Alan Jacobs

The results of the new paper suggest young people have a compulsion to feel good about themselves that overwhelms and precedes other desires.

‘I was shocked,’ said the lead researcher, Brad Bushman, professor of communication and psychology at the Ohio State University. 'Everybody likes compliments, but more than engaging in your favorite sexual activity? More than receiving a paycheck? I was surprised it was such a powerful thing that it trumped everything else.’

In Kansas City, going to a white barbecue joint is like going to a gentile internist: everything might turn out all right, but you’re not playing the percentages.

writing in the dust: Jaron Lanier’s advice for remaining a person on the internet

There are at least two problems with calling Loughner a ‘loner.’ First and foremost, he almost certainly isn’t one. The fact that he used to have a bunch of friends tells us as much. Second, calling Loughner a 'loner’ gives real loners a bad name. As somewhat of a loner myself, this really pisses me off. The above examples, of which I’m sure there are more, constitute a socially acceptable form of loner-bashing. There are lots of words you could use to describe Loughner, 'loner’ isn’t and shouldn’t be one of them.

Apps shatter the very idea of aesthetic coherence, turning computers into weird samplers that betray the smooth, slick exteriors of the iDevices that contain them. It’s no accident that these gadgets also refuse the multitasking and deep integration of traditional graphical computer operating systems. Multitasking may have been omitted from early app-focused devices like the iPhone for reasons of limited hardware resources, but it’s evolved to become anathema to the app aesthetic.

Instead, apps are meant to be isolated from one another. To use a term I coined last year when the iOS 4’s rudimentary multitasking feature was released, apps latertask, they don’t multitask: “Rather than putting apps away entirely, they remain close by but inactive, like a dogeared book on the desk rather than a closed book on the shelf.” Apps are like tic-tacs, always sweet, always there, but usually there for no reason.

The app is a mixed blessing for computer aesthetics, just like music sampling is for music. On the one hand, we get many variations of the same thing that can surprise us when refashioned in different permutations. But on the other hand, we get fewer coherent, complete takes on things. And there’s a risk that deep meaning slowly seeps out of every unit as each does less and less.

Jared Loughner’s despair that everything is unreal and words have no meaning amounts to hatred of the world (a mania of moralism and narcissism) for its failure to resemble the words we apply to it. Faced with a choice between real people and some stupid abstraction about words, themselves mere abstractions, Loughner killed the people to defend the abstraction. This, then, really is a kind of nihilism, only not the kind that people think Nietzsche was guilty of. It’s the kind of nihilism that Nietzsche was trying to warn us about, and help us overcome.

The main barrier is the scientism that pervades our mentality and our culture. We are prone to think that if there’s a serious problem, science will find the answer. If science cannot find the answer, then it cannot be a serious problem at all. That seems to me altogether wrong. It goes hand in hand with the thought that philosophy is in the same business as science, as either a handmaiden or as the vanguard of science. This prevailing scientism is manifest in the infatuation of the mass media with cognitive neuroscience. The associated misconceptions have started to filter down into the ordinary discourse of educated people. You just have to listen to the BBC to hear people nattering on about their brains and what their brains do or don’t do, what their brains make them do and tell them to do. I think this is pretty pernicious – anything but trivial.

I’m not exactly a slow writer—when I’m really cooking I can do 800-1,000 good, polished words in two hours, that’s not bad—but it can take me a long time to get cooking, and sometimes one sentence can hang me up for an hour. (Those are usually the first sentences, in the next draft, to be cut. You would think I might have learned by now.) I have a hard time writing an excuse to one of my kid’s teachers, a recipe for Dutch babies, an apologetic email, without sinking into a revisionary funk. I’m also slow to know what I think, and slow to know how I feel: we’re talking reptile time, rock time, empires rising and then crumbling to dust. I still haven’t decided how I feel about Sandinista!, for example, and I’ve been thinking about it on and off since 1980.

Atargatis, the “Syrian Goddess,” was a demanding mistress. For one thing, her priests (the galli) could win their way into her affections only by emasculating themselves. According to the De Dea Syria, attributed to Lucian of Samosata, any young man disposed to dedicate himself to her service in Hierapolis had to make this first and most extravagant oblation on one of her high holy days, in a fit of divine ecstasy, with a single economic slash of a sacred sword kept at her temple. After that, he would run naked and bleeding through the city streets until he found a home into which he felt inspired to fling the freshly severed jetsam. Any household thus “honored” was then required by religious decency to supply the new initiate with female attire and adornments.

Now, admittedly, we all do our best to lay up treasure in heaven, and I suppose one ought not to cast around too many peremptory judgments regarding other people’s pieties; but I think most of us can agree that this was a fairly exorbitant sum to place in escrow on an uncertain bargain. More to the point, pity the poor housewife or slave to whose lot it fell to take up the gauntlet (so to speak) from where it had been thrown down. Religious enthusiasts in every age have tended to make nuisances of themselves, granted; but even Jehovah’s Witnesses showing up at the door at dinner time do not impose themselves quite so inconsiderately and startlingly as that.

I’m always being informed that if I find something wrong on Wikipedia I’m supposed to “fix” it. Good god. How bullying, really. Let me free up my Mort Sahl indignation at the contemporary world here, for an instant. Why on earth should anyone have to fix and re-fix this bland-but-irregular, passive-aggressively smug, endlessly fallible, super-grudge-sensitive oatmeal-pavement of grindingly monotonous ‘resource’ that has smothered the internet and the very notion of authentically-sourced research?

I’m told I ought to be patient – and also cautiously respectful, for fear of the damage I might do to “my” page – of the powerful and hidden “Wikepedians”, as though they were some strange and distinct culture living within our own – like a science-fiction scenario where the Alpha-Centurians have set up on our planet, with a government of their own, employing many of us now within their vast bureaucracy – “We must fathom them and respect them though they are systematically rendering all our ice cream completely flavorless – they have their noble purposes!” In many ways Wikipedia has narrowed the vibrant chaos of the internet just as badly as Google or Facebook could ever be accused of doing – is it a greater or lesser crime to do so not in the name of secretive and profitable corporate imperatives but under the grand banner of “crowdsourcing”? With all respect to the noble volunteer army, I call it death by pedantry. Question: hadn’t we more or less come to understand that no piece of extended description of reality is free of agendas or ideologies? This lie, which any Encyclopedia implicitly tells, is cubed by the infinite regress of Wikepedia tinkering-unto-mediocrity.