“The crisis consists precisely in the fact that the old is dying and the new cannot be born; in this interregnum a great variety of morbid symptoms appear.” -Gramsci 1 Everyone quotes Gramsci now. …
Calamity Theory
What are the implications of how we talk about apocalypse? A new philosophical field has emerged. “Existential risk” studies any real or hypothetical hum...
The Flat Curve Society
Hi-ho, we’ve reached the moment, in this movie we’re all watching together on X, where model intelligence has become dangerous. Dario…
Cory Doctorow: Stories Are a Fuggly Hack - Locus
I've mentioned before, stories are weird. I mean, really, really weird. Nothing that happens in a piece of fiction has any consequence in the real world. Romeo and Juliet did not live, did not die, and the ''tragedy'' they represent is objectively less important than the tragedy of the live yogurt culture I digested at the breakfast table this morning. My theory is that the parts of our brains that …Read More
Doomscrolling
Doomscrolling is the act of spending an excessive amount of time on digital content that elicit negative emotions. The concept was coined around 2018, and became more widespread in the context of the COVID-19 pandemic. The World Health Organization (WHO) observed that the pandemic was accompanied by widespread misleading information, conspiracy theories, and false reports, which it referred to as an "infodemic".
Late Diagnosis, Demographic Shifts, and Narrative Resistance:
A Critical Analysis
Pluralistic: Model collapse (12 Aug 2026) – Pluralistic: Daily links from Cory Doctorow
One of my favorite rhetorical and analytical moves is joining things together (showing that two different, seemingly unrelated ideas are aspects of the same phenomenon) and taking them apart (resolving a paradox by demonstrating that what appears to be one, contradictory thing is actually two different things that have been lumped together).
The End of Children
Birth rates are crashing around the world. Should we be worried?
Bad shape
The idea I keep coming back to is that the big platforms, like Dickens' Marley, were dead to begin with, and are now something particularly bad, which is dead on their feet.
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism: A Cross-City Quantitative and Historical Text Qualitative Analysis
Evidence linking past experiences of worsening health with support for radical political views has generated concerns about the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 had a devastating health impact: 4.1 million Italians contracted influenza and about 500 000 died. We tested the hypothesis that deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic contributed to the rise of Fascism in Italy. To provide a “thicker” interpretation of these patterns, we applied historical text mining to the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini’s newspaper). Our observations were consistent with evidence from other contexts that worsening mortality rates can fuel radical politics. Unequal impacts of pandemics may contribute to political polarization. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(2):242–247. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306574)
The 1918 Influenza Pandemic and the Rise of Italian Fascism: A Cross-City Quantitative and Historical Text Qualitative Analysis
Evidence linking past experiences of worsening health with support for radical political views has generated concerns about the consequences of the COVID-19 pandemic. The influenza pandemic that began in 1918 had a devastating health impact: 4.1 million Italians contracted influenza and about 500 000 died. We tested the hypothesis that deaths from the 1918 influenza pandemic contributed to the rise of Fascism in Italy. To provide a “thicker” interpretation of these patterns, we applied historical text mining to the newspaper Il Popolo d’Italia (Mussolini’s newspaper). Our observations were consistent with evidence from other contexts that worsening mortality rates can fuel radical politics. Unequal impacts of pandemics may contribute to political polarization. (Am J Public Health. 2022;112(2):242–247. https://doi.org/10.2105/AJPH.2021.306574 )
An Explanation (Which I Would Be Very Grateful If You Took The Time To Read)
What follows is a minor modern horror story.
Little Boy: The Arts of Japan’s Exploding Subculture
Society cannot recover from such an epic scale of devastation - the atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and three days later on Nagasaki on August 9, 1945 - but may, instead, manifest trauma as a perpetual genetic scar—ontological chasm which moves as a consumptive demon ripping up through the generations as a peripatetic wound, egregious disfigurement banished from conscious thought, inflating to cartoon benignity in a pantomime of humanity, sutured gash badly sewn and always reopening, futile replacement of scarred mortality for the immaculate technology of machines, and finally as the wholesale abandonment of frail humanity for alternative existential states.
