# Haul 002: Goalless exploration

> 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.

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/)
- **Editor**: Bhuvanesh
- **Published**: 8 November 2026 (2026-11-08)
- **Last Modified**: 2026-11-08 (version 1)
- **Contents**: Twelve objects
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2

## Field Note: Here, There Be Monsters: Why We Need to Know Our History (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

### 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*](https://www.africa.upenn.edu/Articles_Gen/Letter_Birmingham.html), 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.

At Davos in 2023, sharing a panel with Adam Tooze, the historian who popularised the word "polycrisis," Niall Ferguson [waved the term away](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=rHQJYu_6j3I). The word, he said, "makes me think of polystyrene and polyester, things I never much liked." A financial crash, a populist backlash, a new cold war, a pandemic, a war in Europe: to him, that's just history happening. And he might be right. But as a creature of this era, it doesn't feel like just history happening. It feels discordant and discombobulating.

Part of it is that there's a profound sense of otherness in the air. Nationalism is on the rise, and with it the so-called strongman leader, a term doing a lot of heavy lifting. Like such leaders throughout history, they're concocting an edited version of the past to stoke our deeply ingrained us-versus-them instincts. They promise a racially, ethnically and culturally pure society that puts the "rightful inheritors" of the land back on top, and appeal to our basest instinct: to shut people out. More often than not, that means immigrants, refugees and naturalised citizens, people who came from somewhere else and made a home.

We're fed a steady diet of this stuff, designed to pit us against one another and make us forget that, wherever we live, there are more ties that bind us than separate us. We're being turned against our fellow cosmopolitans. And I don't mean cosmopolitan in the sense of urban and sophisticated, but in the truest sense of the Greek word *kosmopolitēs*, a citizen of the world. (Diogenes the Cynic, asked where he came from, supposedly answered just that.)

It's a dark and depressing time. There's a fetishisation not only of the strongman, but of an imagined past in which some people are purer and superior to others. We are the same creatures who painted the Mona Lisa, carved the temples of Ellora, went to the moon, invented the mRNA vaccine and taught sand how to talk. And yet we still shun our fellow humans for the colour of their skin, the sound of their tongue, the place of their birth and the choice of their faith. This dichotomy of world-altering genius and base stupidity is something I'll never stop being amazed by, even on my deathbed.

So how do we deal with this moment? Apart from lots and lots of therapy, psychedelics, a fair amount of alcohol and other assorted substances, I think the answer is history.

Why? The sharp-eyed reader will have noticed I've been rambling a fair bit, and might ask, rightly, why we need to know history at all. The best answer I've found comes from one of my all-time favourite essays, the philosopher Eric Schwitzgebel's [piece in *Aeon*](https://aeon.co/essays/if-you-ask-why-youre-a-philosopher-and-youre-awesome) on why asking "Why?" is what makes us human:

> Often, our best success is only to better appreciate the shape of our ignorance.

Knowing the shape of your ignorance is a humbling thing, and that, for me, is what history does. It shrinks our ego. It situates us in the vast sweep of time and shrinks our existence to almost nothing. It makes us realise the true density of reality, past, present and future. And in doing that, it helps us understand the people around us better, and in the process we get to know ourselves a little better too. Because as much as we like to think of ourselves as enlightened individuals, we are profoundly relational creatures.

But knowing history isn't only a way to know others, and through them, ourselves. It's also our best defence against the siren songs of those who bastardise our histories, the very histories that bind us together, and use them to divide us, to pit us against one another, and to conjure up enemies where there should be none.

### History, the pitiful creature

But learning history isn't as easy as it seems. You can't just pick up a book and read it. Well, that's part of it, but history is told by human beings, and we are flawed creatures, to say the least.

And history itself, if I can anthropomorphise it, is a pitiful creature. It's forever being forced to do other people's bidding, constantly victimised by people in power for their own greedy and nefarious purposes. To try and understand your history is to run into bewildering facts: often incomplete, often paradoxical, often painful.

History is never neutral. There's always an imbalance in the way it's told. It's easy to dismiss history as just a story told after the fact, and I'll admit that's a line I've used myself, many times, with friends and colleagues. But it's a myopic, impoverished way of understanding it. The way I think about it now, history is a dim light in an ocean of darkness. It can't show you everything. What it does show you is just how much darkness there is out there.

And we live in a moment where everyone has a claim on that light. People across the political spectrum, all over the world, are mining the past for grievances and causes to legitimise whatever brand of opium they're peddling. The historian Eric Hobsbawm put it brilliantly: history is to nationalist and fundamentalist ideologies what poppies are to heroin addiction. It's the raw material.

They mine history for complaints, for wounds, for a sense of victimhood that can be weaponised to legitimise their authority, and then, in doing so, to nakedly grab power. For a lot of people, history serves the same purpose as a religious creation myth. It's the wellspring of their power and legitimacy, and they enslave it in their quest to reclaim some imagined glory. And so many of history's greatest tragedies were preceded by exactly this: people mining the past to legitimise the evils they went on to commit.

Why does it work? I don't want to say we're hardwired for it, but we do end up looking up to people in positions of authority. We trust them, and somewhere along the way we cede some of our agency to them, whether out of a need to belong, blind allegiance, or plain admiration. And with history, that trust matters even more, because most of us can't check the past for ourselves. We can't read ancient inscriptions or dig through archives. We have to take someone's word for it, which means whoever tells the story holds almost all the cards.

### The stories we tell ourselves

Our sense of identity is tied to the stories we tell ourselves, and those stories are usually comforting ones. They come in two flavours: "we were great" and "we were wronged." Rarely are we brave enough to tell the discomforting ones. But it's exactly this need for comfort that gets weaponised, and gets us to do the very things that end up as history's cautionary tales. As important as these stories are to our sense of place and belonging, refusing to grapple with the events that violate them is the ultimate act of intellectual dishonesty.

So, as unfashionable and as psychologically painful as it might be, dig into the stories you've been sold and the stories you bought into. Look underneath the visions your leader or your group has handed you. You'll be shocked at how many things don't stand up to scrutiny. And you'll realise that we're all sheep in one giant flock, following a shepherd who's getting us to do his or her bidding in the quest for power and wealth.

And I should add, I'm part of the same flock. I'm not writing this from some place of superiority, looking down on anyone. I'm writing this as someone who's realised how important it is to question every single bloody thing peddled by the people in power, the people to whom we outsource the job of giving us a good life.

I'll give you my own example. I grew up imbibing the same prejudices about religion and caste as many other Indians. It took me a very, very long time to see the folly of it, and I had to unlearn a lot of conscious and unconscious prejudice I'd soaked up growing up amongst my people. It's not a comfortable story to tell about yourself. But stepping aside and questioning things gave me a far more nuanced view of reality than I'd ever have arrived at otherwise. Questioning isn't just a way of seeing the world outside. It's a way of knowing yourself from within. Turns out Žižek was wrong, or at least half wrong. Look inside honestly enough, and you'll find history in there too.

And questioning doesn't mean cynicism or perpetual doubt. It means an honest exploration of the context and nuance that permeate everything that happens in the world. Context is everything. And context is just another word for history.

### No one survives history's judgement

Coincidentally, I've also been reading Ramachandra Guha's magisterial *India After Gandhi*, and one of the things it's changed for me is how I think about Jawaharlal Nehru. Like most Indians, my understanding of Nehru was limited to the flimsy nonsense in our social science textbooks and the caricature of the socialist who kneecapped India's economic rise. After reading Guha, I realised how foolish that understanding was. I was historically blind. I didn't have the facts to understand the man.

That doesn't mean the criticism is wrong. His enchantment with socialist planning probably did hold India's economy back. The writer Gurcharan Das [tells a story](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=DEM00CG7EeY) from the mid-1970s, when he was working for the company that made Vicks VapoRub. A flu epidemic sent sales through the roof, past the production limit in the company's licence, and a summons arrived from Delhi. At the hearing, a joint secretary treated him like a criminal and pronounced him guilty, even though his product had been easing the misery of millions during an epidemic. On his way out, Das asked the official to imagine how India would look when *The New York Times* reported that it punished a company for exactly that. The government quietly dropped the inquiry. But the lesson stuck. As Das puts it, "Nehru's License Raj has snatched economic freedom." He gave up on socialism that day.

