Posts Tagged ‘society’
“What Orwell feared were those who would ban books. What Huxley feared was that there would be no reason to ban a book because there would be no one who wanted to read one.”*…
In the 4th century BCE, Plato recounts (in the Phaedrus) Socrates’ thoughts on a “technology” that was then moving from specialized (administrative, commercial, religious) to broader (more literary and philosphical) use– writing. Socrates was not a fan. He worried that writing weakened the necessity (and thus, the power) of memory, and that it created the pretense of understanding, rather than real comprehension and mastery.
Still, of course, writing– and the reading that it enabled– became the dominant form of communication.
Today, reading (for anything other than business or formal study) is down. Way down. But not to worry, today’s champions of big tech argue: their streaming and AI will usher in a new golden age of learning and connectivity. Their critics, of course– in an echo of Socrates– suggest that they will do the exact opposite.
James Marriott (and here) puts the skeptic’s case…
… in the middle of the eighteenth century huge numbers of ordinary people began to read.
For the first couple of centuries after the invention of the printing press, reading remained largely an elite pursuit. But by the beginning of the 1700s, the expansion of education and an explosion of cheap books began to diffuse reading rapidly down through the middle classes and even into the lower ranks of society. People alive at the time understood that something momentous was going on. Suddenly it seemed that everyone was reading everywhere: men, women, children, the rich, the poor. Reading began to be described as a “fever”, an “epidemic”, a “craze”, a “madness”. As the historian Tim Blanning writes, “conservatives were appalled and progressives were delighted, that it was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”
This transformation is sometimes known as the “reading revolution”. It was an unprecedented democratisation of information; the greatest transfer of knowledge into the hands of ordinary men and women in history.
In Britain only 6,000 books were published in the first decade of the eighteenth century; in the last decade of the same century the number of new titles was in excess of 56,000. More than half a million new publications appeared in German over the course of the 1700s. The historian Simon Schama has gone so far as to write that “literacy rates in eighteenth century France were much higher than in the late twentieth century United States”.
Where readers had once read “intensively”, spending their lives reading and re-reading two or three books, the reading revolution popularised a new kind of “extensive” reading. People read everything they could get their hands on: newspapers, journals, history, philosophy, science, theology and literature. Books, pamphlets and periodicals poured off the presses.
It was an age of monumental works of thought and knowledge: the Encyclopédie, Samuel Johnson’s Dictionary of the English Language, Edward Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Immanuel Kant’s Critique of Pure Reason. Radical new ideas about God, about history, about society, about politics, and even the whole purpose and meaning of life flooded through Europe.
Even more importantly print changed how people thought.
The world of print is orderly, logical and rational. In books, knowledge is classified, comprehended, connected and put in its place. Books make arguments, propose theses, develop ideas. “To engage with the written word”, the media theorist Neil Postman wrote, “means to follow a line of thought, which requires considerable powers of classifying, inference-making and reasoning.”
As Postman pointed out, it is no accident, that the growth of print culture in the eighteenth century was associated with the growing prestige of reason, hostility to superstition, the birth of capitalism, and the rapid development of science. Other historians have linked the eighteenth century explosion of literacy to the Enlightenment, the birth of human rights, the arrival of democracy and even the beginnings of the industrial revolution.
The world as we know it was forged in the reading revolution.
Now, we are living through the counter-revolution.
More than three hundred years after the reading revolution ushered in a new era of human knowledge, books are dying.
Numerous studies show that reading is in free-fall. Even the most pessimistic twentieth-century critics of the screen-age would have struggled to predict the scale of the present crisis.
In America, reading for pleasure has fallen by forty per cent in the last twenty years. In the UK, more than a third of adults say they have given up reading. The National Literacy Trust reports “shocking and dispiriting” falls in children’s reading, which is now at its lowest level on record. The publishing industry is in crisis: as the author Alexander Larman writes, “books that once would have sold in the tens, even hundreds, of thousands are now lucky to sell in the mid-four figures.”
Most remarkably, in late 2024 the OECD published a report which found that literacy levels were “declining or stagnating” in most developed countries. Once upon a time a social scientist confronted with statistics like these might have guessed the cause was a societal crisis like a war or the collapse of the education system.
What happened was the smartphone, which was widely adopted in developed countries in the mid-2010s. Those years will be remembered as a watershed in human history…
[Marriott explores the impact and some if its implications…]
… This draining away of culture, critical thinking and intelligence represents a tragic loss of human potential and human flourishing. It is also one of the major challenges facing modern societies. Our vast, interconnected, tolerant and technologically advanced civilisation is founded on the complex, rational kinds of thinking fostered by literacy.
