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With 34.2 guns per 100 people, Iraq is ranked eighth on the survey. More to the point, the country already had a well-established gun culture and a high rate of gun ownership before the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. We can't know for sure if a well-armed population could have stopped Hitler's genocide, but it certainly didn't stop Saddam's.

Given the advanced deadly weaponry available to governments these days -- as opposed to the late 18th century -- most tyrants aren't all that threatened by citizens with conventional weapons. Like the Iraqis, Libyans were fairly well armed under Muammar al-Qaddafi -- 15.5 guns per 100 people as of 2007 -- but it still took an assist from NATO air power to finally bring him down.  

On the other extreme, the country ranked last on the survey -- with only 0.1 guns per 100 people -- is Tunisia, which as you'll recall was still able to overthrow a longtime dictator in 2011. With only 3.5 guns per 100 people, the Egyptian population that overthrew Hosni Mubarak was hardly well armed either. On the other hand, Bahrain, where a popular revolution failed to unseat the country's monarchy, has 24.8 guns per 100 people, putting it in the top 20 worldwide. A relatively high rate of 10.7 guns per 100 people in Venezuela hasn't stopped the deterioration of democracy under Hugo Chávez.

it's hard to see a trend either way

But whether 43 percent or 34 percent of the population owns guns, it still suggests that gun-owning households have, on average, more than one gun.

65 percent of America's guns are in the hands of 20 percent of gun owners.

As Lili Loofbourow wrote of the Kavanaugh incident in Slate, adolescent male cruelty toward women is a bonding mechanism, a vehicle for intimacy through contempt. The white men in the lynching photos are smiling not merely because of what they have done, but because they have done it together.

There were the border-patrol agents cracking up at the crying immigrant children separated from their families, and the Trump adviser who delighted white supremacists when he mocked a child with Down syndrome who was separated from her mother

It is not just that the perpetrators of this cruelty enjoy it; it is that they enjoy it with one another. Their shared laughter at the suffering of others is an adhesive that binds them to one another, and to Trump.

Somewhere on the wide spectrum between adolescent teasing and the smiling white men in the lynching photographs are the Trump supporters whose community is built by rejoicing in the anguish of those they see as unlike them, who have found in their shared cruelty an answer to the loneliness and atomization of modern life.

The president who demanded the execution of five black and Latino teenagers for a crime they didn’t commit decrying “false accusations,” when his Supreme Court nominee stands accused; his supporters who fancy themselves champions of free speech meet references to Hillary Clinton or a woman whose only crime was coming forward to offer her own story of abuse with screams of “Lock her up!

The political movement that elected a president who wanted to ban immigration by adherents of an entire religion, who encourages police to brutalize suspects, and who has destroyed thousands of immigrant families for violations of the law less serious than those of which he and his coterie stand accused, now laments the state of due process.

This isn’t incoherent. It reflects a clear principle: Only the president and his allies, his supporters, and their anointed are entitled to the rights and protections of the law, and if necessary, immunity from it. The rest of us are entitled only to cruelty, by their whim. This is how the powerful have ever kept the powerless divided and in their place, and enriched themselves in the process.

Trump’s only true skill is the con; his only fundamental belief is that the United States is the birthright of straight, white, Christian men, and his only real, authentic pleasure is in cruelty. It is that cruelty, and the delight it brings them, that binds his most ardent supporters to him, in shared scorn for those they hate and fear: immigrants, black voters, feminists, and treasonous white men who empathize with any of those who would steal their birthright

I beat myself up about all of this for a while, until I decided that the unfilled hole would have to serve as both feature and defect. What I had were quotidian details, though to be honest, I’m not even sure what these add up to.

But even if I had called Mr. Hovater yet again — even if we had discussed Blavatsky at length, the way we did his ideas about the Federal Reserve Bank — I’m not sure it would have answered the question.

The number of births did increase in 2016, the first year after the policy was eased. But it has been dropping since.

