archive

But that boon comes at a price. As the media theorist Marshall McLuhan pointed out in the 1960s, media are not just passive channels of information. They supply the stuff of thought, but they also shape the process of thought. And what the net seems to be doing is chipping away my capacity for concentration and contemplation. My mind now expects to take in information the way the net distributes it: in a swiftly moving stream of particles. Once I was a scuba diver in the sea of words. Now I zip along the surface like a guy on a Jet Ski.

The idea that our minds should operate as high-speed data-processing machines is not only built into the workings of the internet; it is the network’s reigning business model. The faster we surf across the web—the more links we click and pages we view—the more opportunities Google and other companies gain to collect information about us and to feed us advertisements. Most of the proprietors of the commercial internet have a financial stake in collecting the crumbs of data we leave behind as we flit from link to link—the more crumbs, the better. The last thing these companies want is to encourage leisurely reading or slow, concentrated thought. It’s in their economic interest to drive us to distraction.

In Plato’s Phaedrus, Socrates bemoaned the development of writing. He feared that, as people came to rely on the written word as a substitute for the knowledge they used to carry inside their heads, they would, in the words of one of the dialogue’s characters, “cease to exercise their memory and become forgetful.”

In the quiet spaces opened up by the sustained, undistracted reading of a book, or by any other act of contemplation, for that matter, we make our own associations, draw our own inferences and analogies, foster our own ideas. Deep reading, as Maryanne Wolf argues, is indistinguishable from deep thinking.

HAL’s outpouring of feeling contrasts with the emotionlessness that characterizes the human figures in the film, who go about their business with an almost robotic efficiency. Their thoughts and actions feel scripted, as if they’re following the steps of an algorithm. In the world of 2001, people have become so machinelike that the most human character turns out to be a machine. That’s the essence of Kubrick’s dark prophecy: As we come to rely on computers to mediate our understanding of the world, it is our own intelligence that flattens into artificial intelligence.

Mark Zuckerberg has always been an awful person, but – as Sarah Wynn-Williams demonstrates in her book – he was once careful, worried about the harms he would suffer if he harmed us. Once we took those consequences away, Zuck did exactly what his nature dictated he must: destroyed our lives to increase his own fortune.

Vocês não estão interessados: vocês lutam, com todas as forças, contra os investimentos necessários e a efetivação da inteligência pública com condições de minar o crime organizado. Dilapidam as formas de inteligência pela prevalência do horror. Pior, sempre pior: vocês colaboram com o fomento e a expansão do crime organizado para, no dia seguinte, usá-lo como justificativa da prática de extermínio daqueles que vocês não consideram humanos.

A ficção (em contraste) contrabandeia complexidade real para dentro do seu cérebro. Quando Dostoiévski passa cinquenta páginas deixando Raskólnikov justificar o assassinato para si mesmo, você não está aprendendo sobre filosofia moral de forma abstrata. Você está vivendo dentro da mente de alguém tentando raciocinar até chegar à atrocidade. Você entende algo sobre a racionalização humana que nenhum livro do Gladwell conseguiria te ensinar. O conhecimento vem embutido em contexto, emoção e contradição.

Eu costumava achar que estava sendo prática ao ler principalmente não ficção. Eu estava aprendendo coisas! Acumulando fatos! Ficando informada sobre psicologia, economia, história, ciência. Mas as conversas que realmente ficaram comigo foram com pessoas que liam romances. Elas têm um tipo diferente de inteligência — mais contextual e sutil. Entendem a natureza humana de um jeito que o conhecimento frio sobre vieses cognitivos nunca consegue captar completamente.

O problema dos livros de autoajuda é a suposição de que a sabedoria pode ser sistematizada e transmitida por instruções. Mas a sabedoria resiste à sistematização. Ela é o reconhecimento de padrões em meio a variáveis demais para contar. É saber quando as regras se aplicam — e quando não se aplicam. A ficção treina essa capacidade, forçando você a navegar por complexidades morais e sociais sem respostas claras. Não há “principais lições” no final, porque a vida não tem “principais lições”.

