Very insightful, Ted! I have lived through the doom loop in several of seven careers I've had, from teaching guitar to writing copy to website development. The worst was working for a large corporation (to acquire decent health insurance and a pension), where innovation was discouraged routinely, and layers of middle managers slavishly devoted to their bonuses, based on Performance Management Systems that were altered frequently to find the financial sweet spot. It was risky to be known as "the creative type", and eventually, downsized to the street in one of the cyclical bloodlettings, wherein Human Resources had morphed to Human Capital.
On a personal level, one antidote to this kind of thought, if you're lucky, is to be with young children. They are fearless about risk, true scientists in a willingness to experiment and discard what didn't work without feeling downcast. I learned a great deal fathering a son when I was 40 and onwards!
Thank you for insightfully explaining the warning signs, Ted. The biggest risk is not taking one. Our culture, politics, media, academia, and big tech AI are all spewing the same copy pasta word salad. They have endless cash thanks to monopoly positions, shadowy NGOs, and subsidies from we the taxpayer. Something has to give. Buckle up, we will experience much turbulence as we try to escape the doom loop or get dragged into the Communist abyss kicking and screaming.
I'd be just as concerned with hyper capitalism and its disciples such as Musk, Bezos, Gates et al who don't pay their fair share of taxes, and even more concerned about the runaway military industrial complex that has drained the US since Eisenhower warned about it in the early 60s.
My intuition says follow the money supply and monetary policy, I don’t know much about the theory of it all . It seems to be incredibly debt and deficit heavy . Both sides are ignoring it right now. Will probably be a painful crash and burn.
Yes, we're following along patterns established for their own reasons long ago. We've lost any sense of what those original reasons were and just keep running in place, because we're too scared to think of something possibly risky but better.
Ending the radical monetary policy that started in the late 90s. These policies have led to one bubble after another and history's most extreme asset inflation, making housing, college, having children, etc., unaffordable to younger adults.
That might be the case since almost 20 percent of Norwegians vote communist, though they are truly more radical socialists. In fact, the current labor party government is dependent on SV, a communist party, to pass its legislation. The government has been a flop since day one, and will be voted out in the next national election in 2025.
Big deal! The government is ALWAYS voted out in the next national election. This is a natural law in a democracy where moderate centrists are always unhappy with the current politics, no matter who makes it.
George Carlin was a comedian, and a bit of a one trick pony so I’m not sure I’d use him as a reference for political definition. In your post above you make a distinction between communists and radical socialists, but you’re insisting that democratic socialists are the same as communists? I think that’s a significant contradiction.
All of that aside, why does working with another party to pass legislation make the Labour Party a flop?
Well, 'democratic socialists' is a contradiction in terms. Working with SV, or with Rødt for that matter, sends about the worst signals possible to the rest of the world, and one of several reasons the Norwegian krone is now a junk currency.
Oh yes, I've said that many times over the years. Sometime, taking a risk is just that. Other time, when decay and disintegration threaten, *not* taking a constructive risk is a big risk in itself.
Refer to this and the people running these companies that are afraid to innovate (and don’t feel compelled too) as living in a “velvet coffin.” Francis Frei HBS credit
The only thing fresh with new topics that I can find to read is… THIS SUBSTACK! Thank you Ted for continuing to bring fresh new ideas and culture into my life—sans the algorithm.
"So the algorithm that recommends music or videos on a web platform will never deliver a totally fresh and new experience for you. It always gives you something similar to what you consumed last week—or last month, or last year.... It gives you stale bread when you want a fresh loaf."
It's a small thing, but when I read this, it made me think of all the movie previews I've seen lately where the score is a pop song from the Eighties, only slowed down and distorted. For me, this is now the soundtrack of the doom loop.
And, as much as I loved and still love the 80s, we're much farther from them now than we were then from the 60s. Think of how much slower cultural change is today.
