Posts Tagged ‘society’
“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
###
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…
“If I only had a brain”*…
The estimable Brad DeLong ponders the Discovery Channel series Naked and Afraid, concluding that “the Scarecrow in The Wizard of Oz had a greatly exaggerated view of what he would have been able to do if he only had a brain”…
There is a shlock TV show, on the Discovery Channel, called “Naked & Afraid”.
In it, two humans are dropped into a wilderness somewhere, naked, with one and only one piece of technology each (usually something like a knife, a fire starter, or a fishing line). All around them are other mammals doing their mammal thing: living their lives, reproducing their populations, evolving to fit whatever niche they have found where they are. But the two humans dropped by themselves (well, they are surrounded by cameramen, sound technician, drivers, logistical support, and such who do not help and who stay out of the field of view) do not. Instead, the humans proceed, not too slowly, to start starving to death.
I am not being figurative or metaphorical…
[DeLong details the altogether dire deterioration and resulting ailments of two recent “contestents”…]
… Perhaps you just shrug your shoulders and say: “humans are relatively inept”… The other mammals out in the Amazon have been equipped by Darwin’s Daemon with teeth, claws, instincts, and brains that allow them to get into daily caloric balance. We don’t have much in the way of teeth and claws. We do have opposable thumbs. We do have big brains. They are supposed to compensate. But perhaps you shrug your shoulders and say: “they do not compensate very well”. For, out in the wilderness, Melissa Miller’s brain and thumbs failed at the one job for which Darwin’s Daemon gave them to us, for which other mammals’ teeth, claws, instincts, sprinting speed, dodging quickness, and much smaller and thus less energetically expensive brains largely suffice.
The rule: a smart, knowledgeable human (or two) in the wilderness naked should be afraid: they are highly likely to start starving to death.
And yet: Somehow we are here. We have not all yet been eaten. We have been evolved evolved. Our ancestors survived, and reproduced.
Our ancestors started to come down from the trees about seven million years ago. That was when we left the ancestors of our chimpanzee cousins still up in the forest canopy.
By five million years ago, the ardipitheci were walking upright when they had to, with much smaller and less sexually-dimorphic canines, but as of them with no signs of fire or stone‑tool use or indeed of semi-systematic butchery. Their brain cases were only 350cc, only 350 cubic centimeters. By 3.5 million years ago, the autralopitheci afarenses were habitually walking on two legs with their 450cc brain-cases. By 2.5 million years ago, the homines habiles with their Oldowan stone toolkit and 650cc brain-cases were around. And paleontologists judge they deserve our genus name: homo. By 1.8 million years ago, there were the homines erecti spreading out across the world, with their Acheulean handaxes, their endurance walking/running, and their 950cc brain-cases. When we look back 600,000 years ago, the world was then populated by the likes of the homines heidelbergenses: widely-controlled fire; complex hunting with tools like spears.
These people were not yet us: Their brain-cases were only 3/4 of the size of our brain-cases of 1350cc. They did not have organized big‑game hunting with spears, complex prepared‑core toolmaking techniques, long‑distance mobility, or evidence of our sustained and cumulative symbolic culture—cave art and engravings, personal ornaments, ritual burials, complex language‑supported planning, long‑distance exchange networks, composite tools made with adhesives, tailored clothing, or shelters. They did not have the final brain expansion, the globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.
And between 300,000 and 200,000 years ago there emerged people we definitely call us: homines sapientes, albeit “archaic”, with our brain-case size of 1350cc, but without the fully globular skull, the reduced brow, or the chin.
From a chimpanzee-sized brain one-quarter the size of ours five million years ago to our current state, our ancestors and then we have been evolved. And now we are here. So how can there have been so much selection pressure for larger brains when, even today, out in the wilderness they are insufficient to keep us, when naked individuals, from being hungry and afraid?
You know where I am going here. The answer of course, is simple: What is smart—what the brain is good for—is not each of our brains, but all of our brains thinking together. And the tools that we, and those who came before us, have made—tools that no one individual could make in a lifetime, and that embody all of that thinking-together one. Melissa Miller is an expert on knives, how to use them, and what to use them for. She could not make one from scratch.
From long-ago Acheulean handaxes to contemporary hunger in the Amazon, the throughline is simple: selection favored group knowledge and group production by a pecialized division of labor, not solo genius. Our edge not only was and is not claws or speed, it was and is not the ability to think up clever solutions to problems on the fly. Instead, it was pooled memory and anthology thinking-power, plus the division of labor that allows us to carve tools that contain the results of that collective thinking-power…
“Does Each of Us Have a Big Enough Brain to Compensate for Our Lack of Fangs, Claws, Sprinting Speed, & Dodging Quickness?” from @delong.social.