But Nehru also had an unenviable job. He had to hold together a country that plenty of clever people were sure couldn't be held together. As Guha shows, the doubters go back a long way. Speaking at Cambridge in the 1880s, the senior Raj official Sir John Strachey told his audience that the first and most essential thing to learn about India was that "there is not, and never was an India." After independence, the prophets of doom just changed accents. In his 1960 book *India: The Most Dangerous Decades*, the American political scientist Selig Harrison concluded that Indian nationalism would most likely survive only through a series of authoritarian regimes. And in early 1967, ahead of the first elections after Nehru's death, the *Times* of London ran a series by its Delhi correspondent, Neville Maxwell, called "India's Disintegrating Democracy." He called them the fourth, and "surely last," general election.

They had their reasons. This was a country deeply divided along ethnic, linguistic, religious and caste lines. A country healing from the scars of colonial subjugation, but also still living under the darkness of caste and religion, and that hadn't yet grappled with the horrors of its own history. Holding that together was no small thing.

So I still judge Nehru. I just do it with context now instead of a textbook caricature. Understand first, then judge. (And yes, I'm aware Guha is broadly sympathetic to Nehru, so I may well be swapping one framing for another. That's the trap.)

The same goes for the Father of the Nation. As Guha recounts in *Gandhi Before India*, the young Gandhi in South Africa held deeply racist views, and you don't have to take anyone's word for it. It's there in his own letters. In 1893, writing to the Natal parliament, he complained of a belief in the colony that Indians were "a little better, if at all, than savages or the Natives of Africa." In 1904, he asked a Johannesburg health officer to move Africans out of a slum where they lived alongside Indians:

> About the mixing of the Kaffirs with the Indians, I must confess I feel most strongly.

That same year he wrote that the Indian, unlike the African, had no "war-dances, nor does he drink Kaffir beer." And during the 1905 plague in Durban, he objected to Indians and Africans being "herded together indiscriminately at the hospital." ([BBC](https://www.bbc.com/news/world-asia-india-34265882))

He believed in a racial hierarchy, one in which Indians, as fellow Aryans, deserved to be treated on par with Europeans while Africans were lesser. Guha's view, which he lays out in his latest book, *Arguments with Gandhi* (he talks it through in [this podcast](https://scroll.in/article/1096714/podcast-from-race-to-caste-and-gender-ramachandra-guha-on-arguments-with-gandhi)), is that Gandhi outgrew these prejudices. By the 1930s and 40s he had embraced antiracist principles and was scolding fellow Indians for disparaging Africans. On caste, Guha points out that Gandhi was almost alone among Congress leaders in fighting untouchability, and was viciously attacked by orthodox Hindus for it. But even that is contested. Ashwin Desai and Goolam Vahed argue in *The South African Gandhi* that his racism ran deeper and lasted longer. And Ambedkar would flatly reject the idea that Gandhi fought caste, given how long Gandhi defended the varna system. Even the story of Gandhi's growth is contested history. As Guha himself concludes, "the arguments shall continue."

Which is my point. No one, king or commoner, survives the judgement of history unscathed. We are deeply human, and so were the people who shaped our history. History shows us there are no pure heroes and villains. Most of us are both Jekyll and Hyde.

### The Aryan question

Gandhi's "Aryan" kinship claims lead straight into one of the biggest fights over Indian history today.

Hindu nationalists have staked a claim on India's past by rejecting the "Aryan invasion theory" and insisting that Indians were always here: the immaculate people of the soil, pure and virtuous, the rightful inheritors of this land. But here's the thing. Most historians reject the invasion theory too. The 19th-century picture of a conquering race sweeping into India is largely dead. What most scholars hold now is a migration theory: speakers of Indo-European languages moved into the subcontinent gradually, over centuries, and mixed with the people already here.

Genetics has only made this more interesting. A 2019 study of a roughly 4,500-year-old skeleton from Rakhigarhi, a Harappan site in Haryana, found no steppe ancestry. But Indians today do carry steppe ancestry in varying amounts, which suggests the mixing came after the Indus Valley Civilisation. And here's the delicious bit: the same study was read in completely opposite ways. Some hailed it as the final nail in the coffin of any Aryan migration; others read it as evidence that the migration simply happened later. One skeleton, two stories, each side mining it for what it wanted.

As Romila Thapar explains in *Early India*, "Aryan" was originally a linguistic and cultural label, not a racial one. In the ancient texts, she notes, it refers to "persons of status who speak Sanskrit and observe caste regulations." So not a race, but not exactly innocent either: it was a marker of status and caste. The man most associated with popularising the word in the West was Max Müller, a scholar who never set foot in India yet wrote volume after volume on its Sanskritised past. To be fair to him, he later insisted the word was linguistic and mocked the idea of an "Aryan race." But by then 19th-century Europe had already turned it into a race, and we know where that ended.

Hitler sold Germans exactly the kind of story I've been describing: a glorious, pure Aryan past waiting to be reclaimed. The conservative elites who helped him into power thought they could control him. What followed was a period of unimaginable brutality, and the starkest reminder of the price we pay for the abuse of history.

Back home, the colonial scholar who did the most damage to how we understand our own past was probably James Mill. His *History of British India* (1817) was hugely influential, and like Müller, he never visited India. In fact he had the gall to argue that this made him more objective.

Mill gave us the neat periodisation that still haunts us: a Hindu period, a Muslim period, a British period. In his telling, India was a stagnant land ruled by despots, an idea that ran from Montesquieu through to Marx and is known as Oriental despotism. Which brings me to a rich irony. Today's nationalists reject the Aryan migration as a colonial invention, but happily embrace Mill's Hindu-Muslim-British periodisation, which is every bit as colonial: a glorious Hindu past, a dark Muslim age. They throw out one colonial story and keep the other, because it suits them. The same history Indians once rebelled against is now being peddled back to us.

And it isn't one side's game. The racial reading of "Aryan" cut both ways. As Thapar points out, it appealed to some scholars of Dravidian languages, who proposed a distinct Dravidian race that came before the Aryans, pointing to how differently the two language families build their words. Echoes of that idea are still around. Look at Keeladi in Tamil Nadu, the Sangam-era urban site near Madurai. Its excavator, Amarnath Ramakrishna, dates its earliest activity to around the 8th century BCE. The Archaeological Survey of India has asked him to revise his report and suggested the earliest dates are no older than roughly 300 BCE. He refused. Tamil Nadu's ruling party accuses the Centre of suppressing Tamil antiquity; the ASI says it's just following due process. I genuinely don't know who's right. But I do notice that both sides already know which answer they want.

What all of these claims forget is that there are no immaculate people anywhere. As much as we are children of our parents, we are children of history. We've always been shaped and reshaped by its tides, by trade, by war, by conquest, by our interactions with people within and beyond our shores. What we think of as ours very rarely is. The language we speak, the food we eat, the songs we sing, the stories we tell: all of it is inherited from centuries of influences from all over the world.

### What history can and can't do

Which brings me back to Margaret Macmillan, and the point I really wanted to make. History can't give us answers. It can't tell us what will happen. What it can do is show us the patterns of the past. As she put it in [the lecture](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HKhxfpOFFL0&t=1555s) that started all this:

> History, therefore, I think is hugely important in understanding. It’s also, I think, very important in helping us to formulate questions about the present. As we look at what’s happening, we can use history to help us at least formulate the questions. I don’t believe that history is going to give us very clear answers. I think if you want very clear answers about what the future is going to be, you are much better off going to an astrologer. History is not going to give us a blueprint for the future, but it will give us warning signs. I think that history can be, in a very simple way, like the sort of signs you see on a road which warn you that there’s a bad corner coming up ahead, or there’s a narrow bridge, or that the road gets very icy in the winter and you probably need a particular kind of snow tire if you’re going to drive on that road. And I think that’s what history can do: it can help us at least to formulate the sorts of questions we may want to know, because what history does, among other things, is offer alternatives.
>
> It reminds us that there were other ways of organizing societies, other ways of seeing the world, other ways of doing things. There’s a tendency always in the present to assume that what we’re doing is the right thing, that we have somehow got human wisdom at our fingertips, that we know better than anyone in the past. I think what history does is remind us that what we think of as perfectly normal was not thought of as normal in other pasts, in other societies. It doesn’t mean that we want to emulate them, because they are after all in a very different world. The past, as an English writer said, is a different country, and I think we have to remember that.
>
> Opening up our imaginations to possibilities—to the possibility, among other things, that we’re not always going to be right, that we don’t always know everything—I think is very important. Among other things, such opening up can teach us a sort of humility, and I think a humility as we approach the very complexities of human affairs is in fact a good thing. What the past teaches us, among other things, is that there were plenty of people in the past who were very clever, very powerful, had all sorts of information at their fingertips, and they got it very, very wrong.

That last point, about alternatives, matters. History doesn't only warn us; it can show us what's possible. Think of the patronage that nurtured the Da Vincis and the Michelangelos, or the poets and scholars of India's royal courts. That's not a recipe, and the patrons had their own motives, but it's proof that the right conditions can bring out the best in us.

