Mar
10
GPOYW - SXSW: a Greg Turner field guide edition
turbine
this is my online attic
“We feel so righteous when we buy organic food or a compact fluorescent bulb or a Prius that our internal moral cup runneth over. According to this model, which is called compensatory ethics, people have an inner sense of how morally virtuous they need to feel to support their self-image. If a few actions (including espousing actions for other people) are enough to justify how we like to think of ourselves, then we do not need to perform any additional virtuous actions. It’s as if we accumulate moral points for ethical actions, and having accumulated “enough” we are free to act amorally, or even immorally. That’s why reminding people of what wonderful humanitarians they are causes them to give less to charity.”
Begley, on the ethical pitfalls of green living. (via newsweek)
The problem with consumption-as-morality.
(via newleft)
“Faulkner, never one to do things halfway, made extravagant use of standard modes of reentry in New Orleans, not merely geographical and perhaps sexual modes, not merely alcohol, but also a regular repertory of disguises. In the Vieux Carre he made appearances as a wounded veteran with swagger stick and a bogus steel plate in his head, a hard drinking pre-hippie vagrant Left-Bank type –and wrote Mosquitoes, a not very good novel. It took the ultimate reentry, the return –he had to go home- to write The Sound and the Fury. Even then, he had to “be” a farmer on the side. Later he made the grandest Southern reentry of all, as a Virginia horseman.”
Walker Percy in Lost in the Cosmos, discussing what he called reentry: the difficulty we face in returning to ordinary reality after transcendent experiences. That transcendence is not sustainable is one of the catastrophes of human consciousness: one evolutionary function of the mind is to attend with heightened awareness to what is novel while codifying our reactions to it so it no longer remains so but becomes, rather, rote, unconscious. This aids in survival, but diminishes all experiences over time so that no joy, no lust, no drug, no thrill remains as vivid as when first experienced.
(Note: this, too, involves the machinery of memory; whether and how memories of an event are made tells us as much as our perceptions do of how we experienced it).
This is a problem for us all, and the awkwardness of moving between euphoria, transformation, and joy and the tedium of reality, with its traffic, gas pains, and wrinkled shirts explains why popular media usually chooses one or the other realm and stays there. Percy catalogs with special amusement, however, some of the methods artists in particular must use to achieve transcendence —abstraction from immanent, banal reality— and then navigate their return from it. The entire section recalls Kierkegaard’s discussion of the aesthete’s reliance on rotation and repetition in lieu of deeper metaphysical or moral commitment, which is fitting.
It’s also quite funny to think of Faulkner in such terms. See here for an illustration of the transcendence-reentry problems facing Kafka and the casual music listener.
(via mills)
“Connection” by Elastica
“Big Time Sensuality” by Bjork
love.
Creep
Radiohead
From a certain time and so, so perfect.
The face-time theorem
As I sprint through my inbox toward Austin later this week, I have an observation about how issues get resolved:
Note:
This is by no means a prescription (or a real theorem for that matter), but an observation and a nudge for more people to meet in person more of the time.If distance among people is greater than X miles + question Y cannot be resolved by email, than email results in more email.
(Cost of time: medium-high, emotional cost: high. Duration: endless)If distance among people is less than X miles + question Y cannot be resolved by email, than email results in in-person meeting.
(Cost of time: medium, emotional cost: low. Duration: short)Variables
- Additional people in CC
- Additional people in BCC
- Standing meetings
- Inertia
Theorem
If, after multiple threads, issues are unresolvable via non-face means, meet in person. While the hurdle of meeting face to face seems higher, the time and emotional costs are ultimately lower. Face-time saves time.
I love this equation. By the same measure, many of the text messages in my phone’s outbox are simply, “I think I should call you now.”
“Ready to Go” by Republica
Remember on the next album, when the dude starting rapping? Those were crazy times.
News flash
A popular blog truncated its RSS feeds to boost site pageviews. It’s like last week, when The Atlantic changed to partial-content RSS feeds. And that was like every other week, when some publisher did something that some readers didn’t like to make a few more cents.
I dislike the intrusive advertising on Salon, so I don’t read Salon. I dislike Michael Arrington, so I never read anything on TechCrunch (even when they write about me or my products) and have taken technical measures to ensure that I never even land there accidentally and give them whatever tiny profit that one pageview is worth. I don’t like the timebombed, Unicode-breaking Clickability print-friendly view for New York Magazine, since I like reading NYMag-length pieces in Instapaper and Clickability doesn’t work well in it, so I just don’t read NYMag’s articles. I don’t like Ars Technica’s paginated articles, but since I don’t want to pay for a subscription, I just read every page separately, give them all of their separate-page ad views, and save each page to Instapaper if I want to read them that way.
One reaction I’ve never had is to think that I deserve anything from these publishers.
- Valid point: [Publisher] should consider doing it some other way because this will alienate some readers.
- Invalid point: [Publisher] should do it my way because all content deserves to be free/ad-free/full-RSS/single-page.
I see a staggering amount of entitlement every day in the form of arguments and blog posts like the latter.
We don’t deserve anything. Publishers can do whatever they want. If you don’t like it, don’t send them nasty emails or browse their sites with ad-blockers: just don’t support them. Don’t read their content, don’t link to them, and don’t talk about them. Since money’s not usually involved, vote with your attention and read elsewhere.
I have to disagree on the point of email. If something matters enough to you, send an email, but be polite. If they’ve changed something and you don’t like it, send an email letting them know, but do your best to explain why you felt the old way was better. Or, explain you like the old way, but try to help them make the new way better or more effective.
Also? If someone’s doing something in a way you particularly like, email them too. Many folks don’t understand Web traffic or analytics or log files or any of that stuff. They do, however, understand clear, cogent letters sent electronically or via USPS. Those letters enable them to make decisions about future changes or to decide that things work well just the way they are.
I agree that you probably shouldn’t visit sites with ad blockers on without tossing them at least a couple bucks every couple months. And I do agree with Marco’s assessment that many people have settled into a ridiculous sense of entitlement for absolutely no good reason.
I disagree, however, with the effectiveness of closing yourself off. This idea of “I’ll ignore it,” is ineffective and has allowed for everything from bad business decisions to an endangered Darwin in the Kansas public school system.
Be smart, be nice, but be vocal. It’s the only way anyone will ever understand what you’re thinking.
← Older Posts
Page 2 of 269
Newer Posts →
