Links and quotes: liberalism in overdrive, smooth earth theory, how your phone is stealing your life, AI academics, Mahler

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The Triumph of Reason by Carlo Carlone

Hello,

Welcome to Cultural Capital.

In The Times I wrote about how the rise of extreme pornography and other outlandish online behaviour threatens liberalism.

I think some of the disaffection with liberal society among young people derives from the fact that they are confronted every day with the most outrageous and unpleasant consequences of liberalism’s doctrine of individual freedom: offensive speech, grotesque sexual behaviour etc. If you’re online in 2025, liberalism doesn’t seem noble but ugly, bewildering and nihilistic.

***All being well by the time you read this I will be in Riga in Latvia. I have no idea what to do here so if anyone has been before and has any recommendations for museums/restaurants/activities please let me know in the comments or by email.***

How your phone is stealing your life
Gurwinder is one of the best writers on Substack. He is the author of superb and justly famous essays on the perils of audience capture and intellectual obesity.

His latest is a brilliant explanation of how social media is designed so as to steal our lives.

Part of his essay relies on a brilliant analogy with casino architecture. Apparently huge casinos are designed so that there are as few right angles and corners as possible. When gamblers are confronted with alternative routes or sharp corners to turn round they are forced to make a decision about where to go, potentially jolting them back to an awareness of their surroundings and their actions. Not what you want if you want them in an unthinking fugue state spending money.

This is why casino designers learned to favour “curvilinear paths that had no discernible corners, beginnings, or ends, and could thus be perpetually navigated on autopilot.” If you’re never making a decision about where to go you can just drift around forever.

Gurwinder argues that the architecture of social media is “curvilinear”. Its designers want to keep us trapped in a labyrinth:

In the early days of social media, it was possible to reach the end of a feed. These ends acted much like right-angle turns, snapping the scroller out of autopilot by forcing them to change course. Soon, however, the feeds were made “curvilinear” by the infinite scroll and autoplay function. We now know that these features impair awareness and memory by lulling people into passivity.

Further, just as Friedman’s casinos were made like mazes to maximise wandering and getting lost, so social media platforms have increasingly become labyrinthine to trap people in them. The Gruen effect is now commonly elicited online similarly to the real world: by continually placing distractions in people’s way. Every webpage is littered with links, each a path to another maze. And many of these links are deliberately placed where they don’t belong; search results are sneakily scattered with recommendations unrelated to your search, and personal notifications often have generic news links hiding among them. The goal is to alienate you from your own intentions, so you lose track of where you were, and when you were.

The people who argue that not using your phone is just a matter of exerting “will power” have no conception of how sophisticated and brilliantly manipulative the design of the modern internet is.

Here’s one more fascinating nugget. Screentime seems to speed up ageing:

As well as potentially speeding up puberty, screentime also seems to speed up ageing. A recent study of 7212 adults tracked various biomarkers of body age, such as muscle mass and telomere length, and found that those who spent more time staring at screens had aged faster, even when controlling for physical inactivity. This effect might partly be due to confounding (people with high screentime are likely to have other unhealthy habits) but it’s also a predictable result of the stress, disorientation, and hyposomnia inflicted by living out of sync with reality.

How the internet is driving men and women apart
Really great episode of the demographer Alice Evans’s podcast Rocking Our Priors with the FT’s John Burn Murdoch on how the internet is separating men and women.

I thought this in particular was a fascinating insight into political polarisation which is very high among teenagers. Most teenagers used not to express political beliefs when asked about them in surveys. Many now express strong partisan commitments. This is because the news on social media is more engaging and more polarising:

A larger share of teenagers when asked about politics in the past, used to just say “don't know”. But now they'll give an answer left or right. A lot of the the widening gap [of partisan identification] is “don't know” bifurcating into left and right…

… If you were fifteen or sixteen twenty years ago [questions about] politics and world views such as “are you trad or are you progressive? were not a big part of your life. You were just in the park with your mates.

But now that people are online, even if they're not seeing stuff that is explicitly political, they’re seeing stuff which is nudging them towards taking a position…

… The shift from “don't know” to political certainty speaks to that. The news has become more entertaining and engaging than ever... Twenty years ago, middle aged and older people would pick up a copy of the FT, The Guardian or The Times. But a 14 year old boy may not spend his evenings in bed with the Guardian, right?That may not be the most exciting thing you can do.

But now the news has become far more convenient and engaging and entertaining….So by having paradoxically more engaging news you have more anger and more political engagement.

You can listen to the full podcast here. I highly recommend it:

AI Writing Academic Papers
A new paper suggests a remarkable number of academic papers are now written with AI. One of the crucial clue is the sky-rocketing use of the word “delves” — inexplicably a favourite term of Chat-GPT:

How chaos gave birth to reason
I was struck by this passage in Basil Willey’s brilliant (though sometimes rather disarmingly dated) overview of eighteenth century thought, The Eighteenth-Century Background.

