Mandy Brown wrote a wonderful post that I responded to, and now she’s back with an even better and deeper post. Even as I grow increasingly persuaded that Substack can become a genuine alternative to legacy journalism, I am also increasingly persuaded that the open web is a genuine and necessary alternative, for some writers, to platforms like Substack.
Brad East asks “What does an idol promise?” — and then answers the question. A useful reminder that the Church needs a stronger idolology. This is a good start. See also my old post explaining that we carry idol-factories in our pockets.
It has never occurred to me that someone meeting a philosopher might ask “What are your sayings?”
There’s no way I’ll be watching Megalopolis, but the broader point Matt Zoller Seitz makes here is a very good one:
Movies like “Megalopolis” used to be released fairly regularly, by major studios, which are increasingly not in the movie business, but the IP regurgitation business. Movies were always a popular art form, but it used to be understood that sometimes you’d deliberately seek out something different, challenging, and perhaps obscure or ‘arty’ just to have a reaction to it and be able to discuss it with others. Movies like this only seem “indulgent” because we’re so deep into the era where everything has to be unmitigated fan service, the cinematic equivalent of cooking the Whopper exactly how the customer dreamed about ordering it, or else it’s considered a waste of time — or worse, a form of acting-out by some bratty person who thinks they’re an artist rather than what they presumably are, an employee of whomever bought a ticket.
There’s a lot of this.
Meaghan Ritchey does a fascinating interview of Nicholas Ma, whose new documentary Leap of Faith looks fantastic — and extremely important.
Baylor is having an A.I. week and I’m not super happy about it.
Angus would like you to know that he is two years old today!
Like many of us, he realised that what came to be known as the blogosphere could be a modern realisation of Jürgen Habermas’s idea of “the public sphere” because it was open to all, everything was discussable and social rank didn’t determine who was allowed to speak. But what he – and we – underestimated was the speed and comprehensiveness that tech corporations such as Google and Facebook would enclose that public sphere with their own walled gardens in which “free speech” could be algorithmically curated while the speakers were intensively surveilled and their data mined for advertising purposes.
This is why I am on, and the good Lord willing will always be on, the open web.