Ran Prieur

"The bigger you build the bonfire, the more darkness is revealed."

- Terence McKenna

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May 13. Taking a break from politics, two links about DIY traffic engineering. Can we banish the phantom traffic jam? It's about how self-driving cars can stop traffic waves on freeways, but it's also about how we could do it without "intelligent" cars if we were more intelligent ourselves. This reddit comment goes into more detail on driving technique. The idea is to change start-and-stop traffic in front of you to smooth traffic behind you by watching carefully in both directions. There's also good stuff about the psychology of driving:

If a car merges into your gap, will you be late to work? What if ten cars jump in ahead of you, O the Humanity! Nope, even if 60 cars get ahead, that only delays you by a minute or two. Such a small a delay is insignificant for most commutes. It's down in the noise, a tiny fluctuation. Compared to a line at the grocery checkout, one shopping cart equals 50 to 200 cars ahead of you on the highway. But it doesn't feel that way!

I've been awake since 4am because I had terrible restless legs, not coincidentally because I haven't used marijuana for 13 days. I got up and did a bunch of squats, and then heel lifts while pushing hard at the top of a doorway, and then I went for a predawn run. Normally my legs get tired before my heart and lungs, but this morning my heart and lungs were totally drained and my legs were nowhere near satisfied. So I'll try to do this more often.

And some music for the weekend. I was just reminded of a great obscure song by a question on the Record Store subreddit. There are a lot of bands who I don't particularly like, except for one song that's at the fringe of their usual style. This is a minimalist outtake from American Music Club's weirdest and darkest album, Mercury: Love Connection NYC.

A newer, better band with a similar low-pitched slow style is Timber Timbre, and my favorite by them is Grand Canyon.


May 11. Major new post from Anne, Unnecessariat. It's about the death epidemic among poor rural white Americans, mostly from suicide and opiates. Anne compares it to the AIDS epidemic of the 80's and 90's, which also affected a low-status population that the authorities didn't care about, and had similar death numbers. But AIDS victims were much better at organizing to help each other. Why?

Anne writes, "If there's no economic plan for the Unnecessariat, there's certainly an abundance for plans to extract value from them." Later she links to this article, Death predicts whether people vote for Donald Trump. Now that poor rural whites have been drained economically, Trump is extracting their political value, and if he becomes president I don't expect him to do anything for them -- although maybe he's already done something by overthrowing the Republican establishment.

Of course my solution would be an unconditional basic income, which would free all poor people from a constant state of financial emergency -- but it still wouldn't solve their boredom, their lack of meaningful participation in something larger. I can't even imagine a full solution for this, but I see a partial solution that's maybe good enough for now, and it comes back to why AIDS victims were better organized.

I think it's because they lived in cities. The population density of cities enables networks of high-quality face-to-face connections that are almost impossible in rural and small town living. Maybe it was better in the 19th century, or the 13th century, but 20th century technology has separated rural Americans from their landbase and from each other. Unless you live like the Amish, or live in a city, you probably do not have the technological and economic foundation for a healthy culture.

A hard crash would make this much worse. Even in the Great Depression urban people did better than rural people, and imagine how many practical skills have been lost since then. But it might not be too late for better government. Here's a larger version of an image from Anne's post, Overdose deaths in 2014 per 100,000. What jumps out at me is New York state, like a blue lake in the orange desert of the northeast. There can't be much cultural difference between the New York's rural counties and the neighboring counties in other states, but the drug deaths are much lower, which suggests a connection to state-level policy.

Also, backing up my guess about the Amish, they live in that tiny blue island in Ohio. And I wouldn't have guessed that South Dakota and Nebraska would be so much better than Washington and Oregon.


May 9. Writing about presidential politics is like a bad drug -- I enjoy it at the time and regret it later. So I'm going to try to avoid it for a while. Today, two links about different kinds of bloat.

