558 posts tagged with society.
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Reclaiming the Third Place
“Each year we find ourselves having less social interaction, and we are starting to realize that getting to know people outside of home and work does not just happen on its own,” he said. “We have to be intentional about meeting and talking to others.” from Gen Z Grew Up Chronically Online. Now, They're Craving 'Third Places. [more inside]
The manifesto of the MeFite
@edithcharles.bsky.social asked “What bizarre shit are they finding in your manifesto after you're finally apprehended?” Responses included “Mostly an exhaustive list of how to behave and move correctly in a supermarket” and “Stop bunting” and “5-page digression about how LED headlights are too fucking bright” and “Pics of my cats and 'I did it for them'” and “First of all, IT’S A MISSION STATEMENT”. But what's in your manifesto? Some more responses... [more inside]
How this bears on our own time is fairly obvious
One wonders if he could picture our current moment, when desire and expression are so ready-made, so undemanding and yet so effortlessly able to mollify and monopolize our attention. Open your streaming services—film, TV, music. The choices are overwhelming. Funny, then, that so much of it looks and feels the same, that every artist and writer and musician can tell of unproduced passion projects, that dissenting voices are so easily drowned out. Quantity drowns quality. That which exists is good; that which is good exists. What doesn’t exist is a challenge to this state of affairs. from The Last Avant-Garde [Alexander Billet reviews Dominique Routhier’s “With and Against: The Situationist International in the Age of Automation.” in the L.A. Review of Books; ungated]
What 72 looks like
The global median life expectancy is 72 years old. As part of a photographic project looking at the global community of over 60s we take a look at the lives of a diverse group of people in later life. A photo essay by Ed Kashi, Ilvy Njiokiktjien, and Sara Terry in The Guardian.
Power (Plough, Sword & Book) and Progress (Exit, Voice & Loyalty)
Justice by Means of Democracy [archive|transcript] - "[T]he work of democracy is to continuously resist capture. There is no end of history. There is no state of rest for democracy. Democracy is the work of resisting capture by powerful interests and restoring power-sharing just over and over and over again. So we have to do work to introduce new governance mechanisms in the place of those that are not working."[1,2; link-heavy post!] [more inside]
A Land of Contrasts ^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H^H Sinicisation
How China is tearing down Islam [ungated; viz. cf.] - "Thousands of mosques have been altered or destroyed as Beijing's suppression of Islamic culture spreads."[1,2] [more inside]
cooperation and resilience vital to survive climate collapse conditions
The new research, published in a peer-reviewed biological sciences journal from The Royal Society last month, suggests that resilience is an ability that societies can gain and lose over time. Researchers found that a stable society can withstand even a dramatic climate shock, whereas a small shock can lead to chaos in a vulnerable one.
“Oh, have we decided it’s 1993 again? I guess I didn’t get the memo.”
If unchecked markets worked as well as Andreessen insists, we wouldn't be in this mess. The most powerful people in the world are technological optimists. They asked for our trust in the 90s, the 00s, and the 10s. They insisted that all we needed to do was clap louder. We clapped. They failed. We grew less trustful. - On Marc Andreessen's "techno-optimist manifesto"
The Memory Bank*
A Hidden Currency of Incalculable Worth [ungated] - "We need to start thinking about policies aimed at freeing up time for impoverished families as a form of aid. We could begin by defining a healthy society as one in which everyone has a place to stay, food to eat and time to enjoy the fruits of their labor with those for whom they labor. A living wage should be one in which there is space for something beyond work." [link-heavy FPP! ;] [more inside]
Home School Nation
How the GOP and Christian millionaires plan to syphon billions of dollars from public schools
Florida is just the start.
Florida is just the start.
The Trust Game
It makes sense to be wary of scams: you should not reply to your spam emails, no matter how much you’d like to help a prince retrieve millions from his trust fund. But there are costs to excessive scepticism, too, for both the self and the social order. A diverse body of evidence from psychology and behavioural economics can help us understand those costs. On a personal level, the fear of being suckered can encourage someone to be risk averse, to avoid the kind of cooperation that is essential to any new venture. At the systemic level, the stakes of distrust are even higher. from ‘Wait, am I the fool here?’ [Grauniad; ungated]
How people spend their time is a fundamental mark of civilization
Toward a Leisure Ethic A return to the leisure ethic might show us what we are missing. By developing such an ethos, we might find new vistas of human potential and value while fostering a more harmonious relationship with nature and each other along the way.
