We live in an age of instant answers, but it always strikes me that wisdom moves differently. It requires ambiguity, resistance, and time. The very things our culture is learning to avoid.
Leo Rogers in the article discusses a pervasive global crisis in self-esteem.
https://psyche.co/ideas/the-masculinity-crisis-is-actually-a-crisis-of-self-esteem
I’d also argue that the self-esteem crisis in men fuels gender wars. As traditional roles fade, many struggle for worth, leading to resentment and backlash. In unequal societies, where status competition is fierce, this only deepens gender tensions.
Klein and Wang critique hyper-optimization for fueling sameness, urging friction and diversity to keep culture dynamic.
This too me echoes Mark Fisher’s take where capitalism recycles aesthetics instead of pushing for something new.
https://zine.kleinkleinklein.com/p/hyper-optimization-cultural-singularity
Watching the Trump administration play fast and loose with systemic structure, centralizing control, breaking coordination channels, and short-circuiting regulatory functions, is a cybernetician’s dream/nightmare. Feedback loops? Ignored, distorted, or weaponized. A wild experiment in viability.
https://www.arxiv.org/abs/2412.12140
This study reveals that AI models like Meta's Llama31-70B-Instruct and Alibaba's Qwen25-72B-Instruct can now self-replicate without human input, obviously posing new risks.
It makes me think about the difference between computing power, which grows exponentially, and our brains, which remain largely unchanged. One can't help but think that with advances like this, it is only a matter of time before the gap is bridged, reinforcing the urgency for governance as self-replicating AI becomes a reality. (via Sentiers)
The growing desire for personal convenience accelerates the erosion of democracy.
Civic virtue is vital to democracy, yet our pursuit of convenience weakens active participation and accountability, undermining the democratic process.
After @july included me in his list, quite a lot of new farcasters visits me. Hi to all of you! 👋
I also post in /foresight, do stop by! Looking forward to engaging with everybody!
D20 is a governance game developed by a group of researchers from the Metagov community. Using the d20 Discord bot, groups can come together to embark on a governance “quest”, where they make lightweight decisions about their group and experience varied mechanisms of decision-making.
https://metagov.github.io/d20-governance/?utm_source=substack&utm_medium=email
Citrus trees don’t die of drought, disease, or pests. They die of overabundance. In their final spring, they bloom wildly, filling the air with a sharp sweetness. Lemons ripen all at once, snapping branches under their weight: abundance before death.
