Overton Window

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Pity the Billionaire: The Unexpected Resurgence of the American Right by Thomas Frank

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, bank run, Bear Stearns, big-box store, bonus culture, business cycle, carbon tax, classic study, collateralized debt obligation, collective bargaining, commoditize, Credit Default Swap, credit default swaps / collateralized debt obligations, crony capitalism, Deng Xiaoping, false flag, financial innovation, General Magic , Glass-Steagall Act, housing crisis, invisible hand, junk bonds, Kickstarter, low interest rates, money market fund, Naomi Klein, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, profit maximization, profit motive, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, strikebreaker, The Chicago School, The Myth of the Rational Market, Thorstein Veblen, too big to fail, union organizing, Washington Consensus, white flight, Works Progress Administration

The liberal stratagems they see around them are the stuff of Cold War duplicity—only with the roles reversed: it’s the liberals who are forever peddling crisis, not the people who used to insist that we were about to lose to the Soviets because we weren’t spending enough on the military. The best expression of this fear of trumped-up crisis comes in the 2010 “thriller” by Glenn Beck, The Overton Window. At one point in the novel, the son of an evil progressive PR genius is explaining his dad’s methods to his rebel-conservative girlfriend. “We never let a good crisis go to waste,” he says, echoing Emanuel, “and if no crisis exists, it’s easy enough to make one.” Saddam’s on the verge of getting nuclear weapons, so we have to invade before he wipes out Cleveland.

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Beck himself, back in those days, was leading “Rallies for America” across the country, patriotic demonstrations that often featured a video message from President Bush. Liberals, you will recall, were the wimps on the other side of the issue—the ones like Barack Obama, who called the impending invasion “a dumb war.” To read The Overton Window eight years later, however, the whole episode was just another malevolent deed of the big-government conspiracy, to which only right-wing rebels are wise. Conservative populists, meanwhile, are imagined by the novelist Beck to be victims of everything big brother can throw at them. They are jailed on the flimsiest of charges.

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Similar fears come up all the time in the larger conservative movement culture. In 2009, for example, the populist Right was swept by panic that the new Democratic administration was preparing internment camps for conservatives. On TV, Glenn Beck managed to feed this peculiar fear even as he debunked it, and in The Overton Window he plays it the same way: the existence of the camps is first suggested by an unreliable person, yet the main character seems to end up in just such a facility after his waterboarding. Fortunately, Beck has attached a nonfictional “Afterword” to the end of the novel to sort things out, and here he reminds the reader that a former director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency once proposed rounding up undesirables during a national emergency.10 This historical factoid is a favorite of conspiracy theorists and X-Files fans, but it is generally discussed absent an important detail: the FEMA boss who suggested those infamous plans was brought to Washington by Ronald Reagan; he was a close friend of the Reagan adviser and Tea Party sympathizer Ed Meese, and the object of his emergency scheme was to prevent a recurrence of the antiwar agitation of the sixties.11 The McCarran Act of 1950 also authorized a big roundup of left-wing radicals should a “national emergency” arise.12 And exactly such a roundup actually occurred in 1919, during the first red scare, when radicals and labor organizers were arrested and, in many cases, deported.

Free Speech And Why It Matters by Andrew Doyle

Ayatollah Khomeini, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Bonfire of the Vanities, Boris Johnson, defund the police, disinformation, fake news, Herbert Marcuse, Index librorum prohibitorum, invention of the printing press, Jon Ronson, Joseph Schumpeter, Mahatma Gandhi, mass immigration, microaggression, Overton Window, plutocrats, Silicon Valley, Streisand effect, zero-sum game

If those who support equal marriage are, as they claim to be, ‘on the right side of history’, they have nothing to fear from patience. The range of opinions that are deemed societally acceptable at any given moment is known as the ‘Overton Window’, and its tendency to shift according to time and location should tell us something about the cultural specificity of ethical norms. There are those who would like to see the Overton Window narrowed to the dimensions of a porthole, with the remaining space conveniently accommodating their own prejudices. When we encounter views that we find intolerable, our instinct nudges us towards enmity.

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Even his choice of phrasing – ‘same-sex marriage’ rather than ‘equal marriage’ – marks him out as an antediluvian relic whose views do not merit the attention of those who know better. Yet thirty years ago his view would have been the prevailing one, and those who might have endorsed the now mainstream opinion would have been left stranded outside of the Overton Window. Progress is only ever made when the dissenters are heard. ‘If liberty means anything at all’, wrote Orwell, ‘it means the right to tell people what they do not want to hear.’ This is not to suggest that all forms of dissent are inherently progressive, but if we only ever expose ourselves to the received wisdom of the present, we condemn ourselves to eternal stasis.

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p.42the issue of gay rights: Homosexuality was decriminalised in England and Wales in 1967 and in Scotland in 1980. The age of consent was equalised in 2001. Section 28 (the law prohibiting the ‘promotion’ of homosexuality in schools) was repealed in 2003. Gay marriage was legalised in the UK in 2014 and in Northern Ireland in 2020. p.42the cultural specificity of ethical norms: The ‘Overton Window’ is named after Joseph P Overton, who first conceived the idea in relation to the opinions expressed by politicians and how they would be received. p.43‘people stick to an opinion that they have long supported’: William Hazlitt, ‘Belief, whether voluntary?’ in Literary Remains, 2 vols. (London: Saunders and Otley, 1836), I, pp. 83–96.

The Authoritarian Moment: How the Left Weaponized America's Institutions Against Dissent by Ben Shapiro

2021 United States Capitol attack, active measures, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Amazon Web Services, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, delayed gratification, deplatforming, disinformation, don't be evil, Donald Trump, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Floyd, global pandemic, green new deal, Greta Thunberg, Herbert Marcuse, hiring and firing, illegal immigration, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), It's morning again in America, Jon Ronson, Kevin Roose, lockdown, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, microaggression, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, obamacare, Overton Window, Parler "social media", Robert Bork, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, social distancing, Social Justice Warrior, Steven Pinker, Susan Wojcicki, tech bro, the scientific method, TikTok, Tim Cook: Apple, War on Poverty, yellow journalism

Symbols of loyalty would be demanded: properly self-righteous hashtags on Twitter; anti-Trump bumper stickers on cars; semantically overloaded, tautology-laden lawn signs plunked into well-manicured grass. Statements of dissociation would have to be undertaken: dissociation from newly identified code terms like “meritocracy” and “Western civilization” and “color-blindness.” Dissenters would be lumped in with Trump supporters. The Overton Window—the window of acceptable discourse—would be smashed shut, then boarded over. And, our cultural leftist authoritarians thought, it had worked. In 2018, Democrats won an overwhelming electoral victory, swamping Republicans across the country and seizing control of the House of Representatives, flipping 41 seats blue.

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That’s how you get Coca-Cola, a company with over 80,000 employees, training its workforce to be “less white” in fully racist fashion, noting that to be “less white” means to be “less arrogant, less certain, less defensive, less ignorant, and more humble”—and claiming that this discriminatory content was designed to enhance “inclusion.”11 SHUTTING THE OVERTON WINDOW Within institutions, the authoritarian Left’s incremental demands have been taken up, one by one: from diversity training to affirmative action hiring, from charitable donations to internal purges. But for the generalized impact of institutional takeover to be felt requires one final step: the renormalization of our societal politics in favor of censorship.

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This means threatening action against social media companies for allowing dissemination of nonliberal material, or seeking regulation targeting corporations who do not mirror the liberal agenda. Renormalization takes place by inches. Instead of simply calling for outright bans on broad swaths of speech, leftists have insisted that the Overton Window—the window of acceptable discourse, in which rational discussion can take place—ought to be gradually closed to anyone to the right of Hillary Clinton. This means savaging conservatives as racists and penalizing liberals who deign to converse with conservatives. This means that liberals are left with a choice of their own: they can either choose to form a coalition with leftists, with whom they agree on most policy goals, but with whom they disagree on fundamental freedom principles; or they can form a coalition with conservatives, with whom they disagree on policy goals, but with whom they agree on fundamental freedom principles.

The Upswing: How America Came Together a Century Ago and How We Can Do It Again by Robert D. Putnam

affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Alvin Toffler, Arthur Marwick, classic study, clean water, collective bargaining, correlation does not imply causation, David Brooks, demographic transition, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Edward Glaeser, en.wikipedia.org, equal pay for equal work, financial deregulation, gender pay gap, ghettoisation, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Gunnar Myrdal, guns versus butter model, Herbert Marcuse, Ida Tarbell, immigration reform, income inequality, Kenneth Arrow, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, minimum wage unemployment, MITM: man-in-the-middle, obamacare, occupational segregation, open economy, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, prosperity theology / prosperity gospel / gospel of success, public intellectual, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, strikebreaker, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Spirit Level, trade liberalization, Travis Kalanick, Triangle Shirtwaist Factory, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, union organizing, Upton Sinclair, upwardly mobile, W. E. B. Du Bois, War on Poverty, white flight, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration, yellow journalism

“There is no period in American history when thinkers have not wrestled with the appropriate balance of power between self-interest and social obligation,” observes intellectual historian Jennifer Ratner-Rosenhagen.5 Examined closely, the relative emphasis on the individual and the community in American culture has varied over long periods of time, a pendulum swinging irregularly from one pole to the other and back again.6 But this pendulum doesn’t swing by itself. It is pushed one way or the other by social actors, sometimes by leaders, but often by grassroots activists. As it swings, it alters what pundits have recently called the “Overton window,” making some policies more promising and acceptable or at least conceivable and others less so. “The Overton window is the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse, also known as the window of discourse. The term is named after Joseph P. Overton, who stated that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within this range, rather than on politicians’ individual preferences.”7 As our culture becomes more individualist, for example, policies that rest on the assumption that “we’re all in this together,” like redistributive taxes, become unthinkable, while policies like deregulation become more plausible.

