Trying to scale up technologies that work on the local level leads to depletion of resources and other unforeseen consequences that can ultimately collapse the system.

To skeptics, psychogenic pain is somehow less real than other pain. But all pain is in the mind.

A progress trap is a development that looks at first like a clear advancement but in time proves to actually deoptimize the system.

Social media, with its reach and immediacy, even intimacy, threatens the “us versus them” classifications we make so naturally. It exposes us to people who are suffering thousands of miles away.

In this light, compassion is a matter of aesthetics.

The news, in this model, is not something reported (retold after the fact) but something created (planned out before the fact).

For the past several months, I’ve experienced a creeping psychic exhaustion. “I’m in a numb period,” I tell my friends when they send me frantic texts about the day’s news. My emotions seem blocked.

It is one of the terrible parts of disaster, our complicity: the way we glamorize it and make it consumable; the way the news turns disasters into ready-made cinema; the way war movies, which mean to critique war, can really only glorify war.

In creating new technology to address known problems, we unavoidably create new problems, new unknowns. Progress changes the parameters of possibility.