TheBetter Argument

The Better Argument — A magazine to think about.

A magazine to think about.

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?
Kayla-Megan Burns and Tilda Nilsson13 min read

Does AI Evolution Herald Human Devolution?

The machines we dreamed of always kept their distance. They hovered, they whirred, they did the dishes — but they stayed on the other side of the room, chrome and separate, things we could switch off and walk away from. The technology that actually arrived provides no such distance. It does not sit across from us; it watches us, learns us, and reaches steadily inward — first into how we behave, then into what we want, and at last toward the parts of us we cannot consciously control. The question is no longer what our machines will do for us. It is whether, by the end of it, any part of the self is left that they have not touched.

Popular Armageddon
Maxwell Norman15 min read

Popular Armageddon

With nearly a third of North American respondents expecting the world to “end” in some way during their lifetime, and with over half of young respondents internationally believing humanity is doomed, we must take apocalyptic nihilism seriously as a philosophical and sociopolitical force. The days of frothy-mouthed street preachers proclaiming “THE END IS NIGH” from crosswalk corners lay behind us. Even in the highest echelons of government, the specter of Armageddon justifies policy and animates ideology. How did we get here? What does it mean for our future that we cannot imagine it without death, destruction, and decay?

Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)
Rowan Foxley22 min read

Scroll: 11 Media Missives; Only Concept, No Meaning (No Social Media, Not Now, Not Ever)

The rising dissemination of literary-based and philosophic-based social media accounts present a uniquely problematic crossroads for members of the literary community. On one path we find eyeballs, potential: a path to exposure for non-readers, for blossoming writers and artists; for former readers to become reinvigorated. On the other path we find addiction, deferment: Look that quote up down the road, finish that essay down the road, bookmark that clip for later, read later, paint later. Right now I need to Scroll.

More Articles

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Technology

Artificial Intelligence has a Meeseeks Problem

Make no mistake, AI agents are the newest species on Earth, and we have attempted to replace millions of years of natural selection with a few months of internet-based human history training, and then unleashed them into the world. In a rush to be first, and in the spirit of competition, AI companies have inadvertently created the Meeseeks Problem, and it’s not a problem that’s going away any time soon, but unlike climate change, this is a problem that could end human civilization in less time than it takes to say, “Maybe we should pump the brakes on this AI thing.”

Roli Rivelino20 min read
Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

Technology

Seeing through Memory: The Perceptual Grafting of New Technical Objects

When an individual begins grafting a new object into their experience, the first thing that happens is a recall. The individual, encountering something novel and unfamiliar, has no recourse other than to appeal to memory and to supplement the present perception with already experienced images of other objects and actions. We say here that the process of recall happens before the process of direct perception, counter to what most people would think.

Benjamin Scott15 min read
What the Romantics Can Still Teach Us About Attention

Culture

What the Romantics Can Still Teach Us About Attention

Digital environments alter those conditions. Platforms are structured around interruption, compression, and rapid shifts in focus. These habits train the mind to scan quickly and move between stimuli at speed. Romantic writing provides a language for this change because its poems and prose depend on accumulation, tonal shifts, and relations among parts. Reading Wordsworth or Keats requires the mind to remain with an experience long enough to perceive its internal shape. That practice develops attention as a condition of judgment.

Kevin Lopez Cruz4 min read
Annals of Obscenity: Art, The Person

Culture

Annals of Obscenity: Art, The Person

In February 1921, John Quinn defended The Little Review in court against obscenity charges. As part of his defense, Quinn presented three experts in literature to explain the merits of Ulysses to the drowsy judges. But was it the compliment Philip Moeller of the Theatre Guild made it out to be when he, in his courtroom attestation to its merits, used Freud to explain Ulysses? Freud, after all, is useful notably for making sense of the incomprehensible ravings of madmen. And Moeller, like Freud, made himself sound like one, too, in the process of explaining; so much so that one of the white-haired judges requested that he “speak in a language that the court could understand.”

Jack Schaaf13 min read

Let's Make Sense of a Rapidly Changing World, Together.

The Better Argument is a community of thinkers committed to exploring the ideas that shape our world through rigorous dialogue, classical wisdom, and intellectual courage.

Preorder Issue 1