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Dionne, Our Divided Political Heart: The Battle for the American Idea in an Age of Discontent (New York: Bloomsbury, 2012), with whose argument about the back-and-forth between individualism and community over American history this chapter has much in common. 6 Perhaps the single most influential book on individualism and community of the final decades of the twentieth century and one of the first to call attention to the incipient shift toward excessive individualism was Robert N. Bellah, William M. Sullivan, Steven M. Tipton, Richard Madsen, and Ann Swidler, Habits of the Heart: Individualism and Commitment in American Life (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1985). 7 “Overton Window,” in Wikipedia, November 18, 2018, https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Overton_window&oldid=926722212. 8 James T. Kloppenberg, Toward Democracy: The Struggle for Self-Rule in European and American Thought (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016), 633–702; Daniel Walker Howe, What Hath God Wrought: The Transformation of America, 1815–1848, The Oxford History of the United States (unnumbered) (New York: Oxford University Press, 2009); William Lee Miller, Lincoln’s Virtues: An Ethical Biography (New York: Alfred A.

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TR’s Bull Moose Party was beaten by the equally progressive (or nearly so) Woodrow Wilson in 1912. In the fall of 1916, in an effort to attract TR’s 1912 four million votes, Wilson led congressional approval of the final tranche of national progressive legislation on child labor, the eight-hour workday, the estate tax, and a more progressive income tax. The Overton window had begun to shift to encompass more progressive policies, the culmination of a quarter century of cultural change and grassroots organizing. FANFARE FOR THE COMMON MAN: 1920–195028 After World War I the communitarian thrust of American politics and culture seemed to dissipate during the giddy, materialist interlude of the Roaring Twenties, remembered more for “flapper” dance crazes, Prohibition, gangsters, and stock market gyrations than for enduring policy or intellectual innovations.

Radicals Chasing Utopia: Inside the Rogue Movements Trying to Change the World by Jamie Bartlett

Andrew Keen, back-to-the-land, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, blockchain, blue-collar work, Boris Johnson, brain emulation, Californian Ideology, centre right, clean water, climate change refugee, cryptocurrency, digital rights, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, energy security, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, Evgeny Morozov, failed state, gig economy, hydraulic fracturing, income inequality, intentional community, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Jaron Lanier, Jeremy Corbyn, job automation, John Markoff, John Perry Barlow, Joseph Schumpeter, Kickstarter, life extension, military-industrial complex, Nick Bostrom, Occupy movement, off grid, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post-industrial society, post-truth, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, QR code, radical life extension, Ray Kurzweil, RFID, Rosa Parks, Ross Ulbricht, Satoshi Nakamoto, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Skype, smart contracts, stem cell, Stephen Hawking, Steve Jobs, Steven Pinker, systems thinking, technoutopianism, the long tail, Tragedy of the Commons

There are disagreements on the details and implementation of course, but since the Second World War the main questions have been practically settled: A nation state with a single legal system, managed by officials and professional political parties elected through representative democracy, who determine what its citizens can see, do, buy and put in their bodies; an economy based on private ownership and free (but controlled) markets and public services; welfare funded by forced general taxation; and human rights protect citizens, who are free to practice whatever religious belief they wish as long as those beliefs and practices do not harm others. This set of ideas is sometimes called the ‘Overton window’, or the broad ideas that the majority of the public accept as respectable and normal. It was named after the American political scientist Joseph Overton, who described the range of policies that both left- and right-wing politicians needed to support if they wanted to get elected. Superficial deviations are fine, but anything outside of that window is too unusual, unworkable, unrealistic to be accepted by the public. Too radical. The Overton window has barely moved for years. But when I started this book in late 2014 there were signs it was beginning to widen.

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Politics is an unpredictable, chaotic system: How precisely ideas shift from the fringe to the mainstream is an inexact science. More modestly, this is an attempt to understand why and how politics is changing: not from the viewpoint of the nervous mainstream, but from the heady perspective of those trying to change it. A combination of technological, economic and social changes are putting the Overton window under unprecedented strain, and Western democracies are entering an age of radicalism. The election of Donald Trump or the United Kingdom leaving the European Union are just early skirmishes in a more significant realignment, in which assumptions about what is ‘normal’ will change. This book, although certainly not a comprehensive guide to the political norms of tomorrow, is at least an introduction to some of the ideas and trends that may shape these changes.

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The product of borders, nation states, wars, misery and suffering. Every day, fourteen people leave Slavonja in search of a better life. Epilogue 2016: An Ode Every generation feels itself to be living in unprecedented times and facing unique challenges. But by any measure, 2016 was a peculiar year. It was the year the Overton window—that consensus that defines acceptable, ‘normal’ political ideas—noticeably moved. Although no one could say precisely where it moved to. Or if a brick had been thrown through it. I began work on this book in 2014. By the time I finished over two years later, ideas that had seemed radical when I started were no longer quite so strange.

Inventing the Future: Postcapitalism and a World Without Work by Nick Srnicek, Alex Williams

3D printing, additive manufacturing, air freight, algorithmic trading, anti-work, antiwork, back-to-the-land, banking crisis, basic income, battle of ideas, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, business cycle, call centre, capital controls, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, collective bargaining, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, David Graeber, decarbonisation, deep learning, deindustrialization, deskilling, Doha Development Round, Elon Musk, Erik Brynjolfsson, Evgeny Morozov, Ferguson, Missouri, financial independence, food miles, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, general purpose technology, housing crisis, housing justice, income inequality, industrial robot, informal economy, intermodal, Internet Archive, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kiva Systems, late capitalism, liberation theology, Live Aid, low skilled workers, manufacturing employment, market design, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, means of production, megaproject, minimum wage unemployment, Modern Monetary Theory, Mont Pelerin Society, Murray Bookchin, neoliberal agenda, New Urbanism, Occupy movement, oil shale / tar sands, oil shock, Overton Window, patent troll, pattern recognition, Paul Samuelson, Philip Mirowski, post scarcity, post-Fordism, post-work, postnationalism / post nation state, precariat, precautionary principle, price stability, profit motive, public intellectual, quantitative easing, reshoring, Richard Florida, rising living standards, road to serfdom, Robert Gordon, Ronald Reagan, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, Slavoj Žižek, social web, stakhanovite, Steve Jobs, surplus humans, synthetic biology, tacit knowledge, technological determinism, the built environment, The Chicago School, The Future of Employment, the long tail, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, universal basic income, wages for housework, warehouse automation, We are all Keynesians now, We are the 99%, women in the workforce, working poor, working-age population

Crucial here is the idea of the ‘Overton window’ – this is the bandwidth of ideas and options that can be ‘realistically’ discussed by politicians, public intellectuals and news media, and thus accepted by the public.15 The general window of realistic options emerges out of a complex nexus of causes – who controls key nodes in the press and broadcast media, the relative impact of popular culture, the relative balance of power between organised labour and capitalists, who holds executive political power, and so on. Though emerging from the intersection of different elements, the Overton window has a power of its own to shape which future paths are taken by societies and governments.

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Initially considered ineffectual dreamers, they ended up heavily influencing the future science of rocketry.39 Likewise, early science fiction dealing with space exploration and cosmist utopias went on to influence state policy towards science and technology in the wake of the Russian Revolution.40 The creation of alternatives also makes it possible to recognise that another world is possible in the first place.41 As the flawed but significant global alternative posed by the USSR disappears from living memory, such images of a different world become increasingly important, widening the Overton window and experimenting with ideas about what might be achieved under different conditions. In elaborating an image of the future, utopian thought also generates a viewpoint from which the present becomes open to critique.42 It suspends the appearance of the present as inevitable and brings to light aspects of the world that would otherwise go unnoticed, raising questions that must be constitutively excluded.43 Recent US science fiction, for instance, has often been written in response to contemporary issues of race, gender and class, while early Russian utopias imagined worlds that overcame the problems posed by rapid urbanisation and conflicting ethnicities.44 These worlds not only model solutions, but illuminate problems.

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For a lengthy critique of Laclau and Mouffe’s discourse-based hegemony theory, see Geoff Boucher, The Charmed Circle of Ideology: A Critique of Laclau and Mouffe, Butler and Žižek (Melbourne: re.press, 2009). 14.David Harvey, A Brief History of Neoliberalism (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), p. 40. 15.This concept was originally devised by Joseph Overton, in relation to the proper operational purpose of a think tank. See Nathan J. Russell, ‘An Introduction to the Overton Window of Political Possibilities’, Mackinac Center for Public Policy, 4 January 2006, at mackinac.org. 16.This can be conceived in cultural terms as the creation of ‘capitalist realism’. See Mark Fisher, Capitalist Realism: Is There No Alternative? (Winchester: Zero, 2009). 17.‘In such a situation, hegemony has nothing to do with the capacity to make people believe in you; it has everything to do with the strategic capacity to render their belief or disbelief irrelevant.’

