Alan Jacobs

Facebook is unlikely to shut down tomorrow; nor is Twitter, or Instagram, or any other major social network. But they could. And it would be a good exercise to reflect on the fact that, should any or all of them disappear, no user would have any legal or practical recourse. I started thinking about this situation a few years ago when Tumblr—a platform devoted to a highly streamlined form of blogging, with an emphasis on easy reposting from other accounts—was bought by Yahoo. I was a heavy user of Tumblr at the time, having made thousands of posts, and given the propensity of large tech companies to buy smaller ones and then shut them down, I wondered what would become of my posts if Yahoo decided that Tumblr wasn’t worth the cost of maintaining it. I found that I was troubled by the possibility to a degree I hadn’t anticipated. It would be hyperbolic (not to say comical) to describe my Tumblr as a work of art, but I had put a lot of thought into what went on it, and sometimes I enjoyed looking through the sequence of posts, noticing how I had woven certain themes into that sequence, or feeling pleasure at having found interesting and unusual images. I felt a surge of proprietary affection—and anxiety.

Many personal computers have installed on them a small command-line tool called wget, which allows you to download webpages, or even whole websites, to your machine. I immediately downloaded the whole of my Tumblr to keep it safe—although if Tumblr did end up being shut down, I wasn’t sure how I would get all those posts back online. But that was a problem I could reserve for another day. In the meantime, I decided that I needed to talk with my students.

— Me, earlier this year. With Tumblr in the news I was reminded of my argument here, and would like to remind you of it as well.

Despite its subtle and not-so-subtle ravishments, a Warhol canvas is expressively vacant. “There’s no place for our spiritual eye to penetrate it,” the art historian Neil Printz has said of the work. “We’re just thrown back on the surface.” That’s true, though the effect is more dreadful than that. What made Warhol so perishingly cold was the implication that the “spiritual eye” never existed in the first place. Warhol, one observer put it, “wanted to be Greta Garbo, he wanted to be Marilyn Monroe,” and to better convert himself into an icon, he withdrew behind an affect as lifeless as one of his Marilyn paintings. The deadpan rigmarole was total. It functioned as an anti-elegy. It said that nothing was lost, that nothing of depth or value had been surrendered to the image.

— Stephen Metcalf. Is it Warhol who is “expressively vacant”? Or is it the world that he so faithfully represents? Imagine if Warhol, a faithful Ruthenian Catholic, had been born not in Pittsburgh but in the Carpathians two hundred years ago: Would you expect that an artist of his gifts, so culturally placed, would produce “expressively vacant” work?

For the past few years I have taught a first-year seminar, here in Baylor’s Honors College, focusing largely on technological and media literary. If I am honest with myself, I will have to admit that it has never gone particularly well.

If there is one argument that I make most relentlessly in the class, it is this: Every technology proferred to us by our technocracy has powerful affordances that are encoded in those technologies’ default settings. You do not have to stick with those defaults, and in some cases it can be dangerous or even unethical to do so. So what I’m trying to teach my students is what the Hebrew Bible calls bin, discernment, and what Aristotle and his heirs call phronesis, prudence or judgment. I don’t tell them to delete their Facebook accounts, but I do want them to know precisely what is involved in having a Facebook account, what the costs and benefits are; I want them to be thoughtful and mindful in how they use these technologies.

Some of them thank me for opening their eyes to the realities of our current socio-technological order, but more of them admit, either ruefully or a little defiantly, that nothing we’ve read or discussed is going to change their habits, because it’s just not important enough to invest time and energy in. They’re worried about whether they’re going to get into law school or medical school, and they want to have fun at football games, and when you add up the work hours and the leisure hours there just aren’t any left over for questioning the moral legitimacy of Instagram. And anyway that’s where their friends are. Usually there’s a shrug at this point.

And you know what? I don’t think I can say that they’re wrong. Maybe that’s a rational decision they’re making, all things considered. In which case I need to find a new topic for my first-year seminar.

As it happens, a large amount of carbon sits in American dirt. If that carbon escapes into the atmosphere, it will worsen climate change. Should a small nation ever appoint you despot of all climate laws, please do something about dirt. But generally and politically speaking, dirt does not get the people going. Upon hearing the slogan “Dirt: Now More Than Ever,” most voters will not picture overflowing cornucopias of prosperity. They will picture bath time.

