuroscientific imaginary clearly signals an attempt to displace a modern idea of human ‘freedom’ with a naturalistic idea of impulse, that is, to insert human society back into the animal world, where feelings of responsibility, anxiety and guilt are absent.

Such a politics is only stirred into being thanks to the energies and actions of the left. Indeed, the reactionary shares with the revolutionary a sense of how much is at stake.

The continually enraged or amused political leader appears to serve as a representative, or emotional prosthesis, for those whose hostility to contemporary politics otherwise has no outlet.

TikTok is awash with apparently ‘authentic’ clips of humorous reactions (often based on pranks), the comments on which are preoccupied with whether or not the interaction is ‘real’.

Something similar goes on in the strain of contemporary cultural documentary-making in which celebrity broadcasters such as Simon Schama or Grayson Perry are filmed gazing at an artefact they admire. The camera often lingers just as long on the presenter’s entranced face as on the object itself, as if the real clues to its value lie not in its form or colour, but in the facial expressions of the person viewing it. A kind of mirroring is enacted between human face and artefact, with each put in service of revealing the other.

Across various genres, embodied responses to cultural artefacts carry greater worth than the artefacts themselves. The streaming platform Twitch (which currently has 140 million monthly users worldwide) enables people to watch other people playing computer games. The gamer seeks to expand their audience, so as to win sponsorship and donations, not just by being very good at the games but by displaying an emotionally engaging persona as they play.

But the costs were deemed worthwhile, in order that one magical moment might be captured, then later replayed, and perhaps posted online to be seen by others.

The Instagrammer on holiday learns how to increase follower engagement by monitoring the reactions that their images receive; the delivery company keeps track of its logistics (and surveils its drivers) on the basis of the customer feedback it receives; the financial analyst scours their Bloomberg terminal for the all-important price movement. The most important thing about feedback isn’t whether it’s positive or negative, but that you get it in the first place, and sustaining a constant feedback loop requires constant vigilance and work.

But anyone who has visited a famous landmark or picturesque beach in recent years will be familiar with a phenomenon that’s no less strange: photographs meticulously staged for posting on Instagram. The time and effort that goes into the production of these images (including costume, hair and make-up) is unlike anything that took place in the age of the analogue photo album, and is only explicable in terms of the feverish hunt for online reaction.

While exposure to vitamin D was associated with significantly lower dementia incidence in both males and females, the sex-specific difference was also statistically significant. The effect of vitamin D exposure was greater in females than males. This finding might be explained by the associations of estrogen and activated vitamin D and declining levels of estrogen in aging females. Evidence has shown that estrogen may increase the activity of the enzymes responsible for activating vitamin D.31 Subsequently, it can be hypothesized that declining levels of estrogen in peri- and post-menopausal stages could contribute to vitamin D deficiency in females.

that He will never as an angry Father disinherit His children,

Too much exposure kills an aesthetic, and beyond the moral ickiness of regular people having to think about their personal styles as self-branding, I simply don’t want to dress any other way! I know, ~people should wear whatever they want~. I am very pro-this take in general, but in practice it can often feel scoldy, like it’s your fault that you care what other people think of you. As someone who deeply values politeness and etiquette (within reason), what other people think of you extremely matters!

When we ask newlyweds to think back on what they wanted most for their big day — and we’ve interviewed hundreds of them over the years — the most common response is, “For it not to feel like a wedding!”

The logics of inside and outside, or offline and online, will have us trapped in what Asha Achuthan refers to as an “aporea” that opens up between the finitude of the biological limits of women’s bodies, and the purpose of technology to enter it and act on it.2

Freedom from violence and manipulation is unlikely to be handed out by owners of social media platforms or law, for women and queers were never the imagined inheritors of internet freedom. Every act of security to protect myself online only reinforces my outside-ness, because the responsibility to be safe has always been mine.

we are “free” to have a voice and speech online, but not flesh;

Just as we are constituted by biomes,3 so too are we by volumes of data, ours and from the planet and things on it, that pour into and out of data centers.

