what's going on?

Feel empowered yet? No? That’s because contrary to what your TV tells you America does not run on Dunkin. It runs on fear. Studies have shown that the vast majority of consumer purchases are driven by emotional responses rather necessity, the largest driver being the primal fear of missing out that “taps into our evolutionary need for resource... See more

When civic life is treated like a spectacle, we often find ourselves playing the role of the spectator. Content that supports civic curiosity, shared understanding, or long-term problem-solving loses its foothold in a system calibrated for speed, novelty, and outrage. The good stuff can’t compete – not financially, not algorithmically, not

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This is happening because the materialistic world we live in not only values things more than people, but treats people as if they were things.

Much of what we celebrate as ‘good design’ has simply become very good at hiding its true costs. We’ve become brilliant at creating sleek interfaces that make harmful systems more palatable, beautiful products that accelerate environmental destruction, and ‘user-friendly’ platforms that exploit our psychological vulnerabilities.

There’s something oddly steadying about naming the thing properly – not as some grand historical tragedy, but as what it actually is: getting yelled at by dumbasses.

“All sort of buffoonish men, genuinely disturbed and disturbing men whose own lack of human empathy was capitalized upon by surrounding hordes of enablers, grifters, and sociopaths. The authoritarian strongman figure at the heart of awful regimes may possess some unique and interesting, if horrifying, characteristics, but the regimes themselves are... See more

Nolan sees this particular brand of idiocy not as peripheral noise but as the defining characteristic of contemporary fascism. The weapons of fascism – the masked secret police, the corruption, the crackdowns on civil society – are simply “the emboldened physical manifestations of Getting Yelled at By Dumbasses”. America’s entire power structure,... See more

Every corporation in America is poisoning our food, water and air, and every advertisement is telling me to make an individual lifestyle change and either buy an expensive filter for The Poison or buy this new thing that’s Not Poison. (It will turn out to be Poison.)

– @servingcapreal