Most conspicuous, in my experience, is the way that retailers have responded. It’s not just CVS; coffee shops seem to have gotten more hostile and less welcoming. This is, I suspect, because they are dealing with people who steal, cause a ruckus, or shoot up in the bathroom—disorderly behaviors that they have to deter before they cost them customers.

I increasingly think this is a more general phenomenon. Disorder is not measured like crime—there is no system for aggregating measures of disorder across cities. But if you look for the signs, they are there. Retail theft, though hard to measure, has grown bad enough that major retailers now lock up their wares in many cities. The unsheltered homeless population has risen sharply. People seem to be controlling their dogs less. Road deaths have risen, even as vehicle miles driven declined, suggesting people are driving more irresponsibly. Public drug use in cities from San Francisco to Philadelphia has gotten bad enough to prompt crack-downs.

Cities’ comparative advantage is agglomeration and network effects: concentrating people in one place can create innovation that yields ore than linear returns. But that only is possible if people have shared public spaces in which to interact. Community life, of the sort that makes cities worth living in, is harder to live in the presence of disorder.

A large share of disorder is generated by a small number of people and places—one drunk or one vacant lot, one uncontrolled bar or one guy shouting on the street, can ruin the whole experience for everyone else. Identifying these problem places and people, and remediating them—not exclusively through the criminal justice system—can bring disorder under control.

“The important thing is that you’re informed on issues you care about.” Of course, finding good information is increasingly difficult. Decades ago, there were just a few channels on television; the Internet has broadened the choices and lowered the standards. “Now people might seek out information about a particular candidate on a particular policy and think they have genuine info, but they’re being misinformed or misled,” Kalla said. The decline of newspapers has led to a decrease in split-ticket voting: voters know less about the candidates in their districts, so they simply vote along party lines. This has helped to nationalize politics. Cable news, which voters increasingly rely on, “carries a lot less information than the New York Times,” Schleicher said.

Emmy mainstays like “The Marvelous Mrs. Maisel,” “Better Call Saul” and “Succession” have all ended their runs, and the newer Emmy parvenus, such as the comedies “Abbott Elementary” and “Jury Duty,” while excellent, harken back to an earlier, mass-market era of television that was dominated by sitcoms and hourlong procedurals.

“Wokeness” centers “the personal is political” at the heart of all politics and treats political action as inherently a matter of personal moral hygiene - woke isn’t something you do, it’s something you are. Correspondingly all of politics can be decomposed down to the right thoughts and right utterances of enlightened people.

Central to woke discourse is the substitution of older and less complicated versions of socially liberal perspectives with more willfully complex academic versions. So civil rights are out, “anti-racism” is in. Community is out, intersectionality is in. Equality is out, equity is in. Homelessness is out, unhousedness is in. Sexism is out, misogyny is in. Advantage is out, privilege is in

woke politics are overwhelmingly concerned with the linguistic, the symbolic, and the emotional to the detriment of the material, the economic, and the real

Woke politics are famously obsessive about language, developing literal language policies that are endlessly long and exacting. Utterances are mined for potential offense with pitiless focus, such that statements that were entirely anodyne a few years ago become unspeakable today.

The woke fixation on language and symbol makes sense when you realize that the developers of the ideology are almost entirely people whose profession involves the immaterial and the symbolic - professors, writers, reporters, artists, pundits.

Rather than calling for true mass movements (which you cannot create without the moderation and compromise the social justice set tends to abhor), woke politics typically treats all political struggle as a matter of the individual mastering themselves and behaving correctly

The structural problems (such as racism) are represented as fundamentally combated with individual moral correctness (such as articulated in White Fragility by Robin DiAngelo, which argues that racism is combated by white people interrogating their souls rather than with policy)

You combat homophobia by being gay-affirming. You combat misogyny by respecting women. You combat all social ills by relentlessly fixating on your own position in society and feeling bad about it. Nothing political can escape the gravity of personal psychodrama and no solutions exist but cleansing the self.

The fixation on emotions fits snugly in the assumption of the individual as the basic unit of politics. It also ensures that woke politics assume the possibility of a frictionless universe in which everyone feels good all the time.

Institutions are all corrupt and bigoted, so institutions cannot prompt change. Most people are irredeemably racist, and so the masses cannot create a just society.

Problems can’t be solved gradually through small steps over time, but only through revolutionary change, which itself will inevitably be blocked by the white-cis-male power structure. Everything sucks all the time, which incidentally justifies yelling all the time for people who enjoy yelling

I’d rather woke politics win than conservatism. But I’d rather have a friendly forgiving plainspoken big tent civil libertarian socialist mass movement, personally. Trouble is, there is only woke and anti-woke. There is no escape.

