Fantastic article, and the Chinese turn was unexpected but 100% correct.

I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.

This is anecdotal, but I was just in China for some time and the most shocking thing I found there was there are no iPad kids. Children run around and play and are generally social menaces in all places, and none of them are just given an iPad or whatever to shut them up and go on TikTok. It’s so astonishingly different than my experience on the street in the United States. Hell, at once point I even watched an exasperated parent give her child in China an iPad so she would stop trying to play a musical instrument on the ground, and instead of using the iPad to browse Douyin or something she started running around using it to take pictures of everybody! It was shocking in the most beautiful way. Just re-enforces what was said in this article.

Yeah read books, but start with Blackshirts & reds.

Then read “Who Paid the Pipers of Western Marxism?” by Gabriel Rockhill

The hell do you mean ‘we’? I ain’t reading SHIT

American society is dominated by wealthy mountebanks and literally demented politicians

I think one of the bigger discouragements to reading that doesn’t get mentioned in the article is the absolute torrent of bullshit still being slopped into print. Malcolm Gladwell and Yuval Noah Harari are what pass for public intellectuals. Popular fiction feels more simplistic and less thoughtfully written. Why commit to spending hours reading a book when it’ll turn out that the author didn’t do their research or the plot ends up being nonsensical?

Great article.

We need a “read your theory” emoji. This thread would be a great place to post that.