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Board games aren't an old-fashioned hobby. The real rise happened after 1995. The way they rose runs against everything this era pushes — slow, in person, faces required, full evenings required, real strategy and thinking required. They don't cure boredom. They cure loneliness and attention collapse.
The Soviet Union fell, Eastern Europe collapsed, Cambodia became a punchline — but every failed communist experiment happened in the material domain, never once in the cognitive domain. As it happens, in the 21st century there's a community with no political label that quietly built the "association of free individuals" the Communist Manifesto described — using nothing but cognitive labor. It's called GitHub.
Not melodrama. Data. From Hartmut Rosa's social acceleration, to Byung-Chul Han's achievement subject, to the 35-year-old cliff, to short-form video physically rewiring the brain — what this generation is carrying is an engineered, optimized age of addiction.
The old order is collapsing. The people most thoroughly trained by it are the ones least willing to let go.
Xu Jiyu is worth revisiting not as a persecuted prophet, but as a writer who used China's existing political language to understand a suddenly larger world.
The Bamboo Annals preserves accounts of early China that differ from received classics, but its complicated textual history means it cannot simply be treated as hidden truth.
Features may be easy to copy without making technology worthless; a small team has to turn engineering into workflow, distribution, trust, and the ability to keep delivering.
The stronger AI gets, the more people crave real connection. As generative AI makes content cheap, community, emotion, and human texture are becoming the scarcest resources.
Financial independence is not simply refusing parental support; it is renegotiating help, boundaries, and each person's freedom to choose.
AI can generate a great deal of code, but how much we need to understand and verify depends on the cost of failure—not on who wrote it.
