3 anos atrás · 2cc16b0661
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    <h1>Dark mode et accessibilité</h1>
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  <p>Il y a quelques semaines des collègues designers qui travaillaient sur le <i lang="en">dark mode</i> m’ont demandé si c’était « bon pour l’accessibilité ». Voilà la réponse que je leur ai faite, si ça peut être utile à quelqu’un.</p>

 <p>Préambule : c’est vrai que d’après les quelques articles que j’ai pu lire en ligne, et de ce que je vois de mon entourage, un certain nombre de gens préfèrent régler leur système en mode sombre (fond sombre voire noir, texte clair). Ce n’est pas mon cas :</p>

 <blockquote>
 <p>Pour ma part je fuis purement et simplement le <i lang="en">dark mode</i>, qui me détruit les yeux au bout de 3 lignes — enfin, « L’œil » plutôt, celui qui voit. Je vais faire un message plus personnel que généraliste et professionnel, mais ça me semble utile pour aider à la réflexion.</p>
 <p>Je suis le cas typique du client qui a besoin obligatoirement d’un <i lang="en">light mode</i>, sans quoi je n’utilise plus l’application et/ou je ne consulte plus le site (c’est déjà arrivé, j’ai désinstallé l’application et fermé l’onglet de mon navigateur). Dans mon cas, le <i lang="en">dark mode</i>, contrairement à ce que dit [le document dont parlaient mes collègues], augmente très fortement ma fatigue oculaire. Au bout de trois lignes j’ai la rétine imprimée, des lignes qui flottent devant les yeux, c’est très désagréable.</p>
 <p>Je baisse la luminosité de l’écran en soirée, je le fais virer un peu vers les tons chauds (pour des questions de mélatonine <abbr title="et cætera">etc.</abbr>), mais il est pour moi hors de question de passer en <i lang="en">dark mode</i>.</p>
 <p>Mon hypothèse (mais il faudrait en discuter avec des ergonomes qui s’y connaissent mieux que moi sur les handicaps visuels) c’est que quand on ne voit que d’un œil la sensibilité à la luminosité (et donc à l’éblouissement) n’est pas gérée par une moyenne des deux yeux, ça rend le <i lang="en">dark mode</i> proprement impossible à utiliser.</p>
 <p>Bref, pour ne pas rester sur mon cas parmi des dizaines d’autres, généralisons : je rejoins complètement vos réflexions sur le choix à laisser à l’utilisateur, soit en se basant sur ses paramètre systèmes (par exemple une <i lang="en">media query</i> <abbr title="Cascading Stylesheets">CSS</abbr> qui existe déjà), soit par un réglage (et un cookie ou autre). C’est ce que je vois faire sur les applications qui commencent à l’implémenter sur mon Android.</p>
 <p>Pour finir sur une note rigolote, pour le <span lang="en">fun</span>, voilà un joli exemple de <i lang="en">light/dark mode</i> avec une <i lang="en">media query</i> : <a href="https://daverupert.com/" class="spip_out" hreflang="en" rel="external">le site personnel de Dave Rupert</a>.</p>
 <p>(il suffit de basculer votre système de l’un à l’autre)</p>
 <p>Il joue notamment avec les filtres sur l’image, qui passe un filtre à <code lang="en" class="spip_code" dir="ltr">brightness(0.9) contrast(1.2)</code> en <i lang="en">dark mode</i>, c’est très malin.</p>
 </blockquote>

 <p>En clair : faites un <i lang="en">dark mode</i> sur votre site si ça vous repose les yeux, voire juste parce que ça vous amuse, mais surtout ne me l’imposez pas. J’ai même écrit un <i lang="en">bookmarklet</i> pour forcer automatiquement le site en <a href="">noir sur blanc</a> (avec les liens soulignés), c’est vous dire si ça m’est pénible. (Note : il vous suffit de tirer ce lien vers la barre personnelle de votre navigateur pour le récupérer.)</p>
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 title: Dark mode et accessibilité
 url: https://nota-bene.org/Dark-mode-et-accessibilite
 hash_url: 544ecea9397616a9f4cfcc6fe27afc3d

 <p>Il y a quelques semaines des collègues designers qui travaillaient sur le <i lang="en">dark mode</i> m’ont demandé si c’était « bon pour l’accessibilité ». Voilà la réponse que je leur ai faite, si ça peut être utile à quelqu’un.</p>
 <p>Préambule : c’est vrai que d’après les quelques articles que j’ai pu lire en ligne, et de ce que je vois de mon entourage, un certain nombre de gens préfèrent régler leur système en mode sombre (fond sombre voire noir, texte clair). Ce n’est pas mon cas :</p>
 <blockquote>
 <p>Pour ma part je fuis purement et simplement le <i lang="en">dark mode</i>, qui me détruit les yeux au bout de 3 lignes — enfin, « L’œil » plutôt, celui qui voit. Je vais faire un message plus personnel que généraliste et professionnel, mais ça me semble utile pour aider à la réflexion.</p>
 <p>Je suis le cas typique du client qui a besoin obligatoirement d’un <i lang="en">light mode</i>, sans quoi je n’utilise plus l’application et/ou je ne consulte plus le site (c’est déjà arrivé, j’ai désinstallé l’application et fermé l’onglet de mon navigateur). Dans mon cas, le <i lang="en">dark mode</i>, contrairement à ce que dit [le document dont parlaient mes collègues], augmente très fortement ma fatigue oculaire. Au bout de trois lignes j’ai la rétine imprimée, des lignes qui flottent devant les yeux, c’est très désagréable.</p>
 <p>Je baisse la luminosité de l’écran en soirée, je le fais virer un peu vers les tons chauds (pour des questions de mélatonine <abbr title="et cætera">etc.</abbr>), mais il est pour moi hors de question de passer en <i lang="en">dark mode</i>.</p>
 <p>Mon hypothèse (mais il faudrait en discuter avec des ergonomes qui s’y connaissent mieux que moi sur les handicaps visuels) c’est que quand on ne voit que d’un œil la sensibilité à la luminosité (et donc à l’éblouissement) n’est pas gérée par une moyenne des deux yeux, ça rend le <i lang="en">dark mode</i> proprement impossible à utiliser.</p>
 <p>Bref, pour ne pas rester sur mon cas parmi des dizaines d’autres, généralisons : je rejoins complètement vos réflexions sur le choix à laisser à l’utilisateur, soit en se basant sur ses paramètre systèmes (par exemple une <i lang="en">media query</i> <abbr title="Cascading Stylesheets">CSS</abbr> qui existe déjà), soit par un réglage (et un cookie ou autre). C’est ce que je vois faire sur les applications qui commencent à l’implémenter sur mon Android.</p>
 <p>Pour finir sur une note rigolote, pour le <span lang="en">fun</span>, voilà un joli exemple de <i lang="en">light/dark mode</i> avec une <i lang="en">media query</i> : <a href="https://daverupert.com/" class="spip_out" hreflang="en" rel="external">le site personnel de Dave Rupert</a>.</p>
 <p>(il suffit de basculer votre système de l’un à l’autre)</p>
 <p>Il joue notamment avec les filtres sur l’image, qui passe un filtre à <code lang="en" class="spip_code" dir="ltr">brightness(0.9) contrast(1.2)</code> en <i lang="en">dark mode</i>, c’est très malin.</p>
 </blockquote>
 <p>En clair : faites un <i lang="en">dark mode</i> sur votre site si ça vous repose les yeux, voire juste parce que ça vous amuse, mais surtout ne me l’imposez pas. J’ai même écrit un <i lang="en">bookmarklet</i> pour forcer automatiquement le site en <a href="">noir sur blanc</a> (avec les liens soulignés), c’est vous dire si ça m’est pénible. (Note : il vous suffit de tirer ce lien vers la barre personnelle de votre navigateur pour le récupérer.)</p>
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    <h1>Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms.</h1>
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  <p class="pg-dropCap">It’s hard to escape the sense that we’re living through the last days of the American experiment. In Texas, an “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/16/setup-arctic-outbreak-niziol/">Arctic outbreak</a>” was followed by rolling blackouts that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/16/winter-storm-live-updates/">left much of the state without power</a> during the deadly chill, even as a raging pandemic made it dangerous to seek out crowded public shelters. Last fall, the West Coast was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/10/western-fires-fatalities-homes/">scorched by the biggest wildfires in its history</a> during a heat wave. “Mass-casualty” shootings take place almost every day. Meanwhile, our whole political system seems near the point of implosion, as armed mobs threaten lawmakers and politicians speak openly of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/11/mississippi-secede-election-republican/">secession</a>.</p>

