"The people who are in power are in power (so we're told) because they're smart, because they're innovative, because they just thought harder than us and prestige is tied, more than anything else, to the perception of intelligence. Given that this isn't actually the case, what this means is that status contests in our society are mostly about correctly performing the impression of thinking" -- @iris_meredith
The theatre of power.
deadSimpleTech
Don't think | deadSimpleTech
The tech-adjacent anglosphere, while it doesn't have secret police brutalising dissidents in *my* country just yet (though I must stress that the USA is definitely blurring into that kind of direction), actually makes more claims on the internal forum. It's not enough to desultorily go to the May Day parade once a year and have your "Workers of the world, unite!" poster in the window, and it's not enough to simply not think or keep your thinking to yourself, do your work and go along. No, you have to think, and you have to think correctly.
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Iris
"The kind of thinking-adjacent process that our prestige games prioritise relies on reasoning from a conclusion to premises: it relies on knowing what conclusions are useful for gaining status in your particular area and then coming up with a convincing sounding route to getting to them." -- @iris_meredith
This is a GREAT essay. Recommended.
https://deadsimpletech.com/blog/dont-think
Don't think | deadSimpleTech