July 2024

Frosty Prometheus

By in technology

Today should be the last day of what has been nearly a month of uninterrupted 90+ degree temperatures. It just goes to show that even the forces of Hell have no power on this sacred day:

In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to an air quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, New York, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognized as the world’s first modern air conditioning system. It was so humid in summer that the paper grew and shrank, which resulted in poor quality images, because the color printing process involved running the same piece of paper up to four times, each with a different color ink.

That’s right, it’s Willis Carrier Day for all those who celebrate; with any luck, someday to be a national holiday.

Bliss, Was It?

By in foolosophy, history

I was a senior in high school when the Berlin Wall came down. I was in my late twenties on 9/11. What was it like in between those events? It wasn’t “like” anything. It was the thing itself. It was just…life. Phones stayed attached to desks and walls, and it was still possible to live a normal routine without involving the internet, but other than that, it was the same blooming, buzzing confusion that we have right now. On July 3rd, 1995, I saw Type O Negative play a show at a small club in my hometown. I had no idea that in another thirteen months, they would release an album that would still be one of my favorites today, or that Peter Steele had just under fifteen years left to live. I certainly wasn’t huffing any Spenglerian/Hegelian flatulence about the grand scheme of History, nor was I conscious of any sense of turning and turning in some widening gyre or what the hell ever. What Hochman seems to be fantasizing about is what it would be like to live in the 1990s with the self-consciousness of a visitor from the 2020s. But the 1990s, when we were in them, were just “now,” just like July 3rd, 2024, is “now,” and in both instances, anyone who claimed to have a god’s-eye-view was full of it. Nostalgia is always contaminated by this kind of observer effect. That’s the bitch of linear time — context and clarity only appear in hindsight. Ahead of the present moment, there is only fog.

Bring On the Neo-Astrology

By in the geist of the zeit

Justin Smith-Ruiu:

Sam Kriss and I were sitting on a bench in a graveyard in London a few days ago (the only of the weathered and mossy headstones whose inscription I could make out bore the name of “Marx”, if not of the Marx), reflecting on just how insane the last few years have been. While we agreed that several recent signs suggest the worst of the frenzy has passed, at one point I ventured the prediction that a Trump restoration might bring with it a new and even more forceful wave of illiberal autophagy on the left. Sam argued that this is unlikely, since the same people who were prostrating themselves and confessing their unconscious racism at struggle sessions throughout the Summer of Floyd have for the most part wandered off so far into individualistic self-care that, like the student Maoists of 1968 who by 1973 or so were wearing crystal pendants in the hope of absorbing their energy and enhancing their erections, so too the great majority of the preening evangelists of the Fifth Great Awakening of 2020 will likely only retreat further inward, or rather sink further downward, into their scented-candle me-time bubble-baths, should we have to endure another round of Trump.

I don’t think much of Sam Kriss. Like Freddie DeBoer, it’s surprising how he seems to be taken seriously by many intelligent people who ought to know better. When the rhetorical pyrotechnics are taken away, and he has to perform with a reduced word count under bare lighting, the results are appalling. Nonetheless, it’s nice to see one’s perceptions reinforced by an unlikely source. The Lady of the House and I had just been talking about this very topic, and that was my hopeful conclusion too. I just don’t see how people’s adrenal glands can keep up with the pace they’ve set. A collective, society-wide panic attack can only last so long, to say nothing of our already-truncated attention spans. If history is going to rhyme in this case, I would be glad to see our hyper-political yutes react to a decade of utter failure on the activism front by retreating up their own asses and into their own navels. As long as we’re just slavishly following the New Left template laid down by our Boomer forefathers, we might as well have another Me Decade.