Thanks for sticking around. I've always appreciated long-form intellectual articles (that fall short of reading a whole book) that let me think.
It looks like we are really in an experiment of pure market takeover/integration into every facet of life, where it's essentially impossible to leave. Maybe the purpose of this is to provide future generations with a definitive statement of what capitalism is, the same way Israel has written its definitive statement on Zionism, and in that recognition they can choose to do something different.
But in so many industries we now have direct individual subordination to market tendencies. The irony is instead of a stifling publisher, record label, practice, or company acting as a barrier, we face these coercive forces in the raw. Just thinking about being a therapist, ethically you don't want to be financially reliant on your clients. But if you work independently, you are inherently reliant on clients, and this creates a conflict of interest. Everywhere now there are all these conflicts of interest and "incentives" that warp or pollute the function of most aspects of society.
If someone blew up the internet, in the West we'd have a really hard time as the industrial backbone of production is largely gone. Some friends have been proposing how to escape AI influence in the music industry, and one idea is to do everything analog, with tape, and make vinyl records, physical artifacts that have never touched computers would have more inherent value. But we don't actually have the capacity to be making tape, or records, or even analog recording consoles, nor does distributed capital exist to afford building these costly studios. I think the same is happening with book publishing, and happened years ago with film.
I do appreciate what you do, and I do feel there is intentioned signal that makes it through the noise. Having a systems-level detective working for the collective mind has to be important, and even if we are (temporarily?) captured by the system, our minds don't have to be. Unless the extreme-long shot possibility of Evgenia's dictatorship of the proletariate happens, we may have to wait until human tendency and culture finally overindulges in these impulses to such an extreme and absurd extend that we all get sick and decide to move on and wake up a little.
Here's a weird thing about the internet: if you quit writing, I'd feel like I lost a friend. Reading your essays is often a highlight of my day. It's bizarre and irrational, but deep writing that resonates with your own thoughts makes you feel like you found a soul mate. What sucks for the author is that they rarely get to know it, and the little box I'm writing this comment in is entirely inadequate for explaining the depth of this one-sided emotional connection. I'd like to think that somehow, through the fabric of the universe, you'd occasionally feel it, but of course we both know it's bullshit. Nevertheless, this is very real and meaningful to me, and I truly appreciate you.
I experienced this through posting photography on Instagram. It completely took away my sense of what I like myself artistically. Then I joined a photography collective who shared spreadsheets of hashtags that would get the most traction. This was years ago before the algorithm changed and now you need to pay to play. At one point, I had to step back and question why I was letting some non human algorithm dictate what I was inspired by. I love you and Evgenia’s point of view. It has expanded my thinking and I very much appreciate your writing.
Yet again, thanks for this. It's always really stimulating to read your writing. Ditto Evgenia's.
The Internet takeover is unique in its reach and so is the scale of the destruction it's wrought. But only a certain slice of society (and a certain slice of the world) has the time and money to utterly immerse themselves in it...however much it succeeds in dictating life around them. What seems more remarkable is how few of the immersed will (ever) look away. As you've both noted, they genuinely seem less and less interested in real people, physical events, etc. It's now easy to see in the writing and art they are producing.
But: the history of Anglophone journalism and politics is full of celebrities...as it is of self-promoting, first-person journalism. The number of people really willing to pursue their own art or work simply out of conviction rather than the hope (however secret or unconscious) of some audience or approbation... that's always been pretty small.
Much as the Internet tries to shape and crush all before it, it also can't expunge all national differences - and not every society is predicated on individualism. (A Mexican liberation theologist once told me "society here moves from community to the individual rather than the other way round. The north just can't understand that.")
As Ilf and Petrov noticed, modern American society is deeply incurious. (They picked up all those hitchhikers, crossed all those states, and no one ever asked where they were from or what language they were using !) It's also very confessional – as anyone who's sat through a long flight next to an American traveler will attest. All that helps fuel the Internet you describe. The idea that personhood itself will somehow evaporate if one's personal thoughts, image, political ideals, etc., are not visible and expressed 24/7 is certainly being exploited to a new extent. But I think it's always been there.
> The problem, to her, is that the people don’t know what they want.
When I despair at the state of the world, I remind myself that in the end, people get the government they deserve. If the human race drives itself into extinction, as it likely will, well, we have earned it. I can't control that, but as long as I know that, throughout it all, I did the right thing, that's okay. Somehow, this nihilistic thought brings me peace.
