When I re-engaged with higher education after a 20-year absence in the private sector, I felt like Rip Van Winkle: The generations were different, but the landscape remained the same. During my long self-exile, I worked primarily in media and technology businesses, including with Fathom, an interactive knowledge network in partnership with Columbia University and other institutions here and abroad. I thought then that the shift to a global, technology-based knowledge society, as well as competition from international and for-profit institutions, would force innovation.That was 10 years ago.
I was right that the shifts and competition would create a new playing field for higher education, but the pace of change is stuck somewhere between sluggish and glacial. Those are gross generalities, of course, as you can find hopeful signs everywhere, but when observed from the 20,000-foot level, the basic building blocks of higher education—its priorities, governance, instructional design, and cost structure—have hardly budged.
This insistence that machines don’t care and won’t care about what we see, or about what seeing certain things does to us as organisms, is a deep—and I think deeply productive—problem for the New Aesthetic. There’s a yearning, a beseeching in our relation to machines, and I can’t help thinking we’ll find ourselves spurned, or cuckolded, or worse in the end. Learning to see through machines is not the same thing as learning to see as machines. Networks manifest an aloof, alien kind of omniscience—increasingly ubiquitous and radically, irredeemably insensible in crucial ways. This is off-the-charts otherness, a hyperotherness… and from some quarters there is a yearning, a gnostic peering after some event horizon, a dreamt-of ubiquity or singularity, beyond which machines and human consciousness interpenetrate, some Michelangelesque digital touch-point—all of which Sterling would say is just so much eschatology in the vein of Pierre Teilhard de Chardin. We’re not in fact empathizing with machines; we’re empathizing with screens. And when you consider what’s really going on in the machine, the screen behavior is epiphenomenal.
Nelson’s hatred of conventional structure made him difficult to educate. Bored and disgusted by school, he once plotted to stab his seventh-grade teacher with a sharpened screwdriver, but lost his nerve at the last minute and instead walked out of the classroom, never to return. On his long walk home, he came up with the four maxims that have guided his life: most people are fools, most authority is malignant, God does not exist, and everything is wrong. Nelson loves these maxims and repeats them often. They lead him to sympathize, in every discussion, with the rejected idea and the discounted option.By the time Nelson reached college, his method of combating the regularity chauvinists was quite sophisticated; he put his teachers off with the theories of writer Alfred Korzybski, who denounced all categories as misleading. But this hatred of categories did not produce in Nelson a fuzzy, be-here-now mysticism. On the contrary, Nelson loved words, which were tools for memory, but he hated the way that traditional writing and editing imposed a false and limiting order. Nelson had no interest in the smooth, progressive narratives encased in books. He wanted everything to be preserved in all its chaotic flux, so that it could be reconstructed as needed.
Nelson, a lonely child raised in an unconventional family, became a rebel against forgetting, and a denier of all forms of loss and grief.
The good news is that the human mind has a surprising natural ability to assess the kind of creativity we need. Researchers call these intuitions “feelings of knowing,” and they occur when we suspect that we can find the answer, if only we keep on thinking. Numerous studies have demonstrated that, when it comes to problems that don’t require insights, the mind is remarkably adept at assessing the likelihood that a problem can be solved—knowing whether we’re getting “warmer” or not, without knowing the solution.This ability to calculate progress is an important part of the creative process. When we don’t feel that we’re getting closer to the answer—we’ve hit the wall, so to speak—we probably need an insight. If there is no feeling of knowing, the most productive thing we can do is forget about work for a while. But when those feelings of knowing are telling us that we’re getting close, we need to keep on struggling.
And so: Azealia Banks is the rapper who appeals to Pitchfork readers; A$AP Rocky is the rapper who isn’t homophobic; Lana Del Rey is the lovely waif whose dad is loaded; M.I.A. is the stylish blowhard whose dad is a former Tamil revolutionary. Having learned these lines, you can go ahead and tweet confidently about these artists, holding your own in the great digital scrum, even if you have no idea what the artists actually sound like. If you get drawn into an argument, you can always quickly consult Wikipedia
Keeping a racist on your masthead long after you know he’s a racist goes a long way toward undermining all that hypersensitivity about conservatives being called racist. I can’t really improve on Josh Barro’s line from last week: “Conservatives so often get unfairly pounded on race because, so often, conservatives get fairly pounded on race. And this is the Right’s own fault, because conservatives are not serious about draining the swamp.” NRO took this situation seriously, but only after years and years of not taking it seriously.
If a randy 80-something Don Draper were looking to get laid in the 21st century, he’d find himself moodily attracted to a raven-haired lady columnist who’d written an op-ed supporting allowing women members at Augusta. They’d meet at her place, order Indian food, and make slow, sad love to the gentle strains of Top Chef in the background. Don would lie beside her while she slept, watching the green light of her cable modem flickering off the fur of her labradoodle, and the next day, striding among the familiar sun-dappled lawn under the Big Oak Tree, the whole thing would seem like a gloomy, bewildering dream. The golf course, he’d think. The golf course made sense. The careful plan of the fairways, the pimento cheese sandwiches, the creek. This was order, civilization, tradition. A place where a man commanded respect. The kids would never understand this. They were in some other world, frightening but obscurely thrilling, where waiters went by their first names and you pressed elevator buttons yourself. You could visit that world; maybe you even had to. But you’d always come back to the golf course.
Madère, Eira do Cerrado, 1989
(Forecasting via Chris Blattman)