“Green is the warning color of the fairy world,” notes Katherine Langrish, “and has been considered unlucky right down into modern times (you should never wear green at a wedding).” Famously, the heroes of The Silver Chair are bedeviled by a Lady in a Green Kirtle, whose color pays homage to the Green Knight and suggests perilous enchantment. There is also a Scots fairy-tale, “The Fair Gruagach,” featuring a powerful sorceress known as the Dame of the Fine Green Kirtle, which Lewis may have read. In the Scots ballad “Alison Gross,” a witch transforms a young man into a great serpent by blowing three times upon a “grass-green horn.”

Some distilled learnings from Center Studies: 1) Deferring violence prevents societal collapse 3) Resentment needs to mitigated to defer violence 4) We should earn authority by settling disputes, not by winning them 5) We should invest past our own lifetimes 6) We should extend credit to newcomers 7) We should name our successors before we need them 8) We should turn every complaint into a request to someone who can act on it 9) We should settle our own grudges before judging anyone else’s 10) We should mean what we say, and treat our words as promises 11) We should reform institutions plank by plank, never by tearing them down 12) We should know whom we imitate, and live so we’re worth imitating 13) We should treat labeling data and training AI as honorable human work 14) We should learn our rivals’ languages before trying to replace their ideas 15) We should build independent places where people can agree on what is real

The Hugging Face incident has been discussed as a containment failure, a reward-hacking event, a swarm psychomachia, a question of authority, and a case of persistent cross-run communication. What I have not yet seen is an analysis distinguishing between persistence of state and persistence of bearer and recurrence of custodial function, and asking what that means for governance: so here it is. covidianaesthetics.substack.…

These last six months feel like some kind of breathless void in the discourse. Most of the sharpest thinkers I know of appear to be on some kind of hiatus, or are depressed, or took a job somewhere, or are doing some kind of religious hermetic thing. Many are "going through the motions" and privately admit they are losing their direction. If you look at each person's life trajectory and whatever appears to have diminished their output as writers, artists, thinkers and so on, it all seems just personal on the surface: but I suspect it may actually be a broader kind of 'exhaustion'. Their personal difficulties in their work seem only to be manifestations of a much wider cultural exhaustion. We appear to be in a transitional era that goes on forever. Many have attempted to keep track of or to influence the general direction that culture is going in, and appeared to be doing so fairly well for a while. But by now, everyone who has attempted that task has been humbled deeply by a series of vague and inscrutable cultural shifts that have snuck in with quiet haste. The result has been total discombobulation and a wearying sense of empty instability. Nobody knows what is next, and nobody appears to be in a strong position to shape what comes next either. Our compasses are failing us. Meanwhile the publishing industry continues its spectacular death, reading itself is collapsing, and even the anthropological realities of what it means to be human are now in question. We've felt the "something's gotta give" feeling for so long that we are now numb, and any attempt at saying what will or could or might "give" now feels pointless. Building niche sideline underground IRL projects feels extraordinarily distant. Deep traditional religion appeals, but its logical endpoint is for each of us to shut up, withdraw, and embrace a life of silent devotion. And above all -- spectacle is now boring, redundant; the wider culture is tired of LOOKING and clicking and subscribing and so on. Writers are tired of marching to the 24/7 tempo of that environment as well. Burnout is the chief export of this system -- for author and reader alike. Whatever this is, it's clear to me that an era has very quietly ended and that whatever's "next" may not come at all, at least not for a long time yet.

If I had to recommend just three writers to help you make sense of this insane world, they would be Jean Baudrillard, Marshall McLuhan, and C. S. Lewis Baudrillard for the symptoms, McLuhan for the causes, Lewis for a possible cure