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Modernism of the Soul
“I was writing this paper on the notion of attention span disappearing. I don’t think the issue is attention, you know, I had a professor who always used to talk about that. And then he was telling me his son was playing a video game, and he tried to play it, and he could only play it for five minutes, and he got completely like, he was like ‘I can’t even’, you know, attend to it. We would never accuse the professor of having a short attention span because he could only stand that for five minutes. Though he accused his son of having a short attention span because he couldn’t read a book for five minutes. But that same kid could play that video game that the professor couldn’t play for five hours. And the reason why is we’re bookish people, we’re biased towards the book. And so the issue isn’t attention, for me, it’s interest. And that is a crisis. I think, my kids, I don’t want them to be disinterested in everyday life…It’s not that they can’t pay attention to it, they just don’t…they’re not interested in it. To me, boredom is an excuse, it gives you a crutch. What you’re really saying is, ‘I’m not interested in things that I probably should be interested in’, you know, like everyday life, like time passing, like a slow film. I don’t think they can’t pay attention, I just don’t think they’re interested in it. And that to me is more of a crisis.”
– Filmmaker Kogonada in an interview at the 2016 Berlinale Talents Summit
A haphazard rumination on something foundational. I want to share a corner of the human condition in countenance of the humanist tradition. An avenue towards compassion, empathy, and warmth towards all those who share this shrinking world.
Despite humanity’s seeming connectedness, we are distant. We have not yet reached a stage where technology is able to replicate true connection. But we revel in its distraction and unfulfilled promise. We are a species that evolved needing the presence of others around us, in every sense. We now live in a world of reflective and transparent surfaces, translating each other’s thoughts and personalities through flat screens. Interpreting events having lost ourselves in the gossamer that obscures their true nature.
From within this context and through just as fiddly a medium, I implore you to consider the still frame. The unmoving, lingering shot focused on extracting the remarkable from the routine.
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Weekly Picks – February 11, 2024
Credits (clockwise from top right): Nick Sirotich, Thomas Nast, Pixculture/ Creative Commons, Mark Harris, Sue Cunningham Photographic/Alamy, Maggie Shannon.
The informal economy, crime, and journalism surrounding rural Amazonia. Parasitic effects of fungi an analogue to the corporate thought process. Phantasmagorical escapes into farming retreats in Singapore. The historical and ongoing political and military philosophies behind Israel’s great displacement project, as relayed by the Editor in Chief of Haaretz. A first-hand account and analysis of the dollar store model in the United States. And photographs from a late abortion clinic in a country unwilling to offer basic healthcare to women.
This week’s collection:
- The Forest Eaters
- The Fungus Among Us
- On Farms
- Israel’s Self-Destruction: Netanyahu, the Palestinians, and the Price of Neglect
- Dollar Stores Show Capitalism at its Worst
- A Safe Haven for Late Abortions
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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folkshilfe, LEMO & Kosik
Salzburg as seen from Hohensalzburg Fortress
I visited central Europe last year, my first trip abroad since before the Covid interlude. I travelled with a few friends and we galivanted from Budapest to Geneva, spending the bulk of our time in the lovely country of Austria.
A couple of months later, I decided to revisit the photos and videos we had all taken to compile them into a video for the group. I needed background music and went digging through the Austrian charts from the last few years to find the appropriate track.
The winner was folkshilfe’s “Hau di her”, a song about finding meaningful connection:
Other good ones I came across: “Schwarze Wolken” from LEMO and “Legenden” from Christina Kosik.
In case you are looking to add some Austrian pop to your playlist.
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Weekly Picks – February 4, 2024
“We can’t have a decent society, we can’t have people with their own volition, we can’t have a society that progresses, we can’t have a society based on empathy or kindness, if people are being manipulated from some central source, no matter what type of source that is.”
– Jaron Lanier
Special comment: On the same day that I published this quick dive into the most popular virtual interfacing networks, the CEOs of Facebook, Tiktok, X, Snap, and Discord testified in front of the US Congress. On the docket was the companies’ response to the sharp rise of online sexual exploitation of children and youth. In attendance were families of youth who had self-harmed or committed suicide. There was even a surreal moment when Mark Zuckerberg was asked to “say something” and apologize to the families seated behind him. You could see his hesitation as he struggled with the Senator’s request – acquiesce and admit wrong, or stay put and appear inhuman? He landed somewhere in the middle, issuing about as appropriate an apology as you can get in such a setting, without accepting any ownership of responsibility.
