Twitter is a virus of the mind
From our US edition
Society seems to be growing steadily crazier. And maybe it doesn’t just seem to be. Maybe it actually is growing crazier. In the 1930s, science-fiction writer Robert Heinlein dubbed the early 21st century ‘the Crazy Years’, a time when rapid technological and social change would leave people psychologically unmoored and, frankly, crazy. Today’s society seems to be living up to that prediction. But why? I recently read James C. Scott’s Against the Grain: A Deep History of the Earliest States. One of the interesting aspects of the earliest agricultural civilizations is how fragile they were. A bunch of people and their animals would crowd together in a newly formed city.