Are Your Taxes Paying for the Cost of Your Street? The author does some math to make a boring subject interesting: most residential property taxpayers are not covering the costs of maintaining the section of street right in front of them. He explains this with two stories that seem to contradict each other. 1) Urban sprawl is a Ponzi scheme, where growth is subsidized by the next round of growth. 2) Urban sprawl is a parasite, where growth is subsidized by dense urban cores. Anyway, in either case, the suburban infrastructure is doomed.

The crazy thing is that sprawl is not caused by the free market, but required by law: "Zoning, setbacks, minimum parking requirements, minimum lot sizes, maximum units per lot, minimum road widths." Now, maybe with no laws we'd still get sprawl, but certainly, with different laws we could have dense, walkable cities with sustainable infrastructure. I expect this to happen in about two hundred years, and meanwhile the suburbs are going to turn into crime-ridden wastelands, and then really cool ruins.

The Website Obesity Crisis is a speech transcript loaded with outrageous examples of how big web pages are now. On top of the tiny footprint of actual text, there's usually bunch of badly designed graphics, and on top of that, a massive network of ad-serving surveillance scripts. The author's solution is to ban third party ads, so "Ads would become dumb again, and be served from the website they appear on." This is politically impossible, but I'm curious to see what will happen when the bubble bursts and everyone admits that the cost of ads exceeds the value of ads to increase consumer spending.

The most interesting bit is the conclusion, where he uses a video game metaphor for two visions of how the web could be. The first example is Minecraft, where simple rules create wide-open gameplay and "you are meant to be an active participant." The second example is Call of Duty...

...an exquisitely produced, kind-of-but-not-really-participatory guided experience with breathtaking effects and lots of opportunities to make in-game purchases.
...
The user experience... is that of being carried along, with the illusion of agency, within fairly strict limits. There's an obvious path you're supposed to follow, and disincentives to keep you straying from it. As a bonus, the game encodes a whole problematic political agenda.

Never mind web design and video games -- that sounds like a description of ordinary life in the developed world in the early 21st century. We can't even imagine a society where life is like Minecraft, let alone agree on how to get there. That's why politics are getting so crazy, because the only clear path is to push the Call of Duty world so far that it breaks.


May 6. Sometimes I think all arguments are semantic, and after some reader comments, I want to use different words to explain what troubles me about Trump supporters. I called it "tribalism" and defined it as "the habit of generating meaning by dividing the world into the in-group and the out-group." But those words cast too wide a net that pulls in stuff that's harmless or even beneficial.

I'm thinking about friendly sports rivalries. From the NFL subreddit, here's yesterday's post-draft trash talk thread. The comments are in all caps because they're pretending to be shouting but it's all in fun. This is us-vs-them thinking in a healthy larger context that brings people together, and generally /r/NFL is a civil community that has a good sense of the line you don't cross and if you do cross it you get downvoted.

Compare this to the poisionous atmosphere of another subreddit, Hillary for Prison -- and I'm sure that's not the worst political community but I'm not interested in looking harder. I know some Trump supporters are sane people who don't think like that, but my point is, that's why sane people should fear Trump, because he is serving as a focus for the kind of energy that makes sports fans assault fans of rival teams and political enemies kill each other. Even if we fantasize about the system falling into chaos, I don't think we want that kind of chaos.

So, if we can generate meaning by dividing insiders from outsiders in a healthy way, how does it become unhealthy? I think it has something to do with compulsive narrow focus. There's always a larger context in which apparent insiders and outsiders are really both insiders, and shifting your mind to that context is a valuable skill. If you have it, then you can gain the benefits of competition without any nastiness. When people lack that skill, when they know how to focus down into "us-vs-them" but not focus back out, then there's a ratcheting effect where former allies fight each other about ever smaller disagreements. This is socially unstable, like a black hole collapsing in on itself, or maybe like a forest fire. If you see this happening, the first move is to put the fire out, to make peace; if that fails, the second move is to isolate it and let it burn itself out, to let the enemies fight in a way that doesn't harm the world around them; and the emergency third move is to run away.