But perhaps the most important thing history does, and Macmillan says this beautifully, is teach us to ask better questions. If it does nothing more than teach us humility, skepticism and awareness of ourselves, she writes, it has done something useful. Her book on 1914 makes the point brutally. The men who steered Europe into the First World War "were not fools," she says. They were clever and experienced, and they were completely wrong, because their assumptions were so deeply ingrained they couldn't see them. That's why you read history. Not to find comforting stories or conclusions. That's the bastardised version of history, told by people who've never outgrown their own prejudices.

And in saying all this, I don't mean that history is some rarefied truth handed down from the heavens by objective historians who've transcended the rest of us flawed humans. It isn't. Maybe it's a quirk of how we perceive things, but we often feel that history bends inevitably towards progress, that it runs on laws, as Marx believed. It doesn't. The future is unknowable. All of us, humanity as a whole, are always standing at the edge of the map, staring into a darkness pregnant with a million branching possibilities, all of them gestating, none of them certain.

Historians aren't innocent bystanders either. Some of history's worst atrocities were abetted by historians who told twisted, imagined versions of the past. Historians are creatures of their time, and they can only know what can be known in that time. When I say history shows us the shape of our ignorance, that goes for historians too. The good ones aren't the ones who are sure about everything. They know what is known and, more importantly, what isn't. To borrow Donald Rumsfeld's phrase, they respect the unknown unknowns, and they know that what they've found is only a small glimpse of a much richer past.

So the way to engage with history isn't to read one take or one interpretation. It's to read the dizzying variety of versions out there, make up our own minds by leaning on the best evidence available at the time, and change them when better evidence comes along. We won't get everything right. That isn't possible. But we'll end up a little less ignorant.

History, in other words, is never settled. It's always being questioned and contested, and in that crucible you find the confusing, paradoxical facts that force you to resist easy conclusions and easy judgements. And you realise that what we know of history is a handful of recorded facts, mostly told by elites and the privileged, ignoring the perspectives of the marginalised.

That realisation hit me reading a [review in *Frontline*](https://frontline.thehindu.com/books/kancha-ilaiah-shepherd-a-shudra-life-caste-review/article71596810.ece) of *A Shudra Life* by the scholar Kancha Ilaiah Shepherd. Turning Gandhi's language on its head, Ilaiah argues that what the dominant nation state calls "truth" is really a series of calculated "untruths." From the standpoint of the people he calls the Dalit-Bahujan, the religious texts, chronicles and nationalist myths we grew up on erase the history of the people who actually produced things and did the labour. And telling that other history comes at a price. As the review notes, he's been celebrated abroad as a pioneering political theorist, while at home he's been shut out of elite academic circles and hit with lawsuits, surveillance and death threats.

Remember the blood I mentioned at the start, the blood that's darker for some people than for others? Most of it was never written down. And those who try to write it down are made to pay for it.

History isn't meant to give us answers. That's the role of fairy tales. What history is meant to do is help us ask better questions, often ones that don't have answers yet. It leads us into doubt and uncertainty, and that's where it earns its keep. Not because we're meant to live there, but because we have to pass through it. As Schwitzgebel argues, creating doubt where there was none can itself be progress, as long as that doubt honestly reflects what we don't know. It shows us that there aren't always answers, and that even when there are, they're rarely black and white. And, going back to where I started, it shows us the shape of our own ignorance: how messy and incomplete our knowledge is, and always will be.

We are as much the children of history as we are of our parents. We're the offspring of the holy and unholy union of the histories of our families, communities, regions, nations and humanity as a whole. We are, in a very real sense, marinated in history. The least we can do is have the courage to look at it honestly.

I could keep going on and on, but in the interest of preserving your sanity, I'll stop here.

## Salvaged Items (12)

### From Linux to Wikipedia: How Volunteers Build the Internet — Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold and Aaron Shaw

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/from-linux-to-wikipedia-how-volunteers-build-the-internet
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Benjamin Mako Hill, Christian Pentzold and Aaron Shaw
- **Original Source**: [The MIT Press Reader](https://thereader.mitpress.mit.edu/wp-content/uploads/mit_audio/21185-male.mp3) (5 November 2026) · 9 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

A nice piece on the success of decentralized projects like Linux and Wikipedia. If you step back and think about the sheer absurdity of their success, you may experience a moderate brain aneurysm.

Linux started as a side project, a passion project, by Linus Torvalds. When he announced it in 1991, he described it as:

> just a hobby [that] won’t be big and professional

Soon thousands of developers across the world were working with him towards one shared goal, some writing small bits of code, some writing a lot. Today it’s no exaggeration to say Linux pretty much underpins the modern internet. And the weird part? It’s free. As Hill, Pentzold and Shaw put it, Linux took every rule of proprietary software development and “threw it out the window.”

I don’t know if Linux invented this decentralized, collaborative way of building software, but I think it pioneered it, and anyone who uses the internet owes Linus Torvalds and those thousands of contributors a thank-you. Just to drive home how important Linux is: I dictated this note on an Android phone, which runs on Linux, and published it from my laptop, which runs Omarchy, a Linux distro.

The same goes for Wikipedia. For all its flaws, it has to be one of the most important online resources ever. Period. The collective knowledge of humanity, free, thanks to the tireless work of millions of contributors around the world, in hundreds of languages. It’s a testament to collaborative knowledge creation. Yes, like everything on the internet, Wikipedia has its warts. But I’d rather live in a world where Wikipedia exists, free and open, than one where it doesn’t.

That said, I do wonder what happens to this collaborative way of making things now. Large language models have snorted pretty much all the knowledge on the internet, like a coke addict snorting a line. If they keep snorting everything we put online, what’s the incentive for people to keep creating and sharing knowledge openly?

I keep asking my developer friends a version of the same question about open source. The one thing LLMs are genuinely good at is writing code, so will people keep building software and sharing it freely? The answers I get are bleak. I’m not a programmer, so I don’t have a good sense of what LLMs will do to open source, but I’d presume nothing good. Consider the evidence: you’re reading this on a website vibe coded by a man who doesn’t know the difference between JavaScript and Everest Garam Masala, or between programming and Godrej hair dye. That man, me, told this magical thing called Claude to build and design the site, then to take his voice notes, clean them up and publish them, and it just does it. If most people can build their own software, what’s the need for open source?

I understand the stupidity of me saying that. Not everything can be vibe coded, and not everything should be. Foundational projects like Linux still have to be built and maintained, and LLMs can’t do that, at least not yet. And here’s the irony I keep tripping over: the code for this vibe-coded site is out in the open on GitHub, and everything I write here is free to share and adapt under a Creative Commons licence. That goes for all my passion projects, the ones I spend money on and make nothing from: [akshara.ink](https://akshara.ink), [paperlanterns.ink](https://paperlanterns.ink), [thisindianlife.today](https://thisindianlife.today), [measure.thisindianlife.today](https://measure.thisindianlife.today), [lifeinindia.org](https://lifeinindia.org), pretty much everything. I think copyright as a concept is dead; the way we think about creative work just hasn’t caught up. I also know the biggest readers of my work will be LLMs, not humans, and that LLMs will be the conduit through which most people find it. I’ve made my peace with that. In that sense, this is me putting things back into the common pool, in the hope that it helps create new knowledge someday. The machine that built this site learned to code from open-source software, and it helped me put something back. Does that mean open source survives in some new form, or is a vibe-coded blog no substitute for the people who keep Linux running? I don’t know.

The same logic applies to knowledge. Before LLMs, when you posted something online, it was mostly read by other humans. Now the internet has turned a little grotesque. It’s full of spam and bots, and more often than not, the first thing to reply to your post is a bot. In a very real sense, you’re creating knowledge for machines. And whatever you post, LLMs will hoover it up, with or without your permission. This isn’t hypothetical, either. As the authors point out, Reddit locked down its data in 2023 after AI companies started scraping it in bulk, and some of its most devoted volunteers revolted. The backlash has only grown since. Reddit already blocks every major search engine except Google, which pays for the privilege. Now, in late October, it [announced](https://techcrunch.com/2026/10/29/as-search-traffic-dries-up-reddit-announces-its-shifting-to-a-logged-in-experience/) it’s going behind a login wall, partly to keep the bots out. Even its CEO admitted it’s a big change for someone whose life was shaped by the open internet. And now that agents like Instinct and Meta’s Muse run people’s errands for them, websites are shutting them out too. Amazon, most notably, has [blocked Muse](https://www.geekwire.com/2026/amazon-blocks-metas-muse-ai-assistant-in-new-standoff-over-agentic-shopping/) and moved against agents from Perplexity, Google and OpenAI. To borrow from William F. Buckley Jr., all of this is like standing athwart history, yelling “Stop!” These are momentary reactions, and they’ll give way, because the future is already here. Our heads just haven’t caught up with the new reality.

