T.J. Clark · Frank Auerbach’s London: Frank Auerbach
This episode has stuck in my mind because it’s as close as I’ve ever come to what is supposed to be the primal scene of modern art: the experience of making (or if you’re a viewer, seeing) something that is truly senseless and preposterous as it comes into being, unknown and unidentifiable, and therefore, if you’re lucky, a glimpse of freedom, a unique particular, a way to slip off the mind-forg’d manacles.
I’ve been thinking about backing out of my social media accounts again for some time. I’ve been here before. I’ve deleted, for instance, three or four Facebook accounts since 2008. I can’t remember when I stopped posting on Twitter but I deleted my account when Elon Musk bought it. And yet, I’ve always hung onto my Instagram accounts, not least because I signed up on launch day and felt, for many years — even after the Facebook/Meta acquisition — that it was somehow different from the other platforms. But it’s become clear that what distinguishes Instagram is that its users have been subjected to even greater manipulation than those of its related media.
I’ve always kept an eye out for the new thing: Facebook was new, Blogger before that, Friendster before that. MySpace was in there somewhere. There was Foursquare, With, Path, and no doubt several other VC-driven social networks I can’t remember, plus App.net and whatever other indies popped up. Glass is nice. More recently, there’s the crop of fediverse networks like Mastodon and Pixelfed; corporate-fediverse hybrids like Bluesky and Threads, nearly all of which function the same way. Corporate manipulation is only part of the problem. Dispensing with longer and deeper thought is another, joining a mob-minded culture is another, falling victim to political half-truths and outright lies is another.
Most social platforms eventually bring such detriment to their users. I believe this observation to be true, to be the rule in spite of its occasional exceptions, and if my belief is understood as little more than an informed hunch it is also described elsewhere in extensive study and reportage: we have in the course of the development of these platforms become, on the whole, lonelier, more despairing, more hopeless, more vain, poorer, less likely to receive adequate health care, more violent, less educated, more bigoted, and more prone to rash and destructive behavior. So much for connecting the whole world or whatever. The fact is, most of us were better off before all of this.
And yet it’s hard to deny the original intent of the web, of the internet, to connect people. Simple as that. It’s never been free of corporate investment and management but their presence was less prominent, less pervasive, less intrusive. Which might not matter to some people but it does to me.
As it happens, the two platforms I currently enjoy are Bluesky and Micro.blog. I enjoy them because they move at my pace, without algorithmic interference or exploit. I have no idea how Bluesky makes its money and assume it’s something I’ll find disagreeable at some point, but for now I’ve found people I want to follow so I’ll stay put. As for Micro.blog, its community pays to be on the platform. It’s a microblogging platform, mostly, and its founder wrote a book about what that means and why he believes in it. It connects to Threads and the other fediverse platforms, but it also functions as its own network. What I like about it is that its membership believes in the possibility of a different kind of social platform (no likes, no tally of followers), one that can, solely by virtue of its members, remain interesting, informative, and social.
But to my original remark, I’m backing out of Meta Corporation platforms. Maybe that’s all I mean. It’s the election, of course, and its campaigns. It’s the devolution of news and journalism and the rise of manipulative and untruthful media. It’s all kinds of things. Lies and propaganda leading to reprehensible and awful ends. Again and again, year after year, it’s one thing or another. Just a handful of examples might be Sandy Hook, Pulse, Parkland, Charlottesville, Tree of Life, George Floyd, Kenosha, January 6. All acts and incidents of delusion and hatred, all exacerbated by social media.
I’m not capable of or responsible for a broad and lasting solution but I don’t see how I can continue to be part of the problem and fail to acknowledge somewhere how dreadful and dangerous this culture has become.
The U.S. will now be run by a white supremacist authoritarian President and a political party that has chosen to accept that brand as its identity.
There is no doubt that a key factor in voters’ swing to Trump is that they associated the inflation of the post-pandemic months with Biden and turned the incumbents out, a phenomenon seen all over the world.
There is also no doubt that both racism and sexism played an important role in Harris’s defeat.
But my own conclusion is that both of those things were amplified by the flood of disinformation that has plagued the U.S. for years now. Russian political theorists called the construction of a virtual political reality through modern media “political technology.” They developed several techniques in this approach to politics, but the key was creating a false narrative in order to control public debate. These techniques perverted democracy, turning it from the concept of voters choosing their leaders into the concept of voters rubber-stamping the leaders they had been manipulated into backing.