The Establishment: And How They Get Away With It by Owen Jones

anti-communist, Asian financial crisis, autism spectrum disorder, bank run, battle of ideas, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, bonus culture, Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, British Empire, call centre, capital controls, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, citizen journalism, collapse of Lehman Brothers, collective bargaining, disinformation, don't be evil, Edward Snowden, Etonian, eurozone crisis, falling living standards, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, full employment, G4S, glass ceiling, hiring and firing, housing crisis, inflation targeting, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), investor state dispute settlement, James Dyson, Jon Ronson, laissez-faire capitalism, land bank, light touch regulation, low interest rates, market fundamentalism, mass immigration, Monroe Doctrine, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, Neil Kinnock, night-watchman state, Nixon triggered the end of the Bretton Woods system, Northern Rock, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, old-boy network, open borders, Overton Window, plutocrats, popular capitalism, post-war consensus, profit motive, quantitative easing, race to the bottom, rent control, road to serfdom, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, short selling, sovereign wealth fund, stakhanovite, statistical model, subprime mortgage crisis, Suez crisis 1956, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, transfer pricing, Tyler Cowen, union organizing, unpaid internship, Washington Consensus, We are all Keynesians now, wealth creators, Winter of Discontent

It is not so much that their views have entered mainstream intellectual opinion: they have become the mainstream. What the corporate-backed outriders have achieved is this. They have helped shift the goalposts of debate in Britain, making ideas that were once ludicrous, absurd and wacky become the new common sense. In the terminology of right-wing political thinkers, they have shifted the ‘Overton Window’. The Overton Window is a cherished concept of the US right, coined in homage to Joseph P. Overton, the late vice-president of the right-wing think tank the Mackinac Center for Public Policy. It describes what is seen as politically possible or reasonable at any given time while remaining within the political mainstream.

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But their beliefs do coincide with the interests of wealthy private and corporate interests, ensuring an extraordinarily effective marriage of convenience. A much broader coalition was then built, including an inherently sympathetic media and large swathes of the political elite. Together, this coalition shifted the terms of acceptable political debate: the ‘Overton Window’, which describes the boundaries of the politically possible. Everything within the Window is seen as mainstream, common sense, centre-ground, sensible and so on. Ideas that are outside the Window are dismissed as extremist, dangerous, impossible, ‘what-planet-are-you-living-on’. As the outriders showed, the Window is not static.

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The outriders relentlessly propagated ideas that were not too radical to be instantly written off as too extreme, but radical enough to both put pressure on and create political opportunities for more mainstream sympathetic politicians. In the midst of crisis, when there is a greater prospect and a bigger appetite for radical change, this strategy really comes into its own. The economic crises of the 1970s – from which the modern Establishment emerged – and the 2000s were used effectively to shift the Overton Window. But the strategy always depended on the constant repetition of coherent messages, that is, a variety of different figures and institutions making the same point over and over again. The philosophy of the outriders – whether those in think tanks, university departments or the opinion pages of newspapers – had another important role.

The Science of Hate: How Prejudice Becomes Hate and What We Can Do to Stop It by Matthew Williams

3D printing, 4chan, affirmative action, agricultural Revolution, algorithmic bias, Black Lives Matter, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark matter, data science, deep learning, deindustrialization, desegregation, disinformation, Donald Trump, European colonialism, fake news, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, gamification, George Floyd, global pandemic, illegal immigration, immigration reform, impulse control, income inequality, longitudinal study, low skilled workers, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, Oklahoma City bombing, OpenAI, Overton Window, power law, selection bias, Snapchat, statistical model, The Turner Diaries, theory of mind, TikTok, twin studies, white flight

Key players in the movement had a plan to soften the neo-Nazi and white supremacist message so that it was more palatable to those just right of the mainstream. The rally was promoted on Facebook, Twitter and Reddit, platforms with the widest possible reach. The objective was to shift the Overton window – what is politically possible based on the current climate of public discourse – further to the right (see Figure 19).5 Fig. 19: The Overton window. The London-based Institute for Strategic Dialogue analysed ten thousand posts and two hundred pieces of online propaganda related to the rally.6 The alt-right were targeting students between the ages of fourteen and eighteen.

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This study and others provide a solid evidence base on the effectiveness of online psychological targeting for digital mass persuasion, resulting in real-life behaviour change.15 A visit to an alt-right site that appears high on Google’s listings, possibly masquerading as something less extreme, can result in ads popping up on Facebook tailored to a user’s psychological profile, which attempt to red-pill them in the hope of shifting the Overton window further to the right. Gateway sites Using the internet to start a movement is not a new phenomenon. The Stormfront website, launched in 1995, is regarded as the first successful neo-Nazi online presence. It is run by Don Black, a former Ku Klux Klan leader, and actively promotes offline violence against minority groups.

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Stormfront would become a gateway site for the far right, producing a lot of shareable content that was easy for moderate conservatives to agree with. Once hooked, the more extreme information was dripfed until the audience’s perception of acceptable social and political norms was shifted (see Overton window earlier this chapter). This was not the first time Don Black had attempted to surreptitiously spread the white supremacist message. In 1999 he registered MartinLutherKing.org as a gateway site to spread misinformation about its namesake (see Figure 21). Up until the beginning of 2018, when it was reported to Google as being owned by Stormfront, the site frequently appeared in the top four hits on searches for ‘Martin Luther King’.

Tenants: The People on the Frontline of Britain's Housing Emergency by Vicky Spratt

Airbnb, Albert Einstein, basic income, Big bang: deregulation of the City of London, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, British Empire, Buy land – they’re not making it any more, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, centre right, clean water, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, cryptocurrency, edge city, en.wikipedia.org, full employment, garden city movement, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, global pandemic, housing crisis, Housing First, illegal immigration, income inequality, Induced demand, Jane Jacobs, Jeremy Corbyn, land bank, land reform, land value tax, lockdown, longitudinal study, low interest rates, mass immigration, mega-rich, meta-analysis, negative equity, Overton Window, Own Your Own Home, plutocrats, quantitative easing, rent control, Right to Buy, Rishi Sunak, Rutger Bregman, side hustle, social distancing, stop buying avocado toast, the built environment, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, trickle-down economics, universal basic income, urban planning, urban renewal, working-age population, young professional, zero-sum game

This entails thinking beyond the electoral cycle and accepting that housing needs a long-term big-picture approach. What the pandemic did was make politics and policy more immediate. For the first time since the Second World War, what the government did directly impacted the lives of everybody – not just of select groups. This moved what is known as the Overton Window. This is an idea that was developed by the American lawyer Joseph Overton in the 1990s because he wanted to answer the question: why are so many good political policies – ones that make perfect sense, ones that could objectively improve people’s lives – dismissed out of hand? The answer is simple: politicians reflect public opinion rather than shape it.

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The answer is simple: politicians reflect public opinion rather than shape it. And it can take a while for new ideas to become accepted. Of course, there is an argument that they also shape it (for good and bad) when they want to by positing new ideas and bringing people with them. But the reason that they generally play safe is that they want to be elected. The Overton Window is a model for understanding this, a framework for how ideas in society change over time and influence politics based on what is deemed acceptable to the electorate. Anything that lies outside of it is considered unthinkable or radical, and politicians risk losing popular support if they champion such ideas.

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If they want to hold on to power, politicians have to gauge what will be tolerated by the majority of people and propose policies accordingly. Which is why, as discussed previously, homeownership and house price inflation have been not only normalised but prioritised. Yet coronavirus has proved that the Overton Window can shift rapidly. The pandemic was unexpected and beyond anyone’s control. It moved the needle. We can see this in the fact that, since March 2020, receiving and accepting state support has become less shrouded in shame and stigma. State support is once again something for which not just high-profile people – such as the footballer Marcus Rashford, who campaigned for the government to extend free school meals outside of term time – are proudly prepared to advocate.

WTF?: What's the Future and Why It's Up to Us by Tim O'Reilly

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", 4chan, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, AlphaGo, Alvin Roth, Amazon Mechanical Turk, Amazon Robotics, Amazon Web Services, AOL-Time Warner, artificial general intelligence, augmented reality, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, behavioural economics, benefit corporation, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, Bill Joy: nanobots, bitcoin, Blitzscaling, blockchain, book value, Bretton Woods, Brewster Kahle, British Empire, business process, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, Captain Sullenberger Hudson, carbon tax, Carl Icahn, Chuck Templeton: OpenTable:, Clayton Christensen, clean water, cloud computing, cognitive dissonance, collateralized debt obligation, commoditize, computer vision, congestion pricing, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, CRISPR, crowdsourcing, Danny Hillis, data acquisition, data science, deep learning, DeepMind, Demis Hassabis, Dennis Ritchie, deskilling, DevOps, Didi Chuxing, digital capitalism, disinformation, do well by doing good, Donald Davies, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Erik Brynjolfsson, fake news, Filter Bubble, Firefox, Flash crash, Free Software Foundation, fulfillment center, full employment, future of work, George Akerlof, gig economy, glass ceiling, Glass-Steagall Act, Goodhart's law, Google Glasses, Gordon Gekko, gravity well, greed is good, Greyball, Guido van Rossum, High speed trading, hiring and firing, Home mortgage interest deduction, Hyperloop, income inequality, independent contractor, index fund, informal economy, information asymmetry, Internet Archive, Internet of things, invention of movable type, invisible hand, iterative process, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, job automation, job satisfaction, John Bogle, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, John Zimmer (Lyft cofounder), Kaizen: continuous improvement, Ken Thompson, Kevin Kelly, Khan Academy, Kickstarter, Kim Stanley Robinson, knowledge worker, Kodak vs Instagram, Lao Tzu, Larry Ellison, Larry Wall, Lean Startup, Leonard Kleinrock, Lyft, machine readable, machine translation, Marc Andreessen, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, Marshall McLuhan, McMansion, microbiome, microservices, minimum viable product, mortgage tax deduction, move fast and break things, Network effects, new economy, Nicholas Carr, Nick Bostrom, obamacare, Oculus Rift, OpenAI, OSI model, Overton Window, packet switching, PageRank, pattern recognition, Paul Buchheit, peer-to-peer, peer-to-peer model, Ponzi scheme, post-truth, race to the bottom, Ralph Nader, randomized controlled trial, RFC: Request For Comment, Richard Feynman, Richard Stallman, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Gordon, Robert Metcalfe, Ronald Coase, Rutger Bregman, Salesforce, Sam Altman, school choice, Second Machine Age, secular stagnation, self-driving car, SETI@home, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, skunkworks, Skype, smart contracts, Snapchat, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, social web, software as a service, software patent, spectrum auction, speech recognition, Stephen Hawking, Steve Ballmer, Steve Jobs, Steven Levy, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strong AI, synthetic biology, TaskRabbit, telepresence, the built environment, the Cathedral and the Bazaar, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, the map is not the territory, The Nature of the Firm, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Thomas Davenport, Tony Fadell, Tragedy of the Commons, transaction costs, transcontinental railway, transportation-network company, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, two-pizza team, Uber and Lyft, Uber for X, uber lyft, ubercab, universal basic income, US Airways Flight 1549, VA Linux, warehouse automation, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We are the 99%, web application, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, Y Combinator, yellow journalism, zero-sum game, Zipcar

