Alan Jacobs

Sometimes I think the OED is just pulling my leg.

C Thi Nguyen:

An ‘epistemic bubble’ is an informational network from which relevant voices have been excluded by omission. That omission might be purposeful: we might be selectively avoiding contact with contrary views because, say, they make us uncomfortable. As social scientists tell us, we like to engage in selective exposure, seeking out information that confirms our own worldview. But that omission can also be entirely inadvertent. Even if we’re not actively trying to avoid disagreement, our Facebook friends tend to share our views and interests. When we take networks built for social reasons and start using them as our information feeds, we tend to miss out on contrary views and run into exaggerated degrees of agreement.

An ‘echo chamber’ is a social structure from which other relevant voices have been actively discredited. Where an epistemic bubble merely omits contrary views, an echo chamber brings its members to actively distrust outsiders. In their book Echo Chamber: Rush Limbaugh and the Conservative Media Establishment (2010), Kathleen Hall Jamieson and Frank Cappella offer a groundbreaking analysis of the phenomenon. For them, an echo chamber is something like a cult. A cult isolates its members by actively alienating them from any outside sources. Those outside are actively labelled as malignant and untrustworthy. A cult member’s trust is narrowed, aimed with laser-like focus on certain insider voices. In epistemic bubbles, other voices are not heard; in echo chambers, other voices are actively undermined.

How to Discover the Life-Affirming Comforts of ‘Death Cleaning’: 

Professional home organizers are reporting a spike in calls from older customers asking for help sorting through their belongings, seeking to dole out the heirlooms and sentimental items and toss the excess. The mood, organizers say, is largely upbeat, with people eager to part with china, furniture and photographs. In some cases, the inquiries come from grown children on behalf of their aging parents, keen to get ahead on the task so they don’t have to do it alone later.

“There’s been a shift in the consciousness of people 70 and over,” said Ann Lightfoot, a founder of Done & Done Home, a New York City home-organizing company that saw its business double in 2021, and an author of the forthcoming book, “Love Your Home Again.” “They’re like, ‘Oh my God, nobody wants my stuff. I don’t even want my stuff.’” 

Professionals often refer to the task as “death cleaning,” a term popularized in 2018 with the publication of the book, “The Gentle Art of Swedish Death Cleaning,” by Margareta Magnusson, which posited that the prospect of our eventual demise is reason enough to purge. 

I hadn’t seen this when I wrote my post on keeping my books, but I kinda think that books are different. Books aren’t just stuff. Books have a distinctive ability to hold personal but transferable meaning. 

Graeme Wood:

Various journalists complained that I described MBS as personally “charming” and “intelligent.” To this my reply is twofold. First, MBS was indeed charming and intelligent, and if you want me to say otherwise, then you want to be lied to. Second, if you think charm and intelligence are incompatible with being a sociopath, then your years in Washington, D.C., have taught you less than nothing.

Any publication bragging that it is too sanctimonious to accept an invitation to interview the crown prince of Saudi Arabia is admitting it cannot cover Saudi Arabia. The Atlantic is not in the business of sanctimony, and it expects its readers to understand, without being told, that someone who dwells on his own indignities as the result of a murder, rather than on the suffering of the victim, might not be the perfect steward of absolute power. 

Three points in response: 

1. This is precisely correct. 
2. Wood’s profile of MBS is absolutely brilliant. 
3. The complaints about it are yet further evidence of Twitter’s ability to transform intelligent people into complete idiots. 

”It’s Not Your Fault You’re a Jerk on Twitter,” writes Katherine Cross for WIRED. That said, you are a jerk on Twitter.* As Jaron Lanier said a while back, Twitter is “worse than cigarettes, in that cigarettes don’t degrade you. They kill you, but you’re still you.”

• Of course I don’t mean you, dear reader, I mean … all those other people.

Kant clung to his university, submitted himself to its regulations, retained the appearance of religious belief, endured to live among colleagues and students: so it is natural that his example has produced above all university professors and professorial philosophy. Schopenhauer had little patience with the scholarly castes, separated himself from them, strove to be independent of state and society – this is his example, the model he provides. 

— Nietzsche, “Schopenhauer as Educator.” It is interesting to think of other examples of this distinction — and especially other major thinkers who share this inability to function within standard institutional structures. In a long essay about Kierkegaard in the New Yorker in 1968, Auden wrote, 

Like Pascal, Nietzsche, and Simone Weil, Kierkegaard is one of those writers whom it is very difficult to estimate justly. When one reads them for the first time, one is bowled over by their originality (they speak in a voice one has never heard before) and by the sharpness of their insights (they say things which no one before them has said, and which, henceforward, no reader will ever forget). But with successive readings one's doubts grow, one begins to react against their overemphasis on one aspect of the truth at the expense of all the others, and one's first enthusiasm may all too easily turn into an equally exaggerated aversion. 

(Auden wrote this essay specifically to ensure that his own earlier fascination with Kierkegaard did not pivot to “an equally exaggerated aversion.”) Such thinkers don’t fit in universities because they can’t or won’t obey the codes of the academy. Almost all successful academics are code fetishists, for good reasons (e.g. the maintaining of professional and disciplinary standards) and bad (turf management and the performing of power). Truly original thinkers will either shun environments so code-dominated or will be driven out of them. 

But: not only original thinkers. One can be not original at all but rather unoriginal in the wrong ways, usually in outdated ways, and be equally in violation of the codes. Exhibit A: Jordan Peterson, who was comfortable enough (if neither productive nor influential) in the academy until he started vocally resisting recently developed guidelines of academic life in favor of defending some ideas that he thought had been unjustly forgotten. 