There's a lot here that's misleading. Yes, you get generation loss playing telephone, and you're limited to a single whispering in your ear--but compare that to the Hebrew scribe copying out the Tanakh shoulder to shoulder with two proofreaders making sure it's perfect, character by character. Compare that to the Rg Veda, a much longer document, memorized entirely orally, forward and backwards, two-words-forward-one-word-back, and by several other permutations, to make sure it was perfect and they all had the same recension.
Today's back-up memory (like a RAID setup) is a lot more like the Rg Veda. If you have three separate copies of a piece of data, and one gets damaged, you can tell which because it'll differ from the other two which can be used to restore the damaged one, perfectly, bit for bit. And with modern compression, bit-rot just isn't the issue--mess up a single one or zero, and in most cases, the entire file is corrupt, broken and irrecoverable, which is why you have those backups, anyway. The problem you're describing with things like JPEGs is a re-encoding issue. Re-encoding is by definition a transformation of data and not something you do in order to preserve it in its original form. It's like complaining that it's harder to see when you shrink a picture.
Finally, a single cherry-picked example of AI in a research context suffering from the telephone effect is far from conclusive. As an example, DALL-E, Open AI's premier image generator, is today trained on AI generated image captions, which led to a massive spike in improvement over human captions (As you might guess, human captions are just as likely to provide a snarky in-joke as an informative, long-form visual analysis.) Read the paper: (https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-3.pdf). If you knew AI well, you'd know there are very much cases where AI are used effectively to train AI.
I respect this blog tremendously, but please--you are the Honest Broker. We don't come to you to glean the grimy residue of social media for Pop anti-technology snippets. It goes against all your stated ethics to misinform people about an important technology you yourself don't understand simply because it's popular to do so. The kinds of critiques that are needed (of which there are many) need to be made by someone who really understands what's going on--someone who can trust to tell them the truth.
Ted's a good enough writer to appreciate the caution necessary when using a metaphor. At about the point where you start introducing technical information, certainly something as technical as a scientific monograph, it's safe to assume your audience is going to accept on good faith that you know what you're talking about and that caveats are necessary if you intend to suggest otherwise. Usually Ted is very good about plainly stating something like, "Don't take my word for it, I'm a cultural theorist and humanist, not a Silicon Valley gearhead."
Ted speaks very well to the cultural side of things, and I pretty much agree with his overall assessment in that domain. But if his intention is to be an honest broker, he can't be raising inaccurate fears about technical issues like generation loss in data and then dodging into areas of real expertise as if he were evenly suited to both areas--that pose of universal expertise is the very harbinger of the sort of misinformation he decries. Ted's too good of a journalist to be reporting on these issues merely to weave an unstated metaphor.
Excellent and enlightening perspective on the subject. You put into words a sensation that I deal with every day on a gut level - you go online and something just feels off, even if you consciously try to pull yourself out of the loop, the algorithm seems dead set on pulling you back in.
Generation loss indeed.
I try my best to create and insert content that may get into people's feeds and disrupt such loops, unfortunately I am merely shooting myself in the foot by doing so because the algorithm does not know what I am trying to do and only sees a piece of content that falls into the category of 'uncategorizable' and it feeds it to no one.
“‘Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
Yes, but in the meanwhile, a minority lives in a terrenal Heaven and the rest trying to survive. It is absurd just wait for the Doomsday. If the ship have holes, I'd try to repair them at all costs, no matter the rest of the crew says or do. And our common ship is this blue ball in the cosmos.
Greetings, I was really "grooving along" with your essay, when suddenly I ran into your unflattering description of "copyist" - ugh! I realize you may be talking about something entirely different. But just to clarify: for around 20 years of my life, I was a "music copyist" - and it was an entirely different profession than you describe. Basically, we copyists were editing and cleaning up music scores, improving the legibility and readability of the scores. I worked with many major composers and well-known jazz artists. When computer music notation software came into being, at first there were simply terrible scores being generated, because the first users didn't know how to lay out scores properly. Much has improved since then. But like all technology, tools in the hands of skilled users are going to turn out better products than the unskilled users.