This shit is so bleak, I need something happy for the weekend. Here's the most awesome dog photo I've ever seen.


May 4. So Donald Trump will be the Republican nominee, and today I want to try to explain his success. One prominent blogger told the story that Trump supporters are lower-income wage workers, while Democrats are higher-income salary workers, and the salary workers exported the wage jobs to other countries, so now Trump is leading a wage worker revolt. I don't believe this. Wage vs salary is an interesting way to divide things up, but there is no evidence mapping this division to any political division, or if there is, it goes the other way.

From FiveThirtyEight, The Mythology Of Trump's 'Working Class' Support:

The median household income of a Trump voter so far in the primaries is about $72,000, based on estimates derived from exit polls and Census Bureau data. That's lower than the $91,000 median for Kasich voters. But it's well above the national median household income of about $56,000. It's also higher than the median income for Hillary Clinton and Bernie Sanders supporters, which is around $61,000 for both.

There's a chart of 23 states, and only in Vermont do Clinton supporters have a much higher income than Trump supporters. Clinton is slightly higher in Connecticut and Virginia, and in every other state Trump supporters are making more money than Clinton supporters. Bernie Sanders supporters are richer than Ted Cruz supporters in New York, but in every other state Sanders has poorer supporters than all three Republicans.

This is the key sentence in the article: "Class in America is a complicated concept, and it may be that Trump supporters see themselves as having been left behind in other respects."

My explanation goes back to the deepest problem of being human: the need for life to feel meaningful. This is a book-length subject, so I'll skip ahead to the modern age and say that, in humanity's search for meaning, economic growth was a temporary hack: for a brief time, ordinary people could be part of a great story in which almost everyone was getting more prosperous.

If you've played video games, you know that almost all of them are built around some kind of improvement, and it would be hard to make a compelling game in which nothing is getting better. But that's where we are now as a society. Trump supporters don't have to be poor to feel like they're missing out -- they just have to not be getting richer. But almost nobody is getting richer, so how does this translate into different political factions?

Sanders supporters want to make the poor richer by making the rich poorer. The establishments of both parties refuse to accept that the age of economic growth is over. And the Republican fringe, which is now taking over the party, has given up on economics and gone back to tribalism. Nate Silver agrees: in his analysis of Why Republican Voters Decided On Trump, his number one reason for why he was wrong about Trump is "Voters are more tribal than I thought."

He never explains this, but I'll try. My off-the-cuff definition of "tribalism" is the habit of generating meaning by dividing the world into the in-group and the out-group. Liberals do this too, we all do it a little, and I'm not going to excuse it. It's a mistake and something that humanity has to overcome. But in the short term it's going to get much worse as it expands to fill the void left by the end of economic growth.

Other things are also expanding to fill this void, like prescription opioid addiction and the desire to colonize Mars. I have at least two horses in this race. One is conscientious hedonism, letting go of achievement and having a good time in ways that don't lead to having a bad time later. The other is to find meaning in downsizing.


May 2. I don't expect to post much this week, so here are some other sites that some of you might like. A reader reminds me about Slate Star Codex, a really smart blog that I don't follow because the guy often writes more than my brain can digest. His most recent post is wondering why early psychedelic researchers were so weird.

True Reddit is a subreddit that links to lots of thoughtful articles, including political and negative stuff that doesn't interest me as much as it used to.

And through True Reddit I just now discovered Craigslist Confessional. The author, Helena Bala, posts on Craigslist offering to listen to people, and shares their stories about once a week.


April 29. Last week I posted this link, People Want Power Because They Want Autonomy, and after some reader comments and some thinking, my interpretation is much more cynical.

The first problem is that our language misrepresents the whole issue. Why did they use the word "autonomy" and not the word "freedom"? Because "freedom" has too much baggage -- you can't take the word seriously when there's a building called the Freedom Tower. But "autonomy" means basically the same thing and only hides our lack of understanding.

