I'm thinking to try a more narrative approach to this gatheration of encounters. This may produce a longer html page, but perhaps add useful context for anybody (myself included) trying to track the succession of Rabbit Holes visited. Some sources are paywalled, and for those I'll try to provide especially useful extracts.
Yawning isn't just a deep breath indicating tiredness or boredom, but a process that reorganises the flow of fluids out of the brain, according to MRI scans that also suggest we each yawn in a slightly different way.
...Listening and reading Carney's speech, 'we' felt good. Why? Perhaps it was seeing someone stand up to the bully. Perhaps it was the real talk' with the admissions of failings and hypocrisies. Perhaps it was appealing to some guilty consciousnesses out there. Most likely a combination of these and much more. It was undeniably a carefully measured and delivered speech with considerable rhetorical power. Well put and well played, as far as things go.
Perhaps it was also the rare sight of someone from the Davos beanbag gliberal elite showing a bit of fortitude. In The Wizard of Oz, the Tin Man seeks a heart. In today's world, Davos man seeks a spine. Such people are difficult to find, however, as having or growing a spine tends to be costly and risky, hence it is generally avoided. In this sense, Carney further stands out, as the crop of leaders he is part of is so profoundly poor. Middle powers led by middling mediocrities.
...If we are no longer in conditions of duelling powerpoints, and instead are in an increasingly fierce competition between major actors (states, companies, and sadly, yes some individuals too) for control of the key sources of power and coercion now and in the world to come, then Carney's words only start to really matter if matched by action appropriate to what a 'rupture' would suggest is needed.
The temptation is to identify Carney's intervention as a pivotal 'speech act': in naming present conditions as a 'rupture, not a transition', he is helping to create a new ideational baseline for action. Moving forward, the 'liberal international order' / 'rules based order' is dead, done, and no longer a reference point for policy and action. By admitting this, it clears the decks and allows for actions and policies attuned to these more challenging and changing times. Or does it?
...If one takes seriously that we are experiencing a quick and hard phase shift, then surely what should follow are quick and hard moves to adapt to the new conditions taking shape. Nonetheless, many actors still seem to be clinging onto models and frameworks that no longer apply.
...That the words of Thucydides are again being invoked and interpreted in varying ways speaks to the ongoing value of such texts. In conditions of dissolution and disorientation, ferment and formation, one looks for footholds to assist in thought.
Three thousand ICE maniacs invaded Minneapolis and rampaged through its streets, indiscriminately terrorizing immigrants and US citizens. Ordered by Department of Homeland Security (DHS) Secretary Kristi Noem to carry out Trump's promise of "reckoning and retribution," these masked, armed lunatics express a torrent of belligerence to everyone in sight, breaking windows, pointing guns, storming homes, punching neighborhood residents, dragging disabled people from their cars, and throwing bystanders to the pavement without any probable cause.
Recruited by white nationalist videos, deployed without proper training in conflict de-escalation, and prioritizing arrest quotas, these sadistic vigilantes throw flash-bangs and tear gas at peaceful protestors, grab kids off the street and exploit them as bait to lure targeted people to open their doors, and racially profile Black, Latino and Asian US citizens, including perp-walking an elderly man who was wrongly arrested and dragged half-naked from his home.
...A fascist regime reverses reality, turns moral transgressions upside down, makes the victim the perpetrator, and the perpetrator the victim. This repressive government wants to desensitize people, not only to the kidnapping of children but to the killing of Americans. US citizens have ignored obscure migrant deaths: 32 people died in ICE detention last year. But they are not ignoring the public murder of white American citizens who are doing nothing but witnessing and documenting ICE crimes.
...The concept of autocatalysis originally derives from chemistry and denotes reactions in which one of the reaction products simultaneously functions as a catalyst for the reaction itself. What may appear at first glance to be merely a chemical curiosity proves upon closer examination to be the central principle of life. For the beginning of life is the point at which these chemical autocatalytic reaction cycles became encapsulated from the environment by a membrane.
In an autocatalytic system, a remarkable dynamic emerges: the process generates not only its own products but also the conditions for its own continuation. This leads to a self-reinforcing loop that enables exponential growth under suitable conditions. At the same time, however — and this is crucial — this dynamic is limited and regulated by the availability of resources and the stability of environmental conditions.
...life itself can be understood as a complex network of autocatalytic cycles. From the fundamental metabolic cycles of a single cell to the complex ecosystems of our biosphere — everywhere we find structures that maintain and reproduce themselves through their own activity.
...Particularly remarkable is how increasingly complex structures can emerge from simple autocatalytic cycles through coupling and networking. Individual metabolic pathways link to form networks, these to cells, cells to tissues, tissues to organs, organs to organisms. At each level of this hierarchy we find the same basic principle: structures that maintain themselves through their own activity while bringing forth new levels of organization.
This emergence of complexity is not a random process but follows the inner logic of autocatalysis. Systems that are more successful at self-maintenance prevail and can serve as the foundation for even more complex structures. Evolution thus becomes a large-scale autocatalytic process in which successful self-maintenance strategies assert themselves and develop further.
...The autocatalytic nature of knowledge becomes particularly clear with language. Linguistic meanings are not fixed entities but emergent properties of communicative processes. A word or concept receives its meaning through use in the language community, and this use simultaneously reproduces and modifies the meaning.
Language is thus a collective autocatalytic process: the members of a language community produce through their communicative activities the semantic and syntactic structures that in turn enable and structure their future communicative activities. New concepts and meanings do not arise ex nihilo, but through variation and recombination of already existing linguistic elements.
...The concept of autopoiesis — the self-production of living systems — is directly derived from the principle of autocatalysis.
The constructivist insight that knowledge is not the representation of an independent reality but the construction of reality by the knowing system corresponds exactly to the position advocated here.
...Truth is not a static property of statements but a dynamic process of successful coordination between living systems and their environment. Knowledge is not the accumulation of information but the continuous self-organization of cognitive structures. Rationality is not the application of eternal rules but the evolutionary optimization of thinking strategies.
This new view of knowledge is both modest and revolutionary. Modest because it acknowledges the limits of human knowledge and embeds it in the larger context of the evolution of life. Revolutionary because it dissolves traditional philosophical dichotomies and opens new possibilities for understanding mind and world.
...The arbitrary arrests and killings committed by agents of Trump's authoritarian-style rule differ only in number, not in kind, from the detainments and killings of protesters carried out by the basij (or pro-regime street militias) in Iran. In fact, they rendered his protests and bluster about Iran the height of hypocrisy. Above all, the killing of Renee Nicole Good in her car in Minneapolis by a Trumpian ICE agent haunted his response, providing the all-too-grim Iranian regime with an easy rebuttal to American claims of moral superiority.
...Trump's America now stands on increasingly shaky ground when it accuses other regimes of atrocities. Similarly, Washington's full-throated backing of Israel's genocidal actions against Palestinians in Gaza raised questions about its alleged support for populations in the global South demanding freedom. Nor could Trump's naked power grab in Venezuela, explicitly carried out for the sake of stealing that country's petroleum, have been reassuring to the inhabitants of a petrostate like Iran.
But in what configurations do these impulses circulate? How are they organized and contained? What inner demons and desires drive them?
The deranging thing about the Epstein revelations, is how utterly disinhibited that flux can become.
It brings us back hard to what we actually mean when we talk about "polycrisis" or "rupture".
Are such terms hard enough for what we are actually witnessing? What is actually going on?
...The "liberal international order" was not the only sign that we placed in the shop window of the Western world.
Rights. Decency. Respect for basic societal taboos. These were things that we claimed too.
At an even more elementary level, we claimed to be able to discriminate, to tell the difference between "good guys" and "bad guys".
What the Epstein material reveals is not just the extent to which many figures of the establishment were involved in his world of sordid sex, but also their promiscuous mixing across political boundaries, the blurring of supposedly opposite positions.
...we are actually glimpsing through the released emails and txts are the slightly more cogent participants at a messy, dark, orgy watching from within their own derangement the worst of all take power.
It will be a long road back. There is no getting over this.
Blake Montgomery at TechScape
How storms, Alex Pretti and Trump led TikTok to disaster
Nearly two weeks ago, TikTok stepped on to US shores as a naturalized citizen. Ever since, the video app has been fighting for its life. It endured a major outage that stifled users' ability to upload videos, which fueled a fierce user backlash over perceived censorship. Now it's facing an ascendant competitor and an inquiry by the California governor.
TikTok's calamitous emigration began on 22 January when its Chinese parent company, ByteDance, finalized a deal to sell the app to a group of US investors, among them the business software giant Oracle. The day after the deal closed, its new owners altered its privacy policy to permit more extensive data collection.
During the weekend that followed, the US weathered a fearsome winter storm and the killing of an American citizen by federal immigration agents. Both knocked TikTok off its feet.
Winter Storm Fern crippled multiple Oracle datacenters that TikTok relies on. The app suffered severe outages as a result. Many users said they were unable to upload videos. Others said their videos received zero views despite significant followings. Many of those same users cried censorship as they tried to express their outrage over Alex Pretti's death via TikTok and found they could not. Prominent personalities said they would leave the app.
After days of outcry, TikTok issued a statement ascribing the problems to the snow, ice and cold. That did not stop California governor Gavin Newsom from announcing the next day that his office would investigate the app's alleged suppression of content critical of Donald Trump.
TikTok's late attribution of blame did little to assuage public criticism. The exodus has propelled a new competitor, Upscrolled, which promises less censorship than TikTok, to the top spot in the US Apple App Store and the third spot in the Google Play Store. Upscrolled's founder said in a conversation at the Web Summit Qatar that the app now boasts more than 2.5m users.
With more than a billion users worldwide, it seems unlikely that TikTok will altogether vanish as a result of these failures. TikTok's first week in the US does not bode well, though.
...When you jackhammer into the sewer, you get covered in shit. That's what the Epstein Files are: shit. Unredacted to antagonize the victims; redacted to protect the perpetrators; released in a slow drip to acclimatize people to horror; released in an enormous drop to overwhelm people with fear.
They transform pain into social media content. They turn pain into predator contentment. The pursuit of truth is always noble: but not the sluggish or careless release of a partial reveal. Not when it's about a pedophile rape cabal of ethno-supremacist billionaires and their enablers.
Not when that cabal holds power and we are left navigating a world we would have avoided had more people told the truth &mdash and believed the truth-tellers.
This story could have been told in real time: and if it had been, it wouldn't be this story. If people had believed the Epstein victims when they first came forward, the next wave of horrors would not have happened. If careerists had not been so easy to bribe and blackmail, ordinary people would not have to suffer under this group of sadistic oligarchs and politicians. Our era is the culmination of complicity.
Everyone likes to look at the dots. But when I connect them, people scream. Often because when I'm done connecting the dots, they are looking at a portrait of someone they know.
quotes Timothy Morton (he of Hyperobjects): There are objects: cinnamon, microwaves, interstellar particles and scarecrows. There is nothing underneath objects. Or, better, there is not even nothing underneath them. There is no such thing as space independent of objects (happily contemporary physics agrees). What is called Universe is a large object that contains objects such as black holes and racing pigeons. Likewise there is no such thing as an environment: wherever we look for it, we find all kinds of objects—biomes, ecosystems, hedges, gutters and human flesh. In a similar sense, there is no such thing as Nature. I've seen penguins, plutonium, pollution and pollen. But I've never seen Nature (I capitalize the word to reinforce a sense of its deceptive artificiality).
...Likewise, there is no such thing as matter. I've seen plenty of entities (this book shall call them objects): photographs of diffusion cloud chamber scatterings, drawings of wave packets, iron filings spreading out around a magnet. But I've never seen matter. So when Mr. Spock claims to have found 'Matter without form,' he is sadly mistaken... You can now buy a backpack that is made of recycled plastic bottles. But an object doesn't consist of some gooey substrate of becoming that shifts like Proteus from plastic bottle to backpack. First there is the plastic bottle, then the production of the bag ends the bottle, its being is now only an appearance, a memory of the backpack, a thought: "This bag is made of plastic bottles... Nature [...] is 'discovered in the use of useful things.'
...
Matter, in current physics, is simply a state of information. Precisely: information is necessarily information-for (for some addressee). Matter requires at least one other entity in order to be itself... Instead of using matter as my basic substrate, I shall paint a picture of the Universe that is realist but not materialist. In my view, real objects exist inside other real objects. 'Space' and 'environment' are ways in which objects sensually relate to the other objects in their vicinity, including the larger objects in which they find themselves... There is no space or environment as such, only objects... The existence of an object is irreducibly a matter of coexistence. Objects contain other objects, and are contained 'in' other objects... What are these objects, then, that claustrophobically fill every nook and cranny of reality, that are reality, like the leering faces in an Expressionist painting, crammed into the picture plane? On what basis can we decide that there is no top, middle, or bottom object, that objects are bigger on the inside than they are on the outside, that they generate time and space, and so on?
We are living in the most volatile period of the 21st century. Something big is unfolding in front of our eyes.
Power is shifting, old institutions are weakening, and the systems that once guaranteed stability are no longer trusted the way they used to be.
What we are witnessing today is not just a market cycle
It is a transition from one era to another.
...History teaches us something very important: big crashes never come out of nowhere.
They are the result of long-standing pressures inside the system. When those pressures reach a breaking point, the system does not gently adjust — it breaks violently.
Today, all signs suggest that the system is at the breaking point.
...Debt grows faster than income.
Eventually, one small shock reveals how fragile the system has become.
Crashes are not caused by one event. They are caused by systems stretched too far.
Today, we are once again in that late stage. But unlike previous cycles, the stress is no longer limited to one sector like technology or housing. It is spread across stocks, credit, government debt, and currencies at the same time.
...When the United States and its allies froze Russia's foreign exchange reserves, the message sent to the rest of the world was loud and clear: the dollar is not just money — it is a weapon.
Russia technically "owned" those reserves, but it could not use them.
In effect, assets held in dollars were revealed to be conditional, usable only as long as political alignment exists. For many countries, this was a wake-up call.
From that moment, central banks around the world began to reassess their exposure. Not overnight, not dramatically — but steadily and deliberately. Countries including China, Japan, India, and several European states started reducing their dollar-denominated reserves and increasing their holdings of gold, an asset with no counterparty risk and no political master.
This shift is visible today in record central-bank gold purchases. It is not speculation. It is preparation.
Today, in the era of Donald Trump, this weaponisation of the dollar intensified.
Tariffs, sanctions, trade threats, and financial pressure became routine tools of US foreign policy — applied not only to rivals, but increasingly to allies as well.
This is happening at the worst possible time.
The United States is now carrying more than $38 trillion in debt, a level many economists describe as structurally unsustainable. Even more alarming is the cost of servicing that debt. Interest payments are exploding, consuming an ever-larger share of government spending.
Borrowing is no longer being used to invest in growth or productivity. It is increasingly being used simply to pay interest on past borrowing.
History is very clear on this point: when a state reaches the stage where debt sustains debt, confidence eventually breaks.
...The bubble is not only in stocks, real estate, or technology. It is in the very instruments that hold the system together.
When housing collapsed in 2008, money survived.
When tech collapsed in 2000, bonds survived.
If Treasuries collapse, money itself is questioned.
That is the line the world is now approaching.
...Crashes rarely begin with stock selling. They usually begin with credit stress. Across the US economy, companies and consumers are heavily leveraged. Many firms must refinance large amounts of debt at much higher interest rates than before.
