One definition for fascism that I heard long ago and always found useful is that it's a cult of strength. Fascism says: strength is virtue, and it's the weak who are -- who have always been -- holding back the strong. (It's always, obviously, the strong who fall for this line.)
In this context, these two documents -- the self-published e-book discussed, and Michael Anton's discussion of it -- are clarifying. If you were confused or unclear, here you go! This is fascism.
The fact that there are two layers feels important to me. First, there's the e-book and its gleeful, pitiless, ahistorical visions of cruelty. Second, and just as important, there's Michael Anton's sly willingness to entertain it.
This is bad shit, really bad -- reheated evil from the back of the fridge -- and look how it claws its way out of the darkness. An eager recitation; a tepid rejection; that familiar stance: Well, no, of course I don't agree with this -- but it's interesting to think about!
I think it depends on which "we" you're talking about! In many cases, "we" do value accurate information. I'm thinking not just of high-quality news organizations, but fact-checking sites like Snopes or Politifact -- both real treasures, in my opinion. However, if you cite either On The Internet, you'll often receive the response: "Pshh please. [Fact-checking site] is totally biased." This response is, in my opinion, (a) wrong, and (b) very often offered in bad faith -- an example of the very tactic discussed in the paper linked above -- but those features don't prevent it from short-circuiting the "error correction" you're seeking.
So, if enterprises like Snopes and Politifact don't work... how DO you establish some kind of shared understanding of the world for a very broad "we"? It's really frustrating!
Internal migration in the U.S. has fallen consistently since the 1980s; more people today live closer to where they were born than they did in previous decades. And in most places in the U.S. -- certainly, the places captured by this loneliness survey -- the number of brand-new migrants is tiny relative to that population of people who were born there.
Yes, this definitely counts as criticism! I think the best critics are the ones who can tell you specifically how and why something is great. As an example, James Wood's book "How Fiction Works" is basically a compendium of paragraphs and sentences Wood thinks are wonderful, which he cracks open to inspect and explain. It's really impressive whenever a critic can pull this off; I often struggle to get beyond "OMG [THING X] IS GREAT."
Even with elaborate CSS in play, I think the web has deep characteristics that you can either lean into or struggle against. For example, there's the simple fact of scrolling; does your web page embrace that default behavior, or override it with fancy scroll effects, or replace it entirely with, say, some kind of horizontal page-flipping simulation?
"At the same time as I've been playing this game, I've been making my way through a popular science-fiction trilogy written by Liu Cixin, translated by Ken Liu, and the books have spun my evenings with Fortnite into a deeper, weirder dimension." :)
This doesn't describe my experience of the Bay Area (2004-present) at all. Here's a sincere tip: start attending the Seminars About Long-term Thinking organized by the Long Now Foundation. Take a friend or two. Sitting in those (packed!) theaters, listening to big, bold, and really very challenging ideas -- not just presented and left at that, but also opened up and interrogated -- I really don't think you'll feel you're surrounded by people in "pursuit of ideological purity" who don't value interesting new ideas.
> breaking the global graph up into connected subgraphs
I feel like it's too conservative -- and takes "the transportation graph" as too fixed an entity. Consider how much the shape of the U.S. changed between 1917 and 2017 -- suburbs, the Interstate Highways, malls, fast food, huge parking lots, and on and on. The car literally gave us new ways of living with each other, for better and for worse.
So I think we should expect changes at least that radical in the next hundred years -- which suggests that we'll not just divide some abstract, eternal graph differently, but really truly reshape it.
I can't wait for super-fast trains + self-driving cars, AND I can't wait to see what kind of world they create.
I vote for "Parable of the Sower", definitely. I've enjoyed some of her other books, and I still have more to read, but this is the one that really left a mark on me.
FYI for those who haven't read it, Butler's "Parable of the Sower" is one of the most crucial novels of the last century. It mixes a future so dark and plausible it makes other dystopias look sweet and cartoonish with -- incredibly -- a cosmic optimism so deep and hopeful it makes you proud to be human. It's really an amazing book.
It's worth saying that, in general, Quanta is exemplary; not really "popular science" at all but something much deeper. I see that this writer, George Musser, isn't one of their staff regulars, so this piece might be an exception. But their other (staff?) reporting is absolutely worth following; there's nothing else like it.
> But Facebook is most popular? Yes. Everyone wants? Everyone. Do people have email addresses? No. He makes the email addresses. Has a stack of pre-made Facebook accounts at the ready. He pre-installs the app and pre-loads friends. Facebook is for news, he says. Popular now but maybe not popular in six months. But for now, he installs it on every phone.
Furthermore:
> The Farmers don’t use their real names (“I used my son’s name,” Farmer fourteen told us. Why? “Because it’s a good name!” he said smiling and patting his 1-year-old son on the head.) They don’t have email addresses and so often don’t know their logins. If they get logged out they have someone—often the village Facebook guru—make them a new account.
In this context, these two documents -- the self-published e-book discussed, and Michael Anton's discussion of it -- are clarifying. If you were confused or unclear, here you go! This is fascism.
The fact that there are two layers feels important to me. First, there's the e-book and its gleeful, pitiless, ahistorical visions of cruelty. Second, and just as important, there's Michael Anton's sly willingness to entertain it.
This is bad shit, really bad -- reheated evil from the back of the fridge -- and look how it claws its way out of the darkness. An eager recitation; a tepid rejection; that familiar stance: Well, no, of course I don't agree with this -- but it's interesting to think about!