As Walter Ong writes in his book Orality and Literacy, certain kinds of complex and logical thinking simply cannot be achieved without reading and writing. It is virtually impossible to develop a detailed and logical argument in spontaneous speech — you would get lost, lose your thread, contradict yourself, and confuse your audience trying to re-phrase ineptly expressed points…
The classicist Eric Havelock argued that the arrival of literacy in ancient Greece was the catalyst for the birth of philosophy. Once people had a means of pinning ideas down on the page to interrogate them, refine them and build on them, a whole new revolutionary way of analytic and abstract thinking was born — one that would go on to shape our entire civilisation. With the birth of writing received ways of thinking could be challenged and improved. This was our species’ cognitive liberation…
Not only philosophy but the entire intellectual infrastructure of modern civilisation depends on the kinds of complex thinking inseparable from reading and writing: serious historical writing, scientific theorems, detailed policy proposals and the kinds of rigorous and dispassionate political debate conducted in books and magazines.
These forms of advanced thought provide the intellectual underpinnings of modernity. If our world feels unstable at the moment — like the ground is shifting beneath us — it is because those underpinnings are falling to pieces underneath our feet…
[Marriott explores what a return to an “oral” society might mean, then contemplates what he fears will be “the end of creativity”– If the literate world was characterised by complexity and innovation, the post literate world is characterised by simplicity, ignorance and stagnation. He turns then to its impact on civil society…]
… Amusingly from the perspective of the present the reading revolution of the eighteenth century was accompanied not only by excitement but by a moral panic.
“No lover of tobacco or coffee, no wine drinker or lover of games, can be as addicted to their pipe, bottle, games or coffee-table as those many hungry readers are to their reading habit”, thundered one German clergyman.
Richard Steele feared that “novels raise expectations which the ordinary course of life can never realise”. Others fretted that reading “excites the imagination too much, and fatigues the heart”.
It is easy to laugh at these anxieties. We have spent our whole lives hearing how virtuous and sensible it is to read books. How could reading be dangerous?
But in hindsight, these conservative moralists were right to worry. The rapid expansion of literacy helped to destroy the orderly, hierarchical, and profoundly socially unequal world they cherished.
The reading revolution was a catastrophe for the ultra-privileged and exploitative aristocrats of the European aristocratic ancien regime — the old autocratic system of government with almighty kings at the top, lords and clergy underneath and peasants squirming at the very bottom.
Ignorance was a foundation stone of feudal Europe. The vast inequalities of the aristocratic order were partly able to be sustained because the population had no way to find out about the scale of the corruption, abuses and inefficiencies of their governments…
… you do not have to believe print is a perfect and incorruptible system of communication to accept it is also almost certainly a necessary pre-condition of democracy.
In Amusing Ourselves to Death Neil Postman argues that democracy and print are virtually inseparable. An effective democracy pre-supposes a reasonably informed and somewhat critical citizenry capable of understanding and debating the issues of the day in detail and at length.
Democracy draws immeasurable strength from print — the old dying world of books, newspapers and magazines — with its tendency to foster deep knowledge, logical argument, critical thought, objectivity and dispassionate engagement. In this environment, ordinary people have the tools to understand their rulers, to criticise them and, perhaps, to change them…
… Politics in the age of short form video favours heightened emotion, ignorance and unevidenced assertions. Such circumstances are highly propitious for charismatic charlatans. Inevitably, parties and politicians hostile to democracy are flourishing in the post-literate world. TikTok usage correlates with increased vote share for populist parties and the far right…
… The big tech companies like to see themselves as invested in spreading knowledge and curiosity. In fact in order to survive they must promote stupidity. The tech oligarchs have just as much of a stake in the ignorance of the population as the most reactionary feudal autocrat. Dumb rage and partisan thinking keep us glued to our phones.
And where the old European monarchies had to (often ineptly) try to censor dangerously critical material, the big tech companies ensure our ignorance much more effectively by flooding our culture with rage, distraction and irrelevance.
These companies are actively working to destroy human enlightenment and usher in a new dark age.
The screen revolution will shape our politics as profoundly as the reading revolution of the eighteenth century.
Without the knowledge and without the critical thinking skills instilled by print, many of the citizens of modern democracies find themselves as helpless and as credulous as medieval peasants — moved by irrational appeals and prone to mob thinking. The world after print increasingly resembles the world before print.
Superstitions and anti-democratic thinking flourish. Scholarship in our universities is shaped by rigid partisanship not by tolerance and curiosity. Our art and literature is cruder and more simplistic…
… As power, wealth and knowledge concentrate at the top of society, an angry, divided and uninformed public lacks a way understand or analyse or criticise or change what is going on. Instead more and more people are impressed by the kinds of highly emotional charismatic and mystical appeals that were the foundation of power in the age before widespread literacy.
Just as the advent of print dealt the final death blow to the decaying world of feudalism, so the screen is destroying the world of liberal democracy.
As tech companies wipe out literacy and middle class jobs, we may find ourselves a second feudal age. Or it may be that we are entering a political era beyond our imagining.
Whatever happens, we are already seeing the world we once knew melt away. Nothing will ever be the same again.
