A sobering downright depressing summary of 2025, The Year of Technoligarchy, from Molly White. 

“In 2025, Trump brought tech executives into power to dismantle regulators and write their own rules. But the instabilities they’re creating may be their downfall.”

With that subheading, I expected a hopeful uplift at the end — one that I would of course cast doubt upon. I was… incorrect. She ends thusly:

“We’re not all gonna make it. But neither, necessarily, are they.”

Oof. 

Peco Gaskovski:

The deeper danger is that we become little gods, generating life in our own image and on our own terms, yet with neither the wisdom nor understanding of an actual Creator.

(For further reading, confer with very old-and-ignored literature that most people scoff or roll their eyes at.)

Ruth Gaskovski:

This mechanistic view is a kind of rupture with God. It erases the spiritual dimension of a child growing within a mother’s womb. This mutual participation in creation breaks you open and brings you into contact with helpless love, and also with suffering that produces life.

Notice that the mechanistic is tied to the non-material. It is the mechanistic, non-physical, non-participatory non-things that erase the spiritual. While physical, participatory things break open both material and spiritual reality.

Researchers from Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences report that by the age of two to four months, babies eyes can focus on the eyes of adults, creating what they call a “joint-networked state” during which their brain waves sync with those of the parent, bringing them into “mutual alignment”. When this state is activated by a parent’s gaze, babies try to vocalize and communicate more. If a mother’s eyes are locked onto a screen during nursing, rather than meeting the infant’s eyes, the earliest social connection is interrupted. […]

But who needs instincts, intuition, and patience when you can ask Emily Oster’s Al chatbot for parenting advice?

I’ve quoted Mary Oliver before:

Said the poet Robert Frost, “We begin in infancy by establishing correspondence of eyes with eyes.” It is deeply true. It is where the confidence comes from; the child whose gaze is met learns that the world is real and desirable — that the child himself is real, and cherished.

Also from Ruth:

The stories we tell ourselves about having children can be a major factor in whether people have kids.

If we encourage the idea, as some do, that motherhood is awful, that fathers are bad, that family is doomed to be dysfunctional, then, naturally, we will avoid children or else anxiously armor ourselves with every possible technology to shield us from the challenges.

But it we take the risk to become the parents that kids actually need, if we safeguard the sacred space where our most fundamental connections are formed, then—even if we aren’t perfect—and we won’t be—we might instill in those children a faith that it is possible for them to replicate the goodness that they themselves experienced.

Carolyn Locke:

I heard how the starfish learns the world
through touch, how its chemical sense
leads it to the mussel bed, how it feels
its way around crevices sucking soft bodies
from their shells. You can’t kill a starfish
in any usual way—chop one up
and it multiplies, filling the waters
with quintuples of spiny legs
reaching out from humped backs, and curling
around the deep purple shells on the rocky
bottom. Sometimes I think I know
what it is to know the world
through only the body. If I close my eyes,
I no longer feel where my body ends
and yours begins—
and I can believe your hands are mine
reaching for muscle,
a strange body becoming my own,
and in my ear an unfamiliar heartbeat
pumps new blood, breath no longer mine
doubles the lungs, my need
growing larger than what my body can hold
until there is only this way of knowing, this touch
that leads me, blind as the starfish,
to become what I cannot see.

Jack Goldsmith:

In sum, it would not be terribly hard for the Justice Department to write an opinion in support of the Venezuela invasion even if the military action violates the U.N. Charter.

To repeat, that does not mean that the action is in fact lawful—and it pretty clearly isn’t under the U.N. Charter. It only means that the long line of unilateral executive branch actions, supported by promiscuously generous executive branch precedents, support it. As I wrote in connection with the Soleimani strike: “our country has—through presidential aggrandizement accompanied by congressional authorization, delegation, and acquiescence—given one person, the president, a sprawling military and enormous discretion to use it in ways that can easily lead to a massive war. That is our system: One person decides.”

This is not the system the framers had in mind, and it is a dangerous system for all the reasons the framers worried about. But that is where we are—and indeed, it is where we have been for a while.

My wife asked if we wanted to do another Year of Anti-Inflation. I think I’m always down for that, but especially after reading Byung-Chul Han last night, which pairs wonderfully with it.

