Alan Jacobs

Very few sites on the internet are meant to facilitate reading — most are, in fact, designed to inhibit reading. Imagine watching a movie and having the image regularly shrink to a tiny size, overwhelmed by a much larger advertisement which also plays its sound at double the volume of the movie’s sound — that’s what reading a corporate site is usually like. (I hope you will have noticed that I try to make this blog easily readable on large and small screens alike. Also, perhaps, that I have recently added a button to enable dark mode.)

So what to do? Well, most browsers now offer some kind of reading mode, which helps a lot — though I have not found one that works on every site. Or you could use a read-it-later service like Instapaper or Pocket. I do these things. 

Sometimes, though, I come across a long story or article or essay that I want to read without any of the distractions of being online. In that case I choose one of the following options: 

(1) If simply attentive reading is the goal, I often use a service called Push to Kindle. It does a superb job of converting webpages so that they’re perfectly formatted for the Kindle. For instance, someone recently recommended to me a long SF story called “Folding Beijing” — that’s a perfect candidate for Push to Kindle. I downloaded it and will probably read it in the next day or two. When anything is over 2500 words or so I get really uncomfortable reading it on my computer, so I often use this service for the lengthy reviews in the London Review of Books — to which I subscribe, but the print in the paper edition is uncomfortably small for my aging eyes — and their extended analytical essays like Perry Anderson’s three recent reflections on the European Union — totaling 45,000 words, longer than my most recent book — are also best-suited for the Kindle. 

(I’m trying not to buy anything else from Amazon, but I continue to use what I’ve already bought, putting off the Day of Decision until my current Kindle dies.) 

(2) But if I need to interact significantly with the text — highlight and underline — then I use a different service, Print Friendly. It converts webpages to PDFs that can be saved and/or printed. I use this all the time when I want to make PDFs to send to my students, or when a post really demands critical attention. Example: Ada Palmer’s long post from last year on the ways in which the Renaissance was worse than the Middle Ages. 

There’s a lot of great stuff on the internet. Not much of it is presented in ways designed for serious reading. But as you can see, that’s a problem that can be addressed. 

Recently I wrote a post for the Hedgehog Review on the Substackification of journalism and whether it marks a permanent atomization of journalistic writing or whether it could be the seed of institutional renewal. Here are a couple of relevant data points: 

• On his Substack newsletter, Scott Alexander has been running book reviews by his readers. 
• On her Substack newsletter, Bari Weiss has been publishing essays by other writers, and explains that practice thus: "My goal is not to make a living publishing only my views —  or ones that conform exactly to my worldview —  on this Substack. (Trust me, it’d get boring.) My ultimate goal is far more ambitious. I want to run the most interesting opinion page in America, filled with fresh reporting and commentary.” 

Substack began as a way of highlighting distinctive individual voices; it’s already turning into something more collaborative. 

Kleos means both “glory” or “fame” and also “the song that ensures that glory or fame.” The noun is cognate with the Homeric verb kluō, meaning “I hear.” Kleos is sometimes translated as “acoustic renown” — the spreading renown you get from talking about your exploits.^* It’s a bit like having a large Twitter following. In the Homeric version of the Ethos of the Extraordinary … to live a life worth living was to live a kleos-worthy life, a song-worthy life. Being sung, having one’s life spoken about, your story vivid in others’ heads, is what gives your life an added substance. It’s almost as if, in being vividly apprehended by others, you’re living simultaneously in their representations of you, acquiring additional lives to add to your meager one.

The Ethos of the Extraordinary answered that all that a person can do is to enlarge that life by the only means we have, striving to make of it a thing worth the telling, a thing that will have an impact on other minds, so that, being replicated there, it will take on a moreness. Kleos. Live so that others will hear of you. Paltry as it is, it’s the only way we have to beat back uncaring time. 

Our own culture of Facebook’s Likes and Twitter followings should put us in a good position to sympathize with an insistence on the social aspect of life-worthiness. Perhaps it’s a natural direction toward which a culture will drift, once the religious answers lose their grip. The ancient Greeks lived before the monotheistic solution took hold of Western culture, and we — or a great many of us — live after. A major difference between our two cultures is that, for the ancient Greeks, who lacked our social media, the only way to achieve such mass duplication of the details of one’s life in the apprehension of others was to do something wondrously worth the telling. Our wondrous technologies might just save us all the personal bother. Kleos is a tweet away. 