The barriers to fresh thinking are even higher in politics than in business. The Overton Window, a term introduced by Joseph P. Overton of the Mackinac Center for Public Policy, says that an idea’s political viability depends mainly on whether it falls within the window framing a range of policies considered politically acceptable in the current climate of public opinion. There are ideas that a politician simply cannot recommend without being considered too extreme to gain or keep public office. In the 2016 US presidential election, Donald Trump didn’t just push the Overton Window far to the right, he shattered it, making statement after statement that would have been disqualifying for any previous candidate.

…

This has generally happened in US history as a result of great dislocations, where business as usual just couldn’t continue. It took the Great Depression to give Franklin Roosevelt and Frances Perkins the license to put in place the New Deal. But given that license, they imagined the unimaginable. I was thinking about the Overton Window in November 2016 after attending the Summit on Technology and Opportunity, hosted by the White House, the Chan Zuckerberg Initiative, and the Stanford Center on Poverty and Inequality. I had done a lunchtime debate with Martin Ford, author of the bestselling book The Rise of the Robots, which makes the case that artificial intelligence will take over more and more human jobs, including knowledge work.

…

When imagining the future, it’s best if you stretch out your view of the possible by postulating extreme futures. So let’s assume that machines do replace a vast majority of human work, and most humans are put out of work. What are some of the sacred cows that we might toss through the shattered Overton Window of public policy? If most humans are out of work, a brief exercise of “If this goes on . . .” thinking would quickly lead us to realize that personal income taxes can no longer be the primary source of government revenue. Some other source will be needed, so why not start thinking about it now?

Kill All Normies: Online Culture Wars From 4Chan and Tumblr to Trump and the Alt-Right by Angela Nagle

4chan, A Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, affirmative action, anti-communist, battle of ideas, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, capitalist realism, citizen journalism, crony capitalism, death of newspapers, DIY culture, Donald Trump, Evgeny Morozov, feminist movement, Gabriella Coleman, game design, Hacker Ethic, Herbert Marcuse, hive mind, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, lolcat, mass immigration, moral panic, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, Occupy movement, Oklahoma City bombing, open borders, Overton Window, post-industrial society, pre–internet, Ronald Reagan, sexual politics, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, The Wisdom of Crowds, WikiLeaks

They were the youthful bridge between the alt-right and mainstream Trumpism. Although the tactics of the online right are updated to a digital age, it is hard to think of a better term than Gramscian to describe what they have strategically achieved, as a movement almost entirely based on influencing culture and shifting the Overton window through media and culture, not just formal politics. They succeeded largely by bypassing the dying mainstream media and creating an Internet-culture and alternative media of their own from the ground up. Here, I want to look more closely at those being called the alt-light, who became major independent social media figures with huge audiences well before Trump’s win.

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One is that long before it bubbled up to the surface of college campuses, and even Twitter and YouTube, it developed, in oppositions to its enemy online culture of the new identity politics typified by platforms like Tumblr. They tried to move the culture in the opposite direction by restricting speech on the right but expanding the Overton window on the left when it came to issues of race and gender, making increasingly anti-male, anti-white, anti-straight, anti-cis rhetoric normal on the cultural left. The liberal online culture typified by Tumblr was equally successful in pushing fringe ideas into the mainstream. It was ultra-sensitive in contrast to the shocking irreverence of chan culture, but equally subcultural and radical.

Whiteshift: Populism, Immigration and the Future of White Majorities by Eric Kaufmann

4chan, Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Amazon Mechanical Turk, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, battle of ideas, behavioural economics, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, Chelsea Manning, cognitive dissonance, complexity theory, corporate governance, correlation does not imply causation, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, data science, David Brooks, deindustrialization, demographic transition, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gentrification, Great Leap Forward, Haight Ashbury, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, immigration reform, imperial preference, income inequality, it's over 9,000, Jeremy Corbyn, knowledge economy, knowledge worker, liberal capitalism, longitudinal study, Lyft, mass immigration, meta-analysis, microaggression, moral panic, Nate Silver, New Urbanism, Norman Mailer, open borders, open immigration, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, phenotype, postnationalism / post nation state, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Republic of Letters, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Social Justice Warrior, statistical model, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, the built environment, the scientific method, The Wisdom of Crowds, transcontinental railway, twin studies, uber lyft, upwardly mobile, urban sprawl, W. E. B. Du Bois, Washington Consensus, white flight, working-age population, World Values Survey, young professional

The FPÖ’s previous high of 27 per cent was vastly exceeded by its 49 per cent in 2016 partly because it had become more acceptable to vote for the populist right. The populist surge is not only about what’s driving it, but what’s no longer restraining it. The same holds for immigration. The fact Trump openly talked about building a wall and banning Muslims and still won shifted the so-called ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable political ideas within the right-wing media. This weakened the anti-racist taboo among American conservatives and made it acceptable to openly campaign on a platform of reducing immigration. In Canada, by contrast, the taboo still holds on the right, so talk of reducing immigration lies beyond the bounds of the permissible.

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On the other hand, the fact that Trump’s outrageous statements about women and minorities were not a deal-breaker for many voters is an important indicator of the limited power that norms of ‘political correctness’ – not making remarks about minorities that are negative (or which might be construed as negative by left-modernists) – possess over much of the Republican electorate. Attacks on political correctness were a signature of Trump’s campaign and, as we’ll see, one of the themes that resonated most strongly with many voters. The phrase repeatedly got the president out of tight spots during interviews and demonstrates how far he managed to stretch the ‘Overton Window’ of acceptable public discourse. Trump’s repeated outrages and cavalier attitude to controversy seemed to blunt the force of the social sanctions which had, for instance, compelled FAIR to avoid any mention of cultural anxieties over immigration. Questioned by Fox host Megyn Kelly regarding his pejorative comments about women as ‘animals’, ‘slobs’ and sex objects, he replied, ‘I think the big problem this country has is being politically correct.’

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If successful, this would represent a historic interruption of the post-1965 pro-immigration consensus: the first reduction in numbers since 1965 and a return to immigration levels not seen since the 1960s. In addition to its practical ramifications, the move is pregnant with symbolism because it politicizes legal immigration, a topic once considered outside the Overton Window of acceptable debate in American politics. Between the Wall, cuts to legal immigration and the fate of the DREAMers – whose Obama-era protection from deportation was set to expire – immigration had become the central point of contention in American politics. In January 2018, the Democrats and Republicans failed to agree over the fate of the DREAMers, whom the Republicans promised to protect in exchange for concessions on the Wall and reductions in legal immigration.

Mending the Net: Toward Universal Basic Incomes by Chris Oestereich

Abraham Maslow, basic income, en.wikipedia.org, future of work, Future Shock, Overton Window, profit motive, rent-seeking, The Future of Employment, The inhabitant of London could order by telephone, sipping his morning tea in bed, the various products of the whole earth, universal basic income

This is believed to reduce incentives for people to work hard and develop innovations which would increase the size of the economic pie. (The idea that the pie should grow forever is another one that tends to be accepted uncritically, but we'll have to save that for another day.) This scenario is so far outside of the realm of possibility currently available to Western democracies that it can't even be seen from today's Overton Window, so it seems a waste to discuss it further. That leaves us with the middle case—the pursuit of wants. In this scenario, needs would largely, if not fully, be provided for. We’d then have to take care of any gap s in our needs (This might be something that communities could collectively address), and then any desires beyond this (Luxury cars, big houses, boats, planes, hovercraft, etc.) would be up to the individual to pursue.

March of the Lemmings: Brexit in Print and Performance 2016–2019 by Stewart Lee

Airbnb, AltaVista, anti-communist, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Bullingdon Club, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, Donald Trump, Etonian, fake news, Ford Model T, imposter syndrome, Jeremy Corbyn, New Journalism, off-the-grid, Overton Window, Ronald Reagan, Russell Brand, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Hawking, Steve Bannon, white flight

Nonetheless, this shit hung around in the top ten Google hits of my name for years, portraying me as some kind of unhinged psychopath, and I suspect it cost the kids a few playdates. The following week, after facing mass ridicule online from people who were at the show, and who all got the idea, the critic returned and filed a more balanced report. 2 This is the second mention of the Overton window in this book. And yet, as I sit here writing these footnotes, I can’t even remember what the fucking Overton window is. You look it up. I’ve got early-onset Alzheimer’s, I reckon. It’s thirty years of gigs and never sleeping. I don’t even know what the me from a year ago was talking about. Fuck! Fuck! I’m fucking … Fuck! Don’t drag Abba into Theresa May’s Dead-Cat Dance 5 October 2018 The only available room in Birmingham last Tuesday night was an Airbnb on Edward Street.