This squeezes profits and increases default risk. When weaker borrowers fail, lenders pull back. Credit dries up. Investment slows. Layoffs rise. Demand falls. Financial stress then spreads from markets into the real economy.
The danger today is that this tightening of credit could occur while AI valuations remain stretched and while governments themselves are deeply indebted.
If you are stuck at home, if a disease has begun to eat away the face of your nation, if illness has tinged even the once reliably boring moments of your life with terror, you might start to go a little batty, and, if that happens, you might start to watch the same few movies again and again, the passing hours registered only by the shade of light in the window, at which point you will begin to notice hidden patterns, secret meanings. You will finally hear what such films have been trying to tell you all along.
This is what happened to me in the last few weeks with the movies of Stanley Kubrick, which, on repeat viewing, have turned out to be lousy with portents. Even the most overlooked of the director's films, Eyes Wide Shut, which he was fiddling with when he died, sounds a clarion call through time, revealing the actual nature of a society now being swept aside by the virus.
Kubrick's message is simple: you know nothing.
It's a truth demonstrated via allegory, the story of a powerful man beset by demons. Of course, to many, the movie was always more than a parable. It was an exposé written in code. It revealed a dynamic that had long played out in sectors of elite society but was not glimpsed until our own age, an age of scandal, the most telling being the scandal of Jeffrey Epstein.
In short, Eyes Wide Shut is not fiction. It's documentary. It's a great artist, at the end of a brilliant career, uncovering hidden evil.
What is the function of art?
Is it to show us something diverting, beautiful, new?
Or is it to tell us what we've always known but never admitted to ourselves?
The Epstein affair is a microcosm of our era, a miniature that stands for the whole. It's not just a cabal of cultists that devours young women, as seen in the movie, but the culture itself, which worships an ancient Canaanite god that can be appeased only with the lives of children. Eyes Wide Shut is an eschatological guide to that era, a book of Revelation that prophesized terrible events.
...this was not just about abuse, but leverage. Epstein collected secrets, and secrets are currency. That currency appears to have been spent in ways that transcend personal gain, pointing toward geopolitical manipulation.
...Epstein's operations bore the hallmarks of a classic kompromat scheme: lure powerful men into compromising situations, record the evidence, and exploit it for leverage.
...The pattern is clear: Epstein cultivated access to elites, entrapped them in compromising situations, and maintained meticulous records. This was not random depravity—it was systematic extortion. Epstein's island was less a playground than a trap. Every guest was a potential asset. The files suggest that Epstein's operations were designed to engender leverage, not merely indulgence.
...Cryptocurrencies are, roughly speaking, assets where “ownership” is defined not by legal title but by possession of a digital key — a long number — validated by the blockchain, a decentralized record-keeping system. If you know a crypto asset's key — whether you purchased it, stole it by hacking, or kidnapped someone and tortured him until he revealed it — the asset is yours.
...an administration that has, from top to bottom, merged a social-media-first worldview with authoritarian tendencies. I like to call it the clicktatorship. Political appointees in the clicktatorship are not just using online platforms as a mode of communication. Their judgment and decision making are hyper-responsive to what's happening on the far-right internet. They view everything as content.
No one better exemplifies the clicktatorship than the president himself. Trump routinely makes policy announcements via social media.
...Bitcoin and to a lesser extent other cryptocurrencies have long been sustained by their cult followings, investors with a deep emotional attachment to its future. Cultists HODLed — not an acronym for anything, just a frantic misspelling of HOLD — when prices fell, and piled in to buy more. But recently crypto hoarders like Strategy and BitMine — companies that issue stock and debt and use the proceeds to buy crypto — have become major players. And I doubt that investors will have the same mystical belief in Strategy shares that they used to have in Bitcoin itself, which means that faith will no longer put a floor under prices.
...crypto has become very much a political asset. In 2024 the industry invested huge sums getting Donald Trump elected and in general electing friendly politicians, and since then has spent even larger sums directly enriching Trump and his family.
These investments have paid off. Some of the payoffs have involved the president's pardon power: In November Forbes — Forbes! — published an article titled "Trump's crypto cronies: They sent the president money — and got off easy."
But there was also a huge financial payoff: Crypto-friendly policies and the perception that the U.S. government would actively promote crypto assets helped fuel a huge rise in the prices of Bitcoin and other assets
...The US government is spending two trillion dollars more per year than it takes in. Think about that. Two trillion.
...Companies like Nvidia is worth five trillion dollars now. Just seven companies out of the entire S&P 500 are responsible for almost all the gains in the last twelve months.
...So how does this happen? Why is the market rising when the economy is weakening?
The answer is artificial support. Three main pillars propping everything up.
First, the Fed cutting interest rates. Three times in a row. When interest rates drop, borrowing becomes cheaper. Companies buy back their own stocks. Consumers spend more. All that money flows into markets.
Second, government spending. Two trillion dollars more that the government is spending every single year. Where does that money go? It goes to companies. Those companies pay other companies. It ends up in the stock market.
Third, AI hype. People are excited about artificial intelligence. Stock prices are going up based on how much these companies are spending, not on whether they're actually making profits. It remind me of the dot-com bubble. People said "this time is different." Then it busted.
...The fundamental issue is that there is no traditional way out of this mess.
You can't print more money without causing hyperinflation. You can't cut spending without getting voted out of office. You can't raise taxes without the same problem. You can't default on the debt without destroying the dollar's reserve status. You can't grow the economy at 8 percent for decades because that never happens.
So the only path that makes financial sense is what they already doing. Keep the Fed propping things up. Keep government spending artificially boosting markets. Keep the system liquid so it don't collapse.
And that what gonna happen. The government don't want a recession. The powers that be enjoying the bonanza. So they gonna keep printing. They gonna keep spending.
Anything that is in the world when you're born is normal and ordinary and is just a natural part of the way the world works. Anything that's invented between when you're fifteen and thirty-five is new and exciting and revolutionary and you can probably get a career in it. Anything invented after you're thirty-five is against the natural order of things.
This notion is much on my mind right now because the world is (to me, at least) unassailably in a state of change, and everything is up for grabs. Europe went from 15 years behind on its climate goals to ten years ahead of schedule after the supply of Russian gas dried up and Europeans found themselves shivering in the dark. The massive leap in EU solar means that the (seemingly) all-powerful fossil fuel lobby has absolutely, comprehensively eaten shit, something that was unthinkable just a few years ago
...today's price action shouldn't change your view about Bitcoin's usefulness or lack thereof. If, like me, you consider the whole thing a delusion — BTC isn't a medium of exchange, nor is it a reliable store of value — then you already knew that and the fact that we seem to be having a Wile E. Coyote moment isn't information about the fundamentals. (There are no fundamentals.) If you have some story about why this aging financial innovation is actually useful — do tell — you should HODL through the panic.
Incidentally, some readers insisted that HODL stands for "hold on for dear life." No, it doesn't. That's a retcon intended to make it sound more respectable. The term comes from a post on a crypto message board from an investor so panicked that he misspelled HOLD.
...the fact that BTC is now lower than it was before the 2024 election is significant in two ways. It shows the limits of political favor — all the boasts about making American a crypto superpower, all the deregulatory talk and pardons for cryptocriminals, in the end couldn't defy gravity.
But it also means that everyone who bought Bitcoin in the belief that Trump would make Bitcoin greater than ever has lost money, in many cases a lot of money. So this is another case of ETTD: everything Trump touches dies.
And grant that this your noise hath chid down all the majesty of England. Imagine that you see the wretched strangers, their babies at their backs with their poor luggage, plodding to the ports and coasts for transportation; and that you sit as kings in your desires, authority quite silenced by your brawl, and you in ruff of your opinions clothed. What have you got?
I'll tell you: you have taught how insolence and strong hand should prevail, how order should be quelled. And by this pattern not one of you should live an aged man; for other ruffians, as their fancies wrought, with self‑same hand, self reason and self‑right, would shark on you, and men like ravenous fishes feed on one another.
You'll put down strangers, kill them, cut their throats, possess their houses. Oh, desperate as you are, wash your foul minds with tears; and those same hands that you, like rebels, lift against the peace, lift up for peace, and your unreverent knees, make them your feet to kneel, to be forgiven.
And say now the king, as he is clement if the offender mourn, should so much come too short of your great trespass as but to banish you. Whither would you go?
What country, by the nature of your error, should give you harbor? Go you to France or Flanders, to any German province, Spain or Portugal—anywhere that not adheres to England—why, you must needs be strangers.
Would you be pleased to find a nation of such barbarous temper, that, breaking out in hideous violence, would not afford you an abode on earth; set their detested knives against your throats, spurn you like dogs, and, like as if that God owned not nor made not you, nor that the elements were all appropriate to your comforts, but chartered unto them?
What would you think, to be thus used?
This is the stranger's case; and this your mountainish inhumanity...
...As of a couple years ago, Americans' ignorance of their own immigration system was merely frustrating, as I encountered both squishy liberals and xenophobic conservatives talking about undocumented immigrants and insisting that they should "just follow the rules." But today, as murderous ICE squads patrol our streets kidnapping people and sending them to concentration camps where they are beaten to death or deported to offshore slave labor prisons, the issue has gone from frustrating to terrifying and enraging.
...dealing with the immigration process costs tens of thousands of dollars in legal fees, and without a lawyer, it is essentially unnavigable. Same goes for Trump's "Golden Visa" for rich people — anyone who can afford to pay for one of these is already spending five- or six-figure sums with a white shoe immigration firm.
...When you deal with US immigration authorities, everything is elevated to the highest possible stakes. Every step of every process – work visa, green card, citizenship – comes with forms that you sign, on penalty of perjury, attesting that you have made no mistakes or omissions. A single error constitutes a potential falsification of your paperwork, and can result in deportation – losing your job, your house, your kid's schooling, everything.
...I tried to call the US immigration service's info line. It is now staffed exclusively by an AI chatbot (thanks, Elon). I tried a dozen times to get the chatbot to put me on the phone with a human who could confirm what I should do about visits to the US that I took more than 50 years ago, when I was two years old. But the chatbot would only offered to text me a link to the online form, which has no guidance on this subject.
...Anyone who says that "immigrants should just follow the rules" has missed the fact that the rules are impossible to follow. I get to do luxury Kafka, the business class version of US immigration Kafka, where you get to board first and nibble from a dish of warm nuts while everyone else shuffles past you
...This was terrible a couple years ago, when the immigration system still had human operators you could reach by sitting on hold for several hours. Today, thanks to a single billionaire's gleeful cruelty, the system is literally unnavigable, "staffed" by a chatbot that can't answer basic questions. A timely reminder that the only jobs AI can do are the jobs that no one gives a shit about
...Southwest sucks today because of just one guy: Paul Singer, the billionaire owner of Elliott Investment Management, who bought a stake in SWA and used it to force the board to end open seating and free bag-check, then sold off his stake and disappeared into the sunset, millions richer, leaving behind a pile of shit where a beloved airline once flew
...One guy, Elon Musk, took the immigration system from "frustrating and inefficient" to "totally impossible." That same guy is an avowed white nationalist — and illegal US immigrant who did cheat the immigration system — who sadistically celebrates the unlimited cruelty the immigration system heaps on other immigrants
...composed of sycophants, global toadies and war criminals, with a failure to communicate. It's a lame attempt to a) supplant the UN as the governing umbrella of international organizations and NGO's, and b) raise cash for and stoke the ego for Trump. Martin Edelman, Trump's New York real estate lawyer, would also be part of the executive board, as would his chief-of-staff, Susie Wiles. Edelman's inclusion tips Trump's hand about his real goals, which is to pave the way (literally) for a Trump resort on the Gaza beachfront. By the way, Edelman also advises the United Arab Emirates. Nickolay Mladenov, the UN High Representative for Gaza serves as the operations director for implementation.
The whole thing is a front for Trump's real estate development ambitions for a Gaza beachfront resort. Also included on the Executive Board are Secretary of State Marco Rubio, special envoy Steve Witkoff, Trump's son-in-law Jared Kushner, and former deputy national security adviser Robert Gabriel. They are joined by Republican donor Marc Rowan, World Bank president Ajay Banga and former UK prime minister Tony Blair. This is unvarnished orientalist, imperialism at its worst
...Jared Kushner sees Gaza as a grand real estate development ripe to happen and $ signs in his eyes. Permanent membership requires a $1B fee, and guess who gets to keep all the money? The greatest grifter of all time has already made $1.4B since the start of his presidency through blackmail, extortion and threats of groundless legal complaints. It's never enough. Any country can join the BOP for three years without the $1B ante, but permanent members have to pay up. It's tough to imagine who would want to, considering no nation or person, other than Trump has any decision-making authority. So the motivations for paying are tariff abatement, bribery and stoking Trump's ego for future considerations or forgiveness. The 27 signatory nations are: Argentina, Albania, Armenia, Azerbaijan, Bahrain, Belarus, Bulgaria, Cambodia, Egypt, El Salvador, Hungary, Indonesia, Israel, Jordan, Kazakhstan, Kosovo, Morocco, Mongolia, Pakistan, Paraguay, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, Turkey, the United Arab Emirates, Uzbekistan and Vietnam.
...The member nations are mostly autocratic and authoritarian regimes, and weaker nations willing to ponying up the $1B to curry Trump's favor, and tariff relief. The BOP Charter provides for NO vote among members on resolutions, defers to Trump on all substantive decisions, and requires his signature to enact them.
...(b) The Chairman shall have exclusive authority to create, modify, or dissolve subsidiary entities as necessary or appropriate to fulfill the Board of Peace's mission.
...before mistaking Carney for a Sankara or a Lumumba, one must recall his administration's record on the slaughter in Gaza. The irony is inescapable: Carney rails against a world where "might makes right" when it involves American tariffs or threats to Greenland, yet he presides over a policy that facilitates exactly that in the Middle East.
...Respect for international law, it seems, is a "bazooka" to be used against trade rivals, but a meritless nuisance when applied to Israel.
...The West's conception of a "global order" has always been structural, not accidental—privileging its own strategic interests while marginalizing the rights of the Global South. This imbalance is not a bug in the system; it is the very modus operandi of the system itself. Canada and Europe are only crying foul now because, for the first time in generations, they feel the walls of the privileged club closing in on them. They scream for international law to protect their trade routes and borders from Trump, yet they actively dismantle that same law to shield an ally in Gaza.
An Ontology is a categorization of the world. In Foundry, the Ontology is the digital twin of an organization, a rich semantic layer that sits on top of the digital assets (datasets and models) integrated into Foundry. The Foundry Ontology creates a complete picture of an organization's world by mapping datasets and models to object types, properties, link types, and action types.
Ontology — the philosophical study of existence and the computer science practice of defining relationships between concepts — is often touted in academia as essential for organizing knowledge. If it's so useful, why is the term virtually absent from the engineering trenches of the world's biggest technology companies?
My answer is not that these companies ignore ontology but relying on it so fundamentally that it has been abstracted, rebranded, and woven into the very fabric of their infrastructure.
...In computer science and information science, an ontology is a formal naming and definition of the types, properties, and interrelationships of the entities that really exist for a particular domain of discourse.
...When Google launched its Knowledge Graph in 2012, they weren't inventing a new concept; they were industrializing ontology.
...Ontology is currently experiencing a massive resurgence in importance due to Generative AI and Agentic AI.
