Alan Jacobs

”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 One can be not original at all but rather unoriginal in the wrong ways, usually in outdated ways, and be equally in violation of the codes.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. 

Andrew Delbanco:

There is a third — and perhaps the deepest — problem with the futuristic vision of education advanced by “technologically enabled delivery”: the debilitating fact that it rests on a narrow, positivistic conception of knowledge. In this view, all teaching is training, and all learning is a quest for competence: the mastery of some field whose practitioners can expect compensation for their proficiency or expertise. No one should dispute that colleges have a vital responsibility to prepare students for the world of work — to provide them with what the political scientist Benjamin Ginsberg calls “more or less sophisticated forms of vocational training to meet the needs of other established institutions in the public and private sectors.” In fact, preparation for economic productivity has been the main aim of universities since the decline of prescribed curricula in the 19th century, when the introduction of electives and, later, majors aligned what students chose to study in college with the work they planned to do after. Over the past 50 years, as students from economically insecure families entered college in growing numbers, this alignment has only become tighter, including at elite institutions that serve predominantly affluent students. “It is a shame,” Ginsberg writes, “when that is all that the university offers.” “All” is an exaggeration, but at more and more institutions it’s a fair approximation.

What’s increasingly rare in higher education, and almost entirely missing from writings about its future, is a more than nominal commitment to the value of learning undertaken in the hope of expanding the sympathetic imagination by opening the mind to contesting ideas about nature and history, the power of literature and art, and the value of dialectic in the pursuit of truth. These aspirations — traditionally gathered under the term “liberal education” — are in desperate need of revival. To advance them requires teachers and institutions committed to a more capacious vision of education than the prevailing idea of workforce training and economic self-advancement. 

There will always be many people who want more from their education than “workforce training and economic self-advancement,” but they may not want it from universities. They may perceive — and surely one could not blame them for coming to this conclusion — that the modern Western university is incapable of providing anything else. And in that case they’ll continue to seek credentials from universities but look to private instruction or para-academic organizations for education. 

Ernst Cassirer, An Essay on Man: An Introduction to a Philosophy of Human Culture (1944):

That self-knowledge is the highest aim of philosophical inquiry appears to be generally acknowledged. In all the conflicts between the different philosophical schools this objective remained invariable and unshaken: it proved to be the Archimedean point, the fixed and immovable center, of all thought. Nor did the most sceptical thinkers deny the possibility and necessity of self-knowledge. They distrusted all general principles concerning the nature of things, but this distrust was only meant to open a new and more reliable mode of investigation.

Jordan Peterson, Beyond Order: 12 More Rules for Life (2021):

Human beings have the capacity to courageously confront their suffering — to transcend it psychologically, as well as to ameliorate it practically. This is the most fundamental twin axiom of psychotherapy, regardless of school of thought, as well as key to the mystery of human success and progress across history itself.

Maybe one of the most profound two-kinds-of-people distinctions is just this: The chasm between (a) those who believe we can know ourselves and heal ourselves and (b) those who doubt that we can reliably do either. I am in the latter camp, i.e., on the opposite side from Cassirer and Peterson. (Which is why the architectonic discipline for me is theology rather than philosophy or psychotherapy.)

The only Bluetooth device that has ever worked reliably for me is the first-generation Apple AirPods. In every other circumstance Bluetooth has been hit-or-miss. Probably my Mac will connect to my stereo; but maybe not. I bought the AirPods Pro and they never connected to anything, so I sent them back. And don’t get me started about trying use Bluetooth in my car.

Maybe it works great for everyone else, and my body emits strange radiation that disrupts it for me and me alone. But in any event: I hate Bluetooth, and with very good cause.

Those old AirPods have (inevitably) lost much of their battery life, but they would still be fine for listening to stuff on my morning walks – except that often when I am away from the house the right pod loses its connection and can’t get it back. Weirdly, when I at home this doesn’t happen. But it’s one more form of unpredictability and unreliability and I’ve pretty much had it with that. So I’ve set the AirPods aside altogether and am using wired earbuds again. Last night I was lying in bed listening to some music with them, and as I was drifting off to sleep I thought: Wow, this is amazing. I never have to charge these things – and their battery doesn’t weaken over time because they don’t have a battery. They work, flawlessly, whenever I plug them in. As long as my device has electricity so too do these headphones. What an incredible step forward in technological achievement! And thinking such satisfied thoughts, I rolled over in bed and felt the cord of the headphones tightening around my neck. By the time I rescued myself I was wide awake again. 

Well. Nothing’s perfect, I guess. 

The most recent issue of Oliver Burkeman’s excellent newsletter The Imperfectionist focuses on “becoming news-resilient” – finding ways to stay properly informed while avoiding doomscrolling and other forms of obsessive behavior. For what it’s worth, here’s what I do: 

1. Most important: I avoid social media altogether. 
2. I always have plenty to read because of all the cool sites I subscribe to via RSS, but not one of those sites covers the news. 
3. I get most of my news from The Economist, which I read when it arrives on my doorstep each week. 
4. In times of stress, such as the current moment, I start the day by reading The Economist’s daily briefing. 

And that’s it. I don’t need any more news, and I don’t want anyone’s opinions about what’s happening. 

Back to RSS, which I have praised many times before: It’s so dramatically better than any other way of reading the internet I cannot understand why it has always remained a niche phenomenon. If you use Apple devices, you can get an excellent RSS experience, on Mac and iOS alike, for free with NetNewsWire — which, twenty years ago, was the app that got me into RSS. NetNewsWire got lost in the wilderness for a while, and while it was away I started using Feedbin as an all-platform RSS service and Reeder as my desktop client, so for now anyway I’m sticking with those. But NetNewsWire does all you need. 

One more little tip: both NetNewsWire and Feedbin allow you to subscribe to Twitter accounts as RSS feeds, which means I can keep up with some of my friends while never having to engage directly with the hellsite. Also, there are a few worthy sites on the web that for some unaccountable reason don’t provide an RSS feed, but those sites always have a Twitter presence, so I can still use my RSS client to read their stuff. Highly recommended. 

There’s a remarkable amount of useful information about the attack on Ukraine in this one map from the Economist. They really are masters of data visualization.