Then there’s the fact that a lot of people are sick and tired of the internet in its current configuration, where the open spaces are dominated by a handful of big tech companies. Twitter, YouTube, LinkedIn, Facebook, Instagram and WhatsApp, the places where most people share things, are riddled with algorithmic distortions, spam and rage bait. From what I can tell, people are retreating into the dark corners of the internet: small groups and communities built around shared interests, where little leaks out into the open web.

So what does this mean for the future of open knowledge? If LLMs keep snorting everything we produce without asking, and people keep retreating behind closed doors, why would anyone keep creating and sharing openly? I don’t know. Interesting times.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> With time, Torvalds’ kernel attracted other developers who worked with him to turn the hobby project into an established piece of software that the group called “Linux.” This team combined their new kernel with another Internet-based collaborative project, GNU, whose goal was to create a replacement for the UNIX operating system but which had not yet produced a usable kernel. The result was the GNU/Linux operating system.
> 
> More than 30 years later, GNU/Linux (or just “Linux,” as most people call it) runs on billions of computers worldwide and has become one of the most important pieces of software in history. Nearly all supercomputers, a large majority of Internet servers, a majority of smartphones, and a growing number of “embedded systems” in devices like televisions run some version of Linux. In all of these markets, Linux did not simply fill an empty niche. Rather, it displaced many proprietary server operating systems from major manufacturers at the time, including Sun Microsystems, HP, and IBM.
> 
> Linux’s success upended the prevailing wisdom about how to build software. In the 1980s and 1990s, most world-class software was written by large, hierarchically managed teams of developers within immense, multinational corporations such as AT&T and Microsoft. Software developers worked full time for these companies and were well paid. The companies retained vast legal teams who used restrictive copyright licenses, proprietary patents, and technological measures to ensure that none of the code their developers wrote could ever be used — or, in most cases, even seen — by anyone outside the firm.

### In Praise of the Dilettante — Jay Miller

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/in-praise-of-the-dilettante
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Jay Miller
- **Original Source**: [Aeon](https://aeon.co/essays/why-the-dilettante-is-the-anti-hero-of-our-over-optimised-age) (30 October 2026) · 14 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

I love the word dilettante. I think I fell in love with it as soon as I discovered it, because I consider myself a textbook case. Not the textbook definition, mind you, which is almost entirely negative. Merriam-Webster defines a dilettante as “a person having a superficial interest in an art or a branch of knowledge.” Cambridge and Collins are no kinder: someone whose understanding is shallow, who seems interested in a subject but doesn’t really know much about it.

The moment I read those definitions, I wanted to reclaim the word, because it captured an approach to intellectual life I’ve had for a long time. Jay Miller’s brilliant essay in *Aeon* reminded me of that. As luck would have it, I wrote a post a while back with almost the same title, [“In Praise of Dilettantism.”](https://bhuvan.substack.com/p/in-praise-of-dilettantism) The point I was trying to make was that there’s nothing wrong with being a dilettante, and nothing wrong with being a specialist. But unless you fuck around and find out, you’ll never really know what grabs you and speaks to you. Before you can go deep, you have to go wide. And there’s nothing inherently wrong with being a butterfly or a honeybee, constantly flitting from one interest to another.

As Miller points out, the word only became an insult relatively recently. The cult of achievement behind it, this need to be seen finishing things and sticking with them, is, for me at least, suffocating. I feel happy, joyous and, more importantly, whole precisely because I’m a dilettante and not someone who can stick with one thing for very long. I have a buffet of interests that speak to me at different points in time, and I chase each feeling to its fullest. In the process, I have an insane amount of fun doing things I otherwise never would.

Reading Miller’s essay, I wasn’t just nodding along. I was nodding so vigorously that if I were a plastic doll, my head would have come off. What I love most is how he reclaims the word. He doesn’t defend the dilettante as someone who goes wide and shallow. His dilettante is not a dabbler: they go deep, like anyone else, but never let any one interest become their identity. That ability to stay unattached, to move from one passion to the next without fretting about it, is what makes being a dilettante worth it. Or, as he puts it:

> For the dilettante, every night is karaoke night.

Strip away the pejorative baggage, and being a dilettante gives you permission to be, well, a honeybee: to go from flower to flower, tasting the nectar of many kinds, and to live a fuller life for it. In a society that reifies specialization and completion, where people think you’re serious only if you stick with something for years, the alternative feels like a prison to me.

But, as Miller also says, being a dilettante can be a lonely journey. You’re chasing the things that speak to you, without worrying about finishing them or earning invisible badges of approval from your bosses, parents, friends or society at large.

Perhaps the idea from Miller’s essay that I’ve most deeply absorbed into my own life is dilettantism as open-ended exploration, done for the delight of it, with no end or objective in mind. I first came across that philosophy in “Growth Without Goals,” a 2016 essay by Patrick O’Shaughnessy, who, among other things, hosts the amazing podcast *Invest Like the Best*. I was floored the first time I read it. I think it’s since been taken down from his old blog, but you’ll probably find it on the Internet Archive.

Ever since, I’ve tried to consciously live by that maxim: growth without goals, or dilettantism in its purest, most positive sense, not the pejorative one. So far, I’m having fun. Should everybody be a dilettante? I don’t know. People should figure shit out for themselves. But I am one, and I love being one. We live in a world where everything is seen through a utilitarian, instrumentalist, mechanistic lens. To be able to escape that oppressive yoke and experience the freedom of being a dilettante? What more can you ask for?

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> In 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.

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Mendelssohn plays to Goethe, 1830. Moritz Daniel Oppenheim, 1864.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/in-praise-of-the-dilettante.jpg

### The Likelihood of Persistently Low Global Fertility — Michael Geruso and Dean Spears

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/the-likelihood-of-persistently-low-global-fertility
- **Type**: Paper (Offprint)
- **Creator**: Michael Geruso and Dean Spears
- **Original Source**: [Journal of Economic Perspectives 40 (1)](https://aeaweb.org/articles?id=10.1257/jep.20251463) (Winter 2026) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

An interesting paper by Michael Geruso and Dean Spears on falling fertility rates around the world. According to their data, 67% of the world’s population now lives in a country where fertility is below replacement.

First, a quick primer on what that means. Replacement fertility is the average number of children each woman needs to have for each generation to replace the one before it. It’s usually pegged at 2.1, though the exact number varies with mortality. If fertility holds at replacement, each generation is roughly the same size as the last. Below it, each generation is smaller than the one before. Today, most of the world outside sub-Saharan Africa has fallen below that line. In places like Japan and South Korea, the fall is dramatic. South Korea is at about 0.7, which has led to all sorts of apocalyptic proclamations about the future of the world.

In this paper, the authors dig into a weird statistical quirk of the most common measure, the total fertility rate, or TFR: what demographers call the tempo effect. The TFR is a snapshot. It takes the birth rate for women in each age group in a single year and adds them up. What it doesn’t measure is how many children women actually have over their lifetimes. So if women start having their first baby at 30 instead of 25, the TFR dips during the years that shift happens, even if each woman ends up with exactly the same number of kids.

To get around this, the authors use a different measure: completed cohort fertility, or CCF. It counts the average number of children actually born to women born in a given year, over their whole lives. Timing doesn’t fool it.

They also ask why fertility is falling, and tackle one popular explanation head-on: the supposed rise of the child-free. Using a decomposition analysis, they split the decline into two parts: more people having no kids at all, and parents having fewer kids. In 19 rich countries, comparing women born around 1956 with women born around 1976, more childlessness accounts for only 37% of the decline. The other 63% comes from parents choosing smaller families. In India, the picture is even starker. Comparing high- and low-fertility districts, childlessness explains just 6% of the gap; smaller families explain 94%. And yes, India as a whole is now below replacement, though, like any country, with vast regional variation.

Then there’s the question everyone wants answered: do birth rates bounce back on their own? The authors went through the Human Fertility Database and found 24 countries where cohort fertility fell below 1.9. Not one has seen a later generation climb back to replacement. There have been spikes, the Baby Boom being the famous one, but they were blips around a long-term decline. In countries with records going back to the 1800s, like France and Sweden, fertility has been falling for two centuries.