No livro “Kafka: prós e contras”, Günther Anders fala da noção de “verrückung”, que ele usa para definir o modo como opera o estilo de Kafka, e que foi traduzida por Modesto Carone, para o português, com a palavra genial: desloucamento. Se tem uma coisa que eu duvido que a Inteligência Artificial jamais consiga fazer é entender esse miniconto do Kafka, chamado “A próxima aldeia”. Isso porque a IA jamais conseguirá desloucar-se.

All of the foregoing examples point to the cheapness of “content” in a streaming world, and it seems like Spotify is leaning into that for music, like Netflix did for films. They are creating generic brands to fill out playlists, thus keeping royalties in house through company-owned, algorithmically optimized content. And they think—probably rightly to some extent—that listeners won’t notice or care.

The antidote to ultra-capitalistic platforms whose main goal is to keep you inside their walled gardens can be traced back to the very origin of the World Wide Web; the humble link. Hypertext is the HT in HTML.

Her biographer, Fiona Maddocks, wrote that in order to fully get to grips with Hildegard’s output she would have liked to have become specialist in “12th-century Germany, medieval Latin, ecclesiastical history, the history of science and medicine, botany, mineralogy and petrology, zoology and theology, mysticism, music, painting and monastic architecture”. Hildegard is sometimes named the first composer in music history – although earlier names have since emerged – and is claimed as a feminist hero, radical polymath, ecological pioneer and, in some readings, queer icon, for the way she wrote of her love for her female mentors and peers.

Twain owned up to 19 cats at one time, writes Livius Drusus for Mental Floss, “all of whom he loved and respected far beyond whatever he may have felt about people. His cats all bore fantastical titles, among them: Apollinaris, Beelzebub, Blatherskite, Buffalo Bill, Satan, Sin, Sour Mash, Tammany, Zoroaster, Soapy Sal and Pestilence, writes Drusus.

It’s this kind of dangerous, atavistic fantasy that folk horror takes to task; indeed, much of the “horror” is predicated on the willingness of seemingly ordinary people to believe these claims. In The Wicker Man, Sergeant Howie’s investigation into a girl’s disappearance is frustrated because he is battling against the will of an entire community, and for all his bluster about their pagan beliefs, he is conscious that the islanders live by a common and unshakeable faith in their practices. In Midsommar, it’s the appearance of communal unity that seemingly appeals to Dani when she arrives at Hårga for the festival. Strange though the place is, the very fact the community is celebrating something that’s part of a larger natural cycle is evidence of a consistency and stability lacking in her life. There’s a philosophy that underpins everything. Everyone has a role to play. Power is localised and tangible. And so to live in a community where the individual is not only able to grasp that power, but is an inherent part of its potency, is an attractive proposition in an era of relativist truths, fractured democracy, global environmental threats and a society in which the spheres of influence are ineffably remote.

Burton’s pre–Ed Wood films are elaborate and assured in how they enact the ephemerality of dreams in the material world of production design. What would a style-first crafter like Burton do with the life of Wood, whose film art is—largely and divinely—craftless?

You see, reader, the Internet is ceremoniously collapsing under the weight of itself due to various things that spreadsheet men imagined into existence like venture capital, product managers, KPIs, and getting promoted for launching and then sunsetting your own products at companies like Google. For reasons to do with astoundingly large piles of tax-protected debt finance, our once beautiful Internet has spent a decade being transformed from a perfect, beautiful, open, technicolour sun-shower into a sterile and privately owned collection of 6 websites full of screenshots of one another, that exist to use political atomisation as an emotional backdrop to sell advertising for modern horrors like Temu.

Even more than a flesh-and-blood bureaucracy, Wiener understood, an inscrutable bureaucracy-in-a-box, issuing decisions and edicts with superhuman speed and certainty, could all too easily be put to totalitarian ends. The box might seem autonomous, its outputs immaculate, but it would always serve its masters. It would always be an instrument of power. “The modern man, and especially the modern American, however much ‘know-how’ he may have, has very little ‘know-what,’” Wiener wrote. “He will accept the superior dexterity of the machine-made decisions without too much inquiry as to the motives and principles behind these.”