My post was not planned to coincide with this event. And this is not the first nor the last time these online heads of states will be summoned to legislative assemblies to defuse tensions around growing crises relating to social media usage. As Jaron Lanier describes in the video I had shared, the fundamental architecture of these systems will ensure these outcomes. Modern tech moguls, many of them founders and builders of this fundamental architecture, are brilliant developers and marketers. But they are not saviors. To imbue them with power and expect them to “regulate culture” as Lanier puts it, is an abdication of public responsibility. The profit motive is hardly the stalwart steward of great philosophy, governance, and ethics. It will not safeguard society. That is the public’s task, to be undertaken free from invasive surveillance and ruined edifices.
Another video shared here for those interested in further exploration of the topics discussed in the post:
(12:28-18:52 is a succinct summary of the crux of the issue.)
This week’s collection:
- A Circular Motion: Protest, what is it good for?
- Prisoners in the US are part of a hidden workforce linked to hundreds of popular food brands
- Trees struggle to ‘breathe’ as climate warms, researchers find
- Can Divestment Campaigns Still Work?
- Why You’ve Never Been In A Plane Crash
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
Further reading for those interested in social media, the tech industry’s power, or surveillance:
- When dead children are just the price of doing business, Zuckerberg’s apology is empty
- The illusion of closeness: how social media redefined respect
- The Rise of Techno-Authoritarianism
- How Surveillance Is Changing Our Most Intimate Relationships
Notes on the ongoing Gaza conflict, and its interpretations:
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Bringing the Factory to the Farm
A morsel of your time, if you please, to dive into a surreal vision. A moment under the darkening firmament with a gaggle of green learners, rendered speechless by the immutable.
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A late evening in July 2013. My colleague and I have just finished a day’s worth of sessions at a school a couple of kilometers from the homestead where we are residing. This is a joint elementary-secondary, about 7 clicks away from the small but busy village center of Busolwe, Eastern Uganda. We have supported facilitating a set of reading, writing and debating competitions to close out our time at this particular location. Part of a community-led program to foster higher literacy rates and championed by the local library and Elder Council.
Our host and supervisor, the local librarian, has left us and returned home for the night. We are to finish our conversations and join him and his family for dinner at a reasonable time. The kids, of course, have to stay. They live at the school most of the year, sleeping in dense rooms in stacked beds, sharing meals in the same rooms where they study. They do the chores too – some have already started sweeping the hallways in preparation for mealtime. The teachers, who double as caretakers, and most of whom have not been paid for many months, have retired to their quarters or trundled home.
I am speaking with a few of the older students trying to convince them of impossibilities.
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The Price of Connection
Sometime in the mid-2010s, there was a chorus of researchers who began to seriously consider the long-term effects of modern, digital social media on our personalities. At this point everyone with a mic, pen, and laptop had already waxed lyrical about the positive and negative impacts of online networks invading every corner of our daily lives. The foundation of the dual life – of your actual person and your profiles on digital platforms – had long been consolidated. Facebook was the dominant player (and remains for now as the most utilized site for connecting), essentially ubiquitous among younger demographics who had grown up with technology at their fingertips. Even youth who were living in poverty could afford simple flip phones where they could access the basic Facebook mobile interface and messaging services – something I witnessed working with children in rural Uganda back in 2013.
These researchers may have been motivated by the unexpected and anecdotal rise in social isolation, especially among youth (early adopters and heavy users of large social media sites). MySpace had been an experimental precursor where the potentially harmful effects of social media may not have made themselves apparent. The rise of Facebook, a digital party for all your acquaintances, with a constantly updating feed, and Reddit, which allowed a window into the general zeitgeist and its flowering subcultures, led to increased critical scrutiny of the underlying infrastructure that was fast forming our new social connective tissue.
Facebook, Twitter, Reddit, Youtube, Whatsapp and over in China, WeChat and QQ, were also fast becoming relevant in the workplace. Links to each began to be embedded not just on webpages designed for entertainment and fun, but also for professional use. There are still vast swathes of industry in East Asia where an email or mobile text may not be exchanged during an entire workday; instead, interactions on a single platform like WeChat may be all that is needed to accomplish daily tasks.
