Hello! Thanks for being here. Here’s a little roundup of the pieces we published this week with some additional thoughts, insight, reading, and whatever else feels useful.
No news is new etc. but if you pay a little attention you can anticipate just what the people will be talking about – especially as it pertains to politics.
First: We spoke with Adrian Hon about gamification. Adrian wrote a great book about the ever-expanding presence of gaming in our lives.
“Gamification is almost like the sort of action layer of the quantified self and of self-improvement. We're in a place where people feel pressured to always be competing. If you want to survive and get a promotion and be interesting and build your brand and so on, you need to be doing stuff all the time. Whether that's learning a new language or losing weight or reading the best books. That's not new – the quantified self is not new, but the mechanism by which people try to motivate themselves to become better is.
It's not like, I just read more books. Instead, it’s, I'm going to reward myself by giving myself like five points for every page I read. If you use Apple Books, then if you read for five minutes, it'll be like, “Congratulations, you earned this achievement!” – Adrian Hon
A friend also sent us this essay from Haley Nahman’s Substack. She writes about our addiction to watching our lives through data points, the limits of technology, and the potential alternatives to living.
Quantitative measures are more appealing to us than qualitative ones because they’re empirical and observable, and crucially, because we can pit datapoints against each other. As social creatures who constantly compete and also fear the uncertain and unknown, this affinity isn’t surprising. But technology, being limited in its ability to translate the world’s softer, squishier parts, has simply just led us deeper into the project of objectifying everything. Friends that can be counted, tastes that can be checked like boxes, personalities that can be summed up with labels, fitness that can be tracked and analyzed. It’s a lot easier and more immediately satisfying to rely on concrete data than something borderless like intuition or feeling. It’s also a crutch—a perfect balm for insecurity that can secure us in only one specific way, and not always in the way we think. – Haley Nahman
Which got us thinking about vibes…
Second: We published an interview with Jason De Leon on the border, labor vs. security, and necropolitics. Obviously, we can’t stop talking about immigration over here. We see it as completely central to interpreting American political power.
“Trump has given the Democratic Party a straw man to compare themselves to. I mean, Democrats have been guilty of inaction since Biden was elected. We had all these promises about immigration reform that have not happened, but as long as babies aren't in cages and Biden's not calling Mexico a shit-hole country, it somehow feels like we're more immigrant-friendly.
In some ways, Democrats are a little bit more nefarious because they're hiding their indifference under different, more palatable language. As far as I'm concerned, I would throw them both under the bus. I don't care who is in the White House, whoever is in power right now is responsible for the deaths that prevention through deterrence causes. And under that framing, everybody's hands are dirty. Migrant death is a bipartisan issue.” - Jason De Leon
Since publishing, a “big” immigration story came out in The Atlantic – it is worth a read.
There’s a lot of information in here, and some good reporting. The author (Tim Alberta) seemed to think there wasn’t enough attention being paid to it — particularly by Democratic lawmakers on what he calls “record-breaking” border crossings.
But, to put it plainly, that doesn’t seem to be the case:
This piece exemplifies what’s so fascinating about immigration reporting. There are some truths, some good anecdotal conversations — as well as misinterpreted data, unasked questions, and a lack of any imaginative thinking about what immigration could look like in this country.
More to come this week! Thanks for reading.