We live in an incredible human capital crisis. The best people are working on the fakest things.
The upshot: whoever can provide people with real tasks will be able to break the deadlock and radically reshape our political economy.
Take the elite university: it sucks up the globe's talent and, instead of developing it, crushes its students' spirits and shunts them into mediocrity.
Now multiply this effect throughout most Western corporations, nonprofits, and civil services. A structural crime.
Apr 17, 2021 • 7 tweets • 1 min read
People are forgetting how to socialize. This is bc of a feedback loop where social interaction is at once both more documented than ever before, thanks to digital, and less common than ever before, thanks to atomization. (1/X)
By the 1970s, everyone already knew at what angle they looked best on camera. Today, everyone who grew up with a smartphone knows how we look—and sound—practically 24/7. We know how others see us.
Jan 10, 2021 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
It really blows my mind how in America you can drive around the downtown of what is ostensibly a city of two million people and see a grand total of like twelve pedestrians
The built environment of this country is such a soul crushing tragedy
The fact that “financial district” is an existing thing is so incredibly bleak
It’s also interesting to see the decaying concrete of the 60s and 70s give way to the new Pod Style of CAD-generated Reddit sports bars and slick oligarchic money containers
Oct 25, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
The horror of permanent quarantine is how perfectly it bleeds into American life—rising despair among the young, the isolation of the old, the failure of the state + society to proactively do anything, the empowerment of a professional caste to arbitrarily enforce the stagnation
I try to steer clear of doomerism but it truly feels like the future has been obliterated. The state cannot act, and society has not pushed for a way out. The only thing that works is the financial infra, which maintains a Minimum Viable Society while transferring wealth upwards
Aug 7, 2020 • 4 tweets • 1 min read
one of the paradoxes of elite overproduction is that the supposed mass “empowerment” of the young via education has done nothing to change the fact that we today actually have far less control over our lives than we used to
the university has not democratized power—elite colleges still dominate as they did a century ago—but what it has done is lend legitimacy to the disintegration of social fabric under the guise of social mobility
but ultimately, of course, credentials cannot mask collapse
Apr 19, 2020 • 7 tweets • 2 min read
Apropos of Andreessen:
We can’t let “the revenge of history” backfire
“IT’S TIME TO BUILD”—yes! But many “builders” are going to take this as an excuse to double down on doing exactly the same thing, when it is *they* who need to hear the message the most
it’s good that the Stagnation meme is trickling down. but if “builders” respond by self-righteously reshuffling the SaaS chairs on the deck of the Titanic, while wishing that “politics” and the pesky state would just fade into irrelevance, guess what—1971 all over again baby!
Jan 12, 2020 • 6 tweets • 2 min read
It’s truly humbling to find yourself a pale shadow of what it used to mean to be educated. And it’s not just misplaced nostalgia: this is the Harvard entrance exam for the year 1869. It’s INSANE
Why is the physical world slowly, inexorably turning into an airport?
a thread about elite narrowness
Take the subway from Grand Central to the Hudson Yards station and you will wonder: who the hell is any of this for?
Some point to the likes of the Chrysler Building and see a bygone, antiquated system of patronage and noblesse oblige. But this is mistaken:
Major civic architecture will always reflect the tastes of the cultural elites who facilitate its design and creation—including today.