These researchers did surveys, looked at all publicly available data, and spoke to industry experts, users, promotors, and critics of social media platforms. They quoted twentieth century intellectuals such as B.F. Skinner, Bertrand Russell, Alan Turing, and Norbert Wiener in their search for an answer to the question: should we be worried?
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Weekly Picks – January 28, 2024
This week’s collection:
- Around the globe, the politics of the war in Gaza [are] local
- What Are Intellectuals Good For?
- What’s Next for Histories of Climate Change
- Life Inside the Fiction Factory: Dan Sinykin on Conglomerate Publishing
- Israel’s War Within
- The Potent Pollution Of Noise
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece.
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47 Years (or, Thoughts on Retirement)
“Who was the first man to look at a house full of objects and to immediately assess them only in terms of what he could trade them in for in the market likely to have been? Surely he can only have been a thief.”
– David Graeber, Debt: The First 5,000 Years
I have been on this planet for 32 years. That is the equivalent of two thirds the amount of time a working adult will spend laboring in their life. Sort of.
Not everyone lives a full life and not everyone needs to work to support themselves. Here in Canada, people can retire at any time, but most are compelled to a decision between the ages of 55 and 70. The vast majority spend ages 18 to 65 chasing the dream of freeing themselves from labor. A reprehensible 47 years. Not reprehensible because of what they are doing, choosing to do, or the fact that they are working. There is nothing inherently wrong with work, with occupying yourself in a profession to serve yourself or others, or with finding value in it. Reprehensible, then, because nearly all who work do so primarily to survive – to ensure basic needs, pay off debts, support others, or secure a modicum of leisure. Participate or suffer.
But I digress. This particular post is not about that aspect of how we set up our economy. Instead, it is a rumination on retirement. The end goal. Call it what you will.
I am 14 years into my 47 (or more likely, 52 or more). The sad truth is that retirement may be a fantasy for many individuals moving forwards. There are a variety of statistics that confirm how little Canadians are saving, or how many are aware of how little they are saving, or of those foregoing retirement because they must. Fewer and fewer are earning enough to afford the fast-rising costs of homes; the biggest chunks of paychecks ending up in the pockets of landlords small and large. Increasing inequality, unfettered inflation, reliance on resources dwindling our breathable air, and a financial system that incentivizes greed and excessive growth, not helping in the slightest.
Of course, with a social welfare system that hedges the worst outcomes, Canadians are fortunate. More fortunate than most in the world who have no vision of an old age free from labor, enjoyed on sunny beaches and shimmering shores. There is something to be said for selling your life and soul for a limited time rather than having it wrested from your grip as a child never to get it back.
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Weekly Picks – January 21, 2024
Note that only excerpts (often introductory) are quoted. For full text (and context) or video, please view the original piece. Click on this post’s title or “read more” to ensure anchor links below redirect to the appropriate hyperlinked article.
This week’s collection:
- On policing and state violence:
- On smuggling sand plus its creation:
- On the ongoing Israel/Palestine conflict:
- Other pieces:
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A Well-lit Darkness
The Sun’s rays break through the clouds above Murchison Falls National Park, Uganda.
(Not farmland. Not dark. Likely hiding many a firefly.)
Eight years ago, I co-authored a blog with a friend. It was our attempt to get into the habit of writing regularly. We were students in different hemispheres with an intermittent connection. We published a few posts before our enthusiasm for the exercise was overrun by the demands on our young lives. She was navigating a dual major in Science and Fine Arts, while I struggled through a dissertation on language education in East African settings.
The blog ran its course fairly quickly. I had no patience or time to frequently journal and both of us were short on inspiration. Writer’s block compounded by the mental exhaustion of finishing our respective degrees and preparing for the next chapter in our lives; a blind preparation as we hurtled towards uncertain careers.
The entry below is a slightly edited republishing of a reflection that was posted to the blog in the summer of 2016. The memory it alludes to now 11 orbits past. It is a fond meditation to revisit. My feeling on the noisiness of life has not changed, nor my proclivity to intimate a greater reverie than the one I had perhaps experienced in the moment. The epilogue also echoes – silence remains a luxury, submitting to sleep still a strain, the perennial pressures of existence ever-present.
As I type these words, the night has settled. Snow rests lazy and comfortable on the treetops. Most are sleeping inside their warm abodes. No sharp sounds puncture the nocturnal. Everything is still.
I invite you into the dark.