 <p><div class="ent-raw-container custom-html">
 <div class="author-block"> <img class="authorPhoto" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/washpost/9e51fae8-bbf0-4984-9af4-9382c3c013b2.png" width="100" height="100"> 
 <div class="outlook-author"> <strong>Annalee Newitz</strong> is the author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Four-Lost-Cities-Secret-History/dp/0393652661">Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age</a>.” </div></div></div> <p>Paralyzed by these compounding disasters, people are starting to plan for the imminent collapse of civilization. Conspiracy theorists eagerly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/03/march-4-qanon-trump-inauguration/">anticipate the next coup</a> — as they did when they looked forward to a “real” inauguration in early March and as they surely will for future dates — while more mainstream pundits warn that <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-are-split-over-how-much-the-party-and-american-democracy-itself-are-in-danger/">democracy lies on its deathbed</a>. Climate activists offer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-climate-change">frightening, evidence-based arguments</a> that we’re entering an age of unprecedented natural disasters. Put another way, the stories we’re telling about our future all seem to end with apocalypse.</p> <p>The idea of civilizational collapse goes back thousands of years, but each era imagines it anew, always as a form of annihilation and erasure. In the 18th century, Edward Gibbon blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on “a deluge of Barbarians” and the erosion of civic virtue. Over a century and a half later, the influential anthropologist V. Gordon Childe coined the phrase “urban revolution” to explain the rapid rise of complex, economically stratified societies over the past several thousand years. Childe, an Australian who witnessed the Soviet revolutions from afar, believed hierarchical modern civilizations were internally unstable, doomed to be toppled by worker uprisings. These days, our collapse stories focus more often on total species extinction. Environmentalists predict <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/17/climate-change-on-track-to-cause-major-insect-wipeout-scientists-warn">ecosystem wipeouts</a> that will plunge <i>Homo sapiens</i> into deadly peril, while popular philosopher Nick Bostrom coined the term “<a href="https://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html">existential risk</a>” to describe the grave threat artificial intelligence represents for humanity.</p> 
 <div class="ent-ad-leaderboard ent-ad-container" etadtype="enterprise"></div> <p>But the historical record shows that reports of the end times always turned out to be wrong. “Barbarians” didn’t extinguish Rome: It still stands today, a vital and beloved city, and the cultures of its ancient empire influence populations across Europe and the Americas. Children still study Latin in school, and Silicon Valley executives quote Stoic philosophy. Elsewhere in the world, European colonialism and the slave trade left behind cultural ruins that can’t be explained away as “collapses.” They are open wounds, still smarting in the present. Over time, civilizations eventually morph into something else entirely, but they infuse future societies with their lingering traumas — as well as their hopeful ideals.</p> <p>In truth, our apocalyptic stories are far too simplistic to capture what actually happens when a society melts down. As I argue in my book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZTSFB5T?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=B07ZTSFB5T">“Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age,”</a> a civilization is not a single, monolithic entity, nor does it disintegrate during a momentary crisis. Instead, as we’re witnessing in the United States today, it changes without ever breaking completely from the past. It is far from obvious that a society ever really dies.</p> 
 <div data-elm-loc="" class="ent-photo ent-photo-fullwidth "> <a name="TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI"></a> <img class="unprocessed photo" src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/TmodpKD00OAk-XmC7PBX1JPumVc=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-hi-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/7rFLmT6FZGJsLvMfVZo516sy0dI=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-low-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/TmodpKD00OAk-XmC7PBX1JPumVc=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-raw-src="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-threshold="480"> <span class="pb-caption">Visitors walk through the archaeological site of Mohenjo-Daro. Once the center of a powerful civilization, Mohenjo-Daro was one of the world's earliest cities. (Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images) </span> </div> <p class="pg-dropCap">A few years ago, Danika Parikh, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge Museums, surprised me by saying that the ancient Indus Valley civilization, which famously disappeared over 3,000 years ago, hadn’t undergone a complete collapse. Starting about 5,000 years ago, the peoples there built a number of breathtaking cities connected by rivers. The best known of these cities are called Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, known for their elaborate plumbing systems and enormous public buildings. But these cities were simply the largest in a vast urban and agricultural network that sheltered millions of people. Archaeologists working in far-flung Mesopotamian cities have found caches of etched carnelian beads manufactured at Harappa, likely sold by Indus expats living in ethnic enclaves there.</p> <p>Then, over a period of a few centuries, the Indus Valley rivers began to change course and dry up. Millions of people who once lived on its fertile lands abandoned their cities, never to return.</p> <p>I couldn’t understand why Parikh didn’t view that as a collapse. She said that some archaeologists prefer to call it a transition, because it’s not as if the Indus civilization peoples suffered mass deaths after they left cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Rural Indus communities, whose villages she has explored, sometimes didn’t move very far at all. Their cultures changed, and many settlements got smaller, but the process was an ambiguous combination of loss and continuity. Over thousands of years, new migrants came to the area and settled down with the descendants of the Indus, building a dramatically different civilization that is arguably just as influential as the one that dominated the ancient world’s brisk trade in beads. The transformation was profound, but there’s evidence of continuity too. As <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/genome-nearly-5000-year-old-woman-links-modern-indians-ancient-civilization">recent DNA tests on the 5,000-year-old remains of a woman from the Indus civilization reveal</a>, some of its people are among the ancestors of today’s South Asian populations.</p> <p>It makes little sense to speak of collapse when evidence shows that people from the Indus civilization kept tilling the earth as they had done for centuries, their civilization evolving and hybridizing with other cultures where modern India and Pakistan stand today. In the long view, these complex civilizational shifts, as Parikh prefers to call them, are just eddies in a much larger current bearing our cultures into the present.</p> 
 <div class="ent-ad-leaderboard ent-ad-container" etadtype="enterprise"></div> <p>One of the most famous collapse stories in history comes out of the Khmer Empire that ruled vast parts of Southeast Asia over a millennium ago. Angkor, its capital, was home to nearly a million people who built a sprawling metropolis in what is known today as Cambodia. Tropical cities like Angkor incorporated vast farmlands within regions of dense habitation, fed by sophisticated networks of human-made canals and reservoirs. And yet the Khmer Empire, which once encompassed Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, eventually dwindled to the regions surrounding Angkor. By the time western explorers visited the crumbling palaces, the population had shrunk to a few hundred monks who tended what remained of the temples in the city center.</p> <p>Perhaps inspired by Gibbon’s thesis, 19th century European archaeologists argued that Angkor perished when it was invaded by the neighboring kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1431, around the same time that Angkor’s ruling elites fled south to Phnom Penh. It was a classic “decline and fall” parable, complete with dissipated leadership and barbarian hordes at the gates. But modern archaeologists working in Cambodia have uncovered a very different timeline of events: Angkor sits at the nexus of two monsoon systems which can cause extreme weather even at the best of times. There is evidence that the city’s infrastructure was wrecked in the early 15th century by two major flood events, interspersed with long droughts. Previously, the city had withstood the onslaught of storms because its kings commanded armies of laborers to dig silt out of its canals, which shored up reservoir walls and kept the city’s farms irrigated during dry seasons. But that labor system broke down at roughly the same time the city did.</p> <p>The Khmer king and local leaders maintained cities through a system called debt slavery, where their subjects worked without financial compensation in exchange for various non-monetary rewards: food, housing, hospitals and more. It was an elaborate dance of coercion and persuasion that ultimately depended on workers wanting to live in Angkor. When the city began to fall apart, the promise of housing lost its lure — why give free labor to live in a flooded mess? Torn apart by internal conflict, the government also didn’t have the means to force people to stay against their will. Workers began to drift away. Instead of giving workers fresh incentives to sustain the city, the royal family fled.</p> <p>Still, people continued to live there for decades, recycling stones from fancy temples to repair a bridge and tending to their farms. Eventually, the city was overtaken by jungle and agricultural lands. Urbanites moved on to other cities or settled in nearby villages. But the Khmer culture never disappeared. People from all over Asia continued to make pilgrimages to Angkor’s great temples; and Theravada Buddhism, which has deep roots in the Khmer Empire, is still practiced in Cambodia today. Now visited by millions of tourists every year, Angkor remains an inspirational ideal in southeast Asian culture, just as classical Rome does in the West.</p> 
 <div data-elm-loc="" class="ent-photo ent-photo-fullwidth "> <a name="WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI"></a> <img class="unprocessed photo" src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/tiZa-69gmWViu9sJklo0eUUzzEE=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-hi-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/eeu1j8QD8PNGZTDT5rk8_wq6aJg=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-low-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/tiZa-69gmWViu9sJklo0eUUzzEE=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-raw-src="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-threshold="480"> <span class="pb-caption">An aerial view of an Angkor Wat. Now visited by millions of tourists every year, Angkor remains an inspirational ideal in southeast Asian culture, just as classical Rome does in the West. (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images) </span> </div> <p class="pg-dropCap">This suggests that we need a new definition of civilization, one that isn’t constructed around the story of a recognizable “decline and fall,” but instead follows the multilayered plot twists and transformations that shape any complex society. That conclusion is especially obvious when we consider indigenous civilizations in the Americas, which remain vital despite European settlers’ efforts to erase them — and the tendency of those settlers’ descendants to speak of them as if they were simply gone. Today, as <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/us/indigenous-people-reclaiming-their-lands-trnd/index.html">lawmakers and courts are coming to recognize</a>, indigenous nations have not collapsed, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/09/889562040/supreme-court-rules-that-about-half-of-oklahoma-is-indian-land">their claims to land in places like Oklahoma are legitimate</a>.</p> 
 <div class="ent-ad-leaderboard ent-ad-container" etadtype="enterprise"></div> <p>Activist Julian Brave NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, told me that he thinks indigenous tribes and nations already live in a post-apocalyptic world. They were nearly wiped out by the violence and disease brought by foreign invaders — but they survived. And that’s in part why he has thrown himself into the process of rebuilding the nation to be more resilient. As a strategist at Washington, D.C., think tank Data for Progress, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/joe-biden-has-endorsed-the-green-new-deal-in-all-but-name">he advised the task force</a> crafting the Green New Deal, a program that pushes back against the narrative of collapse. It is a policy objective, yes, but also an aspirational tale of renewal, sustainability, and justice. One could make the same point about voting rights legislation, which is also aimed at renewing the nation’s commitment to the ongoing survival and dignity of African Americans whose ancestral civilizations were torn from them hundreds of years ago.</p> <p>The idea of collapse is appealing because it allows us to handwave away the political reality of how civilizations transform. Sometimes cultures are abandoned at gunpoint, as they were in many parts of the Americas. Sometimes a culture changes over thousands of years the way the Indus Valley civilization did, slowly evolving from urban to rural to urban again. Still, it doesn’t disappear. Its tribulations, failures and successes remain with us. And that means we aren’t headed into doom, but change — and we, the people, will survive. By working together to include as many people as possible in our democratic process, we can guide that transformation and hopefully do things better this time.</p> </p>
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 title: Civilizations don’t really die. They just take new forms.
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 hash_url: 6219b1dac7dfe7295ebf8cde73f0faa4