The structure of the average day precludes what Virginia Woolf called “moments of being,” those rare experiences of authentic self-affirmation that stick with us, crystallized in memory. Although, as Woolf observed, “every day includes much more non-being than being,” that is all the more reason to attend seriously to the limited time one has. The more harried one’s day—the more filled it is with banal busyness and fleeting frivolities—the scarcer the potential for authentic experiences becomes. The shorter one’s life becomes. [more inside]
She is the girl who has everything / Talent and beauty divine
Debutantes, models, fashion writers, publicists, club kids, and assorted demimondaines: A Century of the New York "It" Girl. [article limit before paywall] This sprawling cover story, with many embedded interviews, covers 151 women who drew the camera and made the New York scene over the past 60 years. Although many of them came from money or had family connections, some of them, like Debi Mazar and Connie Girl, just showed up, worked hard, and were themselves. [more inside]
The People's Plan for Nature
Can citizens' assemblies save the planet? The People’s Plan for Nature, launched on Thursday, sets out the UK public’s recommendations for reversing massive declines in Britain’s nature. A hundred people were invited to come together, in a citizens’ assembly, to agree on a plan for how to renew and protect nature. More information at peoplesplanfornature.org [more inside]
Democracy by Lottery
The Case for Abolishing Elections: More disturbing, he noted how his fellow politicians—all of whom owned their homes—tended to legislate in favor of landlords and against tenants. “I saw that the experiences and beliefs of legislators shape legislation far more than facts,” he said. “After that, I frequently commented that any 150 Vermonters pulled from the phone book would be more representative than the elected House membership.” [more inside]
How it looks like trying to buy printer ink in 8 cities
This is what a tech market looks like in:-- Rest of The World's correspondents share their photo essays from: Taipei, Jakarta, São Paulo, Lagos, Hong Kong, Tokyo, Bengaluru, and Mexico City.
Civilization reboot: Imagine post-capitalism instead of the world's end
An Economic History of the ('Long') Twentieth Century - "Slouching Towards Utopia is a rise-and-fall epic—but it is better at depicting the rise than explaining the fall."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Atoms and Bits
The story so far: So until some random assortment of matter and energy somehow arranged itself into what we think of as 'life', the universe was just that: a random assortment of matter and energy. After life, life began to arrange matter and energy, according to life -- creating life (and death) at least on the third rock from some star... [more inside]
“A public punishment… disguised as a trifling psychic disturbance”
Writing in The New Yorker, Becca Rothfield reviews and critiques two new takes on shame and its uses and abuses, particularly in online contexts (How To Do Things With Emotions by Owen Flanagan and The Shame Machine by Cathy O’Neil): “The Shaming-Industrial Context” (archive.org)
Pre-Surrealist Games
David Mitchell, "Manuel Complet des Jeux de Société by Elisabeth Celnart, 1827" and its story collab and/or Mad Libs-like precursors to Exquisite Corpse sometimes also in Catharine Harbeson Waterman's Book of Parlour Games, 1853: "L'Histoire ... in which each successive player only sees the last word of what was previously written ... [or, alternatively] in which each player adds information according to a previously agreed set of categories ... 'The game of 'l'histoire' [1812*; 1836*; Waterman 1853] is the same as the game of 'l'amphigouri' [1812*; 1866*], 'roman impromptu' [1812*; 1836*] and 'secrétaire' [1788*; 1812*; 1836*; Waterman 1853]." Also, on Oct. 10, 1824, Anne Lister (prev.) described the French parlor game of Les Résultats and compared it to Consequences [Higgins 1854; Sandison 1895]. Celnart is known for works on hair care, cosmetics*, perfumery, cooking*, etc.; Waterman, for a language of flowers. [*In French.]
These are good shapes, nice shapes.
