On a day in which #nostr seems to be trending and getting (very deservedly) more attention, I think it’s worth thinking about some of the ways in which traditional social media has rapidly diminished our capacity for citizenship.
The very deliberately addictive design of big social media is and has been a nuclear assault on the collective attention span of the populace. Combine this with all the other millions of available distractions on the devices we all walk around with and you basically have a ubiquitous ocean of noise, of pings and dopamine hits, of quick answers and short form content . We live in inside this.
And in here it’s very hard, and very time-consuming, to constantly parse what is real or not, what’s signal and what’s not, what’s manipulated and what’s not, what has a factual basis and what does not. Bad policies and malevolent actors thrive in this environment. Nuanced policies struggle to find air, to find space on the blanketed jungle floor to grow.
It’s gets hard to pursue things that require sustained attention span, which is most things worth doing.
It’s hard to be perform the basic responsibilities/diligence of citizenship well in an environment like this. And by responsibilities of citizenship I mean being informed, seeing through BS, developing thoughtful views, standing on your values, distinguishing sincerity from charlatanism, between propaganda and information, etc.
Which probably plays some role in the diminishing quality of our political candidates. A clouded citizenry doesn’t deliberate and decide - it lurches violently and unpredictably.
I fear this will only get worse with AI and augmented realities.
I’ve been following this list for probably 10 years or so (it updates every year). In the mood for love has moved up the most dramatically in that time. I think it entered the list in the back half and is now top 20.
Haha fair, I definitely have some objections of my own, too. But as a board, international list of basically aggregated critic and artist opinions it’s probably the best resource out there that I’ve found. Much better I think than the recent New York Times list of the best 100 books of the 21st century, for example.
For any fellow cinephiles and film people out there, this list (and site) is a pretty incredible resource
#filmstr
“Tyranny is the deliberate removal of nuance.”
-Albert Maysles
Amazing, will dive into this after work!
Been spending lots more time on #nostr the last two weeks (shout out nostr:npub164q45vfa8prpl7f63stsl9qm9n22v6julkasjdqxjc8kevchsj0sp42rl3 for the push), and have been trying to share more about the stuff I care deeply about beyond just #bitcoin (though I of course talk Bitcoin too).
But for me those things are literature, art, poetry, and ideas. Before I eventually became a lawyer I went to grad school for lit and film, and that remains an integral part of my life and the way I think about things. It’s my intellectual anchor.
I’ve been blown away honestly at the quality of convos I’ve had on here the last week or so.
Even the last few days I’ve been discussing Infinite Jest, Shakespeare, postmodernism, DeLillo, etc, and the discussions have been very cool.
I feel I can kinda open up and express more of my total self, beyond Bitcoin bull-posting (which to be fair I still enjoy and support). It’s refreshing.
Hoping to continue to find and engage with more Bitcoin/nostr folks who are into literature and mining great artistic achievements for lessons and constructive discourse on the present.
Gm
Totally agree, was highlighting it more for the public on-the-record admission of pressure from the White House.
Letter from Zuck to Congressman Jordan yesterday: 
I appreciate that, friend, will definitely check it out!
Well-said, my theory definitely does not account for the hollowing out of the manufacturing base which I agree is huge.
Curious to hear your thoughts! I don’t think this is the only or exhaustive explanation, of course. But it’s a lens I think about a lot.
Gonna be an awesome convo. One angle I think about a lot:
Don DeLillo described the Kennedy assassination as “the seven seconds that broke the back of the American century.”
And he did so because after that Americans lost conviction in capital-T Truth, in a fundamental coherence of the universe. After all if we can’t even determine who committed the most famous murder since Franz Ferdinand, if we have to fall back on “magic bullet” theories, does anything mean anything? Is there something behind the curtain?
This, coupled with Vietnam, creates the perfect backdrop for the intellectual revolution that is postmodernism and all its tributaries and outgrowths.
Postmodernism takes over college campuses. Critical theorists like Derrida and Foucault and de Man become rockstars. Academia becomes almost a competitive game to see who can formulate the most radical understanding of the world.
We go off gold in 1971, and inflation ensues. For the next 50 years everything gets more expensive, especially higher education. So at the same time post-structuralists and post-colonialists et al are saturating the academy, the number of folks who can actually afford to go to the academy is decreasing.
So now we have elite schools increasingly captured by what is essentially an evolved viral (almost Darwinian) Marxism, teaching increasingly wealthy and well-connected kids. This is where we are now. With the country’s most affluent, privileged, educated kids becoming the most politically radical, and it’s all occurring in a way and in places more and more detached from the lived reality of normal people. And these kids of course grow up to take powerful positions in society (because they’re wealthy and well connected).
So a schism between “the Left” and the constituents it purports to care most about, “the working class,” emerges and grows.
Most regular people are basically just like what the actual fuck are you guys talking about.
And so the Left becomes utterly detached from its target demographic and becomes instead like an eternal regress of theoretical nonsense.
Like the bird in an early David Foster Wallace story (the title escapes me at the moment) that flies in increasingly narrower circles until it actually flies up its own ass.
Voila here we are. nostr:note1vysmayhv5xa3hsj42vfs8jt0ze6kzf7vqpqn766yy0yrlk63vjnq8t05lw
These are the literary takes I’m here for 🔥🔥
Sounds like your woke government school taught Shakespeare wrong, or at least deeply insufficiently. Shakespeare traditionally not taught in anything resembling woke, but some scholars in the last probably 25 or 30 years or so have tried to narrow him in that way. Don’t give up on him. You might find him even more interesting/constructive now as an adult with the economic grounding you now have.
I’m not sure what incendiary (and surveilled) nonsense people are talking about on Twitter tonight, but on Nostr we’re chopping it up about Infinite Jest and Shakespeare book clubs.
Different vibes over here and I fucking love it. nostr:note15l68pn5p6awqkl6p2p8wptnw2tuytcwuzdx0l4wfck9lk2fyjqlqlum5ap