I have come to think of this tension as climate policy’s Boring-as-Dirt Problem: the BAD problem. The BAD problem recognizes that climate change is a very interesting challenge. It is scary and massive and apocalyptic, and its attendant disasters (especially hurricanes, wildfires, and floods) make for good TV. But the policies that will address climate change do not pack the same punch. They are technical and technocratic and quite often boring. At the very least, they will never be as immediate as climate change itself. Floods are powerful, but stormwater management is arcane. Wildfires are ravenous, but electrical-grid upgrades are tedious. Climate change is scary, but dirt is boring. That’s the BAD problem.

— Robinson Meyer. As Rob suggests, almost every social problem in desperate need of addressing shares the BAD problem.

Two brief thoughts about David Sessions’s review of my recent book:

1. I don’t treat the works and writers that Sessions thinks I should have (see his penultimate paragraph) because they’re beyond the scope of my book. I didn’t write a book about Christian responses to World War II or technocracy or liberalism, but rather one about a small collection of people who were particularly interested in education. I’m selective even in treating my five protagonists, as I explain in the Preface: “All that they did and thought and suffered and wrote that does not relate to the circulation of these questions will be set aside here, though sometimes referred to parenthetically and in notes for the benefit of those who may be curious.” But in order to remind my readers that the concerns these writers shared are not the only valid ones, I have an Interlude called “Other Pilgrims, Other Paths” in which (pace Sessions) I do in fact mention the Catholic Worker Movement.
2. Sessions says that my “reading of the Christian humanists proposes retreat into literature at precisely the moment bold thinking about power and technology are most needed.” I am not aware of proposing anything, and I don’t know what a “retreat into literature” might be. My protagonists are not strictly literary in their interests (indeed, Maritain says almost nothing about literature). But for what it’s worth, I do think that reading literature can be quite valuable, and would be happy to provide, on request, a list of literary works that in my judgment constitute “bold thinking about power and technology.”

I was brought up a secular, Reform Jew, which means I didn’t know Aleph from Bet. I knew nothing, and therefore I cared nothing. My father cared culturally, but that’s all. So when I came home from Africa, I thought to myself, there’s this incredible oral tradition in Ghana, passed on from father to son, mother to daughter, for thousands of years. Don’t I have something like that? I’m a member of the oldest group of human beings still known as a group that managed to cohere enough to survive – and I know nothing about it. So I started studying at Lincoln Square Synagogue in midtown Manhattan, an Orthodox temple, that had an incredible adult-education program for the likes of me – and I asked whether they would teach a course in biblical Hebrew, and they said sure, and they brought a professor down from Yeshiva University to teach that, and I studied the weekly portion – I didn’t even know there was such a thing as a weekly portion and commentaries thereon.

So this whole world opened up for me – it was 1975, at about the same time as I met my wife, Beryl, and so all of this sort of came together and it did occur to me – isn’t it curious that I had to go to Ghana to go back to my own traditions because I think if you understand any historical group, or any other religion for that matter, in any detail, then you’ll be able to approach another one with more understanding. So the answer to your question is yes. The longest yes you’ve ever heard.

— Steve Reich

I’m thinking that from here on out I’m gonna imitate Steve Reich’s commitment to the baseball cap.

... let me tell you why Gollum has been on my mind for the last 24 hours or so. Once Gollum takes the Ring, he could slip it on his finger and hightail it out of there, but what does he do? He dances. He takes a victory lap. He celebrates too soon, and so falls to his death. You know who this reminds me of? ERIC DIER. The parallels are so obvious. Dier scores a goal — which should have been disallowed for offside, mind you — and then shushes the crowd and taunts his opponents. Which at that moment results merely in a few handbags, but later results in his playing a part in not one but TWO Arsenal goals (one deflects off him, the other happens after he brainlessly tries to intercept a ball he can’t reach), which is to say, as the inevitable consequence of his dancing and celebrating he falls into a pit of fire where he is burned beyond recognition.

People just don’t learn from Moral Fiction, do they? If I were an Arsenal supporter I’d make much hay from this.

My son helping me get perspective