Parable of the Polygons: A Playable Post on the Shape of Society These little cuties are 50% Triangles, 50% Squares, and 100% slightly shapist. But only slightly! In fact, every polygon prefers being in a diverse crowd. You can only move them if they're unhappy with their immediate neighborhood. They've got one, simple rule: “I wanna move if less than 1/3 of my neighbors are like me.” Harmless, right? Every polygon would be happy with a mixed neighborhood. Surely their small bias can't affect the larger shape society that much? Well... [more inside]
Pathocracy, or how psychopathy takes over a society
Pathocracy, identified by the Polish psychologist Andrzej Lobaczewski, is the condition where government of a society is dominated by those with psychopathological disorders. It begins when one such disordered individual emerges as a leader figure; soon, their personality amplifies it, filtering out those appalled by their brutality and irresponsibility but attracting others who see it as charisma and decisiveness. Soon, others with psychopathic traits attach themselves to the power hierarchy, while responsible and moral people leave or are ejected, and before long, the entire government is filled with people with a pathological lack of empathy and conscience. This psychopathy soon spreads beyond the government, through the population, through propaganda and polarising ideology. [more inside]
The Hitchhiker's Guide to Humanity (2nd Edition)
Everybody knows TVTropes is the best and most time-killing-est way to learn about the clichés and archetypes that permeate modern media. But dear reader, there is so much more. Enter UsefulNotes. Originally created as a place for tropers to pool factual information as a writing aid, the subsite has quietly grown into a small wiki of its own -- a compendium of crowdsourced wisdom on a staggering array of topics, all written in the site's signature brand of lighthearted snark. Though it reads like an irreverent and informal Wikipedia, its articles act as genuinely useful primers to complex and obscure topics alike, all in service of the project's three goals: "To debunk common media stereotypes; To help you understand some media better; To inform (and sometimes entertain) about subjects common in storytelling." Click inside for bountiful highlights... if you dare. [more inside]
Hike, stamp, repeat
"The thousands of hikers who brave Hungary’s Blue Trail each year must face down unexpected obstacles, a bureaucratic, socialist-era stamp system, and a litany of rules. Which begs the obvious question: why bother at all?" [more inside]
Americans seek independence from materialism, society, and their spouses
Where Americans find meaning in life has changed over the past four years "The U.S. stands out as one of only three publics surveyed in 2021 where mentions of society significantly coincide with greater negativity. The other two are Italy and Spain, but in neither of them is the relationship between society and negativity as strong as it is in the U.S."
Why Everyone Is So Rude Right Now
Lawyers are reporting ruder clients. Restaurants are reporting ruder clients. Flight attendants, for whom rude clients are no novelty, are reporting mayhem. “We’re going through a time where physiologically, people’s threat system is at a heightened level,” says Bernard Golden, a psychologist and the author of Overcoming Destructive Anger. This period of threat has been so long that it may have had a damaging effect on people’s mental health, which for many has then been further debilitated by isolation, loss of resources, the death of loved ones and reduced social support. “During COVID there has been an increase in anxiety, a reported increase in depression, and an increased demand for mental health services,” he adds. Lots of people, in other words, are on their very last nerve.
Extra Life: A Short History of Living Longer
How Humanity Gave Itself an Extra Life [ungated link] - "Between 1920 and 2020, the average human life span doubled. How did we do it? Science mattered — but so did activism." (NYT, PBS)
[more inside]
Safety of an asocial society
Coming out of COVID is a chance to radically reimagine our societies
We need to engage with the two sides of any conscious change: imagination and experimentation. "Human beings find it easy to imagine an apocalypse or a disaster. But we struggle to imagine positive alternatives: what education, welfare, workplaces, democracy, or neighborhoods might look like in 30–40 years, or how we could make them radically better."
From doctors to obese people
Everything You Know About Obesity Is Wrong.
Every discovery in public health, no matter how significant, must compete with the traditions, assumptions and financial incentives of the society implementing it.[more inside]
Sensible Progressive Reform
Mr Medlock and the Classics - "It seems helpful to begin with an outline of what some social democratic goals might be. One description might be competitive egalitarianism. This has two components. Firstly, it recognises that people deserve equal worth, having been brought into this world by the arbitrary lottery of birth - as such, inequality can only be justified on the basis of the Rawlsian difference principle.[1] Secondly, it notes that markets do not exist ab ovo, but instead are moulded by the laws and norms of the land. As such, we can use those laws to produce markets which serve the public interest.[2]" (via) [more inside]
“Stick that gorgeous vaccine in my eyes and up my arse...”
[Contains frequent British profanity] In which Flo and Joan return for their tribute to the year 2020. Previously: the 2016 song. Also, a song for anti-vaxxers.
The Trick of Orthodoxy
Economics truly is a disgrace - "This is very personal post. It is my story of the retaliation I suffered immediately after my 'economics is a disgrace' blog post went viral. The retaliation came from Heather Boushey–a recent Biden appointee to the Council of Economic Adviser and the President and CEO of Equitable Growth where I then worked. This is not the story I wanted to be telling (or living). Writing this post is painful. I am sorry." (via; previously) [more inside]
Age of Discord II
Welcome To The 'Turbulent Twenties' - "We predicted political upheaval in America in the 2020s. This is why it's here and what we can do to temper it."[1,2] (via) [more inside]
What we didn't get
Politics is an American industry - "Industries like technology, finance, health care, higher education, and media dominate our collective lives, and yet they are not regulated by anything recognizable as open competition for the custom of decentralized consumers. These industries share some things in common." [more inside]
The chickenization of everything
How to Destroy Surveillance Capitalism (thread) - "Surveillance Capitalism is a real, serious, urgent problem... because it is both emblematic of monopolies (which lead to corruption, AKA conspiracies) and because the vast, nonconsensual dossiers it compiles on us can be used to compromise and neutralize opposition to the status quo."[1,2,3] [more inside]
Organization through sectoral bargaining
How Workers Can Achieve Real Power - "We can build a sectoral bargaining system—and strong, democratic, worker-driven unions—from the ground up." [more inside]
A blind and opaque reputelligent nosedive
Data isn't just being collected from your phone. It's being used to score you. - "Operating in the shadows of the online marketplace, specialized tech companies you've likely never heard of are tapping vast troves of our personal data to generate secret 'surveillance scores' — digital mug shots of millions of Americans — that supposedly predict our future behavior. The firms sell their scoring services to major businesses across the U.S. economy. People with low scores can suffer harsh consequences."[1] [more inside]
An interview with Supreme Court Justice Ginsburg.
