Anger is the binding agent of every mob, from the scale of a few to the scale of a few billion. It feels good to be angry, and when we’re in it we don’t want to let it go. Our greatest defense against madness, then, would be calming down while on some powerful, primal level wanting the opposite. This is something small groups of men have struggled with for as long as we’ve existed, but it has not been until the last few years that a single fit of rage could almost instantly infect the planet. Social media has been an integral part of culture for a period of time that represents seconds of human existence, and we have already seen the emergence of globally-destabilizing conflict because of it. Conflicts of this kind will continue to emerge, and there is no reason to believe we’ve seen the most destructive of them. For the first time in history, we actually have to find a way to manage our impulse toward meme-induced hysteria. At its simplest, a little mental hygiene might be helpful. The notion we all suffer from confirmation bias needs to be normalized, and discussed. When relaying some emotionally-charged story, it is worth relaying first how this kind of story makes you feel in general, and the sort of things you might be missing. Admittedly, in the fever of rage, this will be incredibly difficult. But what about the other end? When receiving a piece of information that evokes anger, could one reflect on the bias of a source, be it a journalist or a friend? Who is the bearer of this bad news, and what are their values? If you had to guess, how would you think they wanted this piece of information to make you feel? Angry? To what end? Getting comfortable with being wrong would also help, as would expecting people around us to be wrong. This, by the way, is something that happens more than it doesn’t. People are constantly wrong. Stories are constantly corrected. That we are not yet skeptical of every new piece of information we receive, with so much evidence all around us now that misinformation is not the exception but the rule, is indication that skepticism of this kind is simply not something we are meaningfully capable of on our own. But might there be some solution in technology?

It would be helpful to know when we’re spending an unusual amount of time focused on a topic. Is this a new interest, or is it an obsession? More importantly, how many other people are focused on the topic? Is that number growing? How fast? I’m not sure what a fire drill for global madness looks like, but an alarm alone — just the knowledge we may be in the middle of a mass hysteria — is something Google could build in a week, and it would have tremendous benefit. The early-stage introduction of a counter-narrative to rapid social sharing would introduce doubt, and that would encourage self-reflection. This would blunt the spread of any possible madness and invite closer examination of the meme from anyone still sober enough to think it over critically. I can’t imagine anything more frustrating while overcome with meme-induced hysteria than a pop-up warning that I might not be thinking clearly. But of course this is precisely when I’d most need the warning. A tool like this would undoubtedly produce all manner of embarrassing false positives. But a goofy, minor irritation is a small price to pay for averting cataclysm. We need to name these concepts, we need to talk about them, and we need to make the act of calming down a cherished cultural institution. We also need to do it now.

https://www.piratewires.com/p/jump-23d06adb4cb7

NYT:

Pew Research:

For decades, researchers have regarded roughly 6,000-year-old Mesopotamian sites, in what’s now Iraq, Iran and Syria, as the world’s first cities. Those metropolises arose after agriculture made it possible to feed large numbers of people in year-round settlements. Mesopotamian cities featured centralized governments, bureaucratic agencies that tracked and taxed farm production, and tens of thousands of city dwellers packed into neighborhoods connected by dusty streets. Social inequality was central to Mesopotamia’s urban ascent, with a hierarchy of social classes that included rulers, bureaucrats, priests, farmers and slaves.

Over the last decade, however, researchers have increasingly questioned whether the only pathway to urban life ran through Mesopotamian cities. Chapman, along with Durham colleague Marco Nebbia and independent, Durham-based scholar Bisserka Gaydarska, is part of a movement that views low-density, spread-out settlements in several parts of the world as alternative form of early city life.

https://www.sciencenews.org/article/ancient-urban-megasites-may-reshape-history-first-cities

That evidence and more—from the Ice Age, from later Eurasian and Native North American groups—demonstrate, according to Graeber and Wengrow, that hunter-gatherer societies were far more complex, and more varied, than we have imagined. The authors introduce us to sumptuous Ice Age burials (the beadwork at one site alone is thought to have required 10,000 hours of work), as well as to monumental architectural sites like Göbekli Tepe, in modern Turkey, which dates from about 9000 B.C. (at least 6,000 years before Stonehenge) and features intricate carvings of wild beasts. They tell us of Poverty Point, a set of massive, symmetrical earthworks erected in Louisiana around 1600 B.C., a “hunter-gatherer metropolis the size of a Mesopotamian city-state.” They describe an indigenous Amazonian society that shifted seasonally between two entirely different forms of social organization (small, authoritarian nomadic bands during the dry months; large, consensual horticultural settlements during the rainy season). They speak of the kingdom of Calusa, a monarchy of hunter-gatherers the Spanish found when they arrived in Florida. All of these scenarios are unthinkable within the conventional narrative.

