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Along with three quarters of a million other people, I’m a member of r/AmIOverreacting, a forum on Reddit devoted to the problem of potentially freaking out too much. It’s a thriving community that’s full of surprises. Recently, a woman posted a screenshot of a text-message exchange with her boyfriend in which he appeared to be accusing her of sabotaging the mayonnaise in their refrigerator. “Funny how all the Hellman’s is liquid,” he writes. “Ideas?” When she expresses confusion about what, exactly, he’s implying, he clarifies, “Thus far you haven’t been able to poison me.” Is she overreacting to this bizarre conversation? The consensus, across nine thousand responses, is that she is “NOR”—not overreacting. “This guy is so obviously unstable,” one poster replies. “You need to get as far away from this dude as possible.”
I haven’t done a quantitative study, but my sense is that the members of r/AmIOverReacting rarely conclude that their fellows have overreacted. Maybe they’re all following the lead of an overreactive age, in which everyone can seem to be on a hair trigger about what everyone else does or says. My own intuition, though, is that the opposite is true. If anything, r/AmIOverreacting is a kind of reactivity buffer zone—a place where reactions can be mediated, and so slowed down. In that sense, it’s part of a larger, society-wide effort. In an increasingly provocative world, many of us seek to manage our emotions. Bros immerse themselves in Stoic philosophy; parents-to-be take mindfulness classes. Online life offers both a forum for our reactions and a way of channelling them. If somebody does something crazy in real life—maybe it’s a rude customer, or a “Karen” from the homeowners’ association—you can pull out your phone and coolly record the exchange, then upload it so that others can react in your stead. Reaction is postponed; restraint in the moment is rewarded with likes later on.
Read the rest of this article at: The New Yorker
For years, crypto skeptics have asked, What is this for? And for years, boosters have struggled to offer up a satisfactory answer. They argue that the blockchain—the technology upon which cryptocurrencies and other such applications are built—is itself a genius technological invention, an elegant mechanism for documenting ownership online and fostering digital community. Or they say that it is a foundation on which to build and fund a third, hyperfinancialized iteration of the internet where you don’t need human intermediaries to buy a cartoon image of an ape for $3.4 million.
Then there are the currencies themselves: bitcoin and ether and the endless series of memecoins and start-up tokens. These are largely volatile, speculative assets that some people trade, shitpost about, use to store value, and, sometimes, get incredibly rich or go bankrupt from. They are also infamously used to launder money, fund start-ups, and concoct elaborate financial fraud. Crypto has its use cases. But the knock has long been that the technology is overly complicated and offers nothing that the modern financial system can’t already do—that crypto is a technological solution in search of a problem (at least for people who don’t want to use it to commit crimes).
I tend to agree. I’ve spent time reporting on NFTs and crypto-token-based decentralized autonomous organizations, or DAOs (like the one that tried to buy an original printing of the Constitution in 2021). I’ve read opaque white papers for Web3 start-ups and decentralized finance protocols that use smart contracts to enable financial-service transactions without major banks, but I’ve never found a killer app.
The aftermath of the presidential election, however, has left me thinking about crypto’s influence differently.
Read the rest of this article at: The Atlantic
LUIGI MANGIONE, CURRENTLY the internet’s main character, probably isn’t who you think he is. Main characters are like that. As soon as someone achieves main character status, they become the screen onto which the world’s opinions and preconceptions get projected. Mangione, who was arrested Monday in connection with the shooting death of UnitedHealthcare CEO Brian Thompson, fits that bill.
Prior to his arrest, Mangione was an unknown. Police had released a grainy security camera photo showing half of their suspect’s face, but beyond that all anyone knew was that someone had killed the CEO of a health insurance company—and that someone quickly became an online folk hero. He was painted as an avenger, a response to a health care system that had fallen short. Some called the mysterious suspect “The Adjuster.”
On TikTok, people performed ballads dedicated to whomever the shooter was. On Bluesky, they marveled over his ebike escape and the backpack found in Central Park full of Monopoly money that allegedly belonged to him. There was a look-alike contest held in New York City. On Spotify, there were dedicated playlists. Fanfic sprang up on Archive of Our Own.