 <p class="pg-dropCap">It’s hard to escape the sense that we’re living through the last days of the American experiment. In Texas, an “<a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/16/setup-arctic-outbreak-niziol/">Arctic outbreak</a>” was followed by rolling blackouts that <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2021/02/16/winter-storm-live-updates/">left much of the state without power</a> during the deadly chill, even as a raging pandemic made it dangerous to seek out crowded public shelters. Last fall, the West Coast was <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/weather/2020/09/10/western-fires-fatalities-homes/">scorched by the biggest wildfires in its history</a> during a heat wave. “Mass-casualty” shootings take place almost every day. Meanwhile, our whole political system seems near the point of implosion, as armed mobs threaten lawmakers and politicians speak openly of <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/nation/2020/11/11/mississippi-secede-election-republican/">secession</a>.</p> 
 <div class="ent-raw-container custom-html">
 <div class="author-block"> <img class="authorPhoto" src="https://s3.amazonaws.com/arc-authors/washpost/9e51fae8-bbf0-4984-9af4-9382c3c013b2.png" width="100" height="100"> 
 <div class="outlook-author"> <strong>Annalee Newitz</strong> is the author of “<a href="https://www.amazon.com/Four-Lost-Cities-Secret-History/dp/0393652661">Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age</a>.” </div></div></div> <p>Paralyzed by these compounding disasters, people are starting to plan for the imminent collapse of civilization. Conspiracy theorists eagerly <a href="https://www.washingtonpost.com/history/2021/03/03/march-4-qanon-trump-inauguration/">anticipate the next coup</a> — as they did when they looked forward to a “real” inauguration in early March and as they surely will for future dates — while more mainstream pundits warn that <a href="https://fivethirtyeight.com/features/democrats-are-split-over-how-much-the-party-and-american-democracy-itself-are-in-danger/">democracy lies on its deathbed</a>. Climate activists offer <a href="https://www.newyorker.com/news/annals-of-a-warming-planet/three-scenarios-for-the-future-of-climate-change">frightening, evidence-based arguments</a> that we’re entering an age of unprecedented natural disasters. Put another way, the stories we’re telling about our future all seem to end with apocalypse.</p> <p>The idea of civilizational collapse goes back thousands of years, but each era imagines it anew, always as a form of annihilation and erasure. In the 18th century, Edward Gibbon blamed the fall of the Roman Empire on “a deluge of Barbarians” and the erosion of civic virtue. Over a century and a half later, the influential anthropologist V. Gordon Childe coined the phrase “urban revolution” to explain the rapid rise of complex, economically stratified societies over the past several thousand years. Childe, an Australian who witnessed the Soviet revolutions from afar, believed hierarchical modern civilizations were internally unstable, doomed to be toppled by worker uprisings. These days, our collapse stories focus more often on total species extinction. Environmentalists predict <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/environment/2018/may/17/climate-change-on-track-to-cause-major-insect-wipeout-scientists-warn">ecosystem wipeouts</a> that will plunge <i>Homo sapiens</i> into deadly peril, while popular philosopher Nick Bostrom coined the term “<a href="https://www.nickbostrom.com/existential/risks.html">existential risk</a>” to describe the grave threat artificial intelligence represents for humanity.</p> 
 <div class="ent-ad-leaderboard ent-ad-container" etadtype="enterprise"></div> <p>But the historical record shows that reports of the end times always turned out to be wrong. “Barbarians” didn’t extinguish Rome: It still stands today, a vital and beloved city, and the cultures of its ancient empire influence populations across Europe and the Americas. Children still study Latin in school, and Silicon Valley executives quote Stoic philosophy. Elsewhere in the world, European colonialism and the slave trade left behind cultural ruins that can’t be explained away as “collapses.” They are open wounds, still smarting in the present. Over time, civilizations eventually morph into something else entirely, but they infuse future societies with their lingering traumas — as well as their hopeful ideals.</p> <p>In truth, our apocalyptic stories are far too simplistic to capture what actually happens when a society melts down. As I argue in my book <a href="https://www.amazon.com/gp/product/B07ZTSFB5T?ie=UTF8&amp;tag=thewaspos09-20&amp;camp=1789&amp;linkCode=xm2&amp;creativeASIN=B07ZTSFB5T">“Four Lost Cities: A Secret History of the Urban Age,”</a> a civilization is not a single, monolithic entity, nor does it disintegrate during a momentary crisis. Instead, as we’re witnessing in the United States today, it changes without ever breaking completely from the past. It is far from obvious that a society ever really dies.</p> 
 <div data-elm-loc="" class="ent-photo ent-photo-fullwidth "> <a name="TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI"></a> <img class="unprocessed photo" src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/TmodpKD00OAk-XmC7PBX1JPumVc=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-hi-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/7rFLmT6FZGJsLvMfVZo516sy0dI=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-low-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/TmodpKD00OAk-XmC7PBX1JPumVc=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-raw-src="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/TSCJ7GUSOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-threshold="480"> <span class="pb-caption">Visitors walk through the archaeological site of Mohenjo-Daro. Once the center of a powerful civilization, Mohenjo-Daro was one of the world's earliest cities. (Asif Hassan/AFP/Getty Images) </span> </div> <p class="pg-dropCap">A few years ago, Danika Parikh, an archaeologist at the University of Cambridge Museums, surprised me by saying that the ancient Indus Valley civilization, which famously disappeared over 3,000 years ago, hadn’t undergone a complete collapse. Starting about 5,000 years ago, the peoples there built a number of breathtaking cities connected by rivers. The best known of these cities are called Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro, known for their elaborate plumbing systems and enormous public buildings. But these cities were simply the largest in a vast urban and agricultural network that sheltered millions of people. Archaeologists working in far-flung Mesopotamian cities have found caches of etched carnelian beads manufactured at Harappa, likely sold by Indus expats living in ethnic enclaves there.</p> <p>Then, over a period of a few centuries, the Indus Valley rivers began to change course and dry up. Millions of people who once lived on its fertile lands abandoned their cities, never to return.</p> <p>I couldn’t understand why Parikh didn’t view that as a collapse. She said that some archaeologists prefer to call it a transition, because it’s not as if the Indus civilization peoples suffered mass deaths after they left cities like Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro. Rural Indus communities, whose villages she has explored, sometimes didn’t move very far at all. Their cultures changed, and many settlements got smaller, but the process was an ambiguous combination of loss and continuity. Over thousands of years, new migrants came to the area and settled down with the descendants of the Indus, building a dramatically different civilization that is arguably just as influential as the one that dominated the ancient world’s brisk trade in beads. The transformation was profound, but there’s evidence of continuity too. As <a href="https://www.sciencemag.org/news/2019/09/genome-nearly-5000-year-old-woman-links-modern-indians-ancient-civilization">recent DNA tests on the 5,000-year-old remains of a woman from the Indus civilization reveal</a>, some of its people are among the ancestors of today’s South Asian populations.</p> <p>It makes little sense to speak of collapse when evidence shows that people from the Indus civilization kept tilling the earth as they had done for centuries, their civilization evolving and hybridizing with other cultures where modern India and Pakistan stand today. In the long view, these complex civilizational shifts, as Parikh prefers to call them, are just eddies in a much larger current bearing our cultures into the present.</p> 
 <div class="ent-ad-leaderboard ent-ad-container" etadtype="enterprise"></div> <p>One of the most famous collapse stories in history comes out of the Khmer Empire that ruled vast parts of Southeast Asia over a millennium ago. Angkor, its capital, was home to nearly a million people who built a sprawling metropolis in what is known today as Cambodia. Tropical cities like Angkor incorporated vast farmlands within regions of dense habitation, fed by sophisticated networks of human-made canals and reservoirs. And yet the Khmer Empire, which once encompassed Vietnam, Cambodia, Thailand and Laos, eventually dwindled to the regions surrounding Angkor. By the time western explorers visited the crumbling palaces, the population had shrunk to a few hundred monks who tended what remained of the temples in the city center.</p> <p>Perhaps inspired by Gibbon’s thesis, 19th century European archaeologists argued that Angkor perished when it was invaded by the neighboring kingdom of Ayutthaya in 1431, around the same time that Angkor’s ruling elites fled south to Phnom Penh. It was a classic “decline and fall” parable, complete with dissipated leadership and barbarian hordes at the gates. But modern archaeologists working in Cambodia have uncovered a very different timeline of events: Angkor sits at the nexus of two monsoon systems which can cause extreme weather even at the best of times. There is evidence that the city’s infrastructure was wrecked in the early 15th century by two major flood events, interspersed with long droughts. Previously, the city had withstood the onslaught of storms because its kings commanded armies of laborers to dig silt out of its canals, which shored up reservoir walls and kept the city’s farms irrigated during dry seasons. But that labor system broke down at roughly the same time the city did.</p> <p>The Khmer king and local leaders maintained cities through a system called debt slavery, where their subjects worked without financial compensation in exchange for various non-monetary rewards: food, housing, hospitals and more. It was an elaborate dance of coercion and persuasion that ultimately depended on workers wanting to live in Angkor. When the city began to fall apart, the promise of housing lost its lure — why give free labor to live in a flooded mess? Torn apart by internal conflict, the government also didn’t have the means to force people to stay against their will. Workers began to drift away. Instead of giving workers fresh incentives to sustain the city, the royal family fled.</p> <p>Still, people continued to live there for decades, recycling stones from fancy temples to repair a bridge and tending to their farms. Eventually, the city was overtaken by jungle and agricultural lands. Urbanites moved on to other cities or settled in nearby villages. But the Khmer culture never disappeared. People from all over Asia continued to make pilgrimages to Angkor’s great temples; and Theravada Buddhism, which has deep roots in the Khmer Empire, is still practiced in Cambodia today. Now visited by millions of tourists every year, Angkor remains an inspirational ideal in southeast Asian culture, just as classical Rome does in the West.</p> 
 <div data-elm-loc="" class="ent-photo ent-photo-fullwidth "> <a name="WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI"></a> <img class="unprocessed photo" src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/tiZa-69gmWViu9sJklo0eUUzzEE=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-hi-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/eeu1j8QD8PNGZTDT5rk8_wq6aJg=/1484x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-low-res-src="https://www.washingtonpost.com/resizer/tiZa-69gmWViu9sJklo0eUUzzEE=/480x0/arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-raw-src="https://arc-anglerfish-washpost-prod-washpost.s3.amazonaws.com/public/WY3A6PESOAI6XKW4V54HAGRQZI.jpg" data-threshold="480"> <span class="pb-caption">An aerial view of an Angkor Wat. Now visited by millions of tourists every year, Angkor remains an inspirational ideal in southeast Asian culture, just as classical Rome does in the West. (Tang Chhin Sothy/AFP/Getty Images) </span> </div> <p class="pg-dropCap">This suggests that we need a new definition of civilization, one that isn’t constructed around the story of a recognizable “decline and fall,” but instead follows the multilayered plot twists and transformations that shape any complex society. That conclusion is especially obvious when we consider indigenous civilizations in the Americas, which remain vital despite European settlers’ efforts to erase them — and the tendency of those settlers’ descendants to speak of them as if they were simply gone. Today, as <a href="https://www.cnn.com/2020/11/25/us/indigenous-people-reclaiming-their-lands-trnd/index.html">lawmakers and courts are coming to recognize</a>, indigenous nations have not collapsed, and <a href="https://www.npr.org/2020/07/09/889562040/supreme-court-rules-that-about-half-of-oklahoma-is-indian-land">their claims to land in places like Oklahoma are legitimate</a>.</p> 
 <div class="ent-ad-leaderboard ent-ad-container" etadtype="enterprise"></div> <p>Activist Julian Brave NoiseCat, a member of the Canim Lake Band Tsq’escen, told me that he thinks indigenous tribes and nations already live in a post-apocalyptic world. They were nearly wiped out by the violence and disease brought by foreign invaders — but they survived. And that’s in part why he has thrown himself into the process of rebuilding the nation to be more resilient. As a strategist at Washington, D.C., think tank Data for Progress, <a href="https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2020/jul/20/joe-biden-has-endorsed-the-green-new-deal-in-all-but-name">he advised the task force</a> crafting the Green New Deal, a program that pushes back against the narrative of collapse. It is a policy objective, yes, but also an aspirational tale of renewal, sustainability, and justice. One could make the same point about voting rights legislation, which is also aimed at renewing the nation’s commitment to the ongoing survival and dignity of African Americans whose ancestral civilizations were torn from them hundreds of years ago.</p> <p>The idea of collapse is appealing because it allows us to handwave away the political reality of how civilizations transform. Sometimes cultures are abandoned at gunpoint, as they were in many parts of the Americas. Sometimes a culture changes over thousands of years the way the Indus Valley civilization did, slowly evolving from urban to rural to urban again. Still, it doesn’t disappear. Its tribulations, failures and successes remain with us. And that means we aren’t headed into doom, but change — and we, the people, will survive. By working together to include as many people as possible in our democratic process, we can guide that transformation and hopefully do things better this time.</p> 
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    <h1>Against alcohol</h1>
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  <p><em>A review of <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drink-Science-Alcohol-Your-Health-ebook/dp/B07SZLPS5B/">Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health</a> by Professor David Nutt, with comments</em>.</p>