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On Thursday night, I and my tour manager were trapped in Bristol by the Beast from the East5 and I was denied two days back with my resentful family in London, as we remained there until Sunday and a date in Plymouth. An audience member’s ice-skidding car had crashed into the loading doors of the Bristol theatre, where it remained for days, blocking our exit, closing the Overton window of our departure and tripling our hotel bill. I missed the kids and sat in reading Ice, worrying about their futures until my heart ached. On Sunday we set off towards Plymouth.6 Though the sudden snow was thawing, all along the A386 abandoned cars lay shipwrecked in laybys, ditched during Thursday’s snowstorm and now stripped clean of parts and fabrics, the Devonshire locals reverting to type at the first sign of social breakdown.

Men Who Hate Women: From Incels to Pickup Artists, the Truth About Extreme Misogyny and How It Affects Us All by Laura Bates

"World Economic Forum" Davos, 4chan, Ada Lovelace, anti-bias training, autism spectrum disorder, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, Cambridge Analytica, cognitive dissonance, coherent worldview, deplatforming, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Filter Bubble, gender pay gap, George Floyd, glass ceiling, Grace Hopper, job satisfaction, Kickstarter, off grid, Overton Window, recommendation engine, ride hailing / ride sharing, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, tech bro, young professional

His use of the term ‘window’ is not a coincidence – manosphere and white-supremacist forums alike are obsessed with the concept of the ‘Overton window’, a term describing the range of ideas tolerated in public discourse. When figures like Morgan use rhetoric that might previously have been considered radical or unacceptable, or politicians like Trump express ideas that might have seemed unthinkable for a former president to utter, alt-right and incel forums cheer at their perception that the Overton window has shifted, opening a wider gap for their even more extreme ideas to nudge their way into the mainstream. So you end up with a chain, which starts in the most extreme online forums: men like Matt Forney explicitly advocating beating women, and incels discussing keeping women as sex slaves.

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They just need to hold out the bait and wait for a little nibble. People who are attracted enough to swallow the hook will find their own way down the rest of the line. And those holding the rod are able to capitalise handsomely, reeling in the benefits of their money, their online adoration or their votes. The Overton window has shifted far enough for those who have newly discovered the manosphere to convince themselves that there’s nothing too outrageous about what they are doing, until it’s too late. Until they reach the point at which being outrageous is exactly the point. And even those who don’t reach that point of eventual radicalisation are not lost causes.

Culture Warlords: My Journey Into the Dark Web of White Supremacy by Talia Lavin

4chan, Bellingcat, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, dark triade / dark tetrad, deplatforming, disinformation, Donald Trump, end-to-end encryption, epigenetics, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, game design, information security, Kevin Roose, lockdown, mass immigration, Minecraft, move fast and break things, Overton Window, phenotype, Scientific racism, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, Social Justice Warrior, Steve Bannon, Susan Wojcicki, The Turner Diaries, Timothy McVeigh, zero-sum game, éminence grise

“The GOP is essentially the White man’s party at this point (it gets Whiter every election cycle), so it makes far more sense for us to subvert it than to create our own party.” Yet for the most part, figures like Casey, who retain hope that the GOP remains a viable route for open white nationalists to gain power, have become a minority on the far right. Those who sought to broaden the Overton window of American discourse through an outward appearance of respectability, like Richard Spencer, have largely found themselves disgraced as the American left grows more and more vocal about the need to stamp out organized racism. Disillusionment with Trumpism—as well as the innate violence of the white-supremacist movement’s culture, which disdains such slow and unthrilling measures as voting and committee meetings—has led to a distancing from their brief embrace of electoral politics.

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These young white nationalists called themselves the Groyper movement—a moniker based on an obscure Pepe the Frog meme. Their agenda had three major points: advocating for anti-Semitism; advancing the theory that white Americans are being “replaced” by immigrants, including legal ones; and asserting the necessity of explicit homophobia.6 Their greater goal is a calculated shattering of the Overton window, drawing the GOP closer and closer to the white-nationalist movement until their goals and public rhetoric are fundamentally indistinguishable. Throughout his tour of various colleges all over the United States, Charlie Kirk, Turning Point USA’s twenty-six-year-old spokesman, struggled to answer questions from smirking young men in MAGA hats, like “Can you prove that our white European ideals will be maintained if the country is no longer made up of white European descendants?”

Going Dark: The Secret Social Lives of Extremists by Julia Ebner

23andMe, 4chan, Airbnb, anti-communist, anti-globalists, augmented reality, Ayatollah Khomeini, Bellingcat, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Boris Johnson, Cambridge Analytica, citizen journalism, cognitive dissonance, Comet Ping Pong, crisis actor, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deepfake, disinformation, Donald Trump, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, fake news, false flag, feminist movement, game design, gamification, glass ceiling, Google Earth, Greta Thunberg, information security, job satisfaction, Mark Zuckerberg, mass immigration, Menlo Park, Mikhail Gorbachev, Network effects, off grid, OpenAI, Overton Window, pattern recognition, pre–internet, QAnon, RAND corporation, ransomware, rising living standards, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, Skype, Snapchat, social intelligence, Social Justice Warrior, SQL injection, Steve Bannon, Steve Jobs, Transnistria, WikiLeaks, zero day

I want to change the cultural narrative,’ said Andrew Breitbart, the creator of the website that has become the favourite source of information and commentary for today’s far right.22 To do so, you need to create provocative counter-cultures that attract young people to increase public pressure on mainstream politicians – ‘metapolitics’. ‘We need polarising action,’ Martin Sellner explains. ‘No one likes it because you are forced to choose sides, but it is needed to provoke change.’ Over time this will normalise far-right world views, he believes, and move the ‘Overton window’23 – the range of ideas that are deemed acceptable in public discourse – to the right. They have learned from the alt-right’s transgressive and disruptive campaigns. For example, in 2016, the Austrian Identitarians simulated a terrorist attack in a flash mob in central Vienna and a few months later covered the famous statue of Maria Theresa in a burqa to attract the media’s attention.

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Available at https://www.thetimes.co.uk/article/premier-league-clubs-warned-over-far-right-football-lads-alliance-0mgq2lppv. 20Hannibal Bateman, ‘Generation Alt-Right’, Radix Journal, 14 April 2016. Available at https://www.radixjournal.com/2016/04/2016-4-14-generation-alt-right/. 21Ibid. 22James Poniewozik, ‘Andrew Breitbart, 1969–2012’, Time, 1 March 2012. Available at http://entertainment.time.com/2012/03/01/andrew-breitbart-1969-2012/. 23The concept of the ‘Overton Window’ describes the window of politically viable views and was developed by Joseph P. Overton. 24Whitney Phillips, ‘The Oxygen of Amplification: Better Practices for Reporting on Extremists, Antagonists, and Manipulators Online’, Data & Society Research Foundation, 2018. Retrieved from https://datasociety.net/output/oxygen-of-amplification/. 25Lizzie Dearden, ‘Generation Identity: Far-right group sending UK recruits to military-style training camps in Europe’, Independent, 9 November 2017.

IRL: Finding Realness, Meaning, and Belonging in Our Digital Lives by Chris Stedman

Albert Einstein, augmented reality, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, context collapse, COVID-19, deepfake, different worldview, digital map, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, Ferguson, Missouri, Filter Bubble, financial independence, game design, gamification, gentrification, Google Earth, Jon Ronson, Kickstarter, longitudinal study, Mark Zuckerberg, Minecraft, move fast and break things, off-the-grid, Overton Window, pre–internet, profit motive, Ralph Waldo Emerson, sentiment analysis, Skype, Snapchat, statistical model, surveillance capitalism, technoutopianism, TikTok, urban planning, urban renewal

This ability to rewrite the narrative, bringing stories that so often get ignored to light and circumventing the gatekeepers—people in power, wealthy owners of legacy media, elected officials—who have traditionally shaped it, is one of social media’s most vital offerings. Social media helps expand the Overton Window, which is the range of what’s considered acceptable public discourse. Online we can see that a wider range of perspectives is available to us. “By exposing people to each other, and each other’s ideas, [social media] expands the range of acceptable discourse, feeding a hungry public who wants to talk about issues that in previous eras might not have been discussed as openly,” writes Mina.

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“By exposing people to each other, and each other’s ideas, [social media] expands the range of acceptable discourse, feeding a hungry public who wants to talk about issues that in previous eras might not have been discussed as openly,” writes Mina. This is generally positive but it can also be harmful. YouTube algorithms often push increasingly extreme content into people’s recommendations, and as such they are frequently cited as a gateway into white supremacist movements. As the Overton Window expands, we need to be vigilant about which of these expansions move us in the direction of our values—such as helping people better understand the experiences of transgender people or immigrants—and which open the door to ideas that run counter to human dignity. But at its best, the internet is one of the most powerful tools available for seeing one another across immense distances. *** Even as we cross vast distances and discover ways to advocate for one another, there are also important reasons we want to disappear—to put distance between ourselves and the world.