What about pronatalist policies? By 2015, 55 governments had explicit goals to raise birth rates, with baby bonuses, subsidized childcare, paid parental leave and the like. None has brought fertility back to replacement. Where studies find an effect, it tends to be small. Part of the problem is how these policies get evaluated. Most studies use methods like difference-in-differences that capture short-term changes in births in a given year. But a lot of the time, the policy just gets people to have kids earlier. If a woman who would have had a baby at 30 has it at 28 instead, births that year go up, but the total number of children she has stays the same. The policy is borrowing births from the future. Romania is the brutal example: when it banned abortion in 1966, the birth rate nearly doubled the next year, but lifetime fertility barely budged.

The authors’ bottom line is that a few thousand dollars in incentives can’t compete with life-defining decisions about what kind of family to build. Turning this around would take a profound structural, economic and cultural change in how societies treat parenting, a radical reorganization on a scale nobody has tried. Without it, sustained global depopulation is the most likely future. As they put it:

> Our times … would be a historical anomaly that will come to an end.

Chilling, but there it is.

All in all, an interesting paper, worth your time. If you hate reading economics papers, this one is light on math. It’s free to download from the American Economic Association, and you can feed it to an LLM and argue with it, as I did. After reading it, of course.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (p. 5, matched word for word)

> Fertility rates have fallen below two in many countries. A second trace in Figure 2 shows that in 1950, almost nobody lived in a country with a fertility rate below two. In 1975, about 15 percent of people did. By 2000, 40 percent of people did. And in the most recent estimates (for 2023), 67 percent of people in the world lived in a country with a fertility rate below two. Each of the three most populous countries—India, China, and the United States—is now below this threshold. The threshold of two is important because it means that fertility is below the “replacement level.” Below-replacement fertility at a national level does not necessarily imply a shrinking national population: National populations can grow, despite below-replacement fertility, due to migration. Even absent positive net migration, population sizes can continue increasing for a short period after birth rates fall below the two-for-two replacement rate because of improvements in mortality or because of the echoes of large cohorts from past decades. But over the long-term, populations with below-replacement fertility would shrink absent net in-migration.

### Revenge of the Dilettantes — Venkatesh Rao

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/revenge-of-the-dilettantes
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Venkatesh Rao
- **Original Source**: [Contraptions](https://contraptions.venkateshrao.com/p/revenge-of-the-dilettantes) (20 December 2025) · 19 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

While writing about Miller’s essay, I wanted to add a note on what AI means for a dilettante life. I’d saved a few highlights to Readwise that I wanted to quote, and while searching for them, I stumbled on this brilliant post by Venkatesh Rao, whom I’ve been a fan of for a very long time. It pretty much sums up what I’m about to say. But let me say it anyway.

I’ve always wanted to do a whole variety of things, but my imagination kept straining against the limits of what I could actually do. A lot of my ideas had code-shaped expressions, and I never learned to code, apart from a few brief bursts of commitment that lasted a day or two. So those ideas remained just that: ideas in my head. Much like Rao says, writing became the only accessible way to express what I wanted to, which is why I started so many writing projects, including this one.

Now those limitations are no longer limitations. If anything, they’ve become expressive, generative freedoms, because you have a magical genie. Rao calls it a jinn. A magic lamp you rub, or a wand you wave, and the thing you want comes to life. At no point in human history was this ever true. As long as your idea has a software-shaped expression (and increasingly, even that isn’t required), you can tell the genie, and it will deliver. The binding constraint is no longer how good the tools are. It’s your imagination. For the most part, if you can imagine it, it can be done.

These things have gotten so good it’s ridiculous. I used to add a caveat whenever I talked about AI coding tools: that I was measuring their awesomeness against my normie baseline. I don’t think that qualifier is needed anymore. They’re awesome whether you’re an expert, a normie or a dilettante, and especially if you’re a dilettante. What once felt magical has quickly become commonplace, because that’s who we are; we get used to things. But the ambitious, complex, nightmarishly hard things you can now accomplish are nuts.

I’ve fully embraced my dilettante worldview, to the point where I think I have a full-blown case of AI delirium. There are simple projects like [thisindianlife.today](https://thisindianlife.today), [measure.thisindianlife.today](https://measure.thisindianlife.today), [tipsheet.market](https://tipsheet.market) and this very site, all vibe coded. And then there are [akshara.ink](https://akshara.ink) and [paperlanterns.ink](https://paperlanterns.ink), where I’m digitizing books and historical letter collections, the kind of reasonably complex work that was out of reach for dilettantes for a very long time. I’m cranking out everything I ever wanted to make, and I’m having more fun than ever.

AI is an unlock for dilettantes. In fact, it’s speed and ecstasy for dilettantes. It amplifies their instincts and lets them express those instincts more creatively. It gives them more degrees of freedom. And it shrinks the time it takes to dive into a new field, because so much of the grunt work and manual effort is gone. Now you just summon your genie to commit acts of sorcery and witchcraft on your behalf. Or, as Rao puts it:

> a man’s reach should exceed his grasp, else what’s vibecoding for?

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Full-Stack Dilettante Futures, matched word for word)

> Before 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.

### Fighting for Growth: Labor Scarcity and Technological Progress During the British Industrial Revolution — Bruno Caprettini, Alex Trew and Hans-Joachim Voth

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/fighting-for-growth
- **Type**: Paper (Offprint)
- **Creator**: Bruno Caprettini, Alex Trew and Hans-Joachim Voth
- **Original Source**: [American Economic Review 116 (10)](https://jvoth.com/Fighting_for_Growth_AER.pdf) (October 2026) · 86 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Why did the Industrial Revolution begin in Britain? The question feels all the more relevant now that we’re staring at another technological revolution, artificial intelligence, that might dwarf it.

I was reading this really clever paper by Bruno Caprettini, Alex Trew and Hans-Joachim Voth. They start by laying out the two competing explanations. The economic historian Robert Allen argued that on the eve of the Industrial Revolution, Britain had high wages and cheap energy in the form of abundant coal, which made it uniquely profitable to adopt labor-saving technology. The Nobel laureate Joel Mokyr argued that it wasn’t just wages: Britain had an unusual concentration of skilled mechanics, craftsmen and tinkerers who could design and build practical machines.

So who’s right, Allen or Mokyr? According to the authors, both. And the way they test it is really clever. To see whether labor shortages drove the adoption of machines, they exploit a natural experiment. Between 1793 and 1815, Britain was at war with France. At the peak of mobilization, around 1813, the army and navy had about 350,000 men under arms, roughly 10 to 14% of the adult male labor force. Recruitment was uneven across the country, and in places that saw heavy enlistment, the population skewed noticeably towards women.

People noticed at the time. In 1812, an official survey of agriculture in Dorset observed:

> A considerable number of thrashing [sic] machines have been erected in this county … the principal inducement for using them is a scarcity of labourers, which, in a state of warfare, may be expected to be felt most in maritime districts.

To make sure they were capturing genuine labor shortages, not something else about those places, the authors looked at where the navy did its recruiting. Much of it was done by press gangs sent ashore from warships, so it mattered how close the big ships could get. Coastal places near deep anchorages, where large warships could anchor close to shore, saw heavy recruitment. Places where the waters were shallower saw much less.

Why did anchorages matter? Because much of the navy’s recruitment was involuntary. Press gangs, often sent ashore by individual ships’ captains, forced men into service in the Royal Navy, frequently against their will. Only about 14% of the sailors in the authors’ sample were recorded as volunteers.

The authors use this labor shock to see what happened next, and they do a lot of clever legwork. To measure recruitment, they hand-collected Royal Navy muster rolls, the personnel records of individual ships, and digitized where each recruit came from. To measure mechanization, they combed through 60 regional newspapers for ads selling or leasing farms, which listed the machines on them, nearly 5,000 machines in all. Then, among coastal places, they compared those close to deep-water anchorages with those farther away.

The difference was marked. Places that saw heavy recruitment adopted labor-saving machines much faster, above all threshing machines. Threshing was brutally labor-intensive, and one 1832 account describes a machine doing in two months what used to take men ten. Machines that didn’t save labor, like turnip cutters, showed no such link with recruitment.

The other interesting finding: in places that also had lots of skilled craftsmen, like blacksmiths, millwrights and watchmakers, machines not only spread faster but improved faster too. And when the men came home from war, the machines stayed.

And here’s the funny, delicious irony: this is a paper about labor-saving technology, and the authors used a labor-saving technology to write it. They had OpenAI’s models read through thousands of old newspaper ads for farm sales, which is how they tracked the spread of machines, labor-saving and otherwise.

I think we’re about to see many more clever papers like this. LLMs have gotten very good at extracting information from messy, unstructured sources, and at analyzing data. All sorts of weird datasets that would have been impossible to build before LLMs are now within reach. Hopefully that gives us a much better understanding of the past.

