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.)