The moment has arrived. Happy New Phone in the Mail Day!
No matter where you’ve wandered off to
Or how far afield you’ve strayed
Underneath a heavy ocean
Deep inside a rotten cave
Still you sing a song that’s holy
Still you burn a perfect flame
What is lost won’t be forgotten
What is good will never change
“Blessed are the meek, for they shall inherit the earth.” — and 7 more faces of AI impact.
Three separate, cross-pressured but overlapping points to put a pin in (listed in, I think, increasing neglect and significance):
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As Morten Høi Jensen emphasizes in the piece above, it was happening, in broad daylight, despite the fact that very bright and attentive people thought it “couldn’t or wouldn’t happen here.”
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It didn’t have to happen. This doesn’t seem to be Jensen’s point, or at least not the one he stresses, but it’s in the piece. It was not inevitable. (Meacham’s Lincoln is excellent on this point, something I tried to say here, and that I need reminding of.)
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Not everything can or should be reduced to its place in a chain of events. Maybe you have the power to change something, maybe you don’t. But life can be lived well and joyfully regardless of what happens next. This is the here-and-now of what Buechner called the untouchable “having-beenness” of time. As Thomas Mann himself put it:
Even stories with a sorry ending have their moments of glory, great and small, and it is proper to view these moments, not in the light of their ending, but in their own light: their reality is no less powerful than the reality of their ending.
Eve Tushnet makes me want to read William Dalrymple’s From the Holy Mountain.
And she also makes me want to subscribe to Conor McDonough’s The White Stone.
How many deaths of other people’s children by bombing or starvation are we willing to accept in order that we may be free, affluent, and (supposedly) at peace?
Kitchen Chalk Talk
This all happens within a schizophrenic culture that simultaneously celebrates every product and innovation that makes something easier and lower-effort, while also celebrating effort and self-discipline — and, at the same time, ignoring millennia of wisdom on how ascetic practice actually works and pretending it’s just a matter of individual choice and volition:
Now, as the tide of internet slop rises around us, it should already be clear that this industrialisation of thought is making us as cognitively sedentary, as cars and labour-saving machines made us physically so. Accordingly, cognitive fitness is on track to become as much an ascetic practice as staying fit in culture of couch potatoes. Now, if we’re going to talk about cultivating the kind of physical and cognitive askesis required to avoid becoming physically and mentally flabby in this context, that means reckoning with the noonday demon. And that means reckoning with technology of acedia that is to cognitive askesis as smoking is to the physical kind: our phones.[…]
Perhaps there’s scope for careful engagement. But it should be clear that there are also whole industries out there today, whose sole aim is getting rich by feeding and legitimising your noonday demon, and making it difficult for you to sustain the self-discipline needed to flourish. And sure, there is a certain amount we can do as individuals to resist: the cheery self-help post. But I think this is a collective action problem, too, which is to say a moral one. We should take the whispering noonday demon — and those who profit from it — a great deal more seriously than we do.