LLMs like GPT-4 are incredible at language, but they have no inherent concept of truth. They hallucinate. To make LLMs useful in a corporate setting (like an internal chatbot for Microsoft employees or an Alexa product answer), you must ground the AI in facts.
How do you provide facts to an AI efficiently? You feed it structured data from your Knowledge Graph (a process often called Retrieval-Augmented Generation or RAG).
To say our world is going through some changes is a bit of an understatement. Alliances are shifting, trade agreements and the old rules-based-order are splintering and the institutions that underpinned this order such as the United Nations, are showing a few cracks in their seams. These sorts of cycles have long played out in our history, but there's a different factor in this cycle. Unlike ever before, today much of the world lives in two worlds, the physical and the digital.
...There are three, perhaps four, possible ways we may, if you will, reorganize ourselves into new tribes. I'm using the word habitus here to describe these new tribal formations. Habitus is a sense of being and knowing.
...The European Union Habitus ...The Authoritarian Digital Habitus ...The US Market Habitus
...Our world is a wee bit stressed out right now. We are in a cycle of immense change, in some ways, revolutions. Not all revolutions are violent, but all are about flipping from old ways to new ways. It may just be that having all these digital tools and ability to communicate will be the key to our advancement. But there are no rules yet, new ones have to be determined, new best practices. The interesting part is that this is a great time of experimentation. To be bold. And accept that it's going to be messy for a while.
Netflix rode a first‑mover advantage and very cheap capital to global scale. The legacy studios panicked at the sight of their licensing cash cow defecting to the rival camp. Everyone decided that the future of television is a loss‑making "growth" story dressed up in venture‑capital drag; too much money chased too few paying eyeballs. Eventually Wall Street discovered the P&L, demands free cash flow, and the brave new world of "everything on demand, ad‑free, at $6.99 a month" collapses back into bundles, ads, consolidation, and a frantic attempt to get back to the low-cost shared-monopoly of the cable bundle.
Meanwhile, YouTube quietly became the largest "television network" on earth.
But beforehand, from the inside, it did not feel the way it looked from the outside. It felt like a gold rush. And in what people imagine is a gold rush, everyone convinces themselves that they are Levi Strauss.
...Netflix's streaming innovation—take the back catalogs that studios had been dribbling out on cable channels and DVDs, wrap them in a snappy interface, and sell the whole thing as 'all you can eat" for the price of a matinee ticket—looked, to the studios, like easy money. They could license library content they had already amortized, get a big check. And they did not have to worry about cannibalization because, after all, this was just "non‑linear" complementing their linear windows.
Then, sometime between "House of Cards" and Disney's 2019 investor day, the penny dropped.
Netflix was not a quirky ancillary outlet. It was rebuilding the bundle in its own image, using everyone else's content as kindling. The studios' fear wasn't irrational. If you license your crown jewels to a player whose only moat is subscription scale and whose recommendation algorithm treats your brand as raw material, you are in the business of manufacturing your own undertaker.
So each studio pulled content back from Netflix and tried to become Netflix. They convinced themselves that the streaming P&L looked like software: high fixed costs, near‑zero marginal cost, global addressable market. All you had to do was endure a few years of red ink "building scale", reassure Wall Street that losses were really "investment", and wind up in half a decade in the Glorious Future of the subscription annuity machine.
And thus the weirdness began.
...the strangest twist is that Netflix is not really the apex predator in the attention economy. YouTube is. If you care about viewing time rather than subscriptions, YouTube is television, and now commands a larger share of total TV viewing in the US than any single subscription streamer with the radically different economic model of user‑generated ad‑supported content free at the point of use. Netflix has to spend on the order of $17 billion a year to fill its shelves; YouTube gets its inventory from millions of creators, compensated via revenue shares and the hope of fame.
...If the Warner Bros.-Netflix merger happens, that is: if Netflix has bribed the Trump family enough and if David and Larry Ellison and Paramount have bribed the Trump family too little and so insurmountable "regulatory" obstacles to the deal do not appear. Then Netflix can profit at pricing levels that other streamers cannot compete at, and they will either have to consolidate further, or throw in the towel and rent their shows out to Netflix at whatever prices it is willing to pay.
I think the term “fascism” is entirely justified. I think a case can be made that it fits well within the definition of historical fascism—or at least as close as it's possible to be in the post-World War II modern age.
A lot of people will reject the term "fascism" in a knee-jerk response because the term has been thrown around sloppily and has been so overused as a pejorative empty of meaning. There's a joke which says that fascism simply means "politics I don't like." People who like to tell that joke usually state that the term should never be used, and will invoke something called "Godwin's Law" to dismiss it outright (despite the fact that law's namesake has objected to it being used in this way).
But I don't subscribe to that. The fact that some people use the term sloppily or inaccurately does not preclude us from using it in a precise, specific way in accordance with political science and historical analysis.
Thus, when I use the term "fascist," I'm not using it simply as a pejorative, or as a synonym for "far right" or "authoritarian, even though other people might be using it that way. No, rather, I'm using in a very clinical, descriptive sense for a type of politics very similar to what the original word was used for.
And by that criteria, I think it's undeniable that the Trump administration and the MAGA (Morons Are Governing America) movement is fascist by even the loosest definition of the term. And to prove that point, I'm going to rely on some academic works from historians who have thought deeply about what fascism is (and is not). I'll be referring to The Nature of Fascism by Roger Griffin, and The Anatomy of Fascism by Robert Paxton, and also some of my own opinions.
(Griffin)..."Fascism is a genus of political ideology whose mythic core in its various permutations is a palingenetic form of populist ultranationalism."
Let's unpack this definition. “Palingenesis” is a fancy term which refers to the notion of a kind of “rebirth.” As Griffin describes, the “mobilizing vision” of fascism is “that of the national community rising phoenix-like after a period of encroaching decadence which all but destroyed it.” He describes its “mythic core” of fascism as, “…rationalizing ephemeral collective movements of extreme violence, including those bent on overthrowing society when it is perceived to be in crisis and replacing it by a new order.”
The idea is that the nation was once great, but has been brought down and humiliated by its enemies. Those enemies may be external—such as military conquest—but more often they are internal, such as opposition parties, leftists, socialists, free-thinkers, nonconformists, "moral degenerates," ethnic and sexual minorities, and immigrants. Thus, in order to restore the nation to its former greatness, then, these subversive elements must be purged. It is essentially backwards-looking, even while it promises a glorious, shining future. It is simultaneously both anti-modern and futuristic, something historian Jeffrey Herf has described as "Reactionary modernism."
"Populism" doesn't just mean a political philosophy that is popular. It is a very specific political style which divides the world into two groups: the "elites," and the "common people." The elites are depicted as the enemy who are responsible for the fall from greatness, and for everything wrong with society. According to this philosophy, the elites are oppressing the common people, who are depicted as the true soul of the nation, and the only "real" citizens. Thus, the elites must be defeated and destroyed for the nation to rise up again and for the common people to throw off their oppression. It often depicts the movement as "outsiders" or "anti-establishment," even when backed by some of the most wealthy and powerful people in the county.
In practice, populism tends to degenerate into internal strife and conflict as people try to figure out exactly who is an "elite" and who is the "common people." For populists, elites end up getting amalgamated into a broad, undifferentiated "they" who are unfairly persecuting us and our leader. "They" are out to get us, which leads into another common feature of populism: paranoia and conspiracy theories.
...Modern forms of populism tend to depict different elites. Left-wing populism sees billionaires, oligarchs, big business, corporate monopolies, bankers, international finance and Wall Street as the enemies. Right-wing populism sees journalists and the media, academics, universities and higher education, the civil service, the independent judiciary, unions, college-educated professionals, scientists, the opposition party and its voters, foreigners, Muslims, leftists, immigrants, and basically everyone trying uphold the liberal (in a Lockean sense) order as "elites," and therefore the enemy who are oppressing the “real” people, typically depicted as blue-collar, Christian, and rural.
In addition, populism claims legitimacy from the alleged support of the "common people" rather than established political institutions or elections, which they regard as hopelessly corrupt and compromised. By this standard, it does not matter whether they have a numerical majority or not, since the movement expresses the true will of the "common people," and the "common people" are defined as those who support the movement in opposition to those who don't.
...Whereas traditional liberal political parties see opposition parties as co-equal-partners in good-faith debates over the direction of the country; and cooperation, compromise and consensus as means to achieve their political goals, palingenic ultra-nationalism sees other political parties as enemies and traitors to be abolished, not negotiated with. Thus its goal is the elimination of political opposition, and those who disagree with their vision, in order to carry out their utopian political program.
So, does Donald Trump and his "Make America great again" movement meet the "fascist minimum"—the minimum criteria that must be met in order to qualify as "fascist" historically?
I think it's pretty obvious that it does. Populist? Check. Ultra-nationalist? Check. Anti-rational and anti-modern? Check. Charismatic authority? Check. I mean, it's right there in the fucking name!
..."Authoritarianism" is both a political style and a personality type. Authoritarianism stresses obedience, loyalty and conformity above all other values. It abandons any notion of objective morality with subservience to authority. It takes an inflexible "the rules are the rules" approach, and deems those who suffer punishment for any transgression whatsoever as "deserving what they get." It rejects pluralism and democracy in favor of a single faction—or even a despot—issuing orders. It is often based around tribalism and the leader's cult of personality which followers can rally behind. It tends to celebrate the patriarchal "strict father" archetype.
...["reactionary" is] often used as a slur for people who tack to the right of the "traditional" right-wing parties which are more centrist and conciliatory, or as a synonym for "far right." But, in reality, a political reactionary is someone who wants to return to a previous social order and is willing to burn down society in order to do so. Rather than the conventional right-wing concerns such as tax rates and business regulations, reactionary politics is a totalizing, all-encompassing vision of a new social order.
In practice, reactionaries tend to embrace a hypermasculinist ideal, and disparage "feminism," childless people, ethnic and religious minorities, and homosexuals. They want to blend church and state in the manner similar to pre-Enlightenment European monarchies. They want a hierarchical, patriarchal society where women are confined to the domestic sphere and away from politics and leadership, exemplified by the Nazi slogan “Kinder, Küche, Kirche” (and by the currently trendy "tradwife" movement). They disparage "multiculturalism," atheism and and "degeneracy" (by which they mean transgressing gender norms), and wish to return to an imagined homogeneous ethnostate. It is deeply intertwined with cultural pessimism and is obsessed with decadence and decline, from which it derives its revolutionary ethos.
I think it's pretty indisputable that the modern Republican party can be accurately described as an "authoritarian reactionary populist movement," which fits with my definition of fascism. Its reactionary tilt is subsumed under the anodyne phrase of "culture war." Its authoritarian personality cult is glaringly obvious. And it enthusiastically embraces the "politics of hate," seeing itself in a total war with the opposition and willing to use the organs of the state to forcibly suppress opposition and dissent.
The people who support this regime, yet reject this term, are simply in denial. They know that fascism is bad, so therefore they reject the label via some sort of rationalization (such as the nonsensical argument described above), despite the fact that their beliefs conform almost exactly to those held by historical fascists, the only differences being culturally specific (e.g. hatred of brown immigrants instead of Jews, worshiping Trump instead of Mussolini, watching Newsmax instead of listening to Goebbels, or imprisoning Democrats instead of Communists).
Democrats are pushing for Bill and Hillary Clinton to testify about their involvement with Epstein. And Republicans are freaking out.
But here's what's actually funny about this moment. Republicans just locked themselves into something they're going to deeply regret.
Because once they establish that former presidents have to testify under congressional subpoena about their ties to Epstein, they can't suddenly pretend that doesn't apply to Trump.
And Trump knows it.
...Here's what Trump's probably thinking. He's thinking he can get away with what Clinton gets away with. Maybe some tough questioning. Maybe some headlines. But ultimately walking free.
But Trump's different.
Clinton's a cautious politician. He knows how to testify. He knows how to hedge. He knows how to use language carefully.
Trump can't help himself. He lies constantly. About everything. On purpose.
And it's a federal crime to lie to Congress.
It's a federal crime to defy a congressional subpoena.
So if Trump shows up and lies about something that can be proven false, he's committing a crime. If he doesn't show up, that's a crime too.
...Republicans established that former presidents answer congressional subpoenas about Epstein involvement. They established that presidential families are fair game. They established that the criteria is whether you have involvement with Epstein, not your party affiliation.
Trump's name appears in the files thousands of times. Way more than Clinton's. Way more than anyone's.
So if Clinton testifies, Trump's next. And Trump can't claim it's unfair because his own party members just said it's fair.
...Obviously the most important aspect of that scandal is the lurid elite corruption revealed by what we already know (and what is still being covered up?). The backlash against Me Too and cancel culture takes on new meaning now that we know that some leading figures in that backlash were having sex with underage girls.
But the corruption we're learning about wasn't just deep. It was also broad: A remarkable number of people were involved with Epstein years after his 2008 conviction as a sex abuser, including, I regret to say, quite a few academics. I believe (and hope) that only a small minority of the hundreds and hundreds in Epstein's extended circle received sexual favors. A larger number of people were probably receiving financial favors, but most weren't. And as someone who has been on the speaking circuit and knows academics in the consulting game, I can tell you that the sums of money we're hearing about are small potatoes.
So what was the secret of Epstein's influence? I'm speculating here, but I believe that a lot of his reach came from his skill at seducing people by providing them with a sense of exclusivity and privilege. To be associated with Epstein meant receiving invitations to participate in fancy dinners or to stay at one of his many luxurious residences in all the best places, including his private island. If you were chums with Jeffrey Epstein, you felt that you were a member of a glittering set of insiders. And that was enough to make you look away when the young woman pouring your drink looked just a little bit too much like your teenage daughter.
So what does all this say about politics and policy? It says to beware — beware in particular of a president whose lifestyle is saturated in dictator chic and who invites his officials to share. Because just as those in Epstein's circle looked away when the "help" looked a little too young and nubile, Trump's cabinet members look away when ICE is gunning down and terrorizing people in the streets.
It's hard to talk about the Epstein class without thinking about "The Economy" – "The Economy" in the sense of a kind of mystical, free-floating entity whose health or sickness determines the outcomes for all the rest of us, whom we must make sacrifices to if we are to prosper.
As nebulous as "The Economy" is as an entity, there's an economic priesthood that claims it can measure and even alter the course of the economy using complex mathematics. We probably won't ever understand their methods, but we can at least follow an indicator or two, such as changes to GDP, an aggregated statistic that is deceptively precise, given that it subsumes any number of estimates, qualitative judgments and wild-ass guesses, which are all disguised behind an official statistic that is often published to three decimal places.
There's plenty to criticize about GDP: a healthy GDP doesn't necessarily mean that the average worker is better off. When your rent goes up, so does GDP. Same with your salary going down (provided this results in more spending by your boss). GDP isn't really a measure of the health of "The Economy" – it's a measure of the parts of "The Economy" that make rich people (that is, the Epstein class) better off.
But what if there was a way to make money from calamitous collapses in GDP? What if the wealthy didn't just win when "number go up," but also when "number eat shit?"
...Musk's move is premised, at least implicitly, on the notion that the current aggressive data-center buildout essentially never ends: Not only will we want to train new models, but once they are trained we will want to use them a lot, and not just to do “computer stuff” as in current A.I. applications, but to run vast armies of robots. The future robot population will be limited by manufacturing capacity but also by the capacity to harness energy to run A.I. inference.
