Thanks, Matt. Appreciate the update and info. You seem like one of the last "normal" people in journalism anymore--able to relate to what real people experience. Your free speech focus has been invaluable. Of course, a better writer than 99.999% of people. I also worry about the reduction in information availability. I can still find things via google but have to scroll through so much more junk to find the real info I'm searching for. Keep fighting the good fight.
The recent update called the "Helpful Content Update" is Google's attempt to combat AI. Unfortunately, the way they seem to be doing it is to be killing off listings for most independent websites. In their place, corporate sites like Reddit and Forbes now dominate the rankings with fairly poor content.
My gut tells me that they are also doing this to combat "misinformation" as corporations are easier to put the squeeze on. Better to remove the unwashed masses. So many small website owners have had solid businesses destroyed by this.
Google was the defacto Gateway to the Open Web. Now it is becoming a closed loop. I can't underscore enough how devastating this is to the free spirit of the Internet.
There is another update going on now that completes in a couple weeks. There are rumors that it might restore some balance... but so far it has not. This is a story to watch.
The arrival in history--thanks to the internet--of 'unwashed masses' with a voice, able to publish their own thoughts and unvetted stories and participate in public discussion of issues, is perhaps the most significant development of the present age. Not so many generations ago, most of the people posting here would have been mute peasants or serfs on the estates of landed aristocrats, ignorant of public affairs and with zero input into them. It's hardly surprising that not everybody is perfectly adept at the game yet, or as well informed about history, philosophy, science, politics, etc., as one would ideally like. Humanity's life story is complex, the learning curves are steep; and few non-aristocrats enjoyed the advantage of having the world's wisdom, from Plato to Kant, at their disposal in home libraries.
The real wonder is how many contributors from 'the back of beyond' manage to come up with remarkable insights. A great number of today's essentially anonymous posters are clearly intelligent, some of them exceptionally so. Elitist snobs who sneer at the resulting broadening of the debate franchise, regarding it as a 'threat to democracy,' couldn't be more wrong: it is a logical step in democracy's evolution. As Brecht said, 'We do not educate the masses just to teach them, but also to learn from them.' Inevitably in this process there are birth pangs and growing pains, but in my opinion we should not only tolerate but welcome them: what kind of progress was ever achieved in their absence?
I wish I could like this post a dozen times. Your dead on with the arc of history, but the reality is that it is an educational problem. We don't teach true information literacy, and if we did these days it would be subverted by activists. We are all born as clueless babes and need to learn the tools to think clearly.
Most people don't even use probabilistic thinking to frame their understanding of the world. People like Kate Starbird will say things like "Biden won the 2020 election fair and square", which she is in no position to know as the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote. The system, by its nature, has an element of the unknowable. Elections require an element of faith, and faith in the system has broken down. I don't truly 'know' whether any fairly close election was fairly decided.
In this case, I need to account for all the evidence, the motivations in a highly charged political climate (why wouldn't you cheat to stop a Nazi?), the knowledge that our security services tried to subvert Trump and are skilled in changing elections in other countries (all speculation, but would the CIA put a backdoor into voting systems like they do with other technologies). Putting it all together with an estimate, I'm ~85-90% sure that Biden won the 2020 election fairly - but to claim 100% certitude is a gross misrepresentation of reality, and is itself misinformation.
In cases where 85-90% certainty is the best we can do, we have little choice but to accept this reality. After all, a standard of certainty that's unattainable even in principle isn't really a standard at all, in the sense of providing a guide for human decision-making. Even in differential calculus we accept that the slope of a curve approaching some value--say, 1--never actually reaches it. Knowing this, we acknowledge the limitation gracefully, give up, and adopt the convention of calling the result '1,' despite the fact that this isn't, technically speaking, 'true.' Might as well: if our result isn't 1 it's 'as good as,' since it approaches 1 infinitely closely. Same story with pi: we can't calculate its value absolutely accurately; but since we can calculate it accurately enough to erect 50-storey buildings that don't fall down, and send space probes to rendezvous with Pluto, we don't really care.
The French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel cautioned against thinking of 'faith' as a species of 'weak belief'--i.e., belief unsupported by adequate evidence. Rather, he said, faith is an 'orientation' that enables us to proceed on the (technically, epistemologically unjustifiable) presumption that beliefs, evidence, and the relations between them, are all as we take them to be to begin with. I find Marcel's argument conceptually persuasive, not merely a terminological quibble. Maybe what's broken down is our confidence that the systems we depend on are functioning as they should, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that such erosion of confidence is rational at present. Where faith enters the picture is in the supposition that those responsible for designing and operating these systems are individuals of good will, who, to the extent that they're able to perceive system limitations, will sooner or later strive to remedy them. This will inevitably never be universally true--there will always be people eager to game systems to their own advantage, at everyone else's expense--but my sense is that it's true enough: I think we live in a world where most people would still rather do right than wrong, the main impediment to their success being not the malicious intent attributed to them by their 'enemies,' variously defined, but widespread confusion over just what qualifies as 'right.'
The question of how individuals should behave, who wish to be socially responsible and exist, as far as possible, on 'right and truth's side,' brings us to game theory. In this connection, I hope you'll find the following tale somewhat encouraging, if you haven't viewed it before:
P.S. You may have gathered that I'm a long-term optimist but also a realist and, short-term, even a pessimist: I have 'faith' we'll eventually "arrive," while lacking confidence (where's the evidence that would support it?) we'll do so by the most sensible, pain-free routes possible. Marcel again:
"For I believe that no man, however enlightened and holy he is, can ever arrive until the others, all the others, have started out to follow him. We never climb alone, though we often seem to do so."
I agree with him, but we're a long way from everyone climbing alongside each other effectively.
P.P.S. We say we're 'misinformed' as shorthand for saying we've been given information that's inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading in some other way; but it doesn't follow from this conventional usage that there's any such thing as misinformation. Ontologically, so-called 'misinformation' comprises a null set: everything that comes to our attention is information.
What we're normally concerned to know about information are its relevance, reliability, utility, etc., and these are matters that can only be settled by empirical investigation. 'Misinformation' is a dodge used by censors to prevent such investigation from taking place, a nefarious label from censorship's arsenal that pretends we already have answers to questions we haven't even been allowed to ask yet. I'm sorry to see information diffusion issues, and debates about the state of journalism, deformed by this deliberately misleading vocabulary.
Thank you for the YouTube link. I'll watch it. Been a long time since I reviewed Game Theory in depth.
My 85%-90% certainty is good enough for me to accept the results, but not good enough to be content with our election system. In Iraq, they made everyone go to the polls and dip their thumbs in red ink to make sure they didn't vote twice and we celebrated it is democracy. I'm not at all convinced that we have a fair system that I can place faith in.
I also think we live in a country where most people are trying to do good. A big difference I see here is unlike in Bush v Gore, Bush v Kerry, or Obama v Romney, we've got a massive contingent of citizens that believes that Trump is objectively evil. I can't understand why those in the system in some of these locales with centralized counting, like in Atlanta, don't cheat to avoid him getting into power.
Couple that with irregularities like covid preventing election watchers from having a vantage point, the bellwether districts failing, and the difficulty in obtaining evidence from within counting operations, I can see skepticism.
Then, when you have the knowledge that a) the media cheated regarding the "fine people hoax", the FBI cheated to start a bogus investigation into Russian Collusion and the security services cheated to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop revelations..... well, I can't argue much with a Trump supporter dropping their estimate to below 50%.
After all, why would every institution be cheating to oust him except for elections?
Then, when you'd think (like in the Iraqi case) that you'd really want to button up election security to instill more confidence amongst those losing faith.... the government (with both parties' leadership disliking Trump) can't seem to do anything to improve it - even though it is a crisis that led to political violence.
The whole thing is maddening. The fact that we aren't making the restoration of faith in our democratic system a top priority is another data point suggesting my 85%-90% estimation might actually be too high.
What people believe about Trump, election fairness and other things is of course closely correlated with what they think they know; and since the truth status of many of the 'facts' cited in your reply is and will continue to be contested endlessly along partisan lines, I don't see much hope of consensus. The Enlightenment supposition underwriting democracy was that people left free of tyrannical interference would naturally pursue the courses of action most compatible with their own best long-term interest; and perhaps if the majority of people were Enlightenment philosophers, this is the direction in which mass industrial societies would have evolved. Of course, that isn't what's happened. My father always said you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear (open a homily and sometimes a world of wisdom falls out), and Huxley warned that it was futile to think humans could perfect their 'systems' before having taken decisive steps toward perfecting themselves.
Yes, our limitations are "maddening;" even now it remains unclear how much the hermetically sealed information silos that undermine attempts at rational dialogue owe to political corruption and an ideologically captured media, and how much to people's perverse willingness to be siloed in the first place. That we can be so self-sabotaging--complicit in our own undermining--is the most maddening thing of all.
"... the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote."
Your post is the first time I have seen someone besides myself point this out.
There are workarounds that professional auditors use--some of which you demonstrate in your final paragraph with respect to the 2020 presidential election--but as you note, they don't get you to 100%, like a full vote to voter tie-out (almost) would.
(I also enjoyed the rest of your conversation with Mark Kennedy.)
No, I haven't, though I like what I've seen of Varoufakis on YouTube. I wonder how much overlap there might be between that particular book of his and Joel Kotkin's The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Here's Amazon's summary of the latter:
"Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.
"The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes―a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates.
"Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers―a vast, expanding property-less population.
"The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them―if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them."
To quote myself: Why are you still going to Google? Granted. it still has the best maps, and still the best source for light videos (suggestions welcome). But as a search engine, the mere act of censoring it has made it into junk.
For personal use, I use Brave Search when possible, Bing as a 2nd choice and Google 3rd. Google's index is larger, and so with advanced queries I can sometimes bend it to my will.
But I've been involved in Web Development for 30 years, and as part of that must keep an eye on the major search engines.
Google's current market share is from 82% to 92%, depending on the metric. It matters greatly because the vast bulk of visitors coming to a typical Web site via search come from Google.
Well, until recently when independent websites were buried.
These businesses, some a decade+ old, are dying on the vine. The independent Web is turning into a ghost town.
