I believe deleting Twitter also helped my mood. I am feeling more upbeat than ever. While circumstantial, I do attribute some of this change to no longer being bombarded by the negativity and one-shot-kill Tweets that are prolific on the platform.

Lots of the articles thread the same water, dive into totally unnecessary details, or just tell a story that, while fascinating, does not really give you any important new information, or bury it in a few casual sentences, never elaborating on them.

For books it is usually just the same story told over and over again with the character names and forms changed.

That applies even to some of the stuff recommended directly here on HN. I would not even dive into aggregators recommended here.

Almost all books have relatively low information density. You can condense "How to Win Friends and Influence People" down to a page of chapter headings, for example, or a history book into a 2-3 page timeline. The point of all of the anecdotes and details isn't to convey more information, it's to force the reader to slow down to think about the topic and provide more memory hooks to help with recall later.

Whenever you read a book, if you think "that was obvious, I knew that already," observe if you are actually acting on that knowledge the way you want to. After reading the book, do you act on that knowledge you already knew more easily?

Even books that are outright bad can be useful if they force you to think more about a topic and re-evaluate your own opinions. For example, I try to read 1-2 general software books a year. Some of them are terrible, most of them tell me things I already learned, but the spaced repetition makes me re-evaluate my own recent choices to see if there are any areas where I have been getting lazy and cutting corners I shouldn't.

actual new things are by definition rare. each thing can only be done once for all of humanity. after that, its an iterative process with the occasional leap forward.

if you're thinking about technical or even worse self-help books: yes - there are very few that actually bring anything worthwhile to the table. thats simply because it becomes common knowledge if its correct to a degree where it has a significant effect.

if you're however thinking of story-books than ... you're just reading similar things. there is a lot of written stories around - they admittedly usually have things like `conversation` in common, but how else would you write a book? by leaving everything blank?

Maybe you don't.

https://www.multivax.com/last_question.html

/s

Reading old books is worth it. New ones are hard to filter and many will turn out to be completely unnecessary.

Leaves you on the sides of contemporary culture but at least you're reading efficiently.

As a simultaneous question and example, Kipling is often given as an example of a British Empire writer with condescending attitudes to the very people he wrote about.

The names of Indian authors never reached me because my parents thought the Empire was unadulterated good, and they thought that because my grandparents were born near the peak of the Empire — one of my grandmothers was, for a period in her infancy, living in a military base in the British Raj.

They whose names I do not know could very plausibly be Kipling’s equal or better. I know from various examples that various cliques will have hidden the names of good authors from me.

That leads me to the question: can anyone here recommend a good Indian author from the same era as Kipling? (Yes I know Kipling was born in India).

While not a direct answer to your question, I think The Location of Culture by Homi Bhabha is relevant in the sense that it addresses why your question is difficult (perhaps impossible) to answer.

I suppose rather than asking for a “good” author (subjective, for example I’ve met an Oxbridge English Literature graduate who thought Shakespeare was overrated), I should have asked for a “famous” author from the same era.

The sort of author whose works a current-day Indian politician would have on their shelves, or perhaps quote from, to signal how cultured they are — in the same sort of way UK PM Johnson tried to show how cultured he was by quoting Kipling.

HN is still valuable for me because it sometimes leads to me discovering new frameworks I can actually use that I wouldn’t hear about anywhere else because people in my part of the world use JAVA, PHP or C#. But HN is mainly a social media and all the attention seeking that comes with that.

For many articles on the web I believe it's an issue because of Google. Google does punish short pieces, so if you want to write about how to do X with Y, you need to start of with a history of Y, lay out a couple of use cases of X and then explain why doing X with Y is difficult, to finally explain how to do it.

Unix man pages are amazing. Every technical help resource should be like that.

I assume you’re referring to fiction ... there’s actually a whole field of study around this rooted in psychology, they’re called Jungian Archetypes. There’s a really fantastic book by Joseph Campbell called The Hero with a Thousand Faces.

I’m not sure what the current state of study is, its been a few years since I personally studied the concepts. It might be a nice change from the mundanity you seem to be describing

Maybe try poetry? Though, same applies. Anything that’s not popular, recent fiction aimed at a grade 8 reading level is going to take some effort and practice to learn to appreciate and fully understand. Literacy is a very wide spectrum.

[edit] incidentally, for whatever reason, I find drawing book recommendations from strangers online nearly useless. This goes double for genre fic and non-fic. For other media it works fine. Dunno why but I think part of it may be that people read more differently, and for more reasons, than they watch movies or listen to music play games. I also find it’s easier in other media to quickly spot people with tastes that are very contrary to mine, and so ignore them.

One thing that seems to help is that more people are able to say “this is trash, but it’s my kind of trash, but hey, here’s this other thing like it that’s actually good” with film than with books. Something about books seems to make people use a much broader and less-differentiated or less-well-tuned definition of “good” and then just apply that same label to everything they read and don’t hate.

It is exacerbated by the fact that there are so many ranking on the internet. I most often start by the top 10 and then the rest seems boring in comparison.

Platforms don't help either. There are hundreds of thousands of creators on Youtube and Instagram and they somehow manage to all produce the same thing...

Eg, i actually like "current events", especially news. I want to know what my political actors are doing, good or bad - but only concrete information. Especially with the current administration. Rumors / weak leaks are wasted cycles in my brain.

They also have a companion magazine, 1843, that dives into longer-form cultural articles.

I'm curious about how old you are. I think the problems you mention get worse, the more life experience one has?

Nowadays I think all 1st person shooters are mostly the same and get bored.

I'd like to applaud you for admitting this to yourself. I feel like a vital part of successfully navigating the internet age is to realize this very fact.