 <p><em>N.B. all statistics are from the book unless otherwise indicated. The book mainly concerned itself with the United Kingdom, but I think the lessons are broadly applicable to other Western countries too.</em></p>

 <p>This useful little book provides a summary of the latest science on the impact of alcohol, which I’ll briefly outline, and goes on to suggest some actions in light of that knowledge.</p>

 <p>The overriding impression I got during the book was that alcohol is Really Bad for your health:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Alcohol use is one of the top five causes of disease and disability in almost all countries in Europe. In the UK, alcohol is now the leading cause of death in men between the ages of 16 and 54 years, accounting for over 20 per cent of the total. More than three- quarters of liver cirrhosis deaths, 7 per cent of cancer deaths and 25 per cent of injury deaths in adults under 65 years of age in Europe in 2004 were estimated to be due to alcohol.1 According to the government, alcohol is the third leading risk factor for death and disability after smoking and obesity. That’s a pretty scary list, right?”</p></blockquote>

 <p>At least one in five cases of dementia is caused by alcohol (although there is a study that contradicts this). It can also exacerbate mental health problems, especially anxiety and depression. One major American study suggested that up to a quarter of young alcoholics have social anxiety disorder.</p>

 <p>This isn’t a big surprise, of course. What I didn’t realise before, though, is how poorly evidenced the beneficial effects of alcohol are. Looking at the available studies, Nutt writes that the positive effect on cardiovascular health has never been definitely proven (i.e. beyond mere association), and even if there is a partial effect, the optimal level of consumption would be around one unit a day. And the benefits don’t outweigh all the other risks, which include cancer.</p>

 <p>The impact of alcohol on my country, the UK, is pretty significant. 10.8m Brits drink at levels posing some risk to their health, and 1.6m ‘may have some level of alcohol dependence’. Different figures, from the NHS, suggest around 9% of men and 3% of women show such signs (which my back of the envelope calculations suggest would be something like 3.3m people in total). <em>[Edit: I amended this paragraph to show these are two different surveys that don’t agree with each other. Sorry for originally implying they were the same survey.]</em></p>

 <p>It’s estimated that alcohol contributes to 30,000 deaths a year in England, Scotland and Wales. And it’s thought to cause 5% of the global disease burden.</p>

 <p>There is enough evidence here to make a strong case against alcohol on a number of grounds (which Nutt himself does not quite do).</p>

 <p>Alcohol is a drain on economic growth, damaging our productivity and forcing us to spend money on healthcare that could be used elsewhere. The CDC estimated the cost of hangovers to the American economy as $249bn in 2010. The Institute of Alcohol Studies estimates a cost of £1.4bn a year for British productivity. (The charity Alcohol Change UK puts the productivity damage at <a href="https://alcoholchange.org.uk/alcohol-facts/fact-sheets/alcohol-in-the-workplace">£7bn a year</a> instead. I haven’t tried to understand why those figures are so different.)  If you think economic growth is <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Responsible-Individuals/dp/1732265135/">important</a>, then alcohol is not worth the hassle.</p>

 <p>Treating the results of excess alcohol consumption is a huge burden for the NHS, which is under increasing strain as the population ages. In 2017/18, 338,000 hospital admissions were mainly attributable to alcohol, and 23% of those were due to accidents.</p>

 <p>It’s a little strange that this isn’t talked about more. Over the past twelve months we’ve seen an outpouring of public support for the NHS, and polls suggest that it’s the one institution that almost everyone in Britain cares about. So why not ease the burden on its workers (and the public purse) by reducing our alcohol consumption?</p>

 <p>Alcohol fuels violence: victims thought offenders were under the influence of alcohol 40% of all violent crimes in 2016/17  — that’s half a million incidents. (It’s hard to know how accurate this figure is, but even if it was only 20% of the total, that’s a lot of crimes. And we can be pretty confident some crimes are not reported.)</p>

 <p>Those figures include sexual violence. Alcohol is the most common date rape drug, involved in 46% of cases studied by a London toxicology lab, while drugs only featured in 33% and sedative drugs in just 2%.</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>One in three women have been sexually taken advantage of while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, mostly in private homes by someone they know, according to the 2019 Global Drug Survey. Nearly 90 per cent of these cases involved alcohol.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>As Nutt makes clear, ‘this is not to put any blame on the women — of course these crimes should not happen.’</p>

 <p>This is, then, the case against alcohol — it undermines our health and our economy. It contributes to violence, including sexual violence. It’s an addictive drug that ensnares too many people in society.</p>

 <hr class="wp-block-separator">

 <p>The evidence here is so damning that I almost wonder whether Nutt is being <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60823b/eli5what_does_tyler_cowen_mean_when_he_says/">Straussian</a> when he suggests that we should still drink (within limits). Some of the arguments he makes in favour of alcohol are almost ridiculous:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>A glass to hold gives us something to do with our hands in awkward situations, particularly now smoking has become so vilified.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>I’m taking him out of context, but only a bit. He adds in the next sentence that food and socialising, which regularly go hand-in-hand with alcohol, are good things. I agree. But there’s no reason that you can’t drink something non-alcoholic while you enjoy dinner and company. If you really want to hold a glass, it doesn’t have to contain a liquid that is harmful to your health and wider society.</p>

 <p>Alcohol is important for rituals, he points out:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Nearly all of our celebration rituals revolve around alcohol, from the cradle to the grave. We wet the baby’s head, we toast exam results and birthdays, we crack open the fizz at both wedding breakfasts and divorce parties. And we say goodbye to our loved ones with alcohol at a funeral wake (and drown our sorrows too). When you are working out how much to drink – or not drink – you may want to factor in the social benefits you get from it.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>Left unaddressed is why we think that alcohol is necessary to any of those (good and often great) <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/rituals-meaning.html">rituals</a>. It’s not. I don’t see why you can’t get most of those social benefits anyway.</p>

 <p>It will be very tough to change those cultural norms, although, as Nutt notes, an increasing number of young people are eschewing alcohol altogether. This trend seems to be linked to a greater focus on health and ‘wellness’, although it may also be because people are taking other drugs instead.</p>

 <p>The other reason that nothing is done about alcohol is the drinks industry. In chapter 11, Nutt relates a sad tale of a cabinet office committee under Blair that proposed new policies to tackle alcohol addiction, but was scuppered by a drinks industry lobbying effort. This is not a surprise:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Despite repeating their message of ‘sensible drinking’ at every opportunity, the drinks industry wants you to keep drinking. That is its reason for existing. One estimate is that, if everyone drank within recommended limits, the industry would lose £13 billion. That’s a lot of lost profit. Its aim is often aided by the government, which wants the tax income.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>The government is pretty much in the pocket of this industry, with gifts to MPs in the ‘All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group’ every year and the perceived importance of the tax revenue from alcohol. There is something disgusting about MPs receiving gifts like that while alcohol causes so much harm in society. And they are being shortsighted, fiscally:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>…in fact, it’s been estimated that when you add in the costs of alcohol to society, there is a net loss to the Exchequer . This is undeniably a difficult argument to disentangle economically, and a complicated sum. But the costs of alcohol to society are relatively well established. These are: £3.5bn on health, especially hospital admissions and accident and emergency attendances; £6.5bn for policing drunkenness; £20bn for lost productivity through hangovers. The total is £30 billion.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>Nutt has his own set of policy solutions, and I think they’d be great: taxing drinks by the amount of alcohol in them and increase that tax back to 1950s levels (i.e. triple it); stop selling strong alcohol in supermarkets; make it a law that all alcohol outlets must sell non-alcoholic drinks; install breathalysers in pubs and stop drunk people from buying more alcohol; banning all alcohol advertising; and many more.</p>

 <p>He focuses most on minimum unit pricing (MUP). As the government has not raised its duty on alcohol, it now costs a third of what it did in 1970 in real terms. Nutt points to evidence that consumption goes down when prices go up. The duty paid in England varies wildly by the type of drink, rather than relating to the amount of alcohol in it, so it’s possible to get a lot of alcohol for little money.</p>

 <p>Scotland, however, introduced MUP in 2018 — with initially positive results:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Research from Newcastle University has shown that the amount of alcohol bought in shops and supermarkets per person per week fell by 1.2 units (just over half a pint of beer or a measure of spirits) compared with what would have been drunk without MUP. In England over the same time, consumption increased.18 The biggest drop – two units a week – was in the heaviest fifth of drinkers. This shows that the policy is having the biggest impact on exactly the people it needs to. The number of units bought per person per week in Scotland is still higher than in England, at 19 units, but it did start from a much higher level. The Welsh Assembly has now passed legislation for MUP . At the same time as MUP was introduced, Scotland made two other important policy changes for alcohol. It reduced the drink-driving limit (from 80mg% to 50mg%) and banned discounted alcohol such as bulk-buys in supermarkets and two-for-one offers in bars. All the evidence suggests that, together with MUP, these should result in a real cut in harms.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>Targeting the heaviest drinkers is important because they are the worst-affected; they contribute the vast majority of the health costs.</p>

 <p>France had an extremely high rate of liver cirrhosis in the 1980s as a result of alcohol consumption. They tackled this by focusing on advertising (banning the drinks industry from it, basically); health warnings on bottles (‘alcohol abuse is dangerous for health’); price (restrictions on ‘happy hours’ and somehow they pressured the wine industry to make higher quality wine); driving (reducing the blood alcohol content limit). </p>

 <p>The French wine industry has turned out to be more profitable following these changes, as it makes better quality wine now. But the UK hasn’t followed suit, says Nutt:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>The UK drinks industry know this data. They know that if we went down the route of raising the price of alcohol, they would be more profitable over time. In my opinion, the reason they don’t is that making money in the short term is so easy. And they think that if they make any concessions in this direction, people will begin to question all our other beliefs around alcohol and health.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>Is this a case of companies prioritising short term economic performance over the long run? If Nutt is right, then presumably the drinks businesses must fear the consequences of a shaking out; perhaps each is worried that they wouldn’t survive the instability. If a law change is on the cards, then one can imagine some private equity </p>

 <p>Nutt also favours the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_drinks_in_Sweden#Regulation_and_taxation">Swedish model</a>, in which only government shops are allowed to sell alcohol of more than 3.5% ABV (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume">Alcohol By Volume</a>). They are only open at certain times of the day, forcing you to plan before you drink:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>This system has led to the Swedes drinking roughly three-quarters of what we drink per year in the UK. And to a rate of deaths from liver cirrhosis approximately half of ours. This shows, yet again, how small changes in consumption lead to bigger health gains.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>Not sure he really proves that these government run shops have this effect, but still, it seems like a sound policy.</p>

