Talking about a ‘schism’ is ahistorical

Enshittification | The Paper Pilot

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Amplification | The Paper Pilot

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology

Ezra Klein’s “Why We’re Polarized” and the Drawbacks of Explainer Journalism

A Darwinian reading of American politics leaves little room for the motivations of conscious, rational agents.

Re: The Noisy Room | The Paper Pilot

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Alasdair MacIntyre’s Philosophy in Practice

It is a curious thing when an artist, thinker, or writer gains influence outside the audience he intends or is comfortable with. When a thinker associated with the right becomes popular on the left, or a novelist associated with the progressive left becomes popular among conservative readers, there can be a sort of strain felt between the audience in fact and the “true” audience, or between those who feel themselves to be the authentic recipients of a work’s message and meaning and those who, to the true believers, come across as opportunistic in their enjoyment of works in tension with their own views. The same is true when a writer working within an academic discipline gets picked up by those outside it: Those working within that discipline may find the co-opting of these thinkers misplaced at best or malicious at worst.

interfluidity » Consensus not censorship

We’ve become obsessed over the past few years with the problem of misinformation. And for good reason. “Flood the zone with shit” is now standard operating procedure for a variety of interests and factions. Groups who pretend to be above that kind of thing let confirmation bias do the same work, elevating conjectures they find convenient to believe far beyond the evidentiary basis for believing them, and transmuting concurrence among prestigious groups whose biases are aligned into “authority” to which they demand deferrence. Casual information consumers become divided into two camps, the “do your own research” types who imagine, mistakenly, that they are capable of seeing through all this (and so succumb to their own confirmation bias), and those who more accurately understand that they cannot reliably distinguish truth from bullshit (and so opt out of democratic deliberation with a shrug, other than perhaps to vote for the candidates whose political party they distrust less).

Journalists still wrongly think the U.S. is different

"Political journalism needs to wean itself from right-wing agitators and call this period what it is: an erosion of democracy and attempts to radicalize large chunks of the electorate."

Concentric Groups, Knowledge Bridges and Epistemic Communities

vs Elitism, Celebrity and Oligarchy This article is part of a series: ‘Stigmergy: Systems of Mass Collaboration’. Note: Concentric circles relate to sound amplification – the voic…

Redeemed Zoomer on Twitter / X

From a Presbyterian perspective, like I have explained, restrictions on the ministry don't just schism as long as the laity may hold to pure doctrine. This is because many of our forefathers like Rutherford were defrocked for not holding to what they considered grave errors but…— Redeemed Zoomer (@redeemed_zoomer) July 21, 2026

Insults | The Paper Pilot

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Data Feminism for AI

Attacks on women and trans people are not happening in a vacuum. Communications scholars W. Lance Bennett and Marianne Kneuer recently argued that we are witnessing the intensification of "illiberal public spheres" around the world (Bennett and Kneuer, 2023). These are characterized by a set of anti-democratic communications tactics that include the denigration and exclusion of minoritized people, targeted attacks on the press and political institutions, and transgression of norms of civil discourse. Such tactics are enabled and amplified by the social media platforms owned by Big Tech, whose business model elevates attention above all other metrics, such that they profit richly off extremism, threats, spectacle, and lies. The success of this corporate partnership with right-wing extremism is evident in the proliferation of book bans (Magnusson, 2024), the demonization of DEI and critical race theory (Crenshaw, 2022), and mob tactics to doxx, intimidate, misrepresent, and otherwise silence people that study misinformation, speak out against racial and gender violence, or rule against insurrectionists (Edmonds, 2024). At the same time, we have seen the continued work of feminists, including Latin American, Indigenous, and abolitionist feminists in the US and globally, doing the work of imagining alternate worlds (Cullors, 2021; Davis, 2022; Ricaurte, 2019; Simpson, 2017). This paper represents our own first attempt to imagine a more equitable, sustainable, feminist world for AI research.

Q&A: Robin Berjon on freeing journalists' feeds.

The AT protocol and “long-term, lifelong, sustainable protection against enshittification.”

There is no fresh air: A problem with the concept of echo chambers

Standardly, echo chambers are thought to be structures that we should avoid. Agents should keep away from them, to be able to assess a fuller range of evidence and avoid having their confidence in that information manipulated. This paper argues against that standard view. Not only can echo chambers be neutral or good for us, but the existing definitions apply so widely that such chambers are unavoidable. We are all in large numbers of echo chambers at any time – they can be found not just on social media or in political groups, but in almost every social or epistemic group we could categorise ourselves into. Because we are finite and fallible, we cannot escape them and need to exist in them just to get by. The concept, then, does not actually capture something as structurally problematic as the paradigmatic cases would suggest. Our way of using the term in social epistemology needs to change.

Ephemeral Identities

The Paper Pilot's digital garden of thoughts on philosophy, politics, and sociology. Reading time: ~6 minute read | Published: Sep 16, 2026 | Updated: Oct 7, 2026

Art or tool?

The Internet spaces I tend to inhabit have more polarisation than at many other recent times, and little explication of the worldviews that lead to different premises for discussion, that in turn...