You can stay just as informed without giving in to doombait articles. You are just as valuable in the public sphere if you don’t succumb to attaching yourself to the firehose of daily information and tweets.

The latter will not seem “informed” because they won’t know about some controversial statement that set the Internet on fire, but they will certainly be more informed about the consequential actions being taken by the government.

TLDR - being “informed” has no relationship to following what currently classifies a news - at least from an “informed citizen” perspective.

The thing that worked for me was simple: don’t use it on mobile. It promotes doom scrolling and shallow consumption.

I also continuously curate my list and mute plenty to keep garbage out. The result is a fairly positive and inspiring feed

* https://logicmag.io/

https://jacobinmag.com/

Regarding the article title, I'm not sure what was the problem. The Jacobin is a leftist newspaper, so critiques of capitalism are to be expected. If you dislike the style of the title, I can appreciate that, everyone has their own tastes. But there is also a quick summary of the thesis of the article, in case the title was too unclear:

> The inclusion of more women at the top of oppressive power structures shouldn’t be confused with women’s liberation. We need a radical, socialist feminism, not a repackaged version of Sheryl Sandberg’s corporate-friendly "lean-in" brand.

Having said that it seems to me that Twitter - opposed to FB and YT - comes with the advantage that you can quite easily specify what you want to see on your wall. I have a lot of investigative journalism outlets on my Follow list and special interest groups. So it seems to offer some value.

Then again it is indeed inviting to endlessly scroll in boredom hoping to find something that triggers some Dopamine.

I'd read news of how Facebook keeps people addicted or how they try out psychological experiments on its users which left me uneasy. Finally, when the Cambridge Analytica scandal broke and revealed that Facebook sells access to your personal messages, thst was the final straw. The biggest problem with deleting your account is that your contacts assume that you just deleted them and think that you're mad at them or something. It can have a real world impact. But I've been way happier texting friends and family and talking with them directly. It's been so much healthier than leaving "likes" on wall posts. I'm never returning to social media.

That's one reason I deleted my Facebook 5 years ago. I unfriended a casual acquaintance (who continually posted political rants), and they confronted me in person at a nightclub, demanding to know why. That just isn't healthy behaviour, and I don't need to be around people like that or on a network that encourages it.

Facebook did not make our timelines toxic. Our 'friends' did.

At best, it'll be something interesting and feeds into our natural curiosity. Other than that, this idea that it's our responsibility as citizens to stay constantly informed on what's happening in the world is nonsense.

Ask yourself, what was the last time you read something in the news that contained information you could actually act on in a meaningful way? Our biggest opportunity to act on information as regular citizens generally comes with elections, at which point you can just read up on the candidates views/proposals before voting.

We really don't need to be obsessively keeping up with the news, the world will keep moving whether or not we know about it.

The what in question would be the news item I had read. The meaningful action was the public protest I chose to join, or the campaign donations I decided to make, or the phone calls to my elected representatives. Elections aren't the only way citizens can (or should) interact with their government.

You seem to prefer personal attacks and ideology, so yes, I'd block you for sure.

Remember to take breaks from the news cycles (whatever flavor of news and outlet you prefer) and try to not get emotionally engaged in what is really quite distant from your actual life.

The news, wherever they come from and regardless of what they are about are mostly just a distraction from what actually matters, your own life, family and mission.

If nothing else, I'm improving my language skills, so the time spent doing it is edifying, even when the piece itself isn't. The concentration involved in deciphering the article inserts some emotional distance that helps me not to get too worked up about what I'm reading. And, since reading in a language one doesn't understand very well is tiring, the whole exercise is self-limiting. It's literally impossible to get sucked in.

And I even agree that it's healthy to keep some emotional distance to the news.

But right now, the news will have a very real and direct impact on what I will do. I'm happy I followed them much more closely in February, which allowed me to get out of the big city just before the lockdown was announced, without too much logistic trouble.

These days it is about returning. Should I go back to renting an inner-city apartment? Depends on how this will go over the next few months. Which in turn largely depends on how people/ public discourse views mask-wearing. Should I visit my family? Well, depends on the situation here and there. Maybe I won't even be allowed to cross state lines by then? What's the contingency plan? Staying abroad for too long, even involuntarily, could reset my girlfriend's immigration status.

I think never in my life have I experienced a situation where the connection between "the news" and direct impact on my life was so immediate.

Naturally, I ignore that advice and still use my phone in bed. But switching from Twitter to doing other stuff helped significantly, because I can monitor myself and put the phone down when I get calm enough and sleepy enough to sleep. Twitter was preventing me from getting calm/sleepy due to producing anxiety. I do still read Discord, which sometimes can have the Twitter problem depending on what people are talking about, but it helps me keep from feeling completely socially disconnected due to using Twitter less.

Also, depending on the person, it heavily depends on what you are reading. With Twitter you are jumping from topic to topic. That's something completely different than reading a book.

I'll log in at a conference, otherwise keeping it off your phone helps.

Also as others have said keep your phone away from your bed, preferably in another room.

The world is a messed up place. Sure, we shouldn't be bombarded by this fact day in and day out, but I personally think it's a good thing to remind yourself now and then how fucked up the world we live in can be - to maintain a sort of tether to the "reality" of the world's current messed up situation; it puts a lot into perspective.

Any thoughts? Am I wrong for thinking this way? (P.s. I have not yet read the OP's article)

The world is indeed a pretty messed up place and it's sad we need Corona to be reminded of a lot of long-standing issues as they affect also other groups now:

- lack of universal health insurance/insufficient social support systems

- lack of pandemic plans

- precarious living conditions are more prevalent than represented by social/news media

Actually very few news outlets even attempt to give global coverage, BBC is the only one I know of that somehow gets close to this.

