Emergency Politics “Sovereign,” writes Carl Schmitt, “is he who decides on the exception.”1 And we live in exceptional times. The White House tells us that “foreign trade and economic practices have created a national emergency,”2 that “the United States’ insufficient energy production, transportation, refining, and generation constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to our Nation’s economy, national security, and foreign policy,”3 that “unchecked unlawful mass migration and the unimpeded flow of opiates across our borders continue to endanger the safety and security of the American people and encourage further lawlessness,”4 that “any effort by the ICC to investigate, arrest, detain, or prosecute protected persons…constitutes an unusual and extraordinary threat to the national security and foreign policy of the United States,”5 and “that underlying conditions, including a lack of reciprocity in our bilateral trade relationships, disparate tariff rates and non-tariff barriers, and U.
Anthropic recently published research examining how AI use impacts skill development and efficiency:
In a randomized controlled trial, we examined 1) how quickly software developers picked up a new skill (in this case, a Python library) with and without AI assistance; and 2) whether using AI made them less likely to understand the code they’d just written.
And the findings:
We found that using AI assistance led to a statistically significant decrease in mastery.
Charlie Warzel and Mike Caulfield argue that the internet is a justification machine. Dan Williams responds that justifications have always been readily available, and thinks that Warzel and Caulfield romanticize past media environments, for their own self-justificatory purposes.1 I think Williams is mostly right, but that both pieces are missing an important component of how changing media environments change how people engage with politics.2
That component is choice: how many entertainment options people have readily accessible to them.