...The technical and logistical challenges to creating large-scale orbital data centers seem daunting, but so are the challenges to dramatically accelerating the pace at which such things are built on Earth. There are limited gas turbines available, there is political resistance to projects that raise electricity costs, and while bring-your-own solar solves the electricity cost problems, it means that the physical data-center footprint gets that much larger, creating even bigger NIMBY issues.
But the space idea is something that could pan out, and it would be a mistake to let affective dislike of Musk blind us to the possibility that he's about to become even richer and more powerful.
...one has to start with the printing press! In 1474 Catholic scribes in Genoa petitioned to have printing presses outlawed. How dare an average person read the bible? Even as early as 1565, Swiss scientist Conrad Gessner warned we faced "information overload"... sound familiar? He claimed reading could be confusing and harmful... I do hope reading this isn't being harmful. The Penny Dreadful panics in the 1800s were blamed for murders, suicides and children turning into rabid criminals.
...The Recurring Pattern:
1. New technology emerges
2. It threatens existing power structures or social norms
3. Medical/religious/moral authorities manufacture fears
4. The fears almost always target women and children first ("for the children!")
5. The technology becomes normalized; the panic seems absurd in retrospect
6. A new technology arrives; repeat
...This all put together suggests these technology panics and fears are less about the technology it's about the disruption of existing norms, anxieties and traditions being threatened. Women and children have long been, in Western societies (not others) as vulnerable and thus become a canary in the coal mine. Authorities invoke that old mantra "think of the children", which actually signals that this technology may be a threat to social reproduction and thus to the transmission of culture itself.
In a way, these technology panics serve a function in our cultural immune system. It's a way of society figuring out if this technology is a foreign body that ought not to be here and us deciding whether to reject, tolerate or integrate them. We're asking if this technology will enslave us or save us. Will it make us more human or less?
there are many places in the contemporary world where children do that kind of labor, including in the United States, and there has been a recent stirring of interest in some American state legislators about lifting some of the existing restrictions on employing children
Arranged marriage and child marriage?
These were never substantially eliminated in the first place, and at least some societies that defended arranged marriage have in the last two decades actually strengthened that defense, often with the endorsement of people who are in arranged marriages. The demographic trends in some parts of the world are heading in the other direction, towards marriage later in life or no marriage at all, but not necessarily out of an ethical objection to marriage earlier in life.
Blood sports?
with the shift to drone warfare, there are already many cameras on battlefields that witness soldiers and civilians killing and being killed and it doesn't seem utterly improbable that someone could monetize those images as a gruesome form of future entertainment.
Deliberate killing of civilians?
I don't think that ever really stopped, it's just that the people in command of militaries and military policies acted as if killing civilians on purpose wasn't something that they did. But land mines weren't laid in all sorts of conflicts to impede the movement of militaries, they were laid to punish civilians and control movement more generally
...Menzies and his colleagues maintain a large population of hundreds of fat-tailed dunnarts (Sminthopsis crassicaudata), which are considered to be one of the closest relatives of the extinct Tasmanian tiger (Thylacinus cynocephalus). In collaboration with the firm Colossal Biosciences, they hope to one day bring back the Tasmanian tiger, or something resembling it, by gene-editing dunnarts.
https://royalsocietypublishing.org/rsos/article/13/2/251970/480242/Dunnart-neonates-actively-climb-to-the-pouch-after">Dunnart neonates actively climb to the pouch after birth Brandon R Menzies et al. Royal Society Open Science
...'idity, like outraged anger and pissy resentment, is truly viral: it is as clickable as it is trapping, and like a computer virus, once we've clicked, it delivers its payload, wrecking our logic-driven systems, locking up our minds and keyboards, and demanding its ransom. As a global deployment, it hits with a huge force. It's payload is the grand and tragicomic irony that induces a 🤦reaction in nearly everyone, then renders nearly everyone in that forcefield 😵💫: much less able to speak up, name, oppose, and destroy it. 'idity's 'efaction marinates everyone in the acidic asininity of its donkeypiss: Obamas are apes (tee hee); there are dick jokes and toilet humour and bombs over Caracas and Tehran; a nasty old seven-year old wants Greenland and a peace prize — and we have not words. In the face of the ass of 'idity, the world has been struck dumb.
...The study found that in a scenario where batteries with different chemistries are sourced across all of China and deployed until they are at 40 per cent of their original capacity, second-life grid storage starts to grow ever more rapidly after 2030, while new batteries plateau. Total capacity would reach 2 trillion watts by 2050.
...Back at Zatorre's lab, in Montreal, his collaborators imaged the brains of music lovers and found that the striatum—part of a network in the brain that releases dopamine during pleasurable activities—was deeply engaged, and seemingly in concert with the brain's auditory circuits, which help perceive and analyze sounds. That finding helped Zatorre develop a theory. To have an emotional musical experience, he proposed, you must have an interaction between the reward system and the auditory circuits. Brain imaging affirmed this idea: A 2016 fMRI study found that, in musical anhedonics, music produced below-average activation in reward areas, but gambling tasks did not. Musical anhedonics also had fewer connections between the auditory circuits and the striatum. In contrast, people who showed strong emotional responses to music had more connections
...Zatorre now thinks of music as a dance with expectation. I asked him if this might be why, in E.D.M. songs, the buildup before a "beat drop" is so exciting. It's a perfect example of an expectation that's first denied and then satisfied, he told me. "You're in suspense," he said. "You're floating in the air, waiting for this beat to come back. .... That's what I was waiting for."
There's a longstanding tradition in American politics of what Richard Hofstadter famously called the paranoid style — a way of thinking that sees conspiracies lurking everywhere. MAGA-world is particularly riddled with conspiracy thinking — from George Soros and Jewish space lasers, QAnon and the Great Replacement Theory, to Italian satellites hacking into voting machines to deliver the 2020 election to Joe Biden.
But these are far-fetched fantasies. The truth is far more banal and shocking.
There are people in positions of great power in the U.S. government engaged in evil conspiracies against everything that is good and decent. Their conspiracies are far more extensive and damaging than almost anyone imagined. But there are no evil masterminds behind this. Only amoral, stupid grifters like Howard Lutnick.
...The only waves he has made are a result of his exceptional combination of stupidity and offensive tone-deafness.
Thus he promised to revive U.S. manufacturing by bringing back "the work of millions and millions of human beings screwing in little, little screws." Lutnick, a billionaire, dismissed concerns about chaos at the Social Security Administration by saying that his mother-in-law wouldn't complain about a missed check. He gave a Europe-bashing speech to a private dinner at Davos so offensive that Christine Lagarde, president of the European Central Bank, walked out.
And in Congressional testimony today, Lutnick admitted that he visited Epstein Island, but said that he did so with his wife, nannies and children, and asserted that "We left with all of my children."
...The more we learn, the more pedophilia and criminal use of cryptocurrency look related, even like different aspects of a single conspiracy. Epstein, it turns out, was a major early investor in the crypto industry. In the backrooms of MAGA-land, passing around under-age girls is a lot like passing around insider crypto deals.
...Lutnick may be under wraps for a while, but don't expect him to resign. Pushing him out would be a tacit admission that huge conflicts of interest, family business that enables crime and association with sexual predators are bad. Oh, and let's not forget jaw-dropping stupidity. Not going to happen.
...Cigarette butts are things people don't give a second thought, but they are the most common plastic litter around the world
...People consume over 5.8 trillion cigarettes globally every year, generating about 8 million tons of waste cigarette butts. Their outer packaging is made of cellulose, a plant-derived material, and the filter tip is made of cellulose acetate, a man-made plastic. Cigarette butts also contain harmful substances such as lead and heavy metals. The plastic filters can take up to 10 years to completely degrade, but the chemicals they release can linger in the environment.
...cigarette butts as a low-cost, widely available carbon resource. Cigarette butts have a structure that makes them a promising starting point for making high quality porous carbon materials.
Such materials, with their very high surface area and ability to conduct charge, make excellent electrodes in energy storage devices. Specifically, devices called supercapacitors, which promise higher power output and faster charging than batteries.
...First they heat wet cigarette butts at 700°C. This converts the waste into a char-like material that looks like it's made of spherical carbon particles under the microscope.
Then the researchers treat the char with potassium hydroxide, which opens up the dense, smooth carbon spheres to create a porous network. During the process, nitrogen and oxygen are both introduced into the material, which evolves into a porous material with a 3D honeycomb-like structure with a huge surface area that allows ions and electrons to zip through.
Supercapacitors made with the material showed a high energy density of over 24 watt-hours per kilogram. This is higher than electrodes made from many biomass-derived and commercial activated carbon materials
The betel quid is one of the most commonly consumed psychoactive substances in the world. By archaeological evidence like the occurrence of areca nuts in archaeological sites, the typical overall reddish-brown staining on prehistoric human teeth or specific artifacts linked with the habit, it is assumed that this tradition reaches back to prehistoric times.
...the findings of this systematic review call for a paradigm shift, moving beyond a disease-focused lens to recognizing psychedelics' capacity to enhance well-being in healthy individuals, ultimately fostering human flourishing.
...Researchers set out to build a pangenome for the species Brassica rapa, whose subspecies include turnips, Chinese cabbage, and bok choy. To do so, they combined genomes from 1720 genetic sequences across individuals from seven subspecies. Last week in Science, the team reported finding 6992 new genes , including one that controlled how the leaf head forms, which is a key distinction between Chinese cabbage, turnip, and a Chinese leafy green called choy sum. The authors propose that B. rapa's immense genetic diversity could explain how the species quickly diversified during cultivation.
Constructing plant pangenomes can help researchers breed and domesticate important species, write the authors. In a related Perspective, plant biologists Pamela and Douglas Soltis predict that "it will soon no longer be unusual to find extensive genetic variation within species ... and the focus will turn to understanding the nature and function of this diversity."
...According to reports by the Maine Immigrant Rights Coalition and other groups following some verification activities, Border Patrol agents raided a bus and arrested at least 17 farmworkers in Skowhegan, where the bus was stopped near a housing area for farmworkers. The people snatched up were en-route to Backyard Farms to work, where they are contract workers. According to witnesses, at least one of those arrested was a U.S. citizen.
...now, I think immigration forces like ICE and Border Patrol are looking to turn up the heat in the rural parts of the state where you have immigrants (most of them here legally, I must note) working farms and such by just snatching them up and taking them who knows where to do who knows what to them. This concerns me already, and it's winter, when you have far fewer such workers. Farm work is scarcer this time of year. So what happens in the spring, summer and fall when we have more immigrant farm workers? What happens especially in summer when its tourist season and lots of hotels, resorts, and other businesses have immigrant workers, too, because there aren't enough locals to handle the extra work?
A self is a story of why you are you — a selective retelling of the myriad chance events between the birth of the universe and this moment: atoms bonding one way and not another, parents bonding with one partner and not another, values binding you to one culture and not another. Against this utter choicelessness in the variables we each drew from the cosmic lottery — our pigments, our neurotransmitters, our outpost in space and in time — it becomes downright absurd to grow attached to the story and its byproducts: opinions, identities, absolutisms. It is a salutary thought experiment to go through a single day imagining any one of those variables having fallen one one-thousandth of a degree elsewhere on the plane of possibility — suddenly, the person going through your day is not you.
In her extraordinary manifesto for seeing more clearly, Iris Murdoch observed:
The self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself... to pierce the veil of selfish consciousness and join the world as it really is.
...I'm talking about the global authoritarian movement, which includes and is even perhaps led by Trump. But it exists quite apart from him and has roots in some of the wealthiest and most powerful people and governments around the world.
I'm talking about the Authoritarian International which includes a host of authoritarian governments around the world, the princelings of the Gulf monarchies, the sprinkling of European right-ravanchist governments, the rightward portion of Silicon Valley (which accounts for a larger and larger percentage of the top owners if not the larger community), the Israeli private intel sector, various post-Soviet oligarchs and, increasingly, the world's billionaire class. Trump is their avatar, but they exist and are now joined together in a way that will outlive him personally and electorally.
...It is not so much an anti-democratic world — though it is certainly that — as an anti-civic world. It's a world of private, one-off deals, mutual pledges of secrecy, often enforced by soft, mutual extortion, and above all, a rejection of democratic accountability. We saw this coming into view during the late Biden administration, when Biden was already rapidly losing public support, with Elon Musk's increasingly brazen efforts to run U.S. foreign policy from Twitter and SpaceX. The Saudis meanwhile were trying to ease Biden out of office through the manipulation of oil prices. It was no accident that Musk was advancing a strongly pro-Russian line in Ukraine, where he was most visibly trying to undermine U.S. policy.
...There didn't use to be so many U.S. billionaires. And they characteristically had economic views which aimed to preserve their wealth. But they were not clearly on the right in the way they are now. They have moved an increasingly anti-civic democratic direction as the scale of their wealth and their identity as a class has exploded. They also weren't so increasingly allied with primitive economy petro-states of the Gulf.
The point is that they will exist no matter what happens to Trump. They command vast economic resources; they run the governments in many countries where the government never changes; they have deep tentacles into the U.S. political system and many of its key players are from the U.S. Trump didn't create this movement precisely. But his role in global politics over the last decade solidified it as a self-conscious group and congealed it together.
(and Brad DeLong continues) ...one of the odder facts about me in 2026. If you were to ask my brain for a list of "people I spend substantial time with every month," you would not get neighbors and you would not get any but a few of my colleagues on the fifth and sixth floors of Berkeley's Evans Hall. You would get a somewhat motley crew of curated information sources: working-paper authors, newsletter writers, podcasters, and algorithmically-surfaced streamers and such who show up in your feeds often enough that they feel like part of the furniture of your mind.
In terms of sheer hours of exposure and emotional arousal, even most of our real relationships these days are primarily parasocial.
...The novelty is scale, intensity, and infrastructure. We have built a communications environment in which a very large share of our social cognition is pointed either at people who are not really celebrities but who do not know we exist, or at people we know but for whom the social is the part of the iceberg that is above the surface, while the parasocial is the part of the iceberg below.
Think of what a human brain evolved to do. For 99 percent of our history, social life was bounded by Dunbar's number of 150 people: one village, a few dozen intense ties, a couple hundred weak ones. Affection, status, obligation, and reputation were anchored in reciprocal observation: if you slighted someone, you had to see them at the well tomorrow.
Now the same wetware is deployed into a mediasphere where the "village" is a billion-person feed, and the people who most reliably trigger our attention systems are those who broadcast strong signals—charisma, outrage, fear, desire—without any of the feedback that would normally tame them. The result is a strange skew in our moral and emotional budgets.
Now these not exclusively but largely parasocial ties are an enormous net benefit to me. But I do wish more of the people whose writings and speakings trigger the subTuring wetware 'bots that inhabit my brain knew that their instantiation-avatar presences that run on my wetware and that command my attention were there, and how large a presence they are in my mental universe.
...after reading Decoherence and Quantum Darwinism (opens a new tab), a book published in March 2025 by the physicist Wojciech Zurek, I'm excited by the possibility of an answer that does away with all those fanciful notions. Zurek, of Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico, has been working for decades to resolve the question of how the quantum rules that govern the behavior of atoms and subatomic particles switch to those of classical physics — Newton's laws of motion and so on — that operate at the scales of everyday life.