Welcome to the post-literate society…
The end of civilization? A sobering assessment of “The dawn of the post-literate society” from @j-amesmarriott.bsky.social. Eminently worth reading in full.
FWIW, your correspondent would note that while Socrates was surely right that writing diminished the power of memory and at least partially right that text allowed its readers to appear more knowledgeable about things than perhaps they were, it was the development of writing that provided the foundation on which the the print revolution Marriott celebrates was able to emerge.
I’d also note that the earliest days of printing (before the 18th century “revolution in reading”) were pretty fraught: from the publication of Luther’s 95 Thesis (and the religious and civil turmoil– both ideological and “bloody”– they occasioned) on through more than a century of conflict that included the Thirty Years War, The English Civil War, and ultimately, the American and French Revolutions– indeed, also the American Civil War. As Ada Palmer notes, “Whenever a new information technology comes along, and this includes the printing press, among the very first groups to be ‘loud’ in it are the people who were silenced in the earlier system, which means radical voices”… very like the our current situation, as Marriott describes it.
Again FWIW, I find Marriott’s take all-too-resonant with my own (geezer’s) sense of loss (as the epistemological and civic superstructure in which I came of age dissolve). I find his pessimism-unto-despair much more plausible than I’d like. But I hold onto the hope that in this transition– as in the transitions from oral to writing, and then to printing/publishing– we will, as societies, find ways to manage the chaos and establish new foundations for reason, creativity, and coherent, constructive civic life.
It starts with us wanting– and working hard– to find that new, more solid ground.
* Neil Postman, Amusing Ourselves to Death
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As we buckle up, we might spare a thought for George Grenville; he died on this date in 1770. An English politician who served as Prime Minister in the early years of the reign of George III, Grenville’s primary challenge was to solve the problem of the massive debt resulting from the Seven Years’ War. A centerpiece of his effort was a policy of taxing the American colonies more heavily, starting with his Sugar Act of 1764 and the Stamp Act of 1765– which began the train of events (much discussed in printed material of the time) that led to the American Revolution.
“An imbalance between rich and poor is the oldest and most fatal ailment of all republics”*…
The rich in the U.S. just keep getting richer. Over the five decades, incomes have risen materially faster at the very top than anywhere below, and similarly, wealth has accumulated much more quickly at the top than anywhere below. A report from the Stone Center On Socio-Economic Inequality (at CUNY) looks at the mutually-reinforcing relationship between these two dynamics…
Homoploutia describes the situation in which the same people (homo) are wealthy (ploutia) in the space of capital and labor income in some countries. It can be quantified by the share of capital income rich who are also labor income rich. In this paper, we combine several datasets covering different time periods to document the evolution of homoploutia in the United States from 1950 to 2020. We find that homoploutia was low after World War II, has increased by the early 1960s, and then decreased until the mid-1980s. Since 1985 it has been sharply increasing: In 1985, about 17% of adults in the top decile of capital income earners were also in the top decile of labor-income earners. In 2018 this indicator was about 30%. This makes the traditional division between capitalists and laborers less relevant today. It makes periods characterized by high interpersonal inequality, high capital-income ratio, and high capital share of income in the past fundamentally different from the current situation. High homoploutia has far-reaching implications for social mobility and equality of opportunity. We also study how homoploutia is related to total income inequality. We find that rising homoploutia accounts for about 20% of the increase in total income inequality in the United States since 1986…
Note that the report was written in the 2020 (and published in The Review of Income and Wealth in 2023). The dynamic has continued since; the polarizing impact has grown.
“Homoploutia: Top Labor and Capital Incomes in the United States, 1950–2020,” from @stone-lis.bsky.social. (Read the full report here.)
[image above: source]
* Plutarch
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As we evaluate equity, we might recall that it was on this date in 1970 that The Oregon Highway Division attempted to destroy a rotting beached Sperm whale with explosives, leading to the now infamous “exploding whale” incident.
“Nationalism is not the awakening of nations to self-consciousness: it invents nations where they do not exist… It is nationalism which engenders nations, and not the other way round.”*…
The estimable Henry Farrell unpacks Ernest Gellner‘s understanding of the conditions of liberty– and the centraliity of civil society– and how they are threatened today…
There are many possible stories about why American political conservatism is such an intellectual trainwreck. Here’s one. Conservatives used at least nominally to argue that it was important to protect civil society from the depredations of government, and many genuinely believed it. Some still do, but now, the dominant figures in political conservatism want to use government to weaponize and suborn civil society.
Like all simplified fables, this gets a fair amount wrong, both in its understanding of what happened and in what it leaves out. Still, it isn’t a bad way to start understanding some of what is taking place. Yet it begs an important question. What is civil society?
When I wrote about how civil society could beat Trumpism a couple of weeks ago, I felt a mild sensation of intellectual guilt – I knew I was invoking a complicated set of ideas without properly explaining them. So here’s my attempt to make up for that, and to explain why we ought want to protect civil society too, leaning on the account in Ernest Gellner’s book, Conditions of Liberty.