* “the Scarecrow” in The Wizard of Oz
###
As we band together, we might recall that it was on this date in 1926 the Winnie-the-Pooh was first published…
The origin of the name of the bear that was stuffed with fluff began years before the book Winnie-the-Pooh by A.A. Milne [here] was published on this day in 1926. During the first World War, Canadian Lieutenant Harry Colebourn caught a bear and named her “Winnie” after his adopted hometown in Winnipeg, Manitoba. She was the brought to the London Zoo where Milne’s son, Christopher Robin would visit. [See also here.]
Christopher re-named his own teddy bear, Edward Bear, to Winnie-the-Pooh. His father named the characters in his book after Christopher’s stuffed animals including Piglet, Eeyore, Kanga, Roo and Tigger. (Mr. Milne added Owl and Rabbit).
In 1961, Walt Disney Productions bought the rights to the stories to create a series of cartoon shorts beginning with Winnie the Pooh and the Honey Tree which debuted in 1966. The last full-length animated movie from Disney, simply titled Winnie the Pooh, came out in theaters in 2011; the live action movie about the inspiration of the stories, Goodbye Christopher Robin by Fox Searchlight Pictures arrived in theaters in October of 2017 and Disney followed up with a live action/CGI about an adult Christopher Robin returning to the 100 Acre Wood in 2018.
– source
“Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity”*…
… But that most valuable of gifts is being hijacked, subverted/converted into a commodity, and used to mold not just consumer behavior, but society-as-a-whole. We live in an attention economy, and its media/tech ownership landscape is becoming ever more consoldiated.
Kyla Scanlon unpacks the way in which concentrated ownership of media and tech and their automated manipulation reshape democracy…
It’s nearly impossible not to get lost in the news right now. I was at a wedding last week, and every conversation eventually drifted back to the same subject: the World We Are in and All That is Happening. The ground feels like it’s moving faster than anyone can feasibly keep up with.
Some people think the shift is progress. Others see collapse. Either way, the line between digital and physical life is increasingly blurry. What happens online is real life. What we consume is what we become.
Plenty of thinkers have circled this before – Postman, Debord, Huxley, Orwell on media; Machiavelli, Tocqueville, Thucydides, Gibbon on human corruptibility during times of uncertainty. The convergence of endless information and a ragebait economy creates the perfect environment for splintering how we understand the world and how we understand each other.
The deeper problem is this: we no longer trust institutions to provide truth, fairness, or mobility. Once, they were scaffolding that helped us climb from raw data to wisdom. And when that scaffolding gives out, people adapt: some over-perform in the status race (because you have to) and others defect from obligations altogether (why would I work for institutions if they don’t work for me).
There are a few ways to picture our distorted information ecosystem.
- The DIKW Pyramid (Data → Information → Knowledge → Wisdom): raw posts and clicks at the bottom, trending content in the middle, shared truths above that, and finally wisdom, the rare ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
- Or the Ladder of Inference: we start with data, add meaning, make assumptions – and our beliefs tend to affect what data we select. Bots and algorithms hijack that ladder, nudging us toward polarized beliefs before we realize what’s happening.
Taken together, we can combine them into what we might call a hierarchy of information:
- Raw data: the endless stream of posts, likes, bot spam
- Information: headlines, hashtags, trending things
- Knowledge: the narratives we share and fight over.
- Understanding: recognizing what might not be real (or is hyperreal)
- Wisdom: systemic analysis, the ability to see causes instead of just symptoms.
Right now, we’re stuck sloshing around in the middle layers of the hierarchy: drowning in outrage, fighting over partisan hot takes, rarely reaching understanding, almost never wisdom.
Chaos always has an architect. And if we want to make sense of American democracy today, we need to understand who those architects are, and how they profit from confusion.
This polarization rests on media concentration.The Telecommunications Act of 1996 was sold as a way to increase competition in media and telecommunications, but in reality, it did quite the opposite. Within five years, four firms controlled ~85% of US telephone infrastructure. That deregulated spine carried today’s consolidation of the entire media environment – not just telephones. Newspapers. Social media. TV stations.
We have the increasing concentration of media ownership, the financialization of attention, and the transformation of information from a public good into a private commodity to be bought, sold, and manipulated…
[Scanlon characterizes and explains the concentration, examines its impacts, and unpacks the roles of bots…]
When manufacturing consensus is both cheap to produce and valuable to those who benefit from confusion, you get industrial-scale manipulation.
