- 2025-06-22
- Finished this book today!
- Want to write up what I remember/what I grokked
- I wanna read it a second time more deeply, make some flashcards and shit
- Voice note I sent to some friends re: this:
Age of typology
- I don’t think this is the exact phrase he used, but still. There was a time in history, especially American history (his focus), where the written word was the main way that information was expressed
- The written word has a particular world-view, or epistemology, a theory of knowledge. Knowledge can be written in a linear sequence, with propositions and conclusions
- In Marshall McLuhan’s parlance, the written word is a “cold” medium, meaning it is spare, low resolution, less… rich in information, in stimuli. As such, it requires more of you, you are encouraged to work more, to grapple with meaning, to co-create meaning
Age of show business
- TV, a hot medium, info-dense, visually stimulating
- But also — commercialised. Condensed. The news — there’s no time to dive deep into a topic, it’s always “and now… this”, a non sequitur
- As such, “Americans know everything about the last 24 hours, and nothing about the last 60 years”
- A constant deluge of information, without anything to attach it to. Question Americans on the actual details of the Iranian Hostage Crisis (the book was published in ~1984) and you’ll find they know almost nothing. The news deals in “what”, not “why” in any deep way. TV obliterates history, context
- Entertainment. TV makes it seem that everything must be entertaining. The news, education, sermons. Perverse incentives, tragedy of the commons - even if you want to make something worthwhile, you need to ensure it gets enough viewers. Political debates where the speakers get 5 mins each, no time for rebuttals, vs the Lincoln-Douglass debate where each speaker got something crazy like 90 mins each, with many rounds
- Trivialities. Trivial Pursuit, game shows, crosswords, as places to use all these random facts. When the telegram (telegraph?) was invented, “now the people in Texas can know what the people in Maine are doing” - why? To what end?
- The Aldous Huxley vision, rather than the George Orwell vision. Information isn’t destroyed - people are too distracted, entertained, to pay attention
- Politicians need to buy advertisements, to be believable on TV, to have pithy slogans. David Foster Wallace’s thing from the German interview re: how politicians are beholden to donors to afford enough TV advertisements, which makes them in some ways corrupt, which repulses Americans, which turns them even further away from politics, etc
And this was 40 years ago!
- Youtube, reddit, instagram, twitter. Polarised news sources, fake news, echo chambers, recommendation algorithms and algorithm-curated newsfeeds. Trump and populism and video games and every film being a sequel or superhero film or video game film. iPad kids, stan culture, the culture wars
A part of the polycrisis?
- I imagine this is talked about as a part of the polycrisis. The loss of the ability for political opponents to debate each other. The move from an engaged citizenry (although how prevalent was this, really?) to a triviality-obsessed populace
How this has played out in my life
- The news always struck me as overwhelming - so much to keep up with, a deluge, so many countries, unfolding crises
- Pop culture is alluring - getting to know the eras of SNL, keeping up with music news, video game news (as a teenager). Who are the new pop-stars? Who are the new rappers? What are the best films of the year? What are the TV shows that everyone’s watching? (Not to mention sport which I’ve totally abjured). Also internet pop culture - memes, youtube channels, trends, fads. Upcoming TV shows, upcoming movies, upcoming video games. (“Holy shit, they’re making a Harry Potter TV show!“)
- Trying to fight the trivialities - torn between “this is mostly slop and I should shift to learning about real shit” to “but then I’ll be even more estranged from normal people than I already am for e.g. not following sport, being involved in Effective Altruism, thinking about the meta-crisis & the post-rationalist scene” etc.
I’ve already blocked distracting websites
- I use Freedom to block youtube, reddit and facebook apart from 30 mins a day
- I’ve recently unblocked twitter because i thought it’d be nice to return to tpot and tweet more, but actually I find it overwhelming, largely just a waste of time, a feeling of a bunch of people yapping, very little signal-to-noise. And really, what I need is not more signal - I’ve seen enough tweets for at least another year
- I’ve love to go full “Minimising the Pull” mode and buy various devices. I’d love to replace my macbook with a linux device that I’ve tweaked to be much easier to minimise the pull on