Here’s Baylor University humanities professor Alan Jacobs, in a remarkable essay for The New Atlantis, referencing a variety of literary and real-world instances of the “madness of crowds” (as in the January 6 U.S. Capitol riot) to offer a demonic account of what’s happening to us in this age of digitally distributed memes and thought…
Category: Society & Culture
The Internet + 24/7 Capitalism = Apocalyptic Dystopia
Here’s a pointedly stark and palpably fierce excerpt from art critic and essayist Jonathan Crary’s Scorched Earth: Beyond the Digital Age to a Post-Capitalist World, which was published just this month: If there is to be a livable and shared future on our planet, it will be a future offline, uncoupled from the world-destroying systems…
We’re all deep fakes now
Nicholas Carr at his (consistently essential) blog, Rough Type: It’s revealing that, before the arrival of the net, people didn’t talk about “authenticity” as we do today. They didn’t have to. They understood, implicitly, that there was something solid behind whatever show they might put on for public consumption. The show was not everything. The…
“It’s an Alien Life Form”: David Bowie on the Internet’s Exhilarating and Terrifying Potential
There’s been a lot of ink spilled in the last thirty years, both physical and digital, explaining and exploring the phenomenon that is the Internet. From the enthusiastic optimism of such influential figures as Clay Shirky and Seth Godin, to the heavily cautious middle ground of such figures as Douglas Rushkoff, to the all-out pessimism…
A Psychic Invasion from Above and Below: Our Present Cultural Apocalypse
As someone who rode the apocalyptic wave of the aughts and 2010s very hard, I find it striking to note the uncanny, almost clinical precision with which mythologist and author Michael Meade, writing back in 2012 about trends that were then becoming visible, forecast and diagnosed the deep mythic-psychological apocalyptic eruptions of 2020-2021: Often apocalyptic…
How to Handle the Cult of Optimism: Thoughts from Novelist/Screenwriter Matthew Specktor
Here are some sage and sobering reflections from Matthew Specktor, author of American Dream Machine and Always Crashing in the Same Car: On Art, Crisis, and Los Angeles, California, in response to an interview question about how to maintain realistic expectations amid the contemporary cult of optimism and positive thinking: INTERVIEWER: Today the cult of…
COVID-19 and our apocalyptic house of cards
With the advent of the Coronacene, the Way of Apocalypse has apparently chosen all of us at once.
Uneasy thoughts on our bookless future
Mark Bauerlein in Claremont Review of Books, in a perceptive review essay on Maryanne Wolf’s Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World, with additional consideration of Leah Price’s What We Talk About When We Talk About Books: The History and Future of Reading: It won’t be long before all living memory of…
The transformative power of autistic thinking
Poet and essayist Chris Martin works with autistic writers to help them transform their lives through their art. In a positively riveting recent essay at Literary Hub, he reflects on the critical — and rising — value of the autistic perspective at a time when our relationship to “the more-than-human world” has entered an acute…
Solitude has always been a blessing and a curse
From a review of two new books (A Biography of Loneliness by Fay Bound Alberti and A History of Solitude by David Vincent) in The Economist: The history of solitude is thus partly a history of extremes—of people who have willingly sat on top of pillars for decades and of prison reformers who aim to…