The overriding point is that hunter-gatherers made choices—conscious, deliberate, collective—about the ways that they wanted to organize their societies: to apportion work, dispose of wealth, distribute power. In other words, they practiced politics. Some of them experimented with agriculture and decided that it wasn’t worth the cost. Others looked at their neighbors and determined to live as differently as possible—a process that Graeber and Wengrow describe in detail with respect to the Indigenous peoples of Northern California, “puritans” who idealized thrift, simplicity, money, and work, in contrast to the ostentatious slaveholding chieftains of the Pacific Northwest. None of these groups, as far as we have reason to believe, resembled the simple savages of popular imagination, unselfconscious innocents who dwelt within a kind of eternal present or cyclical dreamtime, waiting for the Western hand to wake them up and fling them into history.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/11/graeber-wengrow-dawn-of-everything-history-humanity/620177/

And a fun article on Zorn…

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/music-features/john-zorn-jazz-metal-interview-naked-city-1015329/

This is probably the best thing I’ve ever seen on Zorn’s ‘Cobra’ musical improvisation game.

A pretty decent profile of Laurie Anderson.

One winter day, Anderson invited me to her studio at the end of Canal Street, right where it meets the Hudson River. She has been working here since the 1970s — since the downtown glory days of Warhol, Basquiat, CBGB, Patti Smith, the Ramones, David Bowie, etc. etc. etc. I sat there petting her scruffy terrier, Little Will, while Anderson talked to me about basically everything in the universe. She told me about ponies (“If ponies were people they’d all be in jail”) and donkeys (“They have the best memory in the animal kingdom”) and about how the Hudson River is full of seahorses — not the elegant tropical wiggly jewels that you tend to see in aquariums, but New York City seahorses. Survivors. “Funky, brown, crusty,” she said.

https://www.nytimes.com/2021/10/06/magazine/laurie-anderson.html

I’m not necessarily convinced by Stoller’s approach to solutions, which is always lots more regulation, but he’s great at highlighting important problems.

There is a third explanation for inflation and shortages, and it’s not simply that the Fed has printed too much money or that Covid introduced a supply shock (though both are likely factors.) It’s a political and policy story. The consolidation of power over supply chains in the hands of Wall Street, and the thinning out of how we make and produce things over forty years in the name of efficiency, has made our economy much less resilient to shocks. These shortages are the result.

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/counterfeit-capitalism-why-a-monopolized

If this is a moment for power structures to be challenged, and old orthodoxies to be overturned, then understanding the difference between economic radicalism and social radicalism is vital. This could also be described as the difference between identity and class. That is not to dismiss the former: Many groups face discrimination on both measures. Women might not be hired because “Math isn’t for girls” or because an employer doesn’t want to pay for maternity leave. An employer may not see the worth of a minority applicant, because they don’t speak the way the interviewer expects, or that applicant might be a second-generation immigrant whose parents can’t subsidize them through several years of earning less than a living wage.

All this I’ve learned from feminism, where the contrast between economic and social radicalism is very apparent. Equal pay is economically radical. Hiring a female or minority CEO for the first time is socially radical. Diversity training is socially radical, at best. Providing social-housing tenants with homes not covered in flammable cladding is economically radical. Changing the name of a building at a university is socially radical; improving on its 5 percent enrollment rate for Black students—perhaps by smashing up the crazy system of legacy admissions—would be economically radical.

How Capitalism Drives Cancel Culture

Someone who has been made uncomfortable now has multiple paths through which to demand redress. This has given rise to a new facet of life in universities, nonprofits, and corporate offices: the committees, HR departments, and Title IX administrators who have been appointed precisely to hear these kinds of complaints. Anyone who feels discomfort now has a place to go, someone to talk to.

Some of this is, I repeat, positive: Employees or students who feel they have been treated unfairly no longer have to flounder alone. But that comes at a cost. Anyone who accidentally creates discomfort—whether through their teaching methods, their editorial standards, their opinions, or their personality—may suddenly find themselves on the wrong side of not just a student or a colleague but an entire bureaucracy, one dedicated to weeding out people who make other people uncomfortable. And these bureaucracies are illiberal. They do not necessarily follow rules of fact-based investigation, rational argument, or due process. Instead, the formal and informal administrative bodies that judge the fate of people who have broken social codes are very much part of a swirling, emotive public conversation, one governed not by the rules of the courtroom or logic or the Enlightenment but by social-media algorithms that encourage anger and emotion, and by the economy of likes and shares that pushes people to feel—and to perform—outrage. The interaction between the angry mob and the illiberal bureaucracy engenders a thirst for blood, for sacrifices to be offered up to the pious and unforgiving gods of outrage—a story we see in other eras of history, from the Inquisition to the more recent past.

https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/2021/10/new-puritans-mob-justice-canceled/619818/