Trends and Human Social Analysis

The post-9/11 era came to a close on May 1, 2011 when President Obama announced the death of Osama bin Laden. There was celebration in New York. People ran through the streets with flags cheering, whooping with glee. Thousands gathered at Ground Zero. For the first time in a long time, to celebrate—drunk with righteousness and champagne.

Less than ... See more

there was an upside to mass unemployment—though we didn’t see it at the time: people did far more interesting things than simply get jobs. You can’t be lured away from your creative aspirations by gainful employment if there’s no gainful employment to be had.

Last decade, we got used to identifying influencers, content creators, internet personalities—pick your semantic poison—by their platform of choice: the TikTokker, the YouTuber, the Twitch streamer, and yes, the Substacker. The TikTok ban proves the inherent risks of this strategy. Audiences aren’t fungible. Perhaps this explains the persistent val... See more

This Tim Urbanism-Andrew Hubermanism is not the only nonpolitical ideology circulating. There’s a closely related variant that encourages you to get into massive debt buying crypto and bad art. There was one that prescribed moral self-improvement via polyamory, weight gain, and pop music; somehow, this managed to pass itself off as ‘leftism’ for th... See more

What Mangione ultimately believed in was an ideology of personal optimisation. This is what’s left after all politics have been exhausted, the 2010s left and the 2020s right. There’s still the relentless need to improve something, but it’s no longer directed outwards. As we’ve discovered, another world is not actually possible, but there are ways t... See more

This isn’t correct.

In its glory days, NASA was all jocks.

Former (and active duty) fighter pilots, submariners, heavy drinkers, smokers, etc.

The American space program was so defined by jocks its *nerds* were jocks, too.

“A culture that celebrates the prom queen over the math olympiad champ, or the jock over the valedictorian, will not produce the be... See more

For Zoomers, money represents agency. Unlike Millennials, who graduated into the Great Recession and were influenced by their parents’ progressive sentimentalism, Gen Z was not raised by Boomers still misty about the social revolutions of the sixties and seventies. The substitution of purpose for payment, the maneuver most companies employed in the... See more

The problem isn’t that machines are becoming more human-like, it’s that humans are becoming more machine-like in an effort to keep up.

In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machin... See more