The difference between "freedom" and "power" seems clear: freedom means doing what you want, and power means telling other people what to do. But what if you cut someone off in traffic? To you, that feels like freedom, but to the other person it feels like power. More generally, freedom and power are propaganda words for talking about conflicts of interest. If there is no conflict of interest, if you want to do something that doesn't bother anyone else in any way, then you can just do it -- you don't need to play the "freedom" card to justify yourself.

Going back to the study, "people want power because they want autonomy," all that means is that we want to have our way without visibly stopping other people from having their way. "Power" sounds like fun, but in practice, unless you're sadistic or psychopathic, it's unpleasant to make other people do stuff they'd rather not do. This is why, when society has a power inbalance, it tends to hide it from the people who have power, because they want to feel like all they have is freedom. This is how Paul Graham could write his infamous defense of wealth inequality -- he was thinking of wealth as a benign freedom to buy luxuries, and not the power to make people without wealth serve his interests.

Is it always painful to tell other people what to do and be told what to do? In my experience it is, but we're living in a difficult time. In the best tribal cultures, the chief has no coercive power, but serves as a moderator and motivator, organizing people in doing stuff they want to do anyway, and working out all the conflicts between different people's interests. This is nothing like our word "power" or our word "freedom" -- we have no language to grasp a healthy social order.

This also explains individualism. Of course disconnected selfishness is not going to build a good system -- but it's a valuable tool for breaking down bad systems. If a social order is so dysfunctional that a war of self-interest seems preferable, then it deserves to fall apart.

I don't want to return to low-tech tribal living, because the worst tribes are like North Korea without plumbing, and they tend to conquer the happier tribes. The nice thing about technology is that it gives an advantage to less repressive societies, because they're more creative and adaptable, and they can channel this through technology into political influence.

Bottom line: the best place to draw the line is not between power and freedom, or individual and group, but good social order and bad social order; and this difference has something to do with equality of influence, absence of punishment for saying no, and the awarding of positions of authority based on the ability to use authority for the good of everyone.


April 27. I want to write more about authority and autonomy but I'm still not smart enough to put it all together. So today I'll write early about music. My latest obsession is Melanie Safka, who recorded under the name Melanie and had a few radio hits in the 70's. I even bought one of her albums once and failed to appreciate it because I hadn't developed an ear for the human voice as an instrument. Last weekend I rediscovered her through a stroke of fate, when Leigh Ann watched a movie (Northern Soul) with Brand New Key in the soundtrack right after I vaped some weed.

I'm in awe of how much power and warmth Melanie's voice has while still having a sharp edge. Here's a good live video of Look What They've Done To My Song Ma, and her strongest original is probably Lay Down. My favorite song of all time, Big Blood's Song For Baltimore, is basically the next generation of Melanie's cover of Ruby Tuesday, or it's like an extension of the peak verse of Lay Lady Lay.


April 25. I'm not smart enough to do an original post today, so here are more links. From the subreddit, The Evolutionary Argument Against Reality:

Experiment after experiment has shown that if we assume that the particles that make up ordinary objects have an objective, observer-independent existence, we get the wrong answers. The central lesson of quantum physics is clear: There are no public objects sitting out there in some preexisting space.

I've reached a similar conclusion from deep study of subjects like paranormal phenomena, fringe science, and even conspiracy theory. Never mind quantum particles -- even if we're talking about human-scale objects and historical events, we're just patching together the illusion of an objective world from experiences that are fundmentally inconsistent.

How the Apocalypse Will Bring Out the Best in People, and I've written about this before in the context of the book A Paradise Built in Hell.

When violence does occur after a disaster, it is often a result of authorities or elites overreacting, fixating on protecting property instead of lives, misunderstanding situations they encounter, or simply getting frustrated that the recovery is happening without them.

