Alan Jacobs

In the Year of Our Lord 2001, Iain Sinclair walked around the city of London in an attempt to undo a great curse laid upon the city. He walked alongside the M25, the vast London Orbital: sometimes just inside its circumference, sometimes just outside it, very rarely walking on the road itself. The road itself was the curse he sought to remove, along with the politics and philosophy that produce such roads.

Invoking magicians and celebrants of the paranormal, Sinclair imagines London not as an inorganic “place” but as a living body, a body endangered by its mechanistic physicians, above all Margaret Thatcher: “My superstition, sympathetic to Fludd and Paracelsus, persists: the walk around London’s orbital motorway is personal. From Harefield to Purfleet, the rushes, surges of excitement, are connected to an imagined—solar powered?—circulation of blood.” Having noted that many great country houses were built a day’s horseback ride from central London, and that the M25 itself is set just at that distance, he becomes obsessed with concentric circles of spiritual and intellectual force. He sees the poets and sages of London moving to its periphery either to escape or understand: “Blake at Lambeth, [the Elizabethan magician John] Dee at Mortlake, Pope at Twickenham, [the novelist J. G.] Ballard at Shepperton: the great British tradition of expulsion, indifference. The creation of alternative universes that wrap like Russian dolls around a clapped-out core.” The body of London is dying from its heart and being strangled by the great garrotte of the Orbital; Sinclair hopes by walking the ancient lines to make an effectual counterspell, to loosen the malign constriction.

If you then factor in cops who are not necessarily crooked, but think it’s appropriate to pepper-spray people for fun, or leave people in detention over a missing ID, or who simply kill innocent people by mistake, officers who routinely arrest people on “contempt of cop” charges, you are talking about something a bit more dangerous than the One Percent rule implies.

That is the terrain. I accept it as a result of democracy. I also accept that communities which enjoy an overexposure to this privileged One Percent, will tend to be less likely to regard the police as a legitimate branch of law enforcement, and more likely to regard them as another neighborhood crew, empowered with the right to legally kill, and suffer few obvious consequences. One can see how such a people might make the wholly sensible decision to refrain from speaking too much with this One Percent.

Over the long term, I hope we revisit how we’ve decided to police our communities. In short term, I have son to raise. There are numerous forces I seek to safeguard him against. The police are among them.

Music was one of the first businesses to get hit hard. What happened there? Was it all piracy?

This is one of those questions that is hard to answer. It’s very hard to say exactly what caused what, and I would argue that separating those things out is impossible. Right now, the single biggest problem with CD sales is all the stores where you used to buy CDs are closed. Well, what caused that? Well, people started buying songs online. That became a problem because people were only buying singles instead of albums and they weren’t spending a lot. Well, why did that happen? Because piracy put so much downward pressure on prices that you have to take any deal, whether it’s a good deal or a bad deal. It’s very hard to separate these things. Any study where people say this has nothing to do with piracy is a bunch of bullshit.

Go to send for.
Have you say that?
Have you understand that he says?
At what purpose have say so?
At what o'clock dine him?
Apply you at the study during that you are young.
Dress your hairs.
Sing an area.
These apricots and these peaches make me and to come water in the mouth.
How do you can it to deny?
Wax my shoes.
This is that I have think.
That are the dishes whose you must be and to abstain.
This ink is white.
This room is filled of bugs.
This girl have a beauty edge.
It is a noise which to cleave the head.
This wood is fill of thief’s.
Tell me, it can one to know?
Give me some good milk newly get out.
Dry this wine.
He laughs at my nose, he jest by me.
He has spit in my coat.
He has me take out my hairs. He does me some kicks.
He has scratch the face with hers nails.
He burns one’s self the brains.
He is valuable his weight’s gold.
He has the world for to laugh.
He do the devil at four.
He make to weep the room.
It must never to laugh of the unhappies.
He was wanting to be killed.
I am confused all yours civilities.
I am catched cold.
Till say-us?
Till hither.
I have put my stockings outward.
I have croped the candle.
I have mind to vomit.
I will not to sleep on street.
I am catched cold in the brain.
I am pinking me with a pin.
I dead myself in envy to see her.
I take a broth all morning.
Have you understanded?
Let him have know?
Have you understand they?
Do you know they?
Do you know they to?
The storm is go over.
The sun begins to dissipe it.
Witch prefer you?
The paving stone is sliphery.
The thunderbolt is falling down.
The rose-trees begins to button.
The ears are too length.
The hands itch at him.
Have you forgeted me?
Dont you are awaken yet?
That should must me to cost my life.
We are in the canicule.
No budge you there.
If can’t to please at every one’s.
Take that boy and whip him to much.
Take attention to cut you self.
Take care to dirt you self.
Dress my horse.
Since you not go out, I shall go out nor I neither.
That may dead if I lie you.
What is it who want you?
Why you no helps me to?
Upon my live.
All trees have very deal bear.
A throat’s ill.
You shall catch cold one’s.
You make grins.
Will some mutton?
Will you fat or slight?
Will you this?
Will you a bon?
You not make who to babble.
You not make that to prate all day’s work.
You interompt me.
You mistake you self heavily.
You come too rare.

