Ran Prieur

April 27.

2026-04-27T15:50:43Z

April 27. Today I'm in the mood for a rant, starting with this unpopular post from the Seattle subreddit, about draconian anti-theft measures in supermarkets. I agree that supermarkets have to do this because of increasing theft, but I disagree with the comments about the deeper meaning. The Seattle subreddit is full of socially liberal affluent NIMBYs. This is my downvoted comment demolishing all the copium:

I agree, its late stage capitalism. If it's theft by the homeless, why do they have these in midwestern towns with hardly any homeless? If it's general moral decay, why did they not have this in previous decades when violent crime was much higher? If it's left wing economic policies, why did they not have this in the 1950s when the rich were taxed at 90%? If it's soft on crime policies, why are prison populations still so high? If it's anything specific to America, why do they have this in Europe?

People have given up on the social contract, because the ethic of capitalism is every man for himself. Every source of the meaning of life other than money has been wiped away. This is a slow-motion version of what happens in every disaster where people grab everything they can get. The disaster is the death of a culture in which leveraging money into more money is the highest good.

Next, an archive of a good Washington Post article about the rise of Nihilistic Violent Extremism, which prosecutors define as motivated by "a hatred of society at large and a desire to bring about its collapse by sowing indiscriminate chaos, destruction, and social instability."

I'll never understand the right. If society is fucked up, why would you want a strongman leader and uniformed thugs bullying whoever has the lowest status? That's going exactly the wrong direction. But nihilism I get. If society is becoming more and more prison-like, if our public institutions have abandoned the nourishment of human thriving and are only trying to herd us through padded cells until our merciful deaths, then fuck it, let's tear it all down. Let's destroy all fences, all locks, all credentials, all money, nothing but atomized humans coming back together in some new way.

I don't actually support that because, through pure luck, my life is pretty good, and I don't want to starve. I think we have a decent chance at a bumpy transition to a less fucked up world. I'm not going to kill myself, because I don't want to be remembered as having given up. But I can confidently predict a rising tide of both nihilistic extremism and suicide acceptance. You can see it already in this Reddit thread from three weeks ago: At what point does choosing to die become okay?

April 23.

2026-04-23T23:10:31Z

April 23. This is the best news I've seen this year: Alberta Startup Sells No-Tech Tractors for Half Price. We need this for every technology, but especially in food production, if we don't want the inevitable correction of runaway complexity to starve us all. From the Hacker News thread: "These low-tech tractors could become a hot bed for open source experimentation," and, "How many 3rd parties might be able to bring on upgrades/modifications to a 'dumb' tractor to make it smart vs only being able to buy a 'smart' tractor from one vendor and be forced into its rules/restrictions/price."

Related: Jon sends this inspiring article, Inside Portland's Driftwood Cabins. At the end the author editorializes: "These cabins are not symbols of resilience. They are monuments to lowered expectations, bureaucratic neglect, and a society that has learned to tolerate conditions no decent city should ever accept." Symbols hell, these cabins are resilience, and while we do need more institutional free housing for people who are not capable of building cabins, what we also need is more tolerance for informal responses to the decline of modernity.

April 21.

2026-04-21T21:50:50Z

April 21. And for the last song on that playlist, I've just finished a new video: John Cooper Clarke - Valley of the Lost Women. This song has my favorite lyrics, and I barely had to deviate from the actual lines to get the AI prompts. I was able to get a few good images from DeepAI, but mostly I used Perchance, which has some pulp styles that really fit this song. As usual, I looked at a ton of images and stayed away from photorealism. I would not say that AI can make art, because it does not have the human experience of making art, but the human experience of art appreciation is indifferent to the source.

April 20.

2026-04-20T20:40:46Z

April 20. New Spotify playlist, and it's not what you think. 4:20 is a two hour collection of songs between 4:18 and 4:22 in length. It's mainly obscurities and classic rock. I got the idea when I noticed that some of my favorite songs (mainly the last three) are that long, and then I filled it out. This list would be hard to put together if you relied on streaming. All I had to do was go through all my mp3 folders and sort for length.

April 17.

2026-04-17T17:10:01Z

April 17. New subject: books. Two weeks ago I got two books out of the library, both recommended on the Suggest Me A Book subreddit, both acclaimed novels by middle-aged women. Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner is a great fit on theme: eco-activism, deep ecology, even some cryptozoology. But the writing is so flat that I gave up after 50 pages and wrote on Goodreads that it should be called Exposition Lake.

The other book, Animal by Lisa Taddeo, is a violent psychodrama about how casual infidelity destroys families. That's not in my wheelhouse, but the writing is so good that I kept having to slow down just to marvel at it. This is my Goodreads review.

New subject: AI. A Hacker News thread, with linked article, Stanford report highlights growing disconnect between AI insiders and everyone else. The insiders worship the machine and everyone else is cynical.

April 16.

2026-04-16T16:00:26Z

April 16. On a tangent from the last post, I think the eventual books by recovered Trumpers will not satisfy me. There are already books by people who have escaped cults. They say they were put in a bubble, where they only saw information that fit the cult's beliefs. People will look back and blame social media, websites designed to maximize clicks by feeding back more of whatever we already think. But it's obvious to me that there's something else going on, something sub-rational.

