From the Dumpster Fire
Irregular hauls of things worth salvaging from the internet and the archiveChosen by one editor, read with machinesNew Hauls by email
HaulSixteen objects
Haul 2: The Uses and Abuses of History
Linux and Wikipedia, the dilettante twice over, the world's falling birth rates, press gangs and threshing machines, Robert Caro, the anxiety of the AI moment, the end of the internet, killing by algorithm in Gaza, Delhi's air, the 1931 census, and Frost in the snow.
Here, There Be Monsters: Why We Need to Know Our History
Where we come from
If we don’t know where we come from, can we know where we are, or where we’re going? If we don’t know who our ancestors were, can we ever understand others and, perhaps most importantly, understand ourselves?
Because as much as contemporary culture valorises the individual, and as much as we’re seduced by the romance of the lone wolf, we are relational beings. We all have ties, strong ones and weak ones, that bind us together for better or worse. We have families and our own groups, which are in turn embedded in a community, a state and a nation. Our fate is inextricably entwined with the fate of the people around us.
As I write this, I’m reminded of that profoundly evocative passage in Martin Luther King Jr.’s Letter from Birmingham Jail (opens in a new tab), where he writes:
Moreover, I am cognizant of the interrelatedness of all communities and states. I cannot sit idly by in Atlanta and not be concerned about what happens in Birmingham. Injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere. We are caught in an inescapable network of mutuality, tied in a single garment of destiny. Whatever affects one directly, affects all indirectly. Never again can we afford to live with the narrow, provincial “outside agitator” idea.
So how do we know ourselves? Slavoj Žižek would tell us not to bother looking inside, because all we’ll find in there is, to use his word, shit. He may have a point. Knowing oneself is the odyssey of a lifetime, a long journey full of grand adventures and battles with monsters.
But if we’re made by our ties to the people around us, we’re also made by the people who came before us. Which means the other way of knowing who we are is to know our history.
And by history I don’t mean the mechanical accumulation of facts, dates, events and biographies. That’s not what knowing history is. I mean an intellectually honest and open exploration of the past. Though I’m starting to realise that being honest and open isn’t enough. The story of our species has its good, bad, ugly and downright horrendous chapters. It’s a story written in blood, and for some people the blood is a lot darker than for others.
Which is why learning history takes a certain bravery. Because, to quote another one of my favourite philosophers, Captain Hector Barbossa:
You’re off the edge of the map, mate! Here, there be monsters!
Why I’m writing this
The reason I’m writing this is the historian Margaret Macmillan. I don’t remember exactly when, but more than a year ago, on one of those morning commutes with a friend, I listened to a lecture of hers on what history can teach us. And it’s one of those talks that, to put it mildly, fucks you up. There’s such a gravity to it that you keep coming back to it. I’ve listened to it several times since, and what she said only feels more urgent, because we live in truly treacherous times.
Read the rest of the note21 minutes
In this Haul sixteen objects, each set in its own printed form
- From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the InternetBenjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold and Aaron ShawLinux took nearly every aspect of this proprietary software development approach and threw it out the window.
A nice piece on the success of decentralized projects like Linux and Wikipedia. B.
- In Praise of the DilettanteJay MillerIn the dilettante’s genes is a compulsion to pursue passions, deeply coupled with a refusal to shape a life or identity permanently around any one of them. The dilettante possesses a unique capacity to dive deep into an interest, then surface and plunge into the depths of the next, each one an exploration, an adventure, but not a lifelong, life-defining project. It is precisely to hold open the possibility of the next reconnaissance mission that the dilettante rejects any dogmatic principle of stick-to-itiveness. Sometimes, the dilettante is a devout hobbyist parked on one interest for years at a stretch; sometimes, a juggler of several overlapping projects at once; and sometimes, a serial enthusiast on the hunt for the next novelty – what holds these modes together isn’t any fixed duration or rhythm of arrival and departure, but a disposition toward perpetual motion. The dilettante’s talent, energy and passion are constantly rechannelled through new outlets. Far from deficiency, dilettantism is a constant quest for abundance.
The life of the dilettante, so described, is not an especially easy one. It is a life of perpetual searching and fleeting satisfaction, in which accomplishment often arrives without accolades. Until breadth of interest is held in higher esteem, today’s dilettante will largely have to forgo public recognition and settle for a private life of pursuits and pleasures. Rarely is the dilettante widely celebrated as such. Consider someone like Susan Sontag, a novelist, critic and political activist whose wide-ranging work has earned both praise for its unconventional contributions to the intellectual life of 1960s New York and criticism for lacking rigour, for lacking substance. A ‘Win’ in the dilettante’s column, in other words, often comes with an asterisk – a conditional victory at best.