So which search engine do you use? I dumped Google— results were useless. I am trying out Duck Duck Go and Fire Fox was recommended. I would poke ok my eyes before I would go to Bing. Considering a Mac just to be able to get rid of Bing and Edge.
imagine how much "Helpful Content" Updating will be taking place this coming October and early November...Google and its ilk are infested w Dem Party and Deep State operatives and they will all be doing anything and everything to drag the corpse of Biden over the finish line. all our newest cutting-edge propaganda and censorship will be justified as necessary to "save Democracy" lol
Google has been useless as an actual search engine for the past 5-6 years. It's now almost nothing but sponsored content, corporate partnered sites and SEO AI articles.
Oh yes. I've been in the business since '94 and an Internet user since the late '80s. I did a massive amount of advocacy for the Google in my region when they first came on board. I've been to the Googleplex before and Google was by far my favorite company. The downfall has left me pretty cynical about unbridled capitalism.
Even a place like X, which I advocate for now, has a dark side as unfortunately has befallen our dear Mr. Taibbi.
I keep coming back to the nature of power. Power corrupts and the more centralized it is, the more corrupt it will be.
I can't even avoid Google tools in my business and so I must use aspects of it all day long. Frustrating. Would like to see it smashed into Baby Bell shaped pieces.
God, I miss the old internet. It's been painful, watching it turn into the steaming pile of garbage it is now.
While corruption and power are constants, companies are also social constructs that derive from specific places and times. Being based in Mountain View it's not surprising that Google has gone the way it has. A bunch of Peninsula types who are accustomed to a life crafted to cater to their preferences are necessarily going to produce an internet that is restrictive and consumerist.
The infinite scroll enables this mind-killing sickness. Be aware of what you are doing to yourself as you scroll for much of your waking hours. Could you put the phone down and build something instead? Pick up a book? Choose a whole movie to watch(without the phone beside you)? And parents need to have the ability to shut down the scroll... even clicking takes more brain power and intention than scrolling.
I tell you, it is really challenging, even for a book/movie lover like me. I read the Kirn/Taibbi stories every week but my mind keeps drifting while doing so.
It definitely is phones. When the Internet was constrained to the computer I hadn't been conditioned in this way - and I've been using email and online communication since the 1980's when I had friends on BBSes.
This should have bee obvious when we first had "beepers" that led to distractions. Having a supercomputer in your pocket obviously takes it to a whole new level.
Few people can even be more interesting than a smartphone.
Dave Rubin takes a month out of every her to have a "retreat". without tech. I think that is a really good idea to detox, but being self-employed, it isn't possible for me.
Why are you still going to Google? Granted. it still has the best maps, and still the best source for light videos (suggestions welcome). But as a search engine, the mere act of censoring it has made it into junk.
Brave is the best. Brandon Eich was a victim of the nonsense we've seen since Trump/Brexit and should be supported by all free speech advocates.
It is also easily the best browser. Their search project is comparatively new and has been making great strides. It doesn't have seem to have an index close to as large as Google's but I do my 1st crack at a search there.
I have been using Brave / DuckDuckGo for several years now. Overall I like it fine, but in my (very limited) experience I still find better results with Google in some cases; usually the topic is something obscure.
Like any other addition, TikTok/internet addiction won't be reversed until the addict hits rock bottom and WANTS to get better. That's always the first step in recovery. A couple years ago I went out 'with the boys' after our softball game -- but 10 minutes in, and I was the only one not playing on his phone. I remember wondering why we were even 'out' to begin with if not for the social interaction.....
If we're lucky, within a few years the kids will think it's actually cool to talk with others instead of to your phone..........
I think a solid 95 percent of our political problems are due to phones. The internet was a big dent in our brains to begin with but when it was connected to a huge desktop with a huge heavy cathode ray monitor you could still get away from it. The phone wins. Which sucks. But in a few years I think we are going to be so deep in a sea of a.i. we will miss our 'smart' phones. It's really not good. There's alot to be said for a neighborhood Blockbuster.
Perhaps, but I think the difference between "AI brain" and "natural brain" will be so huge that screen time will be treated like smoking.........not cool, man.
Every hear anybody ever say "Keep your friends close, your enemies closer" That's the old Godfather quote, and it's all made up chit-chat between two Mafia Psychopaths - (remember the hooker that ends up beaten to death in the brothel to get one over on the Senator? If that's not the act of a cold-blooded psychopath I don't know what is) Anyhow, just MOVIES lead us astray in a shallow cold blooded way. You really can't trust any picture or vid you see know, there's always the question - is it real or photoshop? AI? - soon enough it's all fiction. As far as AI Brain and Natural Brain - I can remember when porn was sort of a naughty thing. It's not anymore. No, we're screwed. But I really hope I'm wrong and really do hope you are right.
It's tangential to your main point, but I also point out to my sons, and others, that these devices are really computers, with phones and cameras built in.
One of the problems with that mindset is that phones are absolutely terrible at some of the most important Internet tasks- like following links and doing keyword searches (imperative for fact-checking. More than ever.)
Obviously, it can be done. But it's cumbersome. Cumbersome enough to discourage the sort of deep dives that lead to knowledge accumulation and weighing disparate viewpoints. And the problem is partly due to the itty-bitty size of phone screens and keyboards, which means that it isn't remediable without a screen size that's too large to fit in a pocket, aka a grownup computer.
The negative effects on cognition and memory are already well-documented. I also anticipate an epidemic of physical problems from phone addiction- carpal tunnel syndrome of the thumbs, terrible presbyopia-related visual difficulties. The phone also intensifies a problem that was already noted decades ago in regard to television: it fixes the visual field so much that the focus of visual perception is directed entirely at only a small slice of what's actually available in the surroundings. The result is a sort of pre-hypnotic zonk frombeing entrained in the Screen. The Screen inclines the viewer away from situational awareness of the immediacy of the 3-D realm, so to speak. It leaves humans more suggestible to the illusions of surface images. Of course, we all have these media screens, and spend appreciable amounts of time on them. Which is why it's crucial to develop conscious antibodies to keep that suggestibility in check. I don't notice much of an emphasis on that when problems of Internet and social media are discussed. Instead, it all seems to be about having some institutional entity controlling the input on the screen. Setting aside the problems related to the political aspect, remedies of that sort have a terribly attenuated level of effectiveness. Nothing beats the ability to think for oneself, and to decide to say No.
Thanks for laying out so many problems associated with the form of handheld computers. I'll add two thoughts:
1. I've been waiting for a while for the handheld computers to have sufficient processing power and internal memory to replace a desktop computer for the tasks that most of us retail users perform. Just link it in (by Bluetooth or whatever) to a keyboard, large monitor, speakers, etc. and use the same device for the heavy work at home or in a home office as we use for light computer and communications work on the go.
I think processing power-wise, we're there now, especially when the handheld computer is augmented by cloud processing and data storage. We just need the techies to set the hand-held up so that non-techies like me can easily link the peripherals, and we need versions of the apps (software) on the hand-held that function well with the larger peripherals, instead of the thumbing and swiping that you mention in your post that we use for the hand-helds.
Of course, the tech companies have no interest in any of this, because they make more money if we need to buy multiple devices.
2. On a more personal note, I use my hand-held for reading books (specifically, for me, through the Kindle app). Your comments on issues with the small screen size suggest that maybe I should look for a tablet for this purpose. But then, instead of one computing device (as hoped for per my point 1), I'm up to three. That's moving in the wrong direction!
I'm wanting a laptop computer with easy (as in "easy as a phone") texting and audio-only phone connection, myself. Something that can just be in place as a tab window, without the rigamarole of Skype, or Zoom. I don't always feel the necessity to be on-camera. It ought to be possible for me to multitask between phone and computer windows, using the same device.
Hard to believe that they haven't been invented. But I certainly haven't heard of any computer on the retail consumer market being advertised with those capabilities.
It might also be reversed by a complete denial of access to supply to where one is given no choice, although it is hard to imagine the circumstances that would lead to that, but I don't think most victims of Internet addiction will give it up voluntarily.
The consequences will be dire for society if they are allowed to continue with their addictions considering they are the majority of the population, and the effects it has on the brain essentially causing permanent brain damage and retardation, even moreso when people are exposed to these technologies during brain development as many now are.
Silicon Valley elites and the oligarchic class are well-aware of the harmful effects to be better able to resist them, but have no interest in helping the rest of the population do so. Either people are forced to change through denial of access or destruction of the technologies that enslave them to the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave, where they confuse artifice for reality and curse those who would try to liberate them and blind them with the light of day when they have known only darkness, or we risk a future of Eloi and Morlocks like technocratic totalitarian H.G. Wells imagined, or perhaps a society of idiots led by the mediocre that are geniuses by future standards like in C.M. Kornbluth's The Marching Morons.
How long has this deterioration of attention span been going on? Maybe longer than we realize. I read an interesting analysis of Sesame Street about 20 years ago where the point was made that there’s really no plot to follow. There’s a continuity of characters but it’s primarily short bursts of number counting, the alphabet and two to three minutes of characters talking to each other but no sustained story for children to focus on. Children’s programs in the fifties and sixties—like Lassie, Sky King and longer cartoons— engaged the children in a plot to follow and required a longer attention span.
The critique of Sesame Street is by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves To Death published in 1985. The whole thesis of the book is that the media we use to communicate are intertwined with our consciousness and how we think. Postman was alarmed by short form vignettes on television because they can’t communicate complex or subtle ideas. There is just no space for it on that expensive medium. The watcher’s attention span and mind doesn’t get trained to focus on story or argument that’s longer than the most simplistic, bare statement. The result is that raised with new media people just can’t understand law, literature and history. They haven’t created a mind capable of understanding how the ideas of the past were formed. Imagine what Mr. Postman would think of the media we use today. I suspect he would build a cabin deep in the woods like Ted Kaczynski.
I am seeing this first hand with my 19 year old college freshman. Last year he removed Instagram and TikTok from his phone after recognizing how much time was being lost scrolling. He is a good student, a good athlete, and has strong social skills - when he is home I find him talking to his friends on the phone instead of texting them. I love seeing young people develop or maintain strong interpersonal skills despite the addictive nature of the phones in our pockets.
Maybe an EMP event. The collapse of our energy infrastructure. Although I admit: I would miss my fellow nitwits and gadflies on Racket, and console myself by re-reading my collection of Matt's paperbacks. What a world. What a world. I give our youngest daughter credit: when we gather as a family, everyone puts their cellphones in a basket, at minimum during the meal. Lots of griping, but I think it's great.