 <p>I was also struck by this story:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Public Health England wanted to do an advertising campaign promoting (at least) two drink-free days a week.38 This is sensible, safe and appropriate advice. But PHE doesn’t have much money for public advertising so they agreed to partner with Drinkaware, a charity that’s funded by the alcohol industry. Hundreds of academics signed a petition censoring PHE. And their senior alcohol advisor Ian Gilmore resigned in protest.39 It wasn’t the content of the campaign that was contentious, it was where the money was coming from. As a pragmatist, I don’t have a problem with industry funding independent research and education, providing they don’t get to have any influence on the content and outputs. But I can see why people do object. What is a shame is that the campaign didn’t happen because there was no other source of funding. In reality, people will die as a result of not knowing this useful information.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>It seems like the academics were failing to think at the margin here; the choice here was between a campaign and no campaign, and regardless of the source of funding, getting people to drink less would have been good. I can’t help but be reminded of mistakes made by those working on public health in 2020, where a failure to think on the margin and act fast led to worse public health outcomes.</p>

 <p>So alcohol is bad, too much alcohol is *really* bad, and we could go a significant distance to solving this problem if we could work out the political economy a bit better.</p>

 <p>But we can’t work out the political economy, at least for now. Unless there is a sudden national temperance movement, the drinks industry is a powerful lobbying force in the UK.</p>

 <p>Alcohol’s damaging impact on society remains, then. You could lobby your MP, and if enough people do that effectively then maybe the drinks industry would eventually be cowed.</p>

 <p>That seems a bit unsatisfactory, though. The book shows that so much of alcohol consumption is cultural; it’s just ‘the done thing’ to go out for an alcoholic drink or ten with your mates. If you have any experience in British society, then you will know this to be true.</p>

 <p>The winners in this equilibrium are people who, for one reason or another, can manage this situation well. They aren’t genetically predisposed to alcohol addiction; they are socially confident so don’t feel the need for Dutch courage or the need to show off by drinking too much; or, perhaps, they are successful or content in the different spheres of their life, so they don’t have pain that they want to numb. Some successful people are vulnerable too in a different way, being wined and dined if you’re an executive, or trying to climb a corporate ladder by getting drinks with whoever after work.</p>

 <p>It seems wrong that a privileged (!) class of people who can manage alcohol effectively in their lives do not try harder to make sure that the under-privileged, vulnerable members of society don’t end up addicted to this awful drug.</p>

 <p>It’s possible to consume alcohol in a safe manner, with risks to your long term health that you might consider acceptable if you enjoy drinking it. But at some margin, you are contributing to the idea that it’s normal to drink it. And we need to break down that norm.</p>

 <p>I don’t really enjoy drinking alcohol, frankly. I drink a little bit at some social occasions, but following my own argument here, I’m not really sure that I should. By properly abstaining, I could help to undermine the idea that alcohol is normal. And it wouldn’t be that much extra effort to do so.</p>

 <p>I don’t know what Nutt’s personal political or moral views are, but I can’t help but notice that modern liberalism has no real argument against people harming themselves and others with alcohol if that’s what they want to do. In the absence of a Christian or other religious framework, it’s quite difficult to argue that you <em>should</em> do anything about alcohol. Who can tell you what makes your life worthwhile?</p>

 <p>Take the increase in the minimum drinking age in America in the 1980s for example. The National Minimum Drinking Age Act is thought to have saved hundreds of thousands of young lives that would have been lost as a result of drink-driving. But Nutt doesn’t want to raise the minimum drinking age, despite this data:</p>

 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>If someone can vote, if they can join the army, fight and die, get married, then they should be allowed to buy alcohol.”</p></blockquote>

 <p>Granted, there is a certain logic here. Yet the same argument could be made about cocaine or heroin — you’re an adult, you can decide (Nutt, it seems has been willing to follow his logic to its conclusion for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#%22Equasy%22">ecstasy</a>, at least from a ‘harm caused’ perspective). Those drugs are damaging for people and society, and I don’t think anyone has a ‘right’ to take them. But modern liberalism says that you are an autonomous person from age 18 who has no responsibilities to others, and thus provides limited moral arguments against drugs of any kind. If this moral framework is not available to British society anymore, then perhaps <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/08/im-mormons-one.html">individual teetotalism is the only way to go</a>. That way the norm of alcohol consumption can be undermined, one person at a time. </p>

 <p>A Christian framework can be extremely helpful here. The Bible is <a href="https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/ad-fontes/the-case-for-cautious-consumption/">not definitively teetotal</a> (for instance, Christ makes wine for the wedding at Cana in John 2:1-11). But abstention could be the right option for you, either for personal reasons or because of your <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060704174712/http://www.bpnews.net/bpcolumn.asp?ID=2298">convictions</a>. The Bible does, however, prohibit drunkenness (for example, see Ephesians 5:18), which leads to much worse health and social outcomes than light drinking. Crucially, there are no grounds for looking down on people who take a different path from you, as long as it is within these guardrails (see Romans 14:21 or a discussion <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/alcohol-liberty-and-legalism/">here</a>).</p>

 <p>Alcohol occupies a sinister position in British society and culture. But there is a better way, with stricter rules and different norms. You don’t have to fully agree with my prescriptions here to wonder what a society with no alcohol problems would look like. Formerly wasted talent could be used in the economy, an invigorated health service could enjoy reduced waiting times, families and relationships could be healthier and less violent. If we want to get there, it’s worth talking more about the problem of alcohol.</p>
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 title: Against alcohol
 url: https://fergus-mccullough.com/index.php/2021/04/09/against-alcohol/
 hash_url: a19dc546c8ad1ae00f6320f6b1f3ded8

 <p><em>A review of <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Drink-Science-Alcohol-Your-Health-ebook/dp/B07SZLPS5B/">Drink?: The New Science of Alcohol and Your Health</a> by Professor David Nutt, with comments</em>.</p>



 <p><em>N.B. all statistics are from the book unless otherwise indicated. The book mainly concerned itself with the United Kingdom, but I think the lessons are broadly applicable to other Western countries too.</em></p>



 <p>This useful little book provides a summary of the latest science on the impact of alcohol, which I’ll briefly outline, and goes on to suggest some actions in light of that knowledge.</p>



 <p>The overriding impression I got during the book was that alcohol is Really Bad for your health:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Alcohol use is one of the top five causes of disease and disability in almost all countries in Europe. In the UK, alcohol is now the leading cause of death in men between the ages of 16 and 54 years, accounting for over 20 per cent of the total. More than three- quarters of liver cirrhosis deaths, 7 per cent of cancer deaths and 25 per cent of injury deaths in adults under 65 years of age in Europe in 2004 were estimated to be due to alcohol.1 According to the government, alcohol is the third leading risk factor for death and disability after smoking and obesity. That’s a pretty scary list, right?”</p></blockquote>



 <p>At least one in five cases of dementia is caused by alcohol (although there is a study that contradicts this). It can also exacerbate mental health problems, especially anxiety and depression. One major American study suggested that up to a quarter of young alcoholics have social anxiety disorder.</p>



 <p>This isn’t a big surprise, of course. What I didn’t realise before, though, is how poorly evidenced the beneficial effects of alcohol are. Looking at the available studies, Nutt writes that the positive effect on cardiovascular health has never been definitely proven (i.e. beyond mere association), and even if there is a partial effect, the optimal level of consumption would be around one unit a day. And the benefits don’t outweigh all the other risks, which include cancer.</p>



 <p>The impact of alcohol on my country, the UK, is pretty significant. 10.8m Brits drink at levels posing some risk to their health, and 1.6m ‘may have some level of alcohol dependence’. Different figures, from the NHS, suggest around 9% of men and 3% of women show such signs (which my back of the envelope calculations suggest would be something like 3.3m people in total). <em>[Edit: I amended this paragraph to show these are two different surveys that don’t agree with each other. Sorry for originally implying they were the same survey.]</em></p>



 <p>It’s estimated that alcohol contributes to 30,000 deaths a year in England, Scotland and Wales. And it’s thought to cause 5% of the global disease burden.</p>



 <p>There is enough evidence here to make a strong case against alcohol on a number of grounds (which Nutt himself does not quite do).</p>



 <p>Alcohol is a drain on economic growth, damaging our productivity and forcing us to spend money on healthcare that could be used elsewhere. The CDC estimated the cost of hangovers to the American economy as $249bn in 2010. The Institute of Alcohol Studies estimates a cost of £1.4bn a year for British productivity. (The charity Alcohol Change UK puts the productivity damage at <a href="https://alcoholchange.org.uk/alcohol-facts/fact-sheets/alcohol-in-the-workplace">£7bn a year</a> instead. I haven’t tried to understand why those figures are so different.)  If you think economic growth is <a href="https://www.amazon.co.uk/Stubborn-Attachments-Prosperous-Responsible-Individuals/dp/1732265135/">important</a>, then alcohol is not worth the hassle.</p>



 <p>Treating the results of excess alcohol consumption is a huge burden for the NHS, which is under increasing strain as the population ages. In 2017/18, 338,000 hospital admissions were mainly attributable to alcohol, and 23% of those were due to accidents.</p>



 <p>It’s a little strange that this isn’t talked about more. Over the past twelve months we’ve seen an outpouring of public support for the NHS, and polls suggest that it’s the one institution that almost everyone in Britain cares about. So why not ease the burden on its workers (and the public purse) by reducing our alcohol consumption?</p>



 <p>Alcohol fuels violence: victims thought offenders were under the influence of alcohol 40% of all violent crimes in 2016/17  — that’s half a million incidents. (It’s hard to know how accurate this figure is, but even if it was only 20% of the total, that’s a lot of crimes. And we can be pretty confident some crimes are not reported.)</p>



 <p>Those figures include sexual violence. Alcohol is the most common date rape drug, involved in 46% of cases studied by a London toxicology lab, while drugs only featured in 33% and sedative drugs in just 2%.</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>One in three women have been sexually taken advantage of while under the influence of drugs or alcohol, mostly in private homes by someone they know, according to the 2019 Global Drug Survey. Nearly 90 per cent of these cases involved alcohol.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>As Nutt makes clear, ‘this is not to put any blame on the women — of course these crimes should not happen.’</p>



 <p>This is, then, the case against alcohol — it undermines our health and our economy. It contributes to violence, including sexual violence. It’s an addictive drug that ensnares too many people in society.</p>



 <hr class="wp-block-separator">



 <p>The evidence here is so damning that I almost wonder whether Nutt is being <a href="https://www.reddit.com/r/explainlikeimfive/comments/60823b/eli5what_does_tyler_cowen_mean_when_he_says/">Straussian</a> when he suggests that we should still drink (within limits). Some of the arguments he makes in favour of alcohol are almost ridiculous:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>A glass to hold gives us something to do with our hands in awkward situations, particularly now smoking has become so vilified.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>I’m taking him out of context, but only a bit. He adds in the next sentence that food and socialising, which regularly go hand-in-hand with alcohol, are good things. I agree. But there’s no reason that you can’t drink something non-alcoholic while you enjoy dinner and company. If you really want to hold a glass, it doesn’t have to contain a liquid that is harmful to your health and wider society.</p>