Our calculations — based on the Chinese government’s population and employment statistics yearbooks — show that before the one-child policy was lifted, about 40 percent of mothers who had a first child would have a second one. This is known as parity-two fertility of 0.4. (The figure may seem rather high given the rule, but ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a girl were exempt.)

These decreases are the result of many Chinese women’s decision to postpone marriage and childbearing. There are many reasons for these changes in behavior, notably urbanization, greater access to higher education for women and rising expectations about standards of living.

And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”Lifting controls over births would be, for the Chinese Communist Party, a tacit admission that its past policies have failed. And yet anything short of removing all such regulations will only ensure more failure.

The number of births did increase in 2016, the first year after the policy was eased. But it has been dropping since.

Our calculations — based on the Chinese government’s population and employment statistics yearbooks — show that before the one-child policy was lifted, about 40 percent of mothers who had a first child would have a second one. This is known as parity-two fertility of 0.4. (The figure may seem rather high given the rule, but ethnic minorities and rural couples whose first child was a girl were exempt.)

And so the Chinese government isn’t just encouraging women to have more children — and hoping to coax them with maternity leave and other benefits, as well as promises to mobilize resources at all levels of the state. It has vowed to “guide young people to have the correct perspectives on dating, marriage and family.”

The big promise that Democrats failed to keep was the passage of an immigration reform bill that would legalize the approximately 11 million undocumented immigrants living in the United States.

Latinos haven’t forgotten Mr. Obama’s promise. That’s why Democrats have a “Latino problem.”

Now it falls to Mr. Biden and his running mate, Senator Kamala Harris, to overcome this lack of trust within the Latino community. “I think it was a big mistake,” Mr. Biden said of the Obama administration’s mass deportations during our interview. “It took too long to get it right.”

Mr. Biden’s second promise is specifically for Dreamers. “I will also legalize Dreamers again,” he said during our February interview, “making sure they are not deported. These are already Americans.”

Mr. Trump’s policies have had a profound effect on immigration: From 2016 to 2019, annual net immigration to the United States fell by almost half, to about 600,000 migrants per year.

It’s possible that Mr. Biden’s policies could send the wrong message to people in the Southern Hemisphere. So, in order to discourage new caravans of people from traveling to the United States from Honduras, El Salvador and Guatemala, Mr. Biden has said he plans to invest $4 billion to create jobs in Central America and tackle the root causes of migration.

The truth is that all of Silicon Valley, not just Facebook, is in desperate want of a big new idea.

We may always feel like we’re on our phones too much, that we’re already devoting a surfeit of time to our screens, but the truth is we have much more time to give our platforms. If we had screens over our eyes, we could be captive consumers of content and advertising quite literally all the time. Not only that, but if the metaverse went mainstream, it would necessitate a whole swath of new hardware and profit-generating apps too.

The industry needs this framework—at a moment of “unprecedented liquidity for VC funds,” as the investor Matt Cohen put it at Crunchbase, investors are dying for something like a metaverse to pour capital into.

Allowing this company—this industry—to rush headlong into building anything remotely metaverse-like would merely reproduce, if not exacerbate, the problems that arose when it hastily launched the social-media platforms that now define online life.

with Facebook desperately trying to change the terms of the game, Zuckerberg looking to assert himself as more than just the operator of a particularly toxic yearbook feed, and the conditions ripe for the industry to pour cash into the pieces necessary to build some metaverse-shaped thing, they may just wind up succeeding—and replicating outright the dystopian metaverse their source material has warned us about.

A social network is an idle, inactive system—a Rolodex of contacts, a notebook of sales targets, a yearbook of possible soul mates. But social media is active—hyperactive, really—spewing material across those networks instead of leaving them alone until needed.

As the original name suggested, social networking involved connecting, not publishing. By connecting your personal network of trusted contacts (or “strong ties,” as sociologists call them) to others’ such networks (via “weak ties”), you could surface a larger network of trusted contacts

The whole idea of social networks was networking: building or deepening relationships, mostly with people you knew. How and why that deepening happened was largely left to the users to decide.