Still, I try to consume news more responsibly. I stopped using Google News and instead subscribed to a handful of online papers/magazines that produce quality content.

Far fewer still, are news outlets covering child sex trafficking. But hey, "I don't want to see this, this is terrible, let's call it a conspiracy and move on".

The world has it's priorities completely fucking backwards, is the problem. We've got a million dead every year in Africa because of AIDS. It's a completely preventable problem. No one seems to give a shit. Over 100k dead from covid-19 in a few shorts months. But, this weekend, I was bombarded with "news" about Trader Joe's "racist packaging." What the fuck?

Maybe I'm cynical but this most of the news that I come across lately looks like standard election cycle bullshit to me.

</rant>

I also unsubscribed from subreddits who started allowing false, but entertaining posts (like a image with a fake caption for karma). That was a good choice.

Any solutions to find sleep?

To get yourself into the habit, don't read anything on your "to read someday list of important books." Just pick the most notorious page turner you can think of.

Although with a little more thought, 1Q84 might be more upsetting now than it was last year.

Blood Meridian has dark moments in the narrative sure, but it’s a beautifully written book and very easy spaghetti western adventure to get lost in before bed. It’s not like you’re dozing off reading The Necronomicon, c’mon.

I think everyone should read it, but I can also appreciate an "easy there, Satan"-type joke about it!

Last one I read was Suttree while over in the US camping in the South-East.

This probably isn’t entirely the point you were trying to make with that sentence, but I feel like reading a book about an issue instead of trying to inform yourself through doomscrolling social media will actually do more to being an informed and empowered person.

I think this is an underrated comment. Nothing wrong with staying informed to an extent but when it becomes all consuming (esp through social media and 24/7 news), it is essentially taking on the world day in, day out. That's a large burden to absorb for any individual and the loss of control one feels breeds anxiety.

No Dan Carlin, though. That man's voice is caffeine.

We bought a simple digital alarm clock and suddenly we both slept way better and didn't had any trouble to fall asleep.

Reading a book also helps putting your mind in an off state.

At times, I've become so miserable from it that I've had to jump into a cold shower to snap out of the doom and gloom. Thankfully, the cold shower usually works and provides incentive not to fall into the habit again.

Now that right there is a finesse irony

HN thread of its launch: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=22936742

Like another comment here mentioned, the diversity of content (and maybe slightly less political news) is why people like HN, so maybe I've just been lucky to be able to 'curate' my Twitter similarly.

On the second thought, it seems like that's a very good question, for these two processes are maybe in a positive feedback loop. This year we pay more attention to news, and this makes us both more susceptible and more exposed to things like "the moment to act is now".

I agree, stay informed. But really.... How many times a day do you need to be updated on the recent developments and the current status?

In the past people would get their news once a day in the paper and then later at certain times on the radio and early TV. Is that enough to stay informed?

What has happened in the last 12 hours that I must know now instead of just catching a summary tomorrow morning?

Boy, did you miss the point of the article and discussion

Sometimes anxiety (fear, rage) is well justified. Sometimes large-scale threats are real.

A potentially endless stream of seamlessly accessible information (aka continuous scrolling down) is bad, not because of the content read, but because it manages to manipulate the user into going on and on and on and on.

The article touches on that tangentially ...

> Aldao, the director of Together CBT, a clinic that specializes in cognitive behavioral therapy, has worked with her patients to cut back on doomscrolling.

... but fails to point out that the conclusion is not to control which content is being taken in, but to ban doomscrolling altogether, because it's some form of automaticity making you more perceptible to being psychologically manipulated.

That's why it's so successful and that's why it's so bad.

That's why patients are being treated with CBT, because apparently that's what it takes to get her to stop doing it instead of her simply stopping doing it. She simply can't.

Not always, but many stories have some nuance that’s missing in social media outrage and replies.

Like I said, not always, but it does help anxiety to get all the facts. Especially when I ruminate on something after seeing just the headline or the replies.

I felt that there was a lot of nuanced scientific opinions that reporters were doing a poor job of communicating. I get that often deeply technical topics are complicated, but I think more than anything else COVID has helped how unprepared media has been in communicating these complex topics.

And it's not just COVID; it's been a range of subjects such as law (Trump's immigration ban) and elections (in particular the 2020 Democratic primary and all the media coverage over Bloomberg's supposed supremacy in the race). I think overall journalists are well intentioned and can be trusted in most situations, but it's clear to me that there are systemic failures in communicating complex subjects.

Articles here point to the real diversity of what is happening.

Going through my comment history, I often find it littered with comments that give a sense of hopelessness and inevitable misery. Highly cynical, sometimes toxic, wouldn’t feel out of place among the lamentations of the undying. Not sure how I got this way, but probably came after a long history of doomscrolling.

I read the Wall Street Journal for general/business/politics news. I feel that you really have to pay for news if you want accurate reporting. Goldman Sachs has an ok podcast for market updates.

For transient issues, you really need to dig around for where the field experts are posting their analyses... ...but it's also important not to get sucked into every online controversy/story. Achieving your life goals is about FOCUS - and most news are just distractions.

For Pandemic stuff, I listen to the 10 min clinical updates on TWIV every few days, and watch the numbers on the New York Times data charts (not the articles).

The Sans internet storm for IT security, because I'm in that field.

If there's a Iran/NK conflict going on, I'll listen to the Arms Control Wonk podcast analysis. Stuff like that - there are some great experts podcasts out there.

If I'm bored, I'll read HackerNews and ZeroHedge.

I have found very little value in what my local city/state officials have to say.

