And then what? — Moving from narrow to wide-boundary lenses.
Started and stopped reading: All Things Are Too Small by Becca Rothfeld 📚
Doubt I’ll pick it back up. I enjoyed the Commonweal interview with Rothfeld — at least I think I did; I’m only ever half paying attention to podcasts.
I think very often of a quote from one of CS Lewis’s essays, (wonderfully read by Ralph Cosham here):
When equality is treated not as a medicine or a safety-gadget but as an ideal we begin to breed that stunted and envious sort of mind which hates all superiority.…The man who cannot conceive a joyful and loyal obedience on the one hand, nor an unembarrassed and noble acceptance of that obedience on the other, the man who has never even wanted to kneel or to bow, is a prosaic barbarian.
Add minimalist tendencies to equality I suppose that’s what I expected to find — a praise for excess over minimalism and equality. But if that’s what Rothfeld is doing, it’s absolutely nothing like Lewis. The first essay not only shows no sign of Lewis’s sentiment, but seems to lack any sense of satisfaction or reverence at all.
Maybe I’m wrong, but I found no indication that this would improve through the book. And I’m too slow a reader to find out
Finished reading: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff 📚
Because, ya know, I needed to reaffirm the horror of it all. 🤓
I have way more thoughts than I feel like writing down. And since very few of them are nice or happy anyway, I’ll skip most of them for now.
Zuboff is ardent (and absolutely correct) about the disorienting world that the surveillance capitalists — from Google on down the line — are creating more-or-less unimpeded, but she leaves you with a bit of an anxious disorientation, too. Democracy, individuality, personal freedom, community, even resistance — although these words and ideas are peppered throughout the book, they lack any flesh-and-bone quality.
Fortunately, those aren’t the things I read it for, and my own anti-surveillance project now enjoys some fresh vigor.
My new mantra, jumping off one of Zuboff’s subheadings, is Be the friction you hope to see in the world. The world needs more friction than it currently and increasingly avoids, and that will require more unpolished faith, and more gritty resurrections. And if you plan on doing any of this yourself, you might take heart from a quote from Karl Jaspers which I am once again thrown back upon:
The truly real takes place almost unnoticed, and is, to begin with, lonely and dispersed. . . . Those among our young people who, thirty years hence, will do the things that matter are, in all probability, now quietly biding their time; and yet, unseen by others, they are already establishing their existences by means of an unrestricted spiritual discipline.
Layers of old-fashionedness • A person on a bicycle stopped to ask another human being (me) where the local library is. A decent dose of hope for humanity can take 15 seconds or less 🙂
There’s virtue in that picture [of the genome as a ‘highly sensitive organ of the cell’], but I think it points to a wider consideration: that the best narratives and metaphors for thinking about how life works come not from our technologies (machines, computers) but from life itself. … The ‘organic technology’ of language, where meaning arises through context and cannot be atomised into component parts, is a constantly useful analogy. Life must be its own metaphor.
And shouldn’t we have seen that all along? For what, after all, is extraordinary – and challenging to scientific description – about living matter is not its molecules but its aliveness, its agency. It seems odd to have to say this, but it’s time for a biology that is life-centric.
Anna Badkhen, “In praise of magical thinking”:
Because what is the world? A thaumatrope turning magical to profane to magical and back again. And then the tide rose and the abiding patience of big water took everything – the piss, the eggshells, the woman’s tracks in the sand, my sketching perch – and made anything possible, depravity and wonder alike.
Ah yes, the imfamous Euproctis chrysorrhoea. In their larva stage, these are better known by their Indonesian name, Rama-rama ekor coklat, which roughly translates “dirty rotten itchy bastard.”
Random Bookshelf Quote of the Day
Václav Havel, in 1986:
IBM certainly works better than the Škoda plant, but that doesn’t alter the fact that both companies have long since lost their human dimension and have turned man into a little cog in their machinery, utterly separated from what, and for whom, that machinery is working, and what the impact of its product is on the world. I would even say that, from a certain point of view, IBM is worse than Škoda. Whereas Škoda merely grinds out the occasional obsolete nuclear reactor to meet the needs of backward COMECON members, IBM is flooding the world with ever more advanced computers, while its employees have no influence over what their product does to the human soul and to human society. They have no say in whether it enslaves or liberates mankind, whether it will save us from the apocalypse or simply bring the apocalypse closer. Such “megamachinery” is not constructed to the measure of man, and the fact that IBM is capitalist, profit-oriented, and efficient while Škoda is socialist, money-losing, and inefficient, seems secondary to me.
To speak from experience is to be understood everywhere. To speak in abstract terms is to find no understanding.
— Jürgen Moltmann
A friend reminded me that the Kenyan Prayer posted this morning is much like this line from Mary Oliver. I like her more explicit praise for the humility of those who laugh and bow their heads — a combination with impossible-to-overstate significance and value. And with that thought, I kept going.🙂