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.
By Monday, The New York Times’ editorial page had kicked into action. It conceded that, sure, Loughner operated “well beyond usual ideological categories,” but, still, it was “legitimate to hold Republicans and particularly their most virulent supporters in the media responsible for the gale of anger that has produced the vast majority of these threats, setting the nation on edge.” The Los Angeles Times followed suit. It admitted that, sure, Loughner and “his own demons were primarily to blame,” but it still condemned the “increasingly incendiary and violent rhetoric that characterizes today’s political debate,” for which “the right bears the brunt of responsibility.” Meanwhile, dozens of opinion writers were busily adding related but equally ethereal musings to the heap. Writing in the Guardian, blogger Jessica Valenti blamed a “country that sees masculinity — especially violent masculinity — as the ideal.”
There is of course one advantage to all such lines of argument, if argument is the word for it. They are entirely faith-based, which makes them pretty much irrefutable. But faith-based punditry works in more than one direction. Seven years after the massacre at Columbine High School — in which two senior students shot and killed twelve students and a teacher — CBS News invited Brian Rohrbough, who had lost his son Dan, to explain why he thought the shootings had happened. “The public school system has taught in a moral vacuum, expelling God from the school and from the government, replacing him with evolution, where the strong kill the weak, without moral consequences and life has no inherent value,” Rohrbough said. “And I assure you the murder of innocent children is always wrong, including by abortion. Abortion has diminished the value of children.” Most liberals (myself included) would disagree with Rohrbough’s explanation for the shooting, but they’d have trouble explaining why it’s any less plausible or substantive than explanations blaming Jared Loughner on rightwing hysteria.
— How The Media Botched The Arizona Shooting | The New Republic
Defenders of traditional authority will object to the relativism of all this, but relativism is all we’ve got – the rise of the scientific method has taken away certainty and replaced it with nothing but process and probability. An authority isn’t a person or institution who is always right – ain’t no such animal. An authority is a person or institution who has a process for lowering the likelihood that they are wrong to acceptably low levels. And over the last ten years, Wikipedia has been passing that test in an increasing number of circumstances. And this is what I think is really worth celebrating as Wikipedia begins its 10th decade. It took one of the best ideas of the last 500 years – peer review – and expanded its field of operation so dramatically that it changes the way authority is configured. So Happy Birthday, Wikipedia, and thanks for giving us so much to think about.
The fundamental contradiction in my thinking about social life is bound up with the juxtaposition in me of two elements — an aristocratic interpretation of personality, freedom and creativeness, and a socialistic demand for the assertion of the dignity of every man, of even the most insignificant of men, and for a guarantee of his rights in life. This is the clash of a passionate love of the world above, of a love of the highest, with pity for this lower world, the world of suffering. This contradiction is age-long.
If Wikipedia pulled a MySpace and started dwindling away, who could save them? And who could ever build another one?