culture

The meaning of OXI we should fight for is the belief in politics itself. OXI is the belief that we can throw off the demands of a supposedly ‘impartial’ economy that serves only the few, that we can reject the fallacy that ‘economic necessity’ demands something we consider socially unacceptable, and instead begin to make decisions about our own col... See more

I ultimately think that the people who are histrionic about safety in San Francisco—they just hate cities! They hate the fact that they have to interact with other people, people who are visibly poorer than them and different from them, when they go out into the world. They hate the fact that homeless people exist and that they have to see them, in... See more

The San Francisco Bay Area has a long history as the playground of consciousness. For decades, many of its resident technologists have been both habitually curious about — and determined to master — the inside of their brains. This sort of cerebral hedonism is hardly visible to outsiders, in the way that visitors to Miami might be dazzled by the sp... See more

Money and health are nothing more than the means by which we build a meaningful existence. Yet, in the grip of a neoliberal culture, these means have become ends. Money and health, instead of supporting a life of purpose, have become the ultimate purposes of life.

Tpot — sometimes used interchangeably with “postrationalism” — is a loose subculture, notorious for its love of introspection, that grew out of the tech-adjacent rationalist movement. Where rationalists emphasize the use of logic to govern their decision-making, tpot believes that “vibes” and feelings are unaccounted for by pure logic and advocate ... See more

What gives multinational corporations the right to pollute the air we breathe, drain our groundwater and exhaust our planet’s dwindling resources – and deprives us of the right to stop them? One powerful idea: private property. Because the rich own things, and the poor do not, it is legal for the rich to destroy Earth and illegal for the poor to st... See more

The internet-ification of our lives is not a response to the hostility of the built environment to communal life but a continuation and intensification of that hostility.

Literature allows us to name the world by giving us new phrases, new characters, new words. Poets like Chaucer and Shakespeare coined hundreds of new words. So many of their phrases are still used in common speech. They named all sorts of things for us. And by using those names, we expand what we can understand about the world.

A lot has been written about how the internet radicalizes people. But the same dynamics that turn a slightly lonely young man into a seething misogynist—recommendation algorithms; social contexts that concentrate and intensify discourse—are also the dynamics that turn a young person who “likes reading” into someone who spends a year reading Proust,... See more