The paper also has relevance for the AI era, where I think we have the opposite problem. We’re mostly at peace, and there are few labor shortages. The exceptions are places like Russia and Ukraine, where casualties run into the hundreds of thousands. That’s part of why both sides are leaning so heavily on drones, which have become cheap to produce in Ukraine, a country with far fewer men to throw into the war than Russia. But for most of the world, labor is abundant, and if AI makes it more abundant still by putting people out of work, I’m not sure what happens.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (p. 7, matched word for word)

> Q. Do your farmers employ fewer hands than they did before those machines were introduced?
> 
> A. Considerably. […]
> 
> Q. How soon after their introduction did they begin to employ fewer hands?
> 
> A. Directly they began working them; instantly.
> 
> Q. How many months will a threshing machine take to thresh out the produce of a farm which before took the men ten months?
> 
> A. They will thresh it out in two months.

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: The Dutch and British fleets meet as the Dutch flotilla sails for Boulogne, 1804. Martinus Schouman, 1806.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/fighting-for-growth.jpg

### Robert Caro on the Dwarkesh Podcast — Dwarkesh Patel and Robert Caro

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/robert-caro-on-the-dwarkesh-podcast
- **Type**: Podcast (Transcript)
- **Creator**: Dwarkesh Patel and Robert Caro
- **Original Source**: [Dwarkesh Podcast](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=f0J_EeW42Lo) () · 61 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Whenever an author or book comes up, the one thing I can always say is, “Oh, that’s on my reading list.” The same goes for Robert Caro, whose books on Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson are legendary, bestsellers despite their enormous girth.

Caro is perhaps best known for his insanely meticulous research. He’s the exact antithesis of a tourist historian: he works like an archaeologist, constantly digging for something new. As someone who has yet to read his work and has only read a little about him, what draws me to Caro is his dogged persistence and his obsessive engagement with what he thinks is worth doing, in this case the lives of Robert Moses and Lyndon Johnson. Even in an hour-long conversation, that meticulousness shows.

What spoke to me most was his take on solitude. Work like his, where you don’t know where it ends or even what shape it will take, demands almost inhuman focus and persistence. Both show up in the fact that he wrote these books at all.

The other thing that stood out was Dwarkesh’s questions; Caro keeps telling him they’re excellent ones. I’ve long been a fan of Dwarkesh, of his intellectually honest exploration of topics and the way he prepares before engaging with experts. It’s brilliant, and it’s something I personally aspire to.

If one line stands out, it’s a maxim Lyndon Johnson lived by:

> If you do everything, you’ll win.

The same drive shows up in how Caro describes Robert Moses, who started out as a young idealist and became a complex figure, determined to build things and get them done one way or another. That hunger to get what they want, to build and to do, is the common thread between Moses and Johnson.

As someone who has yet to read his books, just listening to Caro talk about them sends a chill down your spine. Maybe one day I’ll get around to reading everything I want to read, including these two. Highly recommend the conversation.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (at 12:53, matched word for word)

> When people say to me everything was bad that he did, what I say is, "You didn’t read the book."
> 
> Because certainly the first parts of the book, hundreds of pages, are about a young idealist who sees this great need for recreation, for beaches on Long Island for the city people, and is going to find a way to make them accessible to people in the city.
> 
> It’s an act of genius and willpower the way he does it, and that’s great. Now, does it evolve into where Moses listens to nobody, and the only thing that matters is what he wants to get built? It does evolve into that.
> 
> He does change. But the young Moses, the idealist, before he’s building, is an expert in the technicalities of civil service. He devotes all his energies to trying to reform the civil service so that people get promoted on merit instead of political pull.
> 
> He works so hard at that. You see a real idealism.

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Senator Lyndon Johnson. US Senate, 1950s.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/robert-caro-on-the-dwarkesh-podcast.jpg

### The Epistemic Crisis Behind the AI Crazy — Nils Gilman

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/the-epistemic-crisis-behind-the-ai-crazy
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Nils Gilman
- **Original Source**: [Small Precautions](https://nilsgilman.substack.com/p/the-epistemic-crisis-behind-the-ai) (19 September 2026) · 6 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

A brilliant post by Nils Gilman on a topic I’ve been thinking about nonstop for a while. I was planning to write my own take on it, happened to check his Substack, and found he’d already written about it. I still have a take, though.

Gilman’s most important point is that we’ve lost any collective way of deciding which claims about the future are reasonable and which are downright nonsense. Elon Musk says AI will bring 100% annual growth. Anthropic’s “reasonable middle” is 15%. Geoffrey Hinton, the godfather of AI, warns of annihilation. P(doom) and p(boom) sit side by side, and neither is laughed out of the room. Without a shared sense of what future we should imagine, it feels like every future is coming at us like a freight train, all at once. And the result is paralysis. We go through the motions out of inertia or momentum, or because everyone else is doing the same, and we can’t exactly stop living.

I think that paralysis point is underrated, and it ties into my own take. Whenever I talk to colleagues and friends about AI, the two most common reactions are ignorance and anxiety. Mine is anxiety, and explaining why might be instructive.

I use these tools day in, day out, and I’ve fully embraced them, not as an AI booster but because I see immense utility in them. I wouldn’t call it AI psychosis; what I have is AI delirium. For a long time, I had a never-ending list of things I wanted to do, all constrained by the fact that I couldn’t code. Now there’s this magical genie that can grant any software-shaped wish, and futures that were unimaginable or unavailable to me are suddenly possible.

And that’s exactly where the anxiety comes from. I can do pretty much whatever I want, and with each thing I build, my ambition grows, which tells you how powerful these tools are. So if they’re already better than me in so many domains, what chance do I stand in the job market? More often than not, my answer is: not a whole lot. Maybe that’s a sad admission that I’m useless, or maybe I’m failing to see what people who understand technological progress see, which is that more jobs always get created than destroyed. Yes, I get it. But in this moment, how can I not be anxious?

Then there’s the other end of the spectrum: ignorance. No matter how you look at it, it’s very early. It’s been nearly four years since these tools entered our lives, and we don’t have great data on how far they’ve spread. The best available numbers, from [Microsoft](https://blogs.microsoft.com/on-the-issues/2026/09/21/the-continued-state-of-global-ai-diffusion-in-2026/), suggest about one in five working-age people worldwide use them, closer to three in ten in richer countries. From what I can see, most people are either unaware of these tools or use them a couple of times a week for generic stuff, like questions they’d otherwise have asked Google.

So where does the anxiety come from? To my mind, two places. Either you use these tools, see how capable they are and despair that it’s over for you, or you simply can’t escape the commentary. It’s everywhere: in the newspaper, on your phone, on Instagram, in reels, videos, podcasts, tweets and posts. It’s impossible not to run into grandiose, outlandish and depressing proclamations from the very people building these things. How can you not pay attention, and believe some of it, if not all of it? As Gilman points out, we have no shared way of pushing back on these claims, and the wildest ones get rewarded. Add to that how divided we are, and we’ve all but surrendered our ability, and our responsibility, to imagine the future to the people building what they believe will be the last invention humanity ever needs to make.

That anxiety is one of the most underappreciated aspects of this moment. It’s a psychological tax we haven’t paid nearly enough attention to, and I think it’s a tax on productivity too. Vast swaths of white-collar workers seem outright paralyzed by what these things can do. In the middle of a profound disruption, it’s always hard to imagine a better future. So these people are dealing with an anxiety that most of us were never trained to handle, while still having to show up at the office, because everyone has responsibilities and food to put on the table. This anxiety tax is debilitating and barely discussed.

For a long time, most people had more or less the same script for life. You finish your education, get a good job or start something, and based on how well you do, you plan your future: a marriage, a house, a retirement. AI has delivered such a profound shock to that script that when I talk to people, I get the feeling that, for them, the future has ended. It’s been foreclosed. They’re stuck in the immediate present, looking ahead and seeing nothing, while still carrying this crushing burden, without the tools to deal with it.

Gilman closes his post with Nietzsche’s madman, and I can’t think of a better description of how it feels:

> How could we drink up the sea? Who gave us the sponge to wipe away the entire horizon?

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> And 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.

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Friedrich Nietzsche. Edvard Munch, 1905–06.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/the-epistemic-crisis-behind-the-ai-crazy.jpg

### The End of the Internet — Ben Thompson

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/the-end-of-the-internet
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Ben Thompson
- **Original Source**: [Stratechery](https://stratechery.com/2026/the-end-of-the-internet/) (26 October 2026) · 13 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

The Internet was once nice, weird, wacky and wonderful. Now it sucks.

