I try not to be afraid of the world; the world pushes into my skull through my laptop screen. I surveil the world; the world surveils me.
Conspiracy theories are what social media creates: narratives and links; networked minds think differently, believe they see more. And sometimes networked minds see more clearly than single minds; and sometimes they don’t. But sometimes they don’t.
Film footage of daily life from fifty years ago shows a more peaceful, slower moving world; of course that world was still recovering from two world wars, and people lived in fear of nuclear escalation. In many places, there may have been more violent crime per capita, too; and yet the world today—pace whatever statistics, pace whatever Steven Pinker wrote in Better Angels—seems fundamentally more violent.
There is more violence in the head, in the soul. Several decades of simulating violence through screens—even while aggregate violence seemed to be falling—only seems to have displaced, delayed future violence; it seems stored up in people underbrush in an overgrown forest… waiting for a spark.
The Current Thing industrial complex.
History doesn’t know grace; only people do.
Philology. A whole generation and a half came of age believing ‘safety’ meant safety from words and ideas; safety was ultra-security within an automatized, consumerist life-sphere. What happens when that sphere breaks down—when real, material danger and insecurity leaks in? What happens to the concept of safety? Can older notions of the word be recovered?
Benjamin: “The hunger artist fasts, the doorkeeper is silent, and the students are awake. This is the veiled way in which the great rules of asceticism operate in Kafka.”