Kerim's Triptych ❧ Stupidology, Birds, Questions

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1️⃣ Stupidology

William Davies has an essay in n+1 on an issue I think about a lot: stupidity. Are people willfully ignorant? Is being stupid about fascism a way of signaling allegiance? Is it because everyone is watching TikTok and AI slop? While Davies looks at some of these, what makes the essay genuinely interesting is the way he looks at the infrastructure of stupidity. There are a couple of dimensions to this.

First, in a world of "big data," stupidity is just another data point.

The platformization of human life means that truth and falsehood, fact and rumor, become mere data points of equal value. False information and stupid policies can move markets at least as much as accurate information and smart policies, and so offer equal opportunity to speculators. . . In a fully platformized world, everything shrinks to the status of behaviors and patterns; meaning, intention, and explanation become irrelevant.

Second, we now monetize stupidity influencers:

Outlandish and pointless fantasies, like the conspiracies circulated by QAnon or the alleged staging of the Sandy Hook school shooting, exist to be recited and shared, acting as instruments of online influence and coordination rather than narratives to make sense of the world.

And, third, markets, rather than acting as a bulwark against stupidity, actively encourage it.

Thorstein Veblen’s 1919 pamphlet “On the Nature and Uses of Sabotage” suggests that we have acquired a warped view of sabotage as something exceptional and violent. If we return to the term’s central meaning — derived from the French sabot, a kind of wooden clog that slows the wearer down — we might understand that the deliberate withdrawal of efficiency is a frequent and constituent part of capitalism. Corporations depend on blocking societal efficiency for profit, constraining nimbler rivals using law (such as patents) or even acquiring them in order to shut them down, as Facebook/Meta has done repeatedly. Tariffs have served as a useful and profitable form of economic sabotage in the past (as Trump seems vaguely aware), though typically to nurture economies at a much earlier stage of industrial development than the present-day United States

Bond markets in particular.

The bond markets look very favorably on economic sabotage, as long as it is the right kind. Economic growth tends to make government debt less attractive to traders, while economic stagnation and austerity are welcomed. Bond prices rise and yields fall when governments engage in stupid acts of social sabotage, such as defunding public services, slashing welfare and pension budgets, and privatizing public goods, most of which have negative long-term fiscal consequences.

There is much more to the article than this, including a nice discussion of Hannah Arendt's theory of stupidity, but the above discussion is what really caught my eye.

2️⃣ Birds

This is a very neat scientific finding:

Birds separated by vast geographic distances and millions of years of evolution share a remarkably similar learned vocal warning to identify parasitic enemies near their nests, an international team of researchers has found.

I've seen lots of studies showing learned behavior in various species, but never one that involved so many different species!

3️⃣ Questions

Los Angeles police in riot gear in front of Barbara Kruger's "Untitled (Questions)." Photo by Jay L. Clenendin (June 10, 2025).

Endnote

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