The Cycle:
1. Observation: "The sky is blue."
2. Critique: "Saying the sky is blue centers a specific ocularcentric hegemony."
3. Synthesis: "The sky is a social construct."
4. Result: 14% chance the sun is actually a hallucination by 2029.
Bari Weiss built her brand on being βcancelledβ from the NYT. She now runs a media company, appears on every major podcast, and speaks at sold-out events. If this is cancellation, I would like to be cancelled. Please cancel me. I am once again asking to be cancelled.
The Four Horsemen of the Information Apocalypse:
1. Selection Bias
2. Audience Capture
3. The Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect
4. Thinking youβre immune to the first threeβ¦
After years of fucking around, compromising and second guessing, I have settled on 3 principles when it comes to my blog:
1. No analytics beyond whatever is baked into Ghost
2. No sponsorships and no advertising, not now, not ever
3. I will never charge more than $2.50 a month for membership and I will never raise my prices
The most successful grift of the modern era was convincing the smartest people in the world that 'changing the world' means optimizing the click-through rate on ads for mattresses that ship in a box
Grounded intellectual work, when it happens, if it ever happens again, is uncomfortable. It tells you things you don't want to hear, makes arguments that threaten positions you hold, points out problems you'd rather not see.
The public intellectuals of the past, at their best, did this.
Our current crop // slop does the opposite.
Charles Dickens in 1843: "what if I wrote a story where a man learns not to be a dick"
Humanity: "holy shit"
Humanity: makes 400 adaptations
Humanity: continues being dicks
Humanity: "we should adapt this again"
My conscious brain: 'We should learn linear algebra to better understand neural networks.'
My revealed preferences: 'We are going to scroll specifically the parts of Wikipedia that list defunct 19th-century breakfast cereals.'
