Aw dang.

All is not well in the Church of MAGA...

E.g., at the intersection of your analysis and a pol-econ perspective: the battle over whether information ecology and knowledge itselt should be primarily treated as a private commodity vs. a public good.

I don't think we can fully solve the hollowing-out problem without also dealing with the massive wealth inequalities, degradation of social safety nets, entrenched anti-democratic interests, etc. that our present pol-economic system perpetuates. But both/and not either/or.

Fair, and you've certainly provided more than enough food for thought in the current thread. Just don't want people to lose sight of the way the crisis you're analyzing so well is reinforced by (and reinforcing of) powerful political-economic interests.

Wow. A very long and genuinely insightful thread about democracy, information environment, and institutional trust.

Good stuff...but also too functionalist in perspective. I don't think everything can be reduced to political economy, but contemporary capitalism plays a helluva role in this story.

These two books contain the sum total of all human knowledge

My Tax Dollars author @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social speaks with @nytimes.com. Check out @tarasiegelbernard.bsky.social's full piece on tax resistance here:

Conceived and designed by my 8-yr old *chef's kiss*

Hammer down

RELIGION UNBUNDLED
Excited that this paper proposing a new paradigm for the sociology of US religion @ruthbraunstein.bsky.social, @jlkucinskas.bsky.social, @bsteens.bsky.social and I have been working on has been accepted for publication in the American Sociological Review.

osf.io/preprints/so...

Homepage Anthropic Copyright Settlement

Just a reminder to folks, you must submit a claim for the Anthropic class action suit by March 30. The site allows you to look up whether/which of your books have been used by Anthropic. It's pretty easy to do. www.anthropiccopyrightsettlement.com?_gl=1*sz2s08....

It's always impossible to compete with Chuck Norris, but nicely done, @drmann.bsky.social

Given current trends and incentives, I'm worried it's going to be consumers who have to do most of that wading (or drowning). Not fun.

In a more AI-driven and reliant economy, I think this problem only gets worse. Yes, AI can and will help create good products, but we also know it generates huge amounts of "slop" along the way. That slop has to be waded through somewhere along the chain of production, distribution, and consumption.

2) if and when the product is relatively low-cost and we don't have the pre-purchase time but do have the $, we play consumer roulette, usually buying a bunch of shitty options until we land on a good or, more likely, an "okay enough" one.

The two major strategies we have to separate the wheat from the chaff are to either 1) spend our limited time and energy doing excessive amounts of pre-purchase research and/or...

This would basically be an amplified version of what we're already living through today. Most of us already understand the problem isn't a lack of products to choose from. The problem is trying to choose the right ones and avoid all the junk.

So another strategy is to keep much of the cost-savings and make quality control and discernment the consumer's responsibility.

This could mean that companies start spending/hiring more on the QC and later-stage evaluation end of things. But of course that's expensive and would negate much if not all of the cost-savings on the early production side.

This means more work on the QC end of things for producers, but the sheer amount of stuff they have to evaluate means that their existing processes start to get overwhelmed.

Also, because fewer ideas make it through the initial pipeline, more of them can be subject to QC processes involving human judgement and evaluation. But today's AI tech can already rapidly churn out and scale up a number of new product ideas.

NOT having the technological capacity to rapidly churn out and scale up every half-baked idea means that producers have to be more discerning and selective at the front end of the process, because they can't waste precious time, money, and labor on too many half-baked proposals and dead-ends.

While often overlooked in all the talk about increased "productivity" via AI, there are some significant benefits to new product ideas being time-consuming and difficult to implement.

But, at the risk of getting out over my own skis, I think one plausible future if we continue to ride the AI hype train is a big degradation of the consumer experience. We're just going to be flooded with a huge amount of shitty products (which, if we're being honest, is already a problem).

Maxwell's Silver Hammer, The Beatles

Captain Sterling's Little Problem, The Coup

Strangers, Ethel Cain

Cocaine Blues, Johnny Cash

Paper Planes, MIA

Hell Broke Luce, Tom Waits

CCS Workshop ~ February 20, 2026 ~ Daniel Winchester

On my way to discuss some work in progress on religion and global imaginaries with the fine folks at Yale's Center for Cultural Sociology. Maybe it's the gothic architecture talking, but I'm feeling smarter already.

BILLY BRAGG - CITY OF HEROES YouTube video by Billy Bragg

For the city of heroes. Skol!

You know you've messed up when you've radicalized the host of Jeopardy.

Huh, hardly seems to warrant shooting moms in the face in the name of "public safety", does it? #abolishicenow