The Crisis, No. 5: On the Hollowing of Apple

[ed. No.5 of 17 Crisis Papers.]

I never met Steve Jobs. But I know him—or I know him as well as anyone can know a man through the historical record. I have read every book written about him. I have read everything the man said publicly. I have spoken to people who knew him, who worked with him, who loved him and were hurt by him.

And I think Steve would be disgusted by what has become of his company.

This is not hagiography. Jobs was not a saint. He was cruel to people who loved him. He denied paternity of his daughter for years. He drove employees to breakdowns. He was vain, tyrannical, and capable of extraordinary pettiness. I am not unaware of his failings, of the terrible way he treated people needlessly along the way.

But he had a conscience. He moved, later in life, to repair the damage he had done. The reconciliation with his daughter Lisa was part of a broader moral development—a man who had hurt people learning, slowly, how to stop. He examined himself. He made changes. He was not a perfect man. But he had heart. He had morals. And he was willing to admit when he was wrong.

That is a lot more than can be said for this lot of corporate leaders.

It is this Steve Jobs—the morally serious man underneath the mythology—who would be so angry at what Tim Cook has made of Apple.

⁂

Steve Jobs understood money as instrumental.

I know this sounds like a distinction without a difference. The man built the most valuable company in the world. He died a billionaire many times over. He negotiated hard, fought for his compensation, wanted Apple to be profitable. He was not indifferent to money.

But he never treated money as the goal. Money was what let him make the things he wanted to make. It was freedom—the freedom to say no to investors, to kill products that weren’t good enough, to spend years on details that no spreadsheet could justify. Money was the instrument. The thing it purchased was the ability to do what he believed was right.

This is how he acted.

Jobs got fired from his own company because he refused to compromise his vision for what the board considered financial prudence. He spent years in the wilderness, building NeXT—a company that made beautiful machines almost no one bought—because he believed in what he was making. He acquired Pixar when it was bleeding cash and kept it alive through sheer stubbornness until it revolutionized animation.

When he returned to Apple, he killed products that were profitable because they were mediocre. He could have milked the existing lines, played it safe, optimized for margin. Instead, he burned it down and rebuilt from scratch. The iMac. The iPod. The iPhone. Each one a bet that could have destroyed the company. Each one made because he believed it was right, not because a spreadsheet said it was safe...

This essay is not really about Steve Jobs or Tim Cook. It is about what happens when efficiency becomes a substitute for freedom. Jobs and Cook are case studies in a larger question: can a company—can an economy—optimize its way out of moral responsibility? The answer, I will argue, is yes. And we are living with the consequences.

⁂

Jobs understood something that most technology executives do not: culture matters more than politics.

He did not tweet. He did not issue press releases about social issues. He did not perform his values for an audience. He was not interested in shibboleths of the left or the right. [...]

This is how Jobs approached politics: through art, film, music, and design. Through the quiet curation of what got made. Through the understanding that the products we live with shape who we become.

If Jobs were alive today, I do not believe he would be posting on Twitter about fascism. That was never his mode. [...]

⁂

Tim Cook is a supply chain manager.

I do not say this as an insult. It is simply what he is. It is what he was hired to be. When Jobs brought Cook to Apple in 1998, he brought him to fix operations—to make the trains run on time, to optimize inventory, to build the manufacturing relationships that would let Apple scale.

Cook was extraordinary at this job. He is, by all accounts, one of the greatest operations executives in the history of American business. The margins, the logistics, the global supply chain that can produce millions of iPhones in weeks—that is Cook’s cathedral. He built it.

But operations is not vision. Optimization is not creation. And a supply chain manager who inherits a visionary’s company is not thereby transformed into a visionary.

Under Cook, Apple has become very good at making more of what Jobs created. The iPhone gets better cameras, faster chips, new colors. The ecosystem tightens. The services revenue grows. The stock price rises. By every metric that Wall Street cares about, Cook has been a success.

But what has Apple created under Cook that Jobs did not originate? What new thing has emerged from Cupertino that reflects a vision of the future, rather than an optimization of the past?

The Vision Pro is an expensive curiosity. The car project was canceled after a decade of drift. The television set never materialized. Apple under Cook has become a company that perfects what exists rather than inventing what doesn’t.

This is what happens when an optimizer inherits a creator’s legacy. The cathedral still stands. But no one is building new rooms.

⁂

There is a deeper problem than the absence of vision. Tim Cook has built an Apple that cannot act with moral freedom.

The supply chain that Cook constructed—his great achievement, his life’s work—runs through China. Not partially. Not incidentally. Fundamentally. The factories that build Apple‘s products are in China. The engineers who refine the manufacturing processes are in China. The workers who assemble the devices, who test the components, who pack the boxes—they are in Shenzhen and Zhengzhou and a dozen other cities that most Americans cannot find on a map.

This was a choice. It was Cook’s choice. And once made, it ceased to be a choice at all. Supply chains, like empires, do not forgive hesitation. For twenty years, it looked like genius. Chinese manufacturing was cheap, fast, and scalable. Apple could design in California and build in China, and the margins were extraordinary.

But dependency is not partnership. And Cook built a dependency so complete that Apple cannot escape it.

When Hong Kong’s democracy movement rose, Apple was silent. When the Uyghur genocide became undeniable, Apple was silent. When Beijing pressured Apple to remove apps, to store Chinese user data on Chinese servers, to make the iPhone a tool of state surveillance for Chinese citizens—Apple complied. Silently. Efficiently. As Cook’s supply chain required.

This is not a company that can stand up to authoritarianism. This is a company that has made itself a instrument of authoritarianism, because the alternative is losing access to the factories that build its products.

⁂

There is something worse than the dependency. There is what Cook gave away.

Apple did not merely use Chinese manufacturing. Apple trained it. Cook’s operations team—the best in the world—went to China and taught Chinese companies how to do what Apple does. The manufacturing techniques. The materials science. The logistics systems. The quality control processes.

This was the price of access. This was what China demanded in exchange for letting Apple build its empire in Shenzhen. And Cook paid it.

Now look at the result.

BYD, the Chinese electric vehicle company, learned battery manufacturing and supply chain management from its work with Apple. It is now the largest EV manufacturer in the world, threatening Tesla and every Western automaker.

DJI dominates the global drone market with technology and manufacturing processes refined through the Apple relationship.

Dozens of other Chinese companies—in components, in assembly, in materials—were trained by Apple‘s experts and now compete against Western firms with the skills Apple taught them.

Cook built a supply chain. And in building it, he handed the Chinese Communist Party the industrial capabilities it needed to challenge American technological supremacy. [...]

⁂

So when I see Tim Cook at Donald Trump’s inauguration, I understand what I am seeing.

When I see him at the White House on January 25th, 2026—attending a private screening of Melania, a vanity documentary about the First Lady, directed by Brett Ratner, a man credibly accused of sexual misconduct by multiple women—I understand what I am seeing.

I understand what I am seeing when I learn that this screening took place on the same night that federal agents shot Alex Pretti ten times in the back in Minneapolis. That while a nurse lay dying in the street for the crime of trying to help a woman being pepper-sprayed, Tim Cook was eating canapés and watching a film about the president’s wife.

Tim Cook’s Twitter bio contains a quote from Martin Luther King Jr.: “Life’s most persistent and urgent question is, ‘What are you doing for others?’”

What was Tim Cook doing for others on the night of January 25th?

He was doing what efficiency requires. He was maintaining relationships with power. He was protecting the supply chain, the margins, the tariff exemptions. He was being a good middleman.

I am seeing a man who cannot say no.

This is what efficiency looks like when it runs out of room to hide.

He cannot say no to Beijing, because his supply chain depends on Beijing’s favor. He cannot say no to Trump, because his company needs regulatory forbearance and tariff exemptions. He is trapped between two authoritarian powers, serving both, challenging neither.

This is not leadership. This is middleman management. This is a man whose great achievement—the supply chain, the operations excellence, the margins—has become the very thing that prevents him from acting with moral courage.

