Alan Jacobs

All this proved a bit too much for Joel Berg, executive director of the New York City Coalition Against Hunger, who was moved to make an impassioned plea this week for a cultural reality check, warning about the possibility of the incursion of “a right-wing political agenda” into seemingly apolitical discussions of how best to fight the effects of a devastating economy on the nation’s most vulnerable.

Berg’s critique, which he focused, online, on Sesame Street, then widened, with me, on the phone this week, might, on the surface seem surprising: a kale and burdock root-munching Brooklyn mom would appear, at first glance, to have little in common with a Tea Party stalwart, and Sesame Street is hardly a hotbed of political reaction.

Yet in these, and in much of the well-meaning progressive response to the twin problems of hunger and obesity in our country, there is, indeed, a common thread: a deep-rooted, unthinking do-it-yourself individualism. It’s so ingrained as to be virtually unconscious. And at a time when nearly 49 million Americans are living in “food-insecure households” — i.e. homes where family members sometimes go hungry — it’s a tendency that, if unchecked, can do a great deal of harm.

Why such narratives are in demand by the general public is more mysterious. It could be that ordinary people find the surreal perplexity of the Internet—the stuff of WikiLeaks, Anonymous, Stuxnet, “Twitter revolutions”—so maddeningly complex and labyrinthine that they are ready to settle for whatever theory or pseudo-theory or theoretical uplift seems to make sense of the puzzling new situation. And what better way to make sense of it all than to claim that the source of their perplexity is in fact a part of some inexorable historical process that has been unfolding for centuries? Most Internet intellectuals simply choose a random point in the distant past—the honor almost invariably goes to the invention of the printing press—and proceed to draw a straight line from Gutenberg to Zuckerberg, as if the Counter-Reformation, the Thirty Years’ War, the Reign of Terror, two world wars—and everything else—never happened.

The ubiquitous references to Gutenberg are designed to lend some historical gravitas to wildly ahistorical notions. The failure of Internet intellectuals actually to grapple with the intervening centuries of momentous technological, social, and cultural development is glaring. For all their grandiosity about technology as the key to all of life’s riddles, they cannot see further than their iPads. And even their iPad is of interest to them only as a “platform”—another buzzword of the incurious—and not as an artifact that is assembled in dubious conditions somewhere in East Asian workshops so as to produce cultic devotion in its more fortunate owners. This lack of elementary intellectual curiosity is the defining feature of the Internet intellectual. History, after all, is about details, but no Internet intellectual wants to be accused of thinking small. And so they think big—sloppily, ignorantly, pretentiously, and without the slightest appreciation of the difference between critical thought and market propaganda.

thingsmagazine:

‘The Mariner on the Deck of the Ship’, by Mervyn Peake

For him that stealeth, or borroweth and returneth not, this book from its owner, let it change into a serpent in his hand and rend him. Let him be struck with palsy, and all his members blasted. Let him languish in pain crying aloud for mercy, and let there be no surcease to his agony till he sing in dissolution. Let bookworms gnaw his entrails in token of the Worm that dieth not, and when at last he goeth to his final punishment, let the flames of Hell consume him forever.

One of the things I noticed in the obits and letters to the editor about Jobs was the recurrent notion that he enhanced our connectivity. This is something that strikes me as such an irony. We’re all connected now, we’re all wired, we have this complete ease of contact with everybody — but it’s also obvious that the more society becomes entrenched in these so-called connecting technologies, the more isolated we are as individuals… .

Well there are these band-aids, these substitutes, of course there are. That’s the appeal, that’s why they’re popular, but in the meantime we’re more and more dispersed. And don’t get me wrong I use them too. I have a close friend in Serbia. How often am I going to see him? Not very often, so I rely on a fixed version of the technology you’re describing. But those are consolations, and you ultimately have to look at what’s being traded away. When you weigh the whole ensemble of this, the whole culture of this and you see the direction it’s going, and again getting back to community, which to me is really the key thing, it’s evaporating.

I’m endlessly fascinated by watching children play with technology. It all started when I saw a 4-year-old child swipe her hand across a television screen in frustration. What makes revolutionary touch and swipe technology so biologically natural?

Many worthy thinkers fear that “the life of the mind” is being crowded out by the current explosion of scientific information and technological innovation. “We are living in an increasingly post-idea world,” warns Neal Gabler, in a New York Times op-ed essay mourning the loss of an era when “Marx pointed out the relationship between the means of production and our social and political systems [and] Freud taught us to explore our minds.”

But in what sense is this a loss? Freud discovered nothing and cured nobody. Marx was a hypocrite whose theories failed in about as hideously spectacular a way as can be imagined.

What is fading, it seems to me, is not the world of ideas but the celebration of big, pretentious ideas untethered to facts. That world has fallen out of favor because fact-starved ideas, when put into practice, produced indefensible amounts of human suffering, and because we today know a lot more facts than was the case back when a Freud could be ranked with an Einstein.

How many times am I going to get suckered by technological promises? I was so excited when I heard that iOS 5 was going to have wireless syncing for iTunes: finally, I won’t have to deal with plugging the iPhone in and letting the syncing process chug away interminably!

Well. For one thing, the wireless syncing only works (a) if you have your iPhone on and (b) have your Mac running and © have iTunes running and — here’s the big one — (d) have your iPhone plugged into an outlet. So it’s not wireless at all. Your choice is whether to plug your iPhone into your Mac and let the syncing happen via USB or plug it into the wall outlet and let your syncing happen wirelessly (and therefore in most cases more slowly).

Not really much of an improvement, is it?

Also, I have my iPhone plugged in and my laptop open and running iTunes … let’s see … that would be “never.” If I had a desktop machine I would be far more likely to leave it running when I’m not using it. But like most people with laptops, especially lightweight ones like the Air, when I’m not using it I close it and put it away. No syncing can happen while the machine’s asleep.

So yet another apparently welcome technological innovation that leaves me right where I was. Lots of cool things in iOs 5! — but the “wireless” syncing isn’t one of them.

UPDATE: I’m told that it’s possible to force a wi-fi sync even when the device is unplugged, but on my iPhone the “Sync Now” button in the Preferences stays grayed out until I plug the phone in.

I am buying this book just for the cover.

There was a divide between the grad student crowd gathered to hear Zizek and the more rough-looking youth in the western part of the park who were camping out on cardboard and sleeping bags. I asked one twenty-something what he thought of a world renowned philosopher coming to speak at the park. He told me, he had “zero interest. People come, people go,” he said, “Cameras come and go. I’ve never heard of him.”

  

From Sociologist Jonathan Wynn’s post in the Everyday Sociology Blog, which describes the order and organization within the community at Zuccotti Park. 

(via nortonsoc)

Of course he’s never heard of Zizek. Who has? I’d guess maybe .01 percent of the population of the U.S., or about 300,000.