The depth of despair: sites that force you to watch ads before trailers — which are already ads, for movies — which have now become content. WE ARE PRODUCT.

Plenty have complained “they give too much away”; and yet people click, watch, and share new movie trailers like crazy. At The Ringer, they’ve had enough.

Stop watching trailers. I don’t mean: If it makes you mad, you should avoid it! I mean: Stop watching trailers. You’re buying a broken product. Trailers are free? No, you’re paying to see a movie, and when you watch a trailer, you are decreasing the value of your ticket. You’re cheapening the experience. Everything costs something. Trailers are ruining good movies, and they are making average movies unwatchable. They are bad and they need to be sent back to the factory.

Framing it as a consumer value proposition feels like a new angle to discuss this from, so I had to offer it up for comment.

If the thing you enjoy and pay for is the movie, why diminish that with trailers?

What would be a better way to find out about and get you excited for a movie that diminishes that joy less?

We can’t blame one crazy man for a system helpless to stop him.

Only a fool would attempt to summarize an entire Atlantic cover story on “How American Politics Went Insane” in a sentence or two. You should read (or at least skim) the full piece; even if you don’t agree, it’s eye-opening.

But one of the key premises does jump out as counterintuitive and worth considering: when the parties were more entrenched, hierarchical, and in a way, closed off, they actually did a better job of serving the larger goal of governing.

Chaos syndrome is a chronic decline in the political system’s capacity for self-organization. It begins with the weakening of the institutions and brokers—political parties, career politicians, and congressional leaders and committees—that have historically held politicians accountable to one another and prevented everyone in the system from pursuing naked self-interest all the time. As these intermediaries’ influence fades, politicians, activists, and voters all become more individualistic and unaccountable. The system atomizes. Chaos becomes the new normal—both in campaigns and in the government itself.

Which is all very counter to what we think of as our modern values of transparency, equality, free speech, and other purely democratic principles. Provocative stuff. Maybe there was more value in some of the old-fashioned stuff than we realized as both the right and left were tearing it down?

Does a functioning democracy (or representative republic) require at least a little bit of hierarchy and closed-door, back room party power brokering to function?

Looking at today’s political chaos, how might we get back to that better working model, or alternately, push through this chaos into something new and improved?

At least constant headphone wearers can still look down on constant walk-and-texters.

I wear headphones constantly. At work, to tune out office noise. Almost 100% of public transportation or commute time. While running errands. I’m an avid podcast listener so it has to be done, only so many hours in the day.

Amanda Petrusich in The New Yorker asks if our personal audio bubbles are making us more antisocial:

Certainly, headphones are an obvious method of exercising autonomy, control—choosing what you’ll hear and when, rather than gamely enduring whatever the environment might inflict upon you. In that way, they are defensive; users insist upon privacy (you can’t hear what I hear, and I can’t hear you) in otherwise lawless and unpredictable spaces. Should we think of headphones, then, as just another emblem of catastrophic social decline, a tool that edges us even deeper into narcissism, solipsism, vast unsociability?

And then goes on to ask if the way we’re listening to music — mostly through headphones — is affecting the kind of music that’s made, or the way it’s made, but that question is way harder to address with evidence, and way less interesting on a personal level. So:

Are headphones making you more antisocial? How much or how often?

Is that a net positive or negative for society? What are the benefits or drawbacks?

Read this post, have a conversation, or don’t. It’s really not up to you anyway.

Want to get really philosophical? How about having the argument to end (or begin) all arguments: Do we really even have free will?

For context, there is a growing amount of real neuroscience that says… we kind of don’t. Or it would seem that way, based on the fact that our bodies seem to act before our “thoughts” are enacted in our brains. And that’s only one piece of the puzzle. This Atlantic article goes into more of the science:

The contemporary scientific image of human behavior is one of neurons firing, causing other neurons to fire, causing our thoughts and deeds, in an unbroken chain that stretches back to our birth and beyond. In principle, we are therefore completely predictable. If we could understand any individual’s brain architecture and chemistry well enough, we could, in theory, predict that individual’s response to any given stimulus with 100 percent accuracy.

…

Yes, indeed. When asked to take a math test, with cheating made easy, the group primed to see free will as illusory proved more likely to take an illicit peek at the answers. When given an opportunity to steal—to take more money than they were due from an envelope of $1 coins—those whose belief in free will had been undermined pilfered more. On a range of measures, Vohs told me, she and Schooler found that “people who are induced to believe less in free will are more likely to behave immorally.”

…but also makes plain that to a certain degree, the same scientists who are disproving free will are in a way saying, “please do not act as if this truth we’re discovering is actually true.” They know that if we throw the premise of will out the window, life fundamentally changes, not necessarily for the better.

If your life is a series of reactions to the world that aren’t really up to you, can you be blamed for doing wrong?

How would thinking of the world this way totally rearrange how we think about people who commit crimes, or are just jerks? Or of good people who are kind and generous?

Angry? Upset? Press X to axe your ex.

Here’s a topic I probably wouldn’t have thought about until reading this excellent Vice article. Apparently, there is a cohort of video game players who like to digitally recreate the ex- or current girlfriends or boyfriends in the video games they play. As you can imagine, this can be for both good and bad reasons…

It would seem designing and controlling avatars that resemble significant others past and present can add a special twist to the gaming experience. For some, using an avatar of their lover, or at least interacting with their digital incarnation, is a benign way to get more into a game, or even add a fun dynamic to their real-life romance. Others, it turns out—the majority of whom are men—enjoy the thrill of subduing and controlling avatars of lovers past.

And the article deals only with how people are doing this in today’s video games, using existing technology. One can only imagine how this ethical dilemma gets more complicated in a more photo-realistic, VR-enabled future… So:

Is it morally wrong to recreate real people in your virtual world? Where’s the line of what’s ok and what isn’t?

How does this change once it’s more than just a character you play in an RPG? What if it’s creating a virtual simulation of someone without their permission?

How does the same question extend to celebrities, for example? Once we have the technology to go on virtual dates with digital copies of famous people, what are the ramifications?