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Sara E. Wolf, Teaching Copyright: Practical Lesson Ideas and Instructional Resources: What it says on the tin—a lot of rubrics and frameworks that would allow copyright teaching to non-law students to fit into other courses. Some useful scenarios and even a few multiple-choice questions and suggested activities for different levels of learners.
How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, ed. Frederik Juliaan Vervaet et al.: Papers from a conference offering different views of the history and its relevance to the present day. Most interesting to me was From Caesarism to Populism: An Intellectual History, by Annelien de Dijn, who argues that repeatedly blaming populists for democratic decline is likely a mistake. Although some autocrats have majority support, Trump initially lost the popular vote and gained power only through the Electoral College, and Jair Bolsonaro only won the popular vote after the courts disqualified his main opponents. She suggests that elite support is actually key, rather than some sort of charismatic hold on the masses.
Michelle Carr, Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind: Full of interesting information about dream research! Dreams, she suggests, are remixes of content from life, “consistently social in nature,” which may play a role in reinforcing social skills overnight. People in sleep labs often dream about trying to sleep well or perform other experimental tasks. At home, dreams also often include repeated attempts to achieve a goal—“process rather than completion,” which might enable rehearsal of useful skills. Dreams might also be like play—trying out new behaviors. By erasing details, dreams support generalization, which can be good for remembering—and even for moving past trauma.
You may have heard that dreams can consolidate learning. While lucid dreamers can definitely improve their performance on puzzles they practice in dreams, I was amused to learn that the ones who fail tend to look to other dream characters for help, who are useless. Still, targeted dreaming often led to insights. The hyper-associative state of REM sleep can also be a source of creative insights—even 1 minute can be enough, so maybe an “upright nap” can help you out with a problem. And discussing dreams in a group or with a partner turns out to lead people to valuable insights—more than discussing waking events. “Through the fictional and story-like façade of dreams we more readily disclose sensitive or personal topics that we might otherwise try to hide or avoid.”
Schizophrenic patients generally don’t recall their dreams as well as non-schizophrenic patients, and their dreams feature more strangers and fewer familiar people. Depressed patients play relatively passive roles in their dreams, and also may have emotionally flat and colorless dreams. Four out of five patients with addiction have drug dreams in the first months of abstinence, with increased cravings the next day. Gambling addicts have similar gambling dreams. But dreams in which dreamers resist drugs or feel relief on awakening can be a good sign for recovery, and the frequency of such dreams tends to decline over time.
Trauma also predisposes people to nightmares. (Deaf adults apparently have more nightmares than hearing adults, connected to early experiences of communication barriers.) And untreated nightmares can reinforce the trauma. Most nightmare sufferers describe repeating themes, often traceable back to emotional memories. Nightmares also disrupt REM sleep, which is important for recovery. People prone to nightmares are often more easily overwhelmed by sensory input like bright lights or loud noises; they may also be more likely to somatize stress: “to experience bodily symptoms such as chest pain or headaches in response to psychological stress.” People who have difficulty identifying or describing their feelings are also more prone to nightmares. But nightmare-prone people are also more open to experience generally, including positive experiences, and are better able than less-sensitive people to detect small differences in photos of landscapes and to detect real words when listening to messed-up audio, suggesting greater visual and aural sensitivity. Still, nightmares themselves are bad: they’re a risk factor for suicide and PTSD, which may be related to REM disruptions.
One thing that doesn’t work: trying to suppress thoughts while awake can worsen nightmares. She also doesn’t like treating nightmares with medications, since they generally suppress REM sleep too and can lead to a nightmare rebound when medication stops. She wants people to work with their nightmares, not avoid or suppress them.
More than half of psychosis patients have nightmares, which can predict spikes in symptoms. And suicide-related dreams can predict a suicidal crisis. She makes the case for using nightmares as a diagnostic tool for both populations. She also speculates that feeling out of control in life and in nightmares is linked, and that helping people with emotion regulation can help both sleep and waking.
Carr argues that treating nightmares can be valuable in itself and to make it easier to treat other problems. Lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is aware she’s dreaming and even able to intervene in the dream, can often be taught, and people who can refuse the nightmare or change some of the conditions within it can usually reduce or eliminate nightmares. Carr ties this to a greater sense of control over one’s life/emotions. More control over dreams could also help people reframe drug-seeking or other distressing dreams, and might even improve chronic pain (at least just by increasing sleep quality).