 <p>Alcohol is important for rituals, he points out:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Nearly all of our celebration rituals revolve around alcohol, from the cradle to the grave. We wet the baby’s head, we toast exam results and birthdays, we crack open the fizz at both wedding breakfasts and divorce parties. And we say goodbye to our loved ones with alcohol at a funeral wake (and drown our sorrows too). When you are working out how much to drink – or not drink – you may want to factor in the social benefits you get from it.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>Left unaddressed is why we think that alcohol is necessary to any of those (good and often great) <a href="https://www.nytimes.com/2019/04/22/opinion/rituals-meaning.html">rituals</a>. It’s not. I don’t see why you can’t get most of those social benefits anyway.</p>



 <p>It will be very tough to change those cultural norms, although, as Nutt notes, an increasing number of young people are eschewing alcohol altogether. This trend seems to be linked to a greater focus on health and ‘wellness’, although it may also be because people are taking other drugs instead.</p>



 <p>The other reason that nothing is done about alcohol is the drinks industry. In chapter 11, Nutt relates a sad tale of a cabinet office committee under Blair that proposed new policies to tackle alcohol addiction, but was scuppered by a drinks industry lobbying effort. This is not a surprise:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Despite repeating their message of ‘sensible drinking’ at every opportunity, the drinks industry wants you to keep drinking. That is its reason for existing. One estimate is that, if everyone drank within recommended limits, the industry would lose £13 billion. That’s a lot of lost profit. Its aim is often aided by the government, which wants the tax income.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>The government is pretty much in the pocket of this industry, with gifts to MPs in the ‘All-Party Parliamentary Beer Group’ every year and the perceived importance of the tax revenue from alcohol. There is something disgusting about MPs receiving gifts like that while alcohol causes so much harm in society. And they are being shortsighted, fiscally:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>…in fact, it’s been estimated that when you add in the costs of alcohol to society, there is a net loss to the Exchequer . This is undeniably a difficult argument to disentangle economically, and a complicated sum. But the costs of alcohol to society are relatively well established. These are: £3.5bn on health, especially hospital admissions and accident and emergency attendances; £6.5bn for policing drunkenness; £20bn for lost productivity through hangovers. The total is £30 billion.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>Nutt has his own set of policy solutions, and I think they’d be great: taxing drinks by the amount of alcohol in them and increase that tax back to 1950s levels (i.e. triple it); stop selling strong alcohol in supermarkets; make it a law that all alcohol outlets must sell non-alcoholic drinks; install breathalysers in pubs and stop drunk people from buying more alcohol; banning all alcohol advertising; and many more.</p>



 <p>He focuses most on minimum unit pricing (MUP). As the government has not raised its duty on alcohol, it now costs a third of what it did in 1970 in real terms. Nutt points to evidence that consumption goes down when prices go up. The duty paid in England varies wildly by the type of drink, rather than relating to the amount of alcohol in it, so it’s possible to get a lot of alcohol for little money.</p>



 <p>Scotland, however, introduced MUP in 2018 — with initially positive results:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Research from Newcastle University has shown that the amount of alcohol bought in shops and supermarkets per person per week fell by 1.2 units (just over half a pint of beer or a measure of spirits) compared with what would have been drunk without MUP. In England over the same time, consumption increased.18 The biggest drop – two units a week – was in the heaviest fifth of drinkers. This shows that the policy is having the biggest impact on exactly the people it needs to. The number of units bought per person per week in Scotland is still higher than in England, at 19 units, but it did start from a much higher level. The Welsh Assembly has now passed legislation for MUP . At the same time as MUP was introduced, Scotland made two other important policy changes for alcohol. It reduced the drink-driving limit (from 80mg% to 50mg%) and banned discounted alcohol such as bulk-buys in supermarkets and two-for-one offers in bars. All the evidence suggests that, together with MUP, these should result in a real cut in harms.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>Targeting the heaviest drinkers is important because they are the worst-affected; they contribute the vast majority of the health costs.</p>



 <p>France had an extremely high rate of liver cirrhosis in the 1980s as a result of alcohol consumption. They tackled this by focusing on advertising (banning the drinks industry from it, basically); health warnings on bottles (‘alcohol abuse is dangerous for health’); price (restrictions on ‘happy hours’ and somehow they pressured the wine industry to make higher quality wine); driving (reducing the blood alcohol content limit). </p>



 <p>The French wine industry has turned out to be more profitable following these changes, as it makes better quality wine now. But the UK hasn’t followed suit, says Nutt:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>The UK drinks industry know this data. They know that if we went down the route of raising the price of alcohol, they would be more profitable over time. In my opinion, the reason they don’t is that making money in the short term is so easy. And they think that if they make any concessions in this direction, people will begin to question all our other beliefs around alcohol and health.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>Is this a case of companies prioritising short term economic performance over the long run? If Nutt is right, then presumably the drinks businesses must fear the consequences of a shaking out; perhaps each is worried that they wouldn’t survive the instability. If a law change is on the cards, then one can imagine some private equity </p>



 <p>Nutt also favours the <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcoholic_drinks_in_Sweden#Regulation_and_taxation">Swedish model</a>, in which only government shops are allowed to sell alcohol of more than 3.5% ABV (<a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alcohol_by_volume">Alcohol By Volume</a>). They are only open at certain times of the day, forcing you to plan before you drink:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>This system has led to the Swedes drinking roughly three-quarters of what we drink per year in the UK. And to a rate of deaths from liver cirrhosis approximately half of ours. This shows, yet again, how small changes in consumption lead to bigger health gains.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>Not sure he really proves that these government run shops have this effect, but still, it seems like a sound policy.</p>



 <p>I was also struck by this story:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>Public Health England wanted to do an advertising campaign promoting (at least) two drink-free days a week.38 This is sensible, safe and appropriate advice. But PHE doesn’t have much money for public advertising so they agreed to partner with Drinkaware, a charity that’s funded by the alcohol industry. Hundreds of academics signed a petition censoring PHE. And their senior alcohol advisor Ian Gilmore resigned in protest.39 It wasn’t the content of the campaign that was contentious, it was where the money was coming from. As a pragmatist, I don’t have a problem with industry funding independent research and education, providing they don’t get to have any influence on the content and outputs. But I can see why people do object. What is a shame is that the campaign didn’t happen because there was no other source of funding. In reality, people will die as a result of not knowing this useful information.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>It seems like the academics were failing to think at the margin here; the choice here was between a campaign and no campaign, and regardless of the source of funding, getting people to drink less would have been good. I can’t help but be reminded of mistakes made by those working on public health in 2020, where a failure to think on the margin and act fast led to worse public health outcomes.</p>



 <p>So alcohol is bad, too much alcohol is *really* bad, and we could go a significant distance to solving this problem if we could work out the political economy a bit better.</p>



 <p>But we can’t work out the political economy, at least for now. Unless there is a sudden national temperance movement, the drinks industry is a powerful lobbying force in the UK.</p>



 <p>Alcohol’s damaging impact on society remains, then. You could lobby your MP, and if enough people do that effectively then maybe the drinks industry would eventually be cowed.</p>



 <p>That seems a bit unsatisfactory, though. The book shows that so much of alcohol consumption is cultural; it’s just ‘the done thing’ to go out for an alcoholic drink or ten with your mates. If you have any experience in British society, then you will know this to be true.</p>



 <p>The winners in this equilibrium are people who, for one reason or another, can manage this situation well. They aren’t genetically predisposed to alcohol addiction; they are socially confident so don’t feel the need for Dutch courage or the need to show off by drinking too much; or, perhaps, they are successful or content in the different spheres of their life, so they don’t have pain that they want to numb. Some successful people are vulnerable too in a different way, being wined and dined if you’re an executive, or trying to climb a corporate ladder by getting drinks with whoever after work.</p>



 <p>It seems wrong that a privileged (!) class of people who can manage alcohol effectively in their lives do not try harder to make sure that the under-privileged, vulnerable members of society don’t end up addicted to this awful drug.</p>



 <p>It’s possible to consume alcohol in a safe manner, with risks to your long term health that you might consider acceptable if you enjoy drinking it. But at some margin, you are contributing to the idea that it’s normal to drink it. And we need to break down that norm.</p>



 <p>I don’t really enjoy drinking alcohol, frankly. I drink a little bit at some social occasions, but following my own argument here, I’m not really sure that I should. By properly abstaining, I could help to undermine the idea that alcohol is normal. And it wouldn’t be that much extra effort to do so.</p>



 <p>I don’t know what Nutt’s personal political or moral views are, but I can’t help but notice that modern liberalism has no real argument against people harming themselves and others with alcohol if that’s what they want to do. In the absence of a Christian or other religious framework, it’s quite difficult to argue that you <em>should</em> do anything about alcohol. Who can tell you what makes your life worthwhile?</p>



 <p>Take the increase in the minimum drinking age in America in the 1980s for example. The National Minimum Drinking Age Act is thought to have saved hundreds of thousands of young lives that would have been lost as a result of drink-driving. But Nutt doesn’t want to raise the minimum drinking age, despite this data:</p>



 <blockquote class="wp-block-quote"><p>If someone can vote, if they can join the army, fight and die, get married, then they should be allowed to buy alcohol.”</p></blockquote>



 <p>Granted, there is a certain logic here. Yet the same argument could be made about cocaine or heroin — you’re an adult, you can decide (Nutt, it seems has been willing to follow his logic to its conclusion for <a href="https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/David_Nutt#%22Equasy%22">ecstasy</a>, at least from a ‘harm caused’ perspective). Those drugs are damaging for people and society, and I don’t think anyone has a ‘right’ to take them. But modern liberalism says that you are an autonomous person from age 18 who has no responsibilities to others, and thus provides limited moral arguments against drugs of any kind. If this moral framework is not available to British society anymore, then perhaps <a href="https://marginalrevolution.com/marginalrevolution/2017/08/im-mormons-one.html">individual teetotalism is the only way to go</a>. That way the norm of alcohol consumption can be undermined, one person at a time. </p>



 <p>A Christian framework can be extremely helpful here. The Bible is <a href="https://ca.thegospelcoalition.org/columns/ad-fontes/the-case-for-cautious-consumption/">not definitively teetotal</a> (for instance, Christ makes wine for the wedding at Cana in John 2:1-11). But abstention could be the right option for you, either for personal reasons or because of your <a href="https://web.archive.org/web/20060704174712/http://www.bpnews.net/bpcolumn.asp?ID=2298">convictions</a>. The Bible does, however, prohibit drunkenness (for example, see Ephesians 5:18), which leads to much worse health and social outcomes than light drinking. Crucially, there are no grounds for looking down on people who take a different path from you, as long as it is within these guardrails (see Romans 14:21 or a discussion <a href="https://www.thegospelcoalition.org/blogs/justin-taylor/alcohol-liberty-and-legalism/">here</a>).</p>



