Alan Jacobs

What would Freud make of group minds in the digital age? I don’t think he’d be surprised by the witch hunts, call-outs, draggings, and pile-ons. On the other hand, social media allow for the creation of micro-communities and the fostering of niche interests. Digital affiliations may discourage collective action, insofar as online discourse can substitute for “live” interaction, or they may send more of us into the street – like my Canadian friends and I, stirred into action by the online calls to march on Washington. Social media may alter the way we join and negotiate our group memberships, but it’s unlikely to change our fundamental need to be part of something larger than ourselves. Humans are social animals by nature and by evolution; we thrive by working together. This will always be something of a paradox to an introvert like me, whose idea of a party is a locked door and a good book. And yet, having tasted the strange pleasures of the mob, I’m certain I could be lured out from my behind my own barricades again. For a good cause, of course.

— Sarah Henstra. One of the major themes of my How to Think is the vital importance of distinguishing between the “mobs” and “crowds” and “Inner Rings” who discourage or forbid thinking from the kinds of groups that offer us the possibility of genuine membership and that, accordingly, encourage us to think — and are, therefore, good people to think with.

Alexis Madrigal:

As the platforms age, their devotees become more and more distinct from the regular person. For more than a decade now, many people in media and technology have been feeding an hour or two of Twitter into our brains every single day. Because we’re surrounded by people who live their lives like this — and, crucially, because so many of the journalists who write about the internet experience the internet in this way — it might feel like this is just how Twitter is, that a representative sample of America is plugged into the machine in this way.

And thus I renew my plea to journalists.

For me, the obvious question about the proposal to forgive student loans — as made, for instance, by Astra Taylor here — is this: Why only student loans? Millions of Americans who have never attended college are being crushed by debt. Why shouldn’t something be done for them? 

Imagine how this looks to all those working-class people who aren’t sure how they’re going to pay their rent next month, who have made far too many visits to payday lenders. “We’re going to have everything we own taken away while all you super-woke people campaign to have the government pay for your MFA in set design. And you call that being progressive.”

UPDATE: Freddie’s position is the right one to take about these matters. If people who are currently focused obsessively on getting their own loans canceled took their bearings from what he says here, this conversation would be a more productive once.

Before you take seriously Bret Easton Ellis’s claim that millennials don’t read, look at the tag on this post and read the other posts with that tag. A consistent theme of this kind of discourse is that the people with the most confident opinions about millennials and Gen Z’ers don’t spend much time around the people they have such confident opinions about. Which is also true of every other person who likes to make summative judgments about vast cohorts.

Malcolm is a very good boy. As you can see.

Amazon’s Project Kuiper, with its plan to put thousands of satellites into low-earth orbit to provide internet access to people who don’t have it, reminds me of the scheme by the Bob and Ray Laboratories to build the Bob and Ray Orbiting Satellite and sell advertising space on it. To those who asked whether a satellite might be too far away for the billboards on it to be readable, Bob and Ray replied that they planned for it to orbit 28 feet above the earth’s surface. 

Today I found myself thinking that someone should perhaps inform French Prime Minister Edouard Philippe that the Cathedral of Notre Dame de Paris is a church. How dare he — and so many dead-to-beauty architects — talk about this glorious place of worship as though it were a mere artifact of culture?

And yet … this Catholic cathedral is not owned by the Catholic Church. It is owned by the French Ministry of Culture. “A mere artifact of culture” is what it legally is. As far as I can tell, Notre Dame de Paris is a place of worship by sufferance only. If the government of France wants to leave it in ruins as a testimony to the evils of colonialism, homophobia, and clerical sexual abuse — which seems possible — or to rebuild it as a shiny new monument to the evils of colonialism, homophobia, and clerical sexual abuse — which seems slightly more possible — it can do so. If the government of France wants to turn it into a disco, then into a disco it shall be turned, with a giant glimmering disco ball hanging from the rebuilt roof.

I have no idea what the Ministry of Culture will decide to do, but I seriously doubt that Catholic Christians will have any real say in the matter. Oh, to be sure, bishops and priests and a few devout laypeople will be assigned to committees. But they’ll have no ability to dictate or even to veto. Bureaucrats may decide that the principles of PR recommend a respectful stance towards believers, and no doubt they’ll make friendly noises. But I don’t see how the final product can fail to embody the interests of the European technocratic elite, as opposed to those of faithful Christians.

And that’s one of the more significant elements of this story: What it reminds us about the long and complex intertwining of the western church with the modern nation-state. You can’t understand the current rebuilding project without understanding the crowning of Charlemagne by Pope Leo III, in St. Peter’s Basilica on Christmas Day of the year 800; and Pope Gregory VII’s role the Investiture Controversy, with its culmination in the humiliation of Henry IV in the snow at Canossa; and the emergence of the Cuius regio, eius religio principle in the Reformation era; and the violent dechristianizing of France during the Revolution; and the vain struggle of Pio Nono against the unification of Italy, ending in the elimination of the Papal States and the loss of all secular power for the Papacy; and the emergence of the Deutsche Christen in the Nazi era, when German pastors competed with one another to defend the celebrate the subservience of (especially but not only) the Lutherans to Hitler.

That long slow transfer of power is over now. The tiger the Church hoped to tame has eaten it. The building on the Île de la Cité dedicated 800 years ago to the Blessed Virgin Mary belongs wholly to the bureaucrats now. The rest of us will just have to stand by to see what they do with it.

“Entering his eightieth decade he hasn’t lost his taste for that whiff of adventure, either in his walking or his writing.” — from this profile of Ian MacEwan. Honestly, I wouldn’t have thought him a day over 600.

This reflection by Sarah Hinlicky Wilson makes me think that churches should regularly run Bible studies specifically on the parts of Scripture that never make it into the lectionary.

Jeffrey Zeldman:

Along those same lines, can the IndieWeb, and products of IndieWeb thinking like Micro.blog, save us? Might they at least provide an alternative to the toxic aspects of our current social web, and restore the ownership of our data and content? And before you answer, RTFM.

On an individual and small collective basis, the IndieWeb already works. But does an IndieWeb approach scale to the general public? If it doesn’t scale yet, can we, who envision and design and build, create a new generation of tools that will help give birth to a flourishing, independent web? One that is as accessible to ordinary internet users as Twitter and Facebook and Instagram?

I think that’s the wrong question. Of course the indie web cannot scale. But that’s a feature, not a bug. Scale — as-big-as-possible, universal-not-local, something-for-everyone scale — is the enemy. It’s the biggest enemy that community and fellowship and friendship can possibly have. If it scales, I want no part of it.