What we've been reading

This week in doom loops

Last week we wrote about TikTok being a rare blip of political consensus in the US, but apparently there’s more. According to the Wall Street Journal, politicians, mostly liberal but also conservatives like Texas Governor Greg Abbott, want to crack down on institutional investors buying up residential property. They think it drives up prices and makes it harder for the Average American to buy a home. There is a long road to actual legislation, but a slew of states are trying. But then again, someone had to? sell their home to the institutional investors in the first place,? and the AP reports that? “Older Americans are fueling a sustained boost to the U.S. economy. Benefiting from outsize gains in the stock and housing markets over the past several years, they are accounting for a larger share of consumer spending — the principal driver of economic growth — than ever before.” Which is in turn delaying rate cuts, which is also making it more expensive to the Average American to buy a home.?Would it help said Average American if said Older Americans bought back the houses from said institutional investors?

This week in not being surprised

Corporate mischief! Also in the WSJ this week, we learned that companies are dramatically underreporting the? cost of exec flights on corporate jets. Speaking of corporate scandals, we found someone on the Internet who wrote a retelling of the WorldCom saga in language fit for a five year old to understand. It’s almost entertaining. They conclude: “If an investment seems too good to be true – it might not be true.” Maybe there’s hope??

This week in rewilding the internet

Humans turned forests into extractive monocultures, which made them fragile and disaster prone. We’re now doing the same thing with the infrastructure that underpins the internet. “ “That impulse to scour away the messiness that makes life resilient is what many conservation biologists call the “pathology of command and control.” Today, the same drive to centralize, control and extract has driven the internet to the same fate as the ravaged forests.” With its infrastructure centralized, ossified, and in the hands of a few, the internet will not provide the resilience humankind needs in the long run. The next steps are? “acute distress punctuated by sudden collapses once tipping points are reached.” ?The solution? Rewilding, say Marie Farrell and Robin Berjon in Noema. What does it entail? Among others…”ecological processes [that] foster complex and self-organizing ecosystems.” Rewilding puts into practice what every good manager knows: Hire the best people you can, provide what they need to thrive, then get out of the way. It’s the opposite of command and control.” Elinor Ostrom and WorldCom (again!) have cameos. Absolutely worth the long read, although as one of our friends put it, “some epic-scale busting of heads is the price of entry to anything like what we need actually happening.”?

She finds no fish by the seashore

Global supply chains are so much fun! You might be sitting in a? restaurant eating shrimp caught down the coast, but shipped to Chile for processing, before flying back frozen to your plate. Long Island is rebelling and waging war on imported Branzino. Fluke and Seabass to the rescue!?

This week in merging disciplines

Neurology and psychiatry are starting to explore heretofore limited common ground. It’s good news, The Economist reports: “Evidence is accumulating that an array of infections can, in some cases, trigger conditions such as obsessive-compulsive disorder, tics, anxiety, depression and even psychosis. And infections are one small piece of the puzzle. It is increasingly clear that inflammatory disorders and metabolic conditions can also have sizeable effects on mental health, though psychiatrists rarely look for them.”

This week in being, or not being, well, being the a***hole

Daniel Yudkin, a researcher, was concerned about moral philosophy focusing largely on abstract problems with strangers, and ignored the relational contexts in which we typically ask ourselves whether we are doing the right thing - with family, co-workers, neighbors and so on. Yudkin also knew a place on the internet where people extensively discussed those; Reddit’s well known AITA forum. So he went about studying the online forum’s 300k+ posts to categorize and make sense of them. Want to know what moral argument you most risk getting into with your cousin Vinnie? Vox has the story.?

Books we might be capable of reading

Indeed, philosophy! It’s great, but, for some of us, it’s not always easy to read. Kaitlin Archambault who, in a break from her day job running the Open Future Coalition, designed our new website (we are excited!), recommended we try Kierkegaard’s The Present Age. Written in 1846, it appears rather contemporary: “A revolutionary age is an age of action; ours is the age of advertisement and publicity. Nothing ever happens but there is immediate publicity everywhere.” In such an environment, meaning is evacuated; thought and discourse are replaced by “talkativeness”; “everything is reduced to a kind of private-public gossip”; and “real content is…miserably limited because of its intensity and self-absorption.”? Goes to show we can’t plain blame it all on social media.?

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