I’ve been talking about the Jevons effect for years, but without knowing it had a name: the Jevons effect. Yes, it’s mostly about technology and energy use. But for its most concrete evidence, look no further than Taco Tuesday. I’ll put it in the form of a ubiquitous maxim, heretofore known as the Jevons Taco (non)Dilemma:

If given a larger taco shell, I will invariably overstuff that one as well.

🌮

Kierkegaard, describing “the whole of modern philosophy” as a wholly immanent, telos-less genius:

The humorous self-sufficiency of genius is the unity of a modest resignation in the world and a proud elevation above the world: of being an unnecessary superfluity and a precious ornament.

Here’s that in the funnier form of a meme a friend once sent me:

Car(e) Free 🤓

Finally Reading: The Age of Surveillance Capitalism by Shoshana Zuboff 📚

I’ve put this off because a) I’m sure I already agree with it, b) I’m sure I already hate everything it’s about as much as anyone can hate such things, and c) I stubbornly refused to order it and for the last 5 years I felt like maybe I was politely shaming bookstores across the country who didn’t stock it on their shelves.

I’m reading it now because a) last month I finally found a bookstore in Brunswick who had it (the owner simply said, “It’s terrifying”), b) I’m inspired by the fun fact that the author lives not far from us (or so the bookstore owner tells me), and c) I’ve fallen behind on the anti-smart phone project this year and need a little extra motivation.

It’s also an increasingly important and unavoidable question: How as parents are we going to handle the incredible stupidity of this invasive and life-destroying rectangle?

And so, without further excuse or ado…

From spit-up rag to mysterious descending cloud of happiness

Kierkegaard’s diatribe on “the public” is priceless:

In order that everything should be reduced to the same level, it is first of all necessary to procure a phantom, its spirit, a monstrous abstraction, an all-embracing something which is nothing, a mirage—and that phantom is the public.

[…]

A public is everything and nothing, the most dangerous of all powers and the most insignificant: one can speak to a whole nation in the name of the public, and still the public will be less than a single real man, however unimportant. The qualification ‘public’ is produced by the deceptive juggling of an age of reflection, which makes it appear flattering to the individual who in this way can arrogate to himself this monster, in comparison with which concrete realities seem poor. The public is the fairy story of an age of understanding, which in imagination makes the individual into something even greater than a king above his people; but the public is also a gruesome abstraction through which the individual will receive his religious formation—or sink.

This is considered over against “the concreteness of individuality.” Not, it should be noted, individualism, but the individualness which may be “taught to be content, in the highest religious sense, with himself and his relation to God, to be at one with himself instead of being in agreement with a public which destroys everything that is relative, concrete and particular in life; educated to find peace within himself and with God, instead of counting hands.“

There is footnote for the above passage that goes well with David Dark’s lonely war against abstractions:

All Kierkegaard’s religious discourses, which form a large part of his works, were dedicated to " ‘that individual’, whom with joy and thankfulness I call my reader because he reads, not thinking of the author, but of God".

The Courageous Middle — A little comically rambling, but Shirley Mullen had a lot of very good things to say.

Happy cousins

Currently Reading: The Present Age by Soren Kierkegaard 📚

Inspired by Matthew Crawford’s recent bit on AI and wedding speeches

What does it mean to outsource a wedding speech to AI? In a very real sense, says Crawford, it means to not show up to the wedding.

And this is, of course, what AI means for most of the things we so happily and thoughtlessly apply it to: It means to not show up for the life you were made to live.

It’s tempting to label the excerpts from Kierkegaard that Crawford uses as nothing short of prescient, but they are probably more accurately described as deeply insightful but oh-so-human.

As Walter Kaufmann puts it, in what is probably the most interesting preface ever written:

Read for the flavour, chew the phrases, enjoy the humour, feel the offence when you are attacked, don’t ignore the author’s blunders, but don’t fail to look for your own shortcomings as well: then the book will make you a better man than you were before. But if you should find it too strenuous to read for the joy and pain of an encounter with a human being who, exasperated with himself, his age, and you, does not—let’s face it—like you, then leave the book alone and do not look for marvellous anticipations!

I shall do my best.