Copyists are unfairly maligned. They were our critical link to the ancient world thanks to a dedicated literary cast, generally of monks working in scriptoria. The original documents are long gone, so most of what we know is thanks to the copyists. When the printing press automated copying, it was a whole different game.
Lawdy, you've got to be one of the first muses I encountered when I arrived at Berkeley in 1980 and embarked on co-curating with Trinity Arts Center THE LIVING ROOM coffee and cider house in basement of Trinity Arts Center (and United Methodist Church). Ernie Mansfield a dervish of winds instrumental and other delightfully mental on way up to City of Berkeley's summer enviro camp up high overlooking Reno basin in the mighty Sierras. Are you still recording your own stuff dear muse Ernie?
Ironic that we struggle to keep up with rates of change, yet many things aren't really changing—at least not for the better. A lot of our "innovation" is noisy, ineffectual, counterproductive, perhaps even futile.
The technical means change faster and faster ... while politics and society stagnate. The latter move far more slowly now than they did 40 or 60 years ago.
Some of what you wrote here reminds me of Grafton Tanner's book, Foreverism (Polity, 2023). He writes about how Hollywood destroyed nostalgia itself by constantly updating franchises to the point that they become hopelessly degraded and alienating their audiences. Politicians have done the same.
A quibble, but: You wrote "Therapists get rich from patients who keep repeating patterns from the past that have stopped working—or, in some cases, never worked" Therapists are not getting rich. A few are - there are outliers in any profession - but let's not casually state that therapists, as a group, are making big money. It's not accurate. We're just earning a living. trying to help folks.
~70% of industries in America have no competition. The music biz has just 3 players. They don’t have to compete, so they don't "risk" innovation. You can't find a better price, product, or job. And it produces robber barons - oligarchs. The fix is antitrust. The problems are not technology or culture. They're business and politics.
There are antitrust laws on the books; they need to be enforced. There are lots of anti-competitive business practices that they prohibit.
For example, price fixing, rigging bids, allocating markets, workers or customers are all illegal. Mergers that reduce competition are illegal, predatory pricing – where prices are set very low to drive competitors out of business, is illegal.
Some industries have virtual monopolies now. Google for internet search. Amazon for retail sales of a number of things. UMG, Sony, Warner in the music business. They don’t compete. There is currently a proposed merger between Kroger’s and Albertson’s. If that happens, they + Walmart would hold 70% of the grocery business in America. That’s being litigated this year.
Here's one doom loop--repetition of the past. The US Constitution is now almost three centuries old, and we have elaborate rituals and institutions to maintain it, starting with the presidential oath to preserve and defend it.
Yes, there's some play in the Supreme Court's rulings based on it--"originalists" now call the shots--but is that only amplifying the doom loop?
And then there's "make America great again...' and whatever the people who staged the coup against a sitting president come up with.
Basic question: when does "preserving" something unquestionably good carry with it a doom loop?
"The US Constitution is now almost three centuries old, and we have elaborate rituals and institutions to maintain it, starting with the presidential oath to preserve and defend it."
Not quite. The elaborate rituals and institutions are the material to make the Constitutional façade that is used, not to maintain it, but to hide the distortions and mutilations of the Constitution that strengthens the power of the state an weakens the protections given to its citizens.
Kind of like how the fiction that many American corporations are actually manufacturing items to sell for a profit instead of being investors in the stock market. Or the universities and colleges that are investment companies with a school attached.
This also helps to perpetuate the doom loops because the businesses, institutions, churches, hospitals, colleges, the military, governments, etc are not actually doing what they were created to do, but instead make money, often in shady, even illegal ways, for a handful of insiders while using what little that their institution's original functions are still done as cover. It is less work, safer, and more profitable to turn whatever it is into a grift instead of doing its original function.
The Constitution has ways of self-correction, like amendments. But notice that we don't pass those anymore. We just rely on our betters on the Supreme Court to do some interpretation hocus-pocus.
