books, papers, and things that got lodged in my head
a selective ledger of things i read, half-read, argued with, or failed to forget.
omissions are editorial, not evidentiary; one line until the text earns more.
seems like its finally the end, its over—just not in the way fukuyama would have imagined.
pretty much the whole question of whether liberalism is now surviving on inherited social capital it has spent the last few centuries liquidating—and whether the terminus is liberation, atomisation, or simply a great deal of paperwork.
the unique peculiarities of the west compared to the rest of the world, where they came from, and just how much they contributed to its success.
i had long taken western individualism, impersonal trust, analytic thought and the rest of the WEIRD bundle as more or less neutral human defaults; turns out we are the strange ones lmao, and the genealogy of the strangeness explains rather a lot.
a history of autism.
read first as history, returned to after diagnosis as something much more personal: the long and often grotesque institutional process by which minds like mine became visible, classifiable, and occasionally permitted to describe themselves.
life is always worth living.
one of those books whose central proposition sounds almost insultingly simple right up until the moments in which it becomes a genuinely non-obvious claim.
capitalism destroys the old world so productively that it eventually destroys the sort of people inclined to defend it too.
schumpeter was one of my earliest encounters with capitalism treated not as a static moral arrangement but as a civilisational process—creative destruction, bourgeois self-liquidation, and all the delicious ironies downstream.
the future is already here and only once; just not normally—but unevenly (pareto) distributed instead.
one of my earliest entrances into girard, contrarianism, political theology and the humanities more broadly, smuggled into my adolescent brain under the extremely effective false pretence of being a book about startups.
adam smith before the invisible hand was severed from the moral psychology attached to it.
partly corrective reading for the almost comically flattened smith of public discourse: sympathy, virtue, spectatorship and the moral furniture commercial society tacitly requires before anybody even gets to the market.
society is not a brain and nobody at the centre is secretly in possession of all its knowledge—awkward news for people whose job title suggests otherwise.
distributed knowledge was already one of the deepest intuitions beneath my politics; this gave it a language, an institutional account, and approximately nine hundred new reasons to distrust tidy centralised diagrams of living systems.
all aggregates are, in the final analysis, just people doing things for reasons; mises then elects to explain this for 900 pages lmao.
methodological individualism in its most uncompromising form, and a useful reminder that abstractions do not act, choose, suffer, exchange or possess ends—people do, despite economists occasionally writing as though GDP woke up with plans.
r > g and several hundred years of receipts.
i wanted the strongest empirical case for the wealth-concentration story rather than its twitter simulacrum; also the broader question of when formally legitimate market outcomes begin corroding the legitimacy of the market order itself.
capitalism's most vigorous hater remains one of its most lucid admirers; also perhaps the most consequential pamphlet ever dropped.
marx is too important to inherit exclusively through either devotees or people performing disgust at his name. the diagnosis of capitalism's dynamism is often superb; the eschatology downstream, rather less harmless.
the liberal case for letting people be wrong in public, weird in private, and otherwise left alone right up until they start harming somebody else.
free speech, individuality, social tyranny and the boundary between preventing harm and forcibly improving people—i.e. most of the liberal questions i keep finding dressed in newer vocabulary.
voters can afford to be wrong because the invoice arrives collectivised.
caplan's account of rational irrationality helped make explicit something i had felt for years: political beliefs are unusually cheap to hold precisely because almost nobody individually bears the marginal cost of being spectacularly mistaken.
civilisation, but from the perspective of the energy throughput required to make any of it happen.
a useful materialist corrective to my tendency to begin at the level of ideas: before the theology, institutions and grand narratives, something still has to power the city, feed the population and move the steel.
four books on why reality keeps humiliating people who mistake a model for a guarantee.
taleb was formative enough that separating the books feels almost artificial now: fragility, hidden exposure, optionality, skin in the game, and the epistemic comedy of people who forecast consequences borne by somebody else.
we reason mostly as counsel for intuitions that have already returned a verdict.
moral psychology as an antidote to the fantasy that political disagreement is merely a data-transfer failure; people are not empty CPUs awaiting the correct facts, alas.
everything is status, including the increasingly elaborate performance of being above status.
self-explanatory given roughly half my recent writing: moral prestige, personal branding, social media, elite signalling, countersignalling, and all the games which become most potent once nobody is permitted to admit they are playing.
evolution gave us a useful desktop, not root access to reality.
this sits rather neatly beside the entire map-territory fixation: perception may be adaptive precisely because it conceals ontology, which is both philosophically thrilling and extremely rude.
two and a half millennia of western thought, narrated with russell's characteristic inability to conceal when he thinks somebody is an idiot.
