I've decided not to renew my subscription to the New York Times and New Yorker to see how it feels. Not to get stuck in my reading habits and discover new avenues.
So recently, I've found myself a bit lost at certain key moments when I usually pull out my phone. (Lunch break: check. Extended bathroom break: check. Before going to bed: check.) A bit like when I stopped Facebook & Co: what did I do before? What was I reading before my cell phone consumed my life?
I thought about subscribing to free newsletters. Found nothing conclusive.
And then by chance, I stumbled upon a trove.
I stumbled upon (via this Lex Fridman podcast) this incredible article Meditations on Moloch.
Moloch is a biblical monster that Allen Ginsberg used in a famous poem (in English here, in French there, it starts in the second part) to describe what is wrong with the world. Many think he's describing capitalism, but that's just it: in Meditations on Moloch, the author unpacks the poem and shows that there's something much darker hidden behind it.
Moloch is the race to the bottom that everyone is forced to participate in even when they know it's bad for everyone. It is the need to abandon deeply human values to gain competitive advantages that will leave us behind if we don't do what others are doing. It is that force that pushes toward survival ("the state of subsistence," he says) rather than life and that, once this transitional period of abundance is over, will enslave us all.
And in this extremely well-written, very long article, packed with examples and references, he unveils an absolutely Lovecraftian vision of the world in which humans are at the mercy of ancestral monsters that battle each other. And one of them, the one that is probably winning: Moloch.
It made me think a lot about human nature, about our times, and about what lies ahead for us, especially in terms of energy contraction in the age of Artificial Intelligence - one of the monsters that could be working for us or against us.
The article grabbed me so much that I went to look around a bit. The author calls himself Scott Alexander, he's a psychiatrist by trade and...he's written so much! Like hundreds of posts. I read three or four of them at random and was overwhelmed by the detail, the intelligence, the originality.
For example, if you're in the mood and really want to be aware of your mere mortal condition, you can read Who by very slow decay which talks about how doctors deal with the end of life - which is a bit like How doctors die that I wrote about a long time ago and that he mentions. (Coincidentally, what made me click on the article: "Who by very slow decay" is a line from the Leonard Cohen song "Who by Fire" that I discovered last week.)
Even better: when you go to his blog, he's got a long list of links to other authors who keep equally packed blogs: economics, science, rationality, etc... Only geeky subjects that interest me. And his pet peeve, the thread that ties his articles together, is effective altruism which he explains extremely well.
Conclusion: you have to clear your mind to discover something new.