If they said, "I dropped facebook/twitter and now get my news in short bursts from the radio"; I would have thought them wise.

People kept up with laws before twitter and reddit.

Officials of my city, province and country post regular COVID updates on Twitter.

For the vast bulk of the human experiences, our approximate level of situational threat awareness wasn’t all that much different.

It’s unsurprising that unmediated, we expand that circumference and simultaneously experience a proportional increase in our general level of anxiety.

I was aware I was doing this but didn't do anything about it until I was prompted by this article, which I think was posted on here recently: https://craigmod.com/essays/how_i_got_my_attention_back/. For me it really hit the nail on the head about wanting to reclaim your attention a bit, but that these companies have thousands of people working on systems to try and claim your attention for themselves, so it's no wonder it's hard.

I made a few small changes as a result of this:

- I used Screen Time on my iPhone to block all apps except essential ones (clock, calendar, notes, Philips Hue) for the first hour of my day

- I logged out of Twitter on my Firefox and instead logged into it in a container tab, which takes a few extra clicks to open

- I logged out of Twitter on my iPhone, so I have to log in to access it

- I didn't install Twitter on my new iPad

I've found these changes have made a big difference - I think particularly blocking apps in the morning. It feels like if you can "control" your attention a bit more in the first part of your day, that continues somewhat throughout the day, then adding in the slight hurdles to access the site throughout the day causes you to stop and think "do I really want to do this?" when your reflex to just open a new tab and type "tw<enter>" or to scroll while you're stood in a queue or whatever kicks in.

I still do browse Twitter and other time wasting sites a little bit, which I'm fine with, but I feel like I'm doing it more conciously - sometimes after a long day I'll think "I just fancy sitting on the sofa and reading the news and looking on Twitter" and I'm fine with that, as it's something I've chosen to do.

It's only been a few weeks so I don't want to speak too soon, but I'm feeling really happy with this approach so far, without having to go atomic and delete Twitter entirely as I do get some value from it.

https://www.cs.utexas.edu/~pingali/CS395T/2009fa/papers/ferr...

How about just ‘$600 Unemployment Benefit Scheme to End’?

The string of events from “unsafe to work” —> “cannot work” / “went to work sick” —> “no benefits” does have a direct impact on the economy, unless I’m missing some section there.

No it's a dispassionate statement of fact.

Sometimes when I'm choosing not to get too wound up in current events I just want to know what's going on expressed in the simplest way possible. A briefing. I'm sure their opinion here on the impact is extremely sensible, but sometimes I'm not interested in anyone's opinions, no matter how obvious or sensible.

This thread was about how to avoid getting involved in people's opinions and just learning the essential facts that you may have to do something about, like a new law to wear a mask, wasn't it?

Editorial would be adding ... "and that's a bad thing" or "and that's a good thing"

I mean it isn't literally a fact that it will definitely hit the economy, unless they've got a time machine, it's just their opinion. I'm sure it will prove to be a completely correct opinion! But it's still an editorial opinion. Sometimes you don't want any opinions, you just want the facts, thanks.

https://focuslite.app

So I went through some health issues in the last few months and I had to radically lower my stress (used to be in politics - that thing will kill you ;) ). So I "unplugged". No media, no social media. No talking politics.

It was like a MASSIVE weight was lifted of my brain. I looked around and realized ... I, at that moment, was a bright spot in a sea of darkness.

Everybody was depressed, anxious. The only thing anybody is talking about is how bad things are. Try looking for movies or TV shows to watch ... that are NOT dark/depressing/negative/cynical etc. You'll have a VERY hard time finding them today. I've gone back to watching old movies and TV shows from better times. We're living in dark times. Literally.

So, back to my challenge:

World has changed and the ROI of "staying informed" has changed. Specifically, the PERSONAL cost (effects on your mental and physical health, quality of life, quality of relationships etc.) has changed - it is now astronomically high. We all "know" that social media and media companies are spending ridiculous amounts of capital devising ever better ways to keep their "users" stressed so that they keep coming back and keep staying on their platforms.

But the "users" are US. And we're also the ones paying for it. With our health. With our quality of life. With our happiness.

So .. is it worth it?

Let's think about it. Will you knowing every daily-politics titbit really ... change anything? Has it ever in the last few decades? So why pay the PERSONAL COST of knowing what [insert crazy person from other side] said today?

What I propose will be good for your, personally, but I would argue, will also be better for democratic political systems: take a step back.

If you're not ACTIVELY FIGHTING A POLITICAL BATTLE RIGHT THIS WEEK then you don't need to know what's going on this week. You don't need more then 10 minutes every week/ every two weeks to pickup any and ALL news that's actually relevant to you. If something big happens in the meantime ... trust me, you'll know. People will tell you.

But what does ACTIVELY mean. Well first it means you IN THE FIGHT, your spending non-trivial amount of effort lobbying, organizing political groups etc. Most of you are NOT in the fight. But even if you think you are ... as was I ... there's a second parameter: can you win? Do you really have the Minimum Required Resources to even have a chance? Because you probably don't. Most modern "grass roots" groups don't. I know, I lost years to this mistake. Nothing wrong with that - it just means you should be focusing on getting the Minimum Required Resources first. But there's the catch: social media companies, with their numbers of likes, irrelevant impression numbers and the like are giving you a feeling like your changing something. But you're not, you really aren't.

So, step back. See the bullshit of the standard Divide and rule[1]/Bread and circuses[2] propaganda, that's keeping you distracted so you don't notice the big trends that ACTUALLY matter.

So step back. Stop spending your emotional energy on daily outrages. Spend a few minutes a week following the big trends so you know who to support when it comes down to it.