Further, the dilettante is also no pack animal; however much a part of a group one may feel, the dilettante will likely always be something of a tourist within it. The dilettante has to be comfortable travelling as a lone wolf at the margins of any community organised around a shared interest.
I love the word dilettante. B.
- Journal of Economic Perspectives 40 (1) · 2026The Likelihood of Persistently Low Global FertilityMichael Geruso and Dean SpearsFrom the paper · p. 5Fertility rates have fallen below two in many countries.
An interesting paper by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears on falling fertility rates around the world. B.
- Revenge of the DilettantesVenkatesh RaoBefore AI, writing just happened to be the only mode of creative expression I could access at low-enough cost, and without AI, given my mix of actual aptitudes and energy levels.
Looking back, in high school, I was something like the Jason Schwartzman character Max in Rushmore. Frenetically dabbling in a dozen different hobbies, from astronomy and airplanes to writing and theater, pursued with dilettantish vigor and amateurishness.
This is not a mode of being you can keep up as an adult unless you have a trust fund underwriting your life. You have to identify your best aptitudes (or in my case, my least worst ones), focus, and do your best to make a living with or near them. You have to do that “hone your craft” thing so many tedious people seem to fetishize, and which I find to be mostly hell on earth.
I’ve spent most of my life just looking for the best leverage I can find for my minimally, reluctantly honed amateur tendencies. This mostly meant gravitating to n=1 margins with so little competition, low-craft amateurishness was never the issue.
Now the jinn-tooling is gravitating to the margins too, where us dilettantes have already been camped out all our lives.
It’s time for a revenge of the dilettantes. The self-consciously deep types are going to hate it. We’re poised to take over the world, one bespoke n=1 janky contraption at a time, conjured up with the help of genius-god full-stack jinns who don’t skeptically challenge even our dumbest, shallowest ideas.
While writing about Miller’s essay, I wanted to add a note on what AI means for a dilettante life. B.
- American Economic Review 116 (10) · 2026Fighting for Growth: Labor Scarcity and Technological Progress During the British Industrial RevolutionBruno Caprettini, Alex Trew and Hans-Joachim VothFrom the paper · p. 7Q. Do your farmers employ fewer hands than they did before those machines were introduced?
Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain? B.
- CaroWhen people say to me everything was bad that he did, what I say is, “You didn’t read the book.”Dwarkesh Podcast
Whenever an author or book comes up, the one thing I can always say is, “Oh, that’s on my reading list.” B.
- The Epistemic Crisis Behind the AI CrazyNils GilmanAnd that disorder, in turn, is producing a political and policy debate characterized by precisely the things that define psychological disturbance: emotional dysregulation and breakdowns in mental functioning that are causing severe distress and daily impairment. How can you stay sane when, every day, the newspapers, your social feed, the chatter on the street, and everything else around you are offering wildly divergent claims about the future? How can you plan anything?
Under either the p(doom) or the p(boom) scenario, is there any reason at all to get an education, let alone contribute to your SEP-IRA? The inability to adjudicate between wildly divergent claims about the future—the absence of any social consensus about how to establish warrant for claims about what is to come—is literally paralyzing people’s ability to act. At best, people continue to act out of inertia, momentum, or simple conformity: just doing things because that is what everyone else is doing.
This is what I mean when I say that the state of the discourse is “disordered” in a clinical sense. The present AI discourse is, in this sense, literally insane.
To put it in more colloquial and old-fashioned terms, the loss of a shared horizon of the future is producing a kind of collective nervous breakdown. That’s not a term used in contemporary psychology, but it seems as apt a label as any for the present state of the discourse.
A brilliant post by Nils Gilman on a topic I’ve been thinking about nonstop for a while. B.
- The End of the InternetBen ThompsonAt the same time, what this entails is that the public Internet, to an even greater extent than now, will be a battle zone at best (i.e. social media), and a wasteland at worst (everything else). Some of this is economic, as AI consumes everything — both content and attention — without giving any of the traffic back that Google did, but it is also technical: it was already a dodgy proposition to stand up your own site or app, which was the very promise of the Internet, given the hacking risks; in the age of AI it’s madness.
It is sad. When I was a kid we called up BBS’s that were hosted in people’s homes; when I was in high school we downloaded music from public FTP addresses; when I was in college we set up our own websites. Anyone could set up a server, and that server was just as much a part of the Internet as any other server; that’s simply not viable any longer, even if you weren’t worried about making money. The Internet as we knew it is dead.
There are, however, green shoots of possibility, and once again the answer is to go smaller. When anyone can make an app, the answer is not to try and make a quick buck in the App Store; in fact, the surge in slop will make the market worse for everyone. Rather, it’s to make something for yourself and a small group of trusted friends and colleagues.
The Internet was once nice, weird, wacky and wonderful. B.