People trying to dream lucidly can take various steps, though a couple of them—including disrupting your sleep-wake cycle to trigger the kind of morning REM cycle that’s most conducive to lucid dreaming—may not be advisable for people having sleep problems. Nonetheless, Carr says people who follow all the steps have about a 50% chance of having a lucid dream within a week, which seems like a pretty effective protocol! Also, video gamers apparently have more lucid dreams than non-gamers; controlling a virtual avatar might be sufficiently like dreaming to prime that. Flying dreams have also been linked to lucid dreaming, because flying can be a clue that you’re in a dream.
You can also do nightmare therapy by listening to sounds while rehearsing positive images, and then having the sounds repeat while you’re asleep (“targeted reactivation”). Similarly, having a pleasant scent present while you’re sleeping can help. But, while she thinks some tech can help some people, there’s also a risk of a nocebo effect—“using wearable devices can actually worsen one’s sleep perception” and make people feel worse/more tired just because they know they didn’t get as much deep sleep as was “best.” Likewise, trying to dream lucidly can lead to sleep loss—succeeding is worth it, but if you fail, your sleep quality can be worse. Also, lucid dreaming might not be a good idea for people prone to psychosis, because the techniques used, including wake-up-go-back-to-sleep and “reality testing,” where you try to figure out if you’re in a dream, “are to some extent designed to blur the boundaries between sleep and wake states,” which is not a good idea for that at-risk population. “In fact, frequent use of lucid dream induction techniques has been associated with an increase in dissociative symptoms.” So people with PTSD may need gentler techniques like the sound/smell targeted reactivation described above, or even just “intention-setting” where you think while awake about having a peaceful/controlled night. Also, treating sleep apnea with a CPAP machine can decrease nightmares (whereas other nightmare treatments don’t work well for apnea-induced nightmares).
There’s also other interesting stuff about sleep—REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) involves people physically acting out their dreams because sleep paralysis stopped working. It’s rare (1%) in the general population but can develop suddenly in men over sixty (8% prevalence), and up to 90% of RBD suffers develop a neurogenerative disease within a decade of their diagnosis.
Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People: No one ever accused Feldman of being humble; although I found the first third of the book not very interesting (it’s a history of different movements in American Jewish thought, with some reference to non-American developments), the discussion of the relationship between Israel and American Jews was thoughtful, nuanced, and far more complicated than I can do justice to. His argument involves Israel as a redemptive counterweight to the Holocaust as well as Israeli political/religious developments—the formation of an actual Israeli state sapped secular Zionism of some of its energy, while religious Zionism gained power and also invested a lot of resources in educating American conservative Jews. (Secular Zionism sought to create a Jewish state in a place with historic meaning for Jews, not to occupy any particular amount or patch of land and therefore accepted UN partition plans; religious Zionism, not so much.) Among other things, he points out that the Holocaust Museum in the US was built before the National Museum of the American Indian or the National Museum of African American History and Culture—and that this was an expression of identity for American Jews. But that itself says a lot about the centrality of the Holocaust to American Jewry—as well as making “a claim of universal significance for the particular Jewish experience of suffering.” For progressive Jews, then, the universalizing meaning led to increasing criticism of the actually existing government of Israel, which is violating the principles of “never again.”
Feldman also explains the higher standard to which Israel is sometimes held as a consequence of its post-WWII creation—in the view of many (Jews and non-Jews) as compensation for the Holocaust. “If Israel was created to be a light until the nations, then when it failed to live up to that ideal, its failure would inevitably be more conspicuous than the failures of other states.” Western Europeans in particular, regarding Israel as essentially Western European in nature, don’t hold Arab or Muslim states to the same Western standards “either because of implicit racism against them or because of a more defensible political relativism.” Relatedly, when the European left became anti-colonial, Israel’s own creation looked like a colonialist legacy—except that the Jews had no other country. There’s a lot more in here, not all of which sits well with me, but if you’re interested in the topic, maybe skip part one and read the rest.
Ko-Lin Chin, Counterfeited in China: The Operations of Illicit Businesses: Chin studied fashion counterfeiters, which provides useful information but also studies the population most likely to believe—with some reason—that what they do only involves monetary harm to big brands. Most of them considered themselves hard-working people who were doing honest work (and often contributing to China’s development, like other small businesses). They argued that counterfeiting drove Chinese demand for “the real thing.” Compared to Chin’s previous work on human traffickers and drug dealers, they were less likely to admit to engaging in prostitution, alcohol/drug use, and gambling. They were baffled by IP proponents’ claims that counterfeiting was a way that “organized crime” makes money; the triads etc. didn’t seem to be involved. There weren’t turfs, hierarchies, leadership structures, or subcultural norms. Counterfeiting was a crime that was organized/required coordination, not organized crime. They were just looking to make money and preferred to avoid detection, and therefore avoided violence. They did pay off local officials when they could do so to avoid prison (reactive rather than proactive), but their corruption was small and local, of far less concern to the central government than high-level corruption. They believed that the authorities tolerated a certain amount of counterfeiting so as to avoid unrest from the many people whose livelihoods depended on it. This was especially true because so many suppliers/factories relied on both legitimate and counterfeit production.