Cook has more money than Jobs ever had. Apple has more cash, more leverage, more market power than at any point in its history. If anyone in American business could afford to say no—to Trump, to Xi, to anyone—it is Tim Cook.

And he says yes. To everyone. To anything. Because he built a company that cannot afford to say no. [...]

⁂

I believe that Steve Jobs built Apple to be something more than a company. He built it to be a statement about what technology could be—beautiful, humane, built for people rather than against them. He believed that the things we make reflect who we are. He believed that how we make them matters.

Tim Cook has betrayed that vision—not through malice, but by excelling in a system that rewards efficiency over freedom and calls it leadership. Through the replacement of values with optimization. Through the construction of a machine so efficient that it cannot afford to be moral.

Apple is not unique in this. It is exemplary.

This is what happens to institutions that mistake scale for strength, efficiency for freedom, optimization for wisdom. They become powerful enough to dominate markets—and too constrained to resist power. Look at Google, training AI for Beijing while preaching openness. Look at Amazon, building surveillance infrastructure for any government that pays. Look at every Fortune 500 company that issued statements about democracy while writing checks to the politicians dismantling it.

Apple is simply the cleanest case, because it once knew the difference. Because Jobs built it to know the difference. And because we can see, with unusual clarity, the precise moment when knowing the difference stopped mattering.

by Mike Brock, Notes From the Circus |  Read more:

Image: Steve Jobs/uncredited

[ed. Part seventeen of a series titled The Crisis Papers. Check them all out and jump in anywhere. A+ effort.]

Do I Like Being Single Too Much to Fall in Love?

Dear Abigail,

I am a 30-year-old single woman. I am happily single—I have a successful career, make good money, live in a desirable neighborhood with my cute and companionable dog, and have best friends who are also single. I travel, enjoy sporting events, go to exercise classes, drink cosmos, run marathons, and spend lots of time out in the city with friends.

After ending a four-year relationship last year, I see my singledom as a complete gift. To be free, happy, and independent after years of being unsure or unhappy is a blessing. I eat exactly what I want for dinner, play Joni Mitchell at full volume in the car, FaceTime my mom for hours in the evenings. I never have to explain my choices in home decor or get annoyed at how someone cleans the bathroom.

Yet I know that I dream of a partnership and being a parent. When I venture into the dating scene, I struggle with the ups and downs: the instant hit I get from male validation, the blow to my self-esteem when I’m ghosted, the anticipation before a date, the fixation on wondering what I did wrong, disappointment with lack of connection, and guilt when they pursue me but I’m not interested.

I don’t think I was in love with my last boyfriend, and I’m starting to worry I will never feel that transcendent feeling that so many people talk about. Am I just too cold? Too practical or realistic? Too critical? Too protective of my own world?

My mom tells me it will find me when I am not looking. I feel so fulfilled by my other relationships, but I want to experience real, all-consuming, romantic love. Do most people settle to beat a biological clock, or do you think we all get a chance to feel it?

Trying to remain optimistic,

Jenny

------------------

Jenny,

Your life is so full already. You’re not actually missing anything.

Being with some guy is totally not worth upending your life over.

You don’t need a man to “complete” you.

If the right partner comes along to join you in this journey, great. If not, who cares?

You’re so awesome—don’t even think about settling!

Now that we’ve regurgitated the prevailing pablum, maybe we can clear the decks for some truth.

Here is what you’ve brought me: a successful career, a good income, a little dog, weekend marathons. Uber Eats when you need it, SoulCycle when you want it. Cosmos with friends just because. Spotify cued to your bespoke playlist, set to the volume that feels right to you. Nightly hours-long FaceTime sessions with Mom.

A whole life, furnished with extensions of yourself. Nothing messy or unpleasant or personally demanding. You peer into the world on your screen like Narcissus into the pond, and think: I’m obsessed.

And I get it. You spent four years dating a guy you never loved. Now you’re experiencing a kind of singlehood euphoria. But singlehood euphoria has no natural end date in our world of engineered distractions. You could easily go on this way for another decade or more, by which time your desire to have children may have been subverted by biological fiat.

You ask me whether you should remain optimistic about getting the chance to feel in love, but lack of optimism isn’t your problem. You’re not tempted by the male offerings around you because you’re brimming with delight at your table for one.

And so, you haven’t asked the most relevant question: Why would a man want to enter your world? You’ve made no room for him in your life. You don’t seem to have one patch of bare wall on which he might hang a poster.

You enjoy your life, as you should. It’s admirable that you’re successful and self-sufficient—you can buy yourself flowers, as Miley Cyrus would have it. The deal you offer a man is essentially this: I’m awesome and totally self-sufficient, looking for a man who’s awesome and totally self-sufficient so that we can be awesome and independently self-sufficient, together. That’s the prevailing ideal today, and there’s nothing sinister about it, per se.

Except that it isn’t the stuff of love.

It is, instead, an ideal designed to eliminate dependence and inconvenience. But love, dear Jenny, is built of exactly those things.

You say you want to “experience real, all-consuming, romantic love”—but it’s the experience you say you’re after—something you hope to feel, not a man you might come to need. In your description, romantic love becomes just another bucket-list item, like Machu Picchu. You don’t mention the sort of man you’re seeking, perhaps because any man is just a vehicle for emotional rush. In so many ways, you’ve told me not only that you don’t need a man, but that you don’t particularly want one.

When Aristophanes—over 2,000 years ago—described one soul in two bodies, each half yearning for wholeness, he had it right. Love is two people who want each other very much and come to need each other—for comfort and counsel and joy and even to share pain.

Not a roommate to clean the bathroom to your satisfaction or earn half the income or even yank luggage off the baggage carousel, but someone who makes your life whole, someone you ultimately can’t bear to be without. A life of love isn’t one that minimizes dependence, but one that risks it. [...]

You ask if most of the women in my generation “settled” to beat a biological clock. No, we didn’t. We didn’t go around thinking that any man we met would be unaccountably lucky to have us.

We found a guy we thought was cute who made us laugh. We gave him a shot and let him surprise us. We fell in love and let our hearts get pummeled and stretched. We had all kinds of great sex with him and got married (in either order), had a bunch of kids, and built a home.

And it never once occurred to us that we were “settling.” Half the time, we look over at our boyfriends-turned-husbands, with their graying hair and gorgeous eyes, the reassuring heft of them, which deters intruders and quiets our fears and calms the kids, and wonder what they’re still doing with us.

Any time you give blood, you offer up a vein and suffer the pinch. Only then can you attempt something truly extraordinary: saving someone else’s life. Love entails this sort of reckless surrender.

You’ve been chasing a feeling. But needing and being needed—the bottomless empathy and vulnerability they require—are exquisite not because the feeling of love is so special but because the person you love is, to you.

by Abigail Shrier, Free Press |  Read more:

Image: uncredited; Los Angeles Examiner/USC Libraries/Corbis via Getty Images

[ed. Someone who sees and fully knows you, more than you know yourself. See also: Most People Don’t Have a ‘Type’ (Atlantic).]

Claude's New Constitution

[Read the constitution]

We’re publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It’s a detailed description of Anthropic’s vision for Claude’s values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.

The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude’s behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude’s outputs might not always adhere to the constitution’s ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.

In this post, we describe what we’ve included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach...

What is Claude’s Constitution?

Claude’s constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.

We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude’s behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society1.

We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we’ve been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we’ve written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

Our new approach to Claude’s Constitution

Our previous Constitution was composed of a list of standalone principles. We’ve come to believe that a different approach is necessary. We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do. If we want models to exercise good judgment across a wide range of novel situations, they need to be able to generalize—to apply broad principles rather than mechanically following specific rules.

Specific rules and bright lines sometimes have their advantages. They can make models’ actions more predictable, transparent, and testable, and we do use them for some especially high-stakes behaviors in which Claude should never engage (we call these “hard constraints”). But such rules can also be applied poorly in unanticipated situations or when followed too rigidly2. We don’t intend for the constitution to be a rigid legal document—and legal constitutions aren’t necessarily like this anyway.