For me it was all a little in reverse. Working in dying newspapers really only showed me the industry has helped no one. By the time covid happened it also kinda killed my career, but then gave me this substack life where I felt like I got the recognition that I never got. But given how you have to basically post all the time, it became too exhausting and I stopped about a year ago. I’ve been writing this whole time but just don’t see the point in sharing. For now it’s just for me. as you said only covering things in the social news cycle gets you any clicks. Whatever. This shit ain’t for us. I don’t wanna be part of the precious race. But you gotta do things for yourself. That’s what it’s all about. So Thanks for putting your self out there man!
It's just capitalism baby. Shitty, horrible capitalism. Every means of communication degenerates into this sort of clicks/viewership/subscription model eventually. Once a medium is around long enough we no longer have to pay any mind to the public interest, and hey, what even is the public interest.
I'll just go with one example. Radio started out with high culture and entertainment, sponsors to be sure, but there definitely was a lot of art, politics and news. FDRs fireside chats come to mind as a much, much different means of political communication than what we have today. And what became of radio? At it's heigh of influence it was ruled by influencers like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. Entertaining in their own rights, whatever one thought of them, but certainly a poisonous form of entertainment aimed at selling products. Corporations finally killed off the medium (almost) by consolidation and a misguided attempt at technology (Sirius and XM), but outside of a few major metros and NPR, what's left of the medium? A local rock station in Boston moved to an HD channel and was replaced by Bloomberg radio, just beaming off nonsense to finance types driving into work at Fidelity and State Street Bank.
The internet is no different. There is still promise there, but it takes much more work and commitment by journalists and creators like yourself. Discovery is hard and for the population at large, it's much, much easier to scroll TikTok or Instagram. The rise of Substack at least indicates there's a good chunk of society that doesn't want to be treated like an iPad kid.
Another SubStacker I have a paid sub to, Bill Shaner, just touched a bit on how hard and pointless it can feel to do this. Bill covers New England's second largest city, Worcester, and gets into the real nitty gritty of local politics. He's trying to change things on a manageable scale and it's just so hard to do. In one of his recent posts he shares that he's burnt out.
The work is worth doing, but I don't fault people for wondering if it's worth it. The money, the time, and the defeat are hard. But it does take an intellectual vanguard to help prop up any movement. As you correctly note, this is why the Koch's invested so hard in think tanks and astroturfed campaigns like the Tea Party. You just have to hope that people discover more than the slop.
This is the first thing of yours I have read, and it knocked me out. So I had to go read several other posts. Same. And then there was Evgenia’s mocumentary. I know some folks in the world of documentary filmmakers. And Evgenia’s short film was brilliant.
"What we really need today — what we need right now — is some enterprising young Luddite-terrorists to destroy the internet. The internet was designed to be decentralized — designed so it could survive a nuclear decapitation strike…designed to be like a fungus or a cancer. But centralizing capitalist society is its own enemy in this regard. So much of the internet is now concentrated in a small number of data centers around the world that its infamous decentralized function has been effectively negated. It is now feasible to take the internet out — or to take out a substantial portion of it to cripple it for a few years."
Good article. I liked, "unless you have power, information is just information." I discovered your substack today, and this is the first article I've read. I'm looking forward to working my way backward.
Superb piece. And I agree with your view of Covid lockdown - when I think of that time, my mind goes instantly to footage of the fish returning to the waters of Venice, not our inability to get into bars, hairdressers and the like.
I don't know what your sourdough breadmaking skills are like, but I'm glad you're sticking with writing in the meantime.
"The problem for her is that people don't know what they want. What they need is guidance. They need an enlightened curation."
I'm presently engaged in a reconsideration of Rousseau's Social Contract.
His analysis was formulated in opposition to the contemporary absolutism that surrounded him. He characterized that absolutism as based on the idea that the people could only have a political existence in and through the submission to and representation by the sovereign.
"A people, say Grotius, can give itself to a king. So that according to Grotius, a people is a people before giving it a king. It would be well to examine the act by which a people is a people. For this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society."
I would submit to you that "this act by which a people is a people" is an idea which has much more potential than blowing up the internet or completely accepting the idea that the market is foundational.
Rousseau argued that "the people" is always double-- simultaneously an anarchic multitude and a coherent people, it never completely coincides with itself and as such can never guarantee that it is what it should be or wills what it ought to be.
Both of you might consider the following--in spite of what has changed over the past 200 or so years the alternative remains much the same, either an insistence on the primacy of self-determination or a presumption that the "people need guidance," or that the people are too crude, barbaric, or childlike to be capable of popular sovereignty.
