The Silicon Valley canon and malformed publics: Podcast with Max Read and John Ganz

Bringing this all together, the technologies through which we see the public shape how we understand it, making it more likely that we end up in the one situation rather than the other. As you have surely guessed by now, I believe Twitter/X, Facebook, and other social media services are just such technologies for shaping publics. Many of the problems that we are going to face over the next many years will stem from publics that have been deranged and distorted by social media in ways that lower the odds that democracy will be a problem solving system, and increase the likelihood that it will be a problem creating one.

Listen at Read Max.

Other Writing:

Essay

Joe Biden’s Foreign Foray is All About Shoring Up Democracy – In the US

During his first trip abroad as US president last week, Joe Biden kept telling Europe that “the US is back”. Before the G7 meeting, Biden signed a new Atlantic charter with Boris Johnson that agreed to protect democracy and open societies. After Cornwall, he went on to more meetings in Brussels with the European Union, ...
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Essay

Globalized Green Lanternism

American political commentators have frequently called for the U.S. president to take effective action to improve world economic growth. Such calls are a form of what Matthew Yglesias has dubbed “Green Lanternism”—the unspoken theory that the U.S. president’s ability to affect outcomes is primarily affected by his willpower. In this article, I examine the opposite—and ...
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