The Pros and Cons of America’s (Extreme) Individualism - Freakonomics
Individualism | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Individualism Reconsidered
Joe Peacott Individualism Reconsidered with a bibliography by Jerry Kaplan 1991
The Inner Life of Liberalism - Aaron Ross Powell’s Blog
The practices that make your life better are the same ones that sustain a free society. It's time liberalism took that seriously.
Opinion | The Tyranny of Convenience (Published 2018)
All the personal tasks in our lives are being made easier. But at what cost?
Pluralistic: Austerity creates fascism (13 Apr 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
I'm worried about AI psychosis. Specifically, I'm worried about the psychosis that makes our "capital allocators" spend $1.4T on the money-losingest technology in the history of the human race, in pursuit of a bizarre fantasy that if we teach the word-guessing program enough words, it will take all the jobs. That's some next-level underpants-gnomery:
An American Tragedy
The electorate has, in its plurality, decided to live in Trump’s world of vanity, hate, arrogance, untruth, and recklessness.
Pluralistic: America is a scam (28 May 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Donald Trump is many things: a racist, an authoritarian, a rapist… but what he is, and has always been, above all and from the very start, is a scammer:
Pluralistic: The far right grows through “disaster fantasies” (25 Nov 2024) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
The core of the prepper fantasy: "What if the world ended in the precise way that made me the most important person?" The ultra-rich fantasize about emerging from luxury bunkers with an army of mercs and thumbdrives full of bitcoin to a world in ruins that they restructure using their "leadership skills."
Radical Liberalism, Pragmatism, and Me - Aricie's thoughts
Gamified Capitalism and 21st Century Fascism w/ Max Haiven
Hyperpolitics? Yes, Please • Protean Magazine
Alex Colston reviews Anton Jäger's "Hyperpolitics," filling in gaps in the book's short argument and arguing for the importance of political formations and activities independent of official political society.
Capitalist Class Cleavages | Alex Browne
The irrationality of American business partisanship is a symptom of its own success
Pluralistic: America and “national capitalism” (18 Feb 2025) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
Thomas Piketty's 2013 unexpected bestseller (a 750 page economics book translated from French!) Capital in the 21st Century, offers a very convincing explanation of our political decay, and it continues to serve this purpose as the decay undergoes alarming acceleration:
Liberal Universalism | The Paper Pilot
The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology
Pluralistic: A world without people (05 Jan 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
To be a billionaire is to be a solipsist – to secretly believe that (most) other people don't really exist – otherwise, how could you live with the knowledge that your farcical wealth and power springs from the agony you have inflicted on whole populations?
NYC in 1880 (!) '[Martí] recoiled at the mix of commercial materialism and libertarian individualism that he thought was driving the United States toward madness. A nation is not a “wild horse race”; people must be “harnessed together” by something other than self-interest' (from America, América)