Preserve, change, reform are malleable to suit the user’s purpose; essentially without inherent meaning unless context provides one. All they deliver is a warm fuzzy feeling. We hear what we want to hear in them.
Wouldn't that be cutlerer-in-chief, or, maybe, Chief Cutlerer of the Utensil Tribe, a long-lost group thought to have resided in the far reaches of Foodland, itself a precurser to the current Food Substitute Land.
I've been aware of the doom loop of AIs training on AI-generated data. The more acute danger which I realize after reading this is th danger of algorithms training humans to produce certain kinds of content. An under-discussed phenomenon are content creators who get 'algorithm captured' after one of their posts goes viral and produce dozens more like it, trying to get that same rush.
This is why I enjoy so many of the authors on Substack, like Ted. Novel ideas and innovations save us from the repeating algorithmic degradation of the past.
Very insightful, Ted! I have lived through the doom loop in several of seven careers I've had, from teaching guitar to writing copy to website development. The worst was working for a large corporation (to acquire decent health insurance and a pension), where innovation was discouraged routinely, and layers of middle managers slavishly devoted to their bonuses, based on Performance Management Systems that were altered frequently to find the financial sweet spot. It was risky to be known as "the creative type", and eventually, downsized to the street in one of the cyclical bloodlettings, wherein Human Resources had morphed to Human Capital.
On a personal level, one antidote to this kind of thought, if you're lucky, is to be with young children. They are fearless about risk, true scientists in a willingness to experiment and discard what didn't work without feeling downcast. I learned a great deal fathering a son when I was 40 and onwards!
Thank you for insightfully explaining the warning signs, Ted. The biggest risk is not taking one. Our culture, politics, media, academia, and big tech AI are all spewing the same copy pasta word salad. They have endless cash thanks to monopoly positions, shadowy NGOs, and subsidies from we the taxpayer. Something has to give. Buckle up, we will experience much turbulence as we try to escape the doom loop or get dragged into the Communist abyss kicking and screaming.
I'd be just as concerned with hyper capitalism and its disciples such as Musk, Bezos, Gates et al who don't pay their fair share of taxes, and even more concerned about the runaway military industrial complex that has drained the US since Eisenhower warned about it in the early 60s.
Fair share is absolute political trope. The progressive media doom loop working well.
My intuition says follow the money supply and monetary policy, I don’t know much about the theory of it all . It seems to be incredibly debt and deficit heavy . Both sides are ignoring it right now. Will probably be a painful crash and burn.
Yes, we're following along patterns established for their own reasons long ago. We've lost any sense of what those original reasons were and just keep running in place, because we're too scared to think of something possibly risky but better.
Debt repudiation? Noncompliance? Peaceful resistance?
Ending the radical monetary policy that started in the late 90s. These policies have led to one bubble after another and history's most extreme asset inflation, making housing, college, having children, etc., unaffordable to younger adults.
Accepting higher inflation like a 3% target.
This is true! I just found a communist propaganda group poster in Oslo yesterday! 🤯😱
That might be the case since almost 20 percent of Norwegians vote communist, though they are truly more radical socialists. In fact, the current labor party government is dependent on SV, a communist party, to pass its legislation. The government has been a flop since day one, and will be voted out in the next national election in 2025.
Big deal! The government is ALWAYS voted out in the next national election. This is a natural law in a democracy where moderate centrists are always unhappy with the current politics, no matter who makes it.
SV are not communist, they are democratic socialist.
They are communist and they admit it. 'Democratic socialist' is just a euphemism, and as George Carlin once said, soft words.
George Carlin was a comedian, and a bit of a one trick pony so I’m not sure I’d use him as a reference for political definition. In your post above you make a distinction between communists and radical socialists, but you’re insisting that democratic socialists are the same as communists? I think that’s a significant contradiction.
All of that aside, why does working with another party to pass legislation make the Labour Party a flop?
Well, 'democratic socialists' is a contradiction in terms. Working with SV, or with Rødt for that matter, sends about the worst signals possible to the rest of the world, and one of several reasons the Norwegian krone is now a junk currency.