I suspect that few people younger than 50 have read this book – it’s been out of print for thirty years or so. [Though it is avaiable at the Internet Archive, in other lbraries, and used.] Gellner wrote it back in the 1990s, when civil society seemed to promise a path forward for the newly freed democracies of Eastern Europe. Now people are rediscovering the idea, not because of future hopes, but because they want to explain what is going wrong as the state escapes its restraints and threatens to crush the people’s liberties.
Gellner’s understanding of civil society is both relevant and a possible bridge between certain parts of the left and right. While he identified loosely with the left, Gellner was profoundly influenced by the kinds of classical liberalism articulated by Adam Ferguson and David Hume. They, in turn, wrote in the aftermath of the English Civil War and Glorious Revolution of the previous century, when Scottish and English society had been torn apart by vicious religious controversies.
Gellner’s account of civil society, like those of his intellectual forebears, begins from the fact of profound disagreement and asks how best to manage it. From Gellner’s perspective, civil society is a marvelous accident, an unanticipated by-product of the seventeenth century stalemate between Calvinist enthusiasts (here and below, the term ‘enthusiast’ refers to Protestants who believe that God lives inside them, and are accordingly uncomfortable with certain kinds of hierarchy) and the English state. Yet this accident has shaped the world that we live in, creating a realm of autonomy in which people are free to live their lives in many different ways, within broad structures that support a reasonable degree of peace and shared order.
The dominant strain in American political conservatism has abandoned any commitments that it once had to this vision of pluralism. Some conservatives favor a shared notion of the common good, which ought be imposed as necessary on society. Others are more straightforwardly interested in domination and plunder. Neither faction has any interest in preserving the autonomy of civil society. Instead of a pluralistic realm to be protected or left alone, they see a “cathedral” of left ideology and argue that universities, non-profits, even multinational corporations are redoubts of the enemy that must be taken by storm. This is dingbat Gramscianism, strained through the turd-encrusted sieve of Curtis Yarvin Thought…
[Farrell unpack’s Gellner’s thinking and puts it into context. He concludes…]
… There is plenty that is missing from the classical liberal account of civil society that Gellner lays out. It doesn’t capture many of the power dynamics that actually existing civil society entails. Civil society’s actual degree of pluralism varies, and is the subject both of legitimate debate and actual political struggle (something that both intelligent left- and right-Gramscian approaches capture better than classical liberal accounts).
Still, it does an excellent job in explaining why it is a problem when the government tries to capture civil society. If we lived in a world where the winning faction of conservatives recognized the value of civil society, we would be a lot better off than we are. There is also excellent reason to think that the left should be more appreciative of civil society too, and less prone to fantasies that everyone would change their politics if only this or that intellectual institution was controlled by the right people with the right way of thinking.
Liberal accounts of civil society push us to recognize the benefits of genuine pluralism, however painful and messy it may be, and however difficult to maintain in practice. Gellner’s particular version also has the particular benefit of emphasizing how contingent the development of civil society was, and how chancy its survival may be without relentless hard work.
Other societies may develop the economic benefits that helped civil society take off. [Quoting Gellner…]
Whether we like it or not, the deadly angel who spells death to economic inefficiency is not always at the service of liberty. He had once rendered liberty some service, but does not seem permanently at her command. This may sadden those of us who are liberals and were pleased at being given such a potent ally – but facts had better be faced.
There will always be tensions in the relationship between nationalism and liberalism, which endanger the pluralism of civil society. Strong forms of national identity and strongman government based on fostering us-them divisions go hand-in-hand with each other. If economic growth stutters or fails, then social mobility is likely to become more problematic, and abusive hierarchy – the default condition of human society – may return.
That, then, is what civil society is (under one useful definition) and why we ought care about it…
Eminently worth reading in full: “What is civil society, and why should we care?” from @himself.bsky.social. For more from Farrell on the importance of civil society an what drives it: “Liberalism transforms plurality from weakness to strength.”
Lest we need a more “commercial” form of convincing (that, among its other defects, inequality doesn’t pay): Noah Smith on “Our Age of Kings” and why “the ‘cure’ is worse than the disease.” One example:
See also: “Equality and Development: A Comparative & Historical Perspective 1800-2025,” and “The Rise and Fall of the Project State: Rethinking the Twentieth Century.”
As Kant said, “The greatest problem for the human species, the solution of which nature compels him to seek, is that of attaining a civil society which can administer justice universally.” Further to which, as Abbie Hoffman observed, “Democracy is not something you believe in or a place to hang your hat, but it’s something you do. You participate. If you stop doing it, democracy crumbles.”
* Ernest Gellner (a la George Orwell’s distinction between the defensive patriot and the offensive nationalist: the former naturally prefers his particular customs, whereas the latter cannot be satisfied without demonstrating their superiority over others — by conflict if necessary).
