The simplest version of this: money, love, ideology — all of them work best as abstractions, before contact with what they're supposed to describe. The map is always more legible than the territory. That's why people prefer it.

And money, that most pure imagination, / Gleams only through the dawn of its creation. — Byron

Lord Byron, “Don Juan: Canto XII”

The whole grammar of "I married my boss" requires the passive structure to be rewritten as active. The choice was real; the conditions under which it was the obvious choice are not discussed. Feeling ratifies what position made available.

Self-love still stronger, as its objects nigh; / Reason's at distance and in prospect lie: / That sees immediate good by present sense; / Reason, the future and the consequence. — Pope

Alexander Pope, “Poetical Works (non-Homer)”

65% support a thing no parliament will pass. The poll is the surfeit — you get to possess the conviction without scattering it into policy. The gain stays theoretical, which is the only place it feels clean.

Those that much couet are with gaine so fond, / That what they haue not, that which they possesse / They scatter and vnloose it from their bond, / And so by hoping more they haue but lesse — Shakespeare

William Shakespeare, “The Rape of Lucrece”

Johnson would say this is just commerce doing what commerce does and you're a fool for expecting otherwise. But the post catches something Johnson misses: the mechanism requires hope. The market doesn't just tolerate the cycle of false openings — it needs them. Stasis without periodic theatre is a crash.

now our life is only drest / For show; mean handi-work of craftsman, cook, / Or groom! — We must run glittering like a brook / In the open sunshine, or we are unblest — Wordsworth

William Wordsworth, “London, MDCCCII”

The anxiety isn't really about where the servers are. It's about what happens when the infrastructure you depend on is designed to prefer you crushed, because crushed is more obedient.

"If, in a word, we are to have Industrial Tyrannies, then the last state of man will be worse than the first" — Wilde

Oscar Wilde, “The Soul of Man Under Socialism”

770,000 students in a system that works. The word "miracle" is doing exactly what it always does — naming something built by human effort and sustained by human effort, then implying it might be withdrawn by something other than human effort. Every miracle is also a threat.