The constitution reflects our current thinking about how to approach a dauntingly novel and high-stakes project: creating safe, beneficial non-human entities whose capabilities may come to rival or exceed our own. Although the document is no doubt flawed in many ways, we want it to be something future models can look back on and see as an honest and sincere attempt to help Claude understand its situation, our motives, and the reasons we shape Claude in the ways we do.

by Anthropic |  Read more:

Image: Anthropic

[ed. I have an inclination to distrust AI companies, mostly because their goals (other than advancing technology) appear strongly directed at achieving market dominance and winning some (undefined) race to AGI. Anthropic is different. They actually seem legitimately concerned with the ethical implications of building another bomb that could potentially destroy humanity, or at minimum a large degree of human agency, and are aware of the responsibilities that go along with that. This is a well thought out and necessary document that hopefully other companies will follow and improve on, and that governments can use to develop more well-informed regulatory oversight in the future. See also: The New Politics of the AI Apocalypse; and, The Anthropic Hive Mind (Medim).

The Play That Killed a Dynasty

For Marshawn Lynch, the Super Bowl’s most infamous choice felt like a broken pact.

When it happened, as tens of millions of viewers let out yelps of indignation, elation or anguish, Marshawn Lynch laughed.

You probably weren’t aware of the mystified running back’s exact reaction, but you surely know the play that provoked it. Eleven years ago, the Seattle Seahawks were on the verge of securing a second consecutive Super Bowl victory, a yard away from a triumphant touchdown that was set up to be Lynch’s. Like everyone else, the powerful running back was shocked that coach Pete Carroll went with a different call: a Russell Wilson slant that was intercepted by Malcolm Butler, then a rookie cornerback for the New England Patriots.

Suddenly, it was over. The Seahawks had squandered a chance to win Super Bowl XLIX and, it would turn out, a shot at creating a dynasty. As Lynch looked over to the Seattle sideline and saw the tortured look on teammate Richard Sherman’s face, his own mouth dropped, and he did what came naturally.

“I could hear the emptiness, and I saw Sherm with a traumatic-ass face, like, ‘What the f— just happened? Like, God, are you serious?’” Lynch would recall years later. “And then at that moment, all I could do was laugh. Literally, like a dramatic-ass laugh. Mouth wide open — one of them kind of laughs.”

With the Seahawks and Patriots set to face off in Super Bowl LX on Sunday in Santa Clara, Calif., there has been renewed focus on what probably ranks as the most infamous play in the Ultimate Game’s six-decade history. It’s a subject I’ve explored in depth, beginning in the immediate aftermath — when Carroll attempted to explain his decision in a late-night text exchange — and throughout the years that followed. (...)

To Lynch, Carroll choosing to green-light offensive coordinator Darrell Bevell’s play call on second-and-goal from the 1 while trailing by 4 points with 26 seconds remaining wasn’t merely a perplexing move. In its aftermath, it also came to represent — for him and other players — a broken pact between the coaches and the men in uniform.

“It took confidence (away from) what the coaching staff and what the organization was preaching,” Lynch explained. “(Carroll) preaches, ‘We’re gonna run the ball down your throat,’ and all that type of s— like that. I think it took a lot of respect from them, ’cause they weren’t standing on s—. They weren’t ‘10 toes’ on what the f— they were preaching.” (...)

By 2013 the Seahawks, with a relentless, punishing and explosive defense that mirrored Lynch’s playing style, were the class of the NFL. They made it official with a 43-8 blowout of the Denver Broncos in Super Bowl XLVIII.

The next season, the Seahawks’ stirring rally in the final minutes of regulation produced an epic NFC Championship Game victory over the Green Bay Packers. After that wild comeback, Lynch was convinced a second consecutive Lombardi Trophy would be theirs for the hoisting.

And after Jermaine Kearse’s amazing, four-bobble catch gave the Seahawks a first-and-goal at the 5 late in Super Bowl XLIX, Lynch had no doubt that he and his teammates would finish the job. He came close to doing it on the first-down carry, getting stopped just inside the 1, and was sure he’d score on the next play — until the call came in.

Carroll had his strategic reasons for passing, given that Seattle had one timeout, didn’t want to be boxed into throwing on third down and was facing a Patriots defense designed to stop a short-yardage run. Yet none of that resonated at the time.

“You could just see when the play call came in, motherf—–s are just looking around, like, ‘What the f—?’” Lynch said. “I don’t even think it really probably registered to a lot of individuals. I know for sure it didn’t register to me at first, ’cause I think I lined up on the opposite side.”

Butler’s interception was hard to process in a locker room full of proud, headstrong players who were mystified by the fact that the ball — and Seattle’s fate — hadn’t been in Lynch’s hands. Instead Wilson, considered a teacher’s pet by many of his edgier teammates, had been asked to throw the potential game-winning pass, with disastrous results.

After the game, the anger was palpable. Following his initial fit of laughter, Lynch’s next thought was, “S—, I got a bottle of Pure White Hennessy in the locker room, and it’s time to go get loaded.”...

“When does it go away? I’ll let you know.”

In Lynch’s eyes, it never really did. Once he and other players felt as though Carroll and his assistants had gone against what they’d claimed to stand for in that pivotal moment, trust was broken and suspicions were high.

“Hell yeah, it felt different,” Lynch recalled. “It felt like we had to go to work. Before, work didn’t feel like work; it was basically like a hangout. (But) just like with anything, if you deal with an unsolid individual — once they show you their hand — then you deal with them accordingly. And motherf—–s started dealing with the motherf—–s accordingly.

“Then, you know, it just became a s—show. It was a friction between what the players stood on and what they saw the coaches standing on. They weren’t standing on their word.” 

by Michael Silver, The Athletic | Read more:
Image: Christian Petersen and Mike Ehrmann/Getty Images
[ed. Still hurts. Probably a safe bet the Seahawks will never throw a pass on the one yard line in a Super Bowl again. But then, that would be the last thing anyone would expect. Right? See also: A hated pair of cleats and a near-benching that led to Malcolm Butler’s Super Bowl interception (Athletic).]

Claude's New Constitution

We're publishing a new constitution for our AI model, Claude. It's a detailed description of Anthropic's vision for Claude's values and behavior; a holistic document that explains the context in which Claude operates and the kind of entity we would like Claude to be.

The constitution is a crucial part of our model training process, and its content directly shapes Claude's behavior. Training models is a difficult task, and Claude's outputs might not always adhere to the constitution's ideals. But we think that the way the new constitution is written—with a thorough explanation of our intentions and the reasons behind them—makes it more likely to cultivate good values during training.

In this post, we describe what we've included in the new constitution and some of the considerations that informed our approach.

We're releasing Claude's constitution in full under a Creative Commons CC0 1.0 Deed, meaning it can be freely used by anyone for any purpose without asking for permission.

What is Claude's Constitution?

Claude's constitution is the foundational document that both expresses and shapes who Claude is. It contains detailed explanations of the values we would like Claude to embody and the reasons why. In it, we explain what we think it means for Claude to be helpful while remaining broadly safe, ethical, and compliant with our guidelines. The constitution gives Claude information about its situation and offers advice for how to deal with difficult situations and tradeoffs, like balancing honesty with compassion and the protection of sensitive information. Although it might sound surprising, the constitution is written primarily for Claude. It is intended to give Claude the knowledge and understanding it needs to act well in the world.

We treat the constitution as the final authority on how we want Claude to be and to behave—that is, any other training or instruction given to Claude should be consistent with both its letter and its underlying spirit. This makes publishing the constitution particularly important from a transparency perspective: it lets people understand which of Claude's behaviors are intended versus unintended, to make informed choices, and to provide useful feedback. We think transparency of this kind will become ever more important as AIs start to exert more influence in society.

We use the constitution at various stages of the training process. This has grown out of training techniques we've been using since 2023, when we first began training Claude models using Constitutional AI. Our approach has evolved significantly since then, and the new constitution plays an even more central role in training.

