History is the only honest psychology lab.
Long before TikTok, long before video games, long before rock and roll, adults were convinced that the younger generation was uniquely, catastrophically lost. The historical record disagrees — loudly, repeatedly, and across every civilization that ever kept one. What the annals actually show is not a crisis of youth, but a reflex of age.
Mar 12, 2026
The Roman Republic did not collapse because its citizens became uniquely irrational. It collapsed, in part, because sophisticated actors learned to weaponize the cognitive vulnerabilities that all humans carry. The mechanisms documented by platform researchers in the 2010s were already running at full speed in the Forum two thousand years ago.
Mar 12, 2026
In the 1840s, a Hungarian physician named Ignaz Semmelweis proved that doctors were killing their patients — and was destroyed professionally for saying so. The mechanism that buried his evidence is not a relic of Victorian medicine. It is running, largely unchanged, through every field where new findings threaten established careers.
Mar 12, 2026
Few websites have shaped — and then lost — the internet's cultural conversation quite like Digg. From its early dominance as the web's premier social news aggregator to its spectacular collapse and subsequent reinventions, the story of Digg is one of the most instructive cautionary tales in Silicon Valley history.
Mar 12, 2026