And that would have been to speak of the constitution of all our roots – the Greek-Roman, the Judaic and the Christian. In our past, we have both Venus and the crucifix, the Bible and Nordic mythology, which we remember with Christmas trees, or with the many festivals of St Lucy, St Nicolas and Santa Claus. Europe is a continent that was able to fuse many identities, and yet not confuse them.That is precisely how I see its future. As for religion: be careful. Many people who no longer go to church end up falling prey to supersitition. And many who are non-practising still carry around a little saint card with a picture of Padre Pio in their wallets!"

only works with an internet connection

people love to dunk on these videos because they’re primarily made by young women who are just simply talking about their day and the internet is giant machine that turns harassment against women into advertising revenue. But, also, most of these videos can’t actually show what these people do because of security reasons and, also, it’s sort of boring visually, so most adult daycare videos are just people eating at the company canteen and making various smoothies and lattes.

Everything on the internet is dumb and shameful until it’s not.

There are a lot of people excited about this stuff and there is a similar amount of people who are terrified of what it could do to us. And a whole bunch more who have never used any of these tools and have no idea where to begin, but once it’s easy enough, won’t even think twice.

the fact it’s becoming open source just as quickly, to me, means we’re not going to wake up one day and find out it all just disappeared.

If you wanted to, you could train an instance of Stable Diffusion solely with your own original artwork or photography and turn it into a (probably pretty bad) virtual clone of yourself.

In my Discord server a few weeks ago, I was chatting with a couple readers who were a little frustrated that I wasn’t condemning generative-A.I. technology more thoroughly. That I was keeping a somewhat open or at least ambivalent mind about it. And I told them that the minute Stable Diffusion was released last August, I thought we had crossed a threshold of which there was no return.

This philosophical commitment to technological determinism may also at times be mingled with a quasi-religious faith in the envisioned techno-upotian future. The quasi-religious form can be particularly pernicious since it understands resistance to be heretical and immoral. Painting with a decidedly broad brush, the Enlightenment, in this reading, did not, as it turns out, vanquish Religion, driving it far from the pure realms of Science and Technology. In fact, to the degree that the radical Enlightenment’s assault on religious faith was successful, it empowered the religion of technology. To put this another way, the notions of Providence, the Kingdom of God, and Grace were transmuted into Progress, Utopia, and Technology respectively. If the Kingdom of God had been understood as a transcendent goal achieved with the aid of divine grace within the context of the providentially ordered unfolding of human history, it became a Utopian vision, a heaven on earth, achieved by the ministrations Science and Technology within the context of Progress, an inexorable force driving history toward its Utopian consummation. It’s worth noting that stories of technological inevitability tend to flourish in contexts were the cultural ground has been prepared by linear and teleological understandings of history. Of course, narratives of inevitability most often arise from a far more banal source: self-interest, usually of the crassly commercial variety. All assertions of inevitability have agendas, and narratives of technological inevitability provide convenient cover for tech companies to secure their desired ends, minimize resistance, and convince consumers that they are buying into a necessary, if not necessarily desirable future.

Honestly, they make this blog worth using. For me. I feel like the design should be for you; the semantic structure is for me.

The first day we just showed them how to link.[3] This was actually plenty. I think this could have gone on for three weeks alone.

They don’t get railroaded into solving mazes.

I Believe (The Nicolas Cage Speech) A speech I like to give—my beliefs wrt Nicolas Cage. This is a speech I like to give my students about my beliefs with regard to Nicolas Cage, to clear up any misunderstanding. Please contact my office if you would like me to give this speech at your school or at a civic meeting.

But because #corecore videos are being created by Gen Z and not millennials, their videos aren’t boring, egotistical snapshots of their actual lives, but, instead, mildly dystopian fragments of the different kinds of media they consume

maybe technology is more of a magical substance than it is a great medicine for society. A realization that cannot come quick enough now that our ideals about social media have been dispelled by the absence of the interpersonal advances we were promised. No, it was all just a trick of getting messages from here to there, not a new form of living.

