Market Ideology
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AGI, Hope, and the Human Future 1: What Is Human Flourishing?
[This is a transcription of the talk I gave at St. James Cathedral on 2/8/24. I’ll be posting the Lectures 2 and 3 in the next two weeks.] Before we dig into the topic tonight, I’d like to frame it by identifying two critical issues. Both have a lot to do with our current social
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What Is After the Future About?
Note: Every once in a while I revise my About statement at the top of the left column on this site. I thought I'd post my most recent revision here today: After the Future is a public diary that I've been writing for over twenty years. It's what I'd be writing anyway if there were
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Worshipping in the Temple of the Invisible Hand
“I tend to think that most fears about A.I. are best understood as fears about capitalism,” Chiang told me. “And I think that this is actually true of most fears of technology, too. Most of our fears or anxieties about technology are best understood as fears or anxiety about how capitalism will use technology against
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Reaganism Finds Its Fulfillment in Trumpism
“We have it in our power to begin the world over again.” —Ronald Reagan quoting Thomas Paine in his speech accepting the GOP nomination in July 1980. The increasing divergence—and antagonism—between the red nation and the blue nation is a defining characteristic of 21st-century America. That’s a reversal from the middle decades of the 20th
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Mordor, the Shire, and Freedom in the Public Sphere
[This post first went up in 2012 as a further development of a post entitled "Henry A. Giroux: Neoliberalism Defined", which focused on the way in which Neoliberalism has supplanted the older political idea of republican freedom with an idea of freedom as consumer choice. It relates to themes developed in "Ukraine and the Politics
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Ukraine and the Politics of Inevitability
Because the politics of inevitability assures you that whatever the good things are, they’re being brought about automatically by some invisible hand, right? The market is like Mom. You know, it’s going to take care of you with that invisible hand. And you don’t have to think about what the values might be, what you
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Edsall on White Unhappiness
Graham and Pinto measured poll respondents’ sense of purpose, sense of community and their financial and social well-being and found that “blacks and Hispanics typically score higher than whites,” noting that “these findings highlight the remarkable levels of resilience among blacks living in precarious circumstances compared to their white counterparts.” Graham and Pinto write: The
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Naive Idealism
During the Enlightenment, it became commonplace among the smart set to think of confessional religion as a force for evil. They had good reason to think it. The 17th Century saw some of the worst violence and the worst kind of crimes committed in the belief that its perpetrators were fighting God's fight. But whatever
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Christian Nationalism
If you're not aware of this bizarre exercise in religious delusion, this article in the NY Times does a good job of laying it out, and of identifying who benefits. It's pretty much what I've been writing about over the last month–how billionaires use culture war issues and credulous Christians to insure the entrenchment of
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Milton Friedman: Proto-Sociopath
But while economists still argue over Friedman’s theories, his hot take 50 years ago for nonspecialists — the Friedman doctrine — turned a capitalist truism (profits are essential) into a simple-minded, unhinged, socially destructive monomania (only profits matter). In “A Christmas Carol,” Scrooge is redeemed when he abandons his nasty profit-mad view of life —