In the passage that Mandy Brown referred to in this post, Han follows with this (all italics original):

In life, things serve as stabilizing resting points. Rituals serve the same purpose. Through their self-sameness, their repetitiveness, they stabilize life. They make life last [haltbar]. The contemporary compulsion to produce robs things of their endurance [Haltbarkeit): it intentionally erodes duration in order to increase production, to force more consumption. Lingering, however, presupposes things that endure. If things are merely used up and consumed, there can be no lingering. And the same compulsion of production destabilizes life by undermining what is enduring in life. Thus, despite the fact that life expectancy is increasing, production is destroying life’s endurance.

A smartphone is not a ‘thing’ in Arendt’s sense. It lacks the very self-sameness that stabilizes life. It is also not a particularly enduring object. It differs from a thing like a table, which confronts me in its self-sameness. The content displayed on a smartphone, which demands our constant attention, is anything but self-same; the quick succession of bits of content displayed on a smartphone makes any lingering impossible. The restlessness inherent in the apparatus makes it a non-thing. The way in which people reach for their smartphones is also compulsive. But things should not compel us in this way.

Forms of ritual, such as manners, make possible both beautiful behaviour among humans and a beautiful, gentle treatment of things. In a ritual context, things are not consumed or used up [verbraucht] but used [gebraucht]. Thus, they can also become old. Under the compulsion of production, by contrast, we behave towards things, even towards the world, as consumers rather than as users. In return, they consume us. Relentless consump-tion surrounds us with disappearance, thus destabilizing life. Ritual practices ensure that we treat not only other people but also things in beautiful ways, that there is an affinity between us and other people as well as things:

The endurance of things and consumption of non-things — this under the umbrella of ritual-saturated culture as “community without communication” compared to our ritual-poor culture as “communication without community.” I’m just starting Han’s The Dissapearance of Rituals. Disclaimers about monocausal explanations notwithstanding, this is a heart-shot.

L. M. Sacasas:

[N]ot all forms of waiting imply a negative relation to power and agency. For his part, [Harold] Schweizer, elsewhere in his book, suggests that “we might think of waiting also as a temporary liberation from the economics of time-is-money, as a brief respite from the haste of modern life, as a meditative temporal space in which one might have unexpected intuitions and fortuitous insights.” 

We can describe waiting as a condition that is, as it were, imposed from above, but it is also possible to describe urgency, hurry, and immediacy as conditions imposed from above. In such cases, waiting could be conceived of both as a form of resistance and as a warranted insistence on the space for deliberation and reflection, which are the preconditions of freedom. Many of us live under the conditions of the just-in-time economy, that is to say of a techno-economic order that thrives when we feel ourselves deprived of the time and freedom to so order our lives that we are not lured into availing ourselves of the costly, last-minute conveniences proffered by the digital marketplace. Under these conditions, waiting, while not without its own costs, is power.

We can also frame such waiting as a resistance to what I have elsewhere described as the enclosure of the human psyche. But to get there, let’s backtrack just a bit. It seems to me that there is a family resemblance between Pascal’s explorations of a spiritual restlessness that cannot abide inactivity and Bergson’s elision of waiting and being. In both cases, we come painfully close to something more basic and real than the illusions with which we ordinarily make do. 

To put matter this way recalls how the 20th-century philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch conceived of freedom as a liberation from fantasy, which she defined as “the proliferation of blinding self-centred aims and images.” “It is in the capacity to love, that is to see,” Murdoch argued, “that the liberation of the soul from fantasy consists.” And this liberation from fantasy begins with “attention to reality inspired by, consisting of, love.” Thus, in her account, “freedom is not strictly the exercise of the will, but rather the experience of accurate vision which, when this becomes appropriate, occasions action.”

The line from waiting to the form of freedom as contact with the real that Murdoch is advocating runs through attention. Accurate vision, a form of seeing that is indistinguishable from love in its selflessness and which generates a freedom from fantasy and for action, arises from attention, which following Simone Weil, Murdoch defined as “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” “It is a task to come to see the world as it is,” Murdoch acknowledges, and that task is chiefly the task of patiently and lovingly paying attention.

[…]

To tarry or to linger at the table, the park bench, the shore, or even busy city street is to invite the things of our common world to make their appearance. It is to learn to see independently of our desire to do as we ought. It is to unlearn the impatience born of the desire to master, predict, and control the world that is first and always a gift.

