David Pennington

Here’s the TLDR:in early 19th-century northern England, textile workers buck up against a new technology that automates their work and replaces well-paid skilled jobs with machines. When factory owners reject demands that the benefits of the new technology be shared, they gravitate around the avatar of young “Ned Ludd” and begin breaking the new... See more

PTSD is literally defined as being “marked by an inability to construct a coherent story of our past.”

The point Klinenberg wanted to make was this: If there was no such thing as a library, and someone proposed it today, there's a 99.9% chance they and their “radical and crazy idea” would be laughed out of the room.

But, as we know, it’s not a crazy idea.

“Your homework is to stop canceling each other, find out about punk, and get laidwhile you’re at it,” I told them. “Punk isn’t a hairstyle; it’s getting your friends together to make useful stories outside approved systems. And it’s still happening right now, all over the world.” MAGA has adopted an authoritarian style of punk that disdains what... See more

If the early internet was serving beer and wine that brought people together, today’s internet is dealing crack and fentanyl that tears people apart. The consumer isn’t winning when they are addicted to a product that makes them unhappy, and when they are spending hours each day using products they would pay money to make disappear.

“People go to church for the same reasons they go to a tavern: to stupefy themselves, to forget their misery, to imagine themselves, for a few minutes anyway, free and happy.”

What happens when we replace boredom with constant distraction and stimulation? Warnings about the harmful effects of too much stimulation are nothing new. “For a living organism, protection against stimuli is an almost more important function than the reception of stimuli,” Sigmund Freud observed. But given the range and speed of stimuli at our... See more

“Once, men turned their thinking over to machines in the hope that this would set them free. But that only permitted other men with machines to enslave them.”