Opinion | The Age of Decadence - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Following in the footsteps of the great cultural critic Jacques Barzun, we can say that decadence refers to economic stagnation, institutional decay and cultural and intellectual exhaustion at a high level of material prosperity and technological development
-
Under decadence, Barzun wrote, “The forms of art as of life seem exhausted, the stages of development have been run through. Institutions function painfully. Repetition and frustration are the intolerable result.” He added, “When people accept futility and the absurd as normal, the culture is decadent.” And crucially, the stagnation is often a consequence of previous development: The decadent society is, by definition, a victim of its own success.
-
“What fascinates and terrifies us about the Roman Empire is not that it finally went smash,” wrote W.H. Auden of that endless autumn, but rather that “it managed to last for four centuries without creativity, warmth, or hope.”
- ...38 more annotations...
Science fiction's curious ability to predict the future | The Spectator - 0 views
-
how many policy decisions have been influenced by dystopian visions? And how often did these turn out to be wise ones?
-
The 1930s policy of appeasement, for example, was based partly on an exaggerated fear that the Luftwaffe could match H.G. Wells’s Martians in destroying London.
-
science fiction has been a source of inspiration, too. When Silicon Valley began thinking about how to use the internet, they turned to writers such as William Gibson and Neal Stephenson. Today, no discussion of artificial intelligence is complete without reference to 2001: A Space Odyssey, just as nearly all conversations about robotics include a mention of Philip K. Dick’s Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep? or the movie it inspired, Blade Runner.
- ...10 more annotations...
Dystopia by the Bay - NYTimes.com - 0 views
High Trust, High Fear: Inside the Dystopian Hellhole of Trumpism - Talking Points Memo - 0 views
-
The clear implication is not simply that Trump hires bad or untrustworthy people. It is far more organic. Trump creates and operates in a world in which anyone can be tossed overboard, fired or denigrated more or less at the drop of a hat. Having the dignity crushed out of you amounts to the most reliable and universal aspect of Trump service. Trump also notoriously sets lieutenants against each other, both for kicks and as a method of control. Trump is himself impulsive and erratic by nature. He uses this culture of disruption and unpredictability as a method of managing himself and others.
-
All of this breeds a climate of mistrust and suspicion both in the ‘bilateral’ relationships between Trump and individual staffers and within the whole subculture – vertical and horizontal mistrust, we might say. It’s a low trust, high fear climate which breeds backstabbing, betrayal, paranoia which only deepens in a self-validating, self-perpetuating way.
-
It is a system of maximal public obsequiousness and maximal private subterfuge. Everything is a lie. It breeds all these negative behaviors because it is an unsafe environment in which they become rational.
- ...5 more annotations...
In defense of science fiction - by Noah Smith - Noahpinion - 0 views
-
I’m a big fan of science fiction (see my list of favorites from last week)! So when people start bashing the genre, I tend to leap to its defense
-
this time, the people doing the bashing are some serious heavyweights themselves — Charles Stross, the celebrated award-winning sci-fi author, and Tyler Austin Harper, a professor who studies science fiction for a living
-
The two critiques center around the same idea — that rich people have misused sci-fi, taking inspiration from dystopian stories and working to make those dystopias a reality.
- ...14 more annotations...
The Trouble with Wall Street | New Republic - 1 views
-
The dystopia often imagined in the world of artificial intelligence—in which computers somehow take on a life of their own and come to rule mankind—has actually happened in the world of finance. The giant Wall Street firms have taken on lives of their own, beyond human control. The people flow into and out of them but have only incidental effect on their direction and behavior. The firms may not be intent on evil; they aren't intent on anything except short-term profits: they're insensible.
-
Stop and think once more about what has just happened on Wall Street: its most admired firm conspired to flood the financial system with worthless securities, then set itself up to profit from betting against those very same securities, and in the bargain helped to precipitate a world historic financial crisis that cost millions of people their jobs and convulsed our political system. In other places, or at other times, the firm would be put out of business, and its leaders shamed and jailed and strung from lampposts. (I am not advocating the latter.) Instead Goldman Sachs, like the other too-big-to-fail firms, has been handed tens of billions in government subsidies, on the theory that we cannot live without them. They were then permitted to pay politicians to prevent laws being passed to change their business, and bribe public officials (with the implicit promise of future employment) to neuter the laws that were passed—so that they might continue to behave in more or less the same way that brought ruin on us all.
-
If Goldman Sachs is going to change, it will be only if change is imposed upon it from the outside—either by the market's decision that it is no longer viable in its current form or by the government's decision that we can no longer afford it.
- ...1 more annotation...