The pleasure of listening to music was not as great as he anticipated. He found more pleasure in manipulating music files. “Engaging with media in a traditional sense is often the last thing we do,” he observes. “In the digital ecosystem, the apparatuses surrounding the artifact are more engaging than the artifact itself.” It was once assumed that digitization would liberate cultural artifacts from their physical containers. We’d be able to enjoy the wine without the bottles. What’s actually happened is different. We’ve come, as Goldsmith says, “to prefer the bottles to the wine.”

Governos burros acham que a economia não pode parar. Mas a economia é uma atividade que os humanos inventaram e que depende de nós. Se os humanos estão em risco, qualquer atividade humana deixa de ter importância. Dizer que a economia é mais importante é como dizer que o navio importa mais que a tripulação. Coisa de quem acha que a vida é baseada em meritocracia e luta por poder. Não podemos pagar o preço que estamos pagando e seguir insistindo nos erros.

A derrubada de estátuas é saudável e um símbolo de sociedades democráticas. A queda da ditadura soviética e do autoritarismo assassino que colonizou boa parte da Europa Central e do Leste Europeu costuma ser marcada pela derrubada das estátuas de Lênin. Em nenhum momento se propôs proibir seus livros ou se vilanizou o personagem histórico. Quem foi “apagado” não foi o pensador bolchevique, o líder da Revolução de 1917 e o chefe de Estado, mas o mito leninista que conferia legitimidade ao regime de terror que governava aqueles países. Não se trata de revisionismo histórico ou de julgamento moral de figuras do passado, mas sim de mitos sobre os quais poderes fáticos do presente justificam seu exercício de poder.

Moby-Dick may be the first work of western fiction to feature a same-sex marriage: Ishmael, the loner narrator (famous for the most ambiguous opening line in literature) gets hitched – in bed – to the omni-tattooed Pacific islander, Queequeg: “He pressed his forehead against mine, clasped me round the waist, and said that henceforth we were married.” Other scenes are deeply homoerotic: sailors massage each others’ hands in a tub of sperm oil and there is an entire chapter devoted to foreskins (albeit of the whalish variety). Indeed, the whole book is a love letter (sadly unreciprocated) from a besotted Melville to his hero, Nathaniel Hawthorne, to whom he wrote: “You have sunk your northern roots down into my southern soul.” Faced with such unbridled flagrancy, the US establishment has never been keen to accept the idea that Melville may just possibly have been gay. And it must have rankled to have the brilliance of his book pointed out to them by a bunch of British queer writers. When a modest Everyman edition appeared in London 20 years after Melville’s death in 1891, DH Lawrence declared it a work of futurism before futurism had been invented; EM Forster and WH Auden extolled its queer nature. Virginia Woolf read it three times, comparing it to Wuthering Heights in its strangeness, and noted in her 1926 diary that no biographer would believe her work was inspired by the vision of “a fin rising on a wide blank sea”.

Race (like gender, sexuality and other markers of identity) shapes travel – and backpacking especially – in such palpable ways. As a black woman, I find there arespaces where my race and gender make me invisible, which means that I can immerse myself more fully into the lives of those around me. I can take a series of public buses from Cape Town to Nairobi over a month and have no one notice that I am thousands of kilometres from home. And there are spaces where the colour of my skin makes me hyper-visible, like taking the train from Vienna to Berne and being the only people in our carriage to get their identity documents checked.