I would really like to know more about the people who counterfeit batteries and baby formula. Chinese authorities supposedly tolerate most fashion counterfeiting in the absence of someone making trouble—employees, business rivals, clients (distributors upset about quality or lack of deliveries or trying to avoid paying, not the individual purchasers who know they’re getting counterfeits), and people in search of a reward offered by the state are the likely suspects, and that’s one reason people prefer to work with family members.
Another risk-mitigating strategy counterfeiters use is to register their own trademarks, regardless of how many goods they actually sell under those marks. They also use misspellings of well-known brands, believing there’s less pressure to stop those (and also willing to change the label to be properly spelled if a known customer asks). They also split up operations: a handbag without any branded hardware isn’t illegal, so only the people with the hardware/finished products are at risk and the leather cutting workshops, for example, are safe.
Chin’s informants suggest that counterfeiting really got rolling when foreign brands came in for cheap production—it was simple to make 2500 bags instead of 2000, etc. And they’d be good quality because they’d been made on the same machines. You have to make extras for quality control. When brand owners started punching holes in rejects, one informant says, resilient sellers just filled in the holes—and sold them as guaranteed authentic (aka “point by point,” which apparently were often reserved for Chinese customers since foreigners aren’t as discerning, though I take it that this may have changed with the rise of Tiktok, which postdates Chin’s data collection). There are also less-accurate copies—what I’d call infringements rather than counterfeits—with slightly different names and/or lower quality. The informants thought that this was less likely to get them in trouble, which might be descriptively true but has nothing much to do with trademark law (including in China). And they also thought the future of counterfeiting in China was bleak, as the country developed further
Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity: As opposed to examining the case for Mars in detail, this is a tour through the dumb things that rich white men in Silicon Valley believe. Becker cogently demonstrates that, by the same logic that leads them endorsing death now to improve the chances of hypothetical zillions a million years in the future, the whole project is nonsensical. For example, if energy use continues to grow at the same rate as it does now, “3,700 years from right now, we’d be using all the energy produced by all the stars in the observable universe. If Bezos believes that ceasing to grow our energy usage must lead to a culture of stagnation, he’d better get used to the idea.”
Becker argues that these ideas, now shaping AI (a huge target of capital investment and justification for energy use), are reductive, since key problems that can supposedly be “solved” with technology are not technological problems but social problems. The gap between “we can make everything we want” and “everyone has access to the things they want” is one of policy. “The solution to, say, border disputes between India and Pakistan isn’t throwing more technology at the problem.”
But pretending that tech is always the solution is profitable. Perhaps even more importantly, their ideas about the future allow them to deny the inevitability of death—in imagining they can live forever, they’re threatening the future of all. Becker calls this “transcendence, allowing adherents to feel they can safely ignore all limitations. Go to space, and you can ignore scarcity of resources, not to mention legal restrictions. Be a longtermist, and you can ignore conventional morality, justifying whatever actions you take by claiming they’re necessary to ensure the future safety of humanity. Hasten the Singularity, and you can ignore death itself, or at least assure yourself that you can put it off for a few billion years.”
But haven’t we been on an exponential upwards technological trajectory? It took thousands of years for the Industrial Revolution, but the pace of change has been much faster since, and if we can now do things impossible before because we imagined they might be possible (antibiotics, spaceflight) then why aren’t all the technologies we’ve imagined possible in the foreseeable future? “The fate of Moore’s law is the fate of all exponential trends: they end.” That includes innovation.
Becker points out that, as with many political positions, positioning huge leaps forward as inevitable is rhetorically effective, including by excusing responsibility for any nasty stuff that comes mid-leap. The AI will decide all, fix all. It also furthers a desire for control—the fantasy that we’re living in a computer-generated universe is a fantasy of total control, “especially for those who know how to control computers.”
But this is nonsense. For example, the internet’s beloved Maciej Cegłowski points out, “If Einstein tried to get a cat in a carrier, and the cat didn’t want to go, you know what would happen to Einstein…. He would have to resort to a brute-force solution that has nothing to do with intelligence, and in that matchup the cat could do pretty well for itself. So even an embodied AI might struggle to get us to do what it wants.” Cegłowski also jokes about the smartest person he knew, “and all he did was lie around and play World of Warcraft between bong rips…. The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation.” Continuing his bangers, he notes that toxic individualism is also doing work here: “A recurring flaw in AI alarmism is that it treats intelligence as a property of individual minds, rather than recognizing that this capacity is distributed across our civilization and culture.”