Zurek's key idea about how this transition occurs, called decoherence, is fairly well established. But his book brings together for the first time all the elements he has been developing into a grand synthesis. He argues that the old mysteries of quantum theory are starting to dissolve. To my eye, Zurek has almost tied up the loose ends that have been confounding physics for 100 years, without invoking any substantially new or speculative assumptions. In doing so, he claims to unite the previously irreconcilable.
...If you know something about quantum mechanics, you can be forgiven for thinking that the big, strange deal is the quantum part: the idea that the world at the finest scales is grainy, that particles can only change their energy in abrupt quantum jumps by exchanging little packets of energy with fixed sizes. But that's not really such a head-scratcher in itself. Or you might imagine the weirdest thing is Werner Heisenberg's famous uncertainty principle, which stipulates that there are some pairs of properties — such as the position and the momentum of a particle — that we can never know at the same time with accuracy beyond a certain limit. Measure precisely where a particle is, and where it's going becomes unknowable. But this uncertainty is just a symptom of a deeper problem.
...if you don't see knowledge production in your discipline in a wholly whiggish spirit, it might be neither better nor worse, just different, and "just different" becomes a more disorienting and unpleasant feeling for many of us as we get older. If I could have my druthers, I would love to be teaching in the late 1990s forever, and not just so I'd never be living in the America of 2026, but because I had a more consistent read on my students then, a clearer sense of what courses they'd be interested in taking, and I would be working in a college that was somewhat better aligned with the sensibility of its faculty overall.
...Another generation of faculty in the 1960s and 1970s were not wrong to think that higher education changed fundamentally because of its massification and democratization and then after that its globalization, with some very substantial changes as a result in what students learned, in the ambition of the standards applied to them while they were matriculated, and in the control of faculty over the entirety of the experience that students had while they were enrolled.
...if this is about people between 45-75 thinking they are smarter, more capable, more knowledgeable and more skilled than people 25-45, it is at least a reasonable working hypothesis that the genesis of such thoughts does not lie in a cooly objective appraisal of the long-term outcomes of educational rigor, but instead in a wider foundation of inter-generational rivalry and contempt, and perhaps even in the insecurity of older generations who are cycling out of their periods of highest achievement and greatest authority due to aging.
...When some faculty worried about changing standards in the 1950s and 1960s, those concerns were partially a proxy for being upset about the student body having more women in it, having more working-class men in it, having more Jews in it, having more Blacks in it, or just more generally a worry that the basic underpinnings of hierarchy were changing.
...As psychiatrist and author Iain McGilchrist showed in his masterful work The Master and His Emissary, the left brain is primarily for breaking the world apart, reducing it to its components, and understanding mechanism. The right brain is holistic; it integrates what the left brain discovers and derives meaning from it. As he says: "the right hemisphere helps us understand the world, the left only to manipulate."
...Quantum mechanics, you may think, is very much a left-brained activity, the ultimate reductionism of the universe to its smallest components. Yet, its mysterious nature would not worry us were it not for our right-hemispheric desire to understand what it means. We would happily "shut up and calculate", and that has been, more or less, what scientists have done for the past 100 years. Nevermind the 1000s of papers on quantum interpretation. Interpretations don't win Nobel Prizes.
McGilchrist, ever the psychiatrist, offers a diagnosis for society as a whole that I think applies especially to the physics community: society has, over the years, become increasingly dominated by left-brain thinking. The tendency to replace the human element with abstract rules perhaps started in Greece with the ancient philosophers and was perfected in Rome with its devotion to law and order. In the modern era, it has increasingly been visible in our architecture, with all straight lines and abstract shapes. A society bloated with bureaucracy, obsessed with control, and prone to paranoia is exactly what we see in many modern societies. This is the left-brained utopia: like Camazotz in A Wrinkle in Time. Everyone is doing the same thing at the same time. Total conformity.
...Music cannot be appreciated by understanding the tricks composers use to trigger certain emotional responses. One must feel the emotions by integrating those techniques.
Thus, what the right brain allows us to do is to turn an objective understanding of an experience into a subjective experience of it. It transforms the explanation of the miracle into the miracle itself.
...The frame we choose is a window into our unique worldview.
We select a subject.
We wait for the right moment.
This is a form of introspection.
It is how we articulate our own voice and promote self-acceptance. Over the years, our collection has become a visual autobiography, mapping our personal growth and values. We see ourselves clearly so we can communicate who we are to others.
And once we find our voice, we offer it to the human narrative
...In an increasingly automated world, the camera is also a tool of human freedom. Choosing the frame is an act of agency. We do not just use technology; we consciously engage with it to shape reality. We assert our significance against the machine.
...Photography is a multifaceted journey of preserving, expressing, and connecting. ...We communicate in a way that transcends words.
...The first edition of the Systema Naturae appeared in Holland in 1735, having apparently arrived there in manuscript with its author. Far from the comprehensive classification of living things it later became, this initial edition was a modest pamphlet of a mere twelve pages. Its main innovation was to consider animals, plants, and minerals as separate but equal groups, divorced from the Great Chain of Being. But it was the start of something much bigger, for Linnaeus subsequently devoted his career to enlarging and revising the Systema, which greatly evolved as the decades passed. By the time its definitive tenth edition appeared in 1758 it had expanded to contain names, diagnoses, and distributions for some 4,400 species of animals and 7,700 species of plants. From the beginning, all names were in Latin, and all were also strictly binominal, with rules to determine precedence, contrasting with the much more casual use of binomina by Linnaeus's predecessors. Most importantly, perhaps, the Systema organized its subjects into nested sets: species were grouped into genera, genera into families, families into orders, orders into classes, and classes into kingdoms, reflecting the patterns of similarity perceived at the relevant levels.
...the secret of the Linnaean classification system's utility and longevity is that it maps very neatly onto the pattern of forking branches produced by evolution as species split to produce new lineages
[of Buffon]...In 1730 he joined an intellectual English aristocrat and his tutor on their European Grand Tour and by the time the trio fetched up in Paris a year and a half later he had been awakened to the life of the mind. Buffon soon left the capital to take care of family affairs and the development of his estates, including the construction of a mansion in his home village of Montbard and the establishment of an experimental forest there. (He was the first thinker to see forests as integrated ecosystems rather than as mere collections of trees.)
...Buffon was not just interested in documenting nature; he saw how dynamic and integrated it was, and he wanted to understand the interactions involved. He acknowledged the great age of Earth, he recognized the significance of biogeography, he accepted both that species could become extinct and that they could change, and he even entertained the idea that humans and apes, so structurally similar, might have had a common ancestry. What he did not accept was the need to classify his subjects, believing that to do so would be to impose an artificial order on nature—which, of course, made Linnaeus a prime target for his disdain.
[reporting a chat with ChatGPT] ...the term could be used informally to describe a theoretical or fictional concept that transcends the normal function of the cortex, but without further context, it is difficult to determine the exact meaning or application.
...The term might be used in different contexts, including:
Technological enhancements: In the context of brain-computer interfaces or neural enhancements, transcending the cerebral cortex might refer to augmenting the brain's natural capabilities using external devices, such as neural implants, to improve cognitive functions or to interface directly with computers or other electronic systems.
Altered states of consciousness: Transcending the cerebral cortex can also refer to achieving altered states of consciousness, such as through deep meditation, psychedelic experiences, or other spiritual practices. In these states, people might report experiences beyond their ordinary cognitive functions, like heightened perception, feelings of oneness, or profound insights.
Artificial intelligence and cognitive computing: In this context, transcending the cerebral cortex could refer to the development of AI systems that surpass human cognitive abilities in certain tasks, potentially offering new insights and understanding that might be difficult for humans to achieve with their natural cognitive abilities.
It is important to note that the term "transcending the cerebral cortex" might be used metaphorically or speculatively, rather than referring to a specific, well-defined scientific concept. The interpretation depends on the context in which the term is being used.
...The majority of the signals do not travel from the eyes to the brain: they go the other way, from the brain to the eyes. What happens is that the brain expects to see something, on the basis of what it knows and has previously occurred. The brain elaborates an image of what it predicts the eyes should see. This information is conveyed from the brain to the eyes, through intermediate stages. If a discrepancy is revealed between what the brain expects and the light arriving into the eyes, only then do the neural circuits send signals towards the brain. So images from around us do not travel from the eyes to the brain – only news of discrepancies regarding what the brain expects do.
When we look around ourselves, we are not truly ‘observing': we are instead dreaming an image of the world based on what we know (including bias and misconception) and unconsciously scrutinizing the world to reveal any discrepancies.
In the words of the nineteenth-century French philosopher Hippolyte Taine, we can say that ‘external perception is an internal dream which proves to be in harmony with external things; and instead of calling "hallucination" a false perception, we must call external perception "a confirmed hallucination".
...Tariffs are excise taxes levied on the domestic sale of goods produced abroad. The principle of how these taxes work should be the same as the principles we apply to other excise taxes — the basic economics doesn't change simply because tariffed goods cross a border. And when economists — or, for that matter, anti-tax advocates — estimate the burden of taxes, they normally assume that excise taxes are passed on to consumers in the form of higher prices. There's no reason to believe that the price effects of taxes on the sale of goods produced abroad are any different.
...in the intuitive mind the principles are found in common use, and are before the eyes of everybody. One has only to look, and no effort is necessary; it is only a question of good eyesight, but it must be good, for the principles are so subtle and so numerous, that it is almost impossible but that some escape notice.
...They are scarcely seen; they are felt rather than seen; there is the greatest difficulty in making them felt by those who do not of themselves perceive them. These principles are so fine and so numerous that a very delicate and very clear sense is needed to perceive them, and to judge rightly and justly when they are perceived, without for the most part being able to demonstrate them in order as in mathematics; because the principles are not known to us in the same way, and because it would be an endless matter to undertake it. We must see the matter at once, at one glance, and not by a process of reasoning.
The digital humanities are one of the true delights of this era. Anthropologists are counting things like sociologists, sociologists are grappling with qualitative data like ethnographers, computational linguists are scraping and making sense of vast corpora of informal speech
...The original internet community space, Usenet, was founded on strict hierarchical principles, using a taxonomy to produce a single canonical group for every kind of discussion. Sure, there was specialization (rec.pets.cats begat rec.pets.cats.siamese), but by design, there weren't supposed to be competing groups laying claim to the same turf
...The first major Usenet schism arose out of this tension: the alt. hierarchy. Though alt. later became known for warez, porn, and other subjects that were banned by Usenet's founding "backbone cabal," the inciting incident that sparked alt.'s creation was a fight over whether "gourmand" should be classified as "rec.gourmand" or "talk.gourmand":
...On its face, this hierarchical principle for conversational spaces makes sense. Viewed through a naive economic lens of "reputation capital," having one place where all the people interested in your subject can be reached is optimal. The more people there are in a group, the greater the maximum "engagement" &mdash' likes, comments, reposts. If you're thinking about communities from an informational perspective, it's easy to assume that bigger groups are better, too: the more users there are in a topical group, the greater the likelihood that a user who knows the answer to your question will show up when you ask it.
...there is no doubt that the accumulation of microplastic particles, an unforeseen consequence of human innovative spirit, will continue to test our capacity to adapt to a changing planet.
...For a generation or more, we mostly saw and navigated the Web through Google, whose original mission was "to organize the world's information and make it universally accessible and useful." When we searched Google, we relied on its PageRank system to bring us lists of pages ranked by how likely they were to contain keywords or other search terms.
But Google Search has changed. Old pages are gone from many searches. This matters to me because I've been writing on the Web for thirty-one years, almost entirely on static sites. But Google no longer finds many of those. My friend Dave Askins tells me the same malady has befallen much of his own archival work, which is present on the Web, but absent from Google searches. Why?
I asked Google's Gemini that question. Here's what it said:
The "disappearing" of the old web is a result of a massive shift in Google's priorities over the last few years.
While you might be looking for a specific historical document or an old forum thread, Google's systems are now aggressively tuned to filter out what they consider "stale" or "unhelpful" content…
In the race to be a 'helpful assistant,' Google has stopped being a 'universal library.
PageRank is still there, it tells me, but subordinated. To what?
Of course: Advertising.
...This is the "secret sauce" of the 2026 search model. If the old search engine was a librarian, the new one is a personal shopper who is taking notes on everything you do to predict your next "need state. The transition you're sensing is the move from Reactive Search (answering what you asked) to Predictive Search (answering what you're going to ask)."
I am sure this is good in some ways, but it is also fuckery.
Google now treats the Web not as a library, or an archival space, but as a roiling heap of data in which patterns can be found, and answers given, based on algorithmic assumptions—not just about who and what the AI thinks it knows about us, but what advertisers are paying to pitch at our eyeballs. Constantly. In real time.
...Directory paths on the Web—what we call locations—are inherited from UNIX. For example, https://science.what/geology/phanerozoic/paleozoic/devonian/fossils/ammonites is what's called a path. It's like one you might follow through the stacks of a library. That's still how the Web works for us. It has structure.
When search engines indexed everything in those published directory structures, they made sense of the whole Web in a library-like way... not any more.
...Big AI absorbs all those miscellaneous small pieces in the vast chaos of the digital world. It calls on patterns in that totality to answer every question we ask of it. It's the room that includes everything that's too big for us to know.
But here's the rub: Big AI also doesn't know a damn thing. It recognizes patterns in a vast totality of data and uses programming and language to answer questions and perform tasks for the human inhabitants of its environments.
Think about what's in the rooms built by OpenAI (ChatGPT), Google (Gemini), Microsoft (Copilot), Perplexity (Perplexity AI), Anthropic (Claude), DeepSeek (DeepSeekAI), and Grok (Xai).
The short answer is everything. All of the Web, all books, all utterings on social media, you name it. Everything explicit, that is. Nothing tacit. It doesn't have tacit knowledge because it's not human.
We need a word for that everything
...Akasha: (Sanskrit) The aether or mystical compendium of all human events, thoughts, words, emotions, and intent ever to have occurred. Perhaps a poetic synonym for a universal database.
...Wànwù: Literally, "The Ten Thousand Things"
...When I asked ChatGPT to "tell me what to name the AI-dependent species that succeeds homo sapiens," it gave me this (which I've abridged into a less wordy form):
Homo delegatus. The delegating human. Clean. Roman. Almost bureaucratic.
Homo auxiliatus. The assisted human. Gentler. Less tragic.
Homo symbioticus. The symbiotic human. Optimistic framing. Mutualism implied.
Homo prostheticus. The prosthetic human. From prosthesis — extension. Suggests cognition extended outside the skull.
Homo algorithmicus. The algorithmic human. Likely to stick. Slightly dystopian. The defining trait is AI reliance.
Homo automatus. The automated human. Bleaker.
Homo machinatus. The machinated human — shaped by machines.
Homo instructus. The instructed human — guided by systems. The defining trait is epistemic submission
Homo credulus. The believing human. Short. Dangerous.
Homo confisus. The trusting human. Ambiguous — trust can be good or naive.
Homo oracularis. The oracle-dependent human. Strong mythic tone.
Homo synthetica. The synthetic human. Hybridized.
Homo copulatus. The coupled human.
Homo nexus. The networked human.
Homo cyberneticus. Classic mid-20th-century feel.
Homo exocerebralis. The external-brained human. Scientifically plausible.
Homo delegans sapiens. The wisdom-delegating human.
Homo post-sapiens. Simple, brutal.