Just remember, whatever you consume be it drugs, porn, food, social media and all the other crap. Can come back and consume you. It's rewired our brains to accept 15 second encounters of dopamine inducing happiness. Just like an addict who is chasing their next fix. The only way to stop it is to stop consuming the things that are consuming you.
i had a friend who had a jammer - it supposedly jammed 2g / 3g frequencies at the time (this was years ago when it was easier and most cell phones only used a small range of frequencies) and he'd use it in panera breads, basically anywhere to see how people acted -
it was always more like an addict trying to get another smoke than simply putting it down, and that was pre-covid -
I have to wonder if our phone addiction isn't just an opportunistic virus that found a host in an already diseased society. I was in Europe this summer and noticed phone zombies didn't seem to exist. Maybe our social structures have degenerated to such an extent that the tech fills in the holes left by the absence of healthy social interaction?
Whenever I get into an elevator, or similar location, where everyone (includong folks who might not know each other) is staring at their phones and not interacting despite being two feet from each other, I announce, "You know, you guys don't have to text each other -- you can just talk." People look up, usually look confused for a second, and then get joke. A brief conversation frequently ensues.
It's just a little thing I do to help fight phone addiction.
The most subversive thing you can do is stay healthy and fit--- mind and body---sober, and thinking for yourself. I'm actively working to strengthen my brain, regain my ability to focus, read at length, process and retain information. The negative neurological impact of socal media is real. Keep up the good fight, Matt!
You nailed it, IMO. I would add to staying healthy and fit, weaning oneself off social media. I did the latter last summer and I was shocked how hard that was. That tells me something. Even without SM I have all the things I need to stay in touch with people who are important to me. I like it that you call this being subversive. It feels good, though, doesn't it?
As a thought: Addiction is the symptom not the disease. One of the hardest things you can ask of an addict is to be present in the moment. To sit quietly in a chair for an hour with his/her personal thoughts and emotions. Talking addiction, what do we think the term "high" means? In the 60's it meant access to an expanded consciousness but in all situations where the means becomes the end it became a destructive loop where consciousness became a "stoned" escape from reality not further entrance into its depths. And we should remember that expanded consciousness has always been the enemy of tyranny. Actual experiments on unsuspecting Americans, the introduction of drugs into poverty stricken communities for exploitation and profit, the prison industrial complex ,the beginning of the current assault on civil liberties, all came about as part of the surveillance state/corporate/political war on consciousness and change disguised as a war on drugs. Now a pretended war on terror where half the population is suddenly suspect. Soon to be criminalized. Do we think everyone is staring into the screen of a device that can track and monitor our every move and thought by chance alone?
In the case of addiction to electronics, if Heroin physically enslaves the body and traps the mind in dreamland, what is the effect of the acknowledged profiteering, manipulation and commodification of the human psyche by tech, corporations and the surveillance bureaucracy? How different is commodification, that is, viewing the human being as a product, from slavery? It is an actual industry. Considering the evolutionary journey from Goebbels to Madison Ave./K Street and now the many recent RACKET NEWS spotlights on the CIC, why are these groups so afraid of "we the people"? Isn't mass surveillance itself a kind of bovine ear tagging and a policy of herd management? How hard is it going to be to separate the actual addiction to and psychic damage from an industry that lives, thrives and profits by the manipulation of reality? Is it possible to reverse the capture and weaponization of tech by the billionaire controlled surveillance bureaucracy?
"We the people" have entered an entirely new age and it is demanding a one person at a time evolutionary awakening. It matters absolutely. It's time to get clear and it's time to get clean. Our best engines of personal survival remain our free Republic, our Constitution and the free citizen. Be excited.
Much of breaking addictive patterns is about re-railing attention focus toward a more worthwhile activity.
The attraction of instant gratification is that it's instantly gratifying, at least at the outset. And then later on the buzz diminishes- but it's like being on some inertial hamster wheel where disengaging involves effort, which ISN'T instantly gratifying. It can be difficult to even conceptualize an alternative to keeping the hamster wheel spinning, long after the realization that it's no fun anymore.
Nonetheless, it has to be done. We eventually run out of time, humans. So all the events we spend our time on are important.
I'm talking a better game than I play, here. But I play it better than I once did.
I recommend, in the spirit of the article, doing this:
Copy and paste it onto Word. Clear the formatting.
If necessary, transform the type from Segoe to the one you prefer.
Expand the type size if necessary. Then as you scroll down, isolate each sentence until each one is standing on its own with white space above and below it.
EXIT CHAIR. Get some exercise. Return and then re-read "Maintain The Brain."
I'm curious, because this sounds like some useful advice, is this just a general writing technique you are sharing or are you subtly pointing out some deficiency in the article?
Thank you for asking. I am not pointing out deficiencies in Matt's article (there are none; it is refreshingly excellent).
This is a general writing technique (nice description!) that evolved from the realization that writers (on any subject) almost never have any idea of what their presentation looks like TO OTHERS --- their readers --- especially on a computer screen.
Ever recoil in disgust when faced with an Exxon Valdez oil spill created by Joe Bombast? Endless verbose / unparagraphed sentences pooled together. RUN!
We all overwrite.
Recasting what we create in a single-sentence format makes it easier to shorten sentences and eliminate possibly redundant remarks, thus enhancing the chance that someone will enjoy reading what you've written.
If you yourself are the author, "recasting" also makes it much easier to see and eliminate non sequiturs; same goes for identifying those written by others.
Some readers complain. That's all we need to say, isn't it?
I'm been sitting in front of a computer since the mid-90's, and have yet to master the "page break" technique.
When my fingers fly around the keyboard like a Kamala Harris speechwriter trying to escape from the Biden White House ("third floor... window open... will the rose bushes break my fall?!"), I do accidentally hit The Wrong Buttons and then find myself in an involuntary relationship with a newly-created and unwanted page break.
Then follows the standard fifteen-minute hunt-swear-and-peck technique by which the page break is eventually made to go back to wherever it came from (Hades!).
I do okay with that on a computer. It's phones that give me the problem. But Phone Society has taught me to only Text in miniscule snippets. On the phone, texting over 50 words is really pushing it. But it probably is the case that some people read my Substack comments on their phones, in which case most of them are scrolled over as "tl;dr." (Which is, in turn, a truncation of the earlier "tl;dnr". At this point, "didn't" rather than "did" is simply assumed...typing that extra letter is Unhip! A cardinal sin, for Americans.)
Tangentially: in 1984*, wasn't one of the goals of Newspeak to reduce the entire vocabulary of English to 500 words?
*Kurt Vonnegut eventually found it borderline mandatory to address his young readership with footnotes such as this: "1984 was a book, by a man named George Orwell. He noticed worrisome trends."
And that was over 30 years ago. Around the same time, Robert Anton Wilson's wife Arlen observed to her husband: "Most young people don't seem to know much of anything any more, do they?"
03/29/24: "The negative neurological impact of socal media is real."
I quite agree --- anything that originates in Southern California ("socal") is inherently destructive to brain cells.
In fact, if the composition of the House of Representatives were to be rightfully recast according to this logic, these missing brain cells (en masse) would result in the entire state being represented by only three Congressmen (two of which would be the adopted children of Michael Jackson).
Your America This Week segment with Walter Kirn help to keep me sane - and my favorite segments are your discussions on short stories that relate to topics that you have featured. When I was a kid I was able to sit in my tent (yes I had one that my parents got me with a zipper) and read books. I read the Secret Garden, and the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice and the Iliad - and I was not that old - maybe 12 or so. I am sure I didn't fully grasp the stories, but I absolutely was able to be still with myself and absorb as much as I could at that age. I now find that, perhaps because of social media and cell phones and texts, that I don't have the same ability to concentrate. Listening to you and Walter I realize how much I miss just sitting outside and reading. Now thinking about the kids who never have had that experience and it's a tremendous loss. You two have a wonderful knowledge of all kinds of literature from American writers to Russian novelists. I always look forward to this segment and can't wait to hear your next podcast. Thank you for everything you do to keep the rest of us sane.
Our brains have been rewired and overwritten, and we were clueless that it was happening. Like every other addiction, we don't realize we have one until we try and stop.
Perfect timing for this article. Just today someone started a conversation with me about politics stating how evil one specific person is and how there is no comparison to the 'good guys.' I responded with a comment like 'corruption is bi-partisan' and the guy went absolutely bonkers threatening to never ever talk to me again. That was the moment when I had no doubt that Brains have been completely pulverized with manufactured rage. The signals are talking. Our bodies and brains have become hyper receptors. It doesn't take much to ignite embedded feelings of rage.
Thank you Pamela. I’ve experienced the exact same thing with life long friends, and family members. Learned the lesson that the subject of politics simply cannot be discussed with many people. In my recent case I stated that Trump is not the only politician who lies often and repeatedly- that Joe Biden does the same. It was like I tripped an anger switch. There was no actual reasoning or thinking at all on their part - just an instinctive jump to defend his “side”, his “team, or tribe”. There was no sense of the damage to our friendship his anger created, only this fevered desire to “win” the “argument”. Thinking for oneself has been eroded by the phone and social media, but I think also the appearance of Trump on the political scene. So many Americans have gone insane with their passion to oppose Trump that they have lost their moral compass and ability to objectively view reality
Yes. The responses are so fierce that it's as if these people live in absolute Fear for their survival. This deliberate psychological influence campaign has been effective primarily for the LEFT, but the trade off is that society is experiencing severe psychological trauma. These people believe that Trump is an existential threat to their very existence and if you do not support their view, then you are also a threat to them.
I have had the same experience. It is puzzling and extraordinary. One of my closest friends, a retired college professor, is no longer willing to discuss any nuances of our political situation. We used to have hours-long conversations on these topics. The angry, cutting off of dialogue I find unsettling, new.
When educated people refuse to think critically, it MUST be called out. Shame, embarrassment and humiliation have positive results but require a fairly long time line.
Now you’re on to it. Goliath through SM brain training, aided by Automated Infomatics, has polarized the population. Thus creating Disruption Discord and a mute button on any thoughtful Discussion by the 21 st century serfs they are creating.
Don't worry about putting us on lists Matt. Anyone reading your content is already slated for re-education once the camps are unveiled. Can't wait to meet you all there in person finally. Cheers.
Today's dopamine-driven culture is all about instant gratification. It's not that the desire to experience gratification is anything new, it's that the internet presents us with unprecedented access to such rewards, with the result being the ruthless monetization of our attention.
