The Analog Times

theconvivialsociety.substack.com/p/your-ai…

dissentmagazine.org/article/a…

www.thenewatlantis.com/publicati…

3 old sorts of books I’d like to read:

The End of All That - reflections on the First World War

Library of America war journalism series (Alan Jacobs wrote about this in The Dispatch)

Toqueville’s Democracy in America

[Good work (whether it’s parenting, ranching, plumbing, playing an instrument, or coding) disciplines our attention because it is recalcitrant to our immediate inclinations. It is because the matter and rhythm of the craft resists our will that it makes some aspect of the world newly interesting and alive for us; it allows us to take the world personally. It places the worker into a creative relationship with reality, which thereby becomes more legible. The vision expressed by Marx’s epigram about a utopia in which people fish, rear cattle, and engage in intellectual criticism in the course of a day is that of a world we act on and own together, rather than one we buy into and are consumed by. In drawing us into creative and responsive relationships, good work opens us to the possibility of recognizing ourselves in solidarity with others; it forms the basis of collective action. As Richard Sennett put it, “good craftsmanship implies socialism.” To work is to matter, and to matter is to make whole.]

• Anton Barba-Kay

Having read quite a bit lately about Big Things Happening in the World Today - lots of Substack ‘think pieces’ on AI, fertility rate decline, the ‘anti-social century’, etc. - I feel a sense of helplessness. It’s helpful, in this moment, to recall Neil Postman’s concept of the ‘information-action ratio.’ Nowadays it is so easy to consume so much information about the world in the form of endless articles about ‘Current Affairs’ that one’s time to simply get on with the business of doing the best one can to care for the immediate concerns around you, and to focus one’s energies of info-consumption on a few particular issues of concern, and to focus one’s reading overall on pleasure/leisure and on gleaning ancient wisdom - the time for _these _pursuits so easily erodes.

Really, I’m just writing myself into a renewed argument for engaging the Web via RSS reader and keeping it at that. I like to think that I don’t ‘doomscroll’ a ton, but really, mine is just a bit more sophisticated form of the same base habit: surfing the web, glutting myself with interesting information that produces no change in myself or the world besides making me feel less capable of taking concrete action in the world. Yikes!

This morning I’m reading a bit about the economy. I read James KA Smith’s latest ‘PSA announcement’ touting the merits of a new book on Elon Musk, Muskism, and then I searched around a bit for some accessible book reviews of related works circling similar or overlapping concerns as those of this new book on Musk. ‘Enshittification’ and ‘digital feudalism’ were a couple of terms I encountered. I read a review of Cory Doctorow’s book whose title is Enshittification; what I came away with was the question of: how can people practically kick back against the prevailing powers that be, and how can we build alternative worlds, even if not ‘at scale’ (because ‘at scale’ actually may be part of the problem)?

Two podcasts:

• The Rest is History: in these days of insomnia, it’s nice to have something decent with which to occupy the time spent in zombie zone. I’ve been enjoying their recent 6-part series on WWI stories. Enjoying might not be the right word - war is monstrous - and yet it somehow feels like the right one.

• Toqueville Road Trip: this is a new 6-part series from the Economist that I’ve yet to listen to. Looks good.

Two authors whose writing and thinking and way of exploring the world I love:

• Alan Jacobs: this man is cool. As someone else has said, he seems to record almost every thought he thinks! Not actually. He’s just a remarkable blogger who reguarly chimes in with interesting things to say about interesting things in the world - things like the value in reading old books; anarchist political philosophy; the history of journalism; and the ethics and ‘ecology’ of technology. I’ve read only two of his actual books: How to Think and Breaking Bread with the Dead. I’d like to re-read the latter at some point as inspiration for my own reading of dead people’s work.

• Dale C. Alison Jr.: Another cool human being. Alison Jr. is a historian of Jesus and the world of/in and around the New Testament. What I appreciate about him is his careful writing style; his even-handedness in evaluating multiple potential viewpoints on a given question of history (e.g., ‘what was going on in the events we refer to as ‘the resurrection’?); and his willingness to readily admit when he simply doesn’t know what to make of something, or when he’s changed his mind. To mind, these are marks of a wise learner and thinker, someone genuinely interested in inquiry.

I also made my pitch for optimism as a civic virtue. I’m kind of bored of the glass half-empty instinct on all sides, and the failure, as I put it here, of “anyone to take a win”. I quoted Rabbi David Wolpe on the “psychological reluctance to succeed” among activists. It’s a lesson I try to keep in mind in my own work. I used to say that policymakers, especially on the political left, were neglecting the issues of boys and men. I simply can’t say that today.

“Those with an intellectual orientation are often the worst offenders. Noting steady progress seems a bit, well, dumb. The intellectual glamor is always to be found in the negative. As my hero John Stuart Mill lamented, “it is thought necessary of any man who knows anything of the world to think ill of it”.

I don’t want to downplay the dangers of our polarized culture and politics. I worry a lot about that, in fact. There are bad things being said and done on many fronts. But I’ve come to believe that our salvation will come not from engaging with the nonsense of the culture warriors, but in acknowledging and accelerating the common sense of most of our fellow citizens”

• from Richard Reeves

I’m attracted to this line of thought. I’m prone to an overly-online cynicism; I’ve picked up the kind of journalistic defaulting to negativity and a focus on the worst wrongs being done as oppossed to the good quietly unfolding. My proclivities need reshaping in this respect. I want to become someone attending more often to the good, in part because I think it may well be in sharing stories of goodness that we recover from a sense of paralysis induced by too much time spent on news websites barraging us with negativity.

Reeves' sentiment here pairs well with this On Being interview with David Bornstein on ‘our lives with the news.’

4 things I read and was inspired by lately:

• NYT article on ‘e-tech’ and what a true and real education for children consists of.

• A joint-review of Paul Kingsnorth’s Against The Machine and C Thi Nguyen’s The Score

• The first 2 essays in the latest issue of Comment (issue theme: ‘The Inhuman / Is There a Human Future?')

  • ‘A Eschatology of Remembering’ - truly, a beautiful, awesome reflection on the Noah story
  • ‘Fear and Suffering in the Age of MAiD’ - a remarkable set of reflections on what Canadian social policy around suffering, and the author’s own sufferings.