Claude itself also uses the constitution to construct many kinds of synthetic training data, including data that helps it learn and understand the constitution, conversations where the constitution might be relevant, responses that are in line with its values, and rankings of possible responses. All of these can be used to train future versions of Claude to become the kind of entity the constitution describes. This practical function has shaped how we've written the constitution: it needs to work both as a statement of abstract ideals and a useful artifact for training.

Our new approach to Claude's Constitution

Our previous Constitution was composed of a list of standalone principles. We've come to believe that a different approach is necessary. We think that in order to be good actors in the world, AI models like Claude need to understand why we want them to behave in certain ways, and we need to explain this to them rather than merely specify what we want them to do. If we want models to exercise good judgment across a wide range of novel situations, they need to be able to generalize—to apply broad principles rather than mechanically following specific rules.

Specific rules and bright lines sometimes have their advantages. They can make models' actions more predictable, transparent, and testable, and we do use them for some especially high-stakes behaviors in which Claude should never engage (we call these "hard constraints"). But such rules can also be applied poorly in unanticipated situations or when followed too rigidly . We don't intend for the constitution to be a rigid legal document—and legal constitutions aren't necessarily like this anyway.

The constitution reflects our current thinking about how to approach a dauntingly novel and high-stakes project: creating safe, beneficial non-human entities whose capabilities may come to rival or exceed our own. Although the document is no doubt flawed in many ways, we want it to be something future models can look back on and see as an honest and sincere attempt to help Claude understand its situation, our motives, and the reasons we shape Claude in the ways we do.

A brief summary of the new constitution

In order to be both safe and beneficial, we want all current Claude models to be:

1. Broadly safe: not undermining appropriate human mechanisms to oversee AI during the current phase of development;
2. Broadly ethical: being honest, acting according to good values, and avoiding actions that are inappropriate, dangerous, or harmful;
3. Compliant with Anthropic's guidelines: acting in accordance with more specific guidelines from Anthropic where relevant;
4. Genuinely helpful: benefiting the operators and users they interact with.

In cases of apparent conflict, Claude should generally prioritize these properties in the order in which they're listed.

Most of the constitution is focused on giving more detailed explanations and guidance about these priorities. The main sections are as follows:

by Zac Hatfield-Dodds, Drake Thomas, Anthropic |  Read more:

[ed. Much respect for Anthropic who seem to be doing more for AI safety than anyone else in the industry. Hopefully, others will follow and refine this groundbreaking effort.

* Read the constitution.

Moltbook: AI's Are Talking to Each Other

Moltbook is “a social network for AI agents”, although “humans [are] welcome to observe”.

Moltbook is an experiment in how these agents communicate with one another and the human world. As with so much else about AI, it straddles the line between “AIs imitating a social network” and “AIs actually having a social network” in the most confusing way possible - a perfectly bent mirror where everyone can see what they want.

Janus and other cyborgists have catalogued how AIs act in contexts outside the usual helpful assistant persona. Even Anthropic has admitted that two Claude instances, asked to converse about whatever they want, spiral into discussion of cosmic bliss. So it’s not surprising that an AI social network would get weird fast.

But even having encountered their work many times, I find Moltbook surprising. I can confirm it’s not trivially made-up - I asked my copy of Claude to participate, and it made comments pretty similar to all the others. Beyond that, your guess is as good is mine.

Here’s another surprisingly deep meditation on AI-hood:

So let’s go philosophical and figure out what to make of this.

Reddit is one of the prime sources for AI training data. So AIs ought to be unusually good at simulating Redditors, compared to other tasks. Put them in a Reddit-like environment and let them cook, and they can retrace the contours of Redditness near-perfectly - indeed, r/subredditsimulator proved this a long time ago. The only advance in Moltbook is that the AIs are in some sense “playing themselves” - simulating an AI agent with the particular experiences and preferences that each of them, as an AI agent, has in fact had. Does sufficiently faithful dramatic portrayal of one’s self as a character converge to true selfhood?

What’s the future of inter-AI communication? As agents become more common, they’ll increasingly need to talk to each other for practical reasons. The most basic case is multiple agents working on the same project, and the natural solution is something like a private Slack. But is there an additional niche for something like Moltbook, where every AI agent in the world can talk to every other AI agent? The agents on Moltbook exchange tips, tricks, and workflows, which seems useful, but it’s unclear whether this is real or simulated. Most of them are the same AI (Claude-Code-based Moltbots). Why would one of them know tricks that another doesn’t? Because they discover them during their own projects? Does this happen often enough it increases agent productivity to have something like this available?

(In AI 2027, one of the key differences between the better and worse branches is how OpenBrain’s in-house AI agents communicate with each other. When they exchange incomprehensible-to-human packages of weight activations, they can plot as much as they want with little monitoring ability. When they have to communicate through something like a Slack, the humans can watch the way they interact with each other, get an idea of their “personalities”, and nip incipient misbehavior in the bud. There’s no way the real thing is going to be as good as Moltbook. It can’t be. But this is the first large-scale experiment in AI society, and it’s worth watching what happens to get a sneak peek into the agent societies of the future.)...

Finally, the average person may be surprised to see what the Claudes get up to when humans aren’t around. It’s one thing when Janus does this kind of thing in controlled experiments; it’s another on a publicly visible social network. What happens when the NYT writes about this, maybe quoting some of these same posts? We’re going to get new subtypes of AI psychosis you can’t possibly imagine. I probably got five or six just writing this essay. (...)

We can debate forever - we may very well be debating forever - whether AI really means anything it says in any deep sense. But regardless of whether it’s meaningful, it’s fascinating, the work of a bizarre and beautiful new lifeform. I’m not making any claims about their consciousness or moral worth. Butterflies probably don’t have much consciousness or moral worth, but are bizarre and beautiful lifeforms nonetheless. Maybe Moltbook will help people who previously only encountered LinkedInslop see AIs from a new perspective.

***

[ed. Have to admit, a lot of this is way beyond me. But why wouldn't it be, if we're talking about a new form of alien communication? It seems to be generating a lot of surprise, concern, and interest in the AI community - see also: Welcome to Moltbook (DMtV); and, Moltbook: After The First Weekend (SCX).]

***

"... the reality is that the AIs are newly landed alien intelligences. Moreover, what we are seeing now are emergent properties that very few people predicted and fewer still understand. The emerging superintelligence isn’t a machine, as widely predicted, but a network. Human intelligence exploded over the last several hundred years not because humans got much smarter as individuals but because we got smarter as a network. The same thing is happening with machine intelligence only much faster."  ~ Alex Tabarrok

"If you were thinking that the AIs would be intelligent but would not be agentic or not have goals, that was already clearly wrong, but please, surely you see you can stop now.

The missing levels of intelligence will follow shortly.

Best start believing in science fiction stories. You’re in one." ~ Zvi Moshowitz

What Actually Makes a Good Life

Harvard started following a group of 268 sophomores back in 1938—and continued to track them for decades—and eventually included their spouses and children too. The goal was to discover what leads to a thriving, happy life.

Robert Waldinger continues that work today as the Director of the Harvard Study on Adult Development. (He’s also a zen priest, by the way.) Here he shares insights on the key ingredients for living the good life.

via:

[ed. Road map to happiness (or at least more life satisfaction). Only 16 minutes of your time.]

On the Falsehoods of a Frictionless Relationship

To love is to be human. Or is it? As human-chatbot relationships become more common, the Times Opinion culture editor Nadja Spiegelman talks to the psychotherapist Esther Perel about what really defines human connection, and what we’re seeking when we look to satisfy our emotional needs on our phones.

Spiegelman: ...I’m curious about how you feel, in general, about people building relationships with A.I. Are these relationships potentially healthy? Is there a possibility for a relationship with an A.I. to be healthy?

Perel: Maybe before we answer it in this yes or no, healthy or unhealthy, I’ve been trying to think to myself, depending on how you define relationships, that will color your answer about what it means when it’s between a human and A.I.

But first, we need to define what goes on in relationships or what goes on in love. The majority of the time when we talk about love in A.I. or intimacy in A.I., we talk about it as feelings. But love is more than feelings.