Somehow, the people must be trusted to make its own decisions without any guarantee of the results. It is simply the people's authority in relation to itself.
For myself, this concept leaves lots of political, economic, and cultural structures to still be explored and possibly attempted.
"Ultimately, I stayed" I'm glad for this. Nice essay. +1000 for "media gang bangs", that is fucking right on the money, I lol'd
I would totally miss the internet and everything it provides me (like reading content and reacting here) if it went away but, while I defo feel the same dopamine hits, it seems I'm nowhere near addicted to it as others (thanks be to gawd) I'm far more addicted to my garden and musical instruments and my pals and my pints - the loss of those would be kinda devastating. And the market...the market or a market is everywhere all the time in one way or another. I suppose like almost everything else tech just makes markets mostly faster and shittier? I wonder what difference med school would make - in USA might be worse than media.
Last night I saw a documentary on China embracing capitalism in 2020. One scene they were teaching classes to a group of women.
Knowledge without monetization is useless they instructed. People went around repeating this. You can memorize 100 Chinese poems and unless you monetize it - that info is useless.
Fits in with my general sense that China is taking some of the worst consumerist-neoliberal western tendencies and is doing a hyper accelerated rush to them.
"What we really need today — what we need right now — is some enterprising young Luddite-terrorists to destroy the internet."
Amen. Or perhaps greedy cryptocurrency buffoons will destroy the hyperfinancialized economy that sustains the modern internet. Once the expensive financial immune systems are depleted and dead, the centralized cloud monocultures will be wiped out by creative and diverse digital microorganisms.
Thanks for sticking around. I've always appreciated long-form intellectual articles (that fall short of reading a whole book) that let me think.
It looks like we are really in an experiment of pure market takeover/integration into every facet of life, where it's essentially impossible to leave. Maybe the purpose of this is to provide future generations with a definitive statement of what capitalism is, the same way Israel has written its definitive statement on Zionism, and in that recognition they can choose to do something different.
But in so many industries we now have direct individual subordination to market tendencies. The irony is instead of a stifling publisher, record label, practice, or company acting as a barrier, we face these coercive forces in the raw. Just thinking about being a therapist, ethically you don't want to be financially reliant on your clients. But if you work independently, you are inherently reliant on clients, and this creates a conflict of interest. Everywhere now there are all these conflicts of interest and "incentives" that warp or pollute the function of most aspects of society.
If someone blew up the internet, in the West we'd have a really hard time as the industrial backbone of production is largely gone. Some friends have been proposing how to escape AI influence in the music industry, and one idea is to do everything analog, with tape, and make vinyl records, physical artifacts that have never touched computers would have more inherent value. But we don't actually have the capacity to be making tape, or records, or even analog recording consoles, nor does distributed capital exist to afford building these costly studios. I think the same is happening with book publishing, and happened years ago with film.
I do appreciate what you do, and I do feel there is intentioned signal that makes it through the noise. Having a systems-level detective working for the collective mind has to be important, and even if we are (temporarily?) captured by the system, our minds don't have to be. Unless the extreme-long shot possibility of Evgenia's dictatorship of the proletariate happens, we may have to wait until human tendency and culture finally overindulges in these impulses to such an extreme and absurd extend that we all get sick and decide to move on and wake up a little.
Here's a weird thing about the internet: if you quit writing, I'd feel like I lost a friend. Reading your essays is often a highlight of my day. It's bizarre and irrational, but deep writing that resonates with your own thoughts makes you feel like you found a soul mate. What sucks for the author is that they rarely get to know it, and the little box I'm writing this comment in is entirely inadequate for explaining the depth of this one-sided emotional connection. I'd like to think that somehow, through the fabric of the universe, you'd occasionally feel it, but of course we both know it's bullshit. Nevertheless, this is very real and meaningful to me, and I truly appreciate you.
Than you for this. It brought a tear to my eye for real. I know people read and that it’s important but it is good to hear it so directly. Thank you.
Somebody please kill the Internet..
I miss having friends irl
I experienced this through posting photography on Instagram. It completely took away my sense of what I like myself artistically. Then I joined a photography collective who shared spreadsheets of hashtags that would get the most traction. This was years ago before the algorithm changed and now you need to pay to play. At one point, I had to step back and question why I was letting some non human algorithm dictate what I was inspired by. I love you and Evgenia’s point of view. It has expanded my thinking and I very much appreciate your writing.
