Remembering
A few days ago, I showed our kids this graph:
And this article, which traces the global decline in academic performance to the popularity of the smartphone.
Our kids, ages 11 and 10, regularly complain to us that their classmates use "smart" phones so much they are emotionally distant on the playground and lazy in the classroom. (Not saying causation, but definitely a correlation!)
So instead ours have asked for flip phones!
We compromised and bought them a vintage rotary phone they can use to call their friends from home. (Reader, the good ones are expensive now!)
In this spirit, on the eve of Christmas eve, I tell our oldest, who loves reading books but also Wikipedia, that I want to buy him a fancy e-reader that he can use to read a downloaded Wikipedia as well as books.
I want to help him avoid YouTube and meme site rabbit holes – to say nothing of the casual game sites he and his peers have learned to access on their "locked down," school-issued netbooks.)
"But what about Google search?" he complains.
I counter: "What do you need Google for if you have Wikipedia?"
He says he uses Google to get quick answers.
"YES! That’s the problem!" I say, laughing.
"You need to learn to synthesize that information for yourself."
Hopefully most of you have better things to do than watch the devolution of Twitter.
But since I don’t, let me share one of the most compelling comedies of the last 5-10 years.
Elon Musk bought Twitter to drown out woke voices, then he made an anti-woke AI, and at birth his Creation came out saying the very things the Father can't stand to hear.
Imagine hating the things your kids say so much you’re willing to pay billions, and burn up your reputation, to change what their magic 8-Ball says. 
What a time to be alive!
Our children are learning to defer their judgement to software.
Many of us are offloading our memories to private databases.
Bullies with billions are buying networks to reshape reality.
(see also Bill Ackman vs "Harvard")
But was it better before?
I mean, facts are facts! So, yeah, even a postmodernist like me, who swears by Bruno Latour and Gadamer, believes there is a fundamental bedrock to living in a free society.
The process of producing facts can either be led by specialists or it can be led by people who got very good in one industry and then believed themselves to be the best in all.
The latter are not to be trusted with the means by which reality is produced. They simply haven’t earned those credentials in a truly meritocratic society.
Money != merit. Only peer review equals merit, and you don’t get to elect your peers. They elect you!
(As the kids say, "In Soviet Russia, LEADER ELECTS PEOPLE!")
These may sound like abstract tenets but reader, they're based on personal experience, as well.
There's a whole spectrum of Patrick Batemans out in these streets!
I recently experienced one of those rare moments in life that you can’t believe is happening and then afterwards becomes a dramatic touchstone as instructive as any Shakespeare or Biblical scene.
In a public moment, the owner of a company I consult for demanded gratitude from his employees. Like, repeatedly. Pointedly. As in "I need you to show me some gratitude."
Reader, if you know the first thing about gratitude – that's not how it works!
It's right there in the word! Gratis – given freely!
Gratis is an adverb which means free, without charge. Gratis stems from the mid-fifteenth century, from a contraction of the Latin word gratiis meaning for thanks, without recompense, for nothing.
Here is a person who clearly doesn’t understand basic power relations and also enjoys the greatest power allowed in civil society (in our capitalist framework.)
I'll share just one more detail because, popular fiction scratches the surface of this profile: on this Sunday Christmas Eve, this blessed soul sends a message to every employee in his company to fill out all the fields in their Slack profiles. The child demands attention from his toys.
It would be just sad if it was about one person. But it's worse. We're the ones at fault. We allow some obviously disqualified people to fail up.
Lucky boys!
Our oldest boy, the one who laments his classmates don't take school seriously, has decided that he wants to be summa cum laude, so that he can go to a good college.
I explain to him that he has a statistically better chance of being summa cum laude at his school because, as he’s noticed, there are fewer students who are exceptional at academics.
But I also warn him that he’ll have worse chances of getting into the kind of college that I did because he won’t be able to go to a high school that is as rare (exceptional) as the one that I did.
It’s not anything he can change, it’s just luck.
I tell him the story of the man who got hit by lightning, survived it, and then bought a winning lottery ticket. There are people who are exceptionally lucky.
He asks me what the guy’s name is.
I laugh and say: Are you gonna call him up and congratulate him?
We joke a little bit about whether or not the guy would want to be reminded of his good luck.
I tell him that most people would rather be told they’re good at something. No one wants to hear “Congratulations for being so lucky!”
I am instantly reminded of the men who bristle at the possibility that they're exceptionally lucky.
Men (and some women) driven to rage by the realization that they'll never be able to disentangle their obvious fortune from their smarts and hard work.
The greater the uptightness around sheer luck, the louder the complaints:
"DEI must DIE," the very clever Musk proclaims. "Society is a meritocracy!"
"Luck had nothing to do with my success. I earned all of it!"
Well, not me, reader!
I've been nothing but lucky! I was born in an open air prison! I don't live there anymore!
That I have been at times smart is a result of my parents. It's not genetics, it's love and care and attention.
Sadly, not all babies are born to parents who try hard to be great parents.
Mine were so excellent they put me in the continued presence of the American elite.
And what I've seen has been eye-opening!
Such is my luck that a few years ago I said, very much in passing, that CEO that Elon Musk is an asshole.
The CEO retorted: Oh, you know him personally?
It's hard for some people to accept that the people who work for them, the subaltern, may know more about the world than they do. Or see things more clearly.
Personally, I try to only hire people who know more, and can see better, than me! I find it really pays off.
(It's not rocket science! but what do I know.)
Anyway…here's some SPAM I got on my phone yesterday.
Bonus+! That Dangerous Supplement!
Our youngest wanted to watch Tron (1982) after watching a YouTube video about its composer Wendy Carlos Williams. (Friends, share your YouTube profiles with your children! It's the new network TV.)
I ask him to look up where it's streaming and he says, without looking:
"It’s only on Disney+ because it’s a Disney movie."
This boy has a richer understanding of IP at 10 than I did well into my 20s.
Such is the new world.
I tell him that sadly we don’t have Disney+ and he says:
“They do!” while pointing the remote control at our TV.
He was showing me the faces of our “extended family” – i.e., the family friends whose Disney+ account we share.
Historians teach us that material conditions shape the family unit.
But this obvious fact, our evolving family, was still unexpected to me.
The same boy made this transfer in art class last week:
Room 404, presumably.
May all your families be safe.
May we dismantle the many machines that destroy so many lives in so many places.
We can do it, I swear.
And for those who celebrate, please remember, they don't call him the prince of peace for nothing.
The only thing that separates us from savagery is what we choose to remember.