We’re Just Talkin’ About the Future, Forget About the Past

By in antisocial networking, books, extraordinary popular delusions, unintended consequences No Comments

It is fair to say that the past decade has not been kind to this vision of electronic community, for reasons that were entirely predictable. When Barlow proclaimed that “we are creating a world where anyone, anywhere may express his or her beliefs, no matter how singular, without fear of being coerced into silence or conformity,” it does not appear to have occurred to him that some people might use this freedom of expression to coerce, harass, or silence other people. Thus, the Internet quickly became infested with all of the same sorts of obnoxious people that exist in the “real world,” such as racists, bigots and sexists, not to mention team-killers, smacktards, cyberstalkers and other “griefers” all too willing to invade privacy, steal identities, harass ex-girlfriends or co-workers and generally make life miserable for other people. Worse, they are able to do so by taking advantage of the very features that were supposed to make cyberspace such a utopia: no laws, barriers or borders, no government or police and almost perfect anonymity. The results confirmed Gresham’s law of cyberspace: bad talk drives out good.

— Joseph Heath and Andrew Potter, Nation of Rebels: Why Counterculture Became Consumer Culture

This is one of my favorite books. I included it on my list of books that have shaped my worldview. The Lady of the House has heard me refer to it so many times over the years that she finally decided to read it herself. On last week’s trips to Ohio and D.C., she brought it along and read her favorite bits out loud, followed by pauses for discussion. I know reading is largely pictured and practiced as a solitary activity, but you get a lot more out of a book when you read as a team. The conversation helps more of it to stick in your memory.

At any rate, this was published in 2004, which makes its pre-Web 2.0 prescience even more striking. In this excerpt, Heath and Potter were referencing Barlow’s Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace, which, they accurately noted, “reeks of bongwater.” But jokes aside, let’s spare a moment for people who used to think like this. Imagine what a cataclysmic disaster 2016 must have been for them. It’s often said that an old European way of life, with all its dreams and promises, was brutally murdered in the trenches of Verdun and the Somme; a century later, the, uh, “trenches” of the web were likewise filled with the smoldering wreckage of utopian hopes and the mangled remains of naïve early adopters. Twitter was being blamed for providing a platform to help Trump to the presidency, Facebook was excoriated for corroding the distinction between news, gossip and conspiracy theories, and social media in general had become largely associated with ominous, dystopian data-harvesting schemes and virulent mob behavior. Two years further on, and rather than the global agora filled with philosophical conversation that the founders envisioned, social media can be fairly described as a giant kennel full of Pavlov’s dogs, with Trump as the bell.

For tragic skeptics like myself, all of this was indeed entirely predictable. It seems too obvious to need saying, but any future developments in society can only be built on, or extended from, what already exists. That includes flawed human beings and all their ignoble, contradictory motives for action. There never will be a form of social, technological or political alchemy that will produce a purified form of human nature without all the dross of its past. If you promised to build a third floor of a building that can support itself on thin air and doesn’t require a foundation or two supporting floors, you would be rightly thought insane, but if you promise that a new political arrangement or a new gadget will make people behave in predictably benevolent ways, you’ll be hailed as a visionary. In a couple decades, you can expect to find people similarly shocked by the unintended consequences of gene editing. And on and on it goes.

Obiter Dicta, no. 53

By in uncategorized No Comments

[Proust] had strong notions about the limitations of reading. He thought reading especially useful to the indolent mind, which cannot think in solitude but requires the lubrication of another, superior mind to set its own in thoughtful motion. My guess is that Proust thought his own a mind of this kind. I know my own is; if my thoughts are ever to catch fire, I need to rub them up against those of a finer-grained mind than my own.

— Joseph Epstein, “The Pleasures of Reading,” Narcissus Leaves the Pool

Wait, so, does an indolent mind need lubrication or friction to be productive? Well, I suppose they both work, depending on context. Some writers have an erotic touch, stroking your thoughts to an ecstatic climax, while others, perversely attractive in their utter wrongness, are only good for hate-fucking. Either one can produce a bouncing prose-baby.

At any rate, I am certainly among this class of lesser intellects. I have no impressive thoughts or ideas of my own. Like a magpie, I decorate my nest here with the sparkly thoughts of better writers. Or, perhaps more accurately, like an Egyptian plover bird, I let the more cerebral crocodiles do the hard, bloody work of bringing down big ideas and gnashing them into digestible chunks. After they’re sated, I just dance into their mouths and pick the scraps off their teeth for them.

You Are Not Your Own, You Were Bought at a Price

By in battling personal entropy, books No Comments

Through diet, exercise, cosmetic surgery, or all combined, we ardently seek it. The means may differ but the end is always the same: how to stay young, how to avoid growing old. Everyone has felt the lure of remaining young. I know I have.

Impossible of achievement, the quest is inevitably frustrated; for youth, though it can sometimes be prolonged a bit, cannot really be maintained much beyond its normal span. Trying to do so is a game that can’t be won. Not that this stops vast numbers of people from playing, as witness the crowds at gyms and jogging tracks. “Fitness is about sex and immortality,” Wilfred Sheed has written. “By toning up the system, you can prolong youth, just about finesse middle age, and then, when the time comes, go straight into senility.” Or, I suppose, be in near perfect shape just in time for death.

— Joseph Epstein, “Grow Up, Why Dontcha?,” Narcissus Leaves the Pool

You hear this sort of wisecracking a lot about what a waste of time it is to stay in shape since we’re all going to die eventually. Of course, if you want to pursue this line of thought more rigorously, you could further argue that thinking of time as a limited commodity that can either be invested wisely or frittered away foolishly is an illusion, since nothing ultimately matters at all, and we might as well all just live short lives of debauched hedonism. But reductiones ad absurdum aside, a physical fitness routine doesn’t have to represent vanity, fear, or immaturity; it can just as easily embody discipline, gratitude and humility.

Right around my twenty-eighth birthday, I went to my doctor for a pain in my right wrist that had been nagging me for a few weeks. The first thing he did was a blood test. “Well, you don’t have arthritis,” he said. I was surprised that had even been a consideration. Of course not, I vaguely thought to myself. Arthritis is for old people. Since the possibility had already been dismissed, I likewise banished the thought from my mind.

Three and a half years later, I was finally diagnosed with rheumatoid arthritis, after having had three wrist and hand surgeries which, of course, were about as effective at slowing down an autoimmune disease as the Maginot Line had been against the Wehrmacht. By chance one day, I showed my orthopedic surgeon some tiny bumps near my elbow which he informed me were rheumatoid nodules. He then sent me to get an MRI, which prompted the diagnosis and a referral to a rheumatologist, where I learned that I am apparently in the lucky 20% of people who don’t show a positive rheumatoid factor on a blood test, which is why this wasn’t caught at the beginning. You keep hearing horror stories about scalpel-happy surgeons and overzealous doctors, but in my experience, all my doctors’ mistakes were ones of caution, of proceeding a little too much by-the-book, as it turned out.

I was in rough shape, as you can imagine. Every joint in my body was inflamed and aching. It hurt my back and knees to stand for more than ten minutes. It hurt my hips to sit for ten minutes. I couldn’t sleep too deeply because lying on one side or the other hurt my shoulders, hips, and back too much, so nights were filled with painful tossing and turning. My hands were slowly transforming into bird claws, and my shoulders and elbows were becoming increasingly immobile. I basically had to stay in slow, gentle motion as much as possible to avoid the inevitable stiffening up, like slowly shuffling away from a predator who has all the time in the world to enjoy this sadistic game.

After six months, the medication finally started to do its magic, and shortly thereafter, I embarked upon the first serious exercise routine of my adult life, the first one since being banished from the Garden of effortless fitness that I had always enjoyed as a youth and adolescent soccer player. Let me assure you, you don’t really appreciate what it is to be able to walk. You got over that thrill when you were still a toddler. But I, I can say that to this day, I still consciously reflect on how wonderful it is after 45 minutes on the treadmill, to feel so alive and full of endorphins, to be able to swing my legs without reflexively wincing. Two months ago, I pulled a muscle in my lower back/tailbone area which forced me to have to take a break from walking, and it was a serious blow to my equanimity, rather than a sweet reprieve from labor. I don’t exercise to “stay young” — I long ago forgot what it even feels like to be “young.” Even now, I probably ignore and accept more aches and pains than I should, partially because I’m not sure what “normal” aches and pains would be at my age, but partially because, hey, it’s not nearly as bad as it once was! Who am I to complain? No, exercise is a practice of gratitude, my ritual of thankfulness for not being crippled, for still being capable of doing activities that most people long ago gave up on out of cynicism. In a time before modern medicine, I would have been an invalid, a burden on others, assuming I didn’t commit suicide out of pain and despair. I try regularly to be appreciative of that fact and show it through effort.

As I age, I’m aware, almost to a morbid degree, of the possibility of injury, disease and premature death. Every day spent in good health and cheer is to me a hard-won prize from an indifferent world. Hiking, walking on a treadmill, doing yoga, doing the “ups” (pushups, pullups, situps), eating right — these all fit comfortably into my tragic, Sisyphean view of life. They reflect my conviction that nothing is guaranteed, good things in life require constant maintenance to avoid corruption and decay, and anything worth having requires disciplined effort. They have nothing to do with a shallow vanity or refusal to grow up and accept my fate. The only pride involved is the pride justly taken in the results of long, hard work. For better or for worse, humanity will never stop trying to understand and control as much as possible. Wisdom does indeed consist in knowing and accepting the difference between the things you can change and the things you can’t, but when you know what to do to live a longer, healthier life, for example, and don’t, is that wisdom, or something more like laziness and cowardice? Why would resigning yourself to a pot belly, a bum knee, and high blood pressure represent a mature acceptance of life? If the thrill is indeed in the chase, I’m sure the Grim Reaper will appreciate you making him work for it.

Obiter Dicta, no. 52

By in books, obiter dicta, status seeking No Comments

I suppose one of the reasons for being well informed on everything is so that one can have an opinion on everything…No one is more opinionated than an intellectual. I am an intellectual. (Finish the syllogism on your own.) One of the delights of being an intellectual is that one is expected to have opinions on everything while incurring responsibility for nothing. But for the formation of these opinions at least a smattering of information is required.

Alas, on an increasingly wide range of subjects, I find I am perfectly pleased to be without any opinion at all. On so many political questions, social scandals, academic disputes, I find my antipathies nicely riven down the center, which makes forming an opinion favoring one side or the other a bit difficult. Besides, opinion generally — and my own in particular — has come to seem less and less interesting to me. A human being, after all, is not an op-ed page; the least impressive of thoughts are formulated in the personal equivalent of editorials.

— Joseph Epstein, “An Extremely Well Informed SOB,” Narcissus Leaves the Pool

Once our basic needs are met, most of our social energy is devoted to cultivating, protecting and enhancing our status. For a certain educated, socially conscious type, opinions are the currencies that buy distinction, even (or especially) if they have no practical value. Without an impressive portfolio of au courant opinions, you might as well just be another mindless beast being led around by the nose. You never know; one day, a powerful figure might suddenly vacate hizzorher position, and you might be called upon to step up from your life as an understudy and cast a deciding vote, give an epoch-defining speech, or sign off on a momentous plan of action. Boy, wouldn’t you feel foolish then if all you had done up to that point was quietly tend your garden!

All Them Books I Didn’t Read, They Just Sat There on My Shelf Looking Much Smarter Than Me (XV)

By in books, so many books, so little time No Comments

Tom Gerken:

While the two words may have similar meanings, there is one key difference: Bibliomania describes the intention to create a book collection, tsundoku describes the intention to read books and their eventual, accidental collection.

I used to fret over my increasing inability to achieve “bookshelf zero”, but I’m slowly resigning myself to the fact that having forty to fifty books in the “want to read” column is just becoming my new baseline, given my constant exposure to temptation. A friend recently said she prefers having unread books lying around because of the potential they represent. Likewise, I’d rather maintain the feeling of childlike excitement in finding a new book I want to read, even if it keeps me chained to my Sisyphean task.

Only Happy When You Hurt. Only Deadly In a Swarm. Only Happy In the Dirt

By in antisocial networking, world football No Comments

ESPN:

“Look, I think my smartest decision in life was not to use social media,” Klopp said. “I don’t read it if people criticize me on social media. They can write whatever they want and it never would faze me because I don’t know it. I don’t read it, so I don’t feel it.

“I never really thought it right if you listen to people, they don’t show you their face — if you want to tell me you’re not happy with me, tell me now, but don’t go out and write it on your smartphone and put it on Facebook, Instagram, whatever.

…”Obviously, in their rooms when they write, they don’t care about the person. Not only Loris — [they care] about nobody. They don’t care. It’s like they have a lot of power in that moment and they use it, but power is two things. When one has power, the other one who feeds it and so I really would say it’s a good idea in life to really don’t get in these things.

“I’m not sure that it will happen, but maybe one time, we can start talking again and don’t write messages to each other.”

I’ve joked before that I could compile a bunch of wise sayings into a book called All I Really Need to Know I Learned from Jürgen Klopp and Cesar Millan. Maybe I actually will, just for my own amusement and edification. But seriously, I love this man. He’s a Stoic sage for an emotionally-incontinent age that doesn’t deserve him. I’d vote for him in a heartbeat. Hell, forget voting; he could seize power in a coup and I’d just shrug and say, “Eh, democracy was always overrated anyway.” Good thing he’s just a football coach.

Oddball Draws His Water From Another Well

By in antisocial networking, bonsai minimalism, santutthi, status seeking No Comments

Self-loathing Twitter is a consistently popular genre. But this candid admission is why, despite all the perfunctory flagellation, I don’t really think the sporadic “back to the blog” mutterings we’ve heard in recent months will ultimately amount to more than another type of status-signaling, sort of like the Day of Unplugging. People who want to be in the conversation but not of it will continue to use Twitter self-deprecatingly, allowing them to have it both ways, pretending to be above the attention and adulation they wallow in.

Dan Cohen says “ambient humanity” is what keeps people yoked to the giant platforms; I prefer to reiterate that people are always eager to avoid effort and agency, happy to drift down to the lowest common denominator while ironically lamenting their weakness. Quality, not quantity, right? I’m far more flattered by the fact that a few people silently show up here every day to see what I’ve written than I would be by thousands of likes, retweets and attaboys from people who just see me as one more ephemeral content provider to help them kill time at work. The satisfaction of a post well-written is its own reward, regardless of how much attention it gets. I always thought this was self-evident, but it turns out I’m just odd. Thank God for that.

Left Hand Path

By in extraordinary popular delusions, political philosophy, status seeking, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Damon Linker:

On the other hand, the policy agenda favored by nearly everyone on the American left resembles more than anything else the political, social, and economic arrangements that prevail in northern Europe, and especially in Denmark. Is Denmark a socialist country? If it is, then there is no meaningful distinction between socialism and liberal democracy — at least when the liberal democracy has a generous welfare state and a modestly regulated, mixed market economy. Given the political history of the United States, doesn’t it make more sense for the left to understand itself, and to explain itself to voters, by making connections with the Democratic Party’s own record of advocating for just such an expansive form of liberalism (rather than “socialism”)?

What the left really seems to want is a return to the administration of Franklin Delano Roosevelt — a New Deal 2.0 for the 21st century.

Well, yes. To the extent that the American left can be said to have any serious ideas and proposals for achieving their objectives, as opposed to a vague collection of postures and grievances, it seems clear that they’re motivated by nostalgia for the decades between the New Deal and the Great Society. Of course, those golden years produced a generation of spoiled brats who were convinced that they had grown up in a tyrannical dystopia that needed to be burnt to the ground, so, given that human nature hasn’t dramatically changed in the meantime, I’m not sure why people think we’d be any more likely to appreciate a reinvigorated welfare state this time around. Still, though, it’s true that most of the inane chatter about “socialism” is either fear-mongering or status-signaling. The invasive managerial state grows in tandem with technological sophistication toward a Brave New World future regardless of which party is in power. Like generals fighting the last war, political junkies rehash century-old arguments over socialism and laissez-faire as if it’s relevant. Even the wispy fantasy of a Danish-style social democracy dissipates on contact with cultural and demographic realities.

Yet, as Kristian Niemietz has observed on his side of the ocean, people who used to claim to only want to see their society become a little more like Scandinavia or Germany have held a finger to the prevailing cultural winds and started signaling their affinity for something more extreme. (Thankfully, we seem to be behind the trend over here.) Sure, Owen Jones and most of his fellow Guardianistas have always been fatuous fools. And sure, despite the fact that it would be impossible to imagine teen and ladies‘ fashion outlets fawning over anyone who proudly proclaimed herself on TV to be a national socialist (“I’m literally a Nazi, you idiot!”), it’s also clear that Sarkar is embarrassingly ignorant about what she’s actually saying; she’s only bright enough to recognize a high-status opinion that will win her praise from her peers. But slippery slopes have to start somewhere, and the bromides that pass for received wisdom among cultural elites seems like as good a place as any. Why are we, especially those of us who don’t believe in any sort of Whiggish progression to history, supposed to rest assured that experiments with extreme leftism could never happen again?

Which brings us to the real point — as Jordan Peterson was recently wondering, what is the limiting principle of the left? How far is too far in pursuit of equality? Why do so many people still believe in some Platonic ideal of “true” socialism, existing outside of space and time, independent of all the failed attempts made on Earth to realize it? Why are we supposed to believe that a New Deal 2.0 would be enough, and not a springboard for a renewed drive to eliminate all inequalities? Regardless of how overblown the rhetoric surrounding socialism may be in our political environment, one can still be wary of the unreconstructed left-wing longing for utopia. Too bad our fellow travelers never had to go through the equivalent of denazification after the fall of the USSR.

The Medium Is the Sewage

By in antisocial networking, technology No Comments

Cathy Young:

Twitter can give us the means both to deepen the polarization and to counter it. To paraphrase Shakespeare: The fault, fellow Americans, lies not in our social media, but in ourselves.

Well, to paraphrase a bumper sticker about guns, social media doesn’t create toxic behavior; it just makes it really easy to indulge in. As for Twitter specifically, Derek Powazek noted years ago that you couldn’t have designed a more effective argument generator if you tried. I can’t help but notice with amusement that the suggestions he offered to improve it — some of which have been implemented, more or less, and which Young praises for having made Twitter more tolerable — tend to make Twitter more like the blogs it superseded, which raises the obvious question of why frivolous twits were in such a hurry to bury blogs in the first place. Well, who am I to criticize people for trading in old products and buying them back again in new packaging. If you want to create unpaid content on a tech giant’s platform rather than hosting your own site where you can exercise the sort of editorial control that people are demanding of Twitter, whatever.

Not all possibilities are equally probable. Sure, Twitter can be used for more elevated purposes than trading hostile sentence fragments with strangers, but it’s not likely to happen. New technologies are born into a world already in motion, which is to say a platform like Twitter joins an already-existing pattern of proclivities and incentives among its users. Perhaps there is, say, a “quilting Twitter” where hobbyists converse amiably and helpfully with each other, but in the pop culture/current events section of Twitter, we’ve seen the results, and however different this or that individual’s experiences have been, it seems safe to say that the overall effect on public discourse has been corrosive and intellectually enfeebling.

Relying on pure, heroic willpower to overcome temptation may be satisfying to our egos, but if it’s virtuous online behavior you want, it’s better to practice good habits — like, say, refusing to participate in the dumbing-down and attention-scattering tendencies of social media.

The Echo That Is Love

By in marriage, the big sleep No Comments

It’s knowing that this can’t go on forever
Likely one of us will have to spend some days alone
Maybe we’ll get forty years together
But one day I’ll be gone
Or one day you’ll be gone
If we were vampires and death was a joke
We’d go out on the sidewalk and smoke
And laugh at all the lovers and their plans
I wouldn’t feel the need to hold your hand
Maybe time running out is a gift
I’ll work hard ’til the end of my shift
And give you every second I can find
And hope it isn’t me who’s left behind

— Jason Isbell and the 400 Unit, “If We Were Vampires”

I heard this song a few months ago while out driving. The melody did nothing for me, but the lyrics struck me immediately, especially the poignancy in the realization that a “mere” forty years can seem paltry to a couple in love. There’s also the endearingly honest weakness in the line about hoping to not be the one left alive to mourn. The next time I stopped, I looked the lyrics up on my phone, then texted the Lady of the House about them, saying that they made me think of her.

In Francis Ford Coppola’s 1992 version of Bram Stoker’s Dracula, he added a reincarnation romance to the familiar story, with Gary Oldman’s Vlad Dracula furiously renouncing God after the tragic death of his wife. After 400 years of undeath, he encounters his beloved again in Victorian England and sets out to reclaim her. Later, he refrains from allowing her to join him in his vampiric state, saying that he loves her too much to condemn her. As Isbell’s lyrics recognize, the price of invulnerability is too high; it kills the very sentiment it’s meant to prolong. Cut loose from the tether of mortality, we float off into meaninglessness rather than freedom. Fantasies of afterlives or reincarnations, however understandable, are just another means of avoiding that painful reckoning.

My greatest fear, without question, is the possibility of having to survive her. Statistically, at least, that’s unlikely. But the threat of accidents and disease weighs more heavily on the mind than actuarial tables, and whatever selfish comfort I could take from the reassurances of probability is offset by the feeling that I love her too much to condemn her to years of aching grief. Would I stoically endure for her sake if I had to? I can only hope to have that much courage. I can only hope to never be called upon to demonstrate it.

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