Ran Prieur
ranprieur.com · clipped 2026-05-06
Preview clipped from the web into my Obsidian — read the full piece at the source.
Let us send men on a great migration: set free, purged of the commerce-made manners and fat prosperity of America; ragged with the beggar’s pride, starving with the crusader’s fervor. Better to die of plague on the highroad seeing the angels, than live on iron streets playing checkers with dollars ever and ever.
-Vachel Lindsay, War Bulletin #3 (1909)
May 5. Quick thought on fakery. For years everyone has been saying that when AI images can’t be told from real images, there will be lots of fake photos and videos that people take as real. I haven’t seen this happen yet in any important way. Making convincing fake imagery is hard, and people who really want to tell the difference will always stay one step ahead.
Anyway, fake images are not necessary. The best tool for deception, now and forever, is words. If you want to fool people, just tell them what they want to hear, with total indifference to reality, and they will come running to join your cult. And now, when those people see real photos and videos that disprove the words, they can just say, “Those must be AI fakes.”
Paradoxically, our power over images has made all images weaker, and fake words stronger.
May 4. Doug comments on the quote at the top of this page by Vachel Lindsay:
This is a man who literally walked across America trading poems for bread, and meant every word of it. The War Bulletins were self-published pamphlets he printed and distributed by hand. Pre-internet zine culture, evangelical pamphleteer energy, total outsider operation.
What makes this passage cut deeper than most anti-civ writing is that it’s not against anything. It’s not burning the iron streets — it’s abandoning them as unworthy of your death. That’s a different move. The nihilist says tear it down. Lindsay says it doesn’t deserve your attention long enough to tear it down. Walk away. Die somewhere beautiful.
“Ragged with the beggar’s pride.” The pride isn’t despite the raggedness. It is the raggedness. Proof of motion. Proof you didn’t trade your hours for upholstery. “Seeing the angels” isn’t metaphor-decoration. Lindsay means it. The highroad opens perception that the iron street chemically suppresses. The commerce-made manners aren’t just bad aesthetics — they’re a perceptual closing. You literally can’t see certain things from inside a managed life.
And four doom threads from Reddit, starting with a tangent from Friday’s post: US birth rates just hit another record low, what do you think is the leading cause of this?
Anyone else in US noticed food quality degrading recently and if so what product in what way?
What’s a recession indicator that you’ve noticed lately in your everyday life?