This is a great article, but it wants to be book. Very heavy on (interesting) background, then never getting around to reintegration / light on conclusions. I also think it lost the thread on the very interesting question that was posed at the start, and never really returned.<p>Why are aesthetics in media and elsewhere converging towards a homogeneous blob of everywhere-consistent, but meanwhile politics has exploded into a kind of anything-goes mess where there is consensus on nothing? (If the answer is supposed to be "protocols", I guess you can make that work but that feels like a non-answer, similar to how "money" as an answer kind of works but doesn't directly explain much.) Maybe the two things are even unrelated, but the effects are extreme and concurrent, so it seems unlikely to be a coincidence.. and I admit I am kind of expecting an answer along the lines of "same process/forces at different stages". And thinking along those lines, converging on complete consensus in political thinking sounds even worse than zero consensus, probably looks like an accelerating slide towards fascism.
> <i>Make virtues of irrational attachment, cultivated ignorance, and stubborn loyalty. The day belongs to those who master the new tools for building, but who preserve in their hearts a secret garden of earnest loves untrammeled by the swarm. ♥</i><p>How to make a closing paragraph that will make the reader feel "Yes! I'm special! I'm not one of them! There is still hope for me!" - while actually applying to absolutely everyone...
I thought this was an excellent statement of the problem, though perhaps it didn’t stick the landing. This author is clear-eyed about the shape of our discontent. Yet, like the rest of us, he had few answers for what to do about it.<p>Still, the first step is understanding you have a problem, and maybe just understanding it is enough to get started.<p>One of the difficulties I’ve noticed is that it’s very difficult to spend any length of time pointing out this central insight (the undesirable character of our new and unaccountable “control society”), because of its proximity to the New Right. And you can’t get caught saying there’s a grain of truth to the dark enlightenment, because It’s too easy to be confused for a clever fascist hiding a more odious and primitive agenda. This establishes a sort of containment zone that prevents you from straying too close to the barriers, pre-empting the conversation we really should be having. If you stray too close to the edges, alarm bells go off and people assume your real goal is far more nefarious.<p>And yet, as annoying as this ‘thought barrier’ is, you really have to lay the blame for it at the feet of the New Right people. It’s not the left’s fault that they went way off the deep end. You get the sense that if the Curtis Yarvin-style dark enlightenment voices had just stayed in their lane and limited their criticism to the world they actually understood (the internet - its power and its foibles), they could have created a reasonable counter culture. Hey, the decentralized bureaucratic forces that shape our lives have no basis for accountability! That’s refreshing! We can take that somewhere!<p>But no, instead, they disappeared up their own asshole and came out the other end as catholic monarchists. And it was their boosting of a populist megalomaniac that has now put us on a ridiculous, idiotic path of self-immolation. (And won’t it be rich at the end of this to hear them complain that we never tried Real Monarchism?) Any wisdom about the insidious nature of headless disaggregated power is now lost - aliased by the Frankenstein monster that is the current administration, stupidly and cynically assembled by them in their grimoire laboratory.
I have to wonder how much of that article is LLM generated.<p>I'm pretty sure the exact same info could have been conveyed in 1/4 the number of words. I found it impossible to read the whole thing, word for word, and was seriously skimming by the end. Very low information density.<p>It really seems aimed at people who order McDonalds via DoorDash, neither company from which I would ever buy anything. Who actually wants to eat that sh1t?<p>And like all "the market is magical" puff pieces, it bases it's conclusions on dream state theory with no accommodation of actual human involvement. One example is the complete avoidance of anything inferring wealth's "third option".<p>When responding to "the network treats any censorship as damage, and reroutes", entrenched capital always has the third option: when a threat to profit can't be overcome by first ignoring it, and second by actively trying to crush it, it can always be defeated with the third option, by simply acquiring it.<p>FacePlant bought InstaGram, Goggle bought youtube, M$ bought github and linkedin.<p>The ultimate veto power of the third option is evident all around us.<p>And like the vacuous market theory that claims "market competition solves all problems", major capital entities hate competition, and take any step necessary to eliminate it. Since most startups fail, the first option is simply to wait for the problem to go away. When that doesn't work, active opposition often solves the problem. But when all else fails, buy it.<p>As a development engineer over decades, I often cited the theory vs reality maxim:<p>The main difference between theory and reality, is that in theory they're the same, but in reality they're not.<p>This applies doubly to economic theory...