Truth becomes whatever can capture the most attention in the shortest amount of time. Traditional journalism, with its slow fact-checking and institutional processes, can’t compete with bot-amplified outrage. Democratic deliberation, which requires shared facts and good faith dialogue, becomes nearly impossible when the information environment is designed to maximize conflict.
We’re living in a speculation economy where perception drives value more than fundamentals. Look at the stock market: Nvidia gained $150 billion in value based the back of a $100 billion OpenAI investment (which OpenAI will use to buy more Nvidia chips). Ten companies pass hundreds of billions back and forth, and the S&P jumps like it’s measuring something real.
It’s all memes wearing suits. Meme stocks and Dogecoin at least looked like jokes; now the same speculative energy runs through the corporate core. Attention, perception, and narrative drive valuation more than production or profit.
We’ve built a world where the hierarchy of information has flipped upside down.
At the bottom, bots flood us with raw noise. In the middle, outrage and team narratives harden into “knowledge.” At the top, the ladders to wisdom like journalism, schools, civic discourse, shared institutions are weakened. The scaffolding that once helped us climb no longer holds.
The traditional solutions – fact-checking, media literacy, content moderation – assume we’re dealing with a content problem when we’re actually facing an infrastructure problem. You can’t fact-check your way out of a system designed to reward misinformation. You can’t educate your way around algorithms optimized for polarization. You can’t moderate your way past economic incentives that make confusion profitable.
Recognizing this as a market structure problem rather than an information problem changes everything. Instead of focusing on individual bad actors or specific false claims, you start thinking about the underlying systems that make manipulation both profitable and scalable.
The information wars are economic policy, determining how we allocate attention, structure incentives, and organize the flow of information that shapes every other market and political decision we make. I don’t think it’s useful to get on a Substack soapbox about this – but we need to take (1) the power of media seriously and (2) those trying to influence it extremely seriously. There is a way to get to the top of the information hierarchy! We don’t have to be stuck in these middle layers…
Follow the money: “Who’s Getting Rich Off Your Attention?” from @kyla.bsky.social
For more on how the Telecommunications Act of 1996 helped set all of this in motion, see: “On Jimmy Kimmel: It’s Time to Destroy the Censorship Machine and Repeal the Telecommunications Act of 1996” from @matthewstoller.bsky.social.
For more on thoughts on why companies are behaving in the ways they are: “Why Corporate America Is Caving to Trump” and “Media consolidation is shaping who folds under political pressure — and who could be next.”
And lest we think that this came out of nowhere: “David Foster Wallace Tried to Warn Us About these Eight Things.”
[Image above: source]
###
As we reclaim recognition, we might recall that on this date in 1452 an earlier information revolution began: Johannes Gutenberg started work on his Bible (which was completed and published in 1455). An inventor and craftsman, Gutenberg created the movable-type printing press, enabling a much faster (and cheaper) printing process. (Movable type was already in use in East Asia, but was slower and used for smaller jobs.) His Bible was his first major work, and his most impactful.
The printing press later spread across the world, leading to an information revolution– the unprecedented mass-spread of literature throughout Europe. It had a profound impact on the development of the Renaissance, Reformation, and Humanist movements.
“I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything.”*…
“Obsolete (adj.): no longer in use or no longer useful”… Stefan Fatsis on the challenges faced by the purveyors of today’s dictionaries…
In 2015, I settled in at the Springfield, Massachusetts, headquarters of Merriam-Webster, America’s most storied dictionary company. My project was to document the ambitious reinvention of a classic, and I hoped to get some definitions of my own into the lexicon along the way. (A favorite early drafting effort, which I couldn’t believe wasn’t already included, was dogpile : “a celebration in which participants dive on top of each other immediately after a victory.”) Merriam-Webster’s overhaul of its signature work, Webster’s Third New International Dictionary, Unabridged—a 465,000-word, 2,700-page, 13.5-pound doorstop published in 1961 and never before updated—was already in full swing. The revision, which would be not a hardback book but an online-only edition, requiring a subscription, was expected to take decades.
Not long after my arrival, though, everything changed. Pageviews were declining for Merriam-Webster.com, the company’s free, ad-driven revenue engine: Tweaks to Google’s algorithms had punished Merriam’s search results. The company had always been lean and profitable, but the financial hit was real. Merriam’s parent, Encyclopedia Britannica, was facing challenges of its own—who needed an encyclopedia in a Wikipedia world?—and ordered cuts. Merriam laid off more than a dozen staffers. Its longtime publisher, John Morse, was forced into early retirement. The revision of Merriam’s unabridged masterpiece was abandoned.
