That’s what the best science fiction does: It makes us question the social arrangements of our technology, and inspires us to demand better ones.
This idea – that who a technology acts for (and upon) is more important than the technology’s operating characteristics – has a lot of explanatory power.
The Social Media User’s Prayer:
God grant me cacophonous wrath about the things I cannot change, habitual neglect of the things I can change, and absolute ignorance of the difference.
Finished reading: Breakneck by Dan Wang 📚. A really outstanding book, in which we see China’s sometimes thoughtless culture of building for building’s sake contrasted to America’s culture of lawyerly prevention of … well, pretty much everything. Here’s a long representative quotation:
The engineering state is focused mostly on monumentalism. Though there are many public toilets, provision of toilet paper is only a sometimes thing. Nowhere in China is it advisable to drink tap water. Not even Shanghai.
The engineering state has engaged in wild spasms of building over the past four decades. That has achieved considerable wonders and a fair degree of harm. The future would be better if China could learn to build less, while the United States learns to build more.
I’ve come to realize that there are many ways that China and the United States are inversions of each other. Households save a great deal of their earnings in China, while it is really easy to borrow money or spend on credit in America. In terms of national policy, China is much more focused on the supply side of the economy: It suppresses consumption as it favors manufacturers with preferential financing and all manner of policy support. The United States, meanwhile, is focused on regulating demand, for example, by imposing rent control in expensive cities or mailing out checks to consumers during the pandemic.
Both approaches are running into problems. China won’t become the world’s biggest economy by building more tall bridges. It also can’t continue manufacturing more than twice the number of cars it sells at home. And the United States is starting to realize the problems of being too focused on the demand side of the economy.
[Randall Balmer] lauds evangelical involvement in nineteenth-century reform movements (particularly abolition, temperance, and women’s education) as exemplars of Christian public witness. These efforts, in his view, demonstrated faith speaking truth to power and working for the common good. Balmer also praises historical figures like William Jennings Bryan for his economic populism and Martin Luther King Jr. for his prophetic civil rights leadership, holding up such examples of progressive, justice-oriented engagement as faithful expressions of Christianity in the public square. More broadly, he voices admiration for faith-based activism that advances values like social justice, equality, and inclusion.
Conversely, Balmer is consistently critical of recent evangelical political engagement, especially when it aligns with the Republican Party or centers on issues such as abortion, gay rights, or religious symbolism in public life. He often portrays such activism not as prophetic witness but as a bid to reclaim lost cultural privilege or enforce sectarian morality through legislation. One is left to wonder why Christian moral witness is celebrated in one era but viewed as suspect in another. Of course, Balmer is entitled to his political and theological commitments, but the criteria by which he distinguishes faithful from inappropriate activism often seem ad hoc and selectively applied. The result is a framework in which Christian political engagement is endorsed when it advances progressive goals but dismissed when it reflects more traditional convictions.
Isn’t that how it always goes, on the left and the right alike? When Christian activists agree with me, I praise them for being “prophetic”; when they disagree with me, I wonder why they insist on bringing politics into worship.
The data on the Reverse Flynn Effect includes several pieces of evidence that support Marriott’s claims. The IQ reversal, for example, seems to begin right around 2010—the point at which smartphones began their rapid ascent to ubiquity. In addition, according to the Northwestern study, the demographic suffering the steepest declines is 18 to 22-year-olds, who also happen to be the heaviest users of smartphones.
A fascinating video on the history of typewriters for the Chinese language — and some learned commentary on it by Victor Mair.
Watching the USMNT under Poch, I can’t tell the difference between what they do and what eleven random strangers sent out without instruction would do. ⚽️
It will be a while before you get to read this, but I have read it, and it is spectacular. I can’t even.
This has got to mean at least a few hundred K for me, yes? Party time!
More seriously, I don’t know what it means. $3000 per book or work — does that suggest that an essay or article or blog post, each of which is a “work,” is worth as much as a book? Searching here suggests that (with repetitions removed) I might have 20 items to be compensated for the use of. But I could have 200. Who knows? And who knows when matters will be decided?
On the larger and long-term issues surrounding this settlement, Dan Cohen is predictably terrific.
Two new arrivals I’m eager to read. That cover on Tim’s book!
Not all great guitarists have big hands — think of Prince, for instance — but most of them do. Yet the big-handers always insist that the rest of us can play what they play. This is an exceptionally annoying thing to hear. So I appreciate that Paul Davids, in this video on a beautiful John Mayer song, acknowledges (as does Mayer himself) that some people simply will not be able to play the song the way Mayer plays it.
Just look at that hipster. (Charlie Chaplin, 1916)
TLS: “Walt Disney’s background artist, Eyvind Earle, drew on Les Très Riches Heures for the colour palette of Sleeping Beauty.” Very obvious once it’s pointed out!
When Penguin paperbacks were a new innovation, you could buy them from a vending machine called the Penguincubator.
Foggy-headed from Covid I posted this one several days too early, but I’m just leaving it up because it matters to me. I’ll probably be quiet for a few days now.
I volunteered at the time in a second-hand bookshop, and often idly rifled through the surplus stock in the back. One day I found a copy of something called The Book of Common Prayer, which I had barely heard of at all. Out of sheer bemused curiosity, I flicked through it.
It was quite different to anything I had ever experienced before when I had had glancing contact with Christianity. I found myself recognising, perhaps through familiarity with an English literary canon profoundly influenced by it or the mysterious transmission of some cross-generational English collective unconscious, some of its phrases and rhythms. I was particularly struck by the general confession said at something called “morning” and “evening prayer”, with its talk of how we had “followed too much the devices and desires of our own hearts” and “left undone those things which we ought to have done” and “done those things which ought not to have done”. I suppose I had become unsatisfied with the emptiness of many aspects of my life and unable to account for or give voice to a deep, visceral sorrow at my own unworthiness and the sinful actions that I was acutely conscious of having committed. It moved me: I was embarrassed at how much, but felt obscurely that it was important. I started carrying around a copy of this curious little book — the bookshop didn’t want it and would have chucked it out otherwise. I did it furtively.
Keep reading to find out where the story goes.
Ten years ago John Siracusa announced that he would no longer write his massive reviews of the new versions of macOS — the last one, on Yosemite, was typical: over 25,000 words. Ars is still running big reviews of macOS, but they’re not as long or as good as Siracusa’s were. With the enormous changes coming in Tahoe, I need a Siracusa review to be fully informed about whether to update or not.