I'm a few years older than you; I graduated college in 2006, but I too did not get a smartphone until 2011.
Looking back, the smartphone/social media combo has improved my life in a couple of ways but introduced God knows how much stress in other ways. As our mutual friend Freddie DeBoer often points out, we're not meant to be rubbing our brains up against so many other brains online day after day. It's destabilizing.
I’ll grant it’s polemic and not therefore expected to cohere in logical fragments, but what examples do you even offer of the decadent present of literature? Besides a bad novel by one of the worst critics writing today? Have you read anything of the last decade? What fails about it? I’m older than you; I read sebald before he died. I also love dada and surrealism and the ways they tried to break the casings and dicta of the establishment, and I mourn the ways they were ultimately subsumed by capitalism. But the imaginary golden age you construct is naive and based on unearned nostalgia. And the stagnation and rot of modern art, while certainly a defensible argument, is not made here. All autofiction is bad? But somehow not Henry Miller’s? Have you READ Modiano and Auster and Cusk? Maybe she’s one you hate? MAKE A CASE. instead you are retreading the infamous fatuity of BH Myers in the Atlantic, moaning about how DeLillo’s actual language didn’t make sense.
I am not sure I am persuaded by the distinction between literature and technology and keep thinking back to Friedrich Kittler's work on technologies of inscription ...
Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") applies here as elsewhere. Most movies are crap, and always have been. One thing which does strike me as different is that the big studio movies are more aesthetically worthless than they used to be, and I have more luck now with low-budget indie films.
I do and explain the nuances of it in my podcast. History lays the path we are walking, if you have the eyes to see and ears to hear. Mindless zombies are not spared. I wish you well.
I'm a few years older than you; I graduated college in 2006, but I too did not get a smartphone until 2011.
Looking back, the smartphone/social media combo has improved my life in a couple of ways but introduced God knows how much stress in other ways. As our mutual friend Freddie DeBoer often points out, we're not meant to be rubbing our brains up against so many other brains online day after day. It's destabilizing.
We were more creative, insightful and mentally tough before the internet.
Brilliant. I love, as always, the staggering insightfulness and unapologetic optimism of your writing.
I’ll grant it’s polemic and not therefore expected to cohere in logical fragments, but what examples do you even offer of the decadent present of literature? Besides a bad novel by one of the worst critics writing today? Have you read anything of the last decade? What fails about it? I’m older than you; I read sebald before he died. I also love dada and surrealism and the ways they tried to break the casings and dicta of the establishment, and I mourn the ways they were ultimately subsumed by capitalism. But the imaginary golden age you construct is naive and based on unearned nostalgia. And the stagnation and rot of modern art, while certainly a defensible argument, is not made here. All autofiction is bad? But somehow not Henry Miller’s? Have you READ Modiano and Auster and Cusk? Maybe she’s one you hate? MAKE A CASE. instead you are retreading the infamous fatuity of BH Myers in the Atlantic, moaning about how DeLillo’s actual language didn’t make sense.
I am not sure I am persuaded by the distinction between literature and technology and keep thinking back to Friedrich Kittler's work on technologies of inscription ...
It's important to get out in nature. The ecosystem surrounds us.
You might appreciate this podcast on A.I. :
https://soberchristiangentlemanpodcast.substack.com/p/ai-deception-s1-ep-1-of-3
Sturgeon's Law ("90% of everything is crap") applies here as elsewhere. Most movies are crap, and always have been. One thing which does strike me as different is that the big studio movies are more aesthetically worthless than they used to be, and I have more luck now with low-budget indie films.
Wokeness destroyed movies. Government schools dumbed people down. Stop the Suicide of the West.
Get that weak copy/pasted far right shit out of here.
What is far right? Personal Liberty. So scary. Lol.
It's not scary. It's silly. It's a cliche. Wokeness is destroying everything, the West is dying, government schools dumbing people down.... etc.
Come on man. You know how many people are mindlessly repeating the exact same shit on Twitter at this very moment? Thousands.
You're literally chanting slogans. Come up with your own material or don't bother.
I do and explain the nuances of it in my podcast. History lays the path we are walking, if you have the eyes to see and ears to hear. Mindless zombies are not spared. I wish you well.