Now for my most radical proposition: the only thing that really matters in politics is money. Those who spend money to rule ... rule. No, taxes don't count as you're not the one spending that money.

So spend some money. First support some NGOs who are ACTUALLY fighting (with lobbyists and policy proposals) for the big picture stuff you care about. Then support a party or a candidate that listen to those NGOs. Make sure to tell them so and to switch your support when they go astray.

Then unplug for a week.. The world of politics will still be there next week.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Divide_and_rule [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bread_and_circuses

In my opinion, good mental health should be considered to be that your feelings align with reality. If reality sucks, it's not mentally unhealthy to feel bad about it. Feeling bad should spur making changes to make it better.

Is instituting/increasing minimum wage: providing a livable income for those at the bottom? or denying jobs to those at the bottom (being unable to produce >= $MINWAGE)? Good/bad of the topic seems obvious, yet differing views are widely held.

The latter example especially takes place in local elections regarding things like zoning and local ordinances and work contracts.

This should hopefully be balanced out by the fact that everyone gets a vote.

One can be understood through the lense of conflict and mistake theory. The other requires a conspiracy.

Besides, "I would rather accept the risk of virus X than the inconvenience of wearing a mask," is a perfectly legitimate position for many viruses, and deciding which ones it applies to is the exact same kind of utility balance and value debate as any other policy choice.

If I vote for the mayoral candidate who promises to poison the reservoir, why should that suddenly be a completely morality-free decision on my part? Just because a lot of people made the same decision I did?

In any case there hasn't been any studies related to efficacy of wearing a mask in public to reduce the risk of infection, so not wearing a mask is not as crazy as some people make it out to be.

This all said if I would use public transport I would be wearing a mask (just not a cloth mask or a surgical mask) or if I visited other places which were packed with people, but best solution is to just not go to places which have a lot of people in them.

The actual actionable news is like 1/1000th of the news if not less...

Our understanding of the way the virus is transmitted changed quite a lot in 6 months. At some point we thought it was mostly spread by direct contact; then by droplets; now we believe it is airborne, to a certain extent. Governments also had the incentive to limit use of PPE to critical workers because of the short supply. It was also obvious that several governments were clueless. So yes, you were told not to wear a mask, whilst at the same time you were provided with facts that contradicted it. This was obvious if you were following the news, particularly the evolution of the then-epidemic in China, Taiwan and South Korea.

Well, for that you need to follow real news, not Fox, the Mail, or disinformation campaigns spread by social media. You also need a grip on how science works, because journalists won’t explain, and often don’t seem to understand.

The average reporter for a newspaper simply doesn't have the time to actually understand a topic. They talk to a few people, and with the current political environment, everything they hear is agenda driven.

Spend your information gathering time in a more productive way. If you really feel you need to be up to date, read the week in review section of one of the national newspapers.

You’re also overlooking a very important fact of life. Overlooking other people’s suffering is an inherent human defense mechanism, and it’s not necessarily a bad thing. You invoke it every time you spend a few grand on a vacation—an amount of money that could save a human life from malaria or feed a child in Bangladesh for a decade.

So imagine my alarm to read that 20% of social science professors self-identify as Marxist. A third of college students embrace communism. In 2017, the nation’s premier newspaper ran a sympathetic retrospective on a century of communism. Thousands of school districts are integrating material into their curriculum that claims slavery was capitalist. A bunch of people on a website associated with a startup incubator are going to read the preceding sentence and go “yeah, that makes sense.” So it feels like gaslighting for you to say it’s a “problem that doesn’t exist.” Maybe I’m being paranoid, but in my experience civilization is fragile. Better safe than sorry.

But obviously, ranting about it on HN won’t fix the problem.

Chattel slavery of the type practiced in the early US and elsewhere was part of the dominant Western system of the mid-19th century for which critics coined the term “capitalism”; what else would it be but capitalist?

It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist. By that logic, slavery is Christian and Islamic too—even more so. I’m not interested in debating Marx’s criticisms of capitalism: the fact that we’re even having this conversation proves my original concern—the resurgence of Marxism in America. I will point out that, in contemporary usage “capitalism” assumes a free market, which is incompatible with slavery both in theory and in practice. (America got richer after it abandoned slavery, which is what free market theories of economics would predict.) Trying to link what people understand capitalism to be today, to the proto-capitalism practiced in the American south, is layering specious argument upon specious argument.

The term “capitalist” for people who control capital was not, the term “capitalism” for a politicoeconomic system (from which comes “capitalist” in its other sense of an advocate/defender of that system, or, as an adjective, pertaining to that systemas, opposed to labelling a particular economic class) was.

> It is, of course, logically invalid to claim that because slavery was practiced in countries that happened to be capitalist, that slavery is capitalist.

It would.be, but that's not the argument. Early modern chattel slavery evolved alongside capitalism, was imposed exclusively by capitalist powers, and reflects the apotheosis of the capitalist commodification of labor from the mutualism of feudal relations, even beyond wage-labor, and the evolution beyond capitalism in the direction, if not by the means, advocated by critics like Marx that led to the modern mixed economy displacing the system for which “capitalism” was coined began with abolition of slavery.

Early modern chattel slavery (not slavery more generally, such as feudal or ancient patriarchal slavery, including serfdom) was a distinctly and exclusively capitalist institution.

The debate is very muddled because we're breaking standard definitions and using them each in our own way. I struggled to phrase the above properly, and no doubt I'm probably misusing some of the terms on some level.

