SpaceXponential

These two extreme groups are similar in surprising ways. They are the whitest and richest of the seven groups, which suggests that America is being torn apart by a battle between two subsets of the elite who are not representative of the broader society. What’s more, they are the two groups that show the greatest homogeneity in their moral and... See more

 "I believe," he writes, "that singing is the key to long life, a good figure, a stable temperament, new friends."  The point is that a cappella harnesses the creative intelligence of a whole group. By contrast, says Eno, high art is about separating geniuses from foot soldiers. "A cappella subverts that: it's highly composed music but there's no... See more

Mountain climbers educated in the Alps discovered the vertical walls of granite in Yosemite in the 1930s and began to scale these monoliths. By 1941 climbers occupied a new permanent camp set up in the north side of Yosemite Valley, Camp 4. ... the geography of this scenius is unremarkable. Camp 4 is a nondescript, bland, dusty campground. Building... See more

Rituals can be defined as temporal technologies for housing oneself. They turn being in the world into being at home. Rituals are in time as things are in space. They stabilize life by structuring time. They give us festive spaces, so to speak, spaces we can enter in celebration. As temporal structures, rituals arrest time. Temporal spaces we can... See more

This is nothing new in the physical social world, but it is revolutionary in the digital social world, where groups and shared messenger threads have historically always been communal spaces.

Cult leaders are their own moderators

Cult leaders need mechanisms for elevating and blessing followers, as well as mutually reinforcing power

Cults need... See more

This is hardly a profound observation. It has been clear for many years that the Internet made it possible for new communities to form, sometimes with astonishing speed. The problem, as Zeynep Tufekci explained in [Twitter and Tear Gas](https://www.twitterandteargas.org/), is that the ease of network formation made these communities more fragile,... See more

In the 20th century, America built the most capable knowledge-producing institutions in human history. In the past decade, they got stupider en masse.  In his book The Constitution of Knowledge, Jonathan Rauch describes the historical breakthrough in which Western societies developed an “epistemic operating system”—that is, a set of institutions... See more