Yet at the same time, Melville’s book subverted those ideas. It tacitly addresses slavery and struggle; it is not a coincidence that one of its most extraordinary chapters, “The Whiteness of the Whale” overturns a notional purity. “It was the whiteness of the whale that above all things appalled me,” Melville writes, and cites images of the “higher horror in this whiteness of . . . woe”. Among many contemporary artists inspired by the book is the internationally celebrated Ellen Gallagher – New England-born, of Cape Verdean and Irish parents – who subtly interrogates the implicit themes of race in Moby-Dick through her Watery Ecstatic series. Add to this Melville’s astonishingly overt homoeroticism (not least the “marriage” of Ishmael and the tattooed South Sea islander Queequeg, one of the first persons of colour to appear in western fiction), and you have a book almost postmodern in its elegant ellipses.

Mas continuo sendo coveiro porque aqui já aprendi muito sobre o ser humano. Quando você está na parte de cima da pirâmide social, todas as coisas que você olha são iguais. É como quando você está no avião e todos os pontinhos lá embaixo parecem a mesma coisa. Mas de onde eu estou, aqui embaixo, consigo enxergar o detalhe. Como coveiro, vejo a dor e a morte em tamanho natural. E foi durante a pandemia que eu vi as coisas mais sombrias da minha carreira, em mais de trinta anos que faço isso.

Western values. The free world. The liberal order. Over the three weeks since Putin declared war on ordinary Ukrainians, these phrases have been slung about more regularly, more loudly and more unthinkingly than at any time in almost two decades. Perhaps like me you thought such puffed-chest language and inane categorisation had been buried under the rubble of Iraq. Not any more. Now they slip out of the mouths of political leaders and slide into the columns of major newspapers and barely an eyebrow is raised. The Ukrainians are fighting for “our” freedom, it is declared, in that mode of grand solipsism that defines this era. History is back, chirrup intellectuals who otherwise happily stamp on attempts by black and brown people to factcheck the claims made for American and British history.

“The fossil fuel industry’s so-called solution to this crisis is nothing more than a recipe to enable fossil-fueled fascists like Vladimir Putin for years to come,” said Jamal Raad, executive director of Evergreen Action. “As long as our economy is dependent on fossil fuels, we will be at the mercy of petro-dictators who wield their influence on global energy prices like a weapon.

O dono da casa ensina ao adolescente, quase sem querer, todo um método de leitura atenta e detalhista – Borges ensinava, escreve Manguel, “não apenas compartilhando comigo sua paixão por esses grandes escritores, mas também me mostrando como trabalhavam, desmontando os parágrafos com a intensidade amorosa de um relojoeiro”. Assim como a de todos os leitores, a biblioteca de Borges, completa Manguel, “era sua autobiografia”. “Para Borges, o âmago da realidade estava nos livros: em ler livros, escrever livros, conversar sobre livros”, escreve Manguel, e continua: “De maneira visceral, ele sabia que dava continuidade a um diálogo iniciado havia milhares de anos, o qual ele acreditava que nunca terminaria. Livros restauravam o passado”.

It’s an astonishing work rate that has surely taken its toll. Arthritis means that Dylan can no longer hold a guitar; onstage he plays, and is propped up by, an electric piano. His voice – rarely a thing of beauty and most often an abrasively compelling affair described by David Bowie as “like sand and glue” – is in tatters, obliging him to abandon singing altogether for gravelly, dramatic declamation on Rough and Rowdy Ways. Yet like Matisse, forced to give up oils and canvas for cut-outs around the same age, Dylan remains obstinately true to his art, “refusing to let his career become embalmed” as Paul Morley puts it in his new book, out next month. Once you stop creating, you’re in the past.

Lindsay Ellis’ video “Mel Brooks, The Producers and the Ethics of Satire About Nazis” argues convincingly that a seemingly lightweight approach can be more subversive than treating Nazis as demonic villains with a coherent ideology that need to be fought on its own ground. She makes a case that the apparent bad taste of depicting neo-Nazis as laughable buffoons in The Producers has proven resistant to co-option by fascists, while the way Edward Norton’s neo-Nazi character is framed by director Tony Kaye and the articulate nature of his racist arguments in American History X upend its intended message, leading it to find a cult following among contemporary fascists. Raiders is shallow by design, with no reflection on how Indiana might share elements of the ideology he’s fighting, but it cedes no ground to the aesthetic of “fascinating fascism.” Named by Susan Sontag in a 1974 essay, the concept suggests, in films like The Night Porter and The Damned, that Nazism was a playground of kinky sex.