Oh yes, I've said that many times over the years. Sometime, taking a risk is just that. Other time, when decay and disintegration threaten, *not* taking a constructive risk is a big risk in itself.
Refer to this and the people running these companies that are afraid to innovate (and don’t feel compelled too) as living in a “velvet coffin.” Francis Frei HBS credit
The only thing fresh with new topics that I can find to read is… THIS SUBSTACK! Thank you Ted for continuing to bring fresh new ideas and culture into my life—sans the algorithm.
As 7-Up is the UnCola, so Ted is the UnAlgorithm.
"So the algorithm that recommends music or videos on a web platform will never deliver a totally fresh and new experience for you. It always gives you something similar to what you consumed last week—or last month, or last year.... It gives you stale bread when you want a fresh loaf."
It's a small thing, but when I read this, it made me think of all the movie previews I've seen lately where the score is a pop song from the Eighties, only slowed down and distorted. For me, this is now the soundtrack of the doom loop.
And, as much as I loved and still love the 80s, we're much farther from them now than we were then from the 60s. Think of how much slower cultural change is today.
Stop thinking of art as content to be consumed, to start off in
There's a lot here that's misleading. Yes, you get generation loss playing telephone, and you're limited to a single whispering in your ear--but compare that to the Hebrew scribe copying out the Tanakh shoulder to shoulder with two proofreaders making sure it's perfect, character by character. Compare that to the Rg Veda, a much longer document, memorized entirely orally, forward and backwards, two-words-forward-one-word-back, and by several other permutations, to make sure it was perfect and they all had the same recension.
Today's back-up memory (like a RAID setup) is a lot more like the Rg Veda. If you have three separate copies of a piece of data, and one gets damaged, you can tell which because it'll differ from the other two which can be used to restore the damaged one, perfectly, bit for bit. And with modern compression, bit-rot just isn't the issue--mess up a single one or zero, and in most cases, the entire file is corrupt, broken and irrecoverable, which is why you have those backups, anyway. The problem you're describing with things like JPEGs is a re-encoding issue. Re-encoding is by definition a transformation of data and not something you do in order to preserve it in its original form. It's like complaining that it's harder to see when you shrink a picture.
Finally, a single cherry-picked example of AI in a research context suffering from the telephone effect is far from conclusive. As an example, DALL-E, Open AI's premier image generator, is today trained on AI generated image captions, which led to a massive spike in improvement over human captions (As you might guess, human captions are just as likely to provide a snarky in-joke as an informative, long-form visual analysis.) Read the paper: (https://cdn.openai.com/papers/dall-e-3.pdf). If you knew AI well, you'd know there are very much cases where AI are used effectively to train AI.
I respect this blog tremendously, but please--you are the Honest Broker. We don't come to you to glean the grimy residue of social media for Pop anti-technology snippets. It goes against all your stated ethics to misinform people about an important technology you yourself don't understand simply because it's popular to do so. The kinds of critiques that are needed (of which there are many) need to be made by someone who really understands what's going on--someone who can trust to tell them the truth.
Ted's a good enough writer to appreciate the caution necessary when using a metaphor. At about the point where you start introducing technical information, certainly something as technical as a scientific monograph, it's safe to assume your audience is going to accept on good faith that you know what you're talking about and that caveats are necessary if you intend to suggest otherwise. Usually Ted is very good about plainly stating something like, "Don't take my word for it, I'm a cultural theorist and humanist, not a Silicon Valley gearhead."
Ted speaks very well to the cultural side of things, and I pretty much agree with his overall assessment in that domain. But if his intention is to be an honest broker, he can't be raising inaccurate fears about technical issues like generation loss in data and then dodging into areas of real expertise as if he were evenly suited to both areas--that pose of universal expertise is the very harbinger of the sort of misinformation he decries. Ted's too good of a journalist to be reporting on these issues merely to weave an unstated metaphor.
