Nic Babarskis

Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚

On the compatibility of a fundamentalist worldview and technological progress:

Mystical, metaphorical, and symbolic perceptions of reality have largely disappeared. Instead, most Americans share what sociologist Michael Cavanaugh designates as “empiricist folk epistemology.“ Things are thought best described exactly the way they appear, accurately with no hidden meanings. Such folk epistemology, it happens, is close to what which works best for engineers – straightforward, consistent, factual, with no nonsense. In fact, there are an unusual number of engineers in the creation-science movement. Henry Morris, an engineer himself, connects his engineering standards to his standards for biblical hermeneutics. “Probably for no class of people more than engineers do common sense and reason have their greatest value, and I hope that these qualities have not remained completely undeveloped in me.“ Many of his readers will agree, Moore quickly observed, that such “common sense and reason” must be applied to biblical interpretation. (p. 166)

Epilogue for my post from an hour ago, I’ve now observed a second patron talking about weather control. Ya’ll, what if the increasing volatility of weather induced by climate change leads not to a collective reckoning with the effects of the Anthropocene but a collective assertion that its all a government conspiracy to raise your taxes and constrain your civil liberties?

Someone just came into the coffee shop and ordered a very customized drink involving a couple different syrups and milk to coffee ratios. They laughed off the complexity of their order by self-deprecatingly confessing they are a coffee snob. At no point did they ask about the origin or fermentation process for the beans or the dialed-in specs for espresso shots today.

The barista and other patron in the coffee shop I’m at are having a sincere discussion about cloud seeding, celebrity cabals, and writing about conspiracy theories for academic assignments-not to disprove them, but to justify taking them seriously.

Technology is shaped by , and shapes us:

What would it mean to have your every adolescent intuition turned into persuasive prose? What is lost in not having to do the work to build out our intuitions ourselves?

The current gov shutdown adding to my mood-board of article clippings about why the unitary executive theory is a bad legal theory:

If a President can point to any unspent funds for an agency, he can reappropriate it for what purposes he wants. We are increasingly operating a form of government where a) we routinely have government shutdowns, and b) the President can selectively end shutdowns for parts of the government he likes, while maintaining them for the part he dislikes. That is is a system of government where Congress has little functional power.

Do yourself a favor and make some time to watch this Animagraffs video on how early 20th century steamships work.

Currently reading: Permanent Crisis: The Humanities in a Disenchanted Age by Paul Reitter and Chad Wellmon 📚

On the books central thesis:

…one of our chief claims is that the self-understanding of the modern humanities didn’t merely take shape in response to a perceived crisis; it also made crisis a core part of the project of the humanities.

🎵 Feist’s Let It Die is an undefeated album.

Katherine Dee reflecting on the dinergoth discourse of the moment:

What makes Mariani’s essay frustrating is how close it gets to getting it. He acknowledges that “mallgoth aesthetics become Walmart defaults.” He knows Hot Topic scaled this culture. But he treats a change in scale as a change in kind, as though moving from niche to mainstream produces a new species of person. It doesn’t!

This is where the essay reveals more about the observer than the observed. The dinergoth becomes interesting because of her distance from his world. He writes about simplicity, lack of guile, a low-stakes way of being. This is a familiar move in writing about class: mistaking distance for innocence, reading someone else’s constraints as freedom.

I’m not on X so mostly insulated from the wider discussion of the original essay. I spent my public secondary school years in a rust-belt town dealing with a long tail of economic disinvestment and with the ripples of myspace and social media just starting to become noticeable on the surface of the cultural river. Katherine’s take seems right.

Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚

On the appeal of secularization in the 19th century U.S. context:

On the one hand, the push to secularize might come from nonreligious people, such as the agnostics, who were convinced that their positivism (using the term loosely) provided a better moral basis for civilization than did Christianity. On the other hand, secularization might be promoted simply as a methodology. That is, various activities might be removed from religious reference not because people sought to promote a non-Christian worldview, but simply because people were convinced that their positivism activities could be better carried out without the distractions of religious considerations, however valuable those considerations might be in other contexts. (p. 141-142)

The days are getting longer in East Lansing

This is what a “mass deportation now” policy agenda gets you:

Trump Has Detained the Parents of More Than 11,000 U.S. Citizen Kids…

Because American-born kids can’t legally join their parents in immigration detention, some end up with friends or strangers when their parents are detained or deported.