"Those laws, artificially restricting what women can do, will not come back. Ever."
Take us back to when you first started, when you wanted to practice as a lawyer but it was difficult for you to do that. In the 1950s, you were attending Harvard Law School. You were one of nine women in a class numbering over 500.
Ethics in AI
DeepMind researchers propose rebuilding the AI industry on a base of anticolonialism - "The researchers detailed how to build AI systems while critically examining colonialism and colonial forms of AI already in use in a preprint paper released Thursday. The paper was coauthored by DeepMind research scientists William Isaac and Shakir Mohammed and Marie-Therese Png, an Oxford doctoral student and DeepMind Ethics and Society intern who previously provided tech advice to the United Nations Secretary General's High-level Panel on Digital Cooperation." [more inside]
Angry, educated and rich
Intra-Elite Competition: A Key Concept for Understanding the Dynamics of Complex Societies - "Elites are a small proportion of the population (on the order of 1 percent) who concentrate social power in their hands."[1] (via; previously) [more inside]
The death of the bra: will the lingerie liberation of lockdown last?
Lockdown has changed a lot of things about the way we present ourselves to the world, and for many women, ditching their bra has been a particularly popular one. (Emine Saner, Guardian) “I just don’t see bras making a comeback after this,” tweeted the Buzzfeed writer Tomi Obaro in May. Her tweet has been “liked” more than half a million times. The feminist satire website Reductress ran a headline last week reading: “Bra furlough extended.”
Open Democracy: Reinventing Popular Rule for the 21st Century
Politics Without Politicians - "The political scientist Hélène Landemore asks, If government is for the people, why can't the people do the governing?" (via) [more inside]
Look for the helpers
33 Moments Where Friends, Family, And Total Strangers Had Each Other's Backs In This Pandemic (Buzzfeed listicle by Stephen LaConte)
The Youngest Prime Minister In The World
Sanna Marin became the world’s youngest state leader when she was made prime minister of Finland in December (2019) at the age of 34. Here, she sits down with Sirin Kale for the May 2020 issue of British Vogue.
They Who Must Sell Are Not Free
“ Anarchists, far from ignoring “human nature,” have the only political theory that gives this concept deep thought and reflection. Too often, “human nature” is flung up as the last line of defence in an argument against anarchism, because it is thought to be beyond reply. This is not the case, however. First of all, human nature is a complex thing. If, by human nature, it is meant “what humans do,” it is obvious that human nature is contradictory — love and hate, compassion and heartlessness, peace and violence, and so on, have all been expressed by people and so are all products of “human nature.” An Anarchist FAQ
A systems approach to containment
Why Nigeria knows better how to fight corona than the US Neoliberalism decimated African countries' public healthcare. And yet they know how to fight the coronavirus effectively
Stop at that top turtle and you miss that it’s turtles all the way down.
But design isn’t magic. To address a wicked problem is to look for its roots — and there’s no hexagon map for getting there. Stop at “insufficient competitiveness” and what you get is a solution that can be tidy exactly because it doesn’t touch the deep causes of Gainesville’s economic stagnation. You get a solution that’s indifferent to the legacies of slavery and segregation, to the highway projects that systematically cut off and blighted East Gainesville, to East Gainesville’s miserable public transportation, and to Florida’s $8.46 minimum wage.
The chicken-or-egg of big gods, morality, and societal complexity
First there were little gods. People then developed complex civilizations, and those people then created big, "morally concerned" gods. That's a very succinct summary of a study using a huge historical database (The Conversation, March 20, 2019), which was published in Nature (abstract; link to full PDF via Nautilus article titled The Worth of an Angry God: How supernatural beliefs allowed societies to bond and spread, which poses a counter-argument to this theory). The huge database is Seshat Databank, named after the ancient Egyptian goddess of wisdom, knowledge, and writing (Wikipedia). [more inside]
Baboon High School
How Living With Baboons Prepared Me for Living Through High School. "The world of mean girls and cliques was a startling change from working alongside my primatologist parents. Fortunately, I’d learned a bit about navigating vicious social structures." [more inside]