Money became increasingly fake-seeming as it diverged more and more from a hard day’s work and most conventional wisdom.

The growing number of people taking chances that they barely believed in (starting an Onlyfans, going all in on a memecoin, becoming a performative racist for clicks) reflected a rational response to seeing absurd and/or conventionally shitty ideas have outsized success (Bored Apes, Trump, the Babyccino).

bucking conventional wisdom in any direction became the order of the day. Contrarianism became incredibly popular. Taking the diametrically opposed position to consensus as a shortcut to standing out in a crowded and volatile field was a key Clown Town strategy.

As a subset of contrarianism, Hot Sauce Behavior became especially popular. Hot Sauce involves taking something basic or mid and applying a socially forbidden or mysterious spice to it (in place of, or to function as, the X factor or the je ne sais quoi). This element had to be shocking, bad, atavistic, or otherwise “not normal”—it could be Nazism, grooming, the Occult, Catholicism, outright aggression, the threat of violence, or the attitudes of obscure-to-you political groups—but in smallish amounts. It made peoples’ hearts race and adrenaline pump while they consumed something otherwise bland. (This was the Tension Economy as the new Attention Economy.)

If the 2020 degen was a gambler willing to go all in on a whim… …the 2023 degen is a sophisticated risk manager We have found ourselves in a new cultural era in which multiple overlapping crises and rising interest rates have led to an emergent reckoning. It is now widely understood that it was very stupid to play crazy games with tons of excess money instead of actually improving material reality. But certain questions remain: What the fuck is anything worth today? What’s the best way to manage risk while it all comes falling down?

In chess, today’s average player is more skilled than the one from yesteryear because online exposure of advanced theory has led to regular players making the moves of masters. As Virgil once said, “One kid does a new skateboard trick, then hundreds more can do it the next day around the world.”

Everyone should be able to use their increased intelligence and awareness to better navigate the world. In reality, the irony is painful: When everyone gets smarter, things get harder. If everyone is reassessing the most-effective-tactics-available all the time, it gets harder and harder to win, even though you’re smarter and “should be in a better position.” The Yale admissions office realizes thousands of applicants have watched the same obscure how-to-get-into-Yale TikTok, and decides to change the meta: Leadership is no longer a valuable quality.

Max Pain means, even when you’re right, you’re wrong; it describes a climate in which everyone’s opinion is right at some point, but never at the right time.

This article proposes to explain why education is so difficult and contentious by arguing that educational thinking draws on only three fundamental ideas&emdash;that of socializing the young, shaping the mind by a disciplined academic curriculum, and facilitating the development of students' potential. All educational positions are made up of various mixes of these ideas. The problems we face in education are due to the fact that each of these ideas is significantly flawed and also that each is incompatible in basic ways with the other two. Until we recognize these basic incompatibilities we will be unable adequately to respond to the problems we face.

While it may ostensibly appear to be a simple case of influencers making a business decision to create more of the content they believe audiences want, and then being incentivized by engagement numbers to remain in this niche forever, it's actually deeper than that. It involves the gradual and unwitting replacement of a person's identity with one custom-made for the audience.

Put simply, in order to be someone, we need someone to be someone for.

When influencers are analyzing audience feedback, they often find that their more outlandish behavior receives the most attention and approval, which leads them to recalibrate their personalities according to far more extreme social cues than those they'd receive in real life. In doing this they exaggerate the more idiosyncratic facets of their personalities, becoming crude caricatures of themselves.

As the caricature becomes more familiar than the person, both to the audience and to the influencer, it comes to be regarded by both as the only honest expression of the influencer, so that any deviation from it soon looks and feels inauthentic. At that point the persona has eclipsed the person, and the audience has captured the influencer.

he implied his firing was part of the conspiracy to silence the truth, and urged his loyal followers to subscribe to his Substack, as this was now his family’s only source of income. His new audience proved to be generous with both money and attention, and his need to meet their expectations seems to have spurred him, consciously or unconsciously, to double down on his more extreme views. Now almost everything he writes about, from Covid to Ukraine, he somehow ties to the shadowy New World Order.

I wanted an audience, but I also knew that having the wrong audience would be worse than having no audience, because they'd constrain me with their expectations, forcing me to focus on one tiny niche of my worldview at the expense of everything else, until I became a parody of myself.