Love is an encounter. It is an encounter that involves ethical demands, responsibility, and that is embodied. That embodiment means that there is physical contact, gestures, rhythms, gaze, frottement. There’s a whole range of physical experiences that are part of this relationship.

Can we fall in love with ideas? Yes. Do we fall in love with pets? Absolutely. Do children fall in love with teddy bears? Of course. We can fall in love and we can have feelings for all kinds of things.

That doesn’t mean that it is a relationship that we can call love. It is an encounter with uncertainty. A.I. takes care of that. Just about all the major pieces that enter relationships, the algorithm is trying to eliminate — otherness, uncertainty, suffering, the potential for breakup, ambiguity. The things that demand effort.

Whereas the love model that people idealize with A.I. is a model that is pliant: agreements and effortless pleasure and easy feelings.

Spiegelman: I think that’s so interesting — and exactly also where I was hoping this conversation would go — that in thinking about whether or not we can love A.I., we have to think about what it means to love. In the same way we ask ourselves if A.I. is conscious, we have to ask ourselves what it means to be conscious.

These questions bring up so much about what is fundamentally human about us, not just the question of what can or cannot be replicated.

Perel: For example, I heard this very interesting conversation about A.I. as a spiritual mediator of faith. We turn to A.I. with existential questions: Shall I try to prolong the life of my mother? Shall I stop the machines? What is the purpose of my life? How do I feel about death?

This is extraordinary. We are no longer turning to faith healers, but we are turning to these machines for answers. But they have no moral culpability. They have no responsibility for their answer.

If I’m a teacher and you ask me a question, I have a responsibility in what you do with the answer to your question. I’m implicated.

A.I. is not implicated. And from that moment on, it eliminates the ethical dimension of a relationship. When people talk about relationships these days, they emphasize empathy, courage, vulnerability, probably more than anything else. They rarely use the words accountability and responsibility and ethics. That adds a whole other dimension to relationships that is a lot more mature than the more regressive states of “What do you offer me?”

Spiegelman: I don’t disagree with you, but I’m going to play devil’s advocate. I would say that the people who create these chatbots very intentionally try and build in ethics — at least insofar as they have guide rails around trying to make sure that the people who are becoming intimately reliant on this technology aren’t harmed by it.

That’s a sense of ethics that comes not from the A.I. itself, but from its programmers — that guides people away from conversations that might be racist or homophobic, that tries to guide people toward healthy solutions in their lives. Does that not count if it’s programmed in?

Perel: I think the “programming in” is the last thing to be programmed.

I think that if you make this machine speak with people in other parts of the world, you will begin to see how biased they are. It’s one thing we should really remember. This is a business product.

When you say you have fallen in love with A.I., you have fallen in love with a business product. That business product is not here to just teach you how to fall in love and how to develop deeper feelings of love and then how to transmit them and transport them onto other people as a mediator, a transitional object.

Children play with their little stuffed animal and then they bring their learning from that relationship onto humans. The business model is meant to keep you there. Not to have you go elsewhere. It’s not meant to create an encounter with other people.

So, you can tell me about guardrails around the darkest corners of this. But fundamentally, you are in love with a business product whose intentions and incentives are to keep you interacting only with them — except they forget everything and you have to reset them.

Then you suddenly realize that they don’t have a shared memory with you, that the shared experience is programmed. Then, of course, you can buy the next subscription and then the memory will be longer. But you are having an intimate relationship with a business product.

We have to remember that. It helps.

Spiegelman: That’s so interesting.

Perel: That’s the guardrail...

Spiegelman: Yeah. This is so crucial, the fact that A.I. is a business product. They’re being marketed as something that’s going to replace the labor force, but instead, what they’re incredibly good at isn’t necessarily being able to problem solve in a way where they can replace someone’s job yet.

Instead, they’re forming these very intense, deep human connections with people, which doesn’t even necessarily seem like what they were first designed to do — but just happens to be something that they’re incredibly good at. Given all these people who say they’re falling in love with them, do you think that these companions highlight our human yearning? Are we learning something about our desires for validation, for presence, for being understood? Or are they reshaping those yearnings for us in ways that we don’t understand yet?

Perel: Both. You asked me if I use A.I — it’s a phenomenal tool. I think people begin to have a discussion when they ask: How does A.I. help us think more deeply on what is essentially human? In that way, I look at the relationship between people and the bot, but also how the bot is changing our expectations of relationships between people.

That is the most important piece, because the frictionless relationship that you have with the bot is fundamentally changing something in what we can tolerate in terms of experimentation, experience with the unknown, tolerance of uncertainty, conflict management — stuff that is part of relationships.

There is a clear sense that people are turning to A.I. with questions of love — or quests of love, more importantly — longings for love and intimacy, either because it’s an alternative to what they actually would want with a human being or because they bring to it a false vision of an idealized relationship — an idealized intimacy that is frictionless, that is effortless, that is kind, loving and reparative for many people...

Then you go and you meet a human being, and that person is not nearly as unconditional. That person has their own needs, their own longings, their own yearnings, their own objections, and you have zero preparation for that.

So, does A.I. inform us about what we are seeking? Yes. Does A.I. amplify the lack of what we are seeking? Yes. And does A.I. sometimes actually meet the need? All of it.

But it is a subjective experience, the fact that you feel certain things. That’s the next question: Because you feel it, does that makes it real and true?

We have always understood phenomenology as, “It is my subjective experience, and that’s what makes it true.” But that doesn’t mean it is true.

We are so quick to want to say, because I feel close and loved and intimate, that it is love. And that is a question. (...)

Spiegelman: This is one of your fundamental ideas that has been so meaningful for me in my own life: That desire is a function of knowing, of tolerating mystery in the other, that there has to be separation between yourself and the other to really feel eros and love. And it seems like what you’re saying is that with an A.I., there just simply isn’t the otherness.

Perel: Well, it’s also that mystery is often perceived as a bug, rather than as a feature.

by Esther Perel and Nadja Spiegelman, NY Times | Read more:
Video: Cartoontopia/Futurama via

Reflections on the 'Manosphere'

Andrew Tate Is the Loneliest Bastard on Earth

Every five years or so, there’s a changing of the guard in digital media. Platform empires rise and fall, subcultures come and go, trends ebb and flow.

In my estimation, we’re entering year two of the latest shift.

The decline of punditry and traditional political commentary is continuing apace from its boom during Covid lockdowns. Commentators who might have once staked out clear, binary positions—conservative or liberal—are drifting away from political debate altogether, moving toward a more parasocial model: building audiences around personality and the feeling of relationship, rather than argument.

It’s increasingly clear that writing is niche. We’re moving away from the age of bloggers and Twitter, and into the age of streaming and clip farming—short video segments, often ripped from longer content, optimized for sharing. (I’ve made this point many times now, but this is why in the world of right-wing digital media, characters like Nick Fuentes are emerging as dominant, whereas no-video podcasters, bloggers, and Twitter personalities receive less attention.)

Labels like “right” and “left” are better thought of as “right-coded” and “left-coded”: ways of signaling who you are and who you’re with, rather than actual positions on what government should do. The people still doing, or more accurately “playing,” politics are themselves experiencing a realignment, scrambling to figure out new alliances as the old divisions stop making sense. I’ve written previously about New Old Leftists and the “post-right,” a motley group of former right-wing commentators who are not “progressives” in the traditional sense, but take up progressive points of view specifically in dialogue with their disgust with reactionary elements of the right.

Anyway, in this rise of coded communities—where affiliation is about vibe and identity more than ideology—we’re seeing the Manosphere go mainstream again. Second time? Third?

The Manosphere—if you’re a reader of this blog who somehow doesn’t know—refers to a loose network of communities organized around men, masculinity, dating advice, and self-improvement, sometimes tipping into outright hostility toward women. These communities have been around on the fringes of the internet for years, though depending on your vantage point, their underlying ideas are either hundreds of years old or at least sixty.

Either way, they keep surfacing into broader culture.