Excellent and enlightening perspective on the subject. You put into words a sensation that I deal with every day on a gut level - you go online and something just feels off, even if you consciously try to pull yourself out of the loop, the algorithm seems dead set on pulling you back in.
Generation loss indeed.
I try my best to create and insert content that may get into people's feeds and disrupt such loops, unfortunately I am merely shooting myself in the foot by doing so because the algorithm does not know what I am trying to do and only sees a piece of content that falls into the category of 'uncategorizable' and it feeds it to no one.
It would be nice to share your content here so we can check it out :)
“‘Enter through the narrow gate. For wide is the gate and broad is the road that leads to destruction, and many enter through it. But small is the gate and narrow the road that leads to life, and only a few find it.”
Matthew 7:13-14
Many are called, but few are home.
Telemarketers lament
Matthew, the first Christian Zen master.
Yes, but in the meanwhile, a minority lives in a terrenal Heaven and the rest trying to survive. It is absurd just wait for the Doomsday. If the ship have holes, I'd try to repair them at all costs, no matter the rest of the crew says or do. And our common ship is this blue ball in the cosmos.
I know this is not what the article is about, but...
In other instances, people have started with the phrase “Only the good die young” and end up with “The three Vikings visit Christ.”
Billy Joel to Leonard Cohen. Not bad!
With the telephone game you also get people who say on purpose a completely different sentence than they heard. They enjoy sowing chaos.
I'm waiting for a genAI transformation of Billy to Leonard, a digital transfiguration, as it were.
I wonder what Leonard would think of AI. And Billy used it in his last video... I will leave it to you to have your own opinion about that...
Greetings, I was really "grooving along" with your essay, when suddenly I ran into your unflattering description of "copyist" - ugh! I realize you may be talking about something entirely different. But just to clarify: for around 20 years of my life, I was a "music copyist" - and it was an entirely different profession than you describe. Basically, we copyists were editing and cleaning up music scores, improving the legibility and readability of the scores. I worked with many major composers and well-known jazz artists. When computer music notation software came into being, at first there were simply terrible scores being generated, because the first users didn't know how to lay out scores properly. Much has improved since then. But like all technology, tools in the hands of skilled users are going to turn out better products than the unskilled users.
Copyists are unfairly maligned. They were our critical link to the ancient world thanks to a dedicated literary cast, generally of monks working in scriptoria. The original documents are long gone, so most of what we know is thanks to the copyists. When the printing press automated copying, it was a whole different game.
Lawdy, you've got to be one of the first muses I encountered when I arrived at Berkeley in 1980 and embarked on co-curating with Trinity Arts Center THE LIVING ROOM coffee and cider house in basement of Trinity Arts Center (and United Methodist Church). Ernie Mansfield a dervish of winds instrumental and other delightfully mental on way up to City of Berkeley's summer enviro camp up high overlooking Reno basin in the mighty Sierras. Are you still recording your own stuff dear muse Ernie?
Keep on doing & grooving,
keep in touch.
Health and balance
Tio Mitchito
Mitch Ritter\Paradigm Sifters, Code Shifters, PsalmSong Chasers
Lay-Low Studios, Ore-Wa (Refuge of Atonement Seekers)
Media Discussion List\Looksee
Yep, Mitch, that's me! Nice to hear from you!
Ironic that we struggle to keep up with rates of change, yet many things aren't really changing—at least not for the better. A lot of our "innovation" is noisy, ineffectual, counterproductive, perhaps even futile.
The technical means change faster and faster ... while politics and society stagnate. The latter move far more slowly now than they did 40 or 60 years ago.
Some of what you wrote here reminds me of Grafton Tanner's book, Foreverism (Polity, 2023). He writes about how Hollywood destroyed nostalgia itself by constantly updating franchises to the point that they become hopelessly degraded and alienating their audiences. Politicians have done the same.
Thanks for the reminder - this is on my reading list! Care to leave a brief review ?
A quibble, but: You wrote "Therapists get rich from patients who keep repeating patterns from the past that have stopped working—or, in some cases, never worked" Therapists are not getting rich. A few are - there are outliers in any profession - but let's not casually state that therapists, as a group, are making big money. It's not accurate. We're just earning a living. trying to help folks.