- Attention, not agreementScott AlexanderUnder Moloch, activists are irresistibly incentivized to dig their own graves.
The definitive piece to understand why the internet feels miserable, and why people fight and argue, and why the most controversial things always get the most attention. B.
- Necro-Economics: Death by AlgorithmEyal WeizmanThe devastating application of AI after 7 October was exposed by Abraham, NAZA’s co-director, in a series of groundbreaking articles for the online magazine +972, Local Call and the Guardian. In NAZA we hear some of his sources talk for the first time. They describe a system called Lavender, which was intended to establish – through phone location data, calls made and contacts saved – whether the user of a phone was a Hamas operative, if so how senior they were and what their home address might be. The system’s degree of certainty was only 85 per cent – and as one of NAZA’s interviewees admits, a baker near a Hamas base will have a phone full of contacts who are Hamas operatives – but this was enough to authorise their killing, along with their entire families. Another of Abraham’s exposés had to do with a system called ‘Where’s Daddy?’ It enables intelligence officers to listen to, among other things, conversations between family members, including a targeted person’s children, happy that their father is home. This technology makes remote killing intimately close. The killers listen to the everyday conversations of the people they are about to kill, and later to the moans and screams of the injured.
The commander of Unit 8200, the intelligence corps that designed the system, referred to ‘the synergy between humans and machines’ as ‘supercognition’. Intelligence officers and legal advisers rarely dispute the results it produces. One of the interviewees says: ‘You have to trust the system.’ And they do trust it, as is made clear by the fact that it takes, on average, just twenty seconds for a target to be authorised. The system allows for the responsibility for ‘industrialised annihilation’ to be shared between coders, operators, legal officers who pre-set the level of collateral damage, officers who approve the strike, officers who choose the bomb and the pilots or drone operators who launch it. ‘I am just a small screw in the system,’ one of the interviewees says, quoting Eichmann’s defence during his trial in Jerusalem. The system that begins with a phone number being put into a computer system ends with an entire family crushed under the rubble.
A chilling piece by Eyal Weizman in the London Review of Books, with a chilling title to match. B.
- Pollution as Growth KillerAlex TabarrokThe demographic dividend is people. If you poison the people, you shrink the dividend. A young workforce with lower cognitive scores, more respiratory illness and shorter working lives is a smaller asset than the headcount suggests, and the damage to today’s children shows up as lower productivity in future decades.
It’s Diwali, it’s winter, and air pollution is back in the mainstream debate as Delhi’s air turns toxic again. B.
- Why Do Cormac McCarthy’s Books Exist?Sam BuntzI fear that people are going to be put off from McCarthy by the biography—not only because of the already-known revelations about his relationship with Augusta Britt. Thereʼs the suggestion that McCarthy may have committed credit card fraud when he was younger, that he slept with some of his friendsʼ wives in the sleazy and swinging ʼ70s, and so on and so forth. All this gives the impression of young McCarthy as louche and unscrupulous. But if you read other writings about McCarthy, like the aforementioned Smithsonian profile, you emerge with a different picture. He was someone constantly, feverishly engaged on an intellectual level and also, at least in later life, concerned with his moral condition and reformation. According to the Vanity Fair piece on his relationship with Britt, McCarthy once told his son John Francis, “The difference between you and me is that you were born a good person. I had to work hard to become one.”
As with Robert Caro, Cormac McCarthy is another writer I’ve been meaning to read for a long time. B.
- CensusnamaMade byIndia State StoriesWhat it isFLAME Centre for Legislative Education and Research, FLAME UniversityCensus-nama is a long-form series that traces the evolution of the Indian Census—from its colonial origins to the present day.
Shivakumar Jolad has been posting some crazy historical datasets lately. B.
- Stopping by Woods on a Snowy EveningRobert FrostWhose woods these are I think I know.His house is in the village though;He will not see me stopping hereTo watch his woods fill up with snow.The whole poem
Robert Frost (1874–1963) is probably the most quoted American poet of the 20th century. B.
In the Atlas a data story from this Haul
The next Haul
Hauls come when there is enough worth sending. Get the next one by email, or follow the RSS feed.
Colophon
Chosen and annotated by Bhuvanesh, mostly by voice. Read, cross-linked and drafted with language models, then checked by hand. The serif is the editor; the blue sans is the machine. Every quotation was matched against its source and every link was fetched before publishing.
Corrections
- : Retitled. Added Sam Buntz's essay on Cormac McCarthy, Dan Silver's note and Scott Alexander's The Toxoplasma of Rage, three charts of the fertility data behind the Geruso and Spears paper, and checked margin notes, big ideas and Wikipedia references.
- : Credited Dan Silver's note to him by name.
- : Added Joe Weisenthal's clip on tech people's epistemic priors, with the full Odd Lots conversation.
This is version 4 of Haul 2.