Becker gets equally good quotes from several of his interviewees. Philosopher Brian Weatherson devastates the foundational assumption of longtermism: that we can know now what choices now will be good for people ten thousand, or million, years in the future. “The Seven Years’ War is about as far in the past as 2300 is in the future. And the Seven Years’ War had a causal impact on just about every country on the planet, in many cases a massive impact…. But did it make those countries better or worse, richer or poorer, more or less just, etc? Who knows! The [what-ifs] are too hard, even knowing how one particular run of history turned out. Our ability to know what will change extinction likelihoods [in] 250+ years, and the size and direction of those changes, is worse than our ability to know the size and direction of the causal impact of past events. And we don’t know that.”
Becker also provides biting readings of various sub-species of tech bro futurism, including the “simulation hypothesis”: we’re in the Matrix, not in nature. “It is hard not to read into this shades of Genesis: We are made in the creator’s image, the world was made with us in mind,” and “If we live in a computer simulation, then expertise in software engineering really is expertise in everything.” They’re in control.
But these dumb ideas have been around, in various forms, for a long time. “The fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is the fundamental problem at the core of this book. They’re the reason this is a polemic rather than a quirky tour of wacky ideas.” We must push back against the claimed inevitability of their domination and remember that “no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. … They are too credulous and shortsighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now.”
Shoshana Walter, Rehab: An American Scandal: Everything in the US is worse than you think. We suppressed buproprion administered by ordinary physicians, made methadone super stigmatizing, separated medication treatment from other kinds of drug treatment and social supports, and harassed doctors who prescribed buproprion. Our alternatives are poorly regulated treatment facilities that far too often prey on the most vulnerable to get their insurance money. Among other consequences, “patients are more likely to overdose and die after a 30-day stint in rehab than before it.” Rehab can work, but it’s most likely to do so if people have support and opportunities when they leave. Women who can bring their children stay in treatment longer and do better longterm, but the number of treatment programs that allow this has declined to 2% of all facilities nationwide.
Meanwhile, while some treatment programs are insurance scams, others have figured out how to make money on both ends—by sending people to work instead of to treatment, often because they agreed to treatment to keep out of jail and thus can’t refuse any assignments: “Between 2013 and 2018, Cenikor made more than $42 million from their uncompensated Cenikor workers. Meanwhile, the facility had lucrative contracts with the state and federal governments, received insurance and Medicaid payouts, and had residents apply for and relinquish their food stamps.”
Why, then, are overdose deaths declining? First, “[i]n the era of fentanyl, drug users have become smarter about the way they consume drugs, such as using them in the company of others and employing Narcan in case of overdose.” Second, many of the most vulnerable users have already died, either from drugs, covid, or other sequelae of poverty and isolation.
Walter is a fan of “contingency management—a type of treatment in which patients receive consequences and rewards for behavior,” along with providing people with resources to support recovery. After all, she notes, tens of millions of Americans report recovering from addiction, 60% without formal treatment and mostly after only two attempts. “Those who recover without treatment typically have access to financial and social resources that help them overcome obstacles, facilitate life change, and allow them to find alternatives to drug use. And these people also are more likely to be white, with higher levels of education, social networks, and opportunity.” But when change is out of reach for most Americans, so are the resources to escape addiction.
Mimi Swartz, Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart: Journalistic, human-focused story of the people who working towards artificial hearts that can really work for most people—the story starts when mostly only white men could get traction, and various Black and female contributors have been written out (for two Black men, either records apparently didn’t reveal their last names or interviewees didn’t remember—there aren’t many notes). Notable features: parallel invention was very much a thing, when believing that it could be done spurred many to move in the same direction. Also, by the 2000s, the international character of research is really kicking in; a key development comes from a team that largely met on Skype and included Europeans, Asians, and an Australian. A research institution in Houston got them all visas to come work on making the device ready for human use—try to imagine that in 2025.
How Republics Die: Creeping Authoritarianism in Ancient Rome and Beyond, ed. Frederik Juliaan Vervaet et al.: Papers from a conference offering different views of the history and its relevance to the present day. Most interesting to me was From Caesarism to Populism: An Intellectual History, by Annelien de Dijn, who argues that repeatedly blaming populists for democratic decline is likely a mistake. Although some autocrats have majority support, Trump initially lost the popular vote and gained power only through the Electoral College, and Jair Bolsonaro only won the popular vote after the courts disqualified his main opponents. She suggests that elite support is actually key, rather than some sort of charismatic hold on the masses.
