Katherine Dee 🐬/acc

If present trends continue, they mark not the end of reading but the end of mass literacy, turning books back into what they used to be: the special super-weapon of a minority class whose mental powers, I propose, will outstrip those of the average mind as greatly and meaningfully in the post-literate era as in the pre-literate era. That would mean the age of high tech looks like the Middle Ages in this regard. Or at least that it looks the way we picture the Middle Ages, with a priestly caste wielding superior powers of focus, prediction, observation, and manipulation over a mentally reduced general public. Once again the readers would be as gods among men. I’m not convinced that’s inevitable, but whether it is or not, the best gift you can possibly give your kids right now is to steel them against the cognitive meltdown that’s coming by shielding them against the phone barrage and teaching them what they can gain from attending in sustained love to great books. The case for a liberal arts education has never been easier to make.

It’s no longer possible to live a decent, even middle class life in the US without being neurodivergent You’ve either gotta be an autist with preternatural technical ability, or have hyperfunctional ADHD such that you can massively multitask, or have an artistic or mathematical gift In other words, you have to be an extreme outlier on at least one scale, because first globalization and now AI have completely gutted the middle of every normal distribution of humans that exists Your ability to generate economic value now depends on being “out of the distribution” in some way. This is why the weird are inheriting the earth

Something that seems obviously true to me, but which I’ve never really seen talked about, is that the second half of 20th century was way better than the first half, and that it maps to the handoff from radio to TV, with the latter clearly being a much healthier broadcast medium.

I hate positivity copers so much who force themselves to only see the upside in things. I just arrived to Greece and dudes are already coping that it mogs because of a few traits like the weather. JFL, as if its not a jester-desert with barely any wifi and a bunch of turbo retards on motorbikes.