If classical music wants to reach a wider audience it must first understand that new audience. That new audience is more likely to be found at the fringes of classical music - among Ludovico Einaudi and André Rieu fans for instance - than among devotees of death metal and dubstep. (A sobering observation by a reader about André Rieu should be compulsory reading for all critics - follow this link to read it.) Critics, and, indeed, the whole classical fraternity, could learn much from studying the Compassionate Listening Project*. Members of this non-profit project have trained themselves in deep listening, which is something the visionary Pauline Oliveros advocated. This involves listening with care, attention, and deep compassion to every side of a difficult situation, with the goal of transforming separation and conflict into an opportunity for connection.

When I was working at the museum, I remember noticing something. They have this Buchla 100 modular system and I had two oscillators set in tune; I was just listening to them drift in and out of one another. For a while I didn’t understand what was happening; I didn’t realize that the oscillators were actually going out of tune, but it was a very interesting experience. Then, the next day, I went to play an acoustic organ and I was just sitting there holding an octave – basically two oscillators tuned in unison – and listening to it do the same thing, fluctuating. It was really an important discovery for me that the two were linked and that was what I was interested in, these instabilities that only certain instruments have.

Here’s the odd thing—26 years on, he hasn’t stopped. He’s been playing about 100 shows annually ever since, growling through a set of songs old and new with a small band. It’s an endeavor that for a good chunk of each year keeps him on a private bus and, in the U.S. at least, in relatively crummy hotel and motel rooms. (He’s said to prefer places that have windows that open and allow him to sleep with his pet mastiffs. Beyond that, they are places fans wouldn’t expect to find him.) The shows at first may have been a tonic, but over time they revealed themselves to be a panacea. It must have struck Dylan: How could he look foolish if he just kept doing the same thing? If he were an artist, he would continue to create and show his art publicly. If he were a celebrity, he would appear in public. And if he were a seer, a prophet, or even a god, well, he would let folks pay and see for themselves how mortal such figures actually were. And far from saturating the market, he has created a new industry for himself as a touring artist. On a good night he makes some of his best-known songs unrecognizable, and on a bad one you come out wondering what it was, exactly, you’ve just seen. So far this year, the 73-year-old has played in Japan (17 shows), Hawaii (two), Ireland, Turkey, and nearly 20 other cities in the hinterlands of Europe; he’s headed now to more than a dozen shows in eight different cities in Australia and New Zealand—and this is before what should be a fall run through the States. Robert Shelton, the New York Times writer who first noticed Dylan, labored on a biography for more than 20 years; seeing the star’s unstable arc on its publication in 1986, he titled it, grandly, No Direction Home. Dylan hadn’t even begun not to go home.

Moreover, billionaires’ extravagant wealth is by and large not spent, as Zuckerberg suggests, on cutting edge research and philanthropic efforts. After they’ve bought up enough yachts and private jets they mainly invest in making themselves richer through casino-style financial speculation and in luxury real estate in starkly unequal cities like San Francisco, Miami and New York, where mostly vacant homes act as safety deposit boxes to shield wealth from taxation. Their money might also end up in tax havens like the Cayman Islands, where it can sit undisturbed by the long arm of the state. Very little of that ever trickles down to the 99%, where inequality has skyrocketed and wages have stagnated.

“I remember that when I worked on the Buchla at NYU for Chry-Ptus there were those sounds that I got by feedback, which I tried to find again with the synthesizer,” she recalled in an interview with Emmanuel Holterbach. “Beatings, pulsations, sustained sounds that evolved by beats, a kind of transposition of the re-injection procedure. It’s just that with the Buchla you could control things much more rigorously and it was I myself who made them move. At the same time I also kept the system of two tapes, which could play with a different synchronization. I kept that principle of mobility. It is improvising by itself all the time. In some way it is improvising itself.”