I’m going to make a willing mistake and compress its history into three phases. In the 1990s, it was a frontier: days of frantic experimentation, of hacking things together, when the future was unwritten and the early pioneers fought a battle of ideas over what the Internet should be. In the 2000s, things settled down. Blogging platforms like Blogger and WordPress gave the Internet a shape, cheaper computers and connections brought more people online, and the wild west was tamed into cozy suburbs. Blogging in that era was gourmet. Artisanal. You set up your own site, wrote things and shared things.

Then, from the mid-2000s, came Facebook, Twitter and the rest, and the Internet urbanized. Big tech colonized vast swaths of it and built megalopolises, and the peasants and serfs of the rural Internet had to migrate there. If you wanted your online life to mean anything, if you wanted anyone to give a shit about who you were, you had to move, because that’s where all your friends were. Stay behind and you were stuck in some dusty village with three people. Network effects kicked in, and the cities grew at an astounding pace, with no plan and no structure. And like any city that grows too fast, it went to shit.

Algorithms became the zoning laws of these cities, and at the scale of billions of people, they were unavoidable. But scale brought out human nature in all its vividness, and it distorted the incentives. We crave attention, and the platforms were the only place to get it, so a race to the bottom began. At first you could get noticed with quaint, cute little things. But as everyone copied each other, you had to keep amping up the performance. Soon we were all strippers twerking for digital bucks, the currency of the realm being attention. We went from posting good mornings and what we ate for lunch to fighting about politics, race and religion, endlessly, like the stick figure in [XKCD](https://xkcd.com/386/) who can’t come to bed because “someone is wrong on the Internet.”

The result is influencer culture. I don’t mean influencers in the textbook sense, anyone with the ability to influence, but these Internet-native strippers doing ever louder, crazier and more grotesque things to grab attention, in the hope of mining it for a few real-world dollars. If you participate, you have to play that game. If you lurk, your feed is full of its output.

Scott Alexander explained why in [his seminal essay](https://slatestarcodex.com/2014/12/17/the-toxoplasma-of-rage/), and once you read it, you can’t look at the Internet the same way again. If everyone agrees on something, there’s nothing to argue about, so it never spreads. When was the last time you saw a fight over whether murdering innocent people is wrong? There’s no constituency, no PETA, for murder. But anything even mildly controversial mutates, like toxoplasma, a parasite that can only reproduce in cats. Cats shed it in their poop, rats pick it up, and it rewires their brains so they lose their fear of cats; infected rats are even drawn to the smell of cat urine. A cat eats the rat, and the cycle continues. Outrage works the same way, with two hosts: one side’s fury is what carries a story to the other side, whose counter-fury carries it back. So what spreads is the loudest, craziest, vilest and dumbest opinion. Sane, logical things that sane people agree on don’t stand a chance.

If the Internet were a person, it would be middle-aged and fighting a serious infection that keeps getting worse. Listen to how people talk about it: it’s almost always negative. The algorithms, the fighting, the way it drives people mad, influencers, AI slop, bots, spam, dark patterns. The era of the mass, open Internet, of digital town squares, is dying. As WIRED’s [Miles Klee writes](https://www.wired.com/story/let-the-internet-die/), drawing on John West’s new book, *The Internet Will Die, and So Will You*, we also make the mistake of treating the Internet as a permanent archive. It isn’t. It’s born, grows up, lives and dies like the rest of us. Pew found that [38% of web pages from 2013](https://www.pewresearch.org/data-labs/2024/05/17/when-online-content-disappears/) were gone a decade later: sites, papers, videos and podcasts vanished because owners stopped paying for hosting, let domains lapse or went out of business. And what dies becomes compost for whatever comes next.

AI may be the final blow. As I wrote earlier, LLMs are snorting up everything we create without permission and sending no traffic back. If bloggers, podcasters and video makers get neither readers nor pay, who in their right mind keeps creating for the open web just to feed the machines?

So what comes after? Ben Thompson’s answer is small, and I agree. He describes the brief window after 2000 when many of today’s Internet celebrities, writers especially, started out blogging, became reasonably popular, and then rode social media’s free distribution to massive popularity. That model is dead. Instead, people are retreating into what Venkatesh Rao calls the “cozyweb”: group chats on WhatsApp, Discord servers, Instagram DMs. I first noticed this in the Reuters Institute’s Digital News Reports a few years ago, though it started well before I caught on. Business models will shrink too. Kevin Kelly’s [1,000 true fans](https://kk.org/thetechnium/1000-true-fans/) might become Li Jin’s 100.

[Dan Silver’s Substack note](https://substack.com/@thesilverlining3/note/c-381497557) explains what all of this does to the people making things, and I see it in myself. Silver distinguishes berries grown for pleasure from berries grown to sell: they taste the same, but one answers to the market. Writing is the same once it becomes “content.” As Adam Smith put it in 1776:

“Every man thus lives by exchanging, or becomes in some measure a merchant.”

On platforms, Silver says, we all become, in some measure, influencers. I tell myself I write only for myself and would keep going even if nobody read it. But I’m human, with the vanity gene like everyone else online. I still want people to read and engage with my work. I still want the likes and the reposts, even if I want them less than I used to. And that deep evolutionary craving for attention bends your reasons for doing the work, pushing you to post more and create more, even when you’re not happy with what you’re making.

The Internet isn’t dead yet. Whether it chokes and dies or recovers as something new is anybody’s guess. What comes next is unwritten.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (The End of the Internet, matched word for word)

> At 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.

### Necro-Economics: Death by Algorithm — Eyal Weizman

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/necro-economics-death-by-algorithm
- **Type**: Essay (The opening)
- **Creator**: Eyal Weizman
- **Original Source**: [London Review of Books, Vol. 48 No. 20](https://www.lrb.co.uk/the-paper/v48/n20/eyal-weizman/necro-economics) (5 November 2026) · 18 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

A chilling piece by Eyal Weizman in the *London Review of Books*, with a chilling title to match. It’s disturbing to read, but it shows how AI is being used by the Israeli military to select and kill targets in Gaza. Exactly how much the military relies on AI is unclear, but what’s undeniable is that it does.

What makes it chilling is that a machine, a non-human entity, now helps decide whether a so-called combatant lives or dies, and how many civilians may die with them. Under the laws of war, the principle of proportionality is supposed to limit how much “collateral damage,” the deaths of innocent civilians, can be justified in attacking a military target. In Weizman’s telling, the system turns that principle into arithmetic: a pre-set number of civilian deaths per target.

The moral maths has a history. In 2002, Daniel Reisner, then the Israeli army’s chief legal adviser, ran an experiment at a seminar for officers. Each wrote down, anonymously, how many civilians they thought it would be legal to kill in an attack on a particular target. The notes went into a military cap, and Reisner averaged them. The answer was 3.14: π. His lesson for the room:

> As a lawyer I need numbers to work with.

The whole logic of putting a value on a human life is deeply disturbing. And it’s hard to deny how much these technologies have helped the Israeli army carry out what I believe is a genocide in Gaza.

While today’s debates about AI revolve around whether it will take our jobs, I think the far more consequential debate should be about these technologies deciding who gets to live and who gets to die. To be fair, Weizman himself cautions against making AI the whole story. Most of Gaza was destroyed by old-fashioned artillery, tanks, bulldozers and bombing so intense it might as well have been carpet-bombing. His point is that the technology serves mainly as cover, lending the killing an air of scientific legitimacy, and that the calculus behind it is far older than AI: colonial powers have always put a price on the lives of the colonised. But that’s precisely what worries me. AI doesn’t have to be the main weapon to be the most dangerous one, if it makes slaughter look rational.

Another disturbing element is how these systems were bent to give people in power what they wanted. As the philosopher Shannon Vallor argues, AI is a mirror. It reflects the choices and biases of its makers, and here, the lawyers, coders and soldiers who shaped this non-human entity, gave birth to it and granted it the power to play God. Not on a battlefield, because Gaza is not a battlefield, but over the fates of the innocent and the guilty alike.

It’s a preview of the world to come. And it isn’t just Israel: numerous reports describe Ukraine as a proving ground for AI in its defense against Russia. The world has changed. We just don’t know it yet.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> The 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.

