Past Mind

Psychology

The Cult Playbook Is Two Thousand Years Old and It Still Works on Smart People

NXIVM, Heaven's Gate, QAnon — their recruitment tactics look like a franchise operation running off the same master document. That document, it turns out, was written in the first century, and Roman historians were already complaining about it. The psychology hasn't changed because the vulnerabilities being exploited were never bugs in human cognition. They're features.

Mar 13, 2026

Tech History

Two Thousand Years Apart, Same Exact Fight: Rome's Immigration Debate Sounds Eerily Familiar

The late Roman Republic tore itself apart over citizenship expansion, foreign labor, and cultural anxiety. The speeches sound like they could have been delivered at a congressional hearing last Tuesday. Here's what cognitive science tells us about why this argument never actually ends.

Mar 13, 2026

Tech History

The Founders Built a Machine for Humans They Never Actually Met

Madison, Hamilton, and Jefferson made specific, documented predictions about how people would behave under the Constitution — and within thirty years, almost none of them held up. They weren't fools. They were brilliant theorists running a live behavioral experiment without the tools to know what they didn't know.

Mar 13, 2026

Tech History

The Secret Rulers of Everything: Why Every Culture in History Invented the Same Story

From Babylonian shadow councils to medieval Jewish blood libel to QAnon, humans have been generating the same basic conspiracy narrative for at least four thousand years. Modern cognitive psychology doesn't just explain why — it explains why we probably can't stop.

Mar 13, 2026

Tech History

The Rise, Fall, and Stubborn Resurrection of Digg: The Site That Almost Broke the Internet

Before Reddit became the undisputed front page of the internet, there was Digg — a scrappy, user-powered news aggregator that dominated the mid-2000s web. This is the story of how it rose to cultural dominance, lost a war it should have won, and refused to stay dead.

Mar 12, 2026