A Future Without Jobs? Two Views of the Changing Work Force - The New York Times - 0 views
-
Eduardo Porter: I read your very interesting column about the universal basic income, the quasi-magical tool to ensure some basic standard of living for everybody when there are no more jobs for people to do. What strikes me about this notion is that it relies on a view of the future that seems to have jelled into a certainty, at least among the technorati on the West Coast
-
the economic numbers that we see today don’t support this view. If robots were eating our lunch, it would show up as fast productivity growth. But as Robert Gordon points out in his new book, “The Rise and Fall of American Growth,” productivity has slowed sharply. He argues pretty convincingly that future productivity growth will remain fairly modest, much slower than during the burst of American prosperity in mid-20th century.
-
it relies on an unlikely future. It’s not a future with a lot of crummy work for low pay, but essentially a future with little or no paid work at all.
- ...17 more annotations...
Puddleglum and the Savage - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
both Huxley and Lewis looked at a utilitarian’s paradise — a world where all material needs are met, pleasure is maximized and pain eliminated — and pointed out what we might be giving up to get there: the entire vertical dimension in human life, the quest for the sublime and the transcendent, for romance and honor, beauty and truth.
-
Two passages from their work illustrate this point — that comfort purchased by sacrificing transcendence might not be worth the cost. The first comes from Lewis’s Narnia novel “The Silver Chair,” in which a character named Puddleglum confronts a queen who has confined the heroes in an underground kingdom, and lulled them with the insistence that the underground world is all there is — that ideas like the sun and sky are dangerous wishful thinking, undermining their immediate contentment. “Suppose we have only dreamed, or made up, all those things,” Puddleglum replies — “trees and grass and sun and moon and stars and Aslan himself. Suppose we have. Then all I can say is that, in that case, the made-up things seem a good deal more important than the real ones ... We’re just babies making up a game, if you’re right. But four babies playing a game can make a play-world which licks your real world hollow.”
-
The second comes from the end of “Brave New World,” when a so-called “Savage” raised outside the dystopia confronts its presiding “Controller,” Mustapha Mond. The Savage lists everything that’s been purged in the name of pleasure and order — historical memory, art and literature, religion and philosophy, the tragic sense. And Mond responds that “these things are symptoms of political inefficiency,” and that the comforts of modern civilization depend on excluding them. “But I don’t want comfort,” the Savage says. “I want God, I want poetry, I want real danger, I want freedom, I want goodness. I want sin.”
- ...2 more annotations...
Fond Recollections of Dictators, Colored Later by the Lessons of History - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
MONICA MACÍAS calls herself the daughter of dictators. Two of them.
-
Her father was Francisco Macías Nguema, the first president of Equatorial Guinea, whose rule was marked by the execution of thousands. But the man who became her guardian, and father figure, was even more infamous: Kim Il-sung, the founder of North Korea and creator of a real-life Orwellian dystopia
Thomas Piketty and His Critics - NYTimes.com - 0 views
-
both optimists and pessimists share a belief more telling than Piketty’s success: the idea that the traditional Democratic economic agenda is dead.
-
Piketty’s book reinforces the idea that the domestic policies liberals advocate for are palliative, not curative — that, in essence, inequality is here to stay.
-
“for countries at the world technological frontier” — the United States, northern Europe and parts of Asia — and “ultimately for the planet as a whole – there is ample reason to believe that the growth rate will not exceed 1-1.5 percent in the long run, no matter what economic policies are adopted.”
- ...10 more annotations...
Fossil fuels kill more people every year than wars, murders, and traffic accidents comb... - 0 views
-
Something unique makes humans the top species of the planet. It’s not our exceptional brain size, but our ability to imagine the future. This skill trains us to think unlike other animals and ultimately triumph over them. And, yet, a limitation of this unique ability might also spell our doom.
-
At a meeting in Paris, world leaders are scratching their heads about how we can deal with the imminent threat posed by global warming. Our energy-thirsty civilization is guzzling fossil fuels at an unsustainable rate and we are soon to run out our carbon budget. If we don’t act now, disastrous consequences are predicted: rising sea levels, extreme weather events, easy-to-spread infections and so on.
-
But, as Arnold Schwarzenegger makes it clear, despite our ability to dream up dystopia, “Stuff that happens in the future does not mean anything to people.” It’s a limitation that could seriously hinder a successful outcome in Paris.
- ...4 more annotations...
Wikipedia, the Last Bastion of Shared Reality - The Atlantic - 0 views
-
Wikipedia finds itself in a strange place these days. Founded amid the throbbing excitement of the first dot-com boom, it’s a shard of the utopian internet now embedded in the informational dystopia of present-day America.