Michelle Carr, Nightmare Obscura: A Dream Engineer’s Guide Through the Sleeping Mind: Full of interesting information about dream research! Dreams, she suggests, are remixes of content from life, “consistently social in nature,” which may play a role in reinforcing social skills overnight. People in sleep labs often dream about trying to sleep well or perform other experimental tasks. At home, dreams also often include repeated attempts to achieve a goal—“process rather than completion,” which might enable rehearsal of useful skills. Dreams might also be like play—trying out new behaviors. By erasing details, dreams support generalization, which can be good for remembering—and even for moving past trauma.
You may have heard that dreams can consolidate learning. While lucid dreamers can definitely improve their performance on puzzles they practice in dreams, I was amused to learn that the ones who fail tend to look to other dream characters for help, who are useless. Still, targeted dreaming often led to insights. The hyper-associative state of REM sleep can also be a source of creative insights—even 1 minute can be enough, so maybe an “upright nap” can help you out with a problem. And discussing dreams in a group or with a partner turns out to lead people to valuable insights—more than discussing waking events. “Through the fictional and story-like façade of dreams we more readily disclose sensitive or personal topics that we might otherwise try to hide or avoid.”
Schizophrenic patients generally don’t recall their dreams as well as non-schizophrenic patients, and their dreams feature more strangers and fewer familiar people. Depressed patients play relatively passive roles in their dreams, and also may have emotionally flat and colorless dreams. Four out of five patients with addiction have drug dreams in the first months of abstinence, with increased cravings the next day. Gambling addicts have similar gambling dreams. But dreams in which dreamers resist drugs or feel relief on awakening can be a good sign for recovery, and the frequency of such dreams tends to decline over time.
Trauma also predisposes people to nightmares. (Deaf adults apparently have more nightmares than hearing adults, connected to early experiences of communication barriers.) And untreated nightmares can reinforce the trauma. Most nightmare sufferers describe repeating themes, often traceable back to emotional memories. Nightmares also disrupt REM sleep, which is important for recovery. People prone to nightmares are often more easily overwhelmed by sensory input like bright lights or loud noises; they may also be more likely to somatize stress: “to experience bodily symptoms such as chest pain or headaches in response to psychological stress.” People who have difficulty identifying or describing their feelings are also more prone to nightmares. But nightmare-prone people are also more open to experience generally, including positive experiences, and are better able than less-sensitive people to detect small differences in photos of landscapes and to detect real words when listening to messed-up audio, suggesting greater visual and aural sensitivity. Still, nightmares themselves are bad: they’re a risk factor for suicide and PTSD, which may be related to REM disruptions.
One thing that doesn’t work: trying to suppress thoughts while awake can worsen nightmares. She also doesn’t like treating nightmares with medications, since they generally suppress REM sleep too and can lead to a nightmare rebound when medication stops. She wants people to work with their nightmares, not avoid or suppress them.
More than half of psychosis patients have nightmares, which can predict spikes in symptoms. And suicide-related dreams can predict a suicidal crisis. She makes the case for using nightmares as a diagnostic tool for both populations. She also speculates that feeling out of control in life and in nightmares is linked, and that helping people with emotion regulation can help both sleep and waking.
Carr argues that treating nightmares can be valuable in itself and to make it easier to treat other problems. Lucid dreaming, where the dreamer is aware she’s dreaming and even able to intervene in the dream, can often be taught, and people who can refuse the nightmare or change some of the conditions within it can usually reduce or eliminate nightmares. Carr ties this to a greater sense of control over one’s life/emotions. More control over dreams could also help people reframe drug-seeking or other distressing dreams, and might even improve chronic pain (at least just by increasing sleep quality).
People trying to dream lucidly can take various steps, though a couple of them—including disrupting your sleep-wake cycle to trigger the kind of morning REM cycle that’s most conducive to lucid dreaming—may not be advisable for people having sleep problems. Nonetheless, Carr says people who follow all the steps have about a 50% chance of having a lucid dream within a week, which seems like a pretty effective protocol! Also, video gamers apparently have more lucid dreams than non-gamers; controlling a virtual avatar might be sufficiently like dreaming to prime that. Flying dreams have also been linked to lucid dreaming, because flying can be a clue that you’re in a dream.