Evil Geniuses: The Unmaking of America: A Recent History by Kurt Andersen

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, air traffic controllers' union, airline deregulation, airport security, Alan Greenspan, always be closing, American ideology, American Legislative Exchange Council, An Inconvenient Truth, anti-communist, Apple's 1984 Super Bowl advert, artificial general intelligence, autonomous vehicles, basic income, Bear Stearns, Bernie Sanders, blue-collar work, Bonfire of the Vanities, bonus culture, Burning Man, call centre, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carbon tax, Cass Sunstein, centre right, computer age, contact tracing, coronavirus, corporate governance, corporate raider, cotton gin, COVID-19, creative destruction, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, deep learning, DeepMind, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Dr. Strangelove, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, Erik Brynjolfsson, feminist movement, financial deregulation, financial innovation, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, future of work, Future Shock, game design, General Motors Futurama, George Floyd, George Gilder, Gordon Gekko, greed is good, Herbert Marcuse, Herman Kahn, High speed trading, hive mind, income inequality, industrial robot, interchangeable parts, invisible hand, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Watt: steam engine, Jane Jacobs, Jaron Lanier, Jeff Bezos, jitney, Joan Didion, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Joseph Schumpeter, junk bonds, Kevin Roose, knowledge worker, lockdown, low skilled workers, Lyft, Mark Zuckerberg, market bubble, mass immigration, mass incarceration, Menlo Park, Naomi Klein, new economy, Norbert Wiener, Norman Mailer, obamacare, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, Picturephone, plutocrats, post-industrial society, Powell Memorandum, pre–internet, public intellectual, Ralph Nader, Right to Buy, road to serfdom, Robert Bork, Robert Gordon, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, Seaside, Florida, Second Machine Age, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, social distancing, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, Steve Jobs, Stewart Brand, stock buybacks, strikebreaker, tech billionaire, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, The Future of Employment, The Rise and Fall of American Growth, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, Tim Cook: Apple, too big to fail, trickle-down economics, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, universal basic income, Unsafe at Any Speed, urban planning, urban renewal, very high income, wage slave, Wall-E, War on Poverty, We are all Keynesians now, Whole Earth Catalog, winner-take-all economy, women in the workforce, working poor, young professional, éminence grise

Radical ideas properly framed and promoted by intellectuals, young Joseph Overton explained, thereby get traction and eventually move from beyond the pale toward the center and change the world. Not long afterward, he died a very American-individualist death (his one-man ultralight aircraft crashed), but the Overton Window is now shorthand for that process of normalizing the ideologically wild-and-crazy. A century before Overton or Friedman, however, Anthony Trollope nailed it in Phineas Finn, his novel about British politics. After losing a vote in Parliament to give more rights to Irish sharecroppers, a leftist MP character explains to his young protégé how they’ll get their way in the long run: Many who before regarded legislation on the subject as chimerical will now fancy that it is only dangerous, or perhaps not more than difficult.

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That is the way in which public opinion is made. By the way, Phineas Finn was published in 1868. Three years earlier in America, the U.S. government ended slavery once and for all even though, just a decade before, emancipation and abolition were ideas on the American fringe, political pipe dreams. But the Trollope-Friedman-Overton Window opened. What has been happening with the economic left in America lately could be a historical rhyme with what happened with the right in the 1970s after its forty years in the wilderness. It had had its celebrated lodestars for decades—popularizers like William F. Buckley and Barry Goldwater and Ronald Reagan in the 1950s and ’60s, increasingly well-known economists for the cognoscenti (the Austrian Friedrich Hayek) and the masses (Milton Friedman) who both got Nobels in the mid-1970s as credible right-wing think tanks appeared.

The Currency Cold War: Cash and Cryptography, Hash Rates and Hegemony by David G. W. Birch

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Alan Greenspan, algorithmic management, AlphaGo, bank run, Big Tech, bitcoin, blockchain, Bretton Woods, BRICs, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, cashless society, central bank independence, COVID-19, cross-border payments, cryptocurrency, Diane Coyle, disintermediation, distributed ledger, Donald Trump, driverless car, Elon Musk, Ethereum, ethereum blockchain, facts on the ground, fault tolerance, fiat currency, financial exclusion, financial innovation, financial intermediation, floating exchange rates, forward guidance, Fractional reserve banking, global reserve currency, global supply chain, global village, Hyman Minsky, information security, initial coin offering, Internet of things, Jaron Lanier, Kenneth Rogoff, knowledge economy, M-Pesa, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, market design, Marshall McLuhan, mobile money, Money creation, money: store of value / unit of account / medium of exchange, moral hazard, Network effects, new economy, Northern Rock, one-China policy, Overton Window, PalmPilot, pattern recognition, Pingit, QR code, quantum cryptography, race to the bottom, railway mania, ransomware, Real Time Gross Settlement, reserve currency, Satoshi Nakamoto, seigniorage, Silicon Valley, smart contracts, social distancing, sovereign wealth fund, special drawing rights, subscription business, the payments system, too big to fail, transaction costs, Vitalik Buterin, Washington Consensus

The idea was that ordinary Americans, millions of them facing immediate unemployment, could receive fast-relief financial distributions from the federal government rather than having to rely on the banking system’s slow, byzantine and restrictive cheque-distribution process. The half-baked proposal was subsequently removed, but it marked a dramatic widening in the Overton window of what is open to discussion. A digital dollar is now on the table. Meanwhile, an early-April report from the Bank for International Settlements predicted that concerns over the safety of ‘dirty’ banknotes would lead central banks to accelerate their various digital currency projects. It is striking, too, that ‘social distancing’ has moved our human connections even more deeply into an online, digital existence: a trend that lends itself even more to digital money and finance.

Arbitrary Lines: How Zoning Broke the American City and How to Fix It by M. Nolan Gray

Albert Einstein, barriers to entry, Black Lives Matter, car-free, carbon footprint, City Beautiful movement, clean water, confounding variable, COVID-19, desegregation, Donald Shoup, Edward Glaeser, Elisha Otis, game design, garden city movement, gentrification, George Floyd, global pandemic, Home mortgage interest deduction, housing crisis, industrial cluster, Jane Jacobs, job-hopping, land bank, lone genius, mass immigration, McMansion, mortgage tax deduction, Overton Window, parking minimums, restrictive zoning, rewilding, San Francisco homelessness, scientific management, Silicon Valley, SimCity, starchitect, streetcar suburb, superstar cities, The Death and Life of Great American Cities, transit-oriented development, Tyler Cowen, Tyler Cowen: Great Stagnation, urban planning, urban renewal, War on Poverty

For the sake of our cities and the people who live in them, it’s time we fundamentally rethink how we regulate land in America. Why Reform Isn’t Enough In light of the current political realities limiting the scope of debate, focusing on zoning reform makes sense. Until the metaphorical Overton window opens up—a shift this book aims to help along—it makes sense for activists and policymakers to focus their scarce resources on causes like reforming local codes or adopting thoughtful state preemptions. But merely reforming zoning cannot be the end goal. The forces that made zoning so awful in the first place won’t magically go away even if we succeed in scrapping single-family zoning or lowering minimum lot sizes.

Give People Money by Annie Lowrey

Abraham Maslow, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, agricultural Revolution, Airbnb, airport security, autonomous vehicles, barriers to entry, basic income, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, carbon tax, clean water, collective bargaining, computer age, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, deindustrialization, desegregation, Donald Trump, driverless car, Edward Glaeser, Elon Musk, ending welfare as we know it, everywhere but in the productivity statistics, full employment, gender pay gap, gentrification, gig economy, Google Earth, Home mortgage interest deduction, income inequality, indoor plumbing, information asymmetry, Jaron Lanier, jitney, job automation, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, John Maynard Keynes: technological unemployment, Kickstarter, Kodak vs Instagram, labor-force participation, late capitalism, Lyft, M-Pesa, Mahatma Gandhi, Mark Zuckerberg, mass incarceration, McMansion, Menlo Park, mobile money, Modern Monetary Theory, mortgage tax deduction, multilevel marketing, new economy, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Peter Thiel, post scarcity, post-work, Potemkin village, precariat, public intellectual, randomized controlled trial, ride hailing / ride sharing, Robert Bork, Robert Solow, Ronald Reagan, Rutger Bregman, Sam Altman, self-driving car, Silicon Valley, single-payer health, Steve Jobs, TaskRabbit, tech billionaire, The future is already here, The Future of Employment, theory of mind, total factor productivity, Turing test, two tier labour market, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, universal basic income, uranium enrichment, War on Poverty, warehouse robotics, Watson beat the top human players on Jeopardy!, We wanted flying cars, instead we got 140 characters, women in the workforce, working poor, World Values Survey, Y Combinator

In light of the country’s political polarization, veiled and unveiled racism, income inequality, wage stagnation, and geographic pulling apart; for all the growth in the wealth gap and of student-loan debt; given the country’s retirement and disability and child-care-work crises; granted the Uberization of the economy, the Overton window—the scope of policy possibilities—has been thrown open. The questions are big, and the answers are too. A radical vision and a radical understanding of the economic possibilities—hope, in other words—are part of the UBI resurgence. Indeed, one of the lessons of a UBI is that our policy outcomes are not inevitabilities but choices.

