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It’s probably just random flux or luck, but that doesn’t make it feel less weird. As the psychologist Rob Brotherton argues in Suspicious Minds, “Our ancestors’ legacy to us is a brain programmed to see coincidence and infer cause.” And what that means, Brotherton says, is that “sometimes, it would seem, buying into a conspiracy is the cognitive equivalent of seeing meaning in randomness.”
By trying to become an elephant, you might become a much more thriving human.
As our experience has shown, that freedom was illusory. The system is still there. It pushed back. The power structure remains. There are just some new people at the apex, prime among them the techlords flush with monopoly profits. They are as sensitive to criticism as any other ruling class, but with the confidence that they can transform and disrupt anything, from government to the press.
I was having my second Frogasm of the night when dinner got weird.
For the city’s homeless population, estimated to be at least 157
If the computer can't read the address because of water damage or your grandmother's ornate script, it sends a picture of the address to a computer at the Remote Encoding Center.
Huge swathes of people, in Europe and North America in particular, spend their entire working lives performing tasks they secretly believe do not really need to be performed. The moral and spiritual damage that comes from this situation is profound. It is a scar across our collective soul. Yet virtually no one talks about it.
The end result is the same person who spends 127 hours per year on Instagram (the global average) complains that she has “no time” for reading.
Fahlman’s creation took on a life of its own, along with a suddenly spastic use of exclamation marks, as people figured out how to communicate via the oft-problematic medium of email. Angry or inappropriate emails sent before the sender had time to think, passive-aggressive emails, and emotionally ambiguous emails were—still are—common inbox issues. (I’ve spent hours angsting over the meaning of a “Thanks.” What is it about the period that makes it sound so insincere?) But Fahlman wasn’t exactly pleased with the popularity of his invention. In the early ’90s he told the Boston Globe: “I had no idea that I was starting something that would soon pollute all the world’s communication channels.”
Sometimes I’ll get a call or email from someone five years after the last contact and I’ll think, oh right, I hated that person. But they would never have known, of course. Let’s see if I still hate them. Very often I find that I don’t. Or that I hated them for a dumb reason. Or that they were having a bad day.