Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Rather, the secret of our success is that we are talented at using information to connect lots of individuals. Unfortunately, this ability often goes hand in hand with believing in lies, errors, and fantasies. This is why even technologically advanced societies like Nazi Germany and the Soviet Union have been prone to hold delusional ideas, without their delusions necessarily weakening them. Indeed, the mass delusions of Nazi and Stalinist ideologies about things like race and class actually helped them make tens of millions of people march together in lockstep.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

When the prison door
bangs shut behind your back—
that’s when you think about freedom.

— Tomica Bajsić / “When You Hit Yourself with an Axe While Chopping Wood”

For someone openly campaigning to get a Nobel Peace Prize, Donald Trump has been going about it in an unusual way. Early last month, the President proclaimed in a press conference that the Department of Defense would thereafter be known as the Department of War. At the same briefing, the presumed new Secretary of War, Pete Hegseth, promised that the armed forces will deliver “maximum lethality” that won’t be “politically correct.” That was a few days after Trump had ordered the torpedoing of a small boat headed out of Venezuela, which he claimed was piloted by “narco-terrorists,” killing all eleven people on board, rather than, for instance, having it stopped and inspected. After some military-law experts worried online that this seemed uncomfortably close to a war crime, Vice-President J. D. Vance posted, “Don’t give a shit.”

— Benjamin Wallace-Wells / “Donald Trump, Pete Hegseth, and the ‘War from Within’ “ / The New Yorker

I just remembered, remembered
freedom was life’s great lie,

remembered body is another
word for cage, remembered

night knew my name before
I ever had reason to fear.

— Alison C. Rollins / “Springtime Again”

American white supremacists have tried to justify their position by appealing to various hallowed texts, most notably the U.S. Constitution and the Bible. The U.S. Constitution originally legitimized racial segregation and the supremacy of the white race, reserving full civil rights for white people and allowing the enslavement of Black people. The Bible not only sanctified slavery in the Ten Commandments and numerous other passages but also placed a curse on the offspring of Ham-the alleged forefather of Africans-saying that “the lowest of slaves will he be to his brothers” (Genesis 9:25).

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

The rubric of our history is synonymous with loss.
But haven’t we built such beautiful homes
on the hillside coming down.
Empires of one-one brick and pillar post.
Empires of galvanise and dirt.

— Anthony Joseph / “Empires”

Information is the glue that holds networks together, and when people are fed bad information, they are likely to make bad decisions, no matter how wise and kind they personally are. For tens of thousands of years, Sapiens built and maintained large networks by inventing and spreading fictions, fantasies, and mass delusions-about gods, about enchanted broomsticks, about Al, and about a great many other things. While each individual human is typically interested in knowing the truth about themselves and the world, large networks bind members and create order by relying on fictions and fantasies. That’s how we got, for example, to Nazism and Stalinism. These were exceptionally powerful networks, held together by exceptionally deluded ideas. As George Orwell famously put it, ignorance is strength.

— Yuval Noah Harari / Nexus: A Brief History of Information Networks from the Stone Age to AI

What I’m Listening To:

Like Saint Joan
Doing a cool jerk
Oh, I want you
Like a kanga roo
Ooh

— Big Star / “Kanga Roo”