The eighteenth century cult of reason grew out of the religious controversies of the seventeenth century. There were so many competing opinions they became mutually discrediting and people began to look for rational explanations of the world. I wonder if the same will eventually happen with social media:

How did the religious conflicts of the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries lead up to the growth of natural religion [i.e. faith based on reason] in our period? Briefly, by calling in doubt all the points of the faith, and reducing them to the level of controversy. Christianity, instead of producing Christian individuals and societies, seemed for so long to have been producing disputes, persecutions, and wars, and in the Protestant countries had not only renounced the Holy See but split up further into so many sects that a desire arose during the seventeenth century to formulate a creed which should be acceptable to all good and reasonable men. Christianity was based upon Revelation: well and good, but what had in fact been revealed? No one seemed to know, or rather — which was worse — everybody seemed to know that his own version was the only correct one.

Willey quotes Charles Blount, who said “All Faiths have been shaken … only those will stand which are based upon reason”.

Smooth earth theory
One more good bit from this book. Willey mentions a seventeenth century theologian named Thomas Burnet who believed the beauty of nature was overrated. Despite being unnecessarily hyped by poets much of nature was really quite “rubbishy”. Burnet even disliked the moon and viewed it as offensively “rugged”.

He suggested that the earth we know has been much degraded since its original creation. When God first made the world it must of course have been “perfect”. By which he meant completely smooth and with all the oceans covered with a thin coat of oil:

When the earth was formed from chaos the elements were arranged in their ‘proper’ order, with Earth as the centre, surrounded by the Water, and this in turn by the Air. ‘Water’, however, includes all fluids, and consequently the watery surface of the globe had a top coating of oil.

Burnet called for the use of “rough globes” in schools as the normal ones give a misleading impression of the smoothness of the earth’s surface. Students need to see “what a rude lump our world is which we are so apt to dote upon”.

Thomas Burnet - smooth earth theorist

AI: over hyped or already doing your job?
Is there any issue on which opinions diverge as widely as on the impact of AI?

Here are two incredibly different views of where AI is right now. Andrew Yang thinks the revolution is already here:

A partner at a prominent law firm told me, “AI is now doing work that used to be done by 1^st to 3^rd year associates. AI can generate a motion in an hour that might take an associate a week. And the work is better. Someone should tell the folks applying to law school right now.” I posted this quote on X and it went viral, getting 7 million views. Also this year, law school applications surged 21% - there’s a flight to safety, though in this case it’s not so safe. 3 years from now, how many lawyers are going to be getting hired?

[. . .]

In essence, what happened to manufacturing workers when robots started hitting the assembly lines 30 years ago is now happening to knowledge workers. Offices are going to be emptied out.

In a splendidly polemical essay Freddie deBoer argues that AI development is mostly hype garnished by distracting trinkets like chatbots that we only think are world-changingly important because we are fuelled by a historical narcissism that makes us determined to believe we are living at the most important moment in all human history:

I will not relent: this period of AI hype is built on twin pillars, one, a broad and deep contemporary dissatisfaction with modern life, and two, the natural human tendency to assume that we live in the most important time possible because we are in it. Our ongoing inability to define communally-shared visions of lives that are ordinary but noble and valuable has left us terribly frustrated with the modern world, and our sclerotic systems convince us that gradual positive change is impossible. Hence pillar one. And the very fact that we have a consciousness system makes it very difficult to avoid thinking that we live in a special place and special time . . . our nervous systems are set up to make us feel that we are the protagonists of reality.

I think the riposte to that is that almost every year since the industrial revolution has felt — not unjustly — like the most important moment in human history. For two hundred years we have been on a rocket of relentless economic growth unlike anything seen before in human history, watching technology constantly do things like things that would once have seemed like magic: steam pumps, steam trains, electric lighting, machine guns, motor cars, aeroplanes, nuclear weapons, space flight, the internet, video calling. . .

Mahler 2
I saw Mahler’s second symphony at the proms last weekend. Not the best performance but it’s probably my all time favourite piece of music. It’s so grand and yearning and hopeful and melancholy and dramatic. You would have to be emotionally inert not to be moved by the time you get to the end and the organ is thundering, the bells are clanging away and the huge choir is roaring:

Arise, yes, you will arise from the dead,
My heart, in an instant!
What you have conquered
Will bear you to God.

There is a famous video of Bernstein sobbing as he conducts this bit:

If you get the chance go and see it even if you think you don’t like classical music. It’s like getting to see the Great Pyramid or the Parthenon.

And finally…
Let me know what you are reading and/or thinking (within reason as always). And to repeat: recommendations for Riga are very welcome.