@akkartik personally, being adaptable and adaptive are great virtues. but socially, politically, i think it’s a mistake to presume people are as adaptable as you think it’d be in their own and our collective interest to be. 1/

@akkartik one of the great errors of the neoliberal experiment is i think was a presumption that people would just retrain or move to opportunity, make whatever changes it takes to maximize earnings. 2/

@akkartik in fact, even when the economic basis for their communities disappear, many people hold fast and try to preserve them. when the skills they have relied upon for decades become worthless, they don’t cheerfully start over to take a nurse’s assistant certificate at the community college. 3/

@akkartik one way to understand a lot of political controversy is as battles over who has to adjust as the world inevitably changes, and who gets to live just in the way they have become accustomed. it’s the latter, not the adapters, who represent the winners in politics. 4/

@akkartik descriptively, thinking about eg social networks, i think you’ll prove more correct predicting that most users are guided by inertia, rather than presuming the sane dynamism you might and should cultivate in yourself. /fin