They write:In the subfield of computer vision, researchers at Meta have demonstrated that images produced by AI models can be identified as AI- generated if they are trained on “radioactive data”—that is, images that have been imperceptibly altered to slightly distort the training process. This detection is possible even when as little as 1% of a model’s training data is radioactive and even when the visual outputs of the model look virtually identical to normal images. It may be possible to build language models that produce more detectable outputs by similarly training them on radioactive data; however, this possibility has not been extensively explored, and the approach may ultimately not work.No one is sure exactly how (or if) this would work; it’s much easier to alter an image imperceptibly than it is text. But the basic idea would be to “require proliferators to engage in secretive posting of large amounts of content online,” they write, in hopes that models trained on it would produce text that could be traced back to those “radioactive” posts. If by now you’re thinking “that’s bonkers,” you’re not alone. Among other things, the authors note, this nuke-the-web plan “raises strong ethical concerns regarding the authority of any government or company to deliberately reshape the internet so drastically.” And even if someone did go to those lengths, they write, “it is unclear whether this retraining would result in more detectable outputs, and thus detectable influence operations.”

I often have to restrain myself from sprinting back to my apartment with endless ideas and caffeinated enthusiasm in tow. I usually burst into the apartment and start ranting at my fiancé: Did you hear about the Fall of Constantinople and how the Ottoman Empire dragged their boats onto land and lifted them over the hills to then drop them into the Golden Horn???

4 Omne quod tibi applicitum fuerit accipe: et in dolore sustine, et in humilitate tua patientiam habe: 4 Take all that shall be brought upon thee: and in thy sorrow endure, and in thy humiliation keep patience. 5 quoniam in igne probatur aurum et argentum, homines vero receptibiles in camino humiliationis. 5 For gold and silver are tried in the fire, but acceptable men in the furnace of humiliation.

Yes, there is death in this business of whaling—a speechlessly quick chaotic bundling of a man into Eternity. But what then? Methinks we have hugely mistaken this matter of Life and Death. Methinks that what they call my shadow here on earth is my true substance. Methinks that in looking at things spiritual, we are too much like oysters observing the sun through the water, and thinking that thick water the thinnest of air. Methinks my body is but the lees of my better being. In fact take my body who will, take it I say, it is not me. And therefore three cheers for Nantucket; and come a stove boat and stove body when they will, for stave my soul, Jove himself cannot.

In what census of living creatures, the dead of mankind are included; why it is that a universal proverb says of them, that they tell no tales, though containing more secrets than the Goodwin Sands; how it is that to his name who yesterday departed for the other world, we prefix so significant and infidel a word, and yet do not thus entitle him, if he but embarks for the remotest Indies of this living earth; why the Life Insurance Companies pay death-forfeitures upon immortals; in what eternal, unstirring paralysis, and deadly, hopeless trance, yet lies antique Adam who died sixty round centuries ago; how it is that we still refuse to be comforted for those who we nevertheless maintain are dwelling in unspeakable bliss; why all the living so strive to hush all the dead; wherefore but the rumor of a knocking in a tomb will terrify a whole city. All these things are not without their meanings. But Faith, like a jackal, feeds among the tombs, and even from these dead doubts she gathers her most vital hope.

Although members of the Black working class—particularly in their more industrially organized sections—are more likely to have substantive left-wing views than virtually any group in America, they have been paradoxically unreceptive to attacks on the centrist party establishment from the left, at least among older cohorts. To say “Bernie is crazy” is to say, with almost perfect economy, “he does not make sense from where I sit in the world.” It is the same logic by which political conservatives can be militant union members if they have a sense of their collective power at work, or obversely how radical academics so often behave like petty baronets. Such orientations are not amenable to rhetoric or argument alone, as none of our orientations are.

Because the Black working class remains somewhat more socially organized through churches, public employment, extended family networks, and civic associations—and in a distinct way that links its members to the machinery of the Democratic Party—Sanders’s message and his organizing efforts could not take root, particularly among the older voters for whom longstanding forms of organization remain more meaningful.

