标签：the masses

The whole world has erupted into a shouting match—what right does a museum have to step in and play peacemaker?

Culture & Public Commentary2026.05.17
The whole world has erupted into a shouting match—what right does a museum have to step in and play peacemaker?
Published in Science Times (2026-05-15, p. 4, Culture); here is the original draft. You may be scrolling on your phone at this very moment, have seen this astonishing title, and clicked in to have a look. If you saw this article in the printed newspaper, that is quite rare, but even then you must have first noticed these eye-catching headlines. In this age of mass media, this age of information explosion, this age of the attention economy, the foremost question for information providers is not whether the content can withstand scrutiny from every angle, or whether it can withstand the test of time, or whether the author has deep accumulations,…
culture history commentary tradition
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2026年5月17日
Distribution According to Enjoyment: How to Break the Logic of Involution in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

AI & Scholarship2026.03.30
Distribution According to Enjoyment: How to Break the Logic of Involution in the Age of Artificial Intelligence
The Cycle of Involution and Unemployment Could We Really Work Only Two Days a Week? As artificial intelligence keeps iterating, a new wave of “raising lobsters” (OpenClaw) has recently swept in: we can give AI permissions, let it act on its own, operate computers like a human, scrape data, write papers, build websites, make trades—there is nothing it cannot do. Although at present it still does not seem easy to train a truly labor-replacing “lobster,” the sense of crisis among wage workers is already hitting us head-on. One lovely fantasy might be this: wage workers go on working as usual and collecting their salaries, but hand all the actual labor…
everyday life culture freedom AI
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2026年3月30日
Will AI Restructure the History of Science?

AI & Scholarship2026.03.24
Will AI Restructure the History of Science?
Published in Xinrui Weekly, issue 162; the original draft is posted here. 1 AI accelerates iteration: from assistant to master I received this commissioned piece in September, but I procrastinated until December to write it. Yet that delay also meant I waited for the November 18 release of Gemini 3.0, a milestone that marks the restructuring of academic research by AI as having entered the present continuous tense. It is not that Gemini 3.0 overturned my previous views; rather, many of the “AI will…” statements I had discussed before now have to be rewritten as “AI can already…”. The previous major milestone was probably at the beginning of 2025, when…
philosophy history of science scholarship history
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2026年3月24日
On the Left’s Self-dug Grave

Culture & Public Commentary2025.02.24
On the Left’s Self-dug Grave
https://x.com/epr510/status/1893851683534643208 (Reflections on watching the right rise in the German election) What’s funny is that many left-wing intellectuals earlier all thought the enemy was Trump, and that once this oddity had run its course, everything would be fine. But the facts have shown that the left’s collapse is global; Trump’s rise is not an exception but a trend. I think many people still haven’t figured this out even now. Of course, the left’s collapse has something to do with the general spirit of the age, but fundamentally it is still an internal problem. In short, left-wing parties themselves abandoned left-wing positions. So the essence of the left’s defeat is not…
culture politics equality the masses
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2025年2月24日
Do We Still Need to “Read” in the Age of “Swiping”?

AI & Scholarship2023.04.21
Do We Still Need to “Read” in the Age of “Swiping”?
The original title of this article was “Does the Age of Artificial Intelligence Still Need Reading?”, published in China Science Daily (2023-04-21, p. 1, News, the title was changed to “Do We Still Need to ‘Read’ in the Age of ‘Scrolling’?”》, and on the WeChat public account the title was changed again to Just for This Reason, in the Age of “Scrolling” We Still Need to “Read”. I myself think the newspaper title is better, so I use it here. What follows is the original draft; it was lightly polished for publication, and when citing it, please use the newspaper version. World Book Day is coming again soon. Books are…
culture scholarship freedom AI
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2023年4月21日
Rebuilding the Threshold—Web3 Is Indeed a Kind of Regression into “Enclosure and Self-Exaltation,” but That May Not Necessarily Be a Bad Thing

Culture & Public Commentary2022.01.30
Rebuilding the Threshold—Web3 Is Indeed a Kind of Regression into “Enclosure and Self-Exaltation,” but That May Not Necessarily Be a Bad Thing
Yesterday, the floor price of the Bored Ape NFT broke through 100 Ether (ETH), and now it is 106.9 (one Ether is currently worth more than 2,500 U.S. dollars), which means a single Bored Ape is worth roughly one to two million yuan. “Floor price” refers to the cheapest ape you can buy right now if you rush in and make the purchase immediately. Because every ape looks different, and the rarity of their various attributes also differs, many people choose to buy at a higher price point; for example, Justin Bieber today spent 500 ETH to buy one. The full name of Bored Ape is “Bored Ape Yacht Club”…
culture Web3 blockchain decentralization
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2022年1月30日
On “What Is Technology?”: An Interview with China Science Daily

Life & Notes2021.01.22
On “What Is Technology?”: An Interview with China Science Daily
Thanks to China Science Daily, which usually invites me to write book reviews; this time, since it was my own book, we simply did an interview. Zhang Wenjing did a very good job with both the interviewing and the editing—it’s just that the headline is a bit over the top (though there was nothing to be done about that). The finished piece can be found on ScienceNet; here I am posting my original written answers. First, could you talk about how the book What Is Technology came to be? In the opening sentence you say, “We are now in a ‘technological age.’” In a technological age, what is the background…
technology media history of technology knowledge
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2021年1月22日
Freedom of Speech and Social Media

Culture & Public Commentary2021.01.11
Freedom of Speech and Social Media
This article was written spontaneously, as a stream-of-consciousness piece prompted by my own feelings; it is shared only on Suixuan, and please do not reprint it. Trump’s social media accounts being banned set off a discussion about freedom of speech. Aside from the arguments that have never reached consensus, today’s discussions of freedom of speech do in fact involve some new conditions that have only emerged in the past decade or so. This is the rise of large social media websites. They have carved out an autonomous space in the network world, and in many cases have replaced what used to be understood as public space. Whether, and how, the…
culture freedom media commentary
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2021年1月11日
The Responsibility of Intellectuals

Enlightenment & the Spirit of Freedom2019.08.22
The Responsibility of Intellectuals
Note: This article may not be reproduced; it is for Suixuan readers only. This article was written out of a sudden impulse. I had originally meant to dash off two paragraphs in one go, but the more I wrote, the more awkward it felt; in the end, I not only wrecked the thing, I couldn’t keep going either. But since, before I knew it, I had written more than seven thousand characters, I might as well post it. For archive purposes only. Emotions or attitudes, like thoughts and speech, are part of each person’s “freedom.” I have the right to worry myself sick, and I also have the right…
philosophy culture autobiography public sphere
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2019年8月22日
The “Two Cultures” Debate Is Long Outdated

Culture & Public Commentary2019.07.02
The “Two Cultures” Debate Is Long Outdated
Published in China Science Daily (2019-06-28, p. 5, Culture) In 1959, the British writer C. P. Snow proposed the thesis of the “two cultures” in a lecture, sparking intense debate. Even sixty years later, the topic is still with us, and seems not to have gone out of date. But I want to put forward a seemingly out-of-place claim: the two-cultures debate is already passé, and there is not much point in still fretting over the issue Snow raised. First, let us return to the context of the time and see just what split between what two cultures Snow was actually talking about. Nowadays, when many people talk about…
culture science sociology intellectuals
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2019年7月2日