You can also do nightmare therapy by listening to sounds while rehearsing positive images, and then having the sounds repeat while you’re asleep (“targeted reactivation”). Similarly, having a pleasant scent present while you’re sleeping can help. But, while she thinks some tech can help some people, there’s also a risk of a nocebo effect—“using wearable devices can actually worsen one’s sleep perception” and make people feel worse/more tired just because they know they didn’t get as much deep sleep as was “best.” Likewise, trying to dream lucidly can lead to sleep loss—succeeding is worth it, but if you fail, your sleep quality can be worse. Also, lucid dreaming might not be a good idea for people prone to psychosis, because the techniques used, including wake-up-go-back-to-sleep and “reality testing,” where you try to figure out if you’re in a dream, “are to some extent designed to blur the boundaries between sleep and wake states,” which is not a good idea for that at-risk population. “In fact, frequent use of lucid dream induction techniques has been associated with an increase in dissociative symptoms.” So people with PTSD may need gentler techniques like the sound/smell targeted reactivation described above, or even just “intention-setting” where you think while awake about having a peaceful/controlled night. Also, treating sleep apnea with a CPAP machine can decrease nightmares (whereas other nightmare treatments don’t work well for apnea-induced nightmares).
There’s also other interesting stuff about sleep—REM sleep behavior disorder (RBD) involves people physically acting out their dreams because sleep paralysis stopped working. It’s rare (1%) in the general population but can develop suddenly in men over sixty (8% prevalence), and up to 90% of RBD suffers develop a neurogenerative disease within a decade of their diagnosis.
Noah Feldman, To Be a Jew Today: A New Guide to God, Israel, and the Jewish People: No one ever accused Feldman of being humble; although I found the first third of the book not very interesting (it’s a history of different movements in American Jewish thought, with some reference to non-American developments), the discussion of the relationship between Israel and American Jews was thoughtful, nuanced, and far more complicated than I can do justice to. His argument involves Israel as a redemptive counterweight to the Holocaust as well as Israeli political/religious developments—the formation of an actual Israeli state sapped secular Zionism of some of its energy, while religious Zionism gained power and also invested a lot of resources in educating American conservative Jews. (Secular Zionism sought to create a Jewish state in a place with historic meaning for Jews, not to occupy any particular amount or patch of land and therefore accepted UN partition plans; religious Zionism, not so much.) Among other things, he points out that the Holocaust Museum in the US was built before the National Museum of the American Indian or the National Museum of African American History and Culture—and that this was an expression of identity for American Jews. But that itself says a lot about the centrality of the Holocaust to American Jewry—as well as making “a claim of universal significance for the particular Jewish experience of suffering.” For progressive Jews, then, the universalizing meaning led to increasing criticism of the actually existing government of Israel, which is violating the principles of “never again.”
Feldman also explains the higher standard to which Israel is sometimes held as a consequence of its post-WWII creation—in the view of many (Jews and non-Jews) as compensation for the Holocaust. “If Israel was created to be a light until the nations, then when it failed to live up to that ideal, its failure would inevitably be more conspicuous than the failures of other states.” Western Europeans in particular, regarding Israel as essentially Western European in nature, don’t hold Arab or Muslim states to the same Western standards “either because of implicit racism against them or because of a more defensible political relativism.” Relatedly, when the European left became anti-colonial, Israel’s own creation looked like a colonialist legacy—except that the Jews had no other country. There’s a lot more in here, not all of which sits well with me, but if you’re interested in the topic, maybe skip part one and read the rest.
Ko-Lin Chin, Counterfeited in China: The Operations of Illicit Businesses: Chin studied fashion counterfeiters, which provides useful information but also studies the population most likely to believe—with some reason—that what they do only involves monetary harm to big brands. Most of them considered themselves hard-working people who were doing honest work (and often contributing to China’s development, like other small businesses). They argued that counterfeiting drove Chinese demand for “the real thing.” Compared to Chin’s previous work on human traffickers and drug dealers, they were less likely to admit to engaging in prostitution, alcohol/drug use, and gambling. They were baffled by IP proponents’ claims that counterfeiting was a way that “organized crime” makes money; the triads etc. didn’t seem to be involved. There weren’t turfs, hierarchies, leadership structures, or subcultural norms. Counterfeiting was a crime that was organized/required coordination, not organized crime. They were just looking to make money and preferred to avoid detection, and therefore avoided violence. They did pay off local officials when they could do so to avoid prison (reactive rather than proactive), but their corruption was small and local, of far less concern to the central government than high-level corruption. They believed that the authorities tolerated a certain amount of counterfeiting so as to avoid unrest from the many people whose livelihoods depended on it. This was especially true because so many suppliers/factories relied on both legitimate and counterfeit production.
I would really like to know more about the people who counterfeit batteries and baby formula. Chinese authorities supposedly tolerate most fashion counterfeiting in the absence of someone making trouble—employees, business rivals, clients (distributors upset about quality or lack of deliveries or trying to avoid paying, not the individual purchasers who know they’re getting counterfeits), and people in search of a reward offered by the state are the likely suspects, and that’s one reason people prefer to work with family members.