Uncanny Valley: A Memoir by Anna Wiener

autonomous vehicles, back-to-the-land, basic income, behavioural economics, Blitzscaling, blockchain, blood diamond, Burning Man, call centre, charter city, cloud computing, cognitive bias, cognitive dissonance, commoditize, crowdsourcing, cryptocurrency, dark triade / dark tetrad, data science, digital divide, digital nomad, digital rights, end-to-end encryption, Extropian, functional programming, future of work, gentrification, Golden Gate Park, growth hacking, guns versus butter model, housing crisis, Jane Jacobs, job automation, knowledge worker, Lean Startup, means of production, medical residency, microaggression, microapartment, microdosing, new economy, New Urbanism, Overton Window, passive income, Plato's cave, pull request, rent control, ride hailing / ride sharing, San Francisco homelessness, Sand Hill Road, self-driving car, sharing economy, Shenzhen special economic zone , side project, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley startup, Social Justice Warrior, social web, South of Market, San Francisco, special economic zone, subprime mortgage crisis, systems thinking, tech bro, tech worker, technoutopianism, telepresence, telepresence robot, union organizing, universal basic income, unpaid internship, urban planning, urban renewal, warehouse robotics, women in the workforce, work culture , Y2K, young professional

What books make up the core of your operating system? the men asked one another, with great sincerity. They discussed how to preserve mental cycles, how to achieve a state of Deep Work. They debated the merits of a Hippocratic oath for developers, the existence of natural monopolies, the value creation of personal compliments, the state of the Overton window. They talked about Stoicism as a life hack. They teetered on the brink of self-actualization. When news about the open-source startup’s gender discrimination case first came to light, the message-board commentariat had grappled with the company’s fall from grace. They pounced on a detail that had surfaced in the reports, about male employees watching their female coworkers Hula-Hoop to music in the office.

Bootstrapped: Liberating Ourselves From the American Dream by Alissa Quart

2021 United States Capitol attack, 3D printing, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Alan Greenspan, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Burning Man, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, carried interest, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, Daniel Kahneman / Amos Tversky, David Graeber, defund the police, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, financial independence, fixed income, George Floyd, gig economy, glass ceiling, high net worth, housing justice, hustle culture, illegal immigration, impact investing, income inequality, independent contractor, invisible hand, Jeff Bezos, lockdown, longitudinal study, loss aversion, Lyft, Marc Benioff, Mark Zuckerberg, meta-analysis, microaggression, Milgram experiment, minimum wage unemployment, multilevel marketing, obamacare, Overton Window, payday loans, post-work, Ralph Waldo Emerson, ride hailing / ride sharing, Ronald Reagan, Salesforce, Scientific racism, sharing economy, Sheryl Sandberg, side hustle, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Snapchat, social distancing, Steve Jobs, Steve Wozniak, tech worker, TED Talk, Travis Kalanick, trickle-down economics, Uber and Lyft, uber lyft, union organizing, W. E. B. Du Bois, wealth creators, women in the workforce, working poor, Works Progress Administration

Despite reliable pushbacks and setbacks, the start of the Biden administration revealed a new level of public support for items like paid family leave (although the four weeks that were on offer in October 2021 still put the United States nearer to the bottom of the 174 countries that offer paid leave for personal health problems). The pandemic was like an Overton window for a different way of thinking about societal care and interconnectedness, from paid leave to childcare assistance. Soon enough, the torments of a riven Democratic Party and extrapartisan Republicans returned to haunt our country, with reactionary forces working, with great war chests, to shut these ideas and movements down, and so far, relatively successfully.

We Need New Stories: Challenging the Toxic Myths Behind Our Age of Discontent by Nesrine Malik

"World Economic Forum" Davos, affirmative action, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, barriers to entry, Bernie Sanders, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, centre right, cognitive dissonance, continuation of politics by other means, currency peg, disinformation, Donald Trump, fake news, feminist movement, financial independence, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, gender pay gap, gentrification, ghettoisation, glass ceiling, illegal immigration, invisible hand, Jeremy Corbyn, mass immigration, moral panic, Nate Silver, obamacare, old-boy network, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, payday loans, planetary scale, Ponzi scheme, public intellectual, race to the bottom, Ronald Reagan, Saturday Night Live, sexual politics, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, The Bell Curve by Richard Herrnstein and Charles Murray, Thomas L Friedman, transatlantic slave trade

He would be on social media with hundreds of thousands of followers, on a YouTube channel and hosted on podcasts and live broadcasts in the UK and the US. In a world where traditional and broadly centrist media organisations no longer curate the public discussion, there is no longer a ‘fringe’ view. Nick Griffin would simply be mainstream. This inevitably expanded what was considered acceptable speech. The Overton window, the range of ideas deemed to be acceptable by the public at any one time, shifted as more views made their way from the peripheries to the centre of the conversation. Any objection to the airing of those views would often be considered an attempt to curtail freedom of speech. In my own journalism, it became clear that whenever I attempted to push back against what amounted to incitement against racial or religious minorities, opponents fixated on the free speech argument, rather than the harmful ramifications of hate speech.

Democracy for Sale: Dark Money and Dirty Politics by Peter Geoghegan

4chan, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, American Legislative Exchange Council, anti-globalists, basic income, Berlin Wall, Big Tech, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Cambridge Analytica, centre right, corporate raider, crony capitalism, data science, deepfake, deindustrialization, demographic winter, disinformation, Dominic Cummings, Donald Trump, East Village, Etonian, F. W. de Klerk, fake news, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, Frank Gehry, Greta Thunberg, invisible hand, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, John Bercow, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, military-industrial complex, moral panic, Naomi Klein, Nelson Mandela, obamacare, offshore financial centre, open borders, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, plutocrats, post-truth, post-war consensus, pre–internet, private military company, Renaissance Technologies, Robert Mercer, Ronald Reagan, Silicon Valley, Snapchat, special economic zone, Steve Bannon, surveillance capitalism, tech billionaire, technoutopianism, Torches of Freedom, universal basic income, WikiLeaks, Yochai Benkler, éminence grise

These websites are businesses too, often run by canny entrepreneurs with a sophisticated understanding of the changed economics of news media. The key challenge is to gain a big enough audience to make money from clicks, while also delivering something that readers will consider paying for. Unity News’s David Clews told me that he knows “what buttons to push”. He talked about the Overton window, the notion that the range of ideas that are acceptable to the public can be shifted. “We cater our content to suit our audience, which is what any business would do,” he said. As well as subscribers, Unity News runs an online shop selling pro-Brexit gimcrack. One of the more popular items is a badge with Winston Churchill flashing the V-sign, embossed with the legends “We want our country back” and “We will never surrender”.

The Glass Half-Empty: Debunking the Myth of Progress in the Twenty-First Century by Rodrigo Aguilera

"Friedman doctrine" OR "shareholder theory", "World Economic Forum" Davos, activist fund / activist shareholder / activist investor, Alan Greenspan, Anthropocene, availability heuristic, barriers to entry, basic income, benefit corporation, Berlin Wall, Bernie Madoff, Bernie Sanders, bitcoin, Boris Johnson, Branko Milanovic, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty, capitalist realism, carbon footprint, Carmen Reinhart, centre right, clean water, cognitive bias, collapse of Lehman Brothers, Colonization of Mars, computer age, Corn Laws, corporate governance, corporate raider, creative destruction, cryptocurrency, cuban missile crisis, David Graeber, David Ricardo: comparative advantage, death from overwork, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Deng Xiaoping, Doha Development Round, don't be evil, Donald Trump, Doomsday Clock, Dunning–Kruger effect, Elon Musk, European colonialism, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, first-past-the-post, Francis Fukuyama: the end of history, fundamental attribution error, gig economy, Gini coefficient, Glass-Steagall Act, Great Leap Forward, green new deal, Hans Rosling, housing crisis, income inequality, income per capita, index fund, intangible asset, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), invisible hand, Jean Tirole, Jeff Bezos, Jeremy Corbyn, Jevons paradox, job automation, job satisfaction, John Maynard Keynes: Economic Possibilities for our Grandchildren, joint-stock company, Joseph Schumpeter, karōshi / gwarosa / guolaosi, Kenneth Rogoff, Kickstarter, lake wobegon effect, land value tax, Landlord’s Game, late capitalism, liberal capitalism, long peace, loss aversion, low interest rates, Mark Zuckerberg, market fundamentalism, means of production, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, Mont Pelerin Society, moral hazard, moral panic, neoliberal agenda, Network effects, North Sea oil, Northern Rock, offshore financial centre, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, Pareto efficiency, passive investing, Peter Thiel, plutocrats, principal–agent problem, profit motive, public intellectual, purchasing power parity, race to the bottom, rent-seeking, risk tolerance, road to serfdom, Robert Shiller, Robert Solow, savings glut, Scientific racism, secular stagnation, Silicon Valley, Silicon Valley ideology, Slavoj Žižek, Social Justice Warrior, Social Responsibility of Business Is to Increase Its Profits, sovereign wealth fund, Stanislav Petrov, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, surveillance capitalism, tail risk, tech bro, TED Talk, The Spirit Level, The Wealth of Nations by Adam Smith, too big to fail, trade liberalization, transatlantic slave trade, trolley problem, unbiased observer, universal basic income, Vilfredo Pareto, Washington Consensus, Winter of Discontent, Y2K, young professional, zero-sum game

But unlike the New Optimists, I make no claim to being an unbiased spectator of human progress and the ideas and policies that we need to adopt in order to move forward. Many of these come from the left, often the “radical” left, though their putative radicalism is more reflective of how markedly the Overton window of our political discourse has shifted to the right — just a few decades earlier they would have been far less controversial. I merely ask that any centrist or conservative readers listen to these proposals with an open mind, and be intellectually honest enough to accept the evidence in their favor, just as they’ve been compelled to accept the claims of the New Optimists that they find naturally appealing.

