Memorable Stuff I Read This Week
The Artificial State honored no boundaries and conferred no rights. Its emergence was inseparable from the deepening connections of transportation, communication, and trade that became known, in the 1980s, as globalization, and ushered in an era of declining faith in democracy all around the world. The opening of the internet in the 1990s and the start of social media in the early to mid-2000s — Facebook was launched in 2004, Twitter in2006 — for all their much-ballyhooed promise of participatory democracy, had by the 2010s begun to undermine democracy and promote autocracy, abetting a process political scientists call “democratic erosion,” the slow falling away of democratic norms, practices, and expectations.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
for the trees are tinder
and the earth grays over
above a death mare’s mane blocks the sun
searing still in orange glow
how terrible the psychedelic colors at sunset
how terrible the smoldering
and still we did not lose our eyes
seeing the blaze for wonder
what was and what might be
— Raina J. León / “what we lose in the fire a blown tire makes us see”
Whenever I went to the dump that is Chornobyl, I always dressed like an angry bum from Pol Pot’s guerilla unit . . . It always feels weird to climb over the barbed-wire fence in the winter: the snow crunches under your feet, the bags rustle in your boots, but you listen to those sounds and don’t even care about being ambushed by the police. It’s no wonder. After all, what kind of an idiot would stand in the middle of the Chornobyl forest when the snow is waist-high and it’s twenty below?
— Markiyan Kamysh / Stalking the Atomic City: Life Among the Decadentband the Depraved of Chernobyl
These streets bury its shame and hoards
Its wealth in bank bailouts and stock buybacks
While the rest of us live paycheck-to-paycheck
In search of the American Dream
— Genny Lim / “Century of Rage”
More than 450,000 people are projected to die from the additional heat brought by the super El Niño by February, according to estimates by climate scientists.
The toll is on top of the early deaths resulting from temperatures already driven up by the climate crisis. It will strike across the globe, from Indonesia to India, and Nigeria to the US. Many further deaths are expected from the droughts, wildfires and flooding that El Niños bring.
— Damian Carrington / “Huge El Niño projected to cause more than 450,000 deaths by February” / The Guardian
On the day when they voted to roll up
the map and burn up the calendar, voted
to spend all that remains of the earth’s
endowment right now on themselves,
I thought I should cry, but I’d run out
of handkerchiefs,
run out of tears.
— Robert Bringhurst / “The Day After Tuesday”
A 2022 report analyzing nearly five hundred large-scale studies undertaken around the world concluded that social media was associated with both rising polarization and a declining trust in democratic government in nations as different as Austria and Rwanda, Sweden and Ukraine. The more established the democracy, the greater the effect. Over much the same stretch of time, people in the most tightly wired parts of the world became lonelier and angrier and at once more susceptible to conspiracy theories, hoaxes, and frauds, and likelier to believe that much of what they had once thought was true and real was false and fake. Nothing was to be relied upon.
Only machines.
— Jill Lepore / The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State
What I’m Listening To:
Ride the darkness somewhere new
Try to unlearn the things you knew
There’s a road out of here
Leads to nowhere
— Beck / “Disappearing Act”