After the Civil War ended, as soon as the labor costs had to be factored in, it became increasingly clear that cotton is a dumb crop to plant at the scale it was being planted. Planters moved to other crops that could be profitable. Slavery essentially held capitalism (the efficient allocation of capital) back. This is why the Great Plains are the most productive agricultural land today, not the South. Syria or Libya, with actual, present day slaves are noticeably unable to produce much agriculture

The abolition of slavery exposed the essential government subsidization of a misallocation of capital, which is inherently un-capitalistic.

“Capitalism” and “maximizing systemic, aggregate profitability” aren't even related concepts, much less so intimately linked that not doing the latter proves that something is not an element of the former.

If the means of production were owned by the government, and the government forced its citizens to work uncompensated against their will, with no option to leave, could one then contend that socialism/communism is inextricably linked to slavery? No, that's absurd. Involuntary servitude can exist in any economic system, whether the means of production are owned by the people or by the government.

Slavery can only exist if the government actively enforces the ability for one to own another human being against their will. While it's absolutely correct that capitalism is rooted in private ownership of property, it by no means presupposes that humans MUST be considered property. On the other hand, capitalism can only really function in a world where all transactions are bilaterally voluntary, which is anathema to slavery.

That depends on whether by “capitalism” you mean “the real-world economic system which emerged through the relentless pursuit of class advantage by the mercantile class as they displaced the feudal aristocracy as the ruling class and which was named ‘capitalism’ by it's critics” or “the aspirational ideal that defenders of that real world system rationalized it as striving imperfectly toward to distract from the characteristics of the real world system itself in a perpetual game of ‘No True Scotsman’”.

For the former, no, it relies almost entirely on economic coercion by denying practical freedom of choice for most of the population to serve the ends for which it was pursued by the class that relentlessly advanced it, and the form of commodified chattel slavery which with it replaced the patriarchal slavery of the feudal era fits well within that.

For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.

Nearly every single modern first world country, from Canada to Singapore to New Zealand to Switzerland to Sweden...all operate on capitalist systems where the majority of industries are privately owned, and operate for profit. They also happen to have robust safety nets where the exact sort of economic coercion is difficult to carry out. To argue that slavery is somehow inextricably linked to the dominant economic system of these countries is plainly absurd, in the same way that it's plainly absurd to claim that slavery is inextricably linked to communism/Marxism just by virtue of the practical manifestation of it we've seen in the 20th century, and not the theoretical ideal as posed by Marx. The whole point here is that slavery is orthogonal to the economic system, not an underlying prerequisite for it.

> in a perpetual game of "No True Scotsman"

> For the latter, sure, slavery is incompatible with that rationalization. But so is literally everything because the ideal is incoherent.

You either need to compare the platonic ideal of communism to the platonic ideal of capitalism, or stick with comparing the empirical outcomes of capitalism as it has been tried all over the developed world today with communism as it has been tried in the real world. You appear to be trying to compare the platonic ideal of communism with the empirical manifestation of capitalism, and then balk when I counter with my own platonic ideal. Compare apples to apples.

That condition has not been true at any time in the history of Capitalism. Since that's only possible if the two parties are perfectly equal, which obviously is almost never the case, and certainly not a state of affairs that the proponents of Capitalism wants or have ever wanted.

In reality, unless born into property/wealth, one is not a voluntary party of such a transaction, and its voluntariness decreases in proportion to the socioeconomical situation of the party at that time.

If your argument is that the inverse relationship between "voluntariness" and socioeconomic status is anathema to capitalism, that reinforces the idea that literal slavery is even further from that platonic ideal.

As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason: it gets us that much closer to truly universal voluntary transactions, because when one is no longer worried about starving to death, they can rationally participate in all economic transactions in a free society.

But the point remains the same: slavery (or more abstractly, involuntary servitude) is orthogonal to the underlying economic system. It can exist in any economic system. Most of the developed world today is largely capitalist, and without slavery. Conversely, some of history's most well known efforts in installing Marxist communism also notably featured forced labor camps where people were compelled to work involuntarily.

The Stalinist structure is set up to be ripe for corruption, abuse of power, etc. That is what it will be rightly remembered for.

The Capitalist structure is set up to be ripe for exploiting whatever there is to be exploited at that particular time to accumulate capital. That both slavery and Colonialism flourished under such an incentive structure should not be a surprise. We can see the same pattern today; exploiting whatever is possible until the moral outrage hurts profits too much or may land the execs behind bars.

> As an aside, capitalists love UBI for this reason

It's a very big assumption that a capitalist UBI would be little else than removing social security and then go on devaluing the UBI year by year. Once again, the incentives suggest exactly that. You're somehow imagining an altruistic capitalism that primarily looks for true voluntary transactions while still concentrating power and privilege in the hands of the few.

But that's factually untrue, slavery held back the accumulation of capital. American agriculture became MORE profitable after slavery was abolished. Once the actual cost of manufacturing had to be factored in, planters were forced to find more productive crops to grow. That process led to:

1. the decimation of the economy of the South, where slavery was rampant. The South had to quickly learn to industrialize to keep up

2. the steep increase in market capitalization of agricultural businesses once capital was forced to be more efficiently allocated, resulting in the agrarian revolution of the Great Plains, which remains one of America's dominant agriculture centers

Slavery quite literally does not allow the incentive structure, by your own words, to flourish.

If you're interested in not just regurgitating propaganda you can read this book: "Slavery by Another Name: The Re-Enslavement of Black Americans from the Civil War to World War II".

Furthermore your entire premise is false, even if we accept what you suggest is true, which is highly controversial, the result is not what we're talking about, but the incentive structure and what outcomes that will produce. Of course people searching to accumulate capital will endorse and proliferate low labour costs if it's possible and currently acceptable.

You do realize that both slavery and wage slavery have a cost of manufacturing right? Both needed to compete with that on the world market. What's the reason to exclude that even a slave-owning South wouldn't have switched to a more profitable produce?

