Matt Levine’s 40,000-word The Crypto Story: “What follows is his brilliant explanation of what this maddening, often absurd, and always fascinating technology means, and where it might go.” 10 Takeaways.
Deirdre McCloskey: “Yet it is not “capitalism” that requires creative destruction, but any progressive economy. If you don’t want betterment to happen and don’t want poor people to get rich by the 3,000 percent that they have in Japan and Finland and the rest since 1800, then fine, we can stick with the old jobs, keeping their former employment the peasants, elevator operators and telephone operators, the armies of typists on old mechanical Underwoods, grocery stores with a clerk in an apron handing you the can of baked beans over the counter. But if innovation is to happen – Piggly Wiggly in Memphis in September 1916 initiating the self-service grocery store, or a North Carolina tobacco trucker initiating in 1956 the shipping container – then people, and also the machines and factories owned by the bosses and their stockholders, have to lose their old jobs. Human and physical capital has to relocate.” [via CafeHayek]
Santosh Desai: “The need to carry oneself lightly becomes impossible in a time when we are always meant to be on our guards lest anything we say be use against today or worse years from now, when today’s acceptable vocabulary becomes taboo tomorrow and our words come back to haunt us. Equally the exhausting pursuit of self-presentation makes it necessary for us to always be preening in front of an invisible audience. What is truly interesting is how inconsequential almost all this posturing is. Desktop warriors that put nothing at stake, activists whose only conception of action is an inflammatory tweet, life coaches who squeeze alleged wisdom out of meaningless experiences, these are the portraits of our time- people who take themselves all too seriously without seriously impacting anything real.”
John Pilger on how propaganda works. “In the 1970s, I met one of Hitler’s leading propagandists, Leni Riefenstahl, whose epic films glorified the Nazis. We happened to be staying at the same lodge in Kenya, where she was on a photography assignment, having escaped the fate of other friends of the Fuhrer. She told me that the “patriotic messages” of her films were dependent not on “orders from above” but on what she called the “submissive void” of the German public. Did that include the liberal, educated bourgeoisie? I asked. “Yes, especially them,” she said.”