And more happy news, Meet 'Bike Batman': Seattle's vigilante reuniting stolen bikes with their owners. The interesting thing is that he's cooperating with the police, and in theory the police could do exactly what he's doing, looking at bikes reported stolen and then looking for matches on Craigslist. But for some reason, probably misdirected funding, it's easier for an independent person to do that.


April 22. Miscellaneous fun stuff for the weekend. The other day I linked to the AbandonedPorn subreddit, which is not actual porn but cool photos of abandoned places. Earlier this week someone posted the creepiest photo I've ever seen, an old ruined house in the woods in Denmark. If you scroll down [link fixed], they go inside the house, which is disappointing because nothing can match the first photo.

An adventure playground is opening soon in New York City. It gives kids more freedom and chaos than an ordinary playground, and this might be part of a trend away from the extreme safety and structure that American kids have endured for the last few decades.

When Dating Algorithms Can Watch You Blush. This is not about scary technology (yet) but about the mysteries of the subconscious. OkCupid worked well for me, but its biggest weakness is that it relies on people to know consciously what they want in a partner, and it turns out they're mostly wrong, and a big part of what makes two people connect is stuff like body language and sentence structure. The next generation of dating sites will try to model this with computers.

My new favorite sport is women's soccer. Leigh Ann got me into the national team and now I'm following the NWSL, which just started its fourth season last weekend. On the schedules page you can find links to all the games streaming live on YouTube. I haven't picked a favorite team yet. Everyone loves the Portland Thorns and they're loaded with talent, but I'm leaning toward the Houston Dash because of their exciting young offense.

What I like best about soccer is what most people like least (other than diving): scoring is really difficult. You can't just impose your will on a defense -- you have to notice the tiniest openings and go through them like an electric spark, and most players can't do it even if they're great athletes. It seems like there are more creative attackers in the women's game than there used to be. Check out this video of Rachel Daly's NWSL debut.


April 20. Random stuff. My blog is quoted in a new book called Fixing Broken Robots. I haven't read it yet but it looks really good.

A long reddit comment answers the question, How are the countries involved in the "Arab Spring" of 2011 doing now? Almost all of them are as bad as they were before, or worse. The big exception is Tunisia, and here's an article about the Tunisian national dialogue quartet, four groups that worked together to keep the country stable and democratic through the transition.

A new study shows that People Want Power Because They Want Autonomy. So I'm wondering: What's going on with people who get power but aren't satisfied and keep grabbing more and more power? Do they really want autonomy, and more power gives them more responsibility and less autonomy, but they don't understand this, and if they did, they would seek autonomy without power and everyone would be happy? Is making a better world really that simple?

I think sometimes it is. This time of year I see all the work my neighbors are putting into their lawns, while my back yard is prettier with less work and less water. That's a cherry tree in the center, a peach and apricot back behind it, a strawberry patch below it and to the right, raspberries on the right against the fence, tomato starts in the lower left, and the purple flowers are grape hyacinth that survive the dry summers and spread by themselves. Of course the yellow flowers are dandelions, which are completely edible, attract pollinators, and improve the soil. They're one of the most helpful and beautiful plants in the world, and yet people see them as a pest and try to eradicate them (and fail).

For me this goes beyond horticulture and into metaphysics. Why do people go out of their way to make the world more difficult? Why are the most controlled places so ugly while neglected places are often beautiful?

I'm an optimist. A pessimist thinks we live in the best of all possible worlds and it still sucks, and I think it takes a lot of effort to make the world this bad and it's still pretty good. (See my quotes page for more about this.) But when I think about it more, making the world worse is physically difficult and emotionally rewarding, because you're destroying what you've found and replacing it with what you've made, while making the world better is physically easy and emotionally painful, because you're expanding your consciousness to integrate the alien.


April 18. Busy and distracted? Everybody has been, since at least 1710. This Aeon essay raises important issues but I don't like the way it's written. On the first reading I thought it was just a laundry list of intellectuals complaining about inattention, and on the second reading I noticed that the author is trying to make the point that attention is a form of submission to authority.