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As we push for plurality, we might spare a thought for “the only man to enter Parliament with honest intentions”– it’s Guy Fawkes Day.
On the eve of a general parliamentary session scheduled for November 5, 1605, Sir Thomas Knyvet, a justice of the peace, found Guy Fawkes lurking in a cellar of the Parliament building, and ordered the premises thoroughly searched. Nearly two tons of gunpowder were found hidden within the cellar. The authorities determine that the suspect was a participant in an English Catholic conspiracy, largely organized by Robert Catesby, to annihilate England’s entire Protestant government including King James I. Over the next few months, English authorities killed or captured all of the conspirators in the “Gunpowder Plot,” and also arrested, tortured, or killed dozens of innocent English Catholics. Fawkes himself was executed on January 31, 1606.
The day after Fawkes arrest, November 5, 1605 Londoners were encouraged to celebrate the King’s escape from assassination by lighting bonfires, “always provided that ‘this testemonye of joy be carefull done without any danger or disorder'”; an Act of Parliament later that year designated November 5th as an official day of thanksgiving for “the joyful day of deliverance”, and remained in force until 1859.
But as historian Lewis Call has observed, Fawkes is now “a major icon in modern political culture.” The image of Fawkes’s face has become “a potentially powerful instrument for the articulation of postmodern anarchism” during the late 20th century, exemplified by the mask worn by V in the comic book series V for Vendetta, who fights against a fictional fascist English state, and by activists who were part of the Occupy Movement.
“Financialization is neither finance-nor enterprise-driven”…
The estimable Brad DeLong has observed that Marx was right: “all that is solid melts into air”…
Since 1870, worldwide, on average, according to our flawed standard measures, every thirty years about 4/5 of the economy have improved in technology and productivity by roughly 25%, at a rate of roughly 0.8% per year. And 1/5 of the economy has quintupled in technology and productivity, at a rate of about 5.4% per year. That leaves average productivity, worldwide, roughly twice what it was a generation before. And it is a different, although overlapping, share of the economy that undergoes this massive leading-sector push every generation.
And so, since 1870, we have seen successive Steampower, Applied-Science, Mass Production, Globalized Value-Chain, and now Attention Info-Bio Tech modes, with these transformations occurring faster and more completely in today’s rich countries and slower and incompletely in today’s poor countries, but with life even in poor countries being substantially transformed vis-à-vis life 150 years ago…
… For most people, a generation sees (i) some change in their roles as producers in the organization and productivity of their jobs and the pieces of the societal division of labor that they do, some change in their roles as consumers and utilizers of most of the products of the human division of labor, but about one-fifth or so of their life as consumers and utilizers of the products of the human division of labor completely upended, largely in a good way. And then there are the 1/5 of people whose jobs and whose roles as producers were caught up in the Schumpeterian creative-destruction leading-sector technology tsunami, for whom little is the same as it was thirty years before. That change is to their substantial detriment if they tried to do the old thing in the old way: their real incomes then would be only 1/4 or so of what they would have expected. But that change would have been to their substantial benefit had they found a way to successfully surf the wave.
To summarize: Since 1770, the modern economy changes by puncture, not glide. Every thirty years these days, a sector explodes—lifting productivity, reorganizing firms, and scrambling career ladders. Roughly four-fifths inch forward, while one-fifth quintuples and redefines the frontier. Those leading sectors—steam, mass production, information—rebuild institutions and stress politics as they march. Most people experience partial gains in consumption and workflow; the unlucky fifth face brutal displacement unless they pivot fast. Past waves forged industry, mass production, suburbia, microelectronics; each remapped the social order, often painfully. Average living standards rise, but the distribution is jagged, and the politics volatile. Today’s leading edge runs through data centers and cognitive work: prompts, context engineering, evaluation, and synthesis. The liberal arts—long buffered—now sit at ground zero. Survival means translation: turn judgment, clarity, and taste into leverage over machines and markets, while rebuilding public capacity to manage the turbulence…
– “All That Is Solid Melts into Air”: Since 1870, Roughly One-Fifth of the Economy Is Transformed Every Thirty Years,” from @delong.social
And how’s that going? Two dispatches from the front, on separate but fundamentally-related phenomena emerging in our current “puncture.” First, Luke Goldstein on the way in which a great many major corporations — from airlines to social media platforms — now aspire to become unregulated banks. As he explains, “bankification” today accounts for the highest profit margins in the US economy, crippling productive capacity and setting the stage for the next crash…
The US economy is turning into one giant bank.
Starbucks holds nearly $2 billion of customers’ money in its rewards program. That’s more than the total deposits managed by 85 percent of chartered banks, making the coffee chain one of the biggest financial institutions in the country.
Conversely, Capital One, one of the world’s top banks, now operates its own cafes on city street corners.
Airlines are now little more than flying banks, given that they make more money from selling frequent-flyer points to credit card companies than they do flying passengers.
More Americans than ever are in debt to their nearby grocery store due to predatory “buy now, pay later” loans offered during checkout.