 <p>Alcohol occupies a sinister position in British society and culture. But there is a better way, with stricter rules and different norms. You don’t have to fully agree with my prescriptions here to wonder what a society with no alcohol problems would look like. Formerly wasted talent could be used in the economy, an invigorated health service could enjoy reduced waiting times, families and relationships could be healthier and less violent. If we want to get there, it’s worth talking more about the problem of alcohol.</p>
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    <h1>“It’s Not Cancel Culture - It’s A Platform Failure.”</h1>
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 <p><em>Before we begin, I’d like to thank all of you for your kind words, sign-ups, and extreme generosity with your hard earned dollars over the last few days. Before launching on Sunday, I oscillated between feeling like I was going to barf and wanting to lift weights, yell, and run through drywall. This is a huge leap for me — professionally, financially, and for my fragile writer ego. But I’m so thankful for you all for signing up and giving Galaxy Brain a chance. I’ll try not to let you down. If you’re new to this newsletter, here’s a bit about <a href="https://warzel.substack.com/p/welcome-to-galaxy-brain">the overall mission</a>. Lastly, a reminder: All posts will be free for a few weeks and then I’ll bring down the hammer. And if you haven’t subscribed…well, then you’re in luck, buddy! There’s a link right below!</em></p>

 <p><hr></p>

 <h2>We Need To Get Rid Of Twitter Trending Topics</h2>

 <p>On April 6, Elle Hunt was in a pub in New Zealand, where life has basically returned to pre-pandemic normal. She was, by her account, two wines deep, having a light hearted argument with her friends about film genres. Half serious, but committed to the bit, she tweeted this:</p>

 <p>A few minutes later, in response to a harmless reply, she tweeted her rationale and closed her phone:</p>

 <p>Even if you don’t know the story, you probably have a sense of what happened next. Her lopsided Twitter poll answers quickly indicated she’d expressed A Bad Opinion. The quote retweets started rolling in. The first few seemed like faux outrage at a particularly spicy genre opinion that kept with the spirit of her post — but that eventually shifted, too. People were mad. Hunt logged off and went to bed.</p>

 <p>She woke up to angry emails from strangers. Overnight, friends in the U.K. sent concerned messages asking if she was doing alright. She opened Twitter and found her poll had 120,000 votes. Over 6000 people, including filmmakers like Kevin Smith, had angrily quote tweeted her, many demanding that she apologize — to Film Twitter, to prominent directors, to the medium of space itself. The reason? Once the tweet picked up steam, it was elevated into Twitter’s Trending Topics widget in the U.S and U.K. </p>

 <p>The whole affair is a perfect example of context collapse, which generally occurs when a surfeit of different audiences occupy the same space, and a piece of information intended for one audience finds its way to another — usually an uncharitable one — which then reads said information in the worst possible faith (You can <a href="http://www.zephoria.org/thoughts/archives/2013/12/08/coining-context-collapse.html?utm_content=buffer5e438&amp;utm_source=buffer&amp;utm_medium=twitter&amp;utm_campaign=Buffer">read about the origins here</a> from scholar danah boyd). </p>

 <p>In this case, the collapse was substantially amplified by Twitter’s Trending widget, which took an anodyne opinion by a verified Twitter user and displayed it to millions of random people as if it was some kind of significant pop cultural event. “My imagined audience when I tweeted this was, ‘oh, we’re all at the bar and having this low stakes debate,” she told me recently. “In retrospect, that was totally naive to think anyone would have taken it that way.”</p>

 <p>The point of Twitter’s Trending Topics is ostensibly to surface significant news and Twitter commentary and invite others to ‘join the conversation.’ Left unsaid, of course, is that ‘the conversation’ at scale is complete garbage — an incomprehensible number of voices lecturing past each other. It didn’t matter how Hunt had intended the argument — whether it was cheeky fun or part of a high-minded indictment of the sci-fi horror industrial complex — it was amplified by others as ammunition to make whatever convenient point that interested parties wanted to make. As Ryan Broderick, who chronicles the internet in his excellent newsletter, <em><a href="https://www.garbageday.email/">Garbage Day</a></em>, noted during the incident, “is this really how a website should function?” </p>

 <p>“I think Trending Topics definitely made it much worse,” Hunt told me. “The choice to feature me had this effect of holding me up as a public figure in a way that would only encourage abuse. I was thinking about if it would’ve been a different situation if they framed it to reduce the focus on me. [As it was] it sort of validated an engagement with a quite flippant opinion that I held.”</p>

 <p>I should pause here to note that this isn’t a dramatic story about unrelenting harassment that ruined a life. But it’s noteworthy precisely because it’s so familiar: a perfect example of our broken social media dynamics, which feel ever-increasingly designed to dehumanize us, polarize us, and make us all miserable.</p>

 <p>When I spoke with Hunt recently, she was sanguine about the experience. She doesn’t want people to think she feels persecuted. “It feels wrong to even call what happened to me as harassment,” she said. “And yet when you look at the volume and frequency of how it comes in, it’s hard to talk about it as anything other than harassment. It’s just so many people engaging in bad faith — it just overwhelms you, and you start to see it as a reflection of who you are, and that’s really difficult.”</p>

 <p>What Hunt is describing is what it’s like to be Twitter’s main character, a seemingly daily occurrence in which huge chunks of the website and its disparate audiences (right wing trolls, bored journalists with huge followings, academics, sitting politicians) decide to focus on one person’s (usually interestingly problematic) tweet. They usually end up with names that only make sense if you’ve lost critical amounts of brain cells due to internet exposure. Example: “<a href="https://twitter.com/Tsusifec/status/1345950742029479937?ref_src=twsrc%5Etfw%7Ctwcamp%5Etweetembed%7Ctwterm%5E1345950742029479937%7Ctwgr%5E%7Ctwcon%5Es1_&amp;ref_url=https%3A%2F%2Fmashable.com%2Farticle%2Fbean-dad-apology-controversy-explainer%2F">Bean Dad</a>” or “<a href="https://news.knowyourmeme.com/news/dude-gets-flamed-on-twitter-for-not-realizing-shampoo-with-big-dog-on-it-is-dog-shampoo">Dog Shampoo Guy</a>.” It ends up creating spats that, when you take them out of context, are both amazing and slightly jarring in their absurdity. </p>

 <p>The entire phenomenon of “Twitter’s Main Character” functions as a master class in context collapse. Many Very Online Users approach this daily ritual as something between high school cafeteria gossip time and one of those Rage Rooms where you pay money to break things with a hammer. But what’s really happening is thousands of strong individual online identities colliding against each other. In Hunt’s case, it was horror and sci-fi fans and film buffs who felt it was important to weigh in as a way to maintain their particular identities. </p>

 <p>Once the initial buzz died down around her tweet, Hunt told me that a small handful of her interlocutors reached out to her in a way that made it seem like they saw the whole event as, well, a game. “It was this bizarre set of people thanking me for a good fun day on the internet and saying things like, ‘That was fun! Nice to argue about something low stakes for a change.’ I was like, ‘oh, glad you had fun but it was not that nice for me!’”</p>

 <p>“You’re repurposed as fodder for content generation in a way that’s just so dehumanizing,” Hunt continued. “I don’t really believe in cancel culture, I think it’s a platform failure.” </p>

 <p>I tend to agree with her. The ability to switch contexts with little friction on Twitter is part of what can make the entire experience feel spontaneous and exciting. It’s how you get celebrities interacting with random nerds. Fun! It’s also how a lot of vile harassment happens. Perhaps the most common form though is what happened to Hunt. Perhaps it doesn’t fit everyone’s definition of harassment, but it’s also categorically a deeply unpleasant experience. </p>

 <p>Twitter’s decision to prominently display Trending Topics is their attempt to highlight the joy of the former and turn it into a service. Twitter, after all, is a niche place and can be hard to navigate — sometimes the best nuggets come as threaded replies or from total randos. It’s mostly chaos. But Twitter is hellbent on the notion that this chaos can be harnessed in a safe, PG-13 kind of way. But that’s wishful thinking. Instead, it dredges up items meant for one audience and throws them into another. Note that the tweet that ended up really going viral wasn’t even Hunt’s poll but her eight word reply to a person with just 2,000 followers</p>

 <p>Twitter’s Trending Topics only seem only to exacerbate the site’s worst tendencies, often by highlighting the day’s (frequently trollish or bigoted) main character and increasing the opportunities for context collapse. And of course, none of this is new. For years, Twitter let Trending Topics devolve into a cesspool of misinformation. Conspiracy theorists and trolls have hijacked hashtags and manipulated trending topics to sow confusion and inject dangerous ideas into mainstream discourse.</p>

 <p>Recently, in an attempt to quash the rampant misinformation spreading via trends, the company changed its processes and hired a curation team to write neutral-sounding descriptions like the one that ended up heaping attention on Hunt. But even its current iteration feels like a tacit admission that the company has no idea how broken its platform is. In Hunt’s case, her tweet was trending in multiple spots on the topics board, sometimes the result of only a thousand or so tweets — hardly national news, but still treated that way. </p>

 <p>I’m not sure if I’d call this irresponsible behavior from the Twitter curation team, but it certainly feels like the company still doesn’t realize that one of the worst possible experiences on Twitter is actually to win the game and go viral. The company worked to provide tools for users being bombarded by harassment, it hasn’t been able to solve for what happens when users manage to break through and gain access to huge pools of attention. </p>

 <p>In this sense, Twitter <em>is</em> a game. Just one that you can’t win. Hunt felt this acutely during her stint as the main character. “One of the options available to me would have been to lock my account to make it stop, which would have been seen as some kind of concession that I couldn’t take the heat,” she told me. “So I decided to post through it,  and it looks like I’m somewhat pathetically trying to keep my head above water. I didn’t know what I could do to ride it out with dignity. It’s just a failure of the platform.”</p>

 <p>Meanwhile, the outrage mill — and the trending topics widget that feeds it — are out to seek more grist. The cycle doesn’t end. Just like Fox News cherrypicks random local news stories to fit its ideological narratives — often around undocumented immigrants, trans librarian story time, “out of control” social justice organizers — to foment the feeling that <em>this is happening all over</em>. The platforms have barraged us with psuedoevents that we are determined to treat as new. The process makes us miserable. The world, as whole, seems more claustrophobic, more oppressive, more enraged. </p>

 <p>Maybe the world really is that way. But if so, don’t we deserve a better way, a better service, a better <em>platform</em> from which to navigate and interpret it?  </p>

 <h2>Let’s Debunk A Thing That’s Not True </h2>

 <p>Ian Bremmer got in on the Galaxy Brain launch/Substack discourse on Monday (we love to see the enthusiasm, we really do!) and, in the spirit of this newsletter’s name, offered a smoldering take:</p>

 <p>Again, I love the enthusiasm as well as the compliment! But in the spirit of transparency I’d regret to inform you that this is wildly, laughably, incredibly (and somewhat heartbreakingly) far from the truth. Reminder: I didn’t take a fancy advance from Substack to come here. I’m building this thing without an existing email list. That means I am not installing any gold plated toilets in my 700 square foot bathroom (yet!). Galaxy Brain will likely be a slow burn, which means that we can grow this thing sustainably. Also, wow, what a great opportunity to become a paid subscriber!</p>

