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After the 1970s, meritocracy began to look more and more like Michael Young’s dark satire. A system intended to give each new generation an equal chan

Inequality destroys the sense of shared citizenship, and with it self-government.

“For only through the union can the wage-earner participate in the control of industry,” Lippmann wrote, “and only through the union can he obtain the

Equality means the right to a life without poverty and its many ills, without discrimination—the opportunity for all people “to realize their full pot

“Follow the science” doesn’t tell a society where to go, because it leaves out politics. Experts know things that the rest of us have to hear, but the

Equal and independent people will satisfy their own desires with no obligation to others outside their narrow circle. The chance to be anything or any

“For only through the union can the wage-earner participate in the control of industry,” Lippmann wrote, “and only through the union can he obtain the

antagonistic groups begin to lose their mutual hostility and acquire trust when they have to work together, as long as they’re engaged in a specific p

Finally, Real America has a strong nationalist character. Its attitude toward the rest of the world is isolationist, hostile to humanitarianism and in

The triumph of popular democracy brought an anti-intellectual bias to American politics that never entirely disappeared. Self-government didn’t requir

Trump’s voters were not the wretched of the earth. They were generally ill-educated, living far from prosperous cities in nearly all-white communities

I’m here to tell you: under-education + lack of faith in the political and economic system that has failed them + Christianity + 40 years of conservat

This might explain why the conspiratorial claims in the Mirror World so often seem to contradict one another. For this new political configuration, co

Both top down and bottom up narrative creation happens across media and social media today, and the influencer sits in the middle of the action. Invis

The temptation of the age of data, again, is to believe that any coherent narrative path that can be charted through the data has a claim to truth.

We don’t use AI algorithms to foster human creativity or nuance, but to autotune producers, and consumers alike. Nuance is noise. Everything is quanti

Imas says the dimensionality of a job really matters, the number of distinct tasks it involves.

AI agents are bad at dealing with unforeseen obstacles. Waymos and Roombas still get stuck. Your job is to be more resilient and adaptive than they ar

There’s no reason, really, for anyone to care about the inner turmoil of the famous. But I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psycholog

Understanding the centrality of the desire for recognition is quite helpful in understanding the power and ubiquity of social media. We have developed

The more we accept the premise that we must be online for everything—liking, loathing, sharing—and the more we accept the tacit contract of trading pr

Actual humans, meanwhile, are treated more and more like infrastructure: not as citizens, but data-producing substrates, behavioral scaffolds for algo

Humans are a cultural species. Our brains and psychology are specialized for acquiring, storing, and organizing information gleaned from the minds and

Individuals and communities preferentially attend to and learn from more successful or prestigious groups. This causes social norms and beliefs to dif

“It is a highly valued function of society to prevent changes in the rules of the many games it embraces... Deviancy, however, is the very essence of

Henrich argues that humans have evolved “brains to allow us to most effectively learn the ideas, beliefs, values, motivations, and practices we’ll nee

I find it helpful to think about my choices with regards to technology as falling into three general possibilities: embrace, negotiation, refusal. Mor

The problem is that “saving” time and labor have become default settings and social imperatives. Rather than wisely judging what labor or time can and

the proliferation of media artifacts and the growing colonization of our experience by varieties of digital mediation have generated an imperative to

As artificial intelligence reconfigures every dimension of our societies—from labor markets to classrooms to newsrooms—we should remember the Luddites

Meaningmaking includes all judgment calls, aesthetic preferences, and moral decisions that require determining what’s worth pursuing or believing. Her

the AI expertise conundrum

The trick is recognizing when you're smoothing away confusion versus character.When it’s producing text, AI pulls everything toward the statistical ce

Musk has said repeatedly that the only laws he believes in are the laws of physics. But even this is selective. His and Peter Thiel’s shared philosoph

So centralis communication to the process of control that the two have becomethe joint subject of the modern science of cybernetics, defined by oneof

Instrumental reason has also grown along with a disengaged model of the human subject, which has a great hold on our imagination. It offers an ideal p

