More me
if you want it. And why on earth should you want it?
I have a couple of posts brewing, but also some urgent writing deadlines coming through. Hence, there may or may not be a full new post this week, depending. In the meantime, a catch-all for some of the other stuff I have been up to here and there over the last several weeks, and an online event on Friday.
On Friday, I’ll be doing an online discussion, organized by James Cham, with Dan Davies and Marion Fourcade. It will likely focus on their respective books, The Unaccountability Machine and The Ordinal Society (with Kieran Healy), both of which I have written about, and both of which are excellent. A couple of weeks ago, Brad DeLong mentioned the mindmeld of Farrell, Shalizi, Gopnik and Evans, adding in Fourcade, Healy and Davies. This event was planned separately, but I do think that there is a shared terrain of ideas coming into view …
Speaking of which, here is Brad’s own synthesis of these ideas (the emphasis on Herbert Simon’s The Sciences of the Artificial in the closing sentences is exactly right imo).
I have a piece in the new issue of Democracy: “Reining in our Tech God-Emperors,” which talks about Elon Musk, and is where I really started to think about the ideas I developed at greater length in the “we’re getting the social media crisis wrong” essay from a couple of months back.
I’ve been on podcasts, mostly talking about Silicon Valley, deformed publics and DOGE.
With Paul Waldman, here.
With John Ganz and Max Read, here.
With Noah Kunin and Julian Sanchez, here.
And, for the moment, that’s it!
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.
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...