Reading a passage from Benjamin’s Illuminations on the subway and come across the following observation (which Benjamin borrows from Georg Simmel): the advent of trains and metros meant that, for the first time, human beings had to sit in silence, staring at each other, regularly, for long periods of time.
While I read, an older woman with purple hair taps on the book. “Good book!” she says quietly, while everyone else is on their phones.
The pleasure the mind takes in creativity is not an accident of evolution, but one of its prime innovations.
I'm beginning to realize that the speed at which information travels and metastasizes, the speed at which speculation becomes collective fact, darkly incentivizes the worst kind of sensationalistic violence, which becomes the most effective form of propaganda or political advertising. I used to think that going viral or virality, the addiction, the obsession, the incentive of virality was a strictly cultural problem—a bacteria, flesh-eating bacteria attacking the last vestiges of humanism—but it's obvious, it's blindingly obvious that it's far worse as a political and even military problem. When you think about the incentive structure…1