Also worth noting:

Reading Schweizer’s book, I discovered the lovely notion of “Sabbath eyes” articulated by Theodor Adorno in his Minima Moralia. “The eyes that lose themselves to the one and only beauty are sabbath eyes,” Adorno wrote. “They save in their object something of the calm of its day of creation.”

Sabbath eyes, in Schweizer’s lovely summation, are eyes that “rest on their object.” May we strive to see with such eyes in this new year.

One day, Pooh was walking along on a mission to find the lost tail of his friend Eeyore…

It was a fine spring morning in the forest as he started out. Little soft clouds played happily in a blue sky, skipping from time to time in front of the sun as if they had come to put it out, and then sliding away suddenly so that the next might have his turn. Through them and between them the sun shone bravely; and a copse which had worn its firs all the year round seemed old and dowdy now beside the new green lace which the beeches had put on so prettily. Through copse and spinney marched Bear; down open slopes of gorse and heather, over rocky beds of streams, up steep banks of sandstone into the heather again; and so at last, tired and hungry, to the Hundred Acre Wood. For it was in the Hundred Acre Wood that Owl lived.

“And if anyone knows anything about anything,” said Bear to himself, “it’s Owl who knows something about something,” he said, “or my name’s not Winnie-the-Pooh,” he said. “Which it is,” he added. “So there you are.”

Owl lived at The Chestnuts, an old-world residence of great charm, which was grander than anybody else’s, or seemed so to Bear, because it had both a knocker and a bell-pull. Underneath the knocker there was a notice which said:

PLES RING IF AN RNSER IS REQIRD.

Underneath the bell-pull there was a notice which said:

PLEZ CNOKE IF AN RNSR IS NOT REQID.

These notices had been written by Christopher Robin, who was the only one in the forest who could spell; for Owl, wise though he was in many ways, able to read and write and spell his own name WOL, yet somehow went all to pieces over delicate words like MEASLES and BUTTEREDTOAST.

Winnie-the-Pooh read the two notices very carefully, first from left to right, and afterwards, in case he had missed some of it, from right to left. Then, to make quite sure, he knocked and pulled the knocker, and he pulled and knocked the bell-rope, and he called out in a very loud voice, “Owl! I require an answer! It’s Bear speaking.” And the door opened, and Owl looked out.

“Hallo, Pooh,” he said. “How’s things?”

“Terrible and Sad,” said Pooh, “because Eeyore, who is a friend of mine, has lost his tail. And he’s Moping about it. So could you very kindly tell me how to find it for him?”

“Well,” said Owl, “the customary procedure in such cases is as follows.”

“What does Crustimoney Proseedcake mean?” said Pooh. “For I am a Bear of Very Little Brain, and long words Bother me.”

“It means the Thing to Do.”

“As long as it means that, I don’t mind,” said Pooh humbly.

“The thing to do is as follows. First, Issue a Reward. Then——”

“Just a moment,” said Pooh, holding up his paw. “What do we do to this—what you were saying? You sneezed just as you were going to tell me.”

“I didn’t sneeze.”

“Yes, you did, Owl.”

“Excuse me, Pooh, I didn’t. You can’t sneeze without knowing it.”

“Well, you can’t know it without something having been sneezed.”

“What I said was, ‘First Issue a Reward’.”

“You’re doing it again,” said Pooh sadly.

“A Reward!” said Owl very loudly. “We write a notice to say that we will give a large something to anybody who finds Eeyore’s tail.”

“I see, I see,” said Pooh, nodding his head.

Of course, Pooh gets distracted by the grumblings in his belly, while Owl goes “on and on, using longer and longer words.” But this does not prevent the simple bear, standing again outside Owl’s house, from finally noticing what the wordy Owl misses.

“Handsome bell-rope, isn’t it?” said Owl.

Pooh nodded.

“It reminds me of something,” he said, “but I can’t think what. Where did you get it?”

“I just came across it in the Forest. It was hanging over a bush, and I thought at first somebody lived there, so I rang it, and nothing happened, and then I rang it again very loudly, and it came off in my hand, and as nobody seemed to want it, I took it home, and——”

“Owl,” said Pooh solemnly, “you made a mistake. Somebody did want it.”

“Who?”

“Eeyore. My dear friend Eeyore. He was—he was fond of it.”

