weekend

It's so cold I'm reading and watching squirrels all weekend!

I'm reading

Untold stories from Election Day 2016. Marvin Gaye and the patriotism of resistance. In Trump country, not much has changed—at least not for the better. The year in push alerts, which I didn't really experience because the only notifications I get are from actual humans calling/texting me. It's not fake news, it's information disorder. Predators on film sets, high-school locker rooms, Capitol Hill (Anita Hill weighs in), and everywhere. Gay men need a whisper network, too. Harassment can be a career-killer. A fan finds out her fave is a creep, which "means admitting you were duped." Listening to Trump's accusers. How the rich hide their wealth. "For 11 brief minutes, they were God." You can run from "identity politics," but you cannot hide. Reblogging Audre Lorde. Yazidi women, post-captivity. Google's mass-shooting misinformation problem. An app for alcoholism. An a capella hazing scandal. What childbirth really feels like. A dispatch from the front lines of California's rush toward legal weed. Can Ford turn itself into a tech company? Saeed Jones on clarity in the face of overwhelming information. A 13-year-old teen-girl baseball blogger posed as an adult dude. The Japanese rent-a-friend business. The appeal of dressing modestly. For a chill thrill, cancel your plans. Or maybe head to one of the quietest places on earth.

in the swarm

Wrestling with my addiction to and loathing of the Internet, I’ve been taking notes from In the Swarm, a pamphlet by Byung-Chul Han, a Korean-born German philosopher, published by MIT Press in April. 

“Sovereign is he who commands the shitstorms of the Net,” Han declares.

Sound timely? Han believes the Internet is “a narcissistic ego machine” that cashiers traditional democratic politics. Once upon a time, it may have been possible for rage to inspire the people of a nation into action, but that was because mass media, like radio, taught citizens how to surrender their individuality and become a people. Today, online, there is no collective soul but only a swarm of isolated individuals, through whom political indignation ripples like a wave—and dissipates. Some of Han’s aphorisms sound very translated from German—“The new man will finger instead of handling”—and he’s a bit too orphic for a pragmatist like me to take him without a grain of salt. But his pessimism feels salutary. —review by Caleb Crain (“Envoy”)


...Byung-Chul Han counters the cheerleaders for Twitter revolutions and Facebook activism by arguing that digital communication is in fact responsible for the disintegration of community and public space and is slowly eroding any possibility for real political action and meaningful political discourse. 

DEEP! BOOM! I am reading this summer!