That changed when social networking became social media around 2009, between the introduction of the smartphone and the launch of Instagram. Instead of connection—forging latent ties to people and organizations we would mostly ignore—social media offered platforms through which people could publish content as widely as possible, well beyond their networks of immediate contacts.

Social media turned you, me, and everyone into broadcasters (if aspirational ones). The results have been disastrous but also highly pleasurable, not to mention massively profitable—a catastrophic combination.

soon enough, all social networks became social media first and foremost. When groups, pages, and the News Feed launched, Facebook began encouraging users to share content published by others in order to increase engagement on the service, rather than to provide updates to friends. LinkedIn launched a program to publish content across the platform, too. Twitter, already principally a publishing platform, added a dedicated “retweet” feature, making it far easier to spread content virally across user networks.

The authors propose social media as a system in which users participate in “information exchange.” The network, which had previously been used to establish and maintain relationships, becomes reinterpreted as a channel through which to broadcast.

The toxicity of social media makes it easy to forget how truly magical this innovation felt when it was new. From 2004 to 2009, you could join Facebook and everyone you’d ever known—including people you’d definitely lost track of—was right there, ready to connect or reconnect. The posts and photos I saw characterized my friends’ changing lives, not the conspiracy theories that their unhinged friends had shared with them

Twitter, which launched in 2006, was probably the first true social-media site, even if nobody called it that at the time. Instead of focusing on connecting people, the site amounted to a giant, asynchronous chat room for the world. Twitter was for talking to everyone—which is perhaps one of the reasons journalists have flocked to it

on Twitter, anything anybody posted could be seen instantly by anyone else. And furthermore, unlike posts on blogs or images on Flickr or videos on YouTube, tweets were short and low-effort, making it easy to post many of them a week or even a day.

a “web 2.0” revolution in “user-generated content,” offering easy-to-use, easily adopted tools on websites and then mobile apps. They were built for creating and sharing “content,”

When we look back at this moment, social media had already arrived in spirit if not by name. RSS readers offered a feed of blog posts to catch up on, complete with unread counts. MySpace fused music and chatter; YouTube did it with video (“Broadcast Yourself”)

This is also why journalists became so dependent on Twitter: It’s a constant stream of sources, events, and reactions—a reporting automat, not to mention an outbound vector for media tastemakers to make tastes.

Other services arrived or evolved in this vein, among them Reddit, Snapchat, and WhatsApp, all far more popular than Twitter. Social networks, once latent routes for possible contact, became superhighways of constant content

Although you can connect the app to your contacts and follow specific users, on TikTok, you are more likely to simply plug into a continuous flow of video content that has oozed to the surface via algorithm.

In the social-networking era, the connections were essential, driving both content creation and consumption. But the social-media era seeks the thinnest, most soluble connections possible, just enough to allow the content to flow.

The ensuing disaster was multipar

“influencer” became an aspirational role, especially for young people for whom Instagram fame seemed more achievable than traditional celebrity—or perhaps employment of any kind.

social-media operators discovered that the more emotionally charged the content, the better it spread across its users’ networks. Polarizing, offensive, or just plain fraudulent information was optimized for distribution. By the time the platforms realized and the public revolted, it was too late to turn off these feedback loops.

When network connections become activated for any reason or no reason, then every connection seems worthy of traversing.

Rounding up friends or business contacts into a pen in your online profile for possible future use was never a healthy way to understand social relationships.

when social networking evolved into social media, user expectations escalated. Driven by venture capitalists’ expectations and then Wall Street’s demands, the tech companies—Google and Facebook and all the rest—became addicted to massive scale

Social media showed that everyone has the potential to reach a massive audience at low cost and high gain—and that potential gave many people the impression that they deserve such an audience.

