2025-11-19
la rumba del perdón
Jasmine Sun interviews Celine Nguyen on the effects of technology on artistic creation and their communities. I feel like complaints about how the internet has destroyed the economic livelihood of artists are ignoring that art has always been a profession reserved for a select few. In the recent past, there was an association between community belonging and the expectation of a relatively stable livelihood, because access their the distribution network of the elite creative community was determined by one’s status within those circles. Now that the internet provides direct access to consumers, this is no longer the case, which is presumably where the general resentment towards selling one’s self and work comes from. But it ignores that as a result, access to artistic culture has become democratized, which means that even if the monopolies were to be returned, the amount of funding available would still be unable to provide for everyone who now considers themselves a member. Personally, this isn’t entirely a bad thing, because when writers are only writers, I feel we get way too much writing about writing. Related, Felice on how she relates with the Substack community, because now that community is no longer directly tied to funding, which groups one chooses is now indicative of one’s personal identifications and aspirations1.
Jessica has an interesting piece on Romantasy, one of the many pieces of discourse spinning out of the Daniel Yadin piece in The Drift. It’s interesting that she uses the apparent lack of regard for human life2 to question the politics of the genre, because this particular trait is probably path-dependence of the grimdark turn. But it occurs to me that perhaps a primary reason for the distinction between literary and mass-market popularity (as described by Naomi Kanakia) is that genre fiction tends to espouse conservative values: romance in hetero-normative relations, and fantasy in the divine right of kings and chosen people in general.
Lydia Laurenson on doing journalism from within or for a community, which describes a lot about why I enjoy the podcast Heavyweight.
Defender on bias in reporting. I feel like people who say they want “both sides” or “all the views” are just as confused as those who are asking for the authoritative story, because most worthwhile topics have far too many viewpoints to be properly covered3, which means the selection of which ones to include is itself an authoritative position.
The Argument hosts a Mad Libs between Nat Purser and Joel Wertheimer on Section 230. It’s weird to be reading what seems to me to be an old and closed argument, one which a couple years ago was an antitrust attempt at forcing the aggregators to split apart to handle their “diseconomies of scale”. That argument has always confused me, because the most likely endstate seemed to me to be a migration of control towards the backend infrastructure (relevant discussion of recent Cloudflare outage). But now that we have AI, it’s very hard for me to understand how anyone can think the implementation of “harm-reducing algorithms” will end with things going well in our current political environment.
Visa on integrating seemingly disparate ideas into a coherent whole. Guy on the reverberations of an idea through the information landscape.
Deepmind releases Gemini 3.0, with claims that performance improvements can still be improved through additional pretraining.
Timothy Lee on Waymo expansion plans with the beginning of freeway service. Related, Ben Thompson on the potential for robotaxis to dramatically improve the quality of life in suburbia. I’ve been saying for a while now that Waymo could easily win the political battle over self-driving by doing this, but for some reason chooses not to.
Jo Bervoets defends the philosophers of the Enlightenment against claims of moral relativism. This is by analogy to extending grace to grandma, so it’s also worth reading Drunk Wisconsin directly on that topic, about Solzhenitsyn’s support for Putin.
Celine mentions that she pivoted from tech to culture as a means to leave the standard path and achieve self-actualization, but ironically this itself is increasingly becoming the standard path. Similarly, I have a theory that the reason Asian-Americans all have trauma isn’t because of their upbringing or sense of otherness, but rather because they are just way too good at doing what is expected of them, and that includes fixating on all the ways that their parents and society have ruined them. (epistemic certainty 60%, although it’s hard to tell, as the more I identify with a complaint the less sympathy I have with it). Related, see Duncan Sabien (partial paywall) on the Aella theory of trauma.
Gurjot Brar interviews Elena Bridgers on motherhood in hunter-gatherer societies, and Lyman Stone has a post specifically on her inter-birth interval claims. This topic is one of those where I feel like inter-group variation means there isn’t really that much to draw conclusions about, but I specifically want to mention high birth rates as the historical answer to high (infant) morality rates as something which most attempts at grimdark for some reason do not include, despite the ostensible reason for the genre’s grittiness being increased realism. For example, the Practical Guide to Evil author has another webfic called Pale Lights, which I really could not take seriously because there seem to be no indications that children are being born despite people constantly dying left and right.
For example, Fred Gao has an interesting description of how the Chinese are interpreting the recent comments by Takaichi Sanae; then consider this article by Eleanor Randolph in ChinaTalk on the recent Chinese diaspora in Tokyo. This complexity is why I generally don’t take “one big idea to explain China”-style books very seriously (eg. Henry Oliver reviews Two Paths to Prosperity, John PSmith reviews The Everlasting Empire).