Alan Jacobs

Cal Newport: 

The battle for telecommuting is a proxy for a deeper unrest. If employees lose remote work, the last highly visible, virus-prompted workplace experiment, the window for future transformation might slam shut. The tragedy of this moment, however, is how this reform movement lacks good ideas about what else to demand. Shifting more work to teleconferencing eliminates commutes and provides schedule flexibility, but, as so many office refugees learned, remote work alone doesn’t really help alleviate most of what made their jobs frantic and exhausting. We need new ideas about how to reshape work, and anthropology may have something to offer. 

Newport, to his credit, acknowledges that the common tropes on this subject — “We are wired to do X because our hunter-gatherer ancestors did Z” — are simplistic at best and often misleading. But I’m still not sure his anthropological anecdotes tell us a lot that’s helpful.  

What’s more important is that modern office work is dehumanizing and stress-inducing in ways that even the office work of a hundred years ago was not. (Note: that doesn’t mean that those early patterns of work didn’t have their own problems, some of them major.) I don’t think any anthropological research, or any recent writing about work, captures the differences between the the computerized workplace and earlier modes of work than Mark Helprin’s 1996 essay “The Acceleration of Tranquility” — which even now I think about regularly because it’s not just about work but also about the kinds of material conditions, the furniture of everyday life as it were, that enable flourishing. 

One final note (in this post, anyway; I do want to return to the topic): What Newport is discussing here applies only to office work. There are other kinds of work — including my own, as a teacher — that are grossly diminished when done remotely, and of course many more (surgery, carpentry) that can’t be done remotely at all. But so many people in our society do office work that we really do need to be looking for ways to make it less miserable. 

Ian Bogost:

If Twitter does fail, either because its revenue collapses or because the massive debt that Musk’s deal imposes crushes it, the result could help accelerate social media’s decline more generally. It would also be tragic [me: tragic?] for those who have come to rely on these platforms, for news or community or conversation or mere compulsion. Such is the hypocrisy of this moment. The rush of likes and shares felt so good because the age of zero comments felt so lonely — and upscaling killed the alternatives a long time ago, besides.

If change is possible, carrying it out will be difficult, because we have adapted our lives to conform to social media’s pleasures and torments. It’s seemingly as hard to give up on social media as it was to give up smoking en masse, like Americans did in the 20th century. Quitting that habit took decades of regulatory intervention, public-relations campaigning, social shaming, and aesthetic shifts. At a cultural level, we didn’t stop smoking just because the habit was unpleasant or uncool or even because it might kill us. We did so slowly and over time, by forcing social life to suffocate the practice. That process must now begin in earnest for social media.

One of Christian’s Gibsons has survived, and here it is being played by the (also great) Julian Lage:

John Banville:

The English language is beautiful. It’s immensely rich and untidy with so many influences from other cultures, and I glory in it. People say to me that they have to go to the dictionary. Is that a great trouble? The dictionary is one of the most precious things you have in your house. You should be thanking me for the excuse to go to it. I say to them: “I bet when you went to look up whatever word, you came across four or five new ones. So you gained! I did you a favour!” 

Alas, most of Banville’s readers would’ve looked up the words on Google. It’s only the dictionary in codex form that works the way Banville wants it to work — the way it should work. Trust me on that — and also trust my buddy Austin Kleon. If you don’t have any other books in codex form, have a dictionary and a Bible. They’ll surprise you and teach you every time you pick them up. 

P.S. Unrelated, but here’a another great passage from that interview:

You know, someone said to me recently: “John, I suppose you’ll be writing your Covid novel?” I said: “I certainly will not, and I hope nobody else does either.” The art of fiction isn’t for commenting on events of the time. It may do that, but that’s not its object, which is to imagine the world. 

Don’t know why that book info has the author’s name in Russian, but it looks cool so I decided to keep it.

Thomas Harrison:

Musil was not the only writer of his time to think of the essay as the method and intellectual mode most appropriate to ethical reflection. A predilection for this flexible genre had taken strong root by the end of the nineteenth century, with brilliant standards established by Søren Kierkegaard, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Friedrich Nietzsche, and half a dozen prominent others. Their essays bent “positivistic” accounts of objective phenomena to the purposes of feeling and subjective need, to matters of spiritual and moral import. A loose manner of prose composition without fixed rules of method — incorporating aphorism, lyrical condensation, confession, invective, and satire — the essay straddled a spectrum along which Western metaphysics seemed to have arrayed two components of human experience: head and heart, science and art, truth and fiction, body and soul, law and desire.

This is why the essay is such a culturally vital and underrated genre, a topic on which I hope soon to write an … essay, I guess.  

[Some of you may have seen that I originally posted this as a screenshot from Instapaper, which was easy and looked pretty good … but because it was an image rather than text (a) the text so imaged didn’t resize properly in different-sized browser windows and (b) the content isn’t searchable. So I’m back to the usual way of posting. But I dunno, I might try again at some point; it not being searchable isn’t such a big deal if I have tags. The value for me is that it’s a way of sharing with less friction.] 

You Can Forget About Crypto Now: “Imagine your debit card suddenly stopped working because the executives at your bank were out making high-risk trades with your money while you were trying to pay for groceries — that’s roughly analogous to what Bankman-Fried is accused of pulling off.”

This Adam Neely video on the ways that intellectual property law is simply unsuited to music is just superb.