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Anton's avatar

Love seeing this intellectual constellation forming around The Unaccountability Machine and The Ordinal Society. There’s something quietly radical—and very needed—in how you, Fourcade, Healy, Davies, et al. are reframing tech critique away from the individual (Musk, Zuck, etc.) toward systems of valuation and decision-making. The social media crisis isn’t just about disinfo or moderation—it’s about how legitimacy, attention, and governance get computed.

The Herbert Simon reference in Brad DeLong’s piece hit hard. We’ve spent decades building systems that optimize signals, but not systems that understand what they’re signaling. And now we’re stuck with machines that are really good at measuring status but terrible at stewarding public goods.

Anyway—hope Friday’s conversation ends up recorded. You all are building a language for something deeper than tech backlash, and it’s exciting to watch that take shape.

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CHRIS's avatar

I'm just a civilian, but even I've recognized that social media are validation machines.

Status signifiers seem a relatively harmless method of social positioning - as opposed to physically beating up or killing your rivals, for example.

It's when those big pickup trucks and automatic rifles and bespoke suits and financial scams get turned on the rest of us...

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