Sublime

The rigid hierarchical system that had held in place in almost every Western society until the eighteenth century, and had denied all hope of social movement except in rare cases, the system glorified by John of Salisbury and John Fortescue, was unjust in a thousand all too obvious ways, but it offered those on the lowest rungs one notable freedom:

For this shift in context to occur, we need leadership that supports a restorative path. Restoration calls for us to deglamorize leadership and consider it a quality that exists in all human beings. We need to simplify leadership and construct it so that it is infinitely and universally available. We need to end our search for better leaders. We

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There is an inherent and healthy tension between the tower and the square, between hierarchy and networks. When power is absolute and sits in one place for too long, the square must resist. But looking across the centuries, the two have co-existed and mostly to the benefit of humanity, argues Ferguson.

“humans don’t mind hardship, in fact, they thrive on it; what they mind is not feeling necessary.”⁠11 Junger argues that “modern society has perfected the art of making people not feel necessary.”

So Weber and Nietzsche together provide us with the key theoretical articulations of the contemporary social order; but what they delineate so clearly are the large-scale and dominant features of the modern social landscape. Just because they are so very effective in this regard, they may be of little help in deciphering the small-scale

Yet that vision of smallness is under the auspices and control of Airbnb, following the template the company has set and the conditions that it profits under. Smallness implies homogeneity and a move toward uniformity, most likely under a Western default, under the ideology of the tech industry. The trade-off that Chesky implied was that the more

The intermittent nature of today’s careers creates an unprecedented set of problems for social insurance. Such mechanisms that were designed for linear career paths are ill-fitted to respond to the needs of individuals whose working lives have become increasingly diverse, discontinuous and multiform. Because traditional social insurance is often

Oscar Newman’s 1972 book Defensible Space: Crime Prevention through Urban Design is widely credited for illustrating how the design of public housing influenced criminal opportunity.18 Newman focused his case studies on NYC public housing complexes, where, he pointed out, robbery rates were much greater in high-rise buildings, even when the actual