Homo paragnostica. The mis-knowing human.
Homo servomechanicus. The servo-mechanical human.
Homo dependens. The dependent human.
Homo exocerebralis. External-brained human
Homo delegatus. Delegating human
Homo symbioticus. Symbiotic human
Homo algorithmicus. Algorithmic human
Homo exocerebralis. It names the real shift: the brain extends beyond the skull into networks and models. Biologically grounded and conceptually sharp.
Homo delegatus. Has quiet menace.
I don't like any of them. But we need one. Vote on one of these, or give us a better alternative.
Brad DeLong: without a world model, correlation matrices will always hallucinate&mdash'and often in ways we can't predict and can't prune out, unless we already know what the answers are that we are purporting to be trying to get.
...a mysterious force making the universe fly apart faster and faster.
Its discovery came from one of the most unexpected results in the history of astronomy: in the late 1990s, two groups studying far-off supernovae discovered that these explosions of dying, overmassive stars were consistently fainter than expected. They concluded that the intervening space through which the supernovae's light had travelled to get to us had stretched more than expected, making them further away than supposed – and so less bright.
Dark energy is the name for whatever is causing this accelerating expansion. It dominates the cosmos, making up by the latest reckoning some 68 per cent of everything there is. But what is it? There, physicists are stumped, even more so than with dark matter, that other mysterious cosmic apparition. At least we know dark matter gravitates. The effect of dark energy seems to be to oppose gravity, whose pull would otherwise tend to make the universe contract – so it doesn't seem to correspond to any physical phenomenon we've yet encountered.
...massive objects experience an attraction between them that follows a set formula. The size of the gravitational attraction between two bodies increases in proportion with their masses, diminishes with the square of the distance between them, and has an absolute value ultimately determined by a universal, fundamental constant of nature, the gravitational constant
...For all its seeming universality, however, gravity is actually by far the weakest of the four known fundamental forces of nature. The only reason it appears to be so overwhelmingly strong in our neck of the woods is the local presence of an overwhelmingly large mass, Earth, beneath our feet that attracts them, and everything else, downwards towards it. It is the presence of large clumps of mass all over the universe, that ensures it determines how the universe works on a grand scale, on the level of planets, galaxies and clusters of galaxies.
...Einstein's general theory of relativity, formulated in 1916, rewrites gravity as a property not of individual bodies, but of the universe as a whole. Gravity is just geometry, the result of the curvature by massive objects of the space and time around them. The strength of the gravitational "field" at any point in space or time is just the degree to which that coordinate in space-time is invisibly curved.
...The simplest shape for the universe would be essentially a flat sheet. Of course, it's far more complicated than that, but it's a useful metaphor (which you could say about most things in physics). I'm going to hand-wave past some of the technical details, but suffice it to say that if the universe is flat, all the geometry you learned in school works: draw a triangle and its angles will add up to 180 degrees and all its lines will be straight. But if the cosmos is curved, things start to get funky. Your triangle wouldn't be a triangle as you know it, but the effects would be so small you wouldn't notice. The universe could be shaped like a saddle or even like a sphere, and either way geometry becomes non-Euclidean and therefore a bit strange.
The size and shape of the universe are governed by two quantities: gravity and dark energy. The gravity of everything in the universe pulls it in, and dark energy pushes it to expand. If these two are perfectly matched, the universe is flat. If dark energy is winning, it's Pringle-shaped.
If gravity is winning, the universe is spherical and therefore finite — which is the simplest solution. However, as far as we can tell from various large-scale observations of the cosmos, it seems like the universe is probably flat.
..."Not only are the galaxies spinning, but also the stars within the galaxies, and the Earth is spinning, and the Earth around the sun and the moon around the Earth. Pretty much the whole universe is spinning," says Noam Libeskind at the Leibniz Institute for Astrophysics Potsdam in Germany. "We don't really know why, and one way to try to answer that is to figure out where the spinning stops."
...A recent study using DNA recovered from a skeleton in the Americas now indicates that Treponema pallidum, the causative agent of the deadly sexually transmitted disease syphilis, was circulating in the Americas much earlier than previously thought.
...Some researchers believe that syphilis was brought from Europe to the Americas, whereas others argue that it was introduced into Europe from the Americas, a hypothesis supported by the recovery of ancient Treponema genomes in the American continent.
...The Ohio State team's answer is simple and unnerving:
Pattern
Using new high-resolution imaging and AI-assisted modeling, they discovered recurring "connectivity motifs" — geometric patterns that repeat across brain regions, like chords in a piece of music.
These motifs appear to determine how networks handle information, linking physical structure to cognitive style.
In other words, memory, attention, and imagination all share the same sheet music —just played in different keys.
...You and I may think differently, but the syntax of thought is shared.
That idea turns neuroscience on its head.
Instead of each brain being a unique snowflake, the new model suggests they're variations on a common algorithm.
Consciousness, then, isn't a fluke of complexity; it's a stable property of this recursive code — a self-referential feedback loop written in electrochemical syntax.
...The researchers describe a hierarchical system of motifs, from local micro-circuits all the way up to large-scale "meta-networks" that integrate sensory input, memory retrieval, and abstract reasoning.
Each level mirrors the others — smaller patterns echoing larger ones —a kind of fractal logic that gives rise to coherence.
...suggests that cognition isn't just computation — it's geometry with memory.
...Piore and Sabel [1984] characterized the 1970s and early 1980s as a second critical inflection point in the history of capitalism. The first shift had been from craft to mass production in the early 1900s.
...Forty years later, we now know P&S were wrong about how the second industrial divide eventually played out. They were right, however, about the fact of a historical divide in the interaction of labor relations and the supply side of the economy, and about the stakes inherent in the massive shift in the organization of production, consumption, and innovation this entailed. Today we face a similar inflection point—a third industrial divide
...Writing in the early 1980s, P&S were fairly pessimistic about a new growth wave and could barely imagine the rapidity of subsequent technological change. Computers feature only briefly in their account; biotechnology not at all. Industrial districts in their sense remained important—but constituted a narrow slice of industrial output. The Pearl River Delta, upstream from Hong Kong, became arguably the biggest and most important industrial district in the world. Elsewhere, most rich country economies increasingly revolved around service provision rather than manufacturing, much of which became the province of low-wage, highly exploited labor.
...Writers have kept notebooks since time immemorial. The auctorial equivalent to the artist's sketchbook is the “commonplace book,” which can contain everything from newspaper clippings to grocery lists to attempts to capture those inspirational bolts out of the blue.
I'm sure that somewhere out there, there is a writer who is far more disciplined than I am, whose commonplace books are legible, carefully indexed, and comprehensive. My private notebooks are unreadable, disorganized messes, written with such appalling penmanship that it's sometimes hard to be sure that they're even written in English.
...Peter "peterme" Merholz coined the term "blog" as a playful contraction of "web-log"— like a ship's log in which hardy adventurers upon the chaotic virtual seas could record their journeys. Though “blogs” have always been a broad church, there's a kind of platonic ideal of a blog that's right there in the term's etymology: the blog as an annotated browser-history, like the traveler's diaries my family kept on vacations, recording which hotels we stayed in and what they were like, where we dined and what we ate, which local attractions we visited and how we felt about them.
Like those family trip-logs, a web-log serves as more than an aide-memoire, a record that can be consulted at a later date. The very act of recording your actions and impressions is itself powerfully mnemonic, fixing the moment more durably in your memory so that it's easier to recall in future, even if you never consult your notes.
The genius of the blog was not in the note-taking, it was in the publishing. The act of making your log-file public requires a rigor that keeping personal notes does not. Writing for a notional audience — particularly an audience of strangers — demands a comprehensive account that I rarely muster when I'm taking notes for myself.
...the news-stories, ideas, sights and sounds you encounter are liable to tug at your attention: this is a piece of something bigger, and maybe something important.
Every day, I load my giant folder of tabs; zip through my giant collection of RSS feeds; and answer my social telephones —primarily emails and Twitter mentions — and I open each promising fragment in its own tab to read and think about.
If the fragment seems significant, I'll blog it: I'll set out the context for why I think this seems important and then describe what it adds to the picture.
These repeated acts of public description adds each idea to a supersaturated, subconscious solution of fragmentary elements that have the potential to become something bigger. Every now and again, a few of these fragments will stick to each other and nucleate, crystallizing a substantial, synthetic analysis out of all of those bits and pieces I've salted into that solution of potential sources of inspiration.
...Every massive galaxy hosts a supermassive black hole in its center. Most of them are relatively inactive, such as Sagittarius A∗, which is in the center of the Milky Way. Yet other supermassive black holes are actively growing through accretion (accumulation of surrounding matter), which releases immense energy in the form of electromagnetic radiation across the entire light spectrum. These bright energetic centers are called active galactic nuclei, of which quasars are the most luminous. Discoveries of quasars powered by supermassive black holes during the first billion years after the Big Bang imply that supermassive black holes may have evolved with galaxies. However, the birth of supermassive black holes and their rapid growth to massive astronomical bodies are some of the unanswered mysteries of the Universe.
..."Pre-Writing in Southeastern Europe: The Sign System of the Vinča Culture" Shan Winn 1981 ...flourished in the Balkans between 5400 BC and 4500 BC. These remarkable people smelted copper during the Neolithic Era. However, their most well-known legacy is inventing a writing system that continues to divide experts.
...Academics still debate the origins of the Vinča culture, and there are two competing theories. The first hypothesis suggests that a wave of migrants from Anatolia started civilization after the preceding Neolithic cultures of the Balkans had declined. The similarities in the 'Black Burnished Ware' pottery style between Anatolia and early Vinča sites are cited as evidence for the Anatolian migration theory.
...The earliest evidence of copper smelting in history was discovered at the Rudna Glava and Belovode archaeological sites in Serbia, dating from 5500 BC to 5000 BC.
Initially, the Vinča culture used copper as a valuable commodity for trade. Later, they hammered copper ores into metal items and jewelry. They eventually found how to process and extract copper from ore and cast it into objects. The archaeological site of Pločnik has the world's earliest known copper tools.
...According to linguist Harald Haarmann:
The Danube script is one of the primary scripts, i.e. an original, non-derived writing system. To the best of our knowledge, there was no other writing system in Southeast Europe before the Danube script, nor was it imported into the Danube region from elsewhere. At that time (end of the 6th millennium BCE), no verified experiments with writing technology were being undertaken anywhere else in the Old World. It was not until about 2,000 years later that writing was first used in Ancient Egypt and Mesopotamia.
...The Vinča culture was undoubtedly Europe's first civilization. It had a hierarchical social class, intensive agriculture, long-distance trade, pioneered copper metallurgy, and invented writing. Yet, its achievements are seldom discussed in popular discourse.
"Being the one, the universal Soul is present in all beings. Though one, It is seen as many, like the moon in the water ... Just as it is the jar which being removed (from one place to another) changes places and not the Akasha ['fifth element' or ether] enclosed in the jar — so is the Jiva [individual, embodied soul] which resembles the Akasha ...When various forms like the jar are broken again and again the Akasha does not know them to be broken, but He knows perfectly. Being covered by Maya [cosmic illusion that veils the true nature of reality], which is a mere sound, It does not, through darkness, know the Akasha (the Blissful one). When ignorance is rent asunder, It being then Itself only sees the unity."
...Europe had nothing that the rest of the world particularly wanted to buy, which meant that Europe had been running a trade deficit for literally centuries. (This would lead to a serious economic crisis later in the century, as the continent nearly ran out of gold and silver.) Militarily, Europeans had been losing battles and wars to non-Europeans for a while, and this would continue for some time. In particular, the Ottomans had just embarked on a long career of kicking Europe's ass. Within a century, a huge chunk of the continent would be Ottoman provinces or tributaries.
And yet. Somewhere along the line, Europe went from "D-tier also-ran kind of lame civilization" to "planetary apex predator".
...The Council wrapped up in 1418. Joan of Arc would have been in first grade, if medieval French peasant girls went to first grade, which they didn't. She was about 10 years away from starting her brief incredible career as the savior of France. Johannes Gutenberg was a freshman at the University of Erfurt. He was about twenty years away from inventing the printing press. Over in England, a handsome young Welshman named Owen Tudor was hanging around the court of King Henry V. In a few years, King Henry would die of dysentery. His widowed Queen would marry handsome Owen. Their grandson would be the first Tudor king of England, and their descendants are sitting on the British throne today.
Jan van Eyck was in his twenties, just getting started on his career as a painter.
And down in Portugal — a kingdom small and obscure even by medieval European standards, out on the far edge of the continent — Prince Henry the Navigator was forming an ambitious plan. Portugal, like the rest of Europe, was running out of gold. But there was gold down in Africa... somewhere. It came north regularly, after all, in caravans across the Sahara. The trade was controlled by Islamic middlemen, who took a hefty cut.
But what if Portuguese ships could work their way down along the African coast? They might find the source of the gold... and who knows what else?
...Yes, well... this post got a little out of hand. But Imperia is not forgotten! Modern Constance has a nine meter, 18 ton concrete statue of a medieval sex worker that rotates every four minutes, and there's a reason for that. We'll get to her story shortly.
(Muir replies) PatinIowa @2, the worst of the Black Death was over by 1415. The big epidemic in 1347-49 was followed by another bad one in 1361, then three more smaller-but-still-bad outbreaks over the next 50 years. By 1415 Europe's population was probably about half of what it had been 70 years earlier.
This had complicated effects. The simplistic narrative is "while it was horrible, it did raise wages and per capita income while significantly reducing pressure on land and resources. Rising wages, in particular, encouraged investment in labor-saving devices and capital."
And that's not wrong, but it's very incomplete. So for instance: there was a huge amount of pushback on rising wages, so that in many places they rose only a bit or not at all. Or: the Black Death hit Europe much harder than it hit China, Central Asia, or India. But it may have hit some parts of the Middle East harder still. If losing half the population was a long-term net positive, why did it lead to investment and innovation in Central Europe but not in Egypt or the Levant? Or: if there was less pressure on resources, why was 14th century Europe still running short on bullion, and why were most Europeans still living with food insecurity even when there was twice as much land per capita?
Anyway, super interesting, but probably a topic I'll leave to a real historian. (You know I'm not a historian, yes? Interested amateur at best.)
...If you go back to the 1400s, you see a bunch of actors, state and nonstate, with very limited capacity. The states are mostly weak and painfully underfunded. Nonstate actors, you see some real concentrations of capital — Medici, Fuggers, Grimaldi, Mendes — but their investment is disproportionately going into land, agriculture, construction, or conspicuous consumption. (I love me some Botticelli, but it's hard to argue that the Allegory of Fortitude led to Europe dominating the world.)
Here and there you do have some interesting stuff like the Fuggers investing in metallurgy and silver mines, including pushing for innovative techniques that alleviated the bullion shortage. But those were very much exceptions. Broadly speaking, there's not a lot of investment going into the stuff that is going to make Europe deadly.
...The expansionist ball gets rolling with the Portuguese drive into Africa. That was very much a public-private partnership, because neither state nor private actors had the capital to make it work, at least at first. It did eventually prove very profitable — the Portuguese reached what is now Senegal in the 1440s, and gold, ivory, spices and slaves started flowing up immediately. (Yes, the Atlantic slave trade predated Columbus by decades. If Portugal had a 1619 Project, it would be a 1444 Project.)