As you’re wheeled into an emergency medical procedure, the nurse may ask if you’d prefer to pay on a deferred-payment loan plan, an increasingly common way to finance health care expenses.
And if you can’t pay your rent on time, it could soon become common for your apartment building owner to lend you the money, putting you in debt to your landlord.
These are snapshots of the new wave of financialization sweeping across the country, where the lines between finance and commerce are being blurred.
Upward of 40 percent of Americans now pay for basic items like groceries and health care using borrowed money — and this excludes credit cards. A third of younger Americans hold their savings on nonbank tech platforms like Venmo, and industries from retail to transportation derive anywhere from 14 percent to half of their profits from partnerships with credit card companies.
While this new type of financialization takes many different forms, the endgame is the same: Most major corporations now aspire to become unregulated banks, opening up new avenues to make even more money hand over fist. Banks operating credit cards are the highest-profit-margin enterprises in the economy. Every company wants a share of the loot, amassed from high fees and low overhead costs.
This development has been supercharged by the Silicon Valley investor class, under the Orwellian term “embedded finance.” Others call it “bankification.”
The peddlers of embedded finance promise a world of “frictionless transactions,” providing consumers efficiency and convenience by integrating financial and nonfinancial services.
But these new profit streams come with a range of potential harms….
– “Everything Is Becoming a Bank” from @jacobinmagazin.bsky.social
Next, Ted Gioia on the rise of our gambling culture. He begins by recounting the grimy details of the recent gambling bust that rocked professional basketball (includsing the roles of ESPN and the NBA itself… though…)..
… It’s not just sports. Two weeks before the FBI arrests, the New York Stock Exchange invested $2 billion in the Polymarket betting operation. As Gordan Gekko says in the movie Wall Street: “It’s all about bucks, kid.”
Does the NYSE now count as the sixth family running gambling in New York?
No, it’s not that simple. There are lots of gambling businesses in New York, starting with the government. The NY State Lottery brings in more cash than all the Mafia families combined. So the NYSE is a johnny-come-lately to the gaming tables, like country rubes visiting the Statue of Liberty…
[Gioia unpacks the “ideas”seven rules of casino design and management” of casino design expert Bill Friedman (“a former gambling addict who wrote a very influential (and expensive) book on casino design”]
… Of course, the real insidious process is happening online, where every big web platform is imitating a gambling casino. And they rake in gangsta profits bigger than any gangsta has ever made.
How bad is it? Consider this fact: Among the eight largest companies in the world, at least half of them promote addiction with screen interfaces that mimic slot machines…
– “Why Is Everything Turning into a Casino?” from @tedgioia.bsky.social
The last word, which applies to both pieces, from Gioia:
Of course, none of this demands your participation. You can leave the casino at any moment—or never enter in the first place. Even if gambling is addictive, most people refuse the bait.
That’s especially true right now. Las Vegas tourism has fallen dramatically. And when you interview consumers, they will tell you why—they are upset at the casinos. The gambling business has become too exploitative and manipulative.
So people just walk away.
The exact same thing is starting to happen with social media. And for the same reason—folks are fed up with the apps. Many stop using them, and brag about it to their friends. So the trend of walking away feeds on itself…
… Maybe businesses need to find a different role model than a casino. It’s not hard to think of a few examples.
So let me close with a wild idea.
Perhaps they can design web apps to serve people—instead of controlling, manipulating, and surveilling them. After all, many businesses once thrived with that simple formula. It’s not too late to return to that practice…
By way of understanding “casino design and management” techniques at work online, see also “Catalog of Dark Patterns, “a variety of dark pattern examples, sorted by category, to better understand deceptive [consumer experience] design practices,” from Dark Patterns.
And by way of context: “The Invisible Economic Crisis,” (Louis Hyman interviewed in TNR), “It Is Trump’s Casino Economy Now. You’ll Probably Lose,” from Kyla Scanlon. and Scanlon’s follow-up piece in her newsletter: “How Bible Sales and Chipotle Explain the Economy.”
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As we just say no, we might recall that it was on this date in 1834 that the first mention of the card game poker was published, a reference to an account by English actor Joseph Cowell, who reported that the game was played in New Orleans and on Mississippi River boats (as recounted in Jonathan H. Green‘s book, An Exposure of the Arts and Miseries of Gambling.
Poker itself originated in the late 18th century, and had probably spread throughout the Mississippi River region by 1800. It was played in a variety of forms, with 52 cards, and included both straight poker and stud. 20 card poker (the variety referenced by Cowell) was a variant for two players. (It is a common English practice to reduce the deck in card games when there are fewer players).