Read the rest of this article at: Wired
When I set off on a cross-country road trip across the United States, it wasn’t to tour National Parks or work remotely at the beach. Instead, my goal was to meet people I normally wouldn’t encounter in the liberal bastion of San Francisco, where I spent most of my adult life. For 12 months, I lived out of my retrofitted Prius and showered at Planet Fitness. I travelled to a Trump rally in Minnesota, a convent where Catholic nuns and millennials were living together, and a small town in rural Appalachia.
I’m a loud-and-proud progressive, queer Asian American whose favourite outfit is a colourful jumpsuit. So when some of my friends heard about my plans, they told me they were concerned for my safety. They even encouraged me to bring a knife and pepper spray.
Honestly, I shared some of their fears. I held biases about people on ‘the other side’. I actively othered whole groups of people because of the stereotypes I held about them. Aren’t Trump voters uneducated and hate fuelled? Don’t Catholic nuns despise my queerness? Wouldn’t a rural town spit out someone like me?
The stereotypes I held weren’t due to any real personal experiences I had. They were supercharged by social media and the news, or conversations with others whose beliefs shaped my own. Getting out on the road and having first-hand experiences with people who were different from me introduced more nuance and complexity to my views. I started to recognise the obvious: that there’s a spectrum of unique individuals in umbrella groups such as ‘Trump voters’ or ‘Catholic sisters’.
And what I found on a personal level is what psychology research studies have shown. The more we come into contact with people who are different from us and see them as unique humans, the less we feel threatened by them. And that, even with polar-opposite views or life stories, we can find common ground and a shared humanity.
I’ve been exploring these questions for the past decade at institutions such as the Greater Good Science Center at the University of California, Berkeley. It’s the reason why I went on my 12-month road trip. I even wrote a book about it. Leading these research-based explorations is all part of my desire to understand how we can forge stronger and more positive relationships with others.
Read the rest of this article at: Psyche
Did the novels of the twentieth century accomplish anything? Edwin Frank, who is known for his love of the genre, is convinced they did. In his stylish, selective survey Stranger Than Fiction: Lives of the Twentieth-Century Novel, he focuses on the genre’s formal innovations, which take readers’ minds off their somewhat vulgar appetite for suspenseful plot and relatable character and teach them to be satisfied, instead, with something like a diet of single sentences, exquisitely prepared. The genre’s masterworks urge us to set a slower pace, savoring what each novelist puts on the table and realizing, as we push back our chairs, how much more substantial the meal was than what we thought we wanted.
There is both instruction and pleasure to be had from Frank’s commentaries on modernist sentence-making. In German, as he notes, the run-on sentence doesn’t violate any rules, but Kafka takes the run-on and runs away with it, adding “slight nervous shifts of tone and implication, abrupt introductions of unforeseen elements that are then absorbed without comment, as if expected.” This procedure makes these sentences “an endless surprise, entertaining disconcerting, effortless, tortured, suddenly funny, and wonderfully sad.” Gertrude Stein can reject all but the simplest, dullest words and can drive the reader to distraction by repeating those dull words over and over, but that’s not what made her magical to writers like Hemingway. Putting the sentence at the center of writing, as Stein does, means that a sentence “can go on or be cut as short as can be, but that one way or another, as a kind of exploratory probe, [it] takes precedence over the work as a whole.” Playfully mimicking Stein, Frank himself goes on: “You start with the sentence and the sentence finds out where it is going and you go on from there.” It’s advice on how to live. Proust’s In Search of Lost Time “is notorious not only for its length as a whole but also for the length of its individual sentences,” and this is “because in it the individual sentence often functions as a kind of sample of the whole . . . going on until it seems at risk of losing its raison d’être, going on until the reader may despair of its going anywhere—as Proust’s narrator frequently despairs that his life is not going anywhere—until at last it does fall into place, does come to a point.”
Read the rest of this article at: The Baffler