The supposed “wealth” of the anti-bellum South is based on a rhetorical fallacy: that by categorizing human beings as “property” you could treat their long term earning power as an asset. But that’s now how economies work. We can label things whatever we want, but they are what they are. (For example, the entity that ultimately bears the economic burden of a tax in practice doesn’t depend on who the law nominally assigns to pay the tax.) Put differently, if you draw a box around the economy, you can’t increase the productive output of that box by imposing slavery. It might change the distribution of wealth within the box, it not for the economy as a whole. Economic theory says the productive capacity of the box will be maximized when labor is not coerced.

Almost all of the “slavery was economically efficient” notions come from a handful of scholars, who are historians and not economists: https://economicsdetective.com/2019/09/cotton-slavery-and-th...

The work is not only methodologically flawed, but depends on shifting definitions of “capitalism”: https://poseidon01.ssrn.com/delivery.php?ID=3191210060650810...

A leading NHC scholar has refused to define what he means by “capitalism” preferring to let the term “float as a placeholder.”

The fact that slaves are not free means that exchanges couldn't possibly be voluntary.

"Slavery is capitalism" is most certainly wrong though.

"Capitalism encourages slavery in plantation economies" would be a better argument, but might also be refuted given the gradual abolishing of slavery despite the continuance of capitalism.

No, capitalism is a particular real-world economic system that existed in a particular time and place; it is true that private ownership of the means of production is a central element of that system, but it's not it's only feature. Slavery was, in fact, an element of that system identified by the people who identified the system and coined the term capitalism for it, critics like Marx, whom wrote in Capital: “Whilst the cotton industry introduced child-slavery in England, it gave in the United States a stimulus to the transformation of the earlier, more or less patriarchal slavery, into a system of commercial exploitation. In fact, the veiled slavery of the wage-earners in Europe needed, for its pedestal, slavery pure and simple in the New World.”

Capitalism, and it's evolution from feudalism, includes the development of commercial, rather than patriarchal, slavery, wherein slaves are chattels rather than, while subordinate, bound up in a system that, at least in tradition and theory, involves mutual-though-asymmetric obligations and responsibilities.

Calling anyone who disagrees with you abusive seems like a pretty wild flex.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gaslighting

Do you mean that Marxist ideas aren’t finding renewed currency? Nobody seems to deny that efforts to equate slavery with capitalism are critiques pioneered by Marx. Instead they seem to be arguing that Marx was correct. So the ideas do seem to be having renewed currency, in which case denying that fact is gaslighting.

If you’re arguing that it’s not a problem that Marxist ideas are being incorporated into schoolbooks, then in that case we just disagree.

What I don't see is any need to assume that, because Marx's critique of capital is serving as a source for those developing a modern critique of capital, Stalinism must necessarily follow. I think that's really where we disagree, and I'll admit, I feel no nearer understanding the wellspring of your fear now than I did when I started this conversation.

Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.

Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale. The kids just aren't listening any more, and I see no reason why they should be.

I didn't say I was worried about Marxism as a pre-text to Stalinist totalitarianism. Marxist notions are dangerous enough standing alone. In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled. In that same time period, Singapore's and Hong Kong's increased by more than a factor of 10. That was the legacy of putting Marxist ideas into practice. Capitalism, by contrast, particularly the Anglo-American variety, has been responsible for turning at least three poor countries into rich ones in the 20th century, and is on pace to turn a dozen more into at least middle income countries. These ideas have been the most powerful engine of enabling prosperity in the 20th century. Having seen the suffering socialist ideas caused in my home country, and seeing how much life has improved after we abandoned those ideas, I regard their re-introduction as an alternative to the basic Anglo-American economic system to be extremely alarming. (Note, I'm not talking about, and you don't appear to be talking about, the notion that everyone should pay "a little bit more" in taxes to fund more social services. My understanding is that we are talking about something more invasive than that.)

> Your experience is of course what it is, and I can see how it would influence anyone's perspective. What I don't see is what makes events in Bangladesh 25 years ago a reliable predictor of events in the United States today.

The story of the 20th century is that academics with ideas are often very dangerous people. (We don't think of fundamentalist Islam as academic, but in many respects that's what it is. It's a set of ideas borne out of theory, in that context theological theory, rather than learned experience, and transmitted by teaching it in schools and radicalizing young people who lack the life experience to know better.) In Bangladesh, people who had grand visions of a better world used schools to replace our practical, moderate version of Islam with a radical one. That makes me tremendously skeptical of people who want to tinker with the basic structure of society, and in doing so invoke theories that exist in books rather than the learned experience of successful societies.

> Or, for that matter, what makes Newsmax's claims of BLM being some kind of secret Gramscian Stalinist underground a reliable predictor of anything. Conservatives in this country have been slandering their opponents with that kind of stuff for going on a century at this point, and - pace Tailgunner Joe, of whose claims I disposed in an earlier comment - it has never yet proven true. That stuff's pretty toothless at this point, even with somebody like me who's old enough to remember when the Soviet Union, and state communism in general, was still a going concern on a meaningful scale

I think you fundamentally misperceive the conservative viewpoint. We point to Stalinism, Maoism, etc., as the logical outgrowth of Marxism in practice. But our concern isn't merely the Stalinist outcome. We think that Marxism is dangerous in and of itself. Western Europe's lost decades of stagnation under socialist ideas, or India or Bangladesh's lost decades, wouldn't be as bad as Stalinism, obviously. But they'd be bad, and insofar as Marxists want to tinker with the basic structure of our economy, we perceive them as a threat to our prosperity. We view their attempts to submarine Marxist ideas into schools as a bid to make our children ignorant about what created the prosperity they see around them. Most importantly, we by nature view civilization as fragile. We are grateful that we stumbled across a formula that basically seems to work—because there are few ideas that work and many more that don’t—and view attempts to rethink that formula from first principles with deep skepticism. I agree that conservatives can go too far with this (calling Obama a socialist, etc.) And they can fail to perceive important distinctions, such as the difference between BLM as a corporate entity, versus what most people who are completely unaware of the Marxist connection believe they are supporting: https://fee.org/articles/is-black-lives-matter-marxist-no-an.... But the Reagan/Thatcher-ite opposition to Marxism was basically a good thing, and destroyed it as a going concern for a good 25 years between 1990-2015. And now, as I think you even agree, it's back.