Yet again, thanks for this. It's always really stimulating to read your writing. Ditto Evgenia's.
The Internet takeover is unique in its reach and so is the scale of the destruction it's wrought. But only a certain slice of society (and a certain slice of the world) has the time and money to utterly immerse themselves in it...however much it succeeds in dictating life around them. What seems more remarkable is how few of the immersed will (ever) look away. As you've both noted, they genuinely seem less and less interested in real people, physical events, etc. It's now easy to see in the writing and art they are producing.
But: the history of Anglophone journalism and politics is full of celebrities...as it is of self-promoting, first-person journalism. The number of people really willing to pursue their own art or work simply out of conviction rather than the hope (however secret or unconscious) of some audience or approbation... that's always been pretty small.
Much as the Internet tries to shape and crush all before it, it also can't expunge all national differences - and not every society is predicated on individualism. (A Mexican liberation theologist once told me "society here moves from community to the individual rather than the other way round. The north just can't understand that.")
As Ilf and Petrov noticed, modern American society is deeply incurious. (They picked up all those hitchhikers, crossed all those states, and no one ever asked where they were from or what language they were using !) It's also very confessional – as anyone who's sat through a long flight next to an American traveler will attest. All that helps fuel the Internet you describe. The idea that personhood itself will somehow evaporate if one's personal thoughts, image, political ideals, etc., are not visible and expressed 24/7 is certainly being exploited to a new extent. But I think it's always been there.
> The problem, to her, is that the people don’t know what they want.
When I despair at the state of the world, I remind myself that in the end, people get the government they deserve. If the human race drives itself into extinction, as it likely will, well, we have earned it. I can't control that, but as long as I know that, throughout it all, I did the right thing, that's okay. Somehow, this nihilistic thought brings me peace.
For me it was all a little in reverse. Working in dying newspapers really only showed me the industry has helped no one. By the time covid happened it also kinda killed my career, but then gave me this substack life where I felt like I got the recognition that I never got. But given how you have to basically post all the time, it became too exhausting and I stopped about a year ago. I’ve been writing this whole time but just don’t see the point in sharing. For now it’s just for me. as you said only covering things in the social news cycle gets you any clicks. Whatever. This shit ain’t for us. I don’t wanna be part of the precious race. But you gotta do things for yourself. That’s what it’s all about. So Thanks for putting your self out there man!
If u can consume the cycle u r the star. If the cycle consumes u, someone else is the star
For sure. And when you laugh at that and know joke’s on them it’s even better
It's just capitalism baby. Shitty, horrible capitalism. Every means of communication degenerates into this sort of clicks/viewership/subscription model eventually. Once a medium is around long enough we no longer have to pay any mind to the public interest, and hey, what even is the public interest.
I'll just go with one example. Radio started out with high culture and entertainment, sponsors to be sure, but there definitely was a lot of art, politics and news. FDRs fireside chats come to mind as a much, much different means of political communication than what we have today. And what became of radio? At it's heigh of influence it was ruled by influencers like Howard Stern and Rush Limbaugh. Entertaining in their own rights, whatever one thought of them, but certainly a poisonous form of entertainment aimed at selling products. Corporations finally killed off the medium (almost) by consolidation and a misguided attempt at technology (Sirius and XM), but outside of a few major metros and NPR, what's left of the medium? A local rock station in Boston moved to an HD channel and was replaced by Bloomberg radio, just beaming off nonsense to finance types driving into work at Fidelity and State Street Bank.
The internet is no different. There is still promise there, but it takes much more work and commitment by journalists and creators like yourself. Discovery is hard and for the population at large, it's much, much easier to scroll TikTok or Instagram. The rise of Substack at least indicates there's a good chunk of society that doesn't want to be treated like an iPad kid.
Another SubStacker I have a paid sub to, Bill Shaner, just touched a bit on how hard and pointless it can feel to do this. Bill covers New England's second largest city, Worcester, and gets into the real nitty gritty of local politics. He's trying to change things on a manageable scale and it's just so hard to do. In one of his recent posts he shares that he's burnt out.
https://www.worcestersucks.email/p/theres-a-white-boat-coming-up-the?lli=1
The work is worth doing, but I don't fault people for wondering if it's worth it. The money, the time, and the defeat are hard. But it does take an intellectual vanguard to help prop up any movement. As you correctly note, this is why the Koch's invested so hard in think tanks and astroturfed campaigns like the Tea Party. You just have to hope that people discover more than the slop.
