Hello and welcome back to Five Things!
I don’t know if you have noticed, but Christmas Eve is just a few days away and today marks the fourth Advent Sunday. We finally go a tree last Thursday and for the first time ever in my married life, my wife picked a tree right away and said: “that’s the one.” - I know what you think. This must be a sign of true Christmas magic. They also delivered the tree already and now it spends some time on our balcony. Every time my wife pulls back the curtain, she shrieks because thinks somebody is standing there. Good fun, at least for me and it is a holiday tradition we have been observing for quite some time now…
It’s also good tradition in my family that we put up the tree the night before Christmas Eve and then start the day by decorating the tree together. Somehow, I am never allowed to decorate the tree with the ornaments I want, so I have to sneak the one from my favorite soccer team into the tree when someone is not looking.
I’m slowly getting into the Christmas mood and I only have a few business emails to write before I can be sure that everything is done for the year, or at least that the undone things won’t get finished anymore this year…
Enjoy the holidays! 🎄
Here are this Sunday’s Five Things - enjoy!
The second Trump administration can no longer identify any specific countries that might wish harm to the United States, or any specific actions they might be taking to do harm. A decade’s worth of Russian cyberwarfare, political intervention, and information war inside the United States goes unmentioned. Russian acts of sabotage across Europe, Russian support for brutal regimes across the Sahel region of Africa, and, of course, Russia’s invasion of Ukraine aren’t important either. None of these Russian acts of aggression gets a mention except for the war in Ukraine, which is described solely as a concern for Europeans.
Even more strangely, China appears not as a geopolitical competitor but largely as a trading rival. It’s as if Chinese hacking and cyberwar did not exist, as if China were not seeking to collect data or infiltrate the software that controls U.S. infrastructure. China’s propaganda campaigns and business deals in Africa and Latin America, which could squeeze out American rivals, don’t seem to matter much either.
I am a big fan of the good old trans-atlantic alliance and I think Europe and the USA have many shared values that make them natural allies. But right now, nothing can be taken for granted anymore and Europe has define its own strategy quickly and back it up with execution.
The so called National Security Strategy is just a complete shitshow that harms American interests and those of the Western liberal democracies as a whole.
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Aryeh’s tours have gained a cult following, often attracting people obsessed with “liminal spaces,” a term given to places that represent in-between stages, connecting two different eras or experiences. By this definition, a parking lot or an empty hallway can be considered a liminal space, as can an abandoned structure, paused mid-demolition. Many people report feeling unsettled or haunted in liminal spaces, and some anthropologists believe this is because our bodies innately know we’re not supposed to dwell in them. They are, after all, not a destination, but a portal, a gateway to another world. But despite this disconnect, many people report feeling a strange, forbidden pull towards liminal spaces. There are digital and in-person communities around the world dedicated to sharing these experiences. r/LiminalSpace on Reddit, for example, has one million followers who post daily photos of bridges and doorways and food courts, of highways that stretch into oblivion. “Dude, that’s so liminal,” others will respond.
Liminal, what an interesting new word I learned.
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Commerce has long been central to social media; as long as ads keep the lights on at Meta, TikTok, and YouTube, we will all be pressured to buy, buy, buy. Instagram was a mall even before #TikTokMadeMeBuyIt and Pinterest became an “AI-enabled shopping assistant.” The influencer industry — which Goldman Sachs has predicted will grow to nearly half a trillion dollars by 2027 — has snowballed into a possible side hustle for anyone with access to a phone. There’s a handful of MrBeasts and Alix Earles at the top and an untold number of micro-influencers hawking goods and services at the bottom. For audiences, it means we have spent the better part of a decade living within a 24/7 digital infomercial, with social media — sponsored content and organic posts alike — resembling not much more than a buying guide, a catalog of unabashed and conspicuous consumption. Some audience members find themselves in deep debt or describe their behavior as a full-blown shopping addiction; others have developed careful strategies in an effort to limit their consumption. We have never been so aware of all the things there are to purchase, and the frictionlessness of shopping apps disguised as social media has created an army of voracious buyers. What has this abundance done to us?
I remember when I ran the first real social media campaign here in Germany some 20 years ago, when we asked four bloggers to drive around in brand new Opel cars for a few weeks and blog about the experience. It was all so innocent back then.
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The progress studies movement and the metascience community have risen, in part, in response to this challenge. Both seek ways to rethink how we do research: by making our research institutions more efficient or by increasing science funding.
But there’s a growing body of evidence that suggests ideas are not, in fact, getting harder to find. Instead, the problem appears to be that markets have become less effective at translating breakthrough technologies into productivity gains. Researchers appear to be continuing to generate valuable innovations at historical rates. It’s just that these innovations face greater barriers to commercialization, and innovative firms thus fail to gain market share.
All this suggests that the constraint on growth isn’t in our universities or labs or R&D departments, but in our markets.
I think the problem with new ideas is that all those finance people in companies are just too unimaginative that they cannot come to the conclusion that a new idea might actually succeed. New ideas and risk-avoidance don’t work together that well.
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Indeed, Miller’s grander aims are best understood as an effort to destroy the entire architecture of immigration and humanitarian resettlement put in place in the post–World War II era. The 1965 law’s end to ethnic quotas guaranteed that, henceforth, immigration slots would be doled out on a race-neutral basis. That and subsequent measures—which created the contemporary refugee and asylum system—drew heavily on the international human rights treaties that the United States and many countries signed on to after the war. Subsequent U.S. law has enshrined the right to seek refuge here and protections against getting sent home to face persecution or grave danger—and a set of values that, theoretically at least, has been to some degree a bipartisan consensus for decades.
The German word that accurately describes Stephen Miller is: Kotzbrocken. Literally a chunk of vomit.
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That’s it. Have a great Sunday! If you missed last Sunday’s edition of Five Things, have a look here:
— Nico
