This is what got me through the book and, to my own surprise, left a lingering interest in potential sequels or spin-offs (she's alluded to the possibility of the latter iirc). I think understanding it as YA helps better calibrate your expectations.

Boards are where every ounce of the action is my friends. Do you know who's on your board? What "expertise" do they bring to the institution? What conflicts of interest do they and their partner have? What litmus test does the political appointing body use to select new members?

I mean the goal is to starve parks of tourism so they can justify selling them off for development, no? I fucking, fucking hate these people.

The whole popular conservative project is this type of re-enchantment, all of it. Conducting obvious power grabs by pretending they're uncovering some hidden, deeper truth of the world.

And to me this is also Karp's thing with raving about "ontology." It's the assumption that tech has found a way to pierce the veil and therefore has absolute authority to manipulate a reality only it sees clearly.

Or just tech conspiracists.

There's a conspiratorial logic in how they think the world is arranged against them and their genius (see: Thiel's scapegoat obsession and Musk's anti-woke stuff) that directly informs how they believe they can rearrange it to their whims.

Cyberlibertarianism is one I've found useful, taken from Golumbia's reading of the phenomenon.

Seemed like everyone was content with thinking she was just a benign kind of crazy when she claimed to be japanese in 2023. Turns out she's just the boring kind of crazy 😔. I'll never be able to listen to rich girl in blissful ignorance again.

You can apply the same framework to media's reliance on engagement as a metric for success. If it performs well, it doesn't really matter what it's actually doing. This isn't new to the industry, but I think the focus on web's extensive quantification of things has been disastrous for it.

The most accurate summation of the movement was Miller's confessional piss fit at the kirk funeral special. He speaks for a mob that is hatred, is nothing, can build nothing, can produce nothing, can create nothing.

Came to the thread to say the exact same thing lol

I'm speaking from a US context, but it really does feel like the simultaneous drive toward "efficiency" coupled with an unwillingness to invest in public projects and infrastructure is curdling into a unique kind of laziness that leads to policies like this the world over.

Someone needs to take his nick land posts away from him. This is getting silly.