"Thinking for oneself" is a dangerous, white Western way of knowing that in the past has caused harm to under-represented groups (or some such thought-terminating drivel)—this would have sounded bizarre and impossible even a decade ago, but is now the hill our liberal "thinking" classes are willing to die on as well as the rock they've built their church upon.
As we all know if we're here, to be a member of the Western "thinking" class in good standing in the second decade of the 21st century means that under no circumstances should one ever be caught actually thinking in public, as this might lead one to repeat "extremist" "disinformation" that could cause unspecified harms to the "marginalized", up to and including suicide or genocide.
Thus our culture and educational establishments, from the heights of the Ivy League down to your local PTA or concert hall, has embraced a hard-edged form of anti-thought and replaced fact and truth with sanctimonious and punitive dogma designed to 1) make us all hate each other, 2) make us all afraid to think or speak anything but what our betters allow; and 3) poison our brains and souls to the point where society is dissolved and they are "forced" to step in and rule over their created chaos.
We are in desperate need of an intellectual and cultural revolution, where our elite "experts" and all the other self-appointed scolds and petty tyrants hoping to dominate our "cognitive infrastructure" are dethroned, mocked and scorned, and chased far away from any lever of power.
You just described the coming civil war predicted in the Fourth Turning book. Thinking class vs the pithed Gullables and the Goliath that created(s) them.
It isn't as if thinking for oneself was such a highly esteemed capability in previous eras. For example, in the 1950s Jim Crow era of the American South, anyone who thought that the political regime was acting unfairly toward black people was very circumspect about ever expressing that opinion. Especially if they were white. And the practical result was a consensus of conformity and assent to de jure oppression of black Americans.
I also grew up in the Cold War era. Much of my formal education I now recognize as propaganda. Not a fabrication, but propaganda nonetheless. It isn't as if there was ever a golden age of free thought and open-minded media in the US, prior to the Internet era. Granted, newspaper and magazine stories had much more detailed content. But gatekeeping was routine.
Thus far in the Internet Age, I view the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War debacle as the high water mark of the vindication of independent dissenting opinions and Internet free speech. The Reality-Based Community of Indies on the Internet exposed the shallowness and groupthink of Respectable Legacy Media, and the corridors of Institutional Power were shaken. They've been trying to stuff the genie back into the box ever since. I think one of the tasks of media outlets like Substack is to restore the role played by the dissenting views presented prior to the Iraq War, of acting as a reality-based ombudsman(person!) that isn't beholden to anyone.
I get that the early years of the Internet was also associated with a continually rising tide of a lot of fringey wingnut extremist views and outright disinformation. But in my observation, the institutional attempts to suppress them with structural censorship preemption only raised their profile, and the claims of some of them to the possession of "forbidden Truth." Some of the extremist views are not only obnoxious and discreditable, but their tactics of disseminating their views are obnoxious and discreditable. The answer is to expose the tactics and the falsity of the views, not to attempt a shutdown with ham-handed censorship "filtering."
In my view, the only way to counteract bad, wrong information is to teach the principles of Informal Logic- especially fallacy detection- and awareness of media manipulation tactics. How to think, not What to think. The results are not instantaneous. But the effort is predicated on the principle that humans are educable and capable of changing their views. Whereas the notion that human attitudes are so static that they can only be formed as the result of intensively imposed top-down conditioning in the Approved Direction is hopeless.
I blew off 451 in HS, so I came to it as a late, voluntary reader. I knew the headline plot about voluntary book destruction, but what captivated me about the book was his wife - standing in a room of giant video walls, talking to NPCs in some dramatic game, completely disconnected from society and completely clueless as to the world her government was creating. As I recall, she was still blissfully ignorant, talking to her computer-generated friends, as the bombs fell on the city.
Of all the prophetic achievements of Bradbury, that for me, is the ultimate one.
I'm 58 and I have been meeting younger musicians at open mics for the last couple years and I have been pleasantly surprised at the level of political awareness in this demographic. They generally know that 1984 is non fiction and that the news is full of doublespeak. Contrarily I have worked with progressive local politicians and volunteers and I find them to be easily misled, like actual characters in the novel.
Wait, why does Matt not like Harari? All I found was his Twitter comment blasting the click-bait 'Yuval Noah Harari: Human rights are "just a fictional story".'
Matt's usually not one to take things out of context and denigrate them... Harari's argument (at least, in his book "Sapiens") is not intending to say that human rights are a bad thing. Er, that's definitely not the takeaway I had.
Yuval Harari is simply not the Great Thinker that he's so often been touted as. His books only seem impressive if they're the only futurist speculations that someone has ever encountered. (Alvin Toffler was a similarly non-original popularizer of humanist futurism, in the 1970s.) To the extent that Harari's writings make any valid points, they aren't original. They're almost entirely retreads of eminent 20th century historians like Daniel Boorstin, and futurist thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Tim Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson. But Bucky Fuller has practically been forgotten, and Leary and Wilson are still in dubious repute as Sixties Counterculture Radicals (which a lot of Substack culture warriors of the political Right appear to confuse with Marxism and present-day Democratic Party neocultural cant; that is not an accurate analysis.) I have some profound disagreements with Fuller, Leary, and Wilson. Some of their ideas have plainly been disproven, in my opinion. But they got some things right. And they all made their points with much more wit, insight, and original vision than Harari.
How about if Racket readers could get together in real life? Maybe it's not just a Racket project. Maybe Racket, Public, Free Press and others could combine their lists to make this happen. Probably the most interesting group of people in the world now, because they self-selected to see through the propaganda. Maybe somebody could teach me how to maintain a motorcycle. It may start a movement to save brain cells.
After a lifetime of desk/keyboard, work I recently built a decent, sized shed in my backyard.Took me ten times longer to do it than it should have, much time spent imagining and puzzling things out and correcting things, but I figured it out on my own, with reference to my garage's framing, and the help of just a couple of web pages and admittedly one YouTube video. Was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, both mentally and physically.
I suspect the future belongs, in small but significant ways, to those who can do real things in the real world.
It works! So satisfying. May not be for everybody. Some people just don’t enjoy thinking for themselves - others relish it. When I interviewed people for an advertising agency where we needed original thinkers (maybe not so much anymore) I asked two questions - 1) which do you like better, baking or cooking and why. (Typically baking requires following the recipe and cooking allows for more improvising) 2) what was your favorite class in high school or college and why? (some said the class where the prof told them what they wanted, and if they did that they got an A, others liked their independent study where they got to immerse themselves in a topic they were curious about)
We need to start a movement. I have been part of a successful movement before. It requires strong ties among members. Not just at the top but at the grassroots level. People need to have beers together and discuss things. They need to recognize faces. They need to learn the names of the kids and spouses, etc. This can't happen online, although online speech is obviously important these days.
I’m a potter and have noticed a huge demand for pottery classes - people find it therapeutic to get their hands in the mud, try and fail (no worries, just re-wedge and try again). And folks let their guard down and tell stories about their lives - no one talks politics. It’s a real oasis in a phony online world.
Thanks, Matt. Appreciate the update and info. You seem like one of the last "normal" people in journalism anymore--able to relate to what real people experience. Your free speech focus has been invaluable. Of course, a better writer than 99.999% of people. I also worry about the reduction in information availability. I can still find things via google but have to scroll through so much more junk to find the real info I'm searching for. Keep fighting the good fight.
The recent update called the "Helpful Content Update" is Google's attempt to combat AI. Unfortunately, the way they seem to be doing it is to be killing off listings for most independent websites. In their place, corporate sites like Reddit and Forbes now dominate the rankings with fairly poor content.
My gut tells me that they are also doing this to combat "misinformation" as corporations are easier to put the squeeze on. Better to remove the unwashed masses. So many small website owners have had solid businesses destroyed by this.
Google was the defacto Gateway to the Open Web. Now it is becoming a closed loop. I can't underscore enough how devastating this is to the free spirit of the Internet.
There is another update going on now that completes in a couple weeks. There are rumors that it might restore some balance... but so far it has not. This is a story to watch.
The arrival in history--thanks to the internet--of 'unwashed masses' with a voice, able to publish their own thoughts and unvetted stories and participate in public discussion of issues, is perhaps the most significant development of the present age. Not so many generations ago, most of the people posting here would have been mute peasants or serfs on the estates of landed aristocrats, ignorant of public affairs and with zero input into them. It's hardly surprising that not everybody is perfectly adept at the game yet, or as well informed about history, philosophy, science, politics, etc., as one would ideally like. Humanity's life story is complex, the learning curves are steep; and few non-aristocrats enjoyed the advantage of having the world's wisdom, from Plato to Kant, at their disposal in home libraries.
The real wonder is how many contributors from 'the back of beyond' manage to come up with remarkable insights. A great number of today's essentially anonymous posters are clearly intelligent, some of them exceptionally so. Elitist snobs who sneer at the resulting broadening of the debate franchise, regarding it as a 'threat to democracy,' couldn't be more wrong: it is a logical step in democracy's evolution. As Brecht said, 'We do not educate the masses just to teach them, but also to learn from them.' Inevitably in this process there are birth pangs and growing pains, but in my opinion we should not only tolerate but welcome them: what kind of progress was ever achieved in their absence?
I wish I could like this post a dozen times. Your dead on with the arc of history, but the reality is that it is an educational problem. We don't teach true information literacy, and if we did these days it would be subverted by activists. We are all born as clueless babes and need to learn the tools to think clearly.
Most people don't even use probabilistic thinking to frame their understanding of the world. People like Kate Starbird will say things like "Biden won the 2020 election fair and square", which she is in no position to know as the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote. The system, by its nature, has an element of the unknowable. Elections require an element of faith, and faith in the system has broken down. I don't truly 'know' whether any fairly close election was fairly decided.
In this case, I need to account for all the evidence, the motivations in a highly charged political climate (why wouldn't you cheat to stop a Nazi?), the knowledge that our security services tried to subvert Trump and are skilled in changing elections in other countries (all speculation, but would the CIA put a backdoor into voting systems like they do with other technologies). Putting it all together with an estimate, I'm ~85-90% sure that Biden won the 2020 election fairly - but to claim 100% certitude is a gross misrepresentation of reality, and is itself misinformation.
