Memorable Stuff I Read This Week

Democracy collapses when humiliation becomes the organizing principle of politics, when revenge feels more righteous than inclusion.

— Richard A. Greenwald / “The Politics of Humiliation” / The Baffler

Friction is inevitable in human relationships. It can be uncomfortable, even maddening. Yet friction can be meaningful—as a check on selfish behavior or inflated self-regard; as a spur to look more closely at other people; as a way to better understand the foibles and fears we all share.

Neither Ani nor any other chatbot will ever tell you it’s bored or glance at its phone while you’re talking or tell you to stop being so stupid and self-righteous. They will never ask you to pet-sit or help them move, or demand anything at all from you. They provide some facsimile of companionship while allowing users to avoid uncomfortable interactions or reciprocity. “In the extreme, it can become this hall of mirrors where your worldview is never challenged . . . And so, although chatbots may be built on the familiar architecture of engagement, they enable something new: They allow you to talk forever to no one other than yourself.

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic

I don’t want to be a farmer but my mother was right
I should never have tried to rise out of the proletariat
Unless I can convince myself as Satan argues with Eve
That we are among a proletariat of poets of all the classes
Each ill-paid and surviving on nothing
Or on as little as one needs to survive
Steadfast as any farmer and fixed as the stars
Tenants of a vision we rent out endlessly

— Bernadette Mayer / “Essay”

And all that burgeoning physicality is held within yourself as a sort of secret, even as it is also the actual surface that you present to the world, so that you’re left absurdly exposed, unsure whether the world knows everything about you or nothing, because you have no way of knowing whether these experiences that you’re having are universal or entirely specific to you.

Perhaps it’s at that age, he thinks, that you first have the sense that you and your body are not entirely identical, that you occupy the same space without being quite the same thing, because some part of you seems to lag the transformation of your body, and to be surprised by it in the way that an outside observer might be, so that you no longer feel entirely at one with your body as you always had until then, and it starts to make sense to talk about it as if it was something slightly separate from yourself, even while you seem more powerless than ever to deny it whatever it wants. Although actually at first there seems to be no reason to deny it what it wants, whenever it wants it.

— David Szalay / Flesh

A violence exiting is still a violence.
After the genocide, the genocide.

— Fady Joudah / “After The Genocide”

Chatbots are like a wormhole into your own head. They always talk and never disagree. 

— Damon Beres / “The Age of Anti-Social Media is Here” / The Atlantic

The MAGA capture of the GOP signals the weakness of the institutional guardrails required to support democracy. Trump might not be exceptional, but the party’s embrace of illiberalism is. In fact, Trump built a movement through a carnival of humiliation and revenge that captured half the country and one of the two major parties.

— Richard A. Greenwald / “The Politics of Humiliation” / The Baffler

What I’m Listening To:

I must look like a dork
Me, naked with textbook poems, spout fountain against the Nazis
With a weird kind of sex symbol
In speeches that are big dance thumps, if we heard mortar shells
We’d cuss more in our songs
And cut down on guitar solos

— The Minutemen / “Political Song for Michael Jackson to Sing”