From Zeynep Tufecki’s “Why Protests Work“:
“The Soviet Union did not fall because it ran out of tanks to send to Eastern Europe when the people there rebelled in the late 1980s. It fell, in large part, because it ran out of legitimacy, and because Soviet rulers lost the will and the desire to live in their own system.”
Spongebob Squarepants on imperfection:
All those wrong notes you played made it sound more original!
Cory Doctorow on “enshittification“:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
I hate to break it to you all. I really do. But Goldfinger’s skate punk 99 Red Balloons cover blows the doors off for no reason at all. In fact it defies reason.
Economist Ha-Joon Chang said some really fascinating stuff about the language of economics.
In the last few decades of neoliberalism we have been encouraged — and sometimes even forced — to think everything in economic terms. So when you’re trying to protect a library or a museum, you have to make this economic argument.
Economist Ha-Joon Chang: “[Mainstream] economics has become like Catholic theology in medieval Europe. It has become the language of the rulers”
“They are not going to let you ‘speak’ it… unless you belong to the priesthood… or are from an extremely privileged background” pic.twitter.com/l3ft45B1Yw
— Ben Norton (@BenjaminNorton) January 4, 2023
From linguist John E. Joseph:
“Without language, there are no beliefs, ideology, or religion. These concepts require a language as a condition of their existence.”
Short post today, partly because I need to make a shorter post today and partly because I need to enforce shorter posts for myself in general, some days. Thought I’d reach into my collection, see if there’s anything interesting.
An excellent Great War-era quote from the British Journal of Opthamology:
“Some military authorities hold that a man, unless he is a sniper, need not see what he shoots at as long as sufficient visual acuity enables him to fire in the right direction.”
Architect Cliff Tan on resolutions:
These tasks are so unnatural to you, they are extra difficult to do and you’ll probably give up […] So, the trick is to understand your own tendencies and, instead of changing yourself, you change the systems around you.
My secret sentence for 2023 is: “Your life would not be better if you were different.” I’m wary of how self-improvement gets fetishized, especially at this time of year. (Not that I’m anti-resolution — you’re reading mine right now.) You can do whatever you want, but I think watching other people’s lives swamps us in habits we wish were ours. Even if those habits are totally counter to the natural grain of your life. Maybe you’re not going to the gym, in other words, because you don’t like the gym.
The second part of Tan’s message reflects another deeper fact about our habits. For instance, I bought my Traveler’s Notebook because I thought it would actualize me as a writer if I always had paper and a pen with me. I just never brought it with me, so I got a little sleeve and started using it to store my debit card and ID. Now I take it everywhere. Having a lifelong ambition for writing did nothing to motivate me, but changing my wallet out for a notebook did. It’s without question my favorite thing I own. Habits shape to our environment as much our ego. Probably more.
I’ll return to Mr. Tan if I ever get around to talking about feng shui. It’s one of my favorite examples of the explanative power of pseudoscience.
