I usually provide a snippet here, but the detail supporting the thesis is worth the full read. And it’s a long one for Techdirt. Here are the first few grafs, beyond which things go sufficiently far into the weeds to make tick spray a good idea:
There is an epidemic of magical thinking. An unwillingness to confront reality. Because reality is scary.
This affliction cuts across all ideological lines, manifesting in different forms but serving the same function: allowing us to avoid the difficult truths about what it will actually take to preserve human dignity, meaning, and freedom in the face of forces designed to eliminate all three.
We live in the most dangerous moment in human history—not because of nuclear weapons or climate change, though both threaten our survival, but because we are creating systems that threaten something deeper: our capacity to remain human. To make meaning. To experience genuine choice. To live lives worth living rather than optimized lives managed by algorithms and administered by bureaucrats.
And our response to this existential crisis? Magical thinking. The comfortable delusion that simple solutions exist for complex problems, that we can have technological progress without existential consequences, that we can avoid difficult choices by pretending they don’t exist.
This is not just political failure—it’s the systematic abandonment of what makes us human in the first place.
Human beings are meaning-making creatures. This isn’t a nice feature of consciousness—it’s what consciousness is for. We don’t just process information like biological computers; we create significance, purpose, and value through the active engagement of our minds with reality. We transform raw experience into narrative, chaos into order, suffering into wisdom.
Rare is the piece of this length that I fully agree with. But this provides a nice, comprehensive overview of just how fucked we are.
I think that’s really interesting. I often think about these moments of community/humanity. The closest I can get is if I have a nice conversation with a neighbor if I have the time. Or finding like-minded people online to chat with.
Smartphones became common place in my last year of high-school, but even at that point mobile data plans weren’t large enough to cause a major impact, but community gathering spots were already gone by that point where I live, so school was the community place. Once I graduated, that was gone. Very weird time to grow up. I’m meeting a lot of people in their early 20’s now who don’t even have the luxury of remembering those simpler times.
It feels super odd because it seems reminiscent of old stories passed down from generations. I hope that this trend ends positively in the future and that the future youth remember these terrible years as a paragraph in a history book and how we overcame these issues.
To paraphrase … someone … You can’t unfuck in a single graf what took three prior volumes and an additional 20 chapters in Vol. 4 to lay out. There’s a lot of soul searching that needs to be done before we start moving in the right direction.