In cases where 85-90% certainty is the best we can do, we have little choice but to accept this reality. After all, a standard of certainty that's unattainable even in principle isn't really a standard at all, in the sense of providing a guide for human decision-making. Even in differential calculus we accept that the slope of a curve approaching some value--say, 1--never actually reaches it. Knowing this, we acknowledge the limitation gracefully, give up, and adopt the convention of calling the result '1,' despite the fact that this isn't, technically speaking, 'true.' Might as well: if our result isn't 1 it's 'as good as,' since it approaches 1 infinitely closely. Same story with pi: we can't calculate its value absolutely accurately; but since we can calculate it accurately enough to erect 50-storey buildings that don't fall down, and send space probes to rendezvous with Pluto, we don't really care.
The French existentialist philosopher Gabriel Marcel cautioned against thinking of 'faith' as a species of 'weak belief'--i.e., belief unsupported by adequate evidence. Rather, he said, faith is an 'orientation' that enables us to proceed on the (technically, epistemologically unjustifiable) presumption that beliefs, evidence, and the relations between them, are all as we take them to be to begin with. I find Marcel's argument conceptually persuasive, not merely a terminological quibble. Maybe what's broken down is our confidence that the systems we depend on are functioning as they should, and there's plenty of evidence to suggest that such erosion of confidence is rational at present. Where faith enters the picture is in the supposition that those responsible for designing and operating these systems are individuals of good will, who, to the extent that they're able to perceive system limitations, will sooner or later strive to remedy them. This will inevitably never be universally true--there will always be people eager to game systems to their own advantage, at everyone else's expense--but my sense is that it's true enough: I think we live in a world where most people would still rather do right than wrong, the main impediment to their success being not the malicious intent attributed to them by their 'enemies,' variously defined, but widespread confusion over just what qualifies as 'right.'
The question of how individuals should behave, who wish to be socially responsible and exist, as far as possible, on 'right and truth's side,' brings us to game theory. In this connection, I hope you'll find the following tale somewhat encouraging, if you haven't viewed it before:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mScpHTIi-kM
P.S. You may have gathered that I'm a long-term optimist but also a realist and, short-term, even a pessimist: I have 'faith' we'll eventually "arrive," while lacking confidence (where's the evidence that would support it?) we'll do so by the most sensible, pain-free routes possible. Marcel again:
"For I believe that no man, however enlightened and holy he is, can ever arrive until the others, all the others, have started out to follow him. We never climb alone, though we often seem to do so."
I agree with him, but we're a long way from everyone climbing alongside each other effectively.
P.P.S. We say we're 'misinformed' as shorthand for saying we've been given information that's inaccurate, incomplete, or misleading in some other way; but it doesn't follow from this conventional usage that there's any such thing as misinformation. Ontologically, so-called 'misinformation' comprises a null set: everything that comes to our attention is information.
What we're normally concerned to know about information are its relevance, reliability, utility, etc., and these are matters that can only be settled by empirical investigation. 'Misinformation' is a dodge used by censors to prevent such investigation from taking place, a nefarious label from censorship's arsenal that pretends we already have answers to questions we haven't even been allowed to ask yet. I'm sorry to see information diffusion issues, and debates about the state of journalism, deformed by this deliberately misleading vocabulary.
Thank you for the YouTube link. I'll watch it. Been a long time since I reviewed Game Theory in depth.
My 85%-90% certainty is good enough for me to accept the results, but not good enough to be content with our election system. In Iraq, they made everyone go to the polls and dip their thumbs in red ink to make sure they didn't vote twice and we celebrated it is democracy. I'm not at all convinced that we have a fair system that I can place faith in.
I also think we live in a country where most people are trying to do good. A big difference I see here is unlike in Bush v Gore, Bush v Kerry, or Obama v Romney, we've got a massive contingent of citizens that believes that Trump is objectively evil. I can't understand why those in the system in some of these locales with centralized counting, like in Atlanta, don't cheat to avoid him getting into power.
Couple that with irregularities like covid preventing election watchers from having a vantage point, the bellwether districts failing, and the difficulty in obtaining evidence from within counting operations, I can see skepticism.
Then, when you have the knowledge that a) the media cheated regarding the "fine people hoax", the FBI cheated to start a bogus investigation into Russian Collusion and the security services cheated to suppress the Hunter Biden laptop revelations..... well, I can't argue much with a Trump supporter dropping their estimate to below 50%.
After all, why would every institution be cheating to oust him except for elections?
Then, when you'd think (like in the Iraqi case) that you'd really want to button up election security to instill more confidence amongst those losing faith.... the government (with both parties' leadership disliking Trump) can't seem to do anything to improve it - even though it is a crisis that led to political violence.
The whole thing is maddening. The fact that we aren't making the restoration of faith in our democratic system a top priority is another data point suggesting my 85%-90% estimation might actually be too high.
What people believe about Trump, election fairness and other things is of course closely correlated with what they think they know; and since the truth status of many of the 'facts' cited in your reply is and will continue to be contested endlessly along partisan lines, I don't see much hope of consensus. The Enlightenment supposition underwriting democracy was that people left free of tyrannical interference would naturally pursue the courses of action most compatible with their own best long-term interest; and perhaps if the majority of people were Enlightenment philosophers, this is the direction in which mass industrial societies would have evolved. Of course, that isn't what's happened. My father always said you can't make a silk purse out of a sow's ear (open a homily and sometimes a world of wisdom falls out), and Huxley warned that it was futile to think humans could perfect their 'systems' before having taken decisive steps toward perfecting themselves.
Yes, our limitations are "maddening;" even now it remains unclear how much the hermetically sealed information silos that undermine attempts at rational dialogue owe to political corruption and an ideologically captured media, and how much to people's perverse willingness to be siloed in the first place. That we can be so self-sabotaging--complicit in our own undermining--is the most maddening thing of all.
"... the vote is impossible to fully audit from voter to vote."
Your post is the first time I have seen someone besides myself point this out.
There are workarounds that professional auditors use--some of which you demonstrate in your final paragraph with respect to the 2020 presidential election--but as you note, they don't get you to 100%, like a full vote to voter tie-out (almost) would.
(I also enjoyed the rest of your conversation with Mark Kennedy.)
Your having mentioned serfs, I’d be interested in knowing if you have read “Techno Feudalism,” by Yanis Varoufakis, and if so, what you thought of it.
No, I haven't, though I like what I've seen of Varoufakis on YouTube. I wonder how much overlap there might be between that particular book of his and Joel Kotkin's The Coming of Neo-Feudalism. Here's Amazon's summary of the latter:
"Following a remarkable epoch of greater dispersion of wealth and opportunity, we are inexorably returning towards a more feudal era marked by greater concentration of wealth and property, reduced upward mobility, demographic stagnation, and increased dogmatism. If the last seventy years saw a massive expansion of the middle class, not only in America but in much of the developed world, today that class is declining and a new, more hierarchical society is emerging.
"The new class structure resembles that of Medieval times. At the apex of the new order are two classes―a reborn clerical elite, the clerisy, which dominates the upper part of the professional ranks, universities, media and culture, and a new aristocracy led by tech oligarchs with unprecedented wealth and growing control of information. These two classes correspond to the old French First and Second Estates.
"Below these two classes lies what was once called the Third Estate. This includes the yeomanry, which is made up largely of small businesspeople, minor property owners, skilled workers and private-sector oriented professionals. Ascendant for much of modern history, this class is in decline while those below them, the new Serfs, grow in numbers―a vast, expanding property-less population.
"The trends are mounting, but we can still reverse them―if people understand what is actually occurring and have the capability to oppose them."
To quote myself: Why are you still going to Google? Granted. it still has the best maps, and still the best source for light videos (suggestions welcome). But as a search engine, the mere act of censoring it has made it into junk.
Remember, its real business is selling ads
For personal use, I use Brave Search when possible, Bing as a 2nd choice and Google 3rd. Google's index is larger, and so with advanced queries I can sometimes bend it to my will.
But I've been involved in Web Development for 30 years, and as part of that must keep an eye on the major search engines.
Google's current market share is from 82% to 92%, depending on the metric. It matters greatly because the vast bulk of visitors coming to a typical Web site via search come from Google.
Well, until recently when independent websites were buried.
These businesses, some a decade+ old, are dying on the vine. The independent Web is turning into a ghost town.
I always prefer search.brave.com.
So which search engine do you use? I dumped Google— results were useless. I am trying out Duck Duck Go and Fire Fox was recommended. I would poke ok my eyes before I would go to Bing. Considering a Mac just to be able to get rid of Bing and Edge.
Only use it for translation / I guess I could find App for that
imagine how much "Helpful Content" Updating will be taking place this coming October and early November...Google and its ilk are infested w Dem Party and Deep State operatives and they will all be doing anything and everything to drag the corpse of Biden over the finish line. all our newest cutting-edge propaganda and censorship will be justified as necessary to "save Democracy" lol
It's nothing but 'blostering election integrity', amiright?
Google has been useless as an actual search engine for the past 5-6 years. It's now almost nothing but sponsored content, corporate partnered sites and SEO AI articles.
Coincidentally with the 2016 election, when Google started having other priorities than their stated mission of "organizing the world's information".
Remember when Google's motto was "Don't be evil"?
Oh yes. I've been in the business since '94 and an Internet user since the late '80s. I did a massive amount of advocacy for the Google in my region when they first came on board. I've been to the Googleplex before and Google was by far my favorite company. The downfall has left me pretty cynical about unbridled capitalism.
Even a place like X, which I advocate for now, has a dark side as unfortunately has befallen our dear Mr. Taibbi.
I keep coming back to the nature of power. Power corrupts and the more centralized it is, the more corrupt it will be.
I can't even avoid Google tools in my business and so I must use aspects of it all day long. Frustrating. Would like to see it smashed into Baby Bell shaped pieces.
God, I miss the old internet. It's been painful, watching it turn into the steaming pile of garbage it is now.
While corruption and power are constants, companies are also social constructs that derive from specific places and times. Being based in Mountain View it's not surprising that Google has gone the way it has. A bunch of Peninsula types who are accustomed to a life crafted to cater to their preferences are necessarily going to produce an internet that is restrictive and consumerist.
The infinite scroll enables this mind-killing sickness. Be aware of what you are doing to yourself as you scroll for much of your waking hours. Could you put the phone down and build something instead? Pick up a book? Choose a whole movie to watch(without the phone beside you)? And parents need to have the ability to shut down the scroll... even clicking takes more brain power and intention than scrolling.