“Fond of it?”

“Attached to it,” said Winnie-the-Pooh sadly.

So with these words he unhooked it, and carried it back to Eeyore; and when Christopher Robin had nailed it on in its right place again, Eeyore frisked about the forest, waving his tail so happily that Winnie-the-Pooh came over all funny, and had to hurry home for a little snack of something to sustain him. And, wiping his mouth half an hour afterwards, he sang to himself proudly:

Who found the Tail?
“I,” said Pooh,
“At a quarter to two
(Only it was quarter to eleven really),
“I found the Tail!”

Read the whole little story here; I haven’t excluded much.

Presented without comment (by me at least):

Demographic collapse is the good news.

Falling in love and having babies is among the most natural and powerful impulses a human being can have. If billions of people are just vaguely saying they “don’t feel like it”, something has gone profoundly wrong, and the appropriate response is not a symptomatic policy band-aid.

If you find yourself trying to justify or sell this basic human imperative, as one lifestyle choice among many, or as a vehicle for delivering some other good — or, God forbid, as a means of wringing a few more years out of a decrepit and exhausted system — you’ve already lost.

People aren’t having babies because the system they live within is profoundly unnatural and anti-human, and it needs to fail.

Trying to make people breed in order to save that system is precisely backwards. The only good reason to care about the economy, or the budget deficit, or house prices, or the state of the military, is because those factors either support, or suppress — or, worst of all, derange — healthy family formation.

Demographic collapse tells us that human society can’t just infinitely circle the drain: the people capable of running the machinery may be willing to liveas psychically gelded interchangeable productivity units, but they aren’t willing to breed that way.

This means that the processes that generate our present predicament really are self-terminating — which is very good news.

This, says Mary Harrington, is “Either more or very much less pessimistic than the Kingsnorth take on modernity, depending on your priors.”

Okay, fine, I’ll comment. I don’t hate “liberalism” enough, nor do I have enough knowledge or wisdom, to cheer along here. But I certainly nod, because I do hate the anti-human nature of the system being referred to. And not enough defenders — today’s poor-weather defenders or, if you can find them, real defenders — of “liberalism” take this seriously.

In any case, it’s not simply good news, as the post goes on to explain, if that wasn’t obvious enough. This collapse — or transformation, or whatever — will not go gently into that good night. Brace for rage, rage against the dying of the light and all that.

Oh, and there’s specifically good news, too. There will be Opportunities!… for the courageous, the energetic, and the excellent.

Whoever Mr. Kevin Dolan, the apparent writer of the Substack above, is, I do not endorse him, at least not based on a 5-minute perusal of his writing. And I’m guessing his ilk will mostly succeed in adding to that rage — calmly, with unwitting cleverness and composure, of course, to go along with all the excellence.

I don’t get the impression that the excellence he has in mind is the right kind, though I get the impression that he thinks it is exactly that.

But I think there are going to be some weird overlaps to navigate in the now and near future. For example, the only one who has put a finger on my own hesitation with Paul Kingsnorth, and only for a brief moment (most of his thoughts were as Blaaah as others’), was David Bentley Hart, when he pointed to some odd overlapping “comfort” Kingsnorth seemed to have, “sitting down with Wendell Berry one night and with Eric Metaxas the next and seeming equally at home with both.” I don’t think that’s entirely a fair statement, but I get it. I know what my gut reaction was when I saw he’d done a Metaxas interview. (I have not listened to it.) But, I also have to admit that I don’t know that I’m entirely justified. I might be right about my discomfort with the interview; or I might be wrong about my purity-test revulsion to it. (I’m much encouraged by Jennifer Herdt’s recent piece on James Pennington: “Today, when purity-seeking and critique so often stymie our capacity for commitment, Pennington embodies a generative alternative.”)

I anticipate more such headache as the wave of 2026 crashes over us.

No way out but through, I suppose.

‘I do not know which to hope,’ said Boromir grimly: ‘that Gandalf will find what he seeks, or that coming to the cliff we shall find the gates lost for ever. All choices seem ill, and to be caught between wolves and the wall the likeliest chance. Lead on!’

__

Don’t worry (I say to myself but also to anyone reading), my next post will be from Winnie-the-Pooh, who speaks to me more clearly and luflyly.

Austin Kleon: