technology

Thank You, Willis Carrier

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Charles C.W. Cooke:

During the 1911 New York heat wave, baked city-dwellers did everything they could to cool down. They slept outside — on their apartment’s fire stairs or in Central Park. They soaked their clothes in water. They even licked large blocks of ice that, despite being covered in flies, the saliva of hundreds of random children, and whatever had come off the back of the horse that dragged it there, were deemed preferable to the alternative. This summer, with them in mind, let’s resolve to hear no more of this silliness, and instead to recite an ancient prayer each and every time we get up from the couch to set the thermostat to a livable 70 degrees: Thank you.

I don’t have anything to add that I haven’t said before. I just wanted to shout Amen. July 17th should be a national holiday.

The Revolt of the Public

By in books, media/propaganda, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians 4 Comments

Like a python with a bellyful of pig, I’m going to be digesting Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium for a very long time. This is one of those books I loved so much I almost feel wary of it now — isn’t it suspicious to find oneself in such overwhelming agreement with an author? Has he really presented such a useful and accurate perspective on world events, or am I just abandoning myself to the debauchery of confirmation bias? Whatever the case, it’s always a delight to find that someone else thinks the same thoughts I think, only better and more clearly.

First published in 2014, this edition added an updated chapter from 2018 which considers Trump and Brexit. I only wish there could be another update analyzing last year’s virus and woke riots in relation to his thesis as well, but I suppose I’ll have to check his blog for that. Speaking of which, he writes:

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 and 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence — the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Sometimes he describes what appears to be a dialectical historical process, in which an age of widespread affluence and education paradoxically produces an equally widespread miasma of nihilistic anger. Other times, his focus is more personal and psychological, as when he attributes nihilism to “radical ingratitude” — an inability to hold realistic expectations of both human nature and of the ability of technology, government, etc. to “solve” the tragic dimension of human existence. Again, events seem to be moving too fast to be included in revised editions. In the last year alone, the utter beclowning of mainstream media, public health officials, and elected representatives has been almost too painful to watch. “Rebels” of both the right and left live in fantasy role-playing worlds of cool costumes and worn-out slogans, and have nothing to offer but condemnation and destruction. The response to this upheaval from hapless elites is to double down on demanding respect for their dwindling authority and attempting in vain to censor and control “misinformation.” But if we are in fact living through the most radical changes in media, technology and mass society since Gutenberg, the ripple effect is likely to go on for decades or longer. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to manage to avoid the twenty-second century equivalent of Europe’s religious wars.

Obiter Scripta, no. 105

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta, technology, writing No Comments

Plato suggests that how we process and articulate our ideas is inseparable from what we end up thinking and doing, that philosophical excellence is as much a matter of dialectical engagement as it is about arriving at a substantive vision. It is hardly surprising that he mistrusted writing as much as he did, seeing it as more likely to dull the mind than invigorate it. The written word is a medium that is peculiarly susceptible to enabling shallow cleverness rather than nourishing genuinely intelligent thought.

— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

I read around a hundred books a year, yet I increasingly agree with old Plato here. I appreciate the way that podcasting can be a medium for in-depth, invigorating conversation, yet I only listen to podcasts occasionally. To some extent, that’s because if I feel like listening to something, I’d rather it be music. I can’t listen to a podcast while working, because concentrating on a conversation uses the same part of the brain I need to concentrate on my work. Ultimately, though, it’s probably just habit. I know my way around the world of books. Who has time to explore the million-and-one podcast options out there?

It’s Not the Future That I Can See, It’s Just My Fantasy

By in fresh hell, technology, unintended consequences No Comments

A little over three years ago, some brilliant seer gazed into the future and reported back:

Nowadays, I’m sure there are brilliant minds working hard to figure out how we can implant SIM cards in our frontal lobes so that we can keep up with the Kardashians without having to go to all the exhausting labor of manipulating our pocket computers with our fingers, like savages.

Well…

Yes, yes, the “initial aim” is always something unobjectionable and beneficial. What’s actually interesting is trying to imagine all the ways in which humans will inevitably harness new technologies to serve the same old ends of hedonism, power struggles, and violence. Musk seems to believe that the best defense against the possibility of hostile AI is for humans to become cyborgs by means of wires implanted in our brains, allowing us to interface with technology at the speed of thought. Did I say interesting? I meant horrifying.

Memex

By in technology 2 Comments

Have you sometimes marveled at my ability to connect disparate ideas? Have you ever admiringly wondered how I manage to pull oblique references and quotations from memory? Well, I appreciate the compliment, even if I had to put the thought in your head myself. The short explanation would be that I’m just a genius that way. But even genius requires a lot of structures, systems, and sheer labor to appear effortless. The truth is, I often experience a distant relative of staircase wit, where I belatedly realize that something I casually read in passing weeks ago is now especially germane to a point I want to make, but I have no clear recollection of where I saw it, and I don’t remember enough direct quotes or keywords to make a Google search, or even a browser history search, useful. You have no idea how many total hours I’ve spent over the years while working on posts simply groping in the dark to find a precise link or quotation again.

The Lady of the House introduced me to a browser add-on called Memex which I’m already finding amazingly useful. Obviously, there are lots of ways to save links and notes from your online browsing. I have a “reference” folder in my email where I have things stored. I have a notepad app on my phone where I save epigrams, snippets of poetry, song lyrics, and other striking phrases that I’d like to use as post titles someday. I even have a private site that I use as sort of an online attic for storing links and pasting excerpts. But what I like about Memex is that it’s a perfect amanuensis — always immediately at hand to take dictation, but completely unobtrusive otherwise. The toolbar hides in the right margin of your screen, unless you put your cursor over there to make it pop out. It automatically indexes the sites you visit, so if all I remember is an author’s name, or an isolated word or phrase, I can search from the dashboard and find which page it was on. For example, I just searched for “Yuval” as a test, and saw the link to the New Atlantis where I read Yuval Levin’s article (and also saw that he must have had an article linked on RealClearBooks, which I visited earlier). My browser history, by contrast, doesn’t bring up any results; it only keeps a record of URLs visited.

Another example: last week, Patrick Kurp quoted a passage from Evelyn Waugh. Shortly after that, I saw a different article that used the same quotation, with an additional line that struck me as especially relevant: “There is no more agreeable position than that of dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of other people’s creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting hypocrisies and inconsistencies.” For a few days, that simmered in my brain stew, until I decided that I would probably want to keep that reference on hand for future use. Somehow, though, I couldn’t find where I had seen it. I thought it had been in a post on National Review, but a search there didn’t turn anything up. In just a few days, I’d somehow managed to lose track of it. My browser history was again no help. I didn’t remember enough of the passage verbatim, just the basic idea of being a dissident in a…wealthy? secure? civilized? society. Finally, I managed to string enough keywords together to find it in a Google search. Then I  highlighted the text, as you normally do to copy and paste, but in this case, it also brought up Memex’s tiny little taskbar underneath the passage with its “highlight” and “annotate” buttons. By using the highlighter, it saved both the link and the relevant text as a note on my dashboard. Now, even if I totally forget about that quotation, I can always think, “Hey, didn’t Evelyn Waugh once say something incisive about spoiled, privileged cultural critics…? What was that again…?”, and with a quick search in Memex for “Waugh” or “dissident,” I can have it right there. So now, anytime I see something that strikes me as even remotely worth noting, I can summon my little digital assistant and trust that it will be safely stored away.

Anyway, if that sounds useful to you, give it a try. I really like it.

Nostradumbass

By in books, extraordinary popular delusions, technology 4 Comments

From the concluding paragraph of William Bernstein’s Masters of the Word: How Media Shaped History, published in 2013:

For the first time, a significant fraction of the world’s citizens can be in instant communication with one another and send words, pictures, and videos across the planet. The coming decades will see, in China and elsewhere, the political, social, and cultural fallout from this explosion in human communication. Most of these changes should be as positive as they will be unpredictable.

Should be, eh? As the kids like to say these days: this certainly aged well. Though I suppose “the coming decades” offers enough of an extended timeframe to make any prediction appear valid. I often wonder where people get this idea that communication itself will be a net positive for human relations. Have they never heard of the narcissism of small differences? Is there any hatred more intense than that which festers between family members, friends or neighbors?

Worthless Words

By in books, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians No Comments

Claire Berlinski:

Western populations have suffered a profound degradation of reason, intellect, and moral integrity. The symptoms of this are many and flagrant. Among the most telling: Americans are rapidly losing both passive and active vocabulary. Both declined at a fairly steady pace postwar until the advent of e-mail and the text message; vocabulary loss then accelerated.

Reading skills have been lost. Only a small minority of Americans now have the ability to read and understand a book—book-reading now is the purview of the personality type drawn to endurance sports—which means most of us are functionally illiterate for democratic purposes. Those who can’t read at book length cannot follow a sustained, linear argument. The brain is highly plastic, and we have changed ours in a way that makes it much harder for most of us to think beyond 140 characters—slogans, not arguments—even as we have created in the Internet such a riveting system of rival entertainment that reading a book now requires exceptional personal discipline whereas once it required only the desire to be relieved of boredom.

That last part gets to the heart of it, I think. The effect of the Internet on book-reading has been like the effect of European diseases upon isolated native populations. The few of us who still read at length, for pleasure, are like the fraction of American Indians who managed to survive smallpox, cholera and whiskey. Many of those who formerly thought of themselves as dedicated readers didn’t have mental immune systems capable of resisting exposure to the bacilli of social media and digital cameras. Articles like the one in yesterday’s post are a modern form of ghost dancing — a delusive, futile attempt to cope with the tragic loss of an entire way of life. But no matter how the English majors wail and beat their breasts, the ghosts of Henry James and Marcel Proust are not coming back to roll up the fiber optic cables and wash all the smartphones into the sea. It’s time to stop lamenting and get on with the hard work of preserving what remnants we can through an uncertain future.

Shut Up, Memory

By in antisocial media, crime and punishment, nietzsche, technology, the geist of the zeit 2 Comments

Charles Lehman:

What should be concerning to us is not that people are being cancelled per se, but the sheer power of digitally-enforced orthodoxy. The Twitter mob is really just an appendage of this machine—it is humans doing what humans do when they are presented with a social transgression. Cancellation is merely a necessary consequence of digital memory. As long as we continue to analyze the “why” rather than the “how,” no discussion of cancel culture will be fruitful. The question is not how punitive to be, but how to not be absolutely punitive in the era of perfect memory. It is how to mutually disarm, how to do by law or social norm what the limits of technology used to do. If we cannot, we all become beholden to a beast of our own invention. Justice is no longer a human affair. It becomes the task of a million cameras, a million tweet-scraping scripts; the ever-watching eye and perfect mind of the cancellation machine.

In On the Genealogy of Morals, Nietzsche called active forgetting “a doorkeeper, a preserver of psychic order, repose, and etiquette,” without which “there could be no happiness, no cheerfulness, no hope, no pride, no present.” Those who lack this ability to actively forget may, he said, be accurately compared to dyspeptics: “he cannot ‘have done’ with anything.” Injustices, insults and slights, if not properly digested and eliminated, cause upset stomachs, irritable personalities, and overall vengefulness. Healthy people, practiced in the art of active forgetting, feel free to act, to create, to live deeply without feeling crushed by an overabundance of historical sense, or paralyzed by a sense of the futility of action given the endless flux of existence. Sickly people with reactive over-awareness spend too much time locked in their own heads, breathing in the dust and mold of decaying memories, losing perspective while rooting around in the footnotes and minutiae of historical trivia. (Tim Short provides a nice summary of this recurring theme in Nietzsche’s writing.)

There’s no doubt the resentful and vengeful are still with us today, thriving in the new technological environment which vastly extends the jurisdiction of their bitter quest for “justice.” But Lehman, I think, brings up an equally important but overlooked point: the complicity, through laziness, of the rest of us. As is often the case, we’d rather outsource the unwelcome burden of agency to technology. Machines will do our thinking, and our remembering, for us. We have no choice but to follow their prompts. If the Eye of Google says you’re guilty and wrecks your social credit score, well, what do you expect us to do about it? The techlaw is the techlaw. Those unfortunate enough to be born in the age of digital memory, faced with audio/video evidence of that time in fifth grade when they used a “problematic” taunt toward a classmate, or that time in high school when they flirted with socially unjust ideas, will have to summon the strength to declare such gotcha-moments off limits, to consign them to the landfill in the name of active forgetting. Those “laws or social norms” will have to be created by people who refuse to be intimidated by resentful inquisitors, who refuse to be sacrificed to a narrative of historical injustice which can never be appeased.

There’s No Shame In Going Out of Style

By in technology, writing No Comments

Claire Berlinski:

… my brother asked me why I didn’t just have a newsletter, like everyone else, instead of writing whole paragraphs on Twitter—which isn’t designed for paragraph-length thoughts. I didn’t really have a good answer to that, except to say that I like Twitter. Probably because play consists of whatever a body is not obliged to do. He reckoned I should start a newsletter, populate it with my random thoughts, get a bunch of subscribers, then ask people to pay. He was sure this would work.

I admit to being a bit confused about why this newsletter thing has caught on. I subscribe to Micah Mattix’s, because I like that sort of books-and-art link aggregation. I also subscribe to Alan Jacobs’s, though I don’t understand why he feels the need to separate “things that give me delight” from “analysis or critique.” Why can’t a blog do both? Why can’t it be anything and everything, from pictures to brief comments to long essays? I know WordPress makes it easy to “follow” a favorite blog and get new posts sent straight to your inbox, and I’m pretty sure Blogspot does too. And if you don’t want to hear from the rabble, you can just turn the comments off. How is that any different from a newsletter? (And whatever happened to that other recent attempt to reinvent the wheel, Tweetlonger or Tweetstorm or whatever it was called?) I guess I’m just amused by the way people seem determined to overlook a perfectly flexible, convenient platform for writing online that’s been around for twenty years now.

In Anthony Kronman’s newest book, he spends a fair amount of time writing about what he calls the “conversational ideal,” which, in his view, should be the animating spirit of academia, a golden mean between the stifling, therapeutic ideal of safe-space culture and the market-oriented rough-and-tumble free-speech culture. While reading that, it struck me that the conversational ideal is what I’ve always loved about blogs. A blog is a way for isolated individuals to connect with like-minded people over shared interests, but on a much smaller, personal scale, where actual written conversations can take place. Once Facebook and Twitter took over and leveled the landscape, communication quickly flowed down to sea level, and now you might as well be trying to have a conversation in a crowded pub, a football stadium, or a metropolitan street at rush hour. (Some junkies are honest enough to admit that the cheap thrill of “statistical dopamine” is the only reason for anyone to degrade themselves like that.) A common practice on blogs back in the day, one which I still follow, was to use an excerpt from someone else’s post, or from a book, as a springboard for one’s own thoughts. This helped maintain the sense of a blog as a record of ongoing conversation. Now it seems that “quote-tweeting” someone on Twitter is widely considered creepy, if not outright harassment. Everyone wants to speak, but no one wants to listen and respond intelligently. Conversation becomes just another zero-sum battle, as Bill Watterson foresaw.

The Lady of the House, who is much more worldly in these matters than me, says that a lot of “content creators” {shudder} prefer newsletters in order to have a captive email list for future marketing purposes. Well, I suppose that was inevitable. Again, though, I prefer the busker ethos of the old blogosphere, where a blogger could put a tip jar or an Amazon wish list in the sidebar so grateful readers could contribute if and when the spirit moved them. As for me, I have nothing to sell you, but I appreciate the fact that you voluntarily show up here, even though I question your taste.

All These Habits Filling Up My Days, Am I Ever Going to Be Here Now?

By in foolosophy, technology No Comments

Chris Matarazzo:

I don’t know if he doesn’t own a cellphone, but I do know that, if he does, it is sitting forgotten somewhere on a nightstand or on the kitchen counter next to the morning mail. And so, he passes, the free man; the only one who smells the salt air un-tinged with plastic and undiluted by the elsewhere-thinking of our brave new world.

Cellphones? Come on, man; that’s so clichéd. Dishwashers are what’s wrong with the world. Still, we agree on the essence of the matter. I tell you, it’s almost an unbearable burden, this gift of truesight, of being able to judge strangers at a glance and read their minds in an eyeblink, to be forced to bear witness to all the inauthentic people doing the wrong things for the wrong reasons. It’s like Virginia Woolf famously said, human nature changed on or about the turn of the millennium, when Trivia, Distraction and Consumerism escaped from Pandora’s flip phone, and people lost touch with all the deep and profound things they were most assuredly doing with their lives up to that point. Not me, of course. My use of a smartphone is always judicious and necessary, and my conversations are always a scintillating mixture of poetry and philosophy. This is why, like Sisyphus as imagined by Camus, I return to my task gladly — to watch the world pass by and be disappointed in how it has failed me. ♫ Iiiiiiii look at all the phone-y people..♫

Earlier today, I went by my rheumatologist’s to do my quarterly blood tests. I was in the waiting room reading Micah Mattix’s newsletter when the nurse called me back. I sat in the chair and handed my paperwork to her. “Did they already enter you into the system? I bet they didn’t…nope, they didn’t! Sigh…” She pecked away at her keyboard for a couple minutes. Finally, I decided to get my phone out of my bag and finish reading the email. For a moment, though, I felt self-conscious — the other three patients in the room, hooked up to their IV drips, were all senior citizens. Would they shake their heads and frown at seeing this younger fellow so predictably reach for his gadget when faced with a moment’s downtime? I glanced up and saw that they were all too busy contentedly scrolling through their own phones to notice or care. Who am I to argue with the wisdom of my elders?

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