— Rebecca Newberger Goldstein, Plato at the Googleplex 

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^{* “Though the gods are incessantly mentioned [in Pindar’s poems], this ethos presents a life worth living in terms that are drawn far more from the world of men. What is desired is not the attention of the immortals, but rather the attention of one’s fellow mortals. The gods come prominently into the picture because they either promote or prevent this good — that is, the achievement that brings fame — from being attained, but the good itself isn’t defined in terms of the gods. The good belongs to the world of mortals; it’s their attention and acclaim one is after.” – RNG↩}

This is the sort of thing the world needs more of. Matthew Sweet saw a tweet claiming that a peer-reviewed study from a Stanford University scholar proved that face masks do nothing to prevent the spread of COVID-19. So he followed up, and learned that 

1. It was not a peer-reviewed study; 
2. The author is not associated with Stanford University or any other institution; 
3. None of the evidence it cites supports the claim about the uselessness of masks.

Of course, Sweet’s demonstration is unlikely to make a dent in typical online behavior; shitposters gonna shitpost. But it’s a great example of how much you can learn if you just take the time to follow the links. Intellectual hygiene requires that we repeat this mantra: Don’t trust, verify. 

Here’s my suggestion: Assume that everything everyone says on social media in the first 72 hours after a news event is the product of temporary insanity or is a side-effect of a psychotropic drug. Write it off. Pretend it never happened. Only pay attention to what they say when three days have passed since the precipitating event.

A couple of thoughts about the collapse of the so-called European Super League.

First, it’s impossible to overstress how badly thought-out the entire enterprise was. The twelve clubs who signed up to create the Super League did nothing to get any of their constituencies on board. They didn’t even inform their managers and players. The one refrain from the managers interviewed about this – the managers who had to go out and face the press and public while the people who made the decisions were hiding in their penthouse apartments – was that they didn’t know anything more than the journalists: They found out at the same time the journalists found out. Moreover, the massive loan these executives had secured from J.P. Morgan was essentially an advance on television revenues, and they hadn’t made or even attempted to make a TV deal. If no TV deal had been forthcoming, or an unexpectedly poor one, then all of those clubs would have been on the hook for paying back a loan that at least some of them simply do not have the resources to pay back. It was a pyramid scheme, and a badly designed one at that. 

The second point is this: The chief makers of this fiasco are extremely unlikely to resign or be fired. (Ed Woodward is out, but he was on his way out anyway — I don’t think he would’ve been fired over just this, because Manchester United has been the least apologetic of any of the English clubs — and only Arsenal issued a straightforward apology that acknowledged the damage done.) There’s no way Florentino Pérez should still have a job, but I cannot imagine any circumstances in which he will get what he deserves; nor, obviously, can he. Andrea Agnelli remains confident in his excellent judgment and enjoys mocking his critics, despite being an absolute clown. And they can be so serene because they quite obviously do not give a rat’s ass about the clubs they work for or the game their teams play. They don’t care! It doesn’t matter to them! If, as a result of the stupidities of Agnelli and Pérez, those two great old clubs Juventus and Real Madrid had to close up shop, shut down altogether, do you think either Agnelli or Pérez would acknowledge any responsibility — or even lose five minutes’ sleep over the catastrophe? Of course not. It’s unthinkable. Somehow or another they would get a golden parachute and that would be just fine with them. Whatever wrath was directed their way by the press would mean absolutely nothing to them. This is what we mean by the word “shameless”: people cannot be shamed when they’re permanently content with their own behavior and care not a whit about the views of their fellow human beings.

It’s the fans who care, the fans who love the game and love their clubs, and they are the ones who are hurt by all this — and by the manifold corruptions that led up to it and that remain in place. And, as the Agnellis and Pérezes of the world know, this means that the fans will come back. The fans actually have the power to force change: if they were to stop attending the games — once attendance becomes possible again — if they were to boycott the clubs’ merchandise, if they were to boycott the television sponsors, they could make something happen. But we all know it won’t play out that way. People don’t just love their teams; in a cruelly mechanical surveillance-capitalism world they need the emotional hit that comes from investment in the successes or failures of their club. It’s surely asking too much of them to demand that they take meaningful collective action. And that’s why at the end of all this Agnelli and Pérez, or in any case people very much like them, will still be running the big clubs. They have the freedom that comes from not caring about anything but their own bank accounts.