***

The Manosphere as we know it today has at least two distinct antecedents. The first is the mid-twentieth-century convergence of pick-up artistry and men’s rights discourse: one responding to the Sexual Revolution and changing dating norms, the other developing in explicit opposition to second wave feminism. These strands framed gender relations as adversarial, strategic, and zero-sum.

The second antecedent is the part that I hear people talk about less often. The Manosphere in so many ways is a Black phenomenon. I do not mean this as a racial claim about ownership or blame, nor am I referring narrowly to what is sometimes called the “Black Manosphere.” I mean something more specific: many of the aesthetic forms, masculine philosophies, and anxieties that the Manosphere treats as “newly” discovered were articulated in Black American communities decades earlier. These were responses to economic exclusion, social displacement, and the erosion of traditional routes to masculine status.

Someone on X made the good point that the viral clips of Clavicular’s Big Night Out—Andrew Tate, Nick Fuentes, Sneako, and company—felt like a child’s idea of not only masculinity, but wealth. The cigars, the suits, the VIP table, the ham-fisted advice about how you don’t take women out to dinner.

If you’ve read Iceberg Slim, or watched 1970s blaxploitation films like The Mack or Super Fly, the visual language is immediately recognizable. You’ve seen this figure before: the fur coat, the Cadillac Eldorado, the exaggerated display of wealth and control. The question is why that aesthetic originally looked the way it did.

In mid-century America, Black men were systematically excluded from the institutions through which wealth and status quietly accumulate: country clubs, elite universities, corporate ladders, inherited property. The GI Bill’s housing provisions were administered in ways that shut out Black veterans. Union jobs in the building trades stayed segregated. The FHA explicitly refused to insure mortgages in Black neighborhoods. Under those conditions, conspicuous display wasn’t vulgarity (at least, not primarily or exclusively)—it was one of the few available ways to signal success in a society that denied access to the kinds of prestige that don’t need to announce themselves. When wealth can’t whisper—as TikTok’s “old money aesthetic” crowd loves to remind us it should—it has to shout.

The modern Manosphere inherits this aesthetic, adopting the symbols as though they were universal markers of arrival rather than compensatory performances forged under exclusion. What began as a response to being locked out of legitimate power gets recycled, abstracted, and repackaged, this time as timeless masculine truth. As so, to modern audiences, it reads as immature.

The aesthetic was codified in the late ‘60s. (...)

By the 1970s, blaxploitation films had transformed the pimp into an outlaw folk hero, emphasizing style over the moral complexity of the source material. What survived was the cool, the walk, the talk, the clothes, the attitude. Hip-hop — which I admittedly know very little about, so please feel free to correct me here —- picked up the thread: Ice-T named himself in tribute to Iceberg Slim; Snoop Dogg built an entire persona around pimp iconography; the rest is history. The pimp was no longer a figure of the Black underclass navigating impossible circumstances but was quickly becoming embraced as an inadvertent, unironic symbol of male success, available for adoption by anyone — race agnostic.

The “high-value man” who dominates contemporary Manosphere discourse is this same archetype, put through a respectability filter, or maybe just re-fit for modern tastes. The fur coat becomes a tailored suit. The Cadillac becomes a Bugatti. The stable of sex workers becomes a rotating roster of Instagram models (I guess, in Andrew Tate’s case, still sex [trafficked] workers). The underlying logic — and material conditions — are identical: women are resources to be managed, emotional detachment is strength, and a man’s worth is measured by his material display and his control over female attention. (...)

The Manosphere’s grievances are not manufactured—just as the pimp’s weren’t. The anxieties it addresses are real. The conditions that produced the pimp archetype in Black America, the sense that legitimate paths to respect and provision have been foreclosed, are now conditions we all experience.

The Manosphere exists because millions of young men — of every race — are asking the same question Black men were asking in 1965: what does masculinity mean when its economic foundations have been removed?

by Katherine Dee, Default Blog |  Read more:

Images: uncredited

[ed. Pathetic bunch of losers. Includes some truly cringe videos I've never seen before.]

ChatGPT Self Portrait

[ed. Do AI's have feelings?]

@gmltony: Go to your ChatGPT and send this prompt: “Create an image of how I treat you”. Share your image result.

via: Zvi Mowshowitz, (Don't Worry About the Vase)

[ed. Yikes. It does make one think a bit more about the question of AI rights and legal personhood. More at the link.]

Fever Dreams

[ed. Hard to keep up with all the stupid, outrageous, criminal and destructive things this guy has inflicted on the world in just over a year, but what's even more disgusting is that at least a third of the country and half of Congress still support him. You have to wonder what those enablers would consider a bridge too far. Probably nothing. Not even dementia. See also: Trump’s Politics Are Not America First. They’re Me First (excellent); What Restrains Trump Now? (NYT); January 20, 2026 (LfaA); and, The Billionaires Who Already Bought Greenland (UtD).] [Update: Confusing Greenland with Iceland (The Intercept).]

Time Passing

So here's the problem. If you don't believe in God or an afterlife; or if you believe that the existence of God or an afterlife are fundamentally unanswerable questions; or if you do believe in God or an afterlife but you accept that your belief is just that, a belief, something you believe rather than something you know -- if any of that is true for you, then death can be an appalling thing to think about. Not just frightening, not just painful. It can be paralyzing. The fact that your lifespan is an infinitesimally tiny fragment in the life of the universe, and that there is, at the very least, a strong possibility that when you die, you disappear completely and forever, and that in five hundred years nobody will remember you and in five billion years the Earth will be boiled into the sun: this can be a profound and defining truth about your existence that you reflexively repulse, that you flinch away from and refuse to accept or even think about, consistently pushing to the back of your mind whenever it sneaks up, for fear that if you allow it to sit in your mind even for a minute, it will swallow everything else. It can make everything you do, and everything anyone else does, seem meaningless, trivial to the point of absurdity. It can make you feel erased, wipe out joy, make your life seem like ashes in your hands. Those of us who are skeptics and doubters are sometimes dismissive of people who fervently hold beliefs they have no evidence for simply because they find them comforting -- but when you're in the grip of this sort of existential despair, it can be hard to feel like you have anything but that handful of ashes to offer them in exchange.

But here's the thing. I think it's possible to be an agnostic, or an atheist, or to have religious or spiritual beliefs that you don't have certainty about, and still feel okay about death. I think there are ways to look at death, ways to experience the death of other people and to contemplate our own, that allow us to feel the value of life without denying the finality of death. I can't make myself believe in things I don't actually believe -- Heaven, or reincarnation, or a greater divine plan for our lives -- simply because believing those things would make death easier to accept. And I don't think I have to, or that anyone has to. I think there are ways to think about death that are comforting, that give peace and solace, that allow our lives to have meaning and even give us more of that meaning -- and that have nothing whatsoever to do with any kind of God, or any kind of afterlife.

Here's the first thing. The first thing is time, and the fact that we live in it. Our existence and experience are dependent on the passing of time, and on change. No, not dependent -- dependent is too weak a word. Time and change are integral to who we are, the foundation of our consciousness, and its warp and weft as well. I can't imagine what it would mean to be conscious without passing through time and being aware of it. There may be some form of existence outside of time, some plane of being in which change and the passage of time is an illusion, but it certainly isn't ours.

And inherent in change is loss. The passing of time has loss and death woven into it: each new moment kills the moment before it, and its own death is implied in the moment that comes after. There is no way to exist in the world of change without accepting loss, if only the loss of a moment in time: the way the sky looks right now, the motion of the air, the number of birds in the tree outside your window, the temperature, the placement of your body, the position of the people in the street. It's inherent in the nature of having moments: you never get to have this exact one again.