🎵 Per my previous post about Mute Math, anyone across these sites remember Earthsuit?

Test

Currently listening: Mute Math’s self-titled album still hits. 🎵

Public Domain Review highlighting a delightful set of block prints of foreigners visiting Yokohama Japan in the 1860s-70s:

Yokohama-e (literally “Yokohama pictures”) are a type of Japanese woodblock print depicting the foreigners who flooded through Yokohama during the 1860s and 70s, in particular North Americans: https://buff.ly/2eSwcac

NPR dispatched a photo journalist to capture scenes of the Kurdish celebration of Nowruz:

From an article in Bolts on city efforts to limit the use of Flock surveillance cameras once they’ve been installed:

“The ability to spy on us is being sold to much bigger players, and to me, that’s another indication of the cameras need to come down,” Diaz said. “The whole point of Flock is that it’s a network, and the more people you have in the network, the more people you have accessing and using it, the stronger it gets.”

Flock is using the same strategy as Facebook used to entice and then lock-in an entire generation of social media users, but instead of starting with “I wonder what my old college roommate is up to” it’s “how much government surveillance can we subject you” to. U.S. residents are the product, not the clients of these sorts of tools.

Ryan Broderick wondering about the future of the film industry in Garbage Day:

Where do all the actors go? And where will the actors of the future come from? Acting is actually the art form that has struggled the most in the age of online video. (I have a red hot take that allowing audiences to film live theater the way they do concerts would blast the doors open on this, but I’ll spare you.) Unfortunately, history doesn’t really help us find an answer here. For the last few years, I’ve assumed the current entertainment landscape was an echo of the early 20th century. When vaudeville performers moved to short-form nickelodeons before eventually getting snapped up by Hollywood studios for silent films and eventually talkies. I figured that the stars of the future were currently grinding it out on TikTok and other derivative video platforms and would reinvigorate Hollywood when they finally “graduated” to more serious productions. What’s actually happening is far stranger. The unchecked tech-media monopolies of the second Trump era have realized you can make more money building perpetual and personalized slop machines than trying to create large-scale mass appeal entertainment. Instead of investing in films that stand the test of time, they’ve fully leaned into the death loop of streaming, where the past has no value beyond determining the algorithmic bucket you’re slotted into for the next pull of the feed. And they’re desperate for a future without writers or actors or anyone they have to pay..

Thinking about reorganizing my @micro.blog site categories. Any advice from older hands around here I should consider before embarking?

Currently reading: Understanding Fundamentalism and Evangelicalism by George Marsden 📚

Here’s a quote that provides some insight into why a subset of silicon valley moguls are starting to sound like the elders in the fundamentalist church of my adolescence:

Fundamentalist thought is in fact, highly suited to one strand of contemporary culture–the technological strand. Unlike theoretical science or social science, where questions of the supernatural raise basic issues about the presuppositions of the enterprise, technological thinking does not wrestle with such theoretical principles. Truth is a matter of true and precise propositions that, when properly classified and organized, will work. Fundamentalism fits this mentality because it is a form of Christianity with no loose ends, ambiguities, or historical developments. Everything fits neatly into a system. It is revealing, for instance, that many of the leaders of the creation – science movement are an applied sciences or engineering. (p. 119)

Do we use our tech products or do they use us:

Here is something nobody says plainly:

Sometime in the last twenty years, our possessions came alive.

Not all at once. Not dramatically. One by one, the objects in our lives opened their eyes, found our faces, and began to need us.

Spring Progress 📷 2026.03.16

March weather is a chaos gremlin.

#SP26.2

Here’s Bluesky’s interim CEO’s first week impressions.

🎩 tip to @matthewlang for the link.