Hate is almost never talked about as appropriate, healthy, or necessary in liberal-democratic society. For conservatives, liberals, and socialists alike, hate itself is the thing to reject, uproot, defeat, and cast out of the soul. Yet anti-hate ideology doesn’t seem to involve targeting its root causes and points of production, nor does it address the inevitability of or the demand — the need — for hate in a class society.
| Sophie Lewis, Hello to My Haters: Tucker Carlson’s Mob and Me
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Perhaps because I was raised by irreligious parents, outside a 10-commandments-based moral system, I have always been able to hate deeply, and without remorse.
Now, in 2025, as authoritarianism is rising, companies are squelching dissent in the ranks, and illegal wars are raging across the globe, perhaps hatred is a sensible response, or at least inevitable.
Lewis aligns with that:
I hate all manner of things in this world, and people, too—though mainly things people do. To be honest, it hadn’t even occurred to me to feel embarrassed about this hatred. I’d cultivated it, and felt actively encouraged in it, for instance, whenever I encountered passages by militant Italian Marxists such as Mario Tronti, who suggests that hatred of capitalism is a necessary engine of love for humanity and life and that, without it, we would go mad.
The Weekly Harvest
The largest part of my work as a newsletter writer is reading, followed by thinking about what I’ve read. I read voraciously, nearly every day, annotating, filing, aggregating by topic and author. The writing comes last, and not everything finds its way into my writing, even stories that are worth reading.
I have a history of making promises I don’t keep, here at workfutures.io. But I plan to try a new scheme: I will share a weekly post — The Weekly Harvest — composed primarily of links to things I’ve recently read that should be of interest to you. And this post will be accessible just to paid subscribers.
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Nostalgia, nostalgia, everywhere.
For some reason, nostalgia is surfacing all over the place.
In Gen Z-ers Are Nostalgic for a Time Before They Were Born, Clay Routledge writes fluff piece, aside from interesting survey results [emphasis mine]:
A 2023 survey conducted by the Harris Poll in partnership with my research team found that 80 percent of Gen Z adults — that is, those born after 1997 — were worried that their generation was too dependent on technology. Seventy-five percent were concerned about social media’s impact on young people’s mental health, and 58 percent said that new technologies were more likely to drive people apart than bring them together.
As a researcher who specializes in the psychology of nostalgia, I was struck by one finding in particular: Sixty percent of Gen Z adults said that they wished they could return to a time before everyone was “plugged in.”
That, of course, would involve returning to a time that largely predates their own lives.
The subsequent analysis is amazingly positivist, all about channeling Gen Z nostalgia for a pre-digital past into some rose-tinted vibes about the future and feel-good. But nationalistic nostalgia for an imagined golden age is part of fascism, not just nerds playing board games or listening to Miles Davis on vinyl.
But this does raise a good question: can you be nostalgic for a time you never experienced? As Alastair Bonnet put it, people may be 'longing for a past that never was'. (Longing for a Past That Never Was, a review of Zygmunt Bauman's Retrotopia.)
As Svetlana Boym wrote in The Future of Nostalgia,
Survivors of the twentieth century, we are all nostalgic for a time when we were not nostalgic. But there seems no way back.
Now, that becomes watered down to ‘a time when we were not brainwashed by smartphones’.
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