Raising Lazarus: Hope, Justice, and the Future of America’s Overdose Crisis by Beth Macy

2021 United States Capitol attack, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Bernie Sanders, big-box store, Black Lives Matter, coronavirus, COVID-19, critical race theory, crowdsourcing, defund the police, Donald Trump, drug harm reduction, Easter island, fake news, Haight Ashbury, half of the world's population has never made a phone call, knowledge economy, labor-force participation, Laura Poitras, liberation theology, mandatory minimum, mass incarceration, medical malpractice, medical residency, mutually assured destruction, New Journalism, NSO Group, obamacare, off grid, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pill mill, Ponzi scheme, QAnon, RAND corporation, rent-seeking, Ronald Reagan, shareholder value, single-payer health, social distancing, The Chicago School, Upton Sinclair, working poor, working-age population, Y2K, zero-sum game

Harm reductionist Alexis Pleus (with Nan Goldin in background) leads an annual Trail of Truth protest and die-in in her home city of Binghamton, N.Y. Surry County, N.C., opioid response director Mark Willis, a former Marine and DEA agent, charts his progress on a wall-spanning whiteboard as he tries to shift his community’s Overton Window of thinking about addiction treatment in his conservative, addiction-plagued region. Sonya Cheek, one of Surry County’s first peer-support counselors, was initially addicted to OxyContin. People in the local jail used to pass her phone number through the “chrome phone,” for help with re-entry, housing, and finding work, and Cheek eventually became the county’s Recovery to Work adviser.

Hacking Politics: How Geeks, Progressives, the Tea Party, Gamers, Anarchists and Suits Teamed Up to Defeat SOPA and Save the Internet by David Moon, Patrick Ruffini, David Segal, Aaron Swartz, Lawrence Lessig, Cory Doctorow, Zoe Lofgren, Jamie Laurie, Ron Paul, Mike Masnick, Kim Dotcom, Tiffiniy Cheng, Alexis Ohanian, Nicole Powers, Josh Levy

4chan, Aaron Swartz, Adam Curtis, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Airbnb, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, Burning Man, call centre, Cass Sunstein, Chelsea Manning, collective bargaining, creative destruction, crony capitalism, crowdsourcing, digital rights, disinformation, don't be evil, dual-use technology, facts on the ground, Firefox, Free Software Foundation, Hacker News, hive mind, hockey-stick growth, immigration reform, informal economy, jimmy wales, John Perry Barlow, Julian Assange, Kickstarter, liquidity trap, lolcat, machine readable, Mark Zuckerberg, obamacare, Occupy movement, offshore financial centre, Overton Window, peer-to-peer, plutocrats, power law, prisoner's dilemma, radical decentralization, rent-seeking, Silicon Valley, Skype, Streisand effect, technoutopianism, The future is already here, WikiLeaks, Y Combinator, Yochai Benkler

A friend introduced a pot legalization bill, in part to make pot decriminalization more palatable, which in turn made medical marijuana seem more reasonable—and the latter two subsequently passed. For all of his inanities, Glenn Beck was astute to have pinpointed the importance of what’s known on the right as the “Overton Window”—that portion of the political spectrum whose ideas are treated as part of the “legitimate” discourse—and the importance of having ideological vanguards to “move the middle” and broaden scope of the debate. I’m already lamenting the inevitable collapse in the spectrum of allowable discourse in Congress, now that the left and right poles—Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul—are both departing.

Slowdown: The End of the Great Acceleration―and Why It’s Good for the Planet, the Economy, and Our Lives by Danny Dorling, Kirsten McClure

"World Economic Forum" Davos, Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, Anthropocene, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Boeing 747, Boris Johnson, British Empire, business cycle, capital controls, carbon tax, clean water, creative destruction, credit crunch, Donald Trump, drone strike, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Extinction Rebellion, fake news, Flynn Effect, Ford Model T, full employment, future of work, gender pay gap, global supply chain, Google Glasses, Great Leap Forward, Greta Thunberg, Henri Poincaré, illegal immigration, immigration reform, income inequality, Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC), Internet of things, Isaac Newton, It's morning again in America, James Dyson, Jeremy Corbyn, jimmy wales, John Harrison: Longitude, Kickstarter, low earth orbit, Mark Zuckerberg, market clearing, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, military-industrial complex, mortgage debt, negative emissions, nuclear winter, ocean acidification, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ponzi scheme, price stability, profit maximization, purchasing power parity, QWERTY keyboard, random walk, rent control, rising living standards, Robert Gordon, Robert Shiller, Ronald Reagan, School Strike for Climate, Scramble for Africa, sexual politics, Skype, Stephen Hawking, Steven Pinker, structural adjustment programs, Suez crisis 1956, the built environment, Tim Cook: Apple, time dilation, transatlantic slave trade, trickle-down economics, very high income, wealth creators, wikimedia commons, working poor

If so, imagine that Bernie Sanders had become the U.S. Democratic Party presidential nominee. In the United Kingdom in 2017 this was said by political progressive outriders who supported Corbyn, whose unexpected electoral success denied the Conservatives a working majority: “Let’s face it, we’ve all been on a high but looking at the shifting Overton window shows that we’ve been hallucinating new possibilities into existence. This suggests that the excitement generated by the prospect of political power can be used to conjure up the social power required for radical change. If not then we’re in trouble. Acid Corbynism must act as a gateway drug else it will disappear altogether.”46 That commentary is indicative of change.

Shutdown: How COVID Shook the World's Economy by Adam Tooze

2021 United States Capitol attack, air freight, algorithmic trading, Anthropocene, Asian financial crisis, asset-backed security, Ayatollah Khomeini, bank run, banking crisis, Basel III, basic income, Ben Bernanke: helicopter money, Benchmark Capital, Berlin Wall, Bernie Sanders, Big Tech, bitcoin, Black Lives Matter, Black Monday: stock market crash in 1987, blue-collar work, Bob Geldof, bond market vigilante , Boris Johnson, Bretton Woods, Brexit referendum, business cycle, business process, business process outsourcing, buy and hold, call centre, capital controls, central bank independence, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, contact tracing, contact tracing app, coronavirus, COVID-19, credit crunch, Credit Default Swap, cryptocurrency, currency manipulation / currency intervention, currency peg, currency risk, decarbonisation, deindustrialization, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, energy transition, eurozone crisis, facts on the ground, failed state, fake news, Fall of the Berlin Wall, fear index, financial engineering, fixed income, floating exchange rates, friendly fire, George Floyd, gig economy, global pandemic, global supply chain, green new deal, high-speed rail, housing crisis, income inequality, inflation targeting, invisible hand, It's morning again in America, Jeremy Corbyn, junk bonds, light touch regulation, lockdown, low interest rates, margin call, Martin Wolf, mass immigration, mass incarceration, megacity, megaproject, middle-income trap, Mikhail Gorbachev, Modern Monetary Theory, moral hazard, oil shale / tar sands, Overton Window, Paris climate accords, Pearl River Delta, planetary scale, Potemkin village, price stability, Productivity paradox, purchasing power parity, QR code, quantitative easing, remote working, reserve currency, reshoring, Robinhood: mobile stock trading app, Ronald Reagan, secular stagnation, shareholder value, Silicon Valley, six sigma, social distancing, South China Sea, special drawing rights, stock buybacks, tail risk, TikTok, too big to fail, TSMC, universal basic income, Washington Consensus, women in the workforce, yield curve

“It’s completely different than ten years ago,” one commission official remarked, “and I don’t think it’s because we’re better policymakers but because the world has changed completely.” 41 The accumulation of science, a generation of youth protest, the changing economics, and the coronavirus had shifted the Overton window. As Spain’s chief climate negotiator Teresa Ribera reflected, “Coming at this pivot point, the coronavirus forced the world to face the ‘contradictions’ in its economy.” Or as one senior official summed it up, in the characteristically broken English of the EU: “Frankly, without the pandemic, I don’t know if we had [sic] solved it.”42 Politically, it may have been impressive, but as a macroeconomic intervention the EU’s budget deal was less so.

Small Men on the Wrong Side of History: The Decline, Fall and Unlikely Return of Conservatism by Ed West

Affordable Care Act / Obamacare, anti-communist, assortative mating, battle of ideas, Beeching cuts, Berlin Wall, Black Lives Matter, Boris Johnson, Brexit referendum, British Empire, Broken windows theory, Bullingdon Club, centre right, clean water, cognitive dissonance, Corn Laws, David Attenborough, David Brooks, deindustrialization, delayed gratification, desegregation, different worldview, Donald Trump, Elon Musk, en.wikipedia.org, Etonian, Fall of the Berlin Wall, Ferguson, Missouri, future of work, gender pay gap, George Santayana, Herbert Marcuse, illegal immigration, Jeremy Corbyn, labor-force participation, laissez-faire capitalism, lump of labour, mass immigration, means of production, megacity, meta-analysis, moral hazard, moral panic, Neil Kinnock, Nelson Mandela, Norman Mailer, obamacare, opioid epidemic / opioid crisis, Overton Window, pattern recognition, Ralph Nader, replication crisis, rising living standards, Ronald Reagan, Scientific racism, Social Justice Warrior, Stephen Fry, Steve Bannon, Steven Pinker, TED Talk, Thomas Malthus, Tragedy of the Commons, Turing test, twin studies, urban decay, War on Poverty, Winter of Discontent, zero-sum game

In 1564, the year of Shakespeare’s birth, half of all Justices of the Peace had hesitated to swear the Oath of Supremacy recognising the monarch as head of the Church. By the time Elizabeth I died in 1603 Catholicism, very recently the majority religion, had become a mark of extremism, totally outside what we would now call the Overton Window of acceptable ideas. In just a few years the belief system that had dominated the country for almost a millennium was now seen as beyond the bounds of decency, even if a shrinking minority continued to cling to it. The old faith provided the security, rituals and social cohesion most people craved; the new offered radical ideas about salvation and a war on sin, although for today’s Godly it’s the sins of racism, sexism and homophobia that must be driven out.