As Alex Pareene observed last month in the New Republic, Joe Biden’s promise of a fifteen-dollar minimum wage might mean little to a given voter if everyone around thinks Biden is a pedophile and a crook, while Trump is a working-class hero. The former’s nattering about higher wages will seem duplicitous no matter how many times the campaign slogans are reiterated. But the situation is even more straightforward than this example suggests: if your experience of the world bears no residue of popular power, and no residue of that power having brought about any improvements in the quality of your and your neighbors’ lives, it is natural that such promises sound fraudulent.

For those contemplating a 2024 Bernie Sanders run, the question of the legacy the campaign leaves behind seems of even greater importance than what it accomplishes, let alone whether it will allow Bernie to ascend to the presidency. Only in that case will we see a true test of constitutional loyalty for capital, and only then can we gauge money’s alignment with liberal democracy.

Putnam was right, but for the wrong reasons: associationalism matters for democracy, but it hardly matters to capital — and might even threaten it.

Clearly, the internet only becomes comprehensible in the world of the lonely bowler. Online culture thrives on the atomization that the neoliberal offensive has inflicted on society — there is now ample research showing positive correlation between declining civic commitment and broadband access. At the same time, the internet accelerates and entrenches social atomization. The exit and entry costs of this new, simulated civil society are extremely low, and the stigma of leaving a Facebook group or a Twitter subculture is incomparable to being forced to move out of a neighborhood because a worker scabbed during a strike.

Militias like the Proud Boys and the boogaloo movement instead thrive as “individualized commandos,” as Adam Tooze put it, far removed from the veterans that populated the Freikorps or the Black and Tans in the early 1920s. These were highly disciplined formations with direct experience of combat, not lumpen loners who drove out to protect car dealerships.

Instead of mass membership organizations, voluntary associations increasingly turned to a nonprofit model to organize advocacy in Washington. The shift to the nonprofit drastically changed the composition of these advocacy groups. Instead of relying on dues-paying members, they reached out to wealthy donors to fill their coffers. In a United States in which the government was increasingly giving up its redistributive role, this move created a natural constituency from new welfare recipients. The logic was self-evident: associations that practically operated as businesses but did not want to fulfill their tax obligations to the state saw an opportunity in the nonprofit model. The American political scientist Theda Skocpol casts them as “advocates without members”: nonprofit organizations functioning as the lawyers of a mute defendant.

The Tories — the first mass party in European history — now receive more donations from dead members than from living ones

Parties also remain the paradigmatic victim of Putnam’s disengagement. As fortresses built between individuals and their states, these institutions secured people’s hold on the state throughout the twentieth century. The Austrian social democratic party in the 1930s hosted a theater club, a child welfare committee, a cremation society, a cycling club, workers’ radio and athletic clubs, and even a rabbit breeders’ association.

Since the 1980s, citizens have been actively ejected from associations through anti-union legislation or globalized labor markets. At the same time, passive alternatives to union and party power — cheap credit, self-help, cryptocurrency, online forums — have multiplied. The result is an increasingly capsular world

The transfer of social services from the community to the state level, the argument ran, would threaten citizens’ self-reliance. Putnam was skeptical: both strong (Scandinavia) and weak (United States) welfare states had seen a decline in civic capacity.

At the end of 1951’s The Origins of Totalitarianism, Arendt postulated that a new form of loneliness had overtaken Westerners in the twentieth century, leading them to join new secular cults to remedy their perdition. “What prepares men for totalitarian domination in the non-totalitarian world,” she claimed, “is the fact that loneliness, once a borderline experience usually suffered in certain marginal social conditions like old age, has become an everyday experience.”

In early American folklore, the plant’s flowering time signaled pioneers that the ground had thawed enough in spring for the burial of the winter’s dead.

The funny thing about Twitter’s feed algorithms is that they were designed to amplify the content that triggered the most reaction, those emotionally sticky posts. This is why boring but informative content never has a chance against that which prompts fury.