I tell you, it is really challenging, even for a book/movie lover like me. I read the Kirn/Taibbi stories every week but my mind keeps drifting while doing so.
It definitely is phones. When the Internet was constrained to the computer I hadn't been conditioned in this way - and I've been using email and online communication since the 1980's when I had friends on BBSes.
This should have bee obvious when we first had "beepers" that led to distractions. Having a supercomputer in your pocket obviously takes it to a whole new level.
Few people can even be more interesting than a smartphone.
Dave Rubin takes a month out of every her to have a "retreat". without tech. I think that is a really good idea to detox, but being self-employed, it isn't possible for me.
Why are you still going to Google? Granted. it still has the best maps, and still the best source for light videos (suggestions welcome). But as a search engine, the mere act of censoring it has made it into junk.
Remember, its real business is selling ads.
Google is cancer for anything other than buying stuff or maps. At this point it's basically Amazon with some garbage AI content sprinkled on top.
What search engine do you use?
DuckDuckGo works pretty well.
“Brave” browser for the win.
Brave.com
Brave is the best. Brandon Eich was a victim of the nonsense we've seen since Trump/Brexit and should be supported by all free speech advocates.
It is also easily the best browser. Their search project is comparatively new and has been making great strides. It doesn't have seem to have an index close to as large as Google's but I do my 1st crack at a search there.
I switched to DuckDuckGo after the Gemini AI story and I have been very happy with it so far
I have been using Brave / DuckDuckGo for several years now. Overall I like it fine, but in my (very limited) experience I still find better results with Google in some cases; usually the topic is something obscure.
Exactly. Google's index size is hard to beat. Even Microsoft Bing, with all their resources, suffers there.
But you need to be well versed in advanced search tools to coax out the info you are looking for.
I use DuckDuckGo, recommended personally by Jacob Applebaum.
I have heard Yandex is good—but haven’t tried it yet.
If Patrick Henry were here, he would not hesitate to say, "Give me Substack and Taibbi, or give me death"!
Like any other addition, TikTok/internet addiction won't be reversed until the addict hits rock bottom and WANTS to get better. That's always the first step in recovery. A couple years ago I went out 'with the boys' after our softball game -- but 10 minutes in, and I was the only one not playing on his phone. I remember wondering why we were even 'out' to begin with if not for the social interaction.....
If we're lucky, within a few years the kids will think it's actually cool to talk with others instead of to your phone..........
I wish I agreed. It's hopeless.
I think a solid 95 percent of our political problems are due to phones. The internet was a big dent in our brains to begin with but when it was connected to a huge desktop with a huge heavy cathode ray monitor you could still get away from it. The phone wins. Which sucks. But in a few years I think we are going to be so deep in a sea of a.i. we will miss our 'smart' phones. It's really not good. There's alot to be said for a neighborhood Blockbuster.
Be Kind - Rewind.
Perhaps, but I think the difference between "AI brain" and "natural brain" will be so huge that screen time will be treated like smoking.........not cool, man.
Every hear anybody ever say "Keep your friends close, your enemies closer" That's the old Godfather quote, and it's all made up chit-chat between two Mafia Psychopaths - (remember the hooker that ends up beaten to death in the brothel to get one over on the Senator? If that's not the act of a cold-blooded psychopath I don't know what is) Anyhow, just MOVIES lead us astray in a shallow cold blooded way. You really can't trust any picture or vid you see know, there's always the question - is it real or photoshop? AI? - soon enough it's all fiction. As far as AI Brain and Natural Brain - I can remember when porn was sort of a naughty thing. It's not anymore. No, we're screwed. But I really hope I'm wrong and really do hope you are right.
That's why my informal rule is to use the phone only for phone stuff, and my computer for Internet stuff.
You are much more disciplined than me, can't even tell you how much crap I've bought on Amazon through the phone app.
I refuse to shop on the phone.
Self-discipline begins by asking "what for?"
Phone masturbation is rude and weak, like shooting up at the table. Why mingle with people in the real world when you are mostly a voyeur?
Love the term "phone masturbation"!
The real con is we call them "phones". I got rid of my mini-computer. I was done after having typed with my thumbs the equivalent of "War and Peace".
It's tangential to your main point, but I also point out to my sons, and others, that these devices are really computers, with phones and cameras built in.
One of the problems with that mindset is that phones are absolutely terrible at some of the most important Internet tasks- like following links and doing keyword searches (imperative for fact-checking. More than ever.)
Obviously, it can be done. But it's cumbersome. Cumbersome enough to discourage the sort of deep dives that lead to knowledge accumulation and weighing disparate viewpoints. And the problem is partly due to the itty-bitty size of phone screens and keyboards, which means that it isn't remediable without a screen size that's too large to fit in a pocket, aka a grownup computer.
The negative effects on cognition and memory are already well-documented. I also anticipate an epidemic of physical problems from phone addiction- carpal tunnel syndrome of the thumbs, terrible presbyopia-related visual difficulties. The phone also intensifies a problem that was already noted decades ago in regard to television: it fixes the visual field so much that the focus of visual perception is directed entirely at only a small slice of what's actually available in the surroundings. The result is a sort of pre-hypnotic zonk frombeing entrained in the Screen. The Screen inclines the viewer away from situational awareness of the immediacy of the 3-D realm, so to speak. It leaves humans more suggestible to the illusions of surface images. Of course, we all have these media screens, and spend appreciable amounts of time on them. Which is why it's crucial to develop conscious antibodies to keep that suggestibility in check. I don't notice much of an emphasis on that when problems of Internet and social media are discussed. Instead, it all seems to be about having some institutional entity controlling the input on the screen. Setting aside the problems related to the political aspect, remedies of that sort have a terribly attenuated level of effectiveness. Nothing beats the ability to think for oneself, and to decide to say No.
Thanks for laying out so many problems associated with the form of handheld computers. I'll add two thoughts:
1. I've been waiting for a while for the handheld computers to have sufficient processing power and internal memory to replace a desktop computer for the tasks that most of us retail users perform. Just link it in (by Bluetooth or whatever) to a keyboard, large monitor, speakers, etc. and use the same device for the heavy work at home or in a home office as we use for light computer and communications work on the go.
I think processing power-wise, we're there now, especially when the handheld computer is augmented by cloud processing and data storage. We just need the techies to set the hand-held up so that non-techies like me can easily link the peripherals, and we need versions of the apps (software) on the hand-held that function well with the larger peripherals, instead of the thumbing and swiping that you mention in your post that we use for the hand-helds.
Of course, the tech companies have no interest in any of this, because they make more money if we need to buy multiple devices.
2. On a more personal note, I use my hand-held for reading books (specifically, for me, through the Kindle app). Your comments on issues with the small screen size suggest that maybe I should look for a tablet for this purpose. But then, instead of one computing device (as hoped for per my point 1), I'm up to three. That's moving in the wrong direction!
good points.
I'm wanting a laptop computer with easy (as in "easy as a phone") texting and audio-only phone connection, myself. Something that can just be in place as a tab window, without the rigamarole of Skype, or Zoom. I don't always feel the necessity to be on-camera. It ought to be possible for me to multitask between phone and computer windows, using the same device.
Hard to believe that they haven't been invented. But I certainly haven't heard of any computer on the retail consumer market being advertised with those capabilities.
It might also be reversed by a complete denial of access to supply to where one is given no choice, although it is hard to imagine the circumstances that would lead to that, but I don't think most victims of Internet addiction will give it up voluntarily.
The consequences will be dire for society if they are allowed to continue with their addictions considering they are the majority of the population, and the effects it has on the brain essentially causing permanent brain damage and retardation, even moreso when people are exposed to these technologies during brain development as many now are.
Silicon Valley elites and the oligarchic class are well-aware of the harmful effects to be better able to resist them, but have no interest in helping the rest of the population do so. Either people are forced to change through denial of access or destruction of the technologies that enslave them to the shadows on the wall in Plato's cave, where they confuse artifice for reality and curse those who would try to liberate them and blind them with the light of day when they have known only darkness, or we risk a future of Eloi and Morlocks like technocratic totalitarian H.G. Wells imagined, or perhaps a society of idiots led by the mediocre that are geniuses by future standards like in C.M. Kornbluth's The Marching Morons.
How long has this deterioration of attention span been going on? Maybe longer than we realize. I read an interesting analysis of Sesame Street about 20 years ago where the point was made that there’s really no plot to follow. There’s a continuity of characters but it’s primarily short bursts of number counting, the alphabet and two to three minutes of characters talking to each other but no sustained story for children to focus on. Children’s programs in the fifties and sixties—like Lassie, Sky King and longer cartoons— engaged the children in a plot to follow and required a longer attention span.
The critique of Sesame Street is by Neil Postman in Amusing Ourselves To Death published in 1985. The whole thesis of the book is that the media we use to communicate are intertwined with our consciousness and how we think. Postman was alarmed by short form vignettes on television because they can’t communicate complex or subtle ideas. There is just no space for it on that expensive medium. The watcher’s attention span and mind doesn’t get trained to focus on story or argument that’s longer than the most simplistic, bare statement. The result is that raised with new media people just can’t understand law, literature and history. They haven’t created a mind capable of understanding how the ideas of the past were formed. Imagine what Mr. Postman would think of the media we use today. I suspect he would build a cabin deep in the woods like Ted Kaczynski.
There was a sane alternative, Mr. Rogers! My children were never exposed to the mind numbing Sesame Street.
I loved Sky King!
Me too
And on the cartoon end Betty Boop and Bosco walking through a totally abstract landscape to the Cab Calloway singing the St. James Infirmary Blues.
What? No Rin Tin Tin?
I remember the Song Bird. Flew with Sky every Saturday.
I am seeing this first hand with my 19 year old college freshman. Last year he removed Instagram and TikTok from his phone after recognizing how much time was being lost scrolling. He is a good student, a good athlete, and has strong social skills - when he is home I find him talking to his friends on the phone instead of texting them. I love seeing young people develop or maintain strong interpersonal skills despite the addictive nature of the phones in our pockets.
I've read so many similar stories. "I'm down to 2 hours a day on TikTok from 8!"
Hey, sons! Come over and read this!