i had accumulated philosophers as isolated islands through essays, arguments and internet wandering; this was an attempt to finally acquire the map, family feuds and historical sequence joining them.
the rational actor encounters a man who would rather ruin his own life than permit the model the satisfaction of predicting him.
spite, resentment, self-sabotage and the irreducible remainder left over after every elegant account of enlightened self-interest—evil-autism's nineteenth-century patron saint, perhaps.
meaning does not make suffering good; it does make it survivable.
less as abstract existentialism than as a question i have had cause to take rather seriously: what remains available when circumstance has removed comfort, certainty, status and most ordinary forms of agency.
the difficulty is not knowing the obvious; it is remembering it while stuck in traffic with other people.
attention as moral practice, default interpretation as a kind of prison, and the tiny but real freedom involved in deciding that somebody else's behaviour need not immediately become a referendum on you.
the obstacle is not under your control; your refusal to stop acting as though it should be, regrettably, is.
stoicism has never interested me much as ornamental ancient wisdom. it has interested me as emergency architecture: proportion, self-command, pain, and the retrieval of whatever agency remains after reality has declined to cooperate.
the productivity problem is, inconveniently, that you are going to die—not that you haven't found the right notion template.
an increasingly necessary corrective to my old productivity-maxxing temperament: optimisation can become a very sophisticated refusal to accept finitude, trade-offs and the scandalous impossibility of doing every worthwhile thing.
how blinking lights become logic and logic becomes the machine you are currently pretending is magic.
part of the software return project at its most foundational: descending beneath frameworks until representation, circuits, memory and instruction stop appearing as arbitrary layers and become one continuous machine.
everything the framework politely hid from you, now with addresses, caches, processes, and consequences.
i could write applications while remaining scandalously abstracted from the computer actually executing them; this is the remedial descent into memory, linking, processes, virtual memory and why innocent-looking code becomes materially expensive.
write objects that know less, ask politely, and do not make tomorrow pay interest on today's confidence.
the difference between code merely functioning and code remaining hospitable to change—dependencies, messages, interfaces, and the cost of pretending we already know what the future version will require.
the graphs go down, violence becomes less ordinary, and the declinist in me is forced into an annoying meeting with the data.
i am temperamentally receptive to civilisational decline stories, which is precisely why the strongest empirical case against the uncomplicated version deserves a hearing. progress may be contingent without being imaginary.
the map ate the territory, got a linkedin, and began posting thought leadership.
the hyperreality essay, obviously, but also the broader horror that metrics, profiles, institutional language and representations can cease merely failing to describe reality and begin replacing the thing outright.
meaning is use, which is obvious right up until philosophers isolate a word from every human practice that made it mean anything.
the language side of the hyperreality work, the argument engine, and my recurring suspicion that many apparently metaphysical problems begin with words being made to do unpaid overtime outside their ordinary games.
the secular west finally escaped christianity and, in a fit of absent-mindedness, took most of christian morality with it.
i had been circling the possibility that modern secular morality is less post-christian than christianity rendered invisible—metaphysics rejected, moral intuitions retained, and their provenance forgotten with tremendous confidence.
roman letters for when your nervous system has declared the empire fallen.
stoic writing as something closer to first aid than lifestyle decoration; not a scented quotation about resilience, but a means of shrinking catastrophe back down to the part of life one can still act upon.
industrial civilisation solved the problem of human power by making almost everybody powerless before the system granting it.
the technological-system question in its ugliest form: tools become environments, convenience becomes dependence, and the scale of ordinary human agency contracts even as aggregate capacity expands beyond recognition.
modern morality retained all the words, misplaced the grammar, and now conducts itself mostly by emphatic vibes.
this is more or less the master text behind my suspicion that modern moral argument endlessly invokes inherited conclusions after discarding the metaphysical, social and teleological structure which once made them mutually intelligible.
the sovereign modern individual has a suspiciously christian birth certificate.
the genealogy of western individualism, particularly the possibility that secular liberal personhood did not spring fully formed from reason but emerged through christian moral innovations it later forgot.
the self as project, product, audience, and eventually full-time crisis manager.
modernity, personal branding, status performance, institutional decay and the strange psychic burden of becoming both the commodity and the consumer assigned to review it. hard to imagine why this appealed to me.
not the story of god disappearing, but of belief becoming one possibility among many and therefore newly difficult.
the immanent frame and the historical production of unbelief: not 'people got smarter and god died', but the much stranger story of how belief and disbelief both became conscious options requiring explanation.
god, properly understood, is not a very large object hiding somewhere inside the universe—much to the dismay of both reddit atheists and half the christians arguing with them.