I would frame it like this: with the Age of Reason in the 1700's, human culture broke free from the Church and ancestral traditions, and turned into a free-for-all, in which one secular authority after another has tried to create Utopia by forcing everyone to pay attention to what it thinks is important. This struggle continued through the 20th century, but the problem is that you can't force attention over the long term -- it has to be earned. People need to feel immediate benefits from what they give their attention to.

The word "moral" appears, in some form, 33 times in the essay. I don't know what "moral" even means, but I know what it means in this context: people appeal to morality when they perceive a conflict between the best thing to do and the fun thing to do.

Here's my new definition of Utopia: any human system in which the best thing to do and the fun thing to do are the same thing. I think some hunter-gatherer tribes (but not all of them) came pretty close to that, and we're still clumsily learning how to do it in large complex societies.

Back to the subject of attention, it leads straight to the subject of social media, video games, and other high-tech superstimuli. At first this is puzzling: attention-grabbing distractions are more powerful than ever, but the authorities are complaining about them less. I mean, lots of people say that smartphone apps are destroying civilization, but they're shouting into the wind. The most powerful institutions in the world -- Google, Facebook, Amazon, Apple -- are not fighting against distraction but using it to increase their own power. The war on distraction is over and distraction won!

What happens next? Like oil, human attention is a finite resource, and its extraction is well into diminishing returns: if there were twice as many ads, we would not give twice as much attention to ads, maybe only ten percent more (and with declining income we're not even buying as much advertised stuff). And just as oil is being used to manufacture junk and push air out of the way of cars, the powers that own human attention are not channeling it to make the world better. I'm tempted to predict doom, but then, the powers that own human attention have almost never used it responsibly, and we're still doing okay.


April 15. Two articles about the same guy, An Experimental Autism Treatment Cost Me My Marriage and What It's Like to Wake Up From Autism After Magnetic Stimulation. The second is longer and goes into more detail about how difficult this guy's whole life has been, often for reasons other than autism. But the broadly interesting thing is that he gained the ability to sense the emotions of others, and it turned out they were mostly bad emotions. I've noticed something similar in my much slower process of becoming more aware of subtext in communication. I used to think communication was 90% on the surface, and now I think it's 90% under the surface, but damn, it's like a snake pit down there.

New subject, a fun reddit thread for doomers, What catastrophe is waiting to happen? The big one at the top is a direct hit from an x-class solar flare.

And some music. This month I've gotten heavily into a 1970 album called Here In the Land of Victory by Rex Holman. Holman was an actor who played lots of small roles in Hollywood westerns, and he made only that one album at the age of 42. His voice is an acquired taste, but the more I listen, the more his music seems deeply and courageously weird, intensely psychedelic in a subtle way. Nobody will agree with me when I say that Rex Holman makes Gordon Lightfoot sound like elevator music and Nick Drake sound like a whiny kid. The link above goes to the whole album, which is not all great, but the best songs are Come On Down and Red Is The Apple.


April 13. Going back already to Siderea, a couple weeks ago she had a major three-part post on The Two Moral Modes. That's Part 1, and here are Part 2 and Part 3.

It starts with Donald Trump, and the idea that he's merely an opportunist, who has noticed a massive unmet demand and is giving people what they want. So even if Trump goes away, that energy is still there waiting for the next leader to channel it.

Siderea thinks that Trump is channeling a moral standard that she calls Mode 2. In Mode 1 we have the same moral standard for all humans, while in Mode 2 there's an in-group and an out-group, and the out-group are not exactly people, more like a resource to be exploited. Here's a good explanation from Part 3:

It probably has never occurred to you, personally, to go someplace far away, where the laws of your country which frown on such things don't extend, and kidnap someone, or several someones, for your personal use: to sell, to exploit for free labor, to torment for kicks and giggles... If you're operating in Mode 1, it's so beyond the horizon of anything your moral sensibilities suggest is even remotely acceptable in interpersonal conduct, that it simply has never come up to be considered, much less rejected.