Brooklyn, NY
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If I know anyone at all who is not voting the Harris/Walz ticket:
Does this describe a bubble or a silo or an echochamber? I think these terms were invented to suit a very recent purpose, to explain unforeseen political outcomes in a time dominated by our infatuation with a contemporary version of the internet, not to describe likemindedness as they present it. By and large, likemindedness has always been attractive, for its affirmative powers, its inspiration, its support. Likemindedness is where we get our courage from, where we learn our strengths and weaknesses, where we learn to prosper.
I believe this idea has been corrupted by the fundamental achievements of current social practice. The platforms did it. The algorithms did it. The infinite scroll, the engagement economy, Surveillance Capitalism, these are the forces and corporations that have created the environment in which we live. Their aim is to know and isolate us in ever-expanding profit-extraction. We are not connected, we are separated. We do not learn, we forget. If we think about it at all, broadly speaking, we think the next post/video/story/dump will be the one that satisfies something in us that did not exist until we started scrolling.
These towns were not randomly submerged. Their disappearance was part of a broader narrative about communities in the American West displaced for—depending on location—hydroelectric power, irrigation, flood control, and a twentieth-century idea of progress. This trend began in the 1920s, accelerated through the go-go years post-World War II, and continued through the Cold War era. It lasted until the 1970s.
Why Are We Humoring Them? | The Atlantic
The brand of politics that Musk and Carlson practice is swaggering and provocative and, as a result, entirely devoid of shame. And so the two men, wielding their mockery, make a show of each chortle and smirk. They may consider their delight to be defiant—a rebuke to the humorless masses who see the violence and not the lol—but it is not defiant. It is dull. This is the way of things now. The tragedy and the farce, the menace that winks, the joke that threatens, the emoji that cries with joy and the one that simply cries: They bleed together, all of them. Irony storms the Capitol.
It’s early in the morning in my Aunt Rita’s kitchen. In my family we pronounce it “ant,” not “awnt”. Rita and I are at her table, the room is lit by a circular fluorescent light, cool, bluer than I am used to. And is the decor blue and green? Wallpaper, maybe? I can’t remember. I can’t remember when this was, either, except that it must have been after my parent’s divorce, which means I was at least 9 or 10. I conflate it with another visit, years later, when my father, brother, and I were there to celebrate my father’s 50th birthday. I was 17 that year, not much after the earlier memory by the standards of middle age but a lifetime later from the vantage of being 10 or 17.
I’m sitting with my aunt Rita at her kitchen table. The overhead light, circular, fluorescent, is dimmer and cooler than I am used to. In that room that morning, the light has volume the way water does and everything feels isolated, discrete, yet retains its vividness. Now I remember: we’re drinking coffee, or she’s drinking coffee, and we’re talking about cigarettes which I smoke at that time and maybe just did prior to this meeting but definitely at the time. She hasn’t smoked in many years and is gently prodding me to think about quitting. Not to quit but just to think about it.
Don’t I get tired of it, she asks? Doesn’t it make me feel bad? I tell her no and I don’t know. She asks me if I know what she hated most about it and I say of course not and we laugh. Of course not, she says. What I hated most was always having to make sure I had them with me, that every time I left the room or the house, I had to make sure I had them with me. It used to drive me crazy, such a crazy thing to worry about. Don’t you worry about that? I tell her I don’t, that I always have them with me, and if I do forget them or run out, I just buy more. She smiles. Of course you do, she says.
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Ellen Reid ~ Big Majestic | A Closer Listen
I’ve been listening to Big Majestic quite a bit these last weeks and find that further listening yields further reward. Review and sample via the link above.
Ellen Reid ~ Big Majestic | A Closer Listen
I’ve been listening to Big Majestic quite a bit these last weeks and find that further listening yields further reward. Review and sample via the link above.
Very excited about this new release from Isaiah Collier and the Chosen Few. The last couple of Collier releases weren’t to my taste and this one is more like it.
This track, the opener, is very much in the same McCoy Tyner vein as KAmasi Washington’s “Changing of the Guard.”
The rest of the album heads in more conventional spiritual jazz territory with dignity, skill, and conviction. Collier is the real deal and if I’m not always into his experiments, I always respect that he’s going for it.
Junked Cars, Planes, Trains
Artfully Arranged Junkyard Objects
In a continuation and tweak of his Coletivos project (which I posted about previously), Cássio Vasconcellos took aerial photos of scrapyards and arranged the junked cars, planes, trains, and other objects into dense photographic collages.
I can’t imagine how much Photoshop work these pieces require.
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Las Vegas, NV
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Las Vegas, NV
Las Vegas, NV
Las Vegas, NV
Las Vegas, NV
Las Vegas, NV