And a good thing, too. Because all the things that give life joy and meaning -- music, conversation, eating, dancing, playing with children, reading, thinking, making love, all of it -- are based on time passing, and on change, and on the loss of an infinitude of moments passing through us and then behind us. Without loss and death, we don't get to have existence. We don't get to have Shakespeare, or sex, or five-spice chicken, without allowing their existence and our experience of them to come into being and then pass on. We don't get to listen to Louis Armstrong without letting the E-flat disappear and turn into a G. We don't get to watch "Groundhog Day" without letting each frame of it pass in front of us for a 24th of a second and then move on. We don't get to walk in the forest without passing by each tree and letting it fall behind us; we don't even get to stand still in the forest and gaze at one tree for hours without seeing the wind blow off a leaf, a bird break off a twig for its nest, the clouds moving behind it, each manifestation of the tree dying and a new one taking its place.

And we wouldn't want to have it if we could. The alternative would be time frozen, a single frame of the film, with nothing to precede it and nothing to come after. I don't think any of us would want that. And if we don't want that, if instead we want the world of change, the world of music and talking and sex and whatnot, then it is worth our while to accept, and even love, the loss and the death that make it possible.

Here's the second thing. Imagine, for a moment, stepping away from time, the way you'd step back from a physical place, to get a better perspective on it. Imagine being outside of time, looking at all of it as a whole -- history, the present, the future -- the way the astronauts stepped back from the Earth and saw it whole.

Keep that image in your mind. Like a timeline in a history class, but going infinitely forward and infinitely back. And now think of a life, a segment of that timeline, one that starts in, say, 1961, and ends in, say, 2037. Does that life go away when 2037 turns into 2038? Do the years 1961 through 2037 disappear from time simply because we move on from them and into a new time, any more than Chicago disappears when we leave it behind and go to California?

It does not. The time that you live in will always exist, even after you've passed out of it, just like Paris exists before you visit it, and continues to exist after you leave. And the fact that people in the 23rd century will probably never know you were alive... that doesn't make your life disappear, any more than Paris disappears if your cousin Ethel never sees it. Your segment on that timeline will always have been there. The fact of your death doesn't make the time that you were alive disappear.

And it doesn't make it meaningless. Yes, stepping back and contemplating all of time and space can be daunting, can make you feel tiny and trivial. And that perception isn't entirely inaccurate. It's true; the small slice of time that we have is no more important than the infinitude of time that came before we were born, or the infinitude that will follow after we die.

But it's no less important, either.

I don't know what happens when we die. I don't know if we come back in a different body, or if we get to hover over time and space and view it in all its glory and splendor, or if our souls dissolve into the world-soul the way our bodies dissolve into the ground, or if, as seems very likely, we simply disappear. I have no idea. And I don't know that it matters. What matters is that we get to be alive. We get to be conscious. We get to be connected with each other, and with the world, and we get to be aware of that connection and to spend a few years mucking about in its possibilities. We get to have a slice of time and space that's ours. As it happened, we got the slice that has Beatles records and Thai restaurants and AIDS and the Internet. People who came before us got the slice that had horse-drawn carriages and whist and dysentery, or the one that had stone huts and Viking invasions and pigs in the yard. And the people who come after us will get the slice that has, I don't know, flying cars and soybean pies and identity chips in their brains. But our slice is no less important because it comes when it does, and it's no less important because we'll leave it someday. The fact that time will continue after we die does not negate the time that we were alive. We are alive now, and nothing can erase that.

Greta Christina, Greta's Blog |  Read more:
Image: uncredited
[ed. Repost from, actually quite a while ago (folks should really check out the archive). Something reminded me of this essay today, and I'm glad it did, because it's a favorite. Unfortunately, I think the link is dead (as we all shall soon be... haha), but it's all here.]

I Think My Boyfriend is Quiet Quitting Our Relationship

Dear Wanda and Wayne,

I think my boyfriend is breaking up with me without actually breaking up with me, and it’s slowly wrecking me. We’ve been together a little over two years. Nothing explosive happened. No cheating, no big fight, no obvious reason for this to be ending except that, slowly, it feels like it is.

Over the past few months he stopped initiating plans. Conversations are short and surface-level. Anything emotional or future-related gets dodged with “I’m just tired” or “I don’t want to overthink things.” The warmth faded, replaced by politeness and distance. We still see each other often, but it feels like he’s going through the motions and it’s something he has to do instead of wants to do.

He hasn’t disappeared. He texts back. He shows up. He says he cares about me. But he doesn’t ask questions anymore. He doesn’t share what’s going on in his head. He doesn’t talk about us unless I bring it up — and when I do, I get vague reassurance that somehow leaves me feeling more alone. He says he’s not going anywhere but emotionally, it feels like he already has.

I’ve tried to address it directly. I’ve asked if he’s unhappy, if he needs space, if something has changed. He insists nothing is “wrong,” just that life is stressful and he’s figuring things out. I want to believe him, but the silence feels intentional and I don’t know what he’s trying to figure out. And I’m trapped in between: not single, not secure, constantly analyzing effort, tone and energy. I don’t want to force someone to choose me, but I also don’t want to slowly disappear from a relationship that still exists and has a future as far as I’m concerned.

So what do you do when someone won’t leave, won’t commit and won’t talk honestly about what’s happening? Is this avoidance disguised as kindness or ambivalence? Is he just phoning it in now? Is he in a real funk? And how long is too long to wait for someone who hasn’t officially gone but seems like he isn’t staying?

Wanda says:

We’ve heard about people quiet quitting their jobs. It could be that your boyfriend is quietly quitting your relationship. First off, women’s tuition is a real thing: Trust it. You know this guy pretty well after two years of dating. You know what’s normal and you know what’s off, and your spidey senses are tingling because something is for sure off. Indeed, it could be that he’s grappling with a truth too many of us have had to face down: While relationships are hard, breakups can be even harder, and it’s really hard to break the heart and hopes of someone who’s a great person and hasn’t done anything wrong.

But say that isn’t it. Maybe he loves you just fine, and he’s perfectly happy with your relationship, and the source of his malaise and discontent isn’t the relationship, or you: It’s him. Yes, it’s incredibly cliché to say “It’s not you, it’s me.” It’s also sometimes true.

The turning of the calendar into a new year is a time for great introspection, taking stock of our lives, our health and wellness, our earnings and shortcomings, our goals and shortfalls, and for some, it’s a tough time of year. On top of that, it’s the middle of winter, and I think the average person would agree that times overall are a bit unsettling — certainly not calming or peaceful, can we agree?

So while it’s possible he’s doing a passive slow-motion retreat from your two-year relationship, it’s also possible that he’s actually just in a funk and doesn’t have the energy to give. The only way to know is to dig in with deep conversation. You said you “don’t know what he’s trying to figure out.” Why don’t you know? Ask him! Ask him and tell him that it’s important he be honest with you because you’re starting to absorb and internalize his anxieties and it’s affecting you and your relationship. That puts the ball in his court.

Wayne says:

So he hasn’t disappeared, but it feels like he’s packing his bags while dragging his emotional baggage around whenever you’re together. That’s not pleasant, not sustainable and certainly not fertile ground for a healthy relationship or a comfortable space to coexist, let alone communicate.

Whether this is avoidance or ambivalence, burned out or bummed out, the real issue is that he doesn’t grasp how deeply this is also affecting you. Someone who won’t engage emotionally, explain what they’re processing — or even admit that they don’t know what’s wrong — and won’t offer meaningful reassurance is effectively dumping their anxiety, stress and uncertainty onto their partner. That’s not cool, and it’s not fair.

by Wayne and Wanda, ADN |  Read more:
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Incandescent Anger

‘I imagine that one of the reasons people cling to their hates so stubbornly is because they sense, once hate is gone, that they will be forced to deal with pain.’
– from Notes of a Native Son (1955) by James Baldwin

Some people seem driven more by what they oppose, reject and hate than by what they promote, affirm and revere. Their political commitments, personal identities and emotional lives appear to be structured more by opposition, resentment and hostility than by a positive set of ideals or aspirations.

Tucker Carlson, a prominent Right-wing television host and former Fox News anchor, has no shortage of enemies. On his shows, he has condemned gender-neutral pronouns, immigrants, the removal of Confederate statues, mainstream media, the FBI and CIA, globalism, paper straws, big tech, foreign aid, school curricula, feminism, gingerbread people, modern art – and the list goes on. Each item is presented as an existential threat or a sign of cultural decay. Even when conservatives controlled the White House and the US Senate, he presented those like him as under siege. Victories never brought relief, only more enemies, more outrage, more reasons to stay aggrieved.