I ensured that my brand image—the person that my audience expects me to be—was in alignment with my ideal image—the person I want to be. So even though audience capture likely does affect me in some way, it only makes me more like the person I want to be.

This is the ultimate trapdoor in the hall of fame; to become a prisoner of one's own persona. The desire for recognition in an increasingly atomized world lures us to be who strangers wish us to be. And with personal development so arduous and lonely, there is ease and comfort in crowdsourcing your identity.

York points to a 1946 U.S. Supreme Court decision, Marsh v. Alabama, which held that private entities can become sufficiently large and public to require them to be subject to the same Constitutional constraints as government entities. Though York says this ruling has “not as of this writing been applied to the quasi-public spaces of the internet”

even if YouTube were treated as an extension of government due to its size and required to retain every non-criminal video uploaded to its service, it would make as much of a political statement elsewhere, if not more. In France and Germany, it — like any other company — must comply with laws that require the removal of hate speech, laws which in the U.S. would be unconstitutional

Several European countries have banned Google Analytics because it is impossible for their citizens to be protected against surveillance by American intelligence agencies.

TikTok has downplayed the seriousness of its platform by framing it as an entertainment venue. As with other platforms, disinformation on TikTok spreads and multiplies. These factors may have an effect on how people vote. But the sudden alarm over yet-unproved allegations of algorithmic meddling in TikTok to boost Chinese interests is laughable to those of us who have been at the mercy of American-created algorithms despite living elsewhere. American state actors have also taken advantage of the popularity of social networks in ways not dissimilar from political adversaries.

what York notes is how aligned platforms are with the biases of upper-class white Americans; not coincidentally, the boards and executive teams of these companies are dominated by people matching that description.

It should not be so easy to point to similarities in egregious behaviour; corruption of legal processes should not be so common. I worry that regulators in China and the U.S. will spend so much time negotiating which of them gets to treat the internet as their domain while the rest of us get steamrolled by policies that maximize their self-preferencing.

to ensure a clear set of values projected into the world. One way to achieve that is to prefer protocols over platforms.

Yes, the country’s light touch approach to regulation and generous support of its tech industry has brought the world many of its most popular products and services. But it should not be assumed that we must rely on these companies built in the context of middle- and upper-class America.

This is all build-up to my proposal for what Musk — or any other bidder for Twitter, for that matter — ought to do with a newly private Twitter. First, Twitter’s current fully integrated model is a financial failure. Second, Twitter’s social graph is extremely valuable. Third, Twitter’s cultural impact is very large, and very controversial. Given this, Musk (who I will use as a stand-in for any future CEO of Twitter) should start by splitting Twitter into two companies. One company would be the core Twitter service, including the social graph. The other company would be all of the Twitter apps and the advertising business.

TwitterServiceCo would open up its API to any other company that might be interested in building their own client experience; each company would: Pay for the right to get access to the Twitter service and social graph. Monetize in whatever way they see fit (i.e. they could pursue a subscription model). Implement their own moderation policy. This last point would cut a whole host of Gordian Knots:

A truly open TwitterServiceCo has the potential to be a new protocol for the Internet — the notifications and identity protocol; unlike every other protocol, though, this one would be owned by a private company. That would be insanely valuable, but it is a value that will never be realized as long as Twitter is a public company led by a weak CEO and ineffective board driving an integrated business predicated on a business model that doesn’t work. Twitter’s Reluctance

The game is that every time we create a new technology, we’re creating new possibilities, new choices that didn’t exist before. Those choices themselves—even the choice to do harm—are a good, they’re a plus.

We want an economy that’s growing in the second sense: unlimited betterment, unlimited increase in wisdom, and complexity, and choices. I don’t see any limit there. We don’t want an economy that’s just getting fatter and fatter, and bigger and bigger, in terms of its size. Can we imagine such a system? That’s hard, but I don’t think it’s impossible.

With greater access to news on social media and the internet, Americans are more deluged than they used to be by depressing stories. (And the news cycle really can be pretty depressing!) This is leading to a kind of perma-gloom about the state of the world, even as we maintain a certain resilience about the things that we have the most control over. Beyond the diverse array of daily challenges that Americans face, many of us seem to be suffering from something related to the German concept of weltschmerz, or world-sadness. It’s mediaschmerz—a sadness about the news cycle and news media, which is distinct from the experience of our everyday life. I’m not entirely sure if I think this is good or bad. It simply is. Individual hope and national despair are not contradictions. For now, they form the double helix of the American spirit.