an attempt to encounter classical theism on its own terms rather than through the modern picture of god as a celestial super-object competing with scientific explanations for causal territory.
one of history's great minds writes a book-length prayer about memory, desire, sin, and why understanding yourself is not the same as being able to save yourself.
fallibility, grace, confession, pride, memory and the frankly inconvenient gulf between correctly diagnosing one's errors and acquiring the power not to reenact them.
society gathers, becomes briefly ecstatic, declares something sacred, and discovers it has been worshipping itself the whole time.
the secular-religion thread: collective effervescence, taboo, identity and the apparent inability of godless communities to remain godless for more than fifteen minutes before producing a sacred object and several heretics.
the mass movement as a very efficient means of escaping the unbearable burden of being a particular person.
political religion and the psychology of self-renunciation: doctrine matters, but perhaps less than the offer of identity, absolution and participation in history to people whose private lives have become intolerable.
when heaven is abolished, politics starts taking applications for the role.
voegelin's immanentised eschaton is dangerously close to becoming a universal solvent in my head: salvation relocated into history, politics becoming theology while furiously insisting that it is merely policy.
liberty survives not because elites become good, but because no elite is permitted to become final.
elite theory without the bedtime story: organised counter-power, circulation and institutional rivalry as more reliable safeguards of freedom than hoping the ruling class experiences a mass conversion to virtue.
capitalists and workers kept arguing while the managers quietly inherited the earth.
bureaucratic power beneath the official left-right and public-private categories; the people who neither formally own nor merely labour, yet somehow retain custody of every consequential lever.
the elites secede, retain administrative custody of everyone else, then pathologise the abandoned for noticing.
elite exit without relinquishment of rule: meritocratic self-congratulation, managerial culture and institutions increasingly estranged from the populations they continue to govern in their own alleged interests.
the state simplified reality until it became governable, then wondered why the living parts died.
perhaps the cleanest institutional version of my map-territory obsession: legibility is necessary, powerful and perpetually tempted to murder whatever cannot survive being reduced to the schema.
robert moses discovers that sovereignty can be poured in concrete and buried inside procedure.
power interests me most when it ceases looking like power. infrastructure, authorities, technical decisions and patient procedural control can outlast the theatrical politics supposedly governing them.
the ruling idea wins properly when it ceases to feel like an idea at all and returns as common sense.
hegemony, language and the pre-political work by which one worldview becomes the neutral background against which every alternative is made to appear deranged. cathedrals everywhere, etc.
the secular state changed the names on the theology and kept the machinery.
sovereignty, exception and the suspicion that modern political concepts are not secular replacements for theology so much as theological structures wearing administrative lanyards.
politics begins at the point where 'enemy' is no longer figurative language.
an attempt to identify what liberal procedural language cannot dissolve: the genuinely political distinction which persists beneath administration, debate and the hope that every conflict is ultimately a misunderstanding.
a politics built around the mildly unfashionable idea that everyone is wrong, especially the people with a theory of history.
fallibilism made institutional: no authorised interpreters of history, no final political knowledge, and systems designed around the certainty that rulers and theories alike will eventually need correction.
nietzsche asks where your conscience came from, who it serves, and why it smells faintly of revenge.
morality not merely as a set of propositions to evaluate, but as an artefact with a genealogy, psychology and function—what sort of life produced the value, and what work is it secretly doing?
philosophy with the motives left in and the safety rails thrown overboard.
part of the same suspicion that arguments carry autobiographies they do not disclose; philosophers describe reality, certainly, but also very often confess themselves in the shape of the description.
problems are inevitable; the interesting question is whether the civilisation permits criticism long enough for solutions to remain possible.
an attempt to retain technological optimism and explanatory ambition without relapsing into the rationalist fantasy that error itself can finally be engineered out of fallible human beings.
normal science proceeds peacefully until the anomalies unionise and the paradigm collapses.
models, lock-in, disciplinary perception and the awkward social process by which evidence becomes visible as an anomaly rather than politely discarded as noise by the reigning framework.
you can explain every function and consciousness remains sitting there, annoyingly still having the explanation.
the hard problem, materialism's explanatory limits, and the present AI-era temptation to treat behavioural success as though ontology had already been settled by benchmark.
the map-making hemisphere forgets it was an emissary and begins issuing decrees to the territory.
abstraction versus lived reality, analytic control versus context, and the possibility that modernity systematically rewards a partial cognitive style while stripping it of the means to perceive its own partiality.
the part of software where the abstractions stop being polite and admit the data has to live somewhere.
the technical return curriculum in one forbidding brick: databases, replication, partitioning, consistency, reliability and the systems reality underneath framework-level fluency.