With regard to the whole Marxism-and-BLM thing - I have to say, at this point, I honestly don't know. On reflection, I decided it might be better, instead of just taking your word (and Newsmax's, and it turned out also Breitbart's!) for what's in that video, if I saw and heard for myself what it contained. So I did that [1], and found that your representation of what it contains (and Newsmax's, and Breitbart's) is, and I say this with all possible charity, extremely tendentious in a way that leads me to suspect it's been deliberately stripped of context in order to sound maximally frightening to people already predisposed to be suspicious of BLM activists' motives.

In particular, when I investigated the quote of which you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) make so much, I found that it was said in the context of answering a question raised by among others Jalil Muntaqim (born Anthony Bottom) [2], a former Black Panther imprisoned since 1974 for the murder of two police officers, over whether the Black Lives Matter movement has a coherent enough ideological direction to avoid simply "fizzling out" as Occupy Wall Street did.

Cullors' answer is, as you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) imagine, a political one. But it's not political in the way that you think it is. Here's a transcription I made just now from the video, covering the entirety of Patrisse Cullors' answer, rather than just the part that has been so frequently taken out of context with what appears to me very strongly to be deliberately deceptive intent.

"I think that the criticism is helpful; I think a lot of things. The first thing I think is that we actually do have an ideological frame; myself and Alicia in particular are trained organizers, we are trained Marxists, we are super versed on sort of ideological theories, and I think that what we really try to do is build a movement that could be utilized by many, many Black folk. We don't necessarily want to be the vanguard of this movement; I think we've tried to put out a political frame that's about centering who we think are the most vulnerable amongst the Black community, to really fight for all of our lives, and I do think that we have some clear direction around where we want to take this movement. I don't believe it's going to fizzle out; it just gets stronger, and we see it, right? We've seen that after Sandra Bland, we're seeing it now with the interruption of the Netroots Nation Presidential Forum. What I do think, though, is [that] folks, especially folks who've been trained in a particular way, want to hear certain things from us, [and] we're not framing it in the ways that maybe another generation has. But I think it's important that people know the Black Lives Matter movement doesn't just live online, although there's many people who utilize it online. We're in a different set of circumstances, a different generation, [and while] social media may feel like it's diluting the larger ideological frame, I argue that it's not."

The reason I say that that's a political answer is, again, in the context of it being a response to critique by someone who is widely regarded as a political prisoner and, as the show host notes, an "elder of the struggle". It really comes across as kind of a "gotcha" question, and Cullors' answer is consequently phrased with care. She opens by declaring credentials of a sort that should resonate with "elders of the struggle", as it's put, and afterward quickly redirects into what she wants to talk about, which essentially is to say that, yes, Black Lives Matter is a coherent movement with a specific purpose, and as such is not liable to the same problems that hampered and eventually undermined the Occupy movement.

It's an answer in which Cullors has to triangulate between the outdated perspective of a past generation who, while still meriting respect for their own efforts toward a more equitable US society for black people, no longer have a firm grasp on the issues of the present moment, and the need to demonstrate that her own work very much is rooted in the issues of the present moment. It's political, yes, but in the office-politics sense rather than that of some sort of conspiratorial Marxism that you (and Newsmax, and Breitbart) apparently choose to see here.

And it's an answer I can respect, both because I agree that black people in the United States have literally never had a fair shot and they deserve better, and because I'm not too proud to admit that she's a hell of a lot better at that kind of interpersonal and intergenerational politics than I've ever managed to be, a lack I've often regarded with a measure of regret. I mean, I usually just say "ok, boomer". Cullors is positively gentle about it, and maybe I should learn something from that.

I have to say, I really appreciate you taking the time to engage on this subject today. Absent that, I don't know that I'd ever have had the motivation to go and find original statements of this sort from BLM organizers. I have to say, my respect for that movement, and the work that's gone and continues to go into making it a force for good in American politics, has really increased as a result of this conversation.

[1] https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kCghDx5qN4s

[2] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthony_Bottom

Marxist notions have been one of the key driving forces in the transition between late 19th Century capitalism and modem mixed economies in the developed world (though never without compromise), and haven't been even attempted to be applied anywhere outside of advanced capitalist democracies directly, only through the lens of Leninist (and later, derived from that, Stalinist and Maoist) totalitarianism, since robust capitalism with developed working class consciousness is a prequisite for the post-capitalist development in Marx’s theory, a pre-requisite abandoned and replaced with the vanguardism in Lenin’s work and it's derivatives.

> In the 20 years between independence and when my family left the country, Bangladesh's GDP per capita barely doubled.

Not sure what that has to do with Marxism, since Marxists (even in the sense of Leninists, etc.) weren't in charge most of that time, and were violently targeted by right-wing military dictatorships for substantial stretches of it.

I mean, unless you mean that Marxist notions are dangerous because holding them might get you murdered by right-wing dictatorships, which I'll grant is valid point, though not the one you seemed to be arguing for.