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What is Social Media to Do About Its Monsters?

One thing that Substack and Bluesky have in common as social media platforms is that every so often a local controversy will pop off on one of them that the other will bang on about as another example about why they are great and that other place is an irredeemable

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🔒 We're Making Pluto a Planet Again, and Dinosaurs Didn't Have Feathers

Editor’s  note:  Due to some nonspecific but nevertheless, let’s say, rather terse communications from the office of US FCC Chairman Brendan Carr regarding my content recently, I have agreed to some changes to make this newsletter less "partisan." To that end, please welcome this week’s

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Trumpism is Winding Down, But Complacency is Not an Option

Little by little, glimpse by flickering glimpse, there are signs that we are pushing our way through to the other side of this ten-year chronic societal illness.  Last year there was the one-two punch of landslide federal elections in Australia and Canada that thoroughly rejected candidates who promised to be

Home

🔒 What is Social Media to Do About Its Monsters?

One thing that Substack and Bluesky have in common as social media platforms is that every so often a local controversy will pop off on one of them that the other will bang on about as another example about why they are great and that other place is an irredeemable

Home

Unstoppable Farce Meets Immovable Object

I haven’t written about the Iran War before now because the whole thing just infuriates me, but now I stew in bafflement at its pointless, brutal, stupidity. The most concise way that it can be summed up for future historians is this classic tweet from 2014: But the topic

Home

🔒 Trumpism is Winding Down, But Complacency is Not an Option

Little by little, glimpse by flickering glimpse, there are signs that we are pushing our way through to the other side of this ten-year chronic societal illness.  Last year there was the one-two punch of landslide federal elections in Australia and Canada that thoroughly rejected candidates who promised to be

Home

The Terminal Telephone Game: How AI is Distorting Our Reality

So, I’m running into an increasingly concerning research problem.  Last week, I wrote a piece that took considerably more research than usual, because it’s a topic I’m not great at: Hard science. It’s about why human beings are never going to colonize other planets. I understood

Home

🔒 Unstoppable Farce Meets Immovable Object

I haven’t written about the Iran War before now because the whole thing just infuriates me, but now I stew in bafflement at its pointless, brutal, stupidity. The most concise way that it can be summed up for future historians is this classic tweet from 2014: But the topic

Home

Confronting the Popular Delusion of Colonizing Space

The Artemis II mission to the moon that was launched a few days ago is a legitimately exciting space adventure that suffered unfortunately little press in the face of Donald Trump’s stupid and pointless resurrection of the Middle East Forever Wars. But what little press it has gotten is

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🔒 The Terminal Telephone Game: How AI is Distorting Our Reality

So, I’m running into an increasingly concerning research problem.  Last week, I wrote a piece that took considerably more research than usual, because it’s a topic I’m not great at: Hard science. It’s about why human beings are never going to colonize other planets. I understood

Home

Parasocial Media: How We Became a World of Influencers

On the now quite rare occasion that I scroll through my Facebook feed, I see a hell of a lot of this one guy: That’s Jason Pargin, my old boss, who is now a prominent TikTok/Reels influencer. We haven’t spoken in nearly a decade, but Facebook spams

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🔒 Confronting the Popular Delusion of Colonizing Space

At the beginning of February, Elon Musk did another internal merger of his companies, putting to rest the notion that these are different companies in any meaningful sense. Earlier, he merged X with his AI company, XAI, and now he has merged X/XAI with his rocketry company, SpaceX. Then