This story idealized detachment, “liberation” from mutual care, ensuring that relationships never came before career goals. It looked like bringing a capitalist mindset into our interactions, making it normal to use, discard, and objectify other people. And as they often do, our rapacious markets and short-term desires won out.
My second question is: Cui bono? Whom did this new story serve? Who benefits from a world of consequence-free sex, weak ties, the putting off of childbearing and family? Today, the pharmaceutical and medical industries benefit, by selling decades-long prescriptions for contraceptives, and then various attempts at ART later on. Corporations and employers benefit: they gain a new labor force unsaddled by commitments to family, place, or other less-than-profitable concerns.
(Intrinsic in Rethinking Sex’s critique of modern feminism’s dependence on contraception is a critique of the free-market values that many who would term themselves conservatives or reactionaries still—oddly to my mind—hold dear.)
A thousand times Yes. See also my description of the three governing axioms of our dominant discourse about gender. And as Mary Harrington says, this dominant understanding, this metaphysical capitalism, “views ‘freedom’ as best served by reframing embodied men and women as atomized, de-sexed, fungible, and interchangeable ‘humans’ composed of disembodied ‘identity’ plus body parts that can be reordered at will, like meat LEGOs.”
Why millennial men are turning to the Book of Common Prayer. Very cool! And if they’d like to know more about the book’s history, I can help.
Tim Keller: “If the Church aims at loving service to one’s neighbor while clearly speaking the truth, it will grow again and may have cultural influence. But if it aims at influence rather than humble service, it will have neither.”
Re: those two recent links: TV and movie writers fear that their employers want to outsource writing to AI; meanwhile, other writers seem to hate their work. Maybe we can work out a deal so the people who want to be replaced by AI can be. (BTW, I wrote about writers hating writing a while back.)
I eagerly co-sign this from Freddie: “So why write if you hate writing? … But you could do literally anything else, if you dislike the process so much. Or you could write, as an amateur or a professional, and join a noble enterprise that’s as almost as old as civilization. If you do that, why not try and enjoy it a little bit?”
Tim Carmody: “A writer in 2023 is disproportionately likely to be working on a script for a giant company that treats their output as a vanishingly small data point to plug into the attention factory. Why wouldn’t they be anxious?”
Emerging
Baldur Bjarnason: “Believing the myth of Artificial General Intelligence makes you incapable of understanding what language models today are and how they work.”
Currently listening 🎵
Richard Gibson: “Current debates about writing machines are not as fresh as they seem. As the footnotes of scientific papers quietly admit, much of the intellectual infrastructure of today’s advances was laid decades ago. Already in the 1940s, the mathematician Claude Shannon demonstrated that language use could be both described by statistics and imitated with statistics, whether those statistics were in human heads or a machine’s memory. As word got out about Shannon’s work, engineers and then artists tinkered with his ideas, wrote essays in which they mulled a future in which machines would write alongside us, and built the first (stuttering) generation of natural language generators. These were the first residents of the headspace into which so many of us have recently wandered.”
Currently reading: The Spirit of Early Christian Thought by Robert Louis Wilken. Another re-read. Very excited to return to this one. 📚
I want to move to the desert just to escape the leaf blowers.
Finished reading: Clockwork, Or, All Wound Up by Philip Pullman. A perfect little fable, ideal for children of all ages. 📚
Mary Harrington: “We need to re-imagine marriage as the enabling condition for radical solidarity between the sexes, and as the smallest possible unit of resistance to overwhelming economic, cultural, and political pressure to be lone atoms in a market. Households formed on this model can work together both economically and socially on the common business of living, whether that’s agricultural, artisanal, knowledge-based, or a mix of all these. This is an essential precondition for the sustainable survival of human societies. Our biggest obstacle is an obsolete mindset that deprecates all duties beyond personal fulfilment, and views intimate relationships in instrumental terms, as means for self-development or ego gratification, rather than enabling conditions for solidarity.”
I (a) announced that I was shutting down my Buy Me A Coffee page, (b) heard from some readers telling me not to do that, (c) announced that I won’t be shutting it down after all. A bit embarrassing … but it’s very kind of people to want to support me.
Klopp pulling a hammy while (a) celebrating the winning goal and (b) shouting at the fourth official is one of the great moments of this of any other Premier League season. ⚽️