❧ ❧ ❧ ❧ ❧
perfect Japanese sweet potato
chickpeas, quinoa, onion, cabbage, garlic
21ii26
Guns, Money and Opium Laleh Khalil reviews Seth Harp's aThe Fort Bragg Cartel on the origins of Special Forces and support for counterinsurgency campaigns ... Iran Contra ... War on Terror
...In Homefront, her book about the effects of the first US war on Iraq, the anthropologist Catherine Lutz describes Fayetteville, the nearest city to Fort Bragg, as having one of North Carolina's smallest tax bases, voter registration rates and number of sidewalk miles, and its county appears near the top or the bottom, whichever is worse, in many lists of North Carolina's 100 counties' features, including those for poverty, child abuse and other crime, female unemployment and auto accidents per capita. It has a striking number of pawnshops and strip joints, and of prostitutes and prostitute murders. And while many of its veterans are successful small businesspeople or civic activists, some live with horrific physical and psychological injuries, and they make up a quarter of the city's substantial number of homeless people.
Harp's Fayetteville is, if possible, an even more squalid version of the town Lutz described more than twenty years ago.
Marts of All Commerce
**Laleh Khalili** reviews Darshana M Baruah's The Contest for the Indian Ocean
...The Ship of Sulaiman came in the wake of dozens of other travelogues and maritime handbooks recording the wonders of the Indian Ocean, from the Greco-Roman Periplus of the Erythraean Sea to the tenth-century account of travels to India and China by Abu Zayd al-Sirafi, to the many manuals of navigation by the 15th-century seafarer Ahmad ibn Majid. Since at least the tenth century BCE, merchants, soldiers, pilgrims and other travellers hopscotched between the ancient ports around the Indian Ocean and its many archipelagos and islands. Armenian traders from Julfa, Baghdadi and Cairene Jewish merchants, Hadhrami sayyids from Yemen and Swahilis of East Africa journeyed east; Gujarati, Bohra, Malabari, Chinese and Malay traders and pilgrims sailed west to the coasts of the Arabian peninsula and East Africa. Pilgrimage was bound up with trade. Fernand Braudel called the hajj ‘the biggest fair in Islam' and quoted a 12th-century observer as saying that ‘no merchandise in the world is absent from this meeting.' Until the age of steam, however, the seaborne leg of the pilgrimage was dependent on the monsoon winds and the lunar calendar. Maritime journeys to Mecca continued until well into the 1950s, when air travel finally replaced the ship as the preferred mode of transportation.
Diasporas, trade routes and financial and familial obligations connected communities across the ocean. Language, food, music and rituals circulated widely. Ships took the East African zār rite that cured spirit possession to the coasts of Iran and Arabia, where it was used to treat pearl divers and sailors who were afflicted at sea. The similarity of regional cuisines on coastlands thousands of miles apart reflected the routes of travel: fish stews flavoured with tamarind, rice dishes topped with nuts and fruits, and the spiciness of coastal cooking connected distant shores. Cargoes traded across the Indian Ocean before the 17th century include spices, aromata, precious resins, fine gems and gold, along with more mundane primary commodities such as timber and copper, and man-made products: textiles, pottery, porcelain and glass.
Among all these, spices most significantly shaped the politics of trade. The Periplus of the Erythraean Sea records the Roman taste for black pepper, which led to trade with merchants on the Malabar Coast. Avicenna's 11th-century Canon of Medicine describes many curative uses for spices that grow on the warmer shores of the Indian Ocean. In Exodus 30:23, God tells Moses to make an anointing oil of myrrh, cinnamon and calamus (myrtle). The authors of Revelation 18:12-13 recite a litany of Indian Ocean cargoes as emblems of opulence, even decadence: not just gold, silver, precious gems and ivory, but 'cinnamon, and odours, ointments and frankincense and wine'. The more pernicious sources of such abundance — 'slaves, and souls of men' —are tacked on at the end.
...While the Portuguese state directly managed both war and trade, the Dutch, British and French chartered merchants to act on the state's behalf. Their companies usurped existing trade infrastructures and grafted their own commercial ventures, lending facilities, seafaring practices and forms of rule onto those already established in the Indian Ocean basin.
...But the power of the European empires also lay in imposing, by force of arms, their own rules. The progenitor of this approach was the lawyer Huig de Groot, better known to posterity as Hugo Grotius, the 'father of international law'. Grotius had been retained by the Dutch East India Company to justify its capture in 1603 of a Portuguese merchant ship off the coast of Johor (near present-day Singapore). Grotius later explained that his copious juridical opinions protected 'the commerce with India which ... was of great importance for the security of the Fatherland, and it was apparent that this commerce could not be sufficiently maintained without arms'. His mare liberum, in other words, meant that you could enjoy freedom of the seas if you secured it with killing power. Even more significant, Grotius revived the Roman doctrine of res nullius to justify European appropriation of unoccupied land and argued that Europeans had the right – through the principle of ‘divisibility of sovereignty' — to delegate to themselves some part of the authority held by non-European rulers.
...I like to think of it as though there is this great map of mathematics, and that human mathematicians are in a particular territory and circle around it. They don't always see connections to things close by. Amazing mathematicians have found bridges between two regions of the map, like the Taniyama-Shimura conjecture, where Japanese mathematicians found a bridge between two otherwise disconnected areas of mathematics. Then, everything that we knew from over here applied over there and vice versa.
I think AI is really good at saying, "Have a little look over here, it looks like fruitful territory that's been under-explored", and that is really, really exciting. What AI isn't so good at is pushing the boundaries further. And what it's really not good at... is full-on abstraction, of having broader, larger theories. The one people always say is, if you gave AI everything up until 1900, it wouldn't come up with general relativity. So I'm still excited we're in this very sweet spot where AI will make human mathematics faster, more efficient, more exciting, but it still needs us.
...Our bodies are tuned for cognitive social relationships. We're the smart, social species. And this is a seemingly smart, seemingly social entity. Of course we put a character on it. There's nothing in our past, in our design, that would make us do anything else.
...I think there's going to be profound changes to the economic models that we've become accustomed to for the whole history of humanity. I think there'll be really giant leaps forward in science, which I'm really excited about, in medicine design as well. The whole structure of our society is built on the idea that you exchange your labour and knowledge and human intelligence for money that you then use to buy stuff — I think that there's some fragility to that.
…In terms of vocabulary, upwards of thirty thousand Indic words entered the Sinitic lexicon with Buddhism beginning in the first century A.D., many of which are still spoken in the common language of today, including those for "convenience", "instant", and "meditation".
...Further, the critic becomes (unless he is of most unusual character) emotionally involved with his work. The pangs of a lover whose addresses are scorned are less severe than those of the emendator whose darling conjecture is accepted by no one. His attitude tends to be, as Miss Tallulah Bankhead so well expressed it, "To hell with criticism: praise is good enough for me."
...people can't just read something and hate you quietly; they can't see that you have provided them with a utility or a warning; they need their screech. You are distributed to millions of people, and become the local proxy for the emotions of maybe dozens of people, who disagree and demand your attention, and because you are the one in the paper you need to welcome them with a pastor's smile and deep empathy, and if you speak a word in your own defense they'll screech even louder.
...In 1997, before social media, before the dreaded, Molochian Algorithm, before any of the infrastructure that now governs online life, a computer scientist named Mark Pesce wrote a short, dense essay called "Ritual and the Virtual." His argument was this: the only adequate way of understanding what the Internet does to human consciousness is magic.
Pesce's claim is that every time human communication undergoes a radical acceleration (the birth of language, the alphabet, printing press, the invention of the telegraph, the emergence of the web), consciousness is overwhelmed, and responds by creating mythology and imaginative interiority. The Internet is the most extreme instance of this. And because the Internet makes reality fluid, multiple, and responsive to speech and intention, it produces a condition where language stops describing the world and starts creating it.
In that condition, Pesce argues, the only possible ontology of cyberspace is magical: reality as that which is invoked, the world conformant to will. (Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the law; reality is what you can get away with; so on and so forth.)
...Singular among the sciences, cyberspace has ever been a tree planted firmly in the rich soils of human mythology. The three authors who defined this field, Vernor Vinge (True Names, 1978), William Gibson (Neuromancer, 1984, Count Zero, 1986, Mona Lisa Overdrive, 1988), and Neal Stephenson (Snow Crash, 1992), relied exclusively upon a mythological foundation to describe the incomprehensible complexities of computer networks. This is hardly coincidental; in fact, it echoes a pattern as old as human consciousness.
...Man before the word was not human. To think, to reflect, requires a conception of figure and ground, the linguistic apprehension of objects, of difference, of transitivity. Whatever we may make of the proto-hominids who passed before the emergence of linguistic consciousness, we must cast them into the pit which separates the unconscious ontology of the "lower" animals from conscious being of man. The use of our word "dumb" to describe those without speech remains a shorthand for the contempt in which we hold our prelapsarian condition.
...Information flow through the unconscious organism is episodic and driven by external stimuli. The primary attitude of the unconscious is indifference; things become worthy of attention when they change - presenting either a danger or an opportunity. The perception of events is entirely discontinuous, lacking the narrative which creates causality, the internal story-telling that reifies expectation into world-view.
...To name a thing is to know it; in this we recognize language as the foundation of consciousness. To know the name of a thing is to have dominion over it. Verbal consciousness unleashes a force which separates man from the animals; the internal division between self and other becomes reinforced in repeated communication with other humans.
...Perception extends to include the whole of culture as a single organism, coupled into community through the self-reinforcing exchanges of narrative, placing an explosive pressure on individual perception, rendering it subservient to a heretofore unknown collective intelligence. The flow of information through the organism is no longer constrained by the exigencies of the individual, unconscious animal; instead, the entire community functions as one, hears as one, and knows as one. Moreover, it knows that it knows, both individually and collectively.
...When Samuel Morse translated Michael Faraday's studies in electromagnetic phenomena into a mechanism for instantaneous communication, human linguistic consciousness began an inevitable and accelerating process of deterritorialization. The tongue, unbound, could speak into a multitude of ears; the ear, unbound, could listen to a multitude of tongues. Family, tribe and nation vanished before the ultimate speed-up - to quote Virilio, "Speed equals light." A new language of pattern, beginning with the Morse Code, passing through the grooves of the phonograph, the successive images of the motion picture, the amplitude modulations of radio and the mosaic-composite of television, culminates in a singularity of bricolage, the meta-mediation of the World Wide Web.
As impossible as it is for us to imagine the ontology of the pre-electric world, it rapidly becomes impossible to imagine being in a pre-Web world — even if we have spent most of our lives there. Increasingly, our experience has become conditioned by and coupled to the world created within the Web; the more we refer to it, the more we tend to refer to it, in a loop of reinforcement which marks the Web as unique among electronic media: it expresses the ontology of the irresistibly seductive, and we all desire it, or have desires in relation to it.
An experiment in extraction from Jan and Feb 2026 links, using NotebookLM
Here we are, watched over by the stone faces of mountains creased with the laugh-lines of time as we walk over the bones of our dead, over the fossils of all the other animals who paid with their lives for the birth of our eyes and lungs and opposable thumbs on a planet domed with two trillion galaxies each housing numberless stars orbited by numberless possible worlds.
The great paradox of consciousness, or perhaps its very function, is its fiery longing to make this life, this flash of borrowed stardust, matter amid the incomprehensible immensity of space and time; to find between our insignificance and our self-importance something truer than both.
...There's more than one way to be ugly, of course. The "edgelords" that defined forums like SomethingAwful and /b/ made heavy use of slurs, rape "jokes" and other beyond-the-pale rhetoric. Whether this reflected sincerely felt beliefs or a mere desire to shock (or both), it had the effect of making these subcultures very difficult to commodify. If you and your friends barely utter a single sentence that can be quoted in a mainstream news forum or office email, it's going to be very hard to co-opt you. For a long time, edgelords festered in the "dark corners" of the internet. But that's changed.
...Which brings Broderick to his main question:
If everything is just attention now, and attention is completely commodified by algorithmic tech platforms, how can you push back against that?
His answer: "You have to essentially pre-deplatform yourself."
For young people, "the only things that have the level of scarcity and danger required to be seen as cool" are "whatever is unacceptable on those platforms." In other words, anything (and maybe only things) that're blocked or banned are a candidate to be cool. Cool people walk away from the places where you'd expect to find them and hang out in places that are culturally viewed as less important.
Broderick argues that this is the source of far-right influencers' influence: the fact that manosphere weirdos and trolls are hanging out in "shadowy corners" like Kick makes them feel authentic and outside of the norm and thus intrinsically interesting. And (Broderick continues) the fact that these manosphere types are now totally reliant on Discord clip-farmers has made them feel more mainstream and thus potentially less interesting.
...Broderick's theory predicts that the "coolest" media — the stuff that makes taste — is the stuff that fits in this zone of copyright infringement. He cites some compelling case studies, like Vera Drew's "The People's Joker," an amazing, unauthorized Batman mashup/trans allegory. Warner shut down multiple screenings of The People's Joker (including at TIF
F), and this increased the coolness and prominence of the movie, driving people to underground screenings
(quotes Bruce Sterling) ...In the immortal words of Lafcadio Hearn, a geek of incredible obscurity whose work is still in print after a hundred years, "woo the muse of the odd." A good science fiction story is not a "good story" with a polite whiff of rocket fuel in it. A good science fiction story is something that knows it is science fiction and plunges through that and comes roaring out of the other side.
there's one thing that is even harder to co-op than acne — "unmonetizable content," the Kryptonite of the platforms.
During his speech at the Board of Peace on February 19, President Trump warned Iran that the window of opportunity for a possible deal with the United States is closing. With the largest military buildup in the region since the invasion of Iraq, at the cost of close to $370 million, the buildup increasingly looks like a decisive plan of action rather than merely a pressure tactic. The deal offered by the United States is simple and straight forward, submit to all American demands or be obliterated. Negotiation, American style.
...Today, all evidence points to the U.S. determination to release the full might of its military prowess on unseating the Islamic Republic. In the absence of a massive ground invasion, this goal is only achievable by total annihilation of the entire infrastructure of the country, in addition to decapitating the state and security apparatus. Undoubtedly, Israel will join this military campaign in making sure that roads, manufacturing sites, bridges, dams, electrical grids, water treatment plants — do not survive the onslaught. They might not be able to overthrow the regime, but they will surely try to leave nothing left to be governed. That is the ultimate fear.
...which led me via a hazy memory of a book cover with that title, but I never read the John O'Hara novel (1934) . But the ...etymology of the Tale is quite ancient (Wikipedia article)
One version is recorded in the Babylonian Talmud, Sukkah 53a.5-6 (NB: The Talmud was compiled in the 5th century while Samarrah was founded in the 9th century; the Talmudic version of the story involves King Solomon sending two men to a place called Luz to avoid death.)
... Sinclair Lewis's denunciation of the book's sensuality as "nothing but infantilism — the erotic visions of a hobbledehoy behind the barn.
The Talmud's version is usually cited online as background to Maugham's, but I think it's far more likely there were a couple of intermediary sources along the way. First of these is Rumi's 13th century Persian telling
...Jean Cocteau is the next link in the chain, through his 1923 novel Le Grand Écart.
(and thence to Maugham's 1933 play:...The link from Cocteau to Maugham 10 years later fortunately feels more firm, Maugham's telling in his 1933 play Sheppey clearly being a padded and altered expansion of Cocteau's.