Maybe an EMP event. The collapse of our energy infrastructure. Although I admit: I would miss my fellow nitwits and gadflies on Racket, and console myself by re-reading my collection of Matt's paperbacks. What a world. What a world. I give our youngest daughter credit: when we gather as a family, everyone puts their cellphones in a basket, at minimum during the meal. Lots of griping, but I think it's great.
Just remember, whatever you consume be it drugs, porn, food, social media and all the other crap. Can come back and consume you. It's rewired our brains to accept 15 second encounters of dopamine inducing happiness. Just like an addict who is chasing their next fix. The only way to stop it is to stop consuming the things that are consuming you.
Yep. And before that comes the REALIZATION that the things are consuming you.
Yep, everyone can see it before we can so we shut them out of our lives so we can consume in peace.
i had a friend who had a jammer - it supposedly jammed 2g / 3g frequencies at the time (this was years ago when it was easier and most cell phones only used a small range of frequencies) and he'd use it in panera breads, basically anywhere to see how people acted -
it was always more like an addict trying to get another smoke than simply putting it down, and that was pre-covid -
I have to wonder if our phone addiction isn't just an opportunistic virus that found a host in an already diseased society. I was in Europe this summer and noticed phone zombies didn't seem to exist. Maybe our social structures have degenerated to such an extent that the tech fills in the holes left by the absence of healthy social interaction?
https://www.theonion.com/relatives-gather-from-across-the-country-to-stare-into-1819575960
Whenever I get into an elevator, or similar location, where everyone (includong folks who might not know each other) is staring at their phones and not interacting despite being two feet from each other, I announce, "You know, you guys don't have to text each other -- you can just talk." People look up, usually look confused for a second, and then get joke. A brief conversation frequently ensues.
It's just a little thing I do to help fight phone addiction.
"Everything old is new again" has become increasingly part of my phraseology the older I get.
Who knows? Maybe I'LL become 'new again'.
The most subversive thing you can do is stay healthy and fit--- mind and body---sober, and thinking for yourself. I'm actively working to strengthen my brain, regain my ability to focus, read at length, process and retain information. The negative neurological impact of socal media is real. Keep up the good fight, Matt!
You nailed it, IMO. I would add to staying healthy and fit, weaning oneself off social media. I did the latter last summer and I was shocked how hard that was. That tells me something. Even without SM I have all the things I need to stay in touch with people who are important to me. I like it that you call this being subversive. It feels good, though, doesn't it?
As a thought: Addiction is the symptom not the disease. One of the hardest things you can ask of an addict is to be present in the moment. To sit quietly in a chair for an hour with his/her personal thoughts and emotions. Talking addiction, what do we think the term "high" means? In the 60's it meant access to an expanded consciousness but in all situations where the means becomes the end it became a destructive loop where consciousness became a "stoned" escape from reality not further entrance into its depths. And we should remember that expanded consciousness has always been the enemy of tyranny. Actual experiments on unsuspecting Americans, the introduction of drugs into poverty stricken communities for exploitation and profit, the prison industrial complex ,the beginning of the current assault on civil liberties, all came about as part of the surveillance state/corporate/political war on consciousness and change disguised as a war on drugs. Now a pretended war on terror where half the population is suddenly suspect. Soon to be criminalized. Do we think everyone is staring into the screen of a device that can track and monitor our every move and thought by chance alone?
In the case of addiction to electronics, if Heroin physically enslaves the body and traps the mind in dreamland, what is the effect of the acknowledged profiteering, manipulation and commodification of the human psyche by tech, corporations and the surveillance bureaucracy? How different is commodification, that is, viewing the human being as a product, from slavery? It is an actual industry. Considering the evolutionary journey from Goebbels to Madison Ave./K Street and now the many recent RACKET NEWS spotlights on the CIC, why are these groups so afraid of "we the people"? Isn't mass surveillance itself a kind of bovine ear tagging and a policy of herd management? How hard is it going to be to separate the actual addiction to and psychic damage from an industry that lives, thrives and profits by the manipulation of reality? Is it possible to reverse the capture and weaponization of tech by the billionaire controlled surveillance bureaucracy?
"We the people" have entered an entirely new age and it is demanding a one person at a time evolutionary awakening. It matters absolutely. It's time to get clear and it's time to get clean. Our best engines of personal survival remain our free Republic, our Constitution and the free citizen. Be excited.
Much of breaking addictive patterns is about re-railing attention focus toward a more worthwhile activity.
The attraction of instant gratification is that it's instantly gratifying, at least at the outset. And then later on the buzz diminishes- but it's like being on some inertial hamster wheel where disengaging involves effort, which ISN'T instantly gratifying. It can be difficult to even conceptualize an alternative to keeping the hamster wheel spinning, long after the realization that it's no fun anymore.
Nonetheless, it has to be done. We eventually run out of time, humans. So all the events we spend our time on are important.
I'm talking a better game than I play, here. But I play it better than I once did.
03/28/24: Superb. Thank you.
I recommend, in the spirit of the article, doing this:
Copy and paste it onto Word. Clear the formatting.
If necessary, transform the type from Segoe to the one you prefer.
Expand the type size if necessary. Then as you scroll down, isolate each sentence until each one is standing on its own with white space above and below it.
EXIT CHAIR. Get some exercise. Return and then re-read "Maintain The Brain."
See what happens.
I have been doing this!
Doing this also helps:
1) To spot where we omitted the words that we had intended to write in our sentences, but in our haste did not; and,
2) To see and obliterate the irritating cliches, "a group of... a series of... a number of..."
I'm curious, because this sounds like some useful advice, is this just a general writing technique you are sharing or are you subtly pointing out some deficiency in the article?
Thank you for asking. I am not pointing out deficiencies in Matt's article (there are none; it is refreshingly excellent).
This is a general writing technique (nice description!) that evolved from the realization that writers (on any subject) almost never have any idea of what their presentation looks like TO OTHERS --- their readers --- especially on a computer screen.
Ever recoil in disgust when faced with an Exxon Valdez oil spill created by Joe Bombast? Endless verbose / unparagraphed sentences pooled together. RUN!
We all overwrite.
Recasting what we create in a single-sentence format makes it easier to shorten sentences and eliminate possibly redundant remarks, thus enhancing the chance that someone will enjoy reading what you've written.
If you yourself are the author, "recasting" also makes it much easier to see and eliminate non sequiturs; same goes for identifying those written by others.
Be well!
"Endless verbose / unparagraphed sentences pooled together. RUN!"
Some readers complain about that format. Others complain about too many page breaks.
Some readers complain. That's all we need to say, isn't it?
I'm been sitting in front of a computer since the mid-90's, and have yet to master the "page break" technique.
When my fingers fly around the keyboard like a Kamala Harris speechwriter trying to escape from the Biden White House ("third floor... window open... will the rose bushes break my fall?!"), I do accidentally hit The Wrong Buttons and then find myself in an involuntary relationship with a newly-created and unwanted page break.
Then follows the standard fifteen-minute hunt-swear-and-peck technique by which the page break is eventually made to go back to wherever it came from (Hades!).
I do okay with that on a computer. It's phones that give me the problem. But Phone Society has taught me to only Text in miniscule snippets. On the phone, texting over 50 words is really pushing it. But it probably is the case that some people read my Substack comments on their phones, in which case most of them are scrolled over as "tl;dr." (Which is, in turn, a truncation of the earlier "tl;dnr". At this point, "didn't" rather than "did" is simply assumed...typing that extra letter is Unhip! A cardinal sin, for Americans.)
Tangentially: in 1984*, wasn't one of the goals of Newspeak to reduce the entire vocabulary of English to 500 words?
*Kurt Vonnegut eventually found it borderline mandatory to address his young readership with footnotes such as this: "1984 was a book, by a man named George Orwell. He noticed worrisome trends."
And that was over 30 years ago. Around the same time, Robert Anton Wilson's wife Arlen observed to her husband: "Most young people don't seem to know much of anything any more, do they?"
03/29/24: "The negative neurological impact of socal media is real."
I quite agree --- anything that originates in Southern California ("socal") is inherently destructive to brain cells.
In fact, if the composition of the House of Representatives were to be rightfully recast according to this logic, these missing brain cells (en masse) would result in the entire state being represented by only three Congressmen (two of which would be the adopted children of Michael Jackson).
Your America This Week segment with Walter Kirn help to keep me sane - and my favorite segments are your discussions on short stories that relate to topics that you have featured. When I was a kid I was able to sit in my tent (yes I had one that my parents got me with a zipper) and read books. I read the Secret Garden, and the Autobiography of Malcolm X and Soul on Ice and the Iliad - and I was not that old - maybe 12 or so. I am sure I didn't fully grasp the stories, but I absolutely was able to be still with myself and absorb as much as I could at that age. I now find that, perhaps because of social media and cell phones and texts, that I don't have the same ability to concentrate. Listening to you and Walter I realize how much I miss just sitting outside and reading. Now thinking about the kids who never have had that experience and it's a tremendous loss. You two have a wonderful knowledge of all kinds of literature from American writers to Russian novelists. I always look forward to this segment and can't wait to hear your next podcast. Thank you for everything you do to keep the rest of us sane.
Thank you for expressing all that better than I ever could.
Same!
In the mid-1800s, students as young as six years old were expected to memorize Virgil in the original Latin.
Our brains have been rewired and overwritten, and we were clueless that it was happening. Like every other addiction, we don't realize we have one until we try and stop.
Thx, Matt! I have been feeling saturated of late about EVERYTHING. This post is refreshing because it is forward thinking, and I want to move forward.
Perfect timing for this article. Just today someone started a conversation with me about politics stating how evil one specific person is and how there is no comparison to the 'good guys.' I responded with a comment like 'corruption is bi-partisan' and the guy went absolutely bonkers threatening to never ever talk to me again. That was the moment when I had no doubt that Brains have been completely pulverized with manufactured rage. The signals are talking. Our bodies and brains have become hyper receptors. It doesn't take much to ignite embedded feelings of rage.
Thank you Pamela. I’ve experienced the exact same thing with life long friends, and family members. Learned the lesson that the subject of politics simply cannot be discussed with many people. In my recent case I stated that Trump is not the only politician who lies often and repeatedly- that Joe Biden does the same. It was like I tripped an anger switch. There was no actual reasoning or thinking at all on their part - just an instinctive jump to defend his “side”, his “team, or tribe”. There was no sense of the damage to our friendship his anger created, only this fevered desire to “win” the “argument”. Thinking for oneself has been eroded by the phone and social media, but I think also the appearance of Trump on the political scene. So many Americans have gone insane with their passion to oppose Trump that they have lost their moral compass and ability to objectively view reality
Yes. The responses are so fierce that it's as if these people live in absolute Fear for their survival. This deliberate psychological influence campaign has been effective primarily for the LEFT, but the trade off is that society is experiencing severe psychological trauma. These people believe that Trump is an existential threat to their very existence and if you do not support their view, then you are also a threat to them.
