 Drug of choice There was a big result in last week’s US election. Polling suggested that the vote would be close, but it was not. Yes, you know the one — the Massachusetts electorate resoundingly rejected Ballot Question 4, the “Natural Psychedelic Substances Act,” on decriminalizing some psychedelic drugs. The policy researcher Charles Fain Lehman notes that this was far from the only progressive policy that lost, alongside defeats for efforts to reduce drug and theft sentences in California and to legalize weed in Florida. The results do not simply reflect a correction of progressive overshoot, he argues, but a repudiation of a philosophical position that has taken root in recent years: That the costs of deterring antisocial behavior exceed the benefits. Scholars argued that even though incarceration reduces crime, and thus improves society at large, it causes so much suffering in the incarcerated that it is unjustified. Lehman says that that argument is probably empirically and morally wrong, but more importantly, the US public wants “to live in a society where people follow shared rules,” and made that clear at the ballot box. Safe travels For years, self-driving cars seemed like one of those technologies that were always five years away. But now they’re normal sights in several US and Chinese cities, and it’s safe to imagine that pretty soon they’ll be mainstream across the rich world. The tech writer Matt Bell has spent 130 hours taking rides in Waymo’s San Francisco robotaxis recently, and the first thing he learnt, he said, is that it’s boring. He took his first ride in 2023 and was ecstatic, but even by the end of that journey, “I already felt a temptation to… get to work on my laptop.” That’s the point, of course. The ride is “smooth and reasonable,” and it’s easy to work on the journey: “Waymos are great mobile offices.” It’s far from perfect — Waymos sometimes make weird route choices, or get confused by unusual road events. But their rise also reveals something about human nature and society: “People are gradually figuring out that Waymos are incredibly docile and careful, and are taking advantage.” One person sat on Bell’s car for several minutes, during which it just stayed still. If you tried that with a human driver, they might well hit you. It’s a factor which “made me realize to what degree the threat of victims fighting back keeps violence down on the streets.” Art class There is a theory about art, which goes something like this. Until modern times, rich people showed off their wealth with ostentation, so their art and especially their architecture was highly ornamented. But then technology made ornamentation cheap and it no longer signaled wealth effectively, so rich people began to signal their wealth through taste instead: Creating elaborate codes and unspoken rules which you had to be rich to have the time and resources to learn. And so art took the “modernist turn,” in which it became more austere, less ornamented, less obviously beautiful. The architecture writer Samuel Hughes, in Notes on Progress, says that this is a fun and insightful theory, but it can’t be the whole story. For one thing, all art forms took the modernist turn, but not all art forms — live music, for instance — became cheaper to produce. Hughes argues that the story is the other way around. Artists drove modernism, and the intellectual elite followed them. The rich and the masses still want tonal music, ornamented architecture, representational art, but they are not the drivers of elite tastes: “I cannot think of any pioneer modernist composer who reluctantly abandoned Romanticism because atonality was where the money was.” |