Another risk-mitigating strategy counterfeiters use is to register their own trademarks, regardless of how many goods they actually sell under those marks. They also use misspellings of well-known brands, believing there’s less pressure to stop those (and also willing to change the label to be properly spelled if a known customer asks). They also split up operations: a handbag without any branded hardware isn’t illegal, so only the people with the hardware/finished products are at risk and the leather cutting workshops, for example, are safe.
Chin’s informants suggest that counterfeiting really got rolling when foreign brands came in for cheap production—it was simple to make 2500 bags instead of 2000, etc. And they’d be good quality because they’d been made on the same machines. You have to make extras for quality control. When brand owners started punching holes in rejects, one informant says, resilient sellers just filled in the holes—and sold them as guaranteed authentic (aka “point by point,” which apparently were often reserved for Chinese customers since foreigners aren’t as discerning, though I take it that this may have changed with the rise of Tiktok, which postdates Chin’s data collection). There are also less-accurate copies—what I’d call infringements rather than counterfeits—with slightly different names and/or lower quality. The informants thought that this was less likely to get them in trouble, which might be descriptively true but has nothing much to do with trademark law (including in China). And they also thought the future of counterfeiting in China was bleak, as the country developed further
Adam Becker, More Everything Forever: AI Overlords, Space Empires, and Silicon Valley's Crusade to Control the Fate of Humanity: As opposed to examining the case for Mars in detail, this is a tour through the dumb things that rich white men in Silicon Valley believe. Becker cogently demonstrates that, by the same logic that leads them endorsing death now to improve the chances of hypothetical zillions a million years in the future, the whole project is nonsensical. For example, if energy use continues to grow at the same rate as it does now, “3,700 years from right now, we’d be using all the energy produced by all the stars in the observable universe. If Bezos believes that ceasing to grow our energy usage must lead to a culture of stagnation, he’d better get used to the idea.”
Becker argues that these ideas, now shaping AI (a huge target of capital investment and justification for energy use), are reductive, since key problems that can supposedly be “solved” with technology are not technological problems but social problems. The gap between “we can make everything we want” and “everyone has access to the things they want” is one of policy. “The solution to, say, border disputes between India and Pakistan isn’t throwing more technology at the problem.”
But pretending that tech is always the solution is profitable. Perhaps even more importantly, their ideas about the future allow them to deny the inevitability of death—in imagining they can live forever, they’re threatening the future of all. Becker calls this “transcendence, allowing adherents to feel they can safely ignore all limitations. Go to space, and you can ignore scarcity of resources, not to mention legal restrictions. Be a longtermist, and you can ignore conventional morality, justifying whatever actions you take by claiming they’re necessary to ensure the future safety of humanity. Hasten the Singularity, and you can ignore death itself, or at least assure yourself that you can put it off for a few billion years.”
But haven’t we been on an exponential upwards technological trajectory? It took thousands of years for the Industrial Revolution, but the pace of change has been much faster since, and if we can now do things impossible before because we imagined they might be possible (antibiotics, spaceflight) then why aren’t all the technologies we’ve imagined possible in the foreseeable future? “The fate of Moore’s law is the fate of all exponential trends: they end.” That includes innovation.
Becker points out that, as with many political positions, positioning huge leaps forward as inevitable is rhetorically effective, including by excusing responsibility for any nasty stuff that comes mid-leap. The AI will decide all, fix all. It also furthers a desire for control—the fantasy that we’re living in a computer-generated universe is a fantasy of total control, “especially for those who know how to control computers.”
But this is nonsense. For example, the internet’s beloved Maciej Cegłowski points out, “If Einstein tried to get a cat in a carrier, and the cat didn’t want to go, you know what would happen to Einstein…. He would have to resort to a brute-force solution that has nothing to do with intelligence, and in that matchup the cat could do pretty well for itself. So even an embodied AI might struggle to get us to do what it wants.” Cegłowski also jokes about the smartest person he knew, “and all he did was lie around and play World of Warcraft between bong rips…. The assumption that any intelligent agent will want to recursively self-improve, let alone conquer the galaxy, to better achieve its goals makes unwarranted assumptions about the nature of motivation.” Continuing his bangers, he notes that toxic individualism is also doing work here: “A recurring flaw in AI alarmism is that it treats intelligence as a property of individual minds, rather than recognizing that this capacity is distributed across our civilization and culture.”