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: The ruins of the Praça da Patriarcal after the Lisbon earthquake of 1755. Jacques Philippe Le Bas, 1757.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/necro-economics-death-by-algorithm.png

### Pollution as Growth Killer — Alex Tabarrok

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/pollution-as-growth-killer
- **Type**: Blog post (The opening)
- **Creator**: Alex Tabarrok
- **Original Source**: [Marginal Revolution](https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2026/11/pollution-as-growth-killer.html) (5 November 2026) · 2 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

It’s Diwali, it’s winter, and air pollution is back in the mainstream debate as Delhi’s air turns toxic again. Delhi almost always gets the attention, but the air in the rest of the country is hardly pure and pristine. There are Delhis all over India. They just don’t get noticed, partly because nobody is measuring. According to the Centre for Science and Environment’s 2026 State of India’s Environment report, more than 64% of India’s 742 districts have no continuous air-quality monitoring at all. This in the most populous country on the planet, and the seventh largest by area. And if there’s no data, there’s no problem: you can wave away anything by calling it a vibe.

The underappreciated fact, as Alex Tabarrok points out on Marginal Revolution, quoting his interview in an Outlook Business issue on the subject, is that air pollution is a tax on India’s productivity and its economy. Or, as he puts it:

> Bad air is a tax on talent.

We keep harping on about India’s demographic dividend. But if today’s young people keep growing up in cities, towns and, increasingly, villages with horrendous air, we are sacrificing part of that future. Their health worsens, they fall sick more often, and they lose more productive working days. For a country that is still developing, the hit is enormous. In the same Outlook Business issue, Anumita Roychowdhury of the Centre for Science and Environment cites estimates of what air pollution costs India each year: about 3% of GDP according to the consultancy Dalberg, about 6% according to the World Bank, and roughly 9.5% according to a study in *The Lancet*. Even if these numbers are only directionally right, they’re scary.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> The 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.

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Smoke from agricultural fires over north India, November 2013. NASA.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/pollution-as-growth-killer.jpg

### Censusnama — India State Stories

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/censusnama
- **Type**: Tool (Specimen label)
- **Creator**: India State Stories
- **Original Source**: [FLAME Centre for Legislative Education and Research, FLAME University](https://www.indiastatestory.in/censusnama) () · 2 minutes
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

[Shivakumar Jolad](https://x.com/shivakjolad) has been posting some crazy historical datasets lately. I haven’t gotten around to playing with them yet, but boy, oh boy, am I excited. These are really important datasets that help us understand the history of India better.

India is gearing up for Census 2027, the largest administrative exercise in its history, an attempt to count more than 1.4 billion people. It will also count caste, which makes the last time India did that suddenly very relevant again.

That was 1931. The 1931 Census was the last census of undivided India, counting about 352.8 million people across British provinces, princely states and agencies, down to districts, towns, cities and castes. It was also the last to publish full caste data: the 1941 Census, taken in wartime, only tabulated population and religion. So for almost a century, 1931 has been the number people reach for whenever caste is debated. The Mandal Commission leaned on it in 1980, and Census 2027 will be measured against it.

A team at FLAME University’s India State Stories project has turned all this into a treasure trove. Censusnama is a long-form series of more than 40 essays tracing the Indian census from its pre-colonial roots and the first count of 1871–72 through to 2027, on how categories like caste, language and religion were invented and what they did to Indian society, with interactive explorers along the way. They’ve also extracted the tables from every colonial census report from 1871–72 to 1941 and made them downloadable.

The census datasets on Harvard Dataverse are the jewels. [The first](https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/JGUBHK) digitizes the Imperial Tables of the 1931 Census, grouped by theme: population and settlement, demographics, migration and birthplace, education and literacy, language, religion, caste, tribe and race, occupation and livelihood, and health and infirmities. [The second](https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/WT5VIY) links historical and contemporary caste lists: the 1931 caste and religion tables, the 1931 list of “exterior castes,” the Mandal Commission’s 1980 lists, the current central list of Other Backward Classes, and state-wise lists of Scheduled Castes and Scheduled Tribes. Put together, you can trace how a community was classified under the British and how it’s classified for reservations today.

The same team has also mapped the other half of colonial India: the princely states. [Their database](https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/2ES4C1), built from the government’s *Memoranda on Indian States, 1939*, covers everything from giants like Hyderabad, Mysore and Jammu and Kashmir down to hundreds of tiny estates and talukas in Kathiawar, with each one’s area, population as of 1931, annual revenue, and its ruler’s title, name and caste. My favorite detail from the notes: Hyderabad had its own currency, and 116 Hali Sicca rupees were worth 100 British Indian rupees. There’s also an [interactive visualization](https://public.flourish.studio/visualisation/29066267/) if you’d rather explore than download.

Even from the descriptions alone, two things stand out about how they’re built. The figures and category labels are kept exactly as printed in 1931, not modernized, and known printing errors are documented rather than quietly corrected, which is exactly how historical data should be handled. Every workbook comes with a codebook, and all three datasets are released under a CC0 licence, free for anyone to use for anything. They’re also a reminder of the point I made about Object 05: datasets that once took years of drudgery to build are suddenly within reach.

#### Verbatim Excerpt (History of Indian Census (1872-2011), matched word for word)

> Census-nama is a long-form series that traces the evolution of the Indian Census—from its colonial origins to the present day. India is on the verge of its largest administrative exercise: Census 2027, a monumental effort to enumerate over 1.4 billion people. With this staggering scope, It is a mirror to the nation itself, capturing everything from age, caste, and language to housing, digital access, and migration. Census-nama will explore how these categories came to be and had a long lasting impact on the Indian society, along with the nitty-gritty of the administrative and statistical process behind this monumental task.

### Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening — Robert Frost

- **Publication**: [From the Dumpster Fire](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/) · [Haul 002: Goalless exploration](https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2)
- **Canonical URL**: https://fromthedumpsterfire.com/haul/2/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening
- **Type**: Poem (Broadside)
- **Creator**: Robert Frost
- **Original Source**: [New Hampshire](https://en.wikisource.org/wiki/New_Hampshire,_a_Poem_with_Notes_and_Grace_Notes/Stopping_by_Woods_on_a_Snowy_Evening) (1923) · 1 minute
- **Published**: 2026-11-08

#### Why it's here (Editor — Bhuvanesh)

Robert Frost (1874–1963) is probably the most quoted American poet of the 20th century. Born in San Francisco, he spent most of his life on farms in New England, the landscape that runs through nearly all his work. Success came late: his first two books were published in England, when he was nearly 40. He went on to win four Pulitzer Prizes and read at John F. Kennedy’s inauguration in 1961. The [Poetry Foundation](https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/robert-frost) has a good profile.

Frost wrote this poem in June 1922, after staying up all night finishing a much longer one. When he stepped outside at dawn, it came to him in a few minutes. On the surface, it’s simple: a man pauses on a winter evening to watch snow fall in someone else’s woods, then remembers he has to keep going. Underneath, it’s about the pull between beauty and duty, between the lovely, dark stillness of the woods and the promises that drag us back to the world. Many readers also hear death in it, with “sleep” doing double duty in that repeated last line. Frost himself resisted that reading, but it’s hard to unhear. Look at the rhymes too: the odd line out in each stanza sets up the rhymes of the next, chaining the poem forward until the last stanza, where every line rhymes and the repetition finally lets it come to rest.

A nice Indian footnote: the poem was a favorite of [Jawaharlal Nehru](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jawaharlal_Nehru), who reportedly kept its last stanza close at hand until his death in 1964. Some say it was handwritten on his desk; others, that the lines were underlined in a book by his bed. Either way, the story was famous enough that Richard Nixon [told it](https://www.presidency.ucsb.edu/node/241202) at a White House dinner for Indira Gandhi, and when Joe Biden gave Narendra Modi a first edition of Frost’s collected poems in 2023, [India read it](https://vtdigger.org/2024/03/26/narain-batra-nehru-tagore-and-frost/) as a nod to Nehru. The poem even has a Hindi life: [Harivansh Rai Bachchan](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Harivansh_Rai_Bachchan), the poet behind [*Madhushala*](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Madhushala), translated those famous last lines as “Arey, abhi to milon mujhko, milon mujhko chalna hai.”

#### Verbatim Excerpt (Source, matched word for word)

> Whose woods these are I think I know.
> His house is in the village though;
> He will not see me stopping here
> To watch his woods fill up with snow.
> 
> My little horse must think it queer
> To stop without a farmhouse near
> Between the woods and frozen lake
> The darkest evening of the year.
> 
> He gives his harness bells a shake
> To ask if there is some mistake.
> The only other sound's the sweep
> Of easy wind and downy flake.
> 
> The woods are lovely, dark and deep.
> But I have promises to keep,
> And miles to go before I sleep,
> And miles to go before I sleep.

#### Public-Domain Plate

- **Caption**: Hunter in Winter Wood. George Henry Durrie, 1860.
- **Credit**: Wikimedia Commons (Public domain)
- **Image**: https://files.fromthedumpsterfire.com/hauls/002/plates/stopping-by-woods-on-a-snowy-evening.jpg

## 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.