“Down with all kings but King Ludd!”*…
Further, in a fashion, to yesterday’s post…
Thomas Pynchon is having a moment. On the heels of the success of Paul Thomas Anderson’s One Battle After Another (loosely based in Pynchon’s novel, Vineland), he has released his first novel in 12 years, Shadow Ticket, a sufficiently big deal to merit not just a featured focus in The New York Times Book Review, but also a combo review-profile in The New York Times Magazine (both links to gift articles). Your correspondent is about half-way through Shadow Ticket and having a blast…
But here, I offer a much older piece from Pynchon, and non-fiction at that: an essay he wrote for The New York Times in 1984… one resonant with themes that run through his novels; one that speaks to that moment– the mid-Eighties– even as it speaks to ours…
As if being 1984 weren’t enough, it’s also the 25th anniversary this year of C. P. Snow’s famous Rede Lecture, ”The Two Cultures and the Scientific Revolution,” notable for its warning that intellectual life in the West was becoming increasingly polarized into ”literary” and ”scientific” factions, each doomed not to understand or appreciate the other. [See almanac entry here.] The lecture was originally meant to address such matters as curriculum reform in the age of Sputnik and the role of technology in the development of what would soon be known as the third world. But it was the two-culture formulation that got people’s attention. In fact it kicked up an amazing row in its day. To some already simplified points, further reductions were made, provoking certain remarks, name-calling, even intemperate rejoinders, giving the whole affair, though attenuated by the mists of time, a distinctly cranky look.
Today nobody could get away with making such a distinction. Since 1959, we have come to live among flows of data more vast than anything the world has seen. Demystification is the order of our day, all the cats are jumping out of all the bags and even beginning to mingle. We immediately suspect ego insecurity in people who may still try to hide behind the jargon of a specialty or pretend to some data base forever ”beyond” the reach of a layman. Anybody with the time, literacy and access fee these days can get together with just about any piece of specialized knowledge s/he may need. So, to that extent, the two-cultures quarrel can no longer be sustained. As a visit to any local library or magazine rack will easily confirm, there are now so many more than two cultures that the problem has really become how to find the time to read anything outside one’s own specialty.
What has persisted, after a long quarter century, is the element of human character. C. P. Snow, with the reflexes of a novelist after all, sought to identify not only two kinds of education but also two kinds of personality. Fragmentary echoes of old disputes, of unforgotten offense taken in the course of long-ago high- table chitchat, may have helped form the subtext for Snow’s immoderate, and thus celebrated, assertion, ”If we forget the scientific culture, then the rest of intellectuals have never tried, wanted, or been able to understand the Industrial Revolution.” Such ”intellectuals,” for the most part ”literary,” were supposed, by Lord Snow, to be ”natural Luddites.”
Except maybe for Brainy Smurf, it’s hard to imagine anybody these days wanting to be called a literary intellectual, though it doesn’t sound so bad if you broaden the labeling to, say, ”people who read and think.” Being called a Luddite is another matter. It brings up questions such as, Is there something about reading and thinking that would cause or predispose a person to turn Luddite? Is it O.K. to be a Luddite? And come to think of it, what is a Luddite, anyway?…
[Pynchon explains, and puts the “movement” into both socio-political and literary context…]
… The Gothic attitude in general, because it used images of death and ghostly survival toward no more responsible end than special effects and cheap thrills, was judged not Serious enough and confined to its own part of town. It is not the only neighborhood in the great City of Literature so, let us say, closely defined. In westerns, the good people always win. In romance novels, love conquers all. In whodunitsses we know better. We say, ”But the world isn’t like that.” These genres, by insisting on what is contrary to fact, fail to be Serious enough, and so they get redlined under the label ”escapist fare.”
This is especially unfortunate in the case of science fiction, in which the decade after Hiroshima saw one of the most remarkable flowerings of literary talent and, quite often, genius, in our history. It was just as important as the Beat movement going on at the same time, certainly more important than mainstream fiction, which with only a few exceptions had been paralyzed by the political climate of the cold war and McCarthy years. Besides being a nearly ideal synthesis of the Two Cultures, science fiction also happens to have been one of the principal refuges, in our time, for those of Luddite persuasion.
By 1945, the factory system – which, more than any piece of machinery, was the real and major result of the Industrial Revolution – had been extended to include the Manhattan Project, the German long-range rocket program and the death camps, such as Auschwitz. It has taken no major gift of prophecy to see how these three curves of development might plausibly converge, and before too long. Since Hiroshima, we have watched nuclear weapons multiply out of control, and delivery systems acquire, for global purposes, unlimited range and accuracy. An unblinking acceptance of a holocaust running to seven- and eight-figure body counts has become – among those who, particularly since 1980, have been guiding our military policies – conventional wisdom.
To people who were writing science fiction in the 50’s, none of this was much of a surprise, though modern Luddite imaginations have yet to come up with any countercritter Bad and Big enough, even in the most irresponsible of fictions, to begin to compare with what would happen in a nuclear war. So, in the science fiction of the Atomic Age and the cold war, we see the Luddite impulse to deny the machine taking a different direction. The hardware angle got de-emphasized in favor of more humanistic concerns – exotic cultural evolutions and social scenarios, paradoxes and games with space/ time, wild philosophical questions – most of it sharing, as the critical literature has amply discussed, a definition of ”human” as particularly distinguished from ”machine.” Like their earlier counterparts, 20th-century Luddites looked back yearningly to another age – curiously, the same Age of Reason which had forced the first Luddites into nostalgia for the Age of Miracles.