But people did this. Actual human beings actually did this, in great numbers. And people continue to do this, and various variations on it. It behooves us to ask What were they thinking, that they thought this was an okay thing to do?

Liberals are wrong to say these people are motivated by hate. From Part 2:

Lions don't hate gazelles. In fact, if you could ask them, I think lions would tell you they love gazelles -- they find them delicious... What the cheering throngs at Trump's rallies are feeling is joy. They're delighted by the uplift of being told, both implicitly and explicitly by Trump, that their Mode 2 morality is good, worthy, and valid... They're thrilled by the prospect of an overturn of the Mode 1 hegemony in American culture, and the possibility of making Mode 2 the dominant norm of the land.

This reminds me of a general process in political revolution: if there's something people believe strongly, but they're not allowed to say it publicly, they still think it privately, and it simmers under the surface until all at once it becomes acceptable to say it publicly, and then all the people who believe it can organize to overthrow the old system.

But I'm wondering how many Trump supporters really want to openly subjugate others, and how many just want to feel like they're participating in a political system that has been blocking them from participating -- and for superficial cultural reasons they like Trump better than Sanders.

Here's a fascinating analysis from fivethirtyeight, The GOP's Wacky Delegate Rules Are Helping Trump. The Republican rule-makers decided to award delegates based on the total population of each district, not the Republican population. So Republicans in heavily Democratic districts have way more influence, per person, than Republicans in heavily Republican districts. These supervoters love Trump, and I think it's not because they want to own slaves -- it's because they feel beseiged by an alien culture. (Although maybe, because they're in Mode 2, they assume that being a cultural minority means being a slave.)

I'm guessing that only 10-20% of Americans are in full-on Mode 2 morality, but I wonder how many others would switch over if it became socially acceptable, like it did in Nazi Germany. A deeper question is whether we're making moral progress. In ten thousand years will we still be flipping between the two modes, or will we be permanently and universally in Mode 1? And if we get there, where will we go next?


April 11. I've just discovered a great internet thinker, Siderea, whose blog is called Sibylla Bostoniensis. So, mixed in with the other stuff I write about, I'll be gradually going through her history and summarizing my favorite bits here. Today, a post from January on Class in America. This stuff is all completely obvious when I think about it, but hardly anyone thinks about it, so it seems fresh and important.

The big idea is that social class and economic class are different things. Economic class is how much money you make, and social class is actually culture. It's forbidden in America to talk about social class, so people talk around it (badly) by talking about economic class:

This rhetorical substitution of economic class for social class has a particular virtue for people in more privileged social classes: it allows them to discuss the lack of privileges of the lower classes in a way that holds them blameless of bigotry. So it is okay -- preferred, even -- to discuss the difficulty of the poor to become non-poor due to lack of resources: how terrible it is that the poor are thwarted in their efforts to improve their employment by not having the money for interview clothing, for transit to better jobs, for qualifying education or training. Real problems all -- but also handy substitutes for discussing the much, much more uncomfortable topics of discrimination against job applicants and promotion candidates for having an accent, a hair-do, a sense of style, an address on one's resume that is lower-class.

Siderea goes on to cover several angles of the subject of moving from one social class to another, and this makes me think of a whole other subject:

People really hate changing their culture, and lots of political issues come down to cultural standoffs, where two cultures are incompatible and neither side wants to change, like when immigrants don't want to assimilate, or when old people don't want to adopt the values of young people. It's not always clear who's right, and sometimes the disagreements are over silly things like how to pronounce words.

But it gets interesting when political and technological changes favor certain cultures. The internet helps cultures that value transparency, and undermines cultures that value secrecy. Birth control helps cultures that value sexual freedom, and undermines cultures that want to harness sex to family obligations. I can even put my support for an unconditional basic income in cultural terms: it would undermine a culture of striving for conventional success, and feed a culture of learning to navigate free time.





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