Astral Codex Ten

2021

3 min read

2021

Article

2021 is a recurring concept in the Astral Codex Ten archive, appearing 2 times across 2 issues between July 28, 2023 and October 29, 2024. The archive places it in contexts such as “When people were trying to get Substack cancelled back in 2021”; “The current retail theft wave started in the summer of 2021”. It most often appears alongside 2010, 2014, 2016.

Metadata

  • Category: Concepts
  • Mention count: 2
  • Issue count: 2
  • First seen: July 28, 2023
  • Last seen: October 29, 2024

Appears In

Source Context

Recovered passages from the original issue text. When the raw archive preserved outbound links inside the source passage, they are listed directly under the quote.

Bad Definitions Of "Democracy" And "Accountability" Shade Into Totalitarianism
July 28, 2023 · Original source
When people were trying to get Substack cancelled back in 2021, one common complaint was that, absent a boss who could fire them if they said politically incorrect things, Substack writers had no “accountability”. Here it’s painfully obvious that “accountability” is opposed to people retaining ownership of their own output, to them working for themselves instead of a megacorporation, and to them keeping control of their own lives. A society where every writer has “accountability” is totalitarian - or, if you don’t like that word for something that might lock in merely corporate rather than government control, at least it would lack a flourishing private sphere.
Inline links: had no “accountability”
The Case Against California Proposition 36
October 29, 2024 · Original source
They found an increase in property crimes after 2015, but it was almost all car break-ins, which for some reason seemed especially elastic to the sentencing reform (we’ll come back to these later). Shoplifting may have gone up slightly, but this lasted less than a year – by 2016, rates were back down to 2010 levels. Then they continued to gradually decline until early 2020, when pandemic lockdowns made them really plummet. The current retail theft wave started in the summer of 2021, after the economy re-opened. I'm not going to weigh in on the root cause – it could be a functional police strike in response to the George Floyd protests, lockdown-induced dysfunction that never got better, the decrease in police staffing across California over the past few years, or maybe some combination of the above. But something about the pandemic era emboldened criminals or broke policing. Prop 47 is not to blame.
Inline links: started in the summer of 2021, police staffing