-
The very idea that a bunch of randos on the internet could create a better encyclopedia than a team of professionals was mildly ludicrous, and yet the project went on, fueled by a faith in “the wisdom of crowds,” a phrase which no one has uttered about the internet for at least two years.
-
then, wouldn’t you know it, the damn thing worked! Tens of thousands of editors contributed. Articles became authoritative. Google and Google users began to prefer the Wikipedia link to any other source. Wikipedia is and was the living proof that an entirely new type of intellectual project could be created through decentralized, peer-to-peer organizing and good-faith individual effort. This was a cathedral of internet.
- ...3 more annotations...
A French Novelist Imagined Sexual Dystopia. Now It's Arrived. - The New York Times - 0 views
-
he has turned out to be a writer of unusual prescience. At a time when literature is increasingly marginalized in public life, he offers a striking reminder that novelists can provide insights about society that pundits and experts miss
-
Houellebecq, whose work is saturated with brutality, resentment and sentimentality, understood what it meant to be an incel long before the term became common.
-
Houellebecq’s theory of sexuality (he is typically French in his love of abstraction and theory). The sexual revolution of the 1960s, widely seen as a liberation movement, is better understood as the intrusion of capitalist values into the previously sacrosanct realm of intimate life. “Just like unrestrained economic liberalism … sexual liberalism produces phenomena of absolute pauperization,” he writes. “Some men make love every day; others five or six times in their life, or never.”
- ...1 more annotation...
Andrew Sullivan: New Hope and New Danger on the Left - 0 views
-
I can’t help drawing parallels between what we’re seeing in Democratic Party and the similar far-left wave of enthusiasm in Britain, where a new tide of youthful energy has flooded the British Labour Party and transformed its ambitions almost overnight from ameliorating capitalism to full-on socialism.
-
There was an infectiousness to the excitement in 2015, in part because full-fledged socialism seemed to be answering a genuine and massive crisis of capitalism.
-
It spoke to those under 40 whose futures are debt-ridden, who have little hope of property ownership, and struggle to manage with precarious, low wages. It rallied a sense of the common good against the isolation and depression of austerity. It actually took the science of climate catastrophe seriously
- ...38 more annotations...
For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here's What I Learned. - The New Y... - 0 views
-
In January, after the breaking-newsiest year in recent memory, I decided to travel back in time. I turned off my digital news notifications, unplugged from Twitter and other social networks, and subscribed to home delivery of three print newspapers — The Times, The Wall Street Journal and my local paper, The San Francisco Chronicle — plus a weekly newsmagazine, The Economist.
-
I have spent most days since then getting the news mainly from print, though my self-imposed asceticism allowed for podcasts, email newsletters and long-form nonfiction (books and magazine articles). Basically, I was trying to slow-jam the news — I still wanted to be informed, but was looking to formats that prized depth and accuracy over speed.
-
It has been life changing. Turning off the buzzing breaking-news machine I carry in my pocket was like unshackling myself from a monster who had me on speed dial, always ready to break into my day with half-baked bulleti
- ...20 more annotations...
Opinion | A Generation Emerging From the Wreckage - The New York Times - 0 views
-
I’ve been going around to campuses asking undergraduate and graduate students how they see the world.
-
I found little faith in large organizations.
-
“I don’t believe in politicians; they have been corrupted. I don’t believe in intellectuals; they have been corrupted,”
- ...11 more annotations...
'Fiction is outperforming reality': how YouTube's algorithm distorts truth | Technology... - 0 views
-
There are 1.5 billion YouTube users in the world, which is more than the number of households that own televisions. What they watch is shaped by this algorithm, which skims and ranks billions of videos to identify 20 “up next” clips that are both relevant to a previous video and most likely, statistically speaking, to keep a person hooked on their screen.
-
Company insiders tell me the algorithm is the single most important engine of YouTube’s growth
-
YouTube engineers describe it as one of the “largest scale and most sophisticated industrial recommendation systems in existence”
- ...49 more annotations...
The coronavirus shows how backward the United States has become - The Washington Post - 0 views
-
Our self-confidence, verging on hubris, should be shaken by the coronavirus. The United States has been a laggard, not a world leader, in confronting the pandemic
-
self-confidence has been bolstered by a century of achievements: We saved Western civilization from German and Soviet militarism, built the most prosperous society in history, and landed a man on the moon.
-
a German company shipped more than 1.4 million diagnostic tests for the World Health Organization by the end of February. During that same time, U.S. efforts to produce our own test misfired. By Feb. 28, only 4,000 tests from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention had been used
- ...20 more annotations...