In the last issue, I promised to report further on my post-vacation efforts at “recalibrating my focus upon where we’re heading and what we might be able to do about it.” As I continue pondering this topic through what is turning out to be an unusually busy month of August, packed with nearly constant days-long driving excursions away from our Manhattan home for various family occasions and leisure activities, I’ve decided to hold off on writing my usual opening essay for a TLBR issue until next month.
In the meantime, I’ve filled the AfterWords section below with links to a few recent viewing and reading experiences which have been particularly useful to me in my current pondering and recalibrating process.
Please continue to take care of yourselves, and enjoy these remaining weeks of summer.
AfterWords
Streaming recommendation … the 2013 film “Elysium”, a sci-fi thriller that came to mind as I read and pondered the recent Guardian piece “The Rise of End Times Fascism”, co-authored by Naomi Klein and Astra Taylor - and featured in last issue’s AfterWords section. This prescient movie depicts a frightening fictional future that could quite possibly become more factual in the years to come, given the current beliefs and behaviors of the tech oligarchy that Klein and Taylor describe so persuasively in their article. Twelve years ago, it served as an alarming example of art predicting life; today, under the Trump regime, it serves much more alarmingly as a dire warning of life imitating art.
Recommended essay #1 … “I Hate, Therefore I Am”, by University of Virginia professor Mark Edmundson, is a sobering account of how rampant the feeling of hate has become in our culture. Besides offering his diagnosis, Edmundson also provides some useful prescriptions for what we can do as individuals to inoculate ourselves from this collective infection.
I find hate to be virtually omnipresent in the current culture. Libs hate conservatives, and conservatives hate ’em right back. People hate politicians, the elite, MAGA hats (and their wearers), social media (though they cannot stay away from it). Some hate the rich. Some despise immigrants.
They hate corporations. They hate capitalism. They hate woke and cancel culture. They hate globalism and globalists. They hate this president.
Why should this be true? What if who and what we hate is who we are now? Why might hate be constructive — crucially constructive — of identity at this particular point in time?
The traditional sources of stable selfhood have been significantly depleted over time. We live in an age of skepticism, often corrosive skepticism, about our institutions and their good intentions. What happens when those once-basic planks for building an identity become useless for many? What happens when they seem to be rotted out?
One may define oneself — one may define the self — through hate. One day you are a blank slate, a void. But you can become yourself simply through hatred. You define yourself through your antipathies. I hate the church. I hate my school. I hate my parents, hate the administration, hate the president, hate the fascists, hate the communists.
Suddenly, you have stabilized the self. Do you want to be somebody? Well, now you are. You are the person with a stunning palette of hatreds. You don’t need to have positive allegiances to define yourself: The negative ones will do. Suddenly, ambiguity and nuance disappear, and you become Someone, with all of whose energies flowing in the same direction.
Recommended essay #2 … “Thinking Is Becoming a Luxury Good”, by British journalist Mary Harrington, explores the social consequences that may arise if the prevalence of digital consumption of news and information leads to a new form of social inequality, between those with the capacity for concentrated thinking and those who lack such a skill.
There is evidence that our ability to apply that brain power is decreasing. According to a recent report, adult literacy scores leveled off and began to decline across a majority of [the 38 member countries of the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development] in the past decade, with some of the sharpest declines visible among the poorest. [A report in the Financial Times] links this to the rise of a post-literate culture in which we consume most of our media through smartphones, eschewing dense text in favor of images and short-form video. Other research has associated smartphone use with A.D.H.D. symptoms in adolescents, and a quarter of surveyed American adults now suspect they may have the condition. School and college teachers assign fewer full books to their students, in part because they are unable to complete them. Nearly half of Americans read zero books in 2023.
The idea that technology is altering our capacity not just to concentrate but also to read and to reason is catching on. The conversation no one is ready for, though, is how this may be creating yet another form of inequality.
Think of this by comparison with patterns of junk food consumption: As ultraprocessed snacks have grown more available and inventively addictive, developed societies have seen a gulf emerge between those with the social and economic resources to sustain a healthy lifestyle and those more vulnerable to the obesogenic food culture. This bifurcation is strongly class-inflected: Across the developed West, obesity has become strongly correlated with poverty. I fear that so, too, will be the tide of post-literacy.
[One] might retort: Sure, but just as with junk food, it’s up to the individual to make healthy choices. What this fails to take into account, though, is that just like the negative health impacts of junk food overconsumption, the cognitive harms of digital media will be more pronounced at the bottom of the socioeconomic scale. In a culture saturated with more accessible and engrossing forms of entertainment, long-form literacy may soon become the domain of elite subcultures. As new generations reach adulthood having never lived in a world without smartphones, we can expect the culture to stratify ever more starkly. On the one hand, a relatively small group of people will retain, and intentionally develop, the capacity for concentration and long-form reasoning. On the other, a larger general population will be effectively post-literate — with all the consequences this implies for cognitive clarity. What will happen if this becomes fully realized? An electorate that has lost the capacity for long-form thought will be more tribal, less rational, largely uninterested in facts or even matters of historical record, moved more by vibes than cogent argument and open to fantastical ideas and bizarre conspiracy theories. If that sounds familiar, it may be a sign of how far down this path the West has already traveled.
Recommended essay #3 … “The Discourse Is Broken”, by Atlantic staff writer Charlie Warzel, analyzes the recent social media brouhaha over the “Sydney- Sweeney-has-good-jeans“ ad from American Eagle from the broader perspective of the cacophonous social media ecosystem within which we currently exist.
Although the Sweeney controversy is predictable, it also shows how the internet has completely disordered political and cultural discourse. Even that word, discourse—a shorthand for the way that a particular topic gets put through the internet’s meat grinder—is a misnomer, because none of the participants is really talking to the others. Instead, every participant—be they bloggers, randos on X, or people leaving Instagram comments—are issuing statements, not unlike public figures. Each of these statements becomes fodder for somebody else’s statement. People are not quite talking past one another, but clearly nobody’s listening to anyone else.
Our information ecosystem collects these statements, stripping them of their original context while adding onthe context of everything else that is happening in the world: political anxieties, cultural frustrations, fandoms, niche beefs between different posters, current events, celebrity gossip, beauty standards, rampant conspiracism. No post exists on an island. They are all surrounded and colored by an infinite array of other content targeted to the tastes of individual social-media users. What can start out as a legitimate grievance becomes something else altogether—an internet event, an attention spectacle. This is not a process for sense-making; it is a process for making people feel upset at scale.
Unfortunately for us all, our institutions, politicians, influencers, celebrities, and corporations—virtually everyone with a smartphone—operate inside this ecosystem. It has changed the way people talk to and fight with one another, as well as the way jeans are marketed. Electoral politics, activism, getting people to stream your SoundCloud mixtape—all of it relies on attracting attention using online platforms. The Sweeney incident is useful because it allows us to see how all these competing interests overlap to create a self-perpetuating controversy.