 <p>Before we go here are…</p>

 <h2>Two Videos That Reward Watching To The End</h2>

 <p>Come for this psychological torment:</p>

 <p>…And stay for the incredibly grim Flight Simulator training sesh:</p>

 <p>Ok! That’s it for today. One last bit of housekeeping: I’m trying to figure out what works best for these emails and I’d love the feedback. Should they be shorter and more frequent or longer and more spaced out in the week? I’ll play around but if something resonates or rubs you the wrong way, let me know. It’s your inbox after all.</p>
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  <p>Léo a 16 ans, lycéen, plutôt bon élève, plein de copains, sa vie n'a rien de particulier, ses parents sont plutôt cool, sa p'tite sœur énervante mais bon, c'est sa p'tite sœur..
 Il vit sa vie d'ado, rien qui ne sorte de l'ordinaire.</p>
 <p>Évidemment il fait des soirées avec ses potes, il dragouille gentiment et sort même actuellement avec la belle Noémie. Ça pourrait être celle avec qui il franchirait le pas, mais bon, Leo n'est pas pressé et attendra qu'elle soit prête.
 Ses parents lui font confiance,
 il gère bien au lycée, il n'y a pas de gros clash entre eux, le dialogue est facile.</p>
 <p>En soirée, Léo boit de l'alcool avec ses potes, c'est compliqué de pas suivre le mouvement, il y en a toujours un qui a réussi à ramener du sky, de la vodka, soit en piquant chez les parents,
 soit en l'achetant dans une supérette pas trop regardante sur l'âge des jeunes.
 Quelques joints tournent aussi, Léo a déjà fumé mais bof, c'est pas trop son délire.</p>
 <p>L'alcool en revanche, il aime bien la sensation après quelques gorgées, la chaleur dans la gorge et la détente..
 Il s'est déjà pris une cuite ou deux, pas facile d'arrêter avant le verre de trop, surtout avec les jeux rigolos qu'ils font entre potes.
 Le dernier c'était un duel blind test, le dernier à trouver le titre de la chanson devait boire un shot de vodka.</p>
 <p>Ce soir-là, Léo est chez un de ses potes, l'ambiance est bonne, on se marre, on flirte avec les filles, Noémie est là, on danse et on multiplie les selfies et vidéos FB.
 Un copain a réussi à trouver de la vodka, il va y avoir revanche au blind test !
 Léo va boire beaucoup ce soir-là, il a envie de lâcher un peu prise, lui le bon élève, l'ado sans problème.</p>
 <p>Il enchaîne les verres de vodka, mélangés à la Redbull, ça passe tout seul.
 En fin de soirée, Léo ne tient plus trop debout, ça tangue de partout, il est temps de rentrer.
 Noémie le raccompagne à pied, il habite dans le même lotissement que son pote qui l'avait invité, c'est pratique. Elle a un peu de mal à le diriger mais il tient à peu près sur ses jambes et trouve le moyen de rigoler, de lui dire qu'il l'aime, ça la fait sourire.</p>
 <p>Arrivés chez lui, Léo embrasse Noémie, lui promet de l'appeler demain et rentre dans la maison, en évitant de faire trop de bruit pour pas réveiller ses parents et sa sœur.
 Il arrive sans trop d'encombres dans sa chambre et s'affale dans le lit, sans même se déshabiller.</p>
 <p>C'est sa petite sœur de 8 ans qui, en rentrant dans sa chambre le lendemain vers 10h pour le réveiller en sautant sur son lit, comme elle a l'habitude de faire, découvrira son frère tout blanc, immobile, avec des traces jaunes autour de la bouche et sur les draps.
 Elle appellera sa mère en criant très fort, paniquée par l'image qu'elle avait devant ses yeux d'enfant et qu'elle n'oubliera jamais.
 Sa mère arrivera et hurlera à son tour, avant d'appeler en larmes le Samu.
 Le Samu est arrivé très vite, a tenté l'impossible mais Léo était mort depuis longtemps.</p>
 <p>Trop d'alcool, son corps ne pouvait supporter, il avait vomi mais inconscient, totalement assommé par la vodka.
 Léo dormait allongé, il s'est tout simplement étouffé avec son propre vomi.
 J'ai reçu l'appel le dimanche matin. J'entends encore les tremblements dans la voix de l'enquêteur. Je le connaissais bien, ça faisait 4 ans qu'on bossait ensemble. Je savais qu'il était lui-même père d'un ado de l'âge de Léo.
 Comment ne pas penser que ça aurait pu être son fils?</p>
 <p>Il m'a raconté le désespoir des parents, la mère en état de choc, le père en larmes, la sœur qui n'arrêtait pas de demander à son grand frère de se réveiller.
 On est habitué aux appels durs, quand on est au Parquet, mais celui-ci restera à jamais gravé en moi.
 Parlez à vos enfants, faites leur lire ce thread au besoin, expliquez à quel point l'alcool peut être dangereux et pas seulement sur la route comme on peut l'imaginer.</p>
 <p>Dites-leur de ne jamais prendre à la légère le copain bourré qui s'endort dans un coin
 De ne pas plaisanter sur untel qui était "totalement déchiré" et qui doit bien dormir ce matin.
 Précisez à quel point Noémie est aussi brisée et culpabilisera toute sa vie de ne pas s'être inquiétée plus que ça de l'état de Léo.
 Léo n'était pas un cas isolé, j'ai eu des dizaines d'appel "découverte de cadavre" pour des personnes, jeunes et moins jeunes, mortes d'une asphyxie alcoolique.
 Tous aussi révoltant les uns que les autres.
 Mais peu aussi bouleversant que celui lié au jeune Léo. </p>
 </article>


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--- a/cache/2021/c967133574fd80e7f95ef901114b5385/index.md
+++ b/cache/2021/c967133574fd80e7f95ef901114b5385/index.md
@@ -0,0 +1,51 @@
 title: Thread by @juge_dread on Thread Reader App
 url: https://threadreaderapp.com/thread/1382057588527931393.html
 hash_url: c967133574fd80e7f95ef901114b5385


 Léo a 16 ans, lycéen, plutôt bon élève, plein de copains, sa vie n'a rien de particulier, ses parents sont plutôt cool, sa p'tite sœur énervante mais bon, c'est sa p'tite sœur..
 Il vit sa vie d'ado, rien qui ne sorte de l'ordinaire.

 Évidemment il fait des soirées avec ses potes, il dragouille gentiment et sort même actuellement avec la belle Noémie. Ça pourrait être celle avec qui il franchirait le pas, mais bon, Leo n'est pas pressé et attendra qu'elle soit prête.
 Ses parents lui font confiance,
 il gère bien au lycée, il n'y a pas de gros clash entre eux, le dialogue est facile.

 En soirée, Léo boit de l'alcool avec ses potes, c'est compliqué de pas suivre le mouvement, il y en a toujours un qui a réussi à ramener du sky, de la vodka, soit en piquant chez les parents,
 soit en l'achetant dans une supérette pas trop regardante sur l'âge des jeunes.
 Quelques joints tournent aussi, Léo a déjà fumé mais bof, c'est pas trop son délire.

 L'alcool en revanche, il aime bien la sensation après quelques gorgées, la chaleur dans la gorge et la détente..
 Il s'est déjà pris une cuite ou deux, pas facile d'arrêter avant le verre de trop, surtout avec les jeux rigolos qu'ils font entre potes.
 Le dernier c'était un duel blind test, le dernier à trouver le titre de la chanson devait boire un shot de vodka.

 Ce soir-là, Léo est chez un de ses potes, l'ambiance est bonne, on se marre, on flirte avec les filles, Noémie est là, on danse et on multiplie les selfies et vidéos FB.
 Un copain a réussi à trouver de la vodka, il va y avoir revanche au blind test !
 Léo va boire beaucoup ce soir-là, il a envie de lâcher un peu prise, lui le bon élève, l'ado sans problème.

 Il enchaîne les verres de vodka, mélangés à la Redbull, ça passe tout seul.
 En fin de soirée, Léo ne tient plus trop debout, ça tangue de partout, il est temps de rentrer.
 Noémie le raccompagne à pied, il habite dans le même lotissement que son pote qui l'avait invité, c'est pratique. Elle a un peu de mal à le diriger mais il tient à peu près sur ses jambes et trouve le moyen de rigoler, de lui dire qu'il l'aime, ça la fait sourire.

 Arrivés chez lui, Léo embrasse Noémie, lui promet de l'appeler demain et rentre dans la maison, en évitant de faire trop de bruit pour pas réveiller ses parents et sa sœur.
 Il arrive sans trop d'encombres dans sa chambre et s'affale dans le lit, sans même se déshabiller.

 C'est sa petite sœur de 8 ans qui, en rentrant dans sa chambre le lendemain vers 10h pour le réveiller en sautant sur son lit, comme elle a l'habitude de faire, découvrira son frère tout blanc, immobile, avec des traces jaunes autour de la bouche et sur les draps.
 Elle appellera sa mère en criant très fort, paniquée par l'image qu'elle avait devant ses yeux d'enfant et qu'elle n'oubliera jamais.
 Sa mère arrivera et hurlera à son tour, avant d'appeler en larmes le Samu.
 Le Samu est arrivé très vite, a tenté l'impossible mais Léo était mort depuis longtemps.

 Trop d'alcool, son corps ne pouvait supporter, il avait vomi mais inconscient, totalement assommé par la vodka.
 Léo dormait allongé, il s'est tout simplement étouffé avec son propre vomi.
 J'ai reçu l'appel le dimanche matin. J'entends encore les tremblements dans la voix de l'enquêteur. Je le connaissais bien, ça faisait 4 ans qu'on bossait ensemble. Je savais qu'il était lui-même père d'un ado de l'âge de Léo.
 Comment ne pas penser que ça aurait pu être son fils?

 Il m'a raconté le désespoir des parents, la mère en état de choc, le père en larmes, la sœur qui n'arrêtait pas de demander à son grand frère de se réveiller.
 On est habitué aux appels durs, quand on est au Parquet, mais celui-ci restera à jamais gravé en moi.
 Parlez à vos enfants, faites leur lire ce thread au besoin, expliquez à quel point l'alcool peut être dangereux et pas seulement sur la route comme on peut l'imaginer.

 Dites-leur de ne jamais prendre à la légère le copain bourré qui s'endort dans un coin
 De ne pas plaisanter sur untel qui était "totalement déchiré" et qui doit bien dormir ce matin.
 Précisez à quel point Noémie est aussi brisée et culpabilisera toute sa vie de ne pas s'être inquiétée plus que ça de l'état de Léo.
 Léo n'était pas un cas isolé, j'ai eu des dizaines d'appel "découverte de cadavre" pour des personnes, jeunes et moins jeunes, mortes d'une asphyxie alcoolique.
 Tous aussi révoltant les uns que les autres.
 Mais peu aussi bouleversant que celui lié au jeune Léo. 
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@@ -165,6 +165,8 @@
      
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@@ -173,6 +175,8 @@
      
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@@ -193,6 +197,8 @@
      
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@@ -219,6 +225,8 @@
      
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