In health care, private equity firms have sought to reorganize the industry into what they openly call a platform model. What that means in practice is squeezing more work from doctors and nurses while raising prices. Likewise, rental housing has suffered from the rise of a corporate-housing platform: the centralizing of rental homeownership along with steady increases in rents. The result is not just bad policy but also a cultural blindness: An entire generation has grown up thinking that extraction, as opposed to building, is the path to riches.
I keep hearing that “we’re living in a post-literate society,” but worldwide literacy levels are the highest in human history. When people say “post-literate society” what they mean is “a North American and/or Western European society in which a smaller percentage of people read books than in 1950, and are correspondingly more likely to get information and entertainment from audio, video, and short-form texts.” Which is a big thing! But it has nothing to do with literacy. I would bet that the average today reads and writes more words-per-day than the average person in 1975 did, when TV ruled the media world. Almost every “post-literacy” jeremiad or lamentation acknowledges this — e.g. — but their authors can’t be bothered to come up with a phrase that accurately describes what they are rightly concerned about.
A fascinating look at the etymology of the Greek word doulos — “slave.” The cognates are remarkable.
I don’t think I appreciated how much a democracy depends upon regular people standing up to defend their rights and their powers against the elites who try to usurp them. These days people are happy to give up their rights and power if they can find some strongman or strongwoman willing to take it. This is a much larger part of human nature than I thought.
The tech media is largely failing to tell this story, so I’ll mark the moment: fall 2025 is when the new Luddite movement really began to accelerate. For the first time in a long time, there is palpable energy – positive energy – in tech. It’s directed away from the Big Tech companies, and toward alternative platforms and mindsets. Many people are trying to opt out of Big Tech altogether.
Come with me! Come with me to FREEDOM!
The Most Revd Dr Laurent Mbanda, Chairman, Gafcon Primates’ Council: “As has been the case from the very beginning, we have not left the Anglican Communion; we are the Anglican Communion.”
Finished reading: Shadow Ticket by Thomas Pynchon. I’m not yet ready to do a review — that will have to wait for a second reading — but I will say that the people who see this as the third in a detective trilogy, following Inherent Vice (2009) and Bleeding Edge (2013), are mostly wrong. The essential point of this book is to trace a line that links the multiple timelines of Against the Day (2006) to the next-door-to-ours hippiecentric moral universe of Vineland (1990) — a connection made pretty explicit when in the final chapter we see a U-boat (“an encapsulated volume of pre-Fascist space-time”) that travels through an alternate dimension in just the way that the Chums of Chance travel in Against, and then read a letter from Skeet Wheeler, on his way to California, quite obviously the father of Vineland’s Zoyd Wheeler. This alternate history of our world runs from the Chicago World’s Fair to the Tunguska Event to Prohibition to the rise of European fascism and ultimately to Reagan’s America. But passage from one terminus to the other takes us through what the narrator of Mason & Dixon (1997) calls “Worlds alternative to this one” — which is why you need a shadow ticket. 📚
The hype is expected — new tech runs on speculation. You can feel the residue of the last 30 years of booms. There is a sense that people missed their chance to get rich on the internet, on ecommerce, on the app store, on social media, on crypto, on meme stocks, on NVIDIA. The hype bubbles get inflated because individuals don’t want to miss their chance at another windfall, and companies don’t want to get displaced by any nascent technological shifts. The history of tech has calcified into stories of dramatic wins and unforeseen downfalls, and what results is a tech culture of near compulsory participation in prediction rather than creating value or serving needs.
The whole talk is great.