Your thoughts?
I have had the same experience. It is puzzling and extraordinary. One of my closest friends, a retired college professor, is no longer willing to discuss any nuances of our political situation. We used to have hours-long conversations on these topics. The angry, cutting off of dialogue I find unsettling, new.
Because in his mind there are no nuances. He's right and you're wrong. End of story.
I feel like these people are trying my last nerve. Very rote and self-satisfied thinking.
Yep.
When educated people refuse to think critically, it MUST be called out. Shame, embarrassment and humiliation have positive results but require a fairly long time line.
When they threaten thus, take them up on their offer instantly (it may not be repeated).
Now you’re on to it. Goliath through SM brain training, aided by Automated Infomatics, has polarized the population. Thus creating Disruption Discord and a mute button on any thoughtful Discussion by the 21 st century serfs they are creating.
Don't worry about putting us on lists Matt. Anyone reading your content is already slated for re-education once the camps are unveiled. Can't wait to meet you all there in person finally. Cheers.
Today's dopamine-driven culture is all about instant gratification. It's not that the desire to experience gratification is anything new, it's that the internet presents us with unprecedented access to such rewards, with the result being the ruthless monetization of our attention.
I hope the like I gave your post gives you the warm and fuzzies! :)
Haha!
And the more "instant gratification" we get, the less satisfaction is experienced --- at the same time that the craving for it increases.
"Thinking for oneself" is a dangerous, white Western way of knowing that in the past has caused harm to under-represented groups (or some such thought-terminating drivel)—this would have sounded bizarre and impossible even a decade ago, but is now the hill our liberal "thinking" classes are willing to die on as well as the rock they've built their church upon.
As we all know if we're here, to be a member of the Western "thinking" class in good standing in the second decade of the 21st century means that under no circumstances should one ever be caught actually thinking in public, as this might lead one to repeat "extremist" "disinformation" that could cause unspecified harms to the "marginalized", up to and including suicide or genocide.
Thus our culture and educational establishments, from the heights of the Ivy League down to your local PTA or concert hall, has embraced a hard-edged form of anti-thought and replaced fact and truth with sanctimonious and punitive dogma designed to 1) make us all hate each other, 2) make us all afraid to think or speak anything but what our betters allow; and 3) poison our brains and souls to the point where society is dissolved and they are "forced" to step in and rule over their created chaos.
We are in desperate need of an intellectual and cultural revolution, where our elite "experts" and all the other self-appointed scolds and petty tyrants hoping to dominate our "cognitive infrastructure" are dethroned, mocked and scorned, and chased far away from any lever of power.
Defund the Thought Police!
Viva Taibbi!
This is one of your most brilliant posts, CP!
Thanks!
much appreciated
You just described the coming civil war predicted in the Fourth Turning book. Thinking class vs the pithed Gullables and the Goliath that created(s) them.
It isn't as if thinking for oneself was such a highly esteemed capability in previous eras. For example, in the 1950s Jim Crow era of the American South, anyone who thought that the political regime was acting unfairly toward black people was very circumspect about ever expressing that opinion. Especially if they were white. And the practical result was a consensus of conformity and assent to de jure oppression of black Americans.
I also grew up in the Cold War era. Much of my formal education I now recognize as propaganda. Not a fabrication, but propaganda nonetheless. It isn't as if there was ever a golden age of free thought and open-minded media in the US, prior to the Internet era. Granted, newspaper and magazine stories had much more detailed content. But gatekeeping was routine.
Thus far in the Internet Age, I view the immediate aftermath of the Iraq War debacle as the high water mark of the vindication of independent dissenting opinions and Internet free speech. The Reality-Based Community of Indies on the Internet exposed the shallowness and groupthink of Respectable Legacy Media, and the corridors of Institutional Power were shaken. They've been trying to stuff the genie back into the box ever since. I think one of the tasks of media outlets like Substack is to restore the role played by the dissenting views presented prior to the Iraq War, of acting as a reality-based ombudsman(person!) that isn't beholden to anyone.
I get that the early years of the Internet was also associated with a continually rising tide of a lot of fringey wingnut extremist views and outright disinformation. But in my observation, the institutional attempts to suppress them with structural censorship preemption only raised their profile, and the claims of some of them to the possession of "forbidden Truth." Some of the extremist views are not only obnoxious and discreditable, but their tactics of disseminating their views are obnoxious and discreditable. The answer is to expose the tactics and the falsity of the views, not to attempt a shutdown with ham-handed censorship "filtering."
In my view, the only way to counteract bad, wrong information is to teach the principles of Informal Logic- especially fallacy detection- and awareness of media manipulation tactics. How to think, not What to think. The results are not instantaneous. But the effort is predicated on the principle that humans are educable and capable of changing their views. Whereas the notion that human attitudes are so static that they can only be formed as the result of intensively imposed top-down conditioning in the Approved Direction is hopeless.
I read such wonderfully rich writing on Substack. It's like going back in time. The human spirit flourishing again. 😀
Same here.
No TikSchlock.
I blew off 451 in HS, so I came to it as a late, voluntary reader. I knew the headline plot about voluntary book destruction, but what captivated me about the book was his wife - standing in a room of giant video walls, talking to NPCs in some dramatic game, completely disconnected from society and completely clueless as to the world her government was creating. As I recall, she was still blissfully ignorant, talking to her computer-generated friends, as the bombs fell on the city.
Of all the prophetic achievements of Bradbury, that for me, is the ultimate one.
I'm 58 and I have been meeting younger musicians at open mics for the last couple years and I have been pleasantly surprised at the level of political awareness in this demographic. They generally know that 1984 is non fiction and that the news is full of doublespeak. Contrarily I have worked with progressive local politicians and volunteers and I find them to be easily misled, like actual characters in the novel.
Musicians lean libertarian. They're suspicious of all forms of authority.
No better example of this than Rush.
Subdivisions!
all except the click track players, they have no swing
Broke out in a cold sweat a few paragraphs into this article when I realized it contains no cat videos.
I'm a boob man myself. Equally disappointed.
Because it takes one to know one.
The crane fails were pretty good.
If the Cranes fall in Seattle...
Matt Taibbi you are an absolute treasure- the literary world would be boring without you in it. Keep writing whatever, I read and enjoy all of it.
And Walter
Hear hear!
"the work of cartoon pseudo-intellectuals like Yuval Noah Harari, who seem really to think nothing good or interesting happened until last week"
Matt, you owe me the coffee I spit out at my monitor. (And cartoon? Winsor McCay would like a word)
Wait, why does Matt not like Harari? All I found was his Twitter comment blasting the click-bait 'Yuval Noah Harari: Human rights are "just a fictional story".'
Matt's usually not one to take things out of context and denigrate them... Harari's argument (at least, in his book "Sapiens") is not intending to say that human rights are a bad thing. Er, that's definitely not the takeaway I had.
Yuval Harari is simply not the Great Thinker that he's so often been touted as. His books only seem impressive if they're the only futurist speculations that someone has ever encountered. (Alvin Toffler was a similarly non-original popularizer of humanist futurism, in the 1970s.) To the extent that Harari's writings make any valid points, they aren't original. They're almost entirely retreads of eminent 20th century historians like Daniel Boorstin, and futurist thinkers like Buckminster Fuller, Tim Leary, and Robert Anton Wilson. But Bucky Fuller has practically been forgotten, and Leary and Wilson are still in dubious repute as Sixties Counterculture Radicals (which a lot of Substack culture warriors of the political Right appear to confuse with Marxism and present-day Democratic Party neocultural cant; that is not an accurate analysis.) I have some profound disagreements with Fuller, Leary, and Wilson. Some of their ideas have plainly been disproven, in my opinion. But they got some things right. And they all made their points with much more wit, insight, and original vision than Harari.
How about if Racket readers could get together in real life? Maybe it's not just a Racket project. Maybe Racket, Public, Free Press and others could combine their lists to make this happen. Probably the most interesting group of people in the world now, because they self-selected to see through the propaganda. Maybe somebody could teach me how to maintain a motorcycle. It may start a movement to save brain cells.
Making/fixing things with your hands turns on the figuring-out part of the brain and grounds it in realty.
After a lifetime of desk/keyboard, work I recently built a decent, sized shed in my backyard.Took me ten times longer to do it than it should have, much time spent imagining and puzzling things out and correcting things, but I figured it out on my own, with reference to my garage's framing, and the help of just a couple of web pages and admittedly one YouTube video. Was one of the most rewarding things I've ever done, both mentally and physically.
I suspect the future belongs, in small but significant ways, to those who can do real things in the real world.
It works! So satisfying. May not be for everybody. Some people just don’t enjoy thinking for themselves - others relish it. When I interviewed people for an advertising agency where we needed original thinkers (maybe not so much anymore) I asked two questions - 1) which do you like better, baking or cooking and why. (Typically baking requires following the recipe and cooking allows for more improvising) 2) what was your favorite class in high school or college and why? (some said the class where the prof told them what they wanted, and if they did that they got an A, others liked their independent study where they got to immerse themselves in a topic they were curious about)
We need to start a movement. I have been part of a successful movement before. It requires strong ties among members. Not just at the top but at the grassroots level. People need to have beers together and discuss things. They need to recognize faces. They need to learn the names of the kids and spouses, etc. This can't happen online, although online speech is obviously important these days.
I’m a potter and have noticed a huge demand for pottery classes - people find it therapeutic to get their hands in the mud, try and fail (no worries, just re-wedge and try again). And folks let their guard down and tell stories about their lives - no one talks politics. It’s a real oasis in a phony online world.
I'm a potter, too. Although I haven't made anything since pre-Covid. You have reminded me that I should join a studio again.
Wouldn’t it be ironic if an online phenomenon like Substack revitalized a real world place like the library.
Or just meaningful face to face communication in local communities.
This is not the first Substack to start in person meet ups. Maybe Matt turns into the literary Jimmy Buffet lifestyle king...