What I really want, and will not get, is an explanation of charisma. I suppose, in the same way that you can be colorblind or face-blind, I'm charisma blind. Everyone says that JD Vance lacks Trump's charisma, but all I see are different personalities and no glow from either one. Also, what's the deal with Michael Jackson? In terms of record sales and airplay, he was on about the same level as Hall and Oates. Why didn't people get all culty about Hall and Oates in the same way? Was it the moonwalk? Will science discover that certain people are able to modulate their voice at 613.5 Hz which resonates with the temporal lobe to induce a suggestible trance state? I doubt it. It's more like the physical world is an illusion and waves are surging on the level of pure mind.

April 14.

2026-04-14T14:40:30Z

April 14. Long Reddit thread about Trump as the Antichrist. I have relatives who are devout Catholics, and decent people, who are now deciding whether to support the most flagrantly immoral person in the world against the Pope. It's so weird. Someday when this is over, I hope some recovered Trumpers write books and explain what was going on in their heads, because I don't get it. I tend to see it as an act of sorcery, a magic spell that operates on levels unrecognized by science.

But I do have a theory, and it's based on a counter-intuitive observation of who does not see Trump as the Antichrist: Biblical literalists. To me the Bible is an interesting book with some good stuff and some dumb stuff. I don't think that anything is true just because it's in there. Trump is the Antichrist in a metaphorical or allegorical sense, or at most archetypal. The author of Revelations was not God but a talented human who tuned in so deeply to human wickedness that he had some uncannily accurate hits on how it would manifest thousands of years in the future. Jesus is not going to return in any kind of obvious way, but maybe humans in general will become more Jesus-like, and the Kingdom of Heaven is a potential human society that embodies the Beatitudes.

Fundamentalists don't know how to think this way, and this incapacity is not normal religious thinking -- it's unusual. This article, The Great Myths 11: Biblical Literalism, explains how ancient and medieval thinkers were perfectly capable of seeing religious texts as allegory. Modern humans have acquired a cognitive weakness, I don't know how, that makes them highly susceptible to absolutism. That's how Trump gets his followers, by performing a primal confidence that is irresistible to people with flattened cognition. There's something about his way of being that they get pulled into and can't get out of. It reminds me of a line from Genesis -- not the book but the band: "Look into my mouth he cries. And all the children lost down many paths, I bet my life you'll walk inside."

April 10.

2026-04-10T22:00:32Z

April 10. Yesterday I finished a project that I've been putting off for years, a page about my Spirit Island stuff. Spirit Island is my favorite board game, a cooperative strategy game where you play nature spirits battling colonists. Back in 2021 I made a set of custom reminder tokens to keep track of multi-spirit solo games, and every winter since then I've been testing and refining three custom spirits. This week I finally put it all together into a video: Three spirit solo game. I don't know how prolific YouTubers do it. This hour-long video took me at least fifty hours of rehearsal and repeated takes. I recorded and deleted entire games just to figure out how to talk about what I was doing, and it's still pretty sloppy. Also on that page are short descriptions of the spirits, and downloads of printer-ready images for the boards and cards.

April 8.

2026-04-08T20:40:07Z

April 8. It finally happened. The DeepAI Olde Model that I was using for my videos, has been quietly enshittified/upgraded. Right away I saw that something was off, and when I tested familiar prompts in familiar styles, the results were a lot faster, a lot different, and a lot worse. I knew it was too good to last, and now I have to see if I can find any beauty at all in the new machine.

April 7.

2026-04-07T19:30:55Z

April 7. New playlist! When I was making my two Spotify covers playlists, some of the best songs were not on Spotify. These songs served as the anchor for a YouTube Covers playlist, that I filled out with some of my favorites from the other two lists. They're mostly obscure, with more songs under a thousand views than over a million. There are three covers of Bob Dylan, two of The Rolling Stones and surprisingly two of Van Halen. I love the transition between two not-on-Spotifys, Larkin Poe's Southern Cross and Killdozer's Sweet Home Alabama, which have almost the same riff.

April 1.

2026-04-01T13:30:27Z

April 1. No ideas this week, but I've just posted my Goodreads review of Paul Kingsnorth's Against The Machine. To give it less than four stars would be infighting, but there's a lot of stuff in it that I disagree with, and I list some anti-machine books that I liked better: Saving The Appearances by Owen Barfield, In The Absence Of The Sacred by Jerry Mander, Tools For Conviviality by Ivan Illich, The Reenchantment of the World by Morris Berman, The Final Empire by William Kotke, and Hospicing Modernity by Vanessa Machado de Oliveira.

Also, this is a great bit from an incredible book that I still haven't finished, James Dickey's Alnilam, describing what we might call the "flow" state, in terms of the swinging of a monkey:

Whatever the gibbon has got hold of is already something else; it's the next thing he's going to have hold of. The present thing is not being replaced by the next thing he's going to catch; it already is the next thing, and the next thing after that is already coming into place, coming at him, coming to him. There's no way that it can't come, or that he would miss it. His catching it is not only built into his body and his rhythm, but it's built into the branch or the limb or the part of a wall that he takes into the rhythm. His whole environment gives itself to him in the rhythm, it flows around him, everything is linked, everything is together for him, and is part of his motion, it's all flow and it's all him, as long as he keeps it up.