From Edwin Muir’s Autobiography:

During these years I began to grow aware of the people round me as individuals. At the Bu [the farm on the tiny isle of Wyre where they had lived when Muir was small] my family had been a stationary, indivisible pattern; now my brothers and sister hardened into separate shapes, and without my knowing division entered the world. The breaking up of our family, the departure of one member after another, strengthened this feeling greatly, for with my eldest brother Jimmie working in Kirkwall I could now think of him as separate from us, yet when he came out to see us at Garth he was obviously a member of the family still. This paradox of unity and separateness troubled my mind a great deal, for Jimmie in Kirkwall lived a life of his own, quite unlike our life; yet when he cam to see us he was still the brother I had known and worshipped as a child. Soon after our shift to Garth he went still farther away, to Glasgow, and after that we saw him only once a year, during his summer holidays. Then Willie, my second oldest brother, grew discontented in turn, and my, father, knowing he was unhappy, allowed him to enter a lawyer’s office in Kirkwall. The process continued; it was as if a fermentation had set up in our family which no power could stop. My third brother, Johnnie, and my sister Elizabeth had a harder struggle to get away, for they were urgently needed on the farm; but my father had to give in, though he could not understand. Elizabeth went to Edinburgh, and Johnnie to Kirkwall. At its heart the family held together; there was no inward break, no enmity: it was as if something quite impersonal were scattering us to all the quarters of the compass. If Garth had been a better farm, or if it had been twenty instead of three miles from a town, all this might not have happened, and some of us might have had a happier life; for to be a farmer in Orkney now is a pleasant lot: Orkney is probably the most prosperous, well-run, and happy community in Britain. But Garth was a thankless farm, Kirkwall was near, Edinburgh and Glasgow, from Kirkwall, seemed merely the next stepping-stone, and no power on earth could have kept us from taking that road. When my father had to give up farming he too, after a year’s hesitation, and against Jimmie’s strong advice, decided to go to Glasgow and take the rest of us with him: a terrible mistake.

Modernity in a nutshell.

I keep vacillating about whether or not to record the books I read here; it’s interesting in a way but also feels performative. (Plus, I’ve never formally trackled my reading so why start now?) But … I’m going to resume. Several books coming now, to catch up.

I think a lot about blogging, about why I like it, what I think I can accomplish through blogging that I can’t accomplish, or not easily anyway, through other kinds of writing … and that leads me to metaphors. For instance, I have appropriated from Brian Eno and others the distinction between architecture and gardening, and have described my blog as a kind of garden. But lately I’ve been revisiting the architecture/gardening distinction and I have come to think that there is something architectural about writing a blog, or can be – but not in the sense of a typical architectural project, which is designed in advance and built to specifications. Rather, writing a blog over a period of years is something like building the Watts Towers:

Simon Rodi didn’t have a plan, didn’t even have a purpose: he just started building. His work was sustained and extended by bricolage, the acquisition and deployment of found objects – and not just any objects, but objects that the world had discarded as useless, as filth. You put something in here, then something else, you discover, fits there … over time you get something big and with a discernible shape. Not the regular shape envisioned in architectural drawings, but nevertheless something that can be pleasing or at least interesting to look at – an organic and irregular shape. A geometry of irregular forms.

Of course, if everything goes wrong this site could end up as an example of Horror in Architecture.

I’m not sure we have a proper language for understanding either how to produce or how to receive something like this, and we may not get one, because the most of the people who were building a culture of blogging were pulled away from that culture by the more frictionless and yet far less rich and diverse social media factories. It’s as though a bunch of people who were building their own Watts Towers ended up setting those projects aside to work for a factory that makes prefabricated housing.

My only real hope in this regard is that people have increasingly come to understand that the frictionlessness of social media is not its primary feature but rather its defining bug. They just don’t know where else to turn, and I think the difficulty of knowing where to turn is a result of the collapse of the variety of blogging possibilities over the past decade. At one point you could choose from among a pretty wide range of platforms, including TypePad, Movable Type, Blogger – created by a company called Pyra Labs before it was acquired by Google in 2003 – and of course WordPress, but now WordPress is for to all intents and purposes the only one left standing. (The others still exist but are close to the life-support stage.) There are of course a wide range of blogging options for the technically astute, but there aren’t very many for people who are just beginning to get interested in blogging, who think they might want to dip a toe in the waters.

The open web is worth saving. We need to reject the monocultures of the walled factories. So let me make just one more plea, for those who feel that they can’t quit social media cold turkey, for micro.blog. Get a micro.blog account; it’s easy to set it up so that you can crosspost to Twitter. (You used to be able to crosspost to Instagram but of course Meta put an end to that.) Let the crossposting be your training wheels and then, after you’ve spent some time away from the hellsite, you might find yourself capable of disabling the crossposting and living only in the smaller and healthier community of micro.blog.

FYI

I should say, in the interests of full disclosure, that I very rarely weigh in at micro.blog – I do almost all my writing here and only post photos over there. I am not by any reasonable standard a public figure, but I’m public enough that when I post anything anywhere I get more comments and questions than I am capable of handling. I am simply a profoundly introverted person, and interacting with strangers or even acquaintances is stressful for me, and my life right now doesn’t have room for any unnecessary stress. So I’m not going to be participating in any online conversations at all. But if you want social media to be in some sense social, there are better places to find that than on the megaplatforms.

Anyway, all that to say: I want to build something strange on the open web, and I wish more people were doing the same.

UPDATE: I posted this draft by accident. I guess I will need to … maybe do a sequel later? Sigh.

We have newsletter!

Most people want to hear two things from politicians: First, that the problem they’re most concerned about has a clear, clean solution with no downsides; and second, that that solution can be implemented easily. And of course we have no shortage of politicians willing to peddle just those lies. So, in relation to the Russian invasion of Ukraine, I hope some of the less egregiously dishonest politicians are reading Ross Douthat’s most recent column.