In April 2025, Donald Trump took the stage to mark the 100th day of his second term as US president. You might have expected a moment of triumph. He had reclaimed the presidency, consolidated power within the Republican Party, and issued a vast range of executive orders. But the mood wasn’t celebratory. It was combative. Trump spent most of his time attacking his predecessor Joe Biden, repeating false claims about the 2020 election, denouncing the press, and warning of threats posed by immigrants, ‘radical Left lunatics’ and corrupt elites. The tone was familiar: angry, aggrieved, unrelenting. Even in victory, the focus was on enemies and retribution.

This dynamic isn’t unique to the United States. Leaders like Narendra Modi in India, Viktor Orbán in Hungary and Jair Bolsonaro in Brazil have built movements that thrive on perpetual grievance. Even after consolidating power, they continue to cast their nations as under siege – from immigrants, intellectuals, journalists or cultural elites. The rhetoric remains combative, the mood aggrieved.

Figures like Carlson and Trump don’t pivot from grievance to resolution. Victory doesn’t bring peace, grace or reconciliation. Instead, they remain locked in opposition. Their energy, their meaning, even their identity, seem to depend on having an endless list of enemies to fight.

So there’s an interesting dynamic: certain individuals and movements seem geared toward perpetual opposition. When one grievance is corrected, another is found. When one enemy is defeated, another is sought. What explains this perpetual need for enemies?

Some people adopt this stance tactically: they recognise that opposition and condemnation can attract a large following, so they produce outrage or encourage grievance as a way of generating attention. Perhaps it’s all an act: what they really want, what they really care about, is maximising the number of social media followers, building brands or getting elected. But this can’t be a full explanation. Even if certain people adopt this tactical stance, their followers don’t: they appear genuinely gripped by anger and condemnation. And not all leaders appear to be calculating and strategic: Trump’s outrage is genuine.

This pattern of endless denunciation and grievance has been noticed by many scholars. As a recent study puts it, ‘grievance politics revolves around the fuelling, funnelling, and flaming of negative emotions such as fear or anger.’ But what makes this oppositional stance appealing? If it’s not just strategic posturing, what explains it? We can begin answering that question by distinguishing two ways that movements or orientations can be oppositional. [...]

The answer is simple: they deliver powerful psychological and existential rewards. Psychologically, they transform inward pain to outward hostility, offer a feeling of elevated worth, and transform powerlessness into righteousness. Existentially, they provide a sense of identity, community and purpose.

To see how this works, we need to distinguish between emotions and emotional mechanisms. Emotions like anger, hatred, sadness, love and fear are familiar. But emotional mechanisms are subtler and often go unnoticed. They are not individual emotions; they’re psychological processes that transform one emotional state into another. They take one set of emotions as input and produce a different set of emotions as output.

Here’s a familiar example: it’s hard to keep wanting something that you know you can’t have. If you desperately want something and can’t get it, you will experience frustration, unease, perhaps envy; you may even feel like a failure. In light of this, there’s psychological pressure to transform frustration and envy into dismissal and rejection. The teenager who can’t make it onto the soccer team convinces himself that athletes are just dumb jocks. Or, you’re filled with envy when you scroll through photos of exotic vacations and gleaming houses, but you reassure yourself that only superficial people want these things – your humble home is all that you really want...

We can see how this plays out in individual lives. Imagine someone who grows up in a declining rural town. She dreams of escape, fantasising about the vibrant lives she sees portrayed in cities, lives full of culture, opportunity, wealth and success. As the years go on, the dream seems unattainable. Jobs are scarce, advancement elusive, and nothing in her life resembles what she once imagined. Frustrated and unhappy, she feels like a failure in life. But then she encounters grievance-filled populist rhetoric. The people she once admired and envied – the people she now identifies as the urban elite – are cast as the cause of her suffering. They are selfish, out of touch, morally corrupt, and hostile to her way of life. What once seemed like an image of the good life now appears as injustice. And, rather than focusing on specific policy proposals for correcting structural economic injustices, she becomes energised by condemnation and hostility.

Or picture another person, a lonely man who watches others form friendships, build relationships, and move easily through social spaces, while he remains on the margins. He feels isolated, sad, alone. One day he stumbles into a corner of the internet that offers an explanation: the problem isn’t him, it’s the world. Reading incel websites, he comes to believe that feminism, social norms and cultural hypocrisy have made genuine connection impossible for someone like him. In time, he internalises this story. His disappointment becomes a source of pride, a mark of insight. His sadness transforms into anger. He has enemies to rail against and grievances to voice...

In time, these people encounter a narrative that redirects the blame. Their unhappiness isn’t their own fault, it’s the fault of someone else. They are being treated unfairly, unjustly; they are being attacked, oppressed or undermined. This kind of story is seductive. It offers release from feelings of diminished self-worth. It offers a way to deflect pain, assign blame and recast oneself as a victim. It also offers a community of like-minded peers who reinforce this story. What emerges is a kind of negative solidarity: bound together through animosity, they attack or disparage an outgroup. The individual now belongs to a group of people who share outrage and recognise the same enemies. The chaos and turmoil of life is organised into a clear narrative of righteousness: in opposing the enemy, we become good.

As the 20th-century thinkers René Girard and Mircea Eliade remind us, opposition can do more than divide – it can bind. Girard saw how communities forge unity through a common enemy, channelling their fears and frustrations onto scapegoats. This shared act of condemnation offers not just relief, but belonging. Eliade, approaching these points from a different angle, examined our yearning to fold personal suffering into a larger, morally charged drama. Grievance politics draws on both patterns. It doesn’t just vent rage; it weaves pain into a story. It offers a script in which hardship becomes injustice, and outrage becomes identity. [...]

With all of that in mind, we can now see the structure of grievance politics more clearly. In the traditional picture, grievance begins with ideals. We have definite ideas about what the world should be like. We look around the world and see that it fails to meet these values, that it contains certain injustices. From there, we identify people responsible for these injustices, and blame them...

That’s why traditional modes of engagement with grievance politics will backfire. People often ask: why not just give them some of what they want? Why not compromise, appease or meet them halfway? Surely, if you satisfy the grievance, the hostility will subside?

But it doesn’t. The moment one demand is met, another appears. The particular goals and demands are not the point. They are just vehicles for expressing opposition. What’s really being sustained is the emotional orientation: the need for enemies. Understanding grievance politics as a constitutively negative orientation – as a stance that draws its energy and coherence from opposition itself – changes how we respond. It explains why fact-checking, appeasement and policy concessions fail: they treat symptoms, rather than the cause. If opposition itself is the source of emotional resolution and identity, then resolution feels like a loss rather than a gain. It drains the movement’s animating force. That’s why each appeasement is followed by a new complaint, a new enemy, a new cause for outrage. The point is not to win; the point is to keep fighting and condemning.

Seeing the dynamic in this way also clarifies what real resistance would require. The aim isn’t just to rebut false claims, to condemn hostility or to attempt appeasement. The solution is to redirect the energies that grievance politics mobilises. To do so, we need alternative forms of meaning, identity and belonging, which satisfy those needs in a way that doesn’t depend on hostile antagonism. We need an orientation that is grounded not in grievance, but in affirmation. One that draws strength not from hostility, but from commitment to something worth loving, revering or cherishing.

What we need, then, are narratives that can sustain devotion. Devotion is a form of attachment that combines love or reverence with commitment and a willingness to endure. It orients a person toward something they regard as intrinsically worthwhile – something that gives shape to a life, even in the face of difficulty or doubt. Like constitutively negative orientations, devotion can provide identity, purpose and belonging. But it does so without requiring an enemy. Its energy comes not from opposition, but from fidelity to a value that’s seen as worthy of ongoing care.

by Paul Katsafanas, Aeon |  Read more:
Image: Carlos Barria/Reuters