Becker gets equally good quotes from several of his interviewees. Philosopher Brian Weatherson devastates the foundational assumption of longtermism: that we can know now what choices now will be good for people ten thousand, or million, years in the future. “The Seven Years’ War is about as far in the past as 2300 is in the future. And the Seven Years’ War had a causal impact on just about every country on the planet, in many cases a massive impact…. But did it make those countries better or worse, richer or poorer, more or less just, etc? Who knows! The [what-ifs] are too hard, even knowing how one particular run of history turned out. Our ability to know what will change extinction likelihoods [in] 250+ years, and the size and direction of those changes, is worse than our ability to know the size and direction of the causal impact of past events. And we don’t know that.”
Becker also provides biting readings of various sub-species of tech bro futurism, including the “simulation hypothesis”: we’re in the Matrix, not in nature. “It is hard not to read into this shades of Genesis: We are made in the creator’s image, the world was made with us in mind,” and “If we live in a computer simulation, then expertise in software engineering really is expertise in everything.” They’re in control.
But these dumb ideas have been around, in various forms, for a long time. “The fact that our society allows the existence of billionaires is the fundamental problem at the core of this book. They’re the reason this is a polemic rather than a quirky tour of wacky ideas.” We must push back against the claimed inevitability of their domination and remember that “no human vision of tomorrow is truly unstoppable. … They are too credulous and shortsighted to see the flaws in their own plans, but they will keep trying to use the promise of their impossible futures to expand their power here and now.”
Shoshana Walter, Rehab: An American Scandal: Everything in the US is worse than you think. We suppressed buproprion administered by ordinary physicians, made methadone super stigmatizing, separated medication treatment from other kinds of drug treatment and social supports, and harassed doctors who prescribed buproprion. Our alternatives are poorly regulated treatment facilities that far too often prey on the most vulnerable to get their insurance money. Among other consequences, “patients are more likely to overdose and die after a 30-day stint in rehab than before it.” Rehab can work, but it’s most likely to do so if people have support and opportunities when they leave. Women who can bring their children stay in treatment longer and do better longterm, but the number of treatment programs that allow this has declined to 2% of all facilities nationwide.
Meanwhile, while some treatment programs are insurance scams, others have figured out how to make money on both ends—by sending people to work instead of to treatment, often because they agreed to treatment to keep out of jail and thus can’t refuse any assignments: “Between 2013 and 2018, Cenikor made more than $42 million from their uncompensated Cenikor workers. Meanwhile, the facility had lucrative contracts with the state and federal governments, received insurance and Medicaid payouts, and had residents apply for and relinquish their food stamps.”
Why, then, are overdose deaths declining? First, “[i]n the era of fentanyl, drug users have become smarter about the way they consume drugs, such as using them in the company of others and employing Narcan in case of overdose.” Second, many of the most vulnerable users have already died, either from drugs, covid, or other sequelae of poverty and isolation.
Walter is a fan of “contingency management—a type of treatment in which patients receive consequences and rewards for behavior,” along with providing people with resources to support recovery. After all, she notes, tens of millions of Americans report recovering from addiction, 60% without formal treatment and mostly after only two attempts. “Those who recover without treatment typically have access to financial and social resources that help them overcome obstacles, facilitate life change, and allow them to find alternatives to drug use. And these people also are more likely to be white, with higher levels of education, social networks, and opportunity.” But when change is out of reach for most Americans, so are the resources to escape addiction.
Mimi Swartz, Ticker: The Quest to Create an Artificial Heart: Journalistic, human-focused story of the people who working towards artificial hearts that can really work for most people—the story starts when mostly only white men could get traction, and various Black and female contributors have been written out (for two Black men, either records apparently didn’t reveal their last names or interviewees didn’t remember—there aren’t many notes). Notable features: parallel invention was very much a thing, when believing that it could be done spurred many to move in the same direction. Also, by the 2000s, the international character of research is really kicking in; a key development comes from a team that largely met on Skype and included Europeans, Asians, and an Australian. A research institution in Houston got them all visas to come work on making the device ready for human use—try to imagine that in 2025.
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ETA: Library is purchasing it on my request! Thank you. :D
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Does he ever get into questions of divorce, agunot, sexual abuse, or just how Traditionalism limits human flourishing? So much more than it did 150/200 years ago, when most men actually had *jobs*?
And then I look ahead and see he has a section on Marriage, & there goes my BP again. Because I don't know as I can trust him to see how the resistance to intermarriage & the related Traditional/Israel rejection of non-O converts is one of the bitter silenced cracks that's led to the current schisms. Being told that "Israel is central to Jewish identity" when we know Israel doesn't think we're really Jewish is something we've swallowed for the sake of family unity, but I'm not putting up with it any more.
Anyway. You will not be surprised to learn that we're virtually-attending
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So inspiring! Yet somewhat depressing, looked at from 2025.
Thanks, fascinating post!
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