This is the first thing of yours I have read, and it knocked me out. So I had to go read several other posts. Same. And then there was Evgenia’s mocumentary. I know some folks in the world of documentary filmmakers. And Evgenia’s short film was brilliant.
"What we really need today — what we need right now — is some enterprising young Luddite-terrorists to destroy the internet. The internet was designed to be decentralized — designed so it could survive a nuclear decapitation strike…designed to be like a fungus or a cancer. But centralizing capitalist society is its own enemy in this regard. So much of the internet is now concentrated in a small number of data centers around the world that its infamous decentralized function has been effectively negated. It is now feasible to take the internet out — or to take out a substantial portion of it to cripple it for a few years."
punk as fuck
Good article. I liked, "unless you have power, information is just information." I discovered your substack today, and this is the first article I've read. I'm looking forward to working my way backward.
Superb piece. And I agree with your view of Covid lockdown - when I think of that time, my mind goes instantly to footage of the fish returning to the waters of Venice, not our inability to get into bars, hairdressers and the like.
I don't know what your sourdough breadmaking skills are like, but I'm glad you're sticking with writing in the meantime.
My sourdough skills are not bad but running a small cut throat business not something I’d like doing to be honest. Or even something I’m cut out for.
Pistachio Wars > Sourdough Wars
This was a terrific and quite accurate analysis.
But I take issue with what Evgenia said:
"The problem for her is that people don't know what they want. What they need is guidance. They need an enlightened curation."
I'm presently engaged in a reconsideration of Rousseau's Social Contract.
His analysis was formulated in opposition to the contemporary absolutism that surrounded him. He characterized that absolutism as based on the idea that the people could only have a political existence in and through the submission to and representation by the sovereign.
"A people, say Grotius, can give itself to a king. So that according to Grotius, a people is a people before giving it a king. It would be well to examine the act by which a people is a people. For this act, being necessarily prior to the other, is the true foundation of society."
I would submit to you that "this act by which a people is a people" is an idea which has much more potential than blowing up the internet or completely accepting the idea that the market is foundational.
Rousseau argued that "the people" is always double-- simultaneously an anarchic multitude and a coherent people, it never completely coincides with itself and as such can never guarantee that it is what it should be or wills what it ought to be.
Both of you might consider the following--in spite of what has changed over the past 200 or so years the alternative remains much the same, either an insistence on the primacy of self-determination or a presumption that the "people need guidance," or that the people are too crude, barbaric, or childlike to be capable of popular sovereignty.
Somehow, the people must be trusted to make its own decisions without any guarantee of the results. It is simply the people's authority in relation to itself.
For myself, this concept leaves lots of political, economic, and cultural structures to still be explored and possibly attempted.
"Ultimately, I stayed" I'm glad for this. Nice essay. +1000 for "media gang bangs", that is fucking right on the money, I lol'd
I would totally miss the internet and everything it provides me (like reading content and reacting here) if it went away but, while I defo feel the same dopamine hits, it seems I'm nowhere near addicted to it as others (thanks be to gawd) I'm far more addicted to my garden and musical instruments and my pals and my pints - the loss of those would be kinda devastating. And the market...the market or a market is everywhere all the time in one way or another. I suppose like almost everything else tech just makes markets mostly faster and shittier? I wonder what difference med school would make - in USA might be worse than media.
Last night I saw a documentary on China embracing capitalism in 2020. One scene they were teaching classes to a group of women.
Knowledge without monetization is useless they instructed. People went around repeating this. You can memorize 100 Chinese poems and unless you monetize it - that info is useless.
The documentary made me sad. Big whoop.
What is the doc called????
https://m.imdb.com/title/tt14505430/
Ascension
Fits in with my general sense that China is taking some of the worst consumerist-neoliberal western tendencies and is doing a hyper accelerated rush to them.
It makes me think things aren’t that different anywhere.
Reminds me of some Russian YouTubers who talk about capitalism like it’s a science to master.
not surprising about russian youtubers. but china...is supposed to be run by communists!
They are still on their way to achieving full communism. This capitalism thing is a stepping stone before they drop it for good. Maybe
"What we really need today — what we need right now — is some enterprising young Luddite-terrorists to destroy the internet."
Amen. Or perhaps greedy cryptocurrency buffoons will destroy the hyperfinancialized economy that sustains the modern internet. Once the expensive financial immune systems are depleted and dead, the centralized cloud monocultures will be wiped out by creative and diverse digital microorganisms.
Here's hopin.