On social media, everyone believes that anyone to whom they have access owes them an audience: a writer who posted a take, a celebrity who announced a project, a pretty girl just trying to live her life, that anon who said something afflictive

Facebook and all the rest enjoyed a massive rise in engagement and the associated data-driven advertising profits that the attention-driven content economy created. The same phenomenon also created the influencer economy, in which individual social-media users became valuable as channels for distributing marketing messages or product sponsorships by means of their posts’ real or imagined reach

people just aren’t meant to talk to one another this much. They shouldn’t have that much to say, they shouldn’t expect to receive such a large audience for that expression, and they shouldn’t suppose a right to comment or rejoinder for every thought or notion either.

From being asked to review every product you buy to believing that every tweet or Instagram image warrants likes or comments or follows, social media produced a positively unhinged, sociopathic rendition of human sociality.

That’s no surprise, I guess, given that the model was forged in the fires of Big Tech companies such as Facebook, where sociopathy is a design philosophy.

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse

Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

Something may yet survive the fire that would burn it down: social networks, the services’ overlooked, molten core. It was never a terrible idea, at least, to use computers to connect to one another on occasion, for justified reasons, and in moderation

The problem came from doing so all the time, as a lifestyle, an aspiration, an obsession. The offer was always too good to be true, but it’s taken us two decades to realize the Faustian nature of the bargain.

when I first wrote about downscale, the ambition seemed necessary but impossible. It still feels unlikely—but perhaps newly plausible.

To win the soul of social life, we must learn to muzzle it again, across the globe, among billions of people. To speak less, to fewer people and less often–and for them to do the same to you, and everyone else as well

We cannot make social media good, because it is fundamentally bad, deep in its very structure. All we can do is hope that it withers away, and play our small part in helping abandon it.

As it turns out, technology demand only increased and the Nasdaq had its best year since 2009, spurred on by low interest rates and a surge in spending on products for remote work.

“Companies that recently raised at very high prices at the height of valuation inflation may be grappling with high burn rates and near-term challenges growing into those valuations,” Shakir told CNBC in an email. “Others that were more dilution-sensitive and chose to raise less may now need to consider avenues for extending runway that would have seemed unpalatable to them just months ago.”

“Our companies heeded that advice and most companies are now prepared for winter,” Lux wrote.

“This time, many of those tools have been exhausted,” Sequoia wrote. “We do not believe that this is going to be another steep correction followed by an equally swift V-shaped recovery like we saw at the outset of the pandemic.”Sequoia told its companies to look at projects, research and development, marketing and elsewhere for opportunities to cut costs. Companies don’t have to immediately pull the trigger, the firm added, but they should be ready to do it in the next 30 days if needed.

And among companies that are still private, staff reductions are underway at Klarna and Cameo, while Instacart is reportedly slowing hiring ahead of an expected initial public offering. Cloud software vendor Lacework announced staffing cuts on Friday, six months after the company was valued at $8.3 billion by venture investors.“We have adjusted our plan to increase our cash runway through to profitability and significantly strengthened our balance sheet so we can be more opportunistic around investment opportunities and weather uncertainty in the macro environment,” Lacework said in a blog post.

Shakir agreed with that assessment. “Like many, we at Lux have been advising our companies to think long term, extend runway to 2+ years if possible, take a very close look at reducing burn and improving gross margins, and start to set expectations that near-term future financings are unlikely to look like what they may have expected six or 12 months ago,” she wrote.

Lux highlighted one of the painful decisions it expects to see. For several companies, the firm said, “sacrificing people will come before sacrificing valuation.”But venture firms are keen to remind founders that great companies emerge from the darkest of times. Those that prove they can survive and even thrive when capital is in short supply, the thinking goes, are positioned to flourish when the economy bounces back.

conditions.”CORRECTION: This story was updated to reflect that cloud software vendor Lacework raised $1.3 billion in growth funding at a valuation of $8.3 billion.