Samuel Moyn in The Nation:
In the chilling speech he gives at the end of the film Margin Call, Jeremy Irons says that no one should say they believe in equality, because no one really thinks it exists: The very idea camouflages the endurance of hierarchy in an essentially unchanging form. “It’s certainly no different today than it’s ever been,” he explains to an underling. “There have always been and there always will be the same percentage of winners and losers….
Yeah, there may be more of us than there’s ever been, but the percentages? They stay exactly the same.”
For many others, the response to the 2008 financial crisis was very different from Irons’s cynical response. The crisis led to more consciousness and criticism of inequality than had been seen in the past 50 years. Starting with Occupy Wall Street in 2011, large numbers of Americans concerned about the ascendancy of the “1 percent” eventually consolidated around Bernie Sanders’s presidential campaigns in 2016 and 2020. During these years, the French economist Thomas Piketty provided the reading public with evidence that vindicated the movement: In Capital in the Twenty-First Century, published in English in 2014, he confirmed that economic inequality had been rising across the North Atlantic world. Piketty also showed that the situation was simultaneously worse and better than the way Irons had characterized it in Margin Call: Capitalism’s inherent dynamics generally increased inequality, he argued, but political mobilizations could bring about its reduction.
Capital in the Twenty-First Century became a surprise bestseller, and inequality became a signature concern of the new century, analyzed and complained about (and, more rarely, justified) in a deluge of articles, books, and tweets. But a decade later, historians, economists, and political theorists are pondering a different set of questions: not about the causes or continued existence of our age of inequality, but about where the moral imperative for its opposite—equality—came from in the first place.
More here.
Enjoying the content on 3QD? Help keep us going by donating now.
T
I
In 2016, scuba-diving philosopher Peter Godfrey-Smith made a huge splash with his book 
I opened the library’s glass door and placed a fresh copy of my latest novel, What the Dead Can Say, on the bottom shelf. Then I returned to the car. For months my wife and I had been driving around the country, dropping off free copies of What the Dead Can Say in hundreds of Little Free Libraries. Now, we turned back on to the main road and headed down to Colorado, in search of more.
The operation that used pagers and walkie-talkies to 
No idea has fallen flatter than the “end of history,” popularized by political philosopher Francis Fukuyama in his eponymous 1993 book. Few still believe that all human beings will accept liberal democracy and free market capitalism as the final forms of society and are uninterested in any alternative. But like many truly awful ideas, the end of history had its 15 minutes, or in this case 15 years, of fame, as a catchall motivation for America’s misguided attempt to export democracy to Afghanistan and Iraq.
An ideas generator powered by artificial intelligence (AI) came up with more original research ideas than did 50 scientists working independently, according to a preprint posted on arXiv this month
Digital quantification determines Americans’ quality of life. Algorithms select job applicants for interviews and employees for performance bonuses. They aggregate stories and products as we shop for news and goods, matching our preferences to the infinite bounty on offer. And they determine which homes we can buy, purchases we can make, and investments we can pursue. In love, the 
The United States doesn’t really make chips these days, instead relying on a complex process of design, production, assembly, and testing that spans the globe. The vast majority of fabrication is done in East Asia; Taiwan, in particular, produces 41 percent of all processor chips and more than 90 percent of the most powerful chips, essential to advanced computing and AI. The supply chain’s concentration in an island nation with which China expressly seeks to “reunify” gives the whole matter unusually weighty stakes. At a White House event to get the bill past the finish line in Congress, Deputy Secretary of Defense Kathleen Hicks 
It is illegal to buy or sell an organ anywhere in the world, with the 
I’ve been reading Nate Lippens for years. I think this is the third time I’ve read My Dead Book and I’m finally getting a grip on what kind of machine his writing is. I think it’s a poetic instrument and also some kind of natural phenomena. I went to Joshua Tree one night in the aughts with a gang of people to see the Perseids. I’ve been thinking about that. We had sleeping bags and some people had drinks and their drugs of choice and then we all laid down flat looking up the sky waiting for the show. There wasn’t much. Like almost nothing. There’s one. And then in maybe about seven minutes another. Then another one. And nothing for a while. Then wham and all of the sudden we were screaming, giddy as kids because we were getting inundated with meteors making the sky like this crazy vibing net and we were ancient people animals lying there looking up in naked awe. It was the best. Start to finish I think that’s what Nate Lippens has done. Let me lay it out here. My Dead Book starts off with a fairly sentimental recitation, a recollection of one of his dead friends from the past. And then another one. I mean of course I like the way he writes. It’s clean, it’s fairly direct, and conceptually I am reminded of how practical friendship is to a lost child which this narrator definitely is. If you don’t know who you are then you make yourself up with bits and pieces of your friends.
On the first day of November, I stopped writing my diary of this despicable war. Not because I was bored and desperate for it to end, nor because I was unable to preserve my memories amid all the trauma, but simply because my phone broke. I had been writing my diaries on the notepad app of my phone, when it went the way of so many things in this war—patience, hope, dreams for the future—and broke.