Clay Johnson, author of the soon-to-be-released The Information Diet: A Case for Conscious Consumption, answering the question, “Does going on an information diet improve one’s productivity?” on Quora:

The concept of an information diet shouldn’t be to “shut away all information consumption and focus on doing work.” If you look at food — the most common place where we have the concept of “diet” we’d never say that a healthy diet is “temporarily not eating” — that’s either waiting between meals/snacks, fasting, or anorexia, but it’s not dieting. A healthy information diet means being selective about one’s information intake, and consciously consuming it.

Can an information diet that’s focused on creating healthy consumption of information improve one’s productivity? You bet — if anything, trying to cap your total daily information intake will increase your productivity by adding more time to your life. The average American spends 11 hours a day consuming information while they’re not at work and many of us who work in front of a computer end up spending a lot of time consuming information while at work, too. …

My information diet consists of a cap of 6 hours a day of total, proactive information consumption. That means everything that requires my explicit attention that doesn’t involve another person — television, movies, the Internet, email, social networks — if it involves a URL, a mouse, or a remote control, that goes into that 6 hours. It doesn’t mean anything physically social or stuff I have no control over, like advertisements on the subway, or music in the grocery store.

Of that six hours, I spend 2 hours on entertainment and 4 hours on work related research and communication. Sometimes that changes — on weekends, for instance, I spend the full six hours doing whatever the heck I want, as long as it’s not more than six hours. By capping it at six hours, it also forces me to do things like go for a long walk with my wife, or cooking a good dinner, or producing information. That’s been a heck of an improvement not only on my productivity, but in my marriage and on my overall health.

Manners also helped create the South’s famous “bless your heart” culture — a powerful way of seeming to be polite without being genuine.

Contrary to popular thought, everyone is not a publisher. When you hear a publisher say it, it’s even sadder. Publishing is a complex and well established collection of knowledge, competencies and processes, refined over time, practiced under forever difficult circumstances in a frankly indifferent market. Which is not to say that it’s exclusive: the bar to entry has dropped massively, obviously, in the last ten years. But it’s still hard, and hard to do well, and the rewards are still small. Writing something and putting it on the internet is not publishing. Producing an application and getting it into the app store is not publishing. If you think everyone is a publisher, go home now, and come back when you’ve thought about what you do.

Consider patients with anterograde amnesia, who cannot consciously recall new experiences in their lives. If you spend an afternoon trying to teach them the video game Tetris, they will tell you the next day that they have no recollection of the experience, that they have never seen this game before—and, most likely, that they have no idea who you are, either. But if you look at their performance on the game the next day, you’ll find that they have improved exactly as much as nonamnesiacs. Implicitly their brains have learned the game: The knowledge is simply not accessible to their consciousness. (Interestingly, if you wake up an amnesic patient during the night after he has played Tetris, he’ll report that he was dreaming of colorful falling blocks but will have no idea why.)

It’s harder to imagine the past that went away than it is to imagine the future. What we were prior to our latest batch of technology is, in a way, unknowable. It would be harder to accurately imagine what New York City was like the day before the advent of broadcast television than to imagine what it will be like after life-size broadcast holography comes online. But actually the New York without the television is more mysterious, because we’ve already been there and nobody paid any attention. That world is gone. My great-grandfather was born into a world where there was no recorded music. It’s very, very difficult to conceive of a world in which there is no possibility of audio recording at all. Some people were extremely upset by the first Edison recordings. It nauseated them, terrified them. It sounded like the devil, they said, this evil unnatural technology that offered the potential of hearing the dead speak. We don’t think about that when we’re driving somewhere and turn on the radio. We take it for granted.

After six months, my editor finally wrote me. Not surprisingly, he no longer liked my book. Too complicated for the average trade reader. He advised me to speculate. “Unleash your inner Marshall McLuhan,” he said, and rewrite the book. This was excellent advice from a smart man with decades of experience in trade publishing. But I realized that I had no inner Marshall McLuhan. Even more important was my realization that I had no inner James Surowiecki, Malcolm Gladwell, or Chris Anderson. From my editor’s perspective, these were models, and rightly so. They made trade publishers a fortune. From my perspective, however, they were good writers who had spun big ideas into gold. I couldn’t write a big-idea book, because, as it turned out, I didn’t believe in big ideas. By my lights, they almost had to be wrong. Years of academic research taught me two things. First, reality is as complicated as it is, not as complicated as we want it to be. Some phenomena have an irreducible complexity that will defeat any big-idea effort at simplification. Detailed research has, not surprisingly, cast doubt on the reality of wise crowds, tipping points, and long tails. Second, most of the easy big questions about the way the world works have been answered. The questions that remain are really hard. Big ideas, then, can only reinvent the wheel or make magical claims.