But we now live, we are told, in the Computer Age. What is the outlook for Luddite sensibility? Will mainframes attract the same hostile attention as knitting frames once did? I really doubt it. Writers of all descriptions are stampeding to buy word processors. Machines have already become so user-friendly that even the most unreconstructed of Luddites can be charmed into laying down the old sledgehammer and stroking a few keys instead. Beyond this seems to be a growing consensus that knowledge really is power, that there is a pretty straightforward conversion between money and information, and that somehow, if the logistics can be worked out, miracles may yet be possible. If this is so, Luddites may at last have come to stand on common ground with their Snovian adversaries, the cheerful army of technocrats who were supposed to have the ”future in their bones.” It may be only a new form of the perennial Luddite ambivalence about machines, or it may be that the deepest Luddite hope of miracle has now come to reside in the computer’s ability to get the right data to those whom the data will do the most good. With the proper deployment of budget and computer time, we will cure cancer, save ourselves from nuclear extinction, grow food for everybody, detoxify the results of industrial greed gone berserk – realize all the wistful pipe dreams of our days.
The word ”Luddite” continues to be applied with contempt to anyone with doubts about technology, especially the nuclear kind. Luddites today are no longer faced with human factory owners and vulnerable machines. As well-known President and unintentional Luddite D. D. Eisenhower prophesied when he left office, there is now a permanent power establishment of admirals, generals and corporate CEO’s, up against whom us average poor bastards are completely outclassed, although Ike didn’t put it quite that way. We are all supposed to keep tranquil and allow it to go on, even though, because of the data revolution, it becomes every day less possible to fool any of the people any of the time. If our world survives, the next great challenge to watch out for will come – you heard it here first – when the curves of research and development in artificial intelligence, molecular biology and robotics all converge. Oboy. It will be amazing and unpredictable, and even the biggest of brass, let us devoutly hope, are going to be caught flat-footed. It is certainly something for all good Luddites to look forward to if, God willing, we should live so long. Meantime, as Americans, we can take comfort, however minimal and cold, from Lord Byron’s mischievously improvised song, in which he, like other observers of the time, saw clear identification between the first Luddites and our own revolutionary origins. It begins:
As the Liberty lads o’er the sea
Bought their freedom, and cheaply, with blood,
So we, boys, we
Will die fighting, or live free,
And down with all kings but King Ludd!
Thomas Pynchon considers: “Is It O.K. To Be A Luddite?” from @nytimes.com.
Pair with: “Is This the New ‘Scariest Chart in the World’?”
* Lord Byron
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As we hang onto our humanity, we might recall that it was on this date in 2006 that review copies of Against the Day were distributed; it published later that year. At 1,085 pages, it is the longest of Pynchon’s novels to date (note that there is a rumor that Pynchon, who is now 88, completed another book alongside Shadow Ticket (only 304 pages long)… so who knows if Against the Day will hold its “title”…)
Pynchon has “teased” the novel with a synopsis:
Pynchon’s synopsis states that the novel’s action takes place “between the 1893 Chicago World’s Fair and the years just after World War I”. “With a worldwide disaster looming just a few years ahead, it is a time of unrestrained corporate greed, false religiosity, moronic fecklessness, and evil intent in high places. No reference to the present day is intended or should be inferred.” Pynchon promises “cameo appearances by Nikola Tesla, Bela Lugosi and Groucho Marx”, as well as “stupid songs” and “strange sexual practices”.
The novel’s setting “moves from the labor troubles in Colorado to turn-of-the-century New York City, to London and Göttingen, Venice and Vienna, the Balkans, Central Asia, Siberia at the time of the mysterious Tunguska Event, Mexico during the Revolution, postwar Paris, silent-era Hollywood, and one or two places not strictly speaking on the map at all.”
Like several of Pynchon’s earlier works, Against the Day includes both mathematicians and drug users. “As an era of certainty comes crashing down around their ears and unpredictable future commences, these folks are mostly just trying to pursue their lives. Sometimes they manage to catch up; sometimes it’s their lives that pursue them.”
The synopsis concludes: “If it is not the world, it is what the world might be with a minor adjustment or two. According to some, this is one of the main purposes of fiction. Let the reader decide, let the reader beware. Good luck…”
– source
It is probably Pynchon’s most debated novel. Some readers and critics find it too scattered; others believe it to be his masterpiece (a title more commonly awarded to Gravity’s Rainbow). FWIW, Against the Day is your correspondent’s favorite, which, given how much I’ve admired and enjoyed and learned from all of Pynchon’s work, is saying something…
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