Platform companies have themselves hired economists to help conceptualize and manage the economies they’ve created. Google, Airbnb, Uber and Amazon have aggressively recruited professors and researchers to help understand what, exactly, they have on their hands, and how to expand, regulate and exploit it.
~ John Herrman
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The mother of excess is not joy but joylessness.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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The United States has cultivated a culture that prizes attention over empathy, fame over purpose, grievance over grace. The modern gunman doesn’t seek anonymity but immortality. He has learned that, in the land of viral violence, even murder guarantees an audience.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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Ideas born in the ’60s, subsequently refined and complicated by critical theory, postcolonial studies, and identity politics, are now so pervasive and unquestioned that they’ve become the instincts of students who are occupying their campuses today. Group identity assigns your place in a hierarchy of oppression. Between oppressor and oppressed, no room exists for complexity or ambiguity. Universal values such as free speech and individual equality only privilege the powerful. Words are violence. There’s nothing to debate.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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The liar is a person who uses the valid designations, the words, in order to make something which is unreal appear to be real.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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No country on earth bleeds like the U.S. No nation so wealthy, so wired, and so watched has grown so numb to slaughter. Schools, malls, churches, cinemas — each new massacre arrives like bad weather. Flags lower, candles burn and then life resumes. Until the next mass shooting occurs.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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Americans remain a wildly diverse, individualistic, aspirational people, with rising rates of mixed marriage, residential integration, and immigration from all over the world. Any rigid politics of identity—whether the left’s obsession with “marginalized communities,” or its sinister opposite in the reactionary paranoia of “white replacement theory”—is bound to shatter against the realities of American life.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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He who fights with monsters should look to it that he himself does not become a monster. And if you gaze long into an abyss, the abyss also gazes into you.
~ Friedrich Nietzsche
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The flannel, the Catholic mysticism, the bunker aesthetic — it’s all part of the shameless act. Underneath is a Machiavellian tactician who understands power not as something to dismantle, but to inhabit. Part P.T. Barnum, part Pat Buchanan, this is a man who preaches humility while flying private. Steve Bannon isn’t leading a rebellion. He is selling one.
~ John Mac Ghlionn via The Hill
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The post-liberal university is defined by a combination of moneymaking and activism. Perhaps the biggest difference between 1968 and 2024 is that the ideas of a radical vanguard are now the instincts of entire universities—administrators, faculty, students. They’re enshrined in reading lists and codes of conduct and ubiquitous clichés.
~ George Packer via The Atlantic
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