OK "make a living" :D
And a good therapist does try to get you out of that "transference" loop.
~70% of industries in America have no competition. The music biz has just 3 players. They don’t have to compete, so they don't "risk" innovation. You can't find a better price, product, or job. And it produces robber barons - oligarchs. The fix is antitrust. The problems are not technology or culture. They're business and politics.
What do you mean by antitrust? How would that work?
There are antitrust laws on the books; they need to be enforced. There are lots of anti-competitive business practices that they prohibit.
For example, price fixing, rigging bids, allocating markets, workers or customers are all illegal. Mergers that reduce competition are illegal, predatory pricing – where prices are set very low to drive competitors out of business, is illegal.
Some industries have virtual monopolies now. Google for internet search. Amazon for retail sales of a number of things. UMG, Sony, Warner in the music business. They don’t compete. There is currently a proposed merger between Kroger’s and Albertson’s. If that happens, they + Walmart would hold 70% of the grocery business in America. That’s being litigated this year.
https://www.ftc.gov/news-events/news/press-releases/2024/02/ftc-challenges-krogers-acquisition-albertsons
There is nothing more coward than money
Great post.
Here's one doom loop--repetition of the past. The US Constitution is now almost three centuries old, and we have elaborate rituals and institutions to maintain it, starting with the presidential oath to preserve and defend it.
Yes, there's some play in the Supreme Court's rulings based on it--"originalists" now call the shots--but is that only amplifying the doom loop?
And then there's "make America great again...' and whatever the people who staged the coup against a sitting president come up with.
Basic question: when does "preserving" something unquestionably good carry with it a doom loop?
"The US Constitution is now almost three centuries old, and we have elaborate rituals and institutions to maintain it, starting with the presidential oath to preserve and defend it."
Not quite. The elaborate rituals and institutions are the material to make the Constitutional façade that is used, not to maintain it, but to hide the distortions and mutilations of the Constitution that strengthens the power of the state an weakens the protections given to its citizens.
Kind of like how the fiction that many American corporations are actually manufacturing items to sell for a profit instead of being investors in the stock market. Or the universities and colleges that are investment companies with a school attached.
This also helps to perpetuate the doom loops because the businesses, institutions, churches, hospitals, colleges, the military, governments, etc are not actually doing what they were created to do, but instead make money, often in shady, even illegal ways, for a handful of insiders while using what little that their institution's original functions are still done as cover. It is less work, safer, and more profitable to turn whatever it is into a grift instead of doing its original function.
The Constitution has ways of self-correction, like amendments. But notice that we don't pass those anymore. We just rely on our betters on the Supreme Court to do some interpretation hocus-pocus.
Ancient Greek democracy was perfect because slaves couldn't participate.
Preserve, change, reform are malleable to suit the user’s purpose; essentially without inherent meaning unless context provides one. All they deliver is a warm fuzzy feeling. We hear what we want to hear in them.
Love thy neighbor.. forgive us our trespasses as we forgive those who trespass against us! Love your enemies etc
I prefer to avoid those who trespass against me.
That’s part of the premise, cutlery in chief!
Wouldn't that be cutlerer-in-chief, or, maybe, Chief Cutlerer of the Utensil Tribe, a long-lost group thought to have resided in the far reaches of Foodland, itself a precurser to the current Food Substitute Land.
CIC for people into the whole acronym/ brevity thing… CIC Abides!
I've been aware of the doom loop of AIs training on AI-generated data. The more acute danger which I realize after reading this is th danger of algorithms training humans to produce certain kinds of content. An under-discussed phenomenon are content creators who get 'algorithm captured' after one of their posts goes viral and produce dozens more like it, trying to get that same rush.
Great piece, Ted!
This is why I enjoy so many of the authors on Substack, like Ted. Novel ideas and innovations save us from the repeating algorithmic degradation of the past.