By “instrumental reason” I mean the kind of rationality we draw on when we calculate the most economical application of means to a given end. Maximum

Information literacy (real information literacy, not the watered-down version you might have gotten in a one-hour high school library orientation) is

The discipline of information literacy has always pushed back against this. Its foundational premise is that access to information should serve the pe

Passive reception, letting a feed decide what we see next and for how long, is a fundamentally different cognitive experience than active retrieval, g

This isto say that political actors routinely fail to understand themselves andtheir political opponents as making fallible knowledge-claims—falliblek

Ross and Ward defined naïve realism as the assumptionthat one’s opinions are direct reflections of reality. The chief tenet ofnaïve realism is “that I

For the most part, whether we believe something depends on whether and how we trust the source. Whether and how we trust the source often has more to

The temptation of the age of data, again, is to believe that any coherent narrative path that can be charted through the data has a claim to truth.

Trust, in other words, is transferable through parasocial relationships—regardless of whether the institution has done anything to earn it.

Particularly for their young core audiences, creators are the emotional centers of the new information ecosystem. What they have in common is a strong

I see opportunities in curating the best of our conversation and creativity, establishing authority and credibility from expert sources, convening com

he had created the conditions within which a network of conversations could move fluidly across the boundary between the online and off-line worlds. B

The digital network is an environment, we're incorporated into as components: nodes, continuously receiving and transmitting signals. Our actions are

Culture is shaped by the technology we are surrounded by, and the marketplace of ideas depends on the structure of the communications and culture indu

Our digital economy has levied a gigantic cognitive tax on news consumers trying to find accurate information. The cost is just too much to bear.

In medieval communities… Fama was the mark of authority and reliability that attaches to a piece of information, new, gossip, and to the teller, to

People still select and deliver important content to one another, but content no longer takes the form of logical statements with truth-values that ca

There’s no reason, really, for anyone to care about the inner turmoil of the famous. But I’ve come to believe that, in the Internet age, the psycholog

Forgetting is a feature, not a bug. It makes us feel like we’re moving forward through time, rather than standing still or running in circles. My gran

For Freire, education is fundamentally about freedom, which is “not an ideal located outside of man; nor is it an idea which becomes myth. It is rathe

Yet in truly effective thinking the prime necessity is to liquidate judgments, regain an innocent eye, disentangle feelings, be curious and open-heart

Criticism is not some inscrutable, mysterious process. It’s just a matter of: (1) noticing ourselves responding to a work of art, moment by moment, an

But to love is to be drawn out of our self-centered patterns toward some positive object that is other than oneself. Love thus has the same outward-pu

What strikes me most is the difference between people who’ve learned to construct what I call ‘containers for attention’ – bounded spaces and practice

What’s more, the capacity to pay attention is the result of several processes in the brain. These include sustained attention, the ability to stay eng

When digital media reversed cognitive detachment into situational immersion, it set off other reversals. The structured, fixed world built by literacy

The Internet provided an opportunity not only for imaginative play but for personal transformation, a liminal space between fantasy and reality, somet

This instability extends to identity itself. Where offline identity is grounded in lived experience, online identity forms through affinity and alignm

The internet's infinite private worlds at times feel more like the clan-based societies that predated individualism. But where past worlds were bound

A value prop is a utility poem. It’s the most concise way to explain what you do, and who you do it for, and why that’s important.Accordingly, a lot o

You have to tell your story to yourself before you can tell it to your customers. That is, you have to do the messy, therapeutic work of deciding who

These artists are performing a kind of service for brands, lending their credibility and enabling the brands to “insert themselves into an existing cu

In the SVC narrative, the state cannot deliver social progress and prosperity at the pace and scale attributed to private actors – and if it attempts

In this playbook, the goal is straightforward: hypergrowth-fueled VC-backed disrupters act in the zone of exception, transgressing the law if necessar

Like the enclosures movement that inaugurated modern capitalism, disruptive innovators seek to convert public goods and common wealth into private goo

The SVC is "an ideological and institutional formation through which repeated exceptions are rendered intelligible and stabilizable, and an unspoken p