Alan Jacobs

Can the Lascaux paintings be saved?

I wish I had this radio

Imaging the caves of Nottingham

Indefensibly cruel

What was the response you received to Race Against the Machine?

People accepted that technology was really accelerating and that there were going to be labor-force consequences. The broader discussion was between optimism and pessimism. Does it feel like we are heading into the kind of economy and society that we want, or the kind of economy and society that we don’t? A lot of people who commented said, “Look, if these guys are anywhere near right, we are heading into an economy that is going to be dire for a lot of people.”

What does the economy that we don’t want look like?

The spread between the haves and the have-nots continues to grow, and more importantly, the absolute standard of living of the people at the middle and the bottom goes down. That is the economy that I don’t want to head into.

What is the optimistic view?

Erik Brynjolfsson came up with a great phrase: “digital Athens.” The Athenian citizens had lives of leisure; they got to participate in democracy and create art. That was largely because they had slaves to do the work. Okay, I don’t want human slaves, but in a very, very automated and digitally productive economy you don’t need to work as much, as hard, with as many people, to get the fruits of the economy. So the optimistic version is that we finally have more hours in our week freed up from toil and drudgery.

Do you see evidence for a digital Athens on the street, in the real economy?

No. What we are seeing—and this was pretty much unanticipated—is that the people at the top of the skill, wage, and income distribution are working more hours. We have this preference for doing more work. The people who have a lot of leisure—I think in too many cases it’s involuntary. It’s unemployment or underemployment. That is not my version of digital Athens.

Temperamental conservatism understands that in order to preserve anything, it must be kept within certain limits in order to be sustainable. It recognizes that resources are finite and can be exhausted by current generations at the expense of posterity. Finally, it knows that a nation’s power and influence are things that have to be husbanded and not frittered away in pointless displays of supremacy. Many Americans still possess a conservative temperament, but if they vote for Romney they are doing so in spite of that temperament and not because of it.

Charlie Kaufman and Dan Harmon (the creator of NBC’s show Community) have set a record for fundraising on Kickstarter. By that, I don’t mean that these relatively wealthy people have donated money to some worthy project by a bunch of idealistic kids. No, instead 5,770 supporters have given them nearly $406,237. The idealistic kids are funding the Establishment now.

I’m sure Harmon and company can put together a nice stop-motion film. But could they really find no one in Hollywood willing to part with $500,000?

This happens over and over again on the internet. Twitter was announced with a lot of hot hair about how both you and Lady Gaga are limited to 140 characters. And sure, a few people have become notorious on Twitter. But Lady Gaga has over 29 million followers. Even some of the most famous-for-Twitter properties are nowhere near that. @ShitMyDadSays has just over 3 million followers.

I’m glad for the internet. But it isn’t ushering in some new era of meritocracy. The easiest way to go viral now is no different than it was in the 1950s: have a hit on television or radio.

[The Smiths’] career prospects were always held in check by a problem that grew worse as their success increased: Morrissey’s refusal to employ a manager or submit to the standard promotional grind, both of which were at odds with his almost pathological griping about chart positions, radio play and the esteem in which they were or were not held by their record company, Rough Trade.

As he seemed to see it, if the Smiths were commercial underachievers, it was always someone else’s fault – but if you refuse to make videos, blow out TV appearances at a moment’s notice and cancel European tours in the airport departure lounge, then “the margins” are something you will never quite escape. Moreover, without a big figure to oversee the business side of their lives, any comparable group would have probably buckled, something beautifully captured in one Marr quote: “I’ve never met anyone who thinks that the 23-year-old guitar player of a really big band should be the manager.”

We may swear simply because it makes us feel better. In a 2011 study led by Keele University’s Richard Stephens, researchers measured how long participants would keep a hand in a container of freezing water. On one trial, participants repeated a swear word of their choice. On another trial, the same participants immersed their hand without cursing. (Sometimes the no-cursing trial occurred first, sometimes second). When cursing, participants’ heart rates increased, as did the amount of time they were capable of withstanding the freezing water—from about a minute to a minute and a half. But the swearing-as-painkiller method, though intriguing, becomes less effective with repeated use: this “swearing benefit” is largest for those who swear least.

Since his death, there seems to be an emerging interest in Wallace’s religious views, and to cast him as more religious and spiritual than he was. What do you make of that?

Eric Been, speaking to David Foster Wallace’s biographer D. T. Max. Note the simple assumption that anyone who takes Wallace’s religious history more seriously than Max does is “cast[ing] him as more religious and spiritual than he was.” The possibility that Max might have underrated or misunderstood the place of religion in Walace’s life is not even considered. But it ought to be considered:

• People who knew Wallace when he lived in Bloomington, Illinois say that he was a regular church-attender. Max does not mention this anywhere in his big book. He does quote at one time a memo Wallace wrote to himself in which he outlines the ideal structure for his week, concluding it with “Church,” but it apparently does not occur to Max even to ask whether that item is on the list for a serious reason.

• Wallace frequently said that C. S. Lewis’s The Screwtape Letters was either one of his favorite books or his absolute favorite. Max does not mention this. One might think that a biography of a writer would note a book that that writer had made a point of announcing his affection for, but no.

• Max tells us that one of Wallace’s early AA sponsors taught him the prayer of St. Francis “Lord, make me an instrument of your peace.” Much later in the book he mentions, quite in passing, that Wallace made a point of pinning a copy of that prayer to a wall of his house, along with certain other documents that were especially important to him. But Max sees no significance in this act.

I could go on. There are many such examples. Nota bene: I do not think that Wallace would have described himself as a Christian; I do not think it likely that he was a Christian. But it is possible that he was, and engagement with Christianity (and with religion more generally) obviously played a far larger role in Wallace’s life than Max is prepared to admit. The parts of his work where he does so directly — for instance, the asterisked passages in his long essay on Dostoevsky — go unmentioned by Max. There is no doubt that in these matters Christians see what they want to see; there is equally no doubt that D. T. Max manages to avoid seeing what he doesn’t want to see.