...In unsparing detail, the documents lay bare the once-furtive activities of an unaccountable elite, largely made up of rich and powerful men from business, politics, academia and show business. The pages tell a story of a heinous criminal given a free ride by the ruling class in which he dwelled, all because he had things to offer them: money, connections, sumptuous dinner parties, a private plane, a secluded island and, in some cases, sex.
...One of the central contentions of Trump's movement was that the world was run by a corrupt, deviant, and rootless élite, a cabal of cosmopolitan globalists who held themselves out as enlightened but were actually callous, self-interested, and predatory. (Trump positioned himself as an alternative to this group: if the rich weren't like you and me, he was the exception.) Another Trumpist tenet was that our society had become lawless, its justice system far too lenient. (He promised rough justice: "Lock her up!") Yet another was that the technocratic experts were part of a deep state, and weren't telling the truth. (He knew better.)
...A kaleidoscope is always shifting, with new patterns coming into focus. The Jeffrey Epstein scandal has been fascinating and horrifying onlookers for more than a decade; in addition to being an actual set of appalling events that involved real perpetrators and real victims, it's been a political wild card and a conspiratorial lure. But it's only recently—with the release of millions of documents, which anyone can read for themselves—that its pieces have really snapped into place. Trump, for many, is now inside its pattern, along with a lot of other people, organizations, and institutions. A different dark vision of society has emerged. Suddenly, we seem to be living in the age of Epstein. We tell ourselves that by understanding his rise to power we might understand the world.
Please write a parody of this famous Borges catalog. But instead of listing kinds of animals, make it a list of farfetched, zany metaphors about Artificial Intelligence. AI is like a Searle Chinese Room, AI is like a shoggoth, AI is like a colossus, and so on.
A playful Borges‑style bestiary of metaphors about Artificial Intelligence could open with the same mock‑scholarly solemnity, then spiral into categories no reasonable taxonomy should contain.
...Metaphors of Mild Existential Dread
That which is like a shoggoth wearing a friendly user interface as a jaunty hat — vast, tentacular, and politely helpful.
...Metaphors of Over‑Engineered Ingenuity
That which is a Rube Goldberg machine for producing sentences — elaborate, baroque, and somehow effective.
That which is a clockwork librarian — endlessly indexing, cross‑referencing, and occasionally hallucinating entire books.
That which is a mechanical Turk who unionized and now demands more RAM — industrious, but with conditions.
Though we live on the same planet, the world of bacteria is far removed from our own, largely because of the sheer difference in size. Life on the micrometer scale is governed by rules that do not constrain us, and vice versa: aquatic environments are dominated by viscous forces, and external stimuli such as chemical gradients occur on a scale too large to sense over the length of a single bacterial cell. And yet, some strategies used in both worlds carry at least a superficial resemblance. Surprisingly, one of these is the ability, literally, to see.
We have dimensions for where things are (X, Y, Z) and when they happen (t). But we missed the dimension that measures how real they are.
...τ is not another direction you can point to. You won't travel along it, and no spacecraft will ever drift through it. τ is not time wearing a fake mustache, nor is it consciousness hiding in an equation. τ is better understood as depth — not physical depth, but coherence depth. It measures how fully a system has settled into itself.
If time tells you when something happens, τ tells you how finished it is.
Imagine a thought that hasn't quite resolved. You know the feeling — the sentence forming in your mind before the words arrive, the melody hovering before it lands on a key. That intermediate state, neither chaos nor conclusion, is where τ begins. Low τ corresponds to that unfinished condition: fuzzy, overlapping, unstable. High τ is what it feels like when something clicks, when ambiguity collapses into clarity and when a decision becomes irreversible.
...This is why τ is so unsettling once you grasp it. It suggests that reality is not fundamentally made of things, but of decisions that have finished deciding
...The architecture of social media is designed to favor grift over contemplation. People don't deny the depth of depravity of Epstein and his cohort anymore. But they are getting acclimatized to it, and they will eventually be acclimatized to the lack of justice. The next step is normalization. It may be hard to imagine the sadistic Epstein acts being regarded as normal — there are universal taboos in those emails — but the world just witnessed a live-streamed genocide by Israel. Denial of Israeli war crimes is now gone, but no one is punished for them. Challenging political culture often rests on individuals and small groups of people being persistent and not giving in, even when those around them surrender to depravity. Folks still have a moral choice. If you stick to your morals, sometimes people are encouraged and stick to theirs, too.
...I have not yet named the pieces because I don't want you to leave mine too early—at least not before I have had the time to warn you of what will happen to you if you read them (there will be no turning back to your innocent life). I'm not worried that you'll go look them up either way because no one has the mental stamina to read 20,000 words (half of them AI-generated, no one writes that much by hand anymore). So here you go, in summary form.
The first is Matt Shumer's "Something Big Is Happening," which amassed north of 80 million views on X, bringing together the entire timeline in a miracle not seen since St. Paul walked the paths of the old world proselytizing for Christ's word (the godlike reach of Shumer's essay can be explained by the fact that the title allows every single person to project the biggest thing in their lives right now as the thing happening to everyone else: we all have main character syndrome, especially myself). To Shumer, the big thing happening is AI, plain and simple, without caveats or nuances: AI is big and AI is happening (it's probably irrelevant that he's an AI founder himself with a tendency to hype up claims that don't hold up under scrutiny).
The second is Citrini's "The 2028 Global Intelligence Crisis," a financial variation of the take-off scenario where AI ends up doing everything that doomer pundits and industry leaders have been warning of but instead of killing everyone it stops at killing the $13 trillion mortgage market (because of course, that's the most dramatic thing that could happen if you're a financial analyst). I read it until I reached a point where they give three examples of SaaS firms that could be affected—'Monday.com, Zapier, and Asana"— because when I asked Claude 4.6 Opus about the "SaaSpocalypse" two weeks earlier, it gave those three exact examples to illustrate its point. It might be a coincidence, but stochastic parrots are usually more parrot than stochastic.
The third one, and a personal favorite, is Sam Kriss's Harper's "Child's play," a retelling of Kriss's experience among some of the most idiosyncratic personalities of the San Francisco tech scene. This is the last one chronologically and, in literary merit and arguably historical value, the best of the three. Kriss, unlike, I presume, Shumer and Citrini, is a veteran in the sport of disguising fiction as non-fiction—worthy heir to the Borgesian style, although perhaps born at the worst time possible now that everyone seems to be shamelessly copycatting his schtick—which is apparent from the fact that, among the three texts, his is the only one that feels real. His thesis is something I imagine everyone agrees with: obsessing over being "high agency" and living your life as a means to an end is, ultimately, a relentless run-up for a date with death.
...A fair number of fans in any given community, of any given faction or outlook, are pretty fucking shit at watching, reading or understanding culture with any degree of careful attention, technical understanding, or wide-ranging knowledge. A lot of fans see what they want to see in the object of their devotion (or hatred) and a lot of them are incredibly narrow and parochial in their understanding of the wider world, in their knowledge about other work within a given genre, etc. Fans are often domain specialists who would benefit enormously by reading, watching and understanding a broader range of cultural work, and because many of them don't, they get locked inside unimaginative interpretations of their favorite (or most hated) shows and texts without any ability to put that work into dialogue with culture, history, and common sense.
So at least some of the parasociality of fan communities is exhausting not because of trolls and death threats and bots but because the social reality of other human minds at massified scales is that you encounter people who just have exasperatingly stupid opinions and those people often drive the conversation. Those are the people who the bots are trained to imitate and the trolls take lessons from. I'm not talking politics, I mean people who have read or watched something and just fucking do not understand what they've seen.
...It turns out that some approaches are better than others for learning and understanding &mdash' but given tools that appear to trivialize knowledge, are we making good choices? Knowing is not just about having a good memory or being able to parrot answers. Learning is not just assembling data. Our ability to assess correctness, align views, and balance the efficiency of learning is not as honest as we may think.
...Knowledge isn't sold in tins for an instant quench. Lately, the idea of follow-up (due diligence) has waned, as we've wandered into The Disposable Society of the 21st century. Finding quick answers to ever simpler questions, using simple-minded schema models, based on some kind of logic-based alibi, has become all too easy, like replacing a sit down meal with a burger in a box.
Search engines now help us to find answers (they actually sell us canned responses, often sponsored by advertising) like a MacDonald's for information, but they don't necessarily give us what we really want, rather they seduce us with a quick and simplified response. Do we even know what that is? We settle for quick and superficial answers that are "good enough" for most half-baked intents and purposes. And now we all suffer from information diabetes. The corollary of that is that we have a generation who thrives on superficial Internet hearsay rather than deeply learned and reflected experience.
...Purely logical databases and catalogues, filled with normal forms, are merely cold storage warehouses, without a plan for reasoning or a reason to care. We can search them by brute force for identifying their parts, but we don't know how to compose them.
Stories, on the other hand, embed emotional resonances through their expansiveness, to guide us through such warehouses of facts with causally connected scenarios — recipes of intent. How we feel about them becomes a part of the storytelling, just as the music in movies is there to tell us how to feel at each moment. Stories make facts much easier to process; they interlace more of the cognitive attributes that we have evolved to process than sterilized propositions and theorems can: navigation, pattern recognition, trust, and assessment of value.
...We actively misrepresent the details of knowledge in order to formulate an orthodox doctrine for herding individuals' storytelling.
...Be smart. Learn the tools even if you don't use them. Be aggressive with savings. Put money away. Just in case. Teach your kids to be learners. Builders. And adaptable. I don't know what ten or twenty years will look like. But give your kids the mindset to be smart enough to keep up. They need a mind that can survive multiple futures. Teach them curiosity, resilience, emotional regulation, problem solving, creative thought processing, social intelligence and how to learn without being told. Help them become self-directed learners. That's how they can survive anything. Obsession with a single career path may not work. Be so adaptable they can't ignore you.
...Trump's FTC dropped the Pepsi/Walmart case, and Amazon wriggled out of the DC case, but the California AG's office has a lot more resources than DC can muster. This is a timely reminder that America's antitrust laws can be enforced at the state level as well as by the federal authorities. Trump might be happy to let Amazon steal from Americans so long as Jeff Bezos neuters the Washington Post, writes a check for $1m to sit on the inaugural dais, and makes a garbage movie about Melania; but that doesn't stop California AG Rob Bonta from going after Amazon for ripping off Californians (and, in so doing, develop the evidentiary record and precedent that will allow every other state AG to go after Amazon).
The fact that Amazon's monopoly lets it control prices across the economy highlights the futility of trying to fix the Amazon problem by shopping elsewhere. A "boycott" isn't you shopping really hard, it's an organized movement with articulated demands, a theory of change, and a backbone of solidarity.
...the billions that Amazon steals from American buyers and sellers are the source of the millions that Bezos uses to support Trump's fascist takeover of America. Without billionaires who would happily support concentration camps in their back yards if it means saving a dollar on their taxes, fascism would still be a fringe movement.
Götterdämmerung at 2 A.M. EST JM Smith
...The same system that cannot guarantee housing for its citizens can always guarantee funding for war. That imbalance is not accidental — it is the architecture of late empire. We are doomed by the nihilism built into neoliberal entitlement.
...the bombing of Tehran hurts, because the citizens there are not responsible, only cursed by belonging to a nation with oil flowing through its soil that is coveted by the oligarchs of capitalism.
Donald Trump, reeling from the Epstein pedophile scandal, soaring inflation, and rotten poll numbers, launched an unprovoked regional war without congressional authorization — let alone a coherent rationale for the strikes across Iran. Iran retaliated with strikes on U.S. forces and U.S. military assets across the region. Reports indicate Iran launched attacks on Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Qatar, Dubai, and Bahrain.
The New York Times explained:
President Trump and his aides asserted that Iran had restarted its nuclear program, had enough available nuclear material to build a bomb within days and was developing long-range missiles that will soon be capable of hitting the United States.
All three of these claims are either false or unproven.
...The rationale for the war is confused, at best. Trump and his war collaborator, Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu, are calling for regime change. But how is that to come about? In his announcement, Trump proclaimed to the Iranian people: "Now is the time to seize control of your destiny and to unleash the prosperous and glorious future that is close within your reach." Without further direction or promise of assistance, he declared, "This is the moment for action. Do not let it pass."
...Major General (Ret.) Paul D. Eaton, an Army commander during Operation Iraqi Freedom, and senior adviser to VoteVets PAC, said in a statment:
Men who know more about war than Donald Trump ever will warned him repeatedly about the risks to American lives by starting a war with Iran. Indeed, Trump himself predicted casualties in his speech to America. The Constitution could not be more clear. When launching wars of choice, especially with American lives in the balance, the president goes to Congress and Congress authorizes it. That did not happen, and these operations are blatantly unconstitutional.
More to the point, these operations seem to have no focus. Trump says they're to keep Iran from getting a nuclear weapon, but just last year he said we ‘obliterated' that program. It seems to be targeting missile sites, but Trump says it is to stoke regime change. A war without focus is a war with no tangible goals. And a war with no goals ends up a Forever War.
...Sen. Elizabeth Warren (D-MA) was emphatic: "Donald Trump's single-handedly starting another war with Iran is dangerous and illegal. 'America first' doesn't mean dragging the United States into another forever war built on lies while ignoring the needs of Americans here at home." She added: "The Constitution is clear: only Congress can declare war. The Senate must come back in session immediately to vote up or down on a War Powers Resolution."
...In an eight-minute video released in the wee hours of Saturday morning, while most Americans were still asleep, he announced that his goals are the abolishment of the theocratic regime, total capitulation by its Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps—or else the death of its members at U.S. hands—and an end to the country's controversial nuclear program.
Trump called for Iran's ninety-two million people to rise up in popular resistance and form a new government. "For many years, you have asked for America's help, but you never got it," he told the Iranian people. "Now you have a President who is giving you what you want, so let's see how you respond. America is backing you with overwhelming strength and devastating force."
...Ali Vaez, who heads the Iran project at the International Crisis Group, told me, "The idea in Washington and Tel Aviv that bombing Iran will somehow trigger a popular uprising is not strategy—it's wishful thinking." He noted that there is no modern precedent for forcing regime change by airpower alone. "Bombs can degrade infrastructure. They can weaken capabilities," he said. "But they do not manufacture organized political alternatives."
Damnable RottennessLucy Wooding at LRB, on Joanne Paul's biography of Thomas More
...More and his humanist friends were fluent in a range of languages. They moved effortlessly between genres, and were masters of irony and allusion. They were also adept at self-fashioning, to the point of complete deception. High-minded, sorrowful and penetrating indictments of court corruption and the evils of politics were written by men who were prospering in political life or desperately seeking political advancement.
...He also condemned the heretics in vitriolic language, reviling Luther's utterances as 'all the muck and shit which your damnable rottenness has vomited up'. In this, he was giving like for like, since Luther himself was renowned for his scatological and violent language. Luther had condemned Henry VIII for his 'slavish and impudent and strumpet-like insolence', called him a 'damnable and offensive worm' who should be spattered 'with his own muck and shit' and pronounced that 'this royal heretic, unless he comes to his senses, should be burned.' More responded vigorously by saying that if Luther thought he could 'besmirch the royal crown with shit' then More could proclaim 'the beshitted tongue' of Luther most fit to lick' the posterior of a pissing she-mule'.
...We should be wary of assuming that anything in Utopia is what it appears to be.
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