Call it the paradox of the modern dictionary. We’re in a golden age for the study and appreciation of words—a time of “meta awareness” of language, as one lexicographer put it to me. Dictionaries are more accessible than ever, available on your laptop or phone. More people use them than ever, and dictionary publishers now possess the digital wherewithal to closely track that use. Podcasts, newsletters, and Words of the Year have popularized neologisms, etymologies, and usage trends. Meanwhile, analytical software has revolutionized linguistic inquiry, enabling greater understanding of the ways language works—when, how, and why words break out; the specific contexts for expressions and idioms. And all of that was true long before the rise of AI.
But these advances are also strangling the business of the dictionary. Definitions, professional and amateur, are a click away, and most people don’t care or can’t tell whether what pops up in a search is expert research, crowdsourced jottings, scraped data, or zombie websites. Before he left Merriam, Morse told me that legacy dictionaries face the same growing popular distrust of traditional authorities that media and government have encountered…
[Fatsis recounts the recent troubled commercial history of lexicography: Merriam, Dictionary.com, et al…]
It’s hard to know what future business model might save the industry. Getting swallowed by a tech giant expecting hockey-stick growth has proved untenable. A billionaire willing to let the dictionary just be the dictionary—a self-sustaining company with a modest staff performing an outsize cultural job that might not always be profitable—looks less likely after Dan Gilbert’s foray. A grand national dictionary project—some collaboration among government, private, nonprofit, and academic institutions—feels like the Platonic ideal. But with universities and intellectual inquiry under assault in 2025, I’m not holding my breath.
At Merriam-Webster, the standard capitalist model is working, at least for now, as is its hybrid print-digital approach. The publisher has rebounded from its mid-2010s struggles. It was a social-media darling during the first Trump administration, racking up likes and retweets for its smart-alecky and politically subversive social-media persona. (When Donald Trump tweeted “unpresidented” instead of “unprecedented,” the Merriam account responded: “Good morning! The #WordOfTheDay is … not ‘unpresidented’. We don’t enter that word. That’s a new one.”) Britannica invested in software, hardware, and humans to enable Merriam to better navigate Google’s algorithms. Merriam added a phalanx of games, including Wordle knockoffs and a dictionary-based crossword, to attract and retain visitors.
Merriam has outlasted a long line of American dictionaries. But plenty of household media names have been humbled by the shifting habits of digital consumers. Even before Google’s AI Overview began taking clicks from definitions written by flesh-and-bone lexicographers, the trajectory of the industry was clear.
After Merriam shut down its online unabridged revision, I stuck around the company’s 85-year-old brick headquarters, reporting and defining. I eventually drafted about 90 definitions. Most of them didn’t make the cut. But a handful are enshrined online, including politically charged terms such as microaggression and alt-right, and whimsicalones such as sheeple and, yes, dogpile.
While I’m proud of these small contributions to lexicography, my wanderings through dictionary culture convinced me of something far more important: the urgent need to save this slowly fading business. Twenty years ago, an estimated 200 full-time commercial lexicographers were working in the United States; today the number is probably less than a quarter of that. At a time when contentious words dominate our conversations—think insurrection and fascism and fake news and woke—the need for dictionaries to chronicle and explain language, and serve as its watchdog, has never been greater…
Adapted from Fatsis” new book, Unabridged- The Thrill of and Threat to the Modern Dictionary: “Is This the End of the Dictionary?” @stefanfatsis.bsky.social in @theatlantic.com.
* Steven Wright
###
As we look it up, we might we might send carefully-chosen words of birthday greeting to William Cuthbert Faulkner; he was born on this date in 1897. A writer of novels, short stories, poetry, essays, screenplays, and one play, Faulkner is best remembered for his novels (e.g., The Sound and the Fury, As I Lay Dying, and Light in August) and stories set in “Yoknapatawpha County,” a setting largely based on Lafayette County, Mississippi, where Faulkner spent most of his life. They earned him the 1949 Nobel Prize for Literature.
Faulkner inadvertently expressed (what would pass in the context on the piece above for) confidence in the longevity of Ernest Hemingway’s work: in 1951 he observed that “he has never been known to use a word that might send a reader to the dictionary.”
On the other hand…
The past is never dead. It’s not even past.
