Henry Farrell

“Personal website”

“Inside every hungry entrepreneur, there is a bloated monopolist struggling to get out.”

“There is a famous Mario Cuomo dictum that a politician should campaign in poetry and govern in prose. Donald Trump both campaigns and governs in the language of shitposts. His great tragedy is that this is all that he is capable of doing.”

“Instead of a pluralistic realm to be protected or left alone, [conservatives] see a “cathedral” of left ideology and argue that universities, non-profits, even multinational corporations are redoubts of the enemy that must be taken by storm. This is dingbat Gramscianism, as filtered through the mud-encrusted sieve of Curtis Yarvin Thought.”

“We can blame the English language for a lot of things. But it is never going to become conscious and decide to turn us into paperclips. LLMs don’t have personalities, but compressions of genre that can support a mixture of ‘choose your own adventure’ with role-playing game. It is very important not to confuse the latter for the former.”

“The authoritarian who wants to build a ruling coalition needs not only to make their success seem like a fait accompli. She also needs to persuade others that they will prosper rather than suffer from joining. The aspiring authoritarian needs to persuade allies that she (and they) will predate on outgroups, and that she will not predate on the allies themselves.”

“Loose canons can give rise to loose cannons: the intellectual consequences of e.g. Atlas Shrugged, Zero to One, and The Sovereign Individual have mostly been pernicious.”