From Requiem for a Nun, Act I, Scene III, by William Faulkner
“When you come out of the storm, you won’t be the same person who walked in. That’s what this storm’s all about.”*…
Jack Goldstone and Peter Turchin have a theory, one that led them some years ago to predict political upheaval in America in the 2020s. Here, their explanation of why it’s here and what we can do to temper it…
Almost three decades ago, one of us, Jack Goldstone, published a simple model to determine a country’s vulnerability to political crisis. The model was based on how population changes shifted state, elite and popular behavior. Goldstone argued that, according to this Demographic-Structural Theory, in the 21st century, America was likely to get a populist, America-first leader who would sow a whirlwind of conflict.
Then ten years ago, the other of us, Peter Turchin, applied Goldstone’s model to U.S. history, using current data. What emerged was alarming: The U.S. was heading toward the highest level of vulnerability to political crisis seen in this country in over a hundred years. Even before Trump was elected, Turchin published his prediction that the U.S. was headed for the “Turbulent Twenties,” forecasting a period of growing instability in the United States and western Europe.
Given the Black Lives Matter protests and cascading clashes between competing armed factions in cities across the United States, from Portland, Oregon to Kenosha, Wisconsin, we are already well on our way there. But worse likely lies ahead.
Our model is based on the fact that across history, what creates the risk of political instability is the behavior of elites, who all too often react to long-term increases in population by committing three cardinal sins. First, faced with a surge of labor that dampens growth in wages and productivity, elitesseek to take a larger portion of economic gains for themselves, driving up inequality. Second, facing greater competition for elite wealth and status, they tighten up the path to mobility to favor themselves and their progeny. For example, in an increasingly meritocratic society, elites could keep places at top universities limited and raise the entry requirements and costs in ways that favor the children of those who had already succeeded.
Third, anxious to hold on to their rising fortunes, they do all they can to resist taxation of their wealth and profits, even if that means starving the government of needed revenues, leading to decaying infrastructure, declining public services and fast-rising government debts.
Such selfish elites lead the way to revolutions. They create simmering conditions of greater inequality and declining effectiveness of, and respect for, government. But their actions alone are not sufficient. Urbanization and greater education are needed to create concentrations of aware and organized groups in the populace who can mobilize and act for change.
Top leadership matters. Leaders who aim to be inclusive and solve national problems can manage conflicts and defer a crisis. However, leaders who seek to benefit from and fan political divisions bring the final crisis closer. Typically, tensions build between elites who back a leader seeking to preserve their privileges and reforming elites who seek to rally popular support for major changes to bring a more open and inclusive social order. Each side works to paint the other as a fatal threat to society, creating such deep polarization that little of value can be accomplished, and problems grow worse until a crisis comes along that explodes the fragile social order.
These were the conditions that prevailed in the lead-up to the great upheavals in political history, from the French Revolution in the eighteenth century, to the revolutions of 1848 and the U.S. Civil War in the nineteenth century, the Russian and Chinese revolutions of the twentieth century and the many “color revolutions” that opened the twenty-first century. So, it is eye-opening that the data show very similar conditions now building up in the United States…
They unpack their diagnosis, examine historical examples of successful– peaceful– resolution, and outline steps they recommend for a recovery from the hole we’ve dug for ourselves: “Welcome To The ‘Turbulent Twenties’,” from @noemamag.com.
For another “big cycle” take: “It All Has Happened Before for the Same Reasons” from Ray Dalio (@raydalioofficial.bsky.social).
On on the subject of what happens if efforts to stem a turn to autocracy that would (Goldstone and Turchin argue) lead ultimately to revolution and systemic failure, an optimistic (?) view from Luke Kemp, author of Goliath’s Curse: The History and Future of Societal Collapse argues that “Collapse has historically benefited the 99%.”
And for a suggestion that history does indeed rhyme, a headline from 1939: “Goebbels Ends Careers of Five ‘Aryan’ Actors Who Made Witticisms About the Nazi Regime” (gift article from The New York Times).
* Haruki Murakami, Kafka on the Shore
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As we batten down, we might recall that it was on this date in 1977, in the 5th season premiere of the series Happy Days, that a water-skiing “Fonzie” (Henry Winkler) jumped the shark— which has become a descriptive phrase for a creative work– or entity– that has evolved past its prime, that has reached a stage in which it has exhausted its core intent and is introducing new ideas that are discordant with or an extreme exaggeration (a caricature) of its original theme or purpose.
An example relevent to the piece linked above (in this case, of new, discordant ideas masquerading as “old” and authentic): “How Originalism Killed the Constitution,” from Jill Lepore.
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