Book review: The revolution will not be tweeted / Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?
The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman
Reviewed by Kit Wilson
Radical change, as any
good historian will tell you, never just comes out of nowhere. Even the most
seemingly unexpected shifts in history can, with hindsight, be traced back to
specific material, intellectual and political preconditions - even if, often,
we only notice the accumulated pile of tinder once it’s finally been set
alight.
Why, though, do some
moments in history produce no more than a wisp of smoke, while others erupt
into revolution? In The Quiet Before: On the Unexpected Origins of
Radical Ideas, Gal Beckerman, the Atlantic’s senior books
editor, attempts to give an answer. Telling the lesser-known backstories of ten
pivotal moments from the last four hundred years, Beckerman pays particular
attention to the specific media that were, he believes, in each case crucial to
effecting change: chartist petitions in Victorian Britain, anti-colonial
newspapers in pre-independent Ghana, samizdat literature in Soviet Russia and
the cut-paste-and-photocopy feminist zines of 1990s America.
Beckerman is a deft
storyteller, and his anecdotes skip along. We follow the eccentric 17th century
astronomer Nicolas-Claude Fabri de Peiresc as he tries to coordinate, months in
advance, simultaneous observations of the eclipse around the world in order to
calculate the earth’s longitude. We watch as the modernist poet and painter
Mina Loy attempts to forge a feminist manifesto from the crucible of the highly
misogynistic Futurist movement of the 1910s. And we peek behind the scenes at
the private WhatsApp groups and email threads that circulated among panicked
doctors as the coronavirus started to spread in early 2020.
Beckerman presents
these stories as a warning. In recent years, he believes, we’ve been duped into
thinking that the internet, and social media in particular - with its hashtags
and emojis - provide us some new, quick shortcut to radical change. As the Arab
Spring made painfully clear, this is an illusion. Truly sustainable movements,
Beckerman argues, require a period of slow, careful incubation. If we want
genuine, lasting change, we’ll need to rediscover or create anew the slower
rhythms of older, pre-digital forms of communication…
https://thecritic.co.uk/the-revolution-will-not-be-tweeted/
Jeffrey Lawrence: Who Owns Your Academic Community?
Overwhelming
evidence has shown that the primary purpose of the technological platforms
currently dominating the digital world is to gain access to our personal data
in order to sell it to advertisers. The worst thing about the machine-generated
algorithms that fuel these platforms is not that they are arbitrary, or skewed,
but that they are explicitly designed to keep us addicted. And it turns out
that what most addicts us (or what Big Tech has decided most addicts us) is not
that which is true or endearing or insightful. It’s what is most outrageous - both in the etymological sense of “excessive” and in the literal sense of
producing and sustaining outrage. As Zuboff put it in a 2021 interview
with Time: “Algorithms are engineered to amplify the
most extreme, angry, toxic content, drawing people in to maximize data
extraction.”
Although academics
have been at the forefront of diagnosing the ills of our platform-dominated
digital economy, they have had comparatively little to say about how platforms
have affected academe itself….
https://www.chronicle.com/article/who-owns-your-academic-community
STANISLAV MARKELOV - Patriotism as a
diagnosis
Science, society and related matters: an exchange
Two lectures on time and ideology: January 23 and 24
Colloquium: The Disappearing Present: Reflections on Ideology - October 2020
David Foster Wallace - This Is Water
Alexandre Koyré The Political Function of
the Modern Lie
A
pre-history of post-truth, East and West. By MARCI SHORE
Michiko
Kakutani - The death of truth: how we gave up on facts and ended up with Trump
Farewell
to reality - WHY WE’RE POST-FACT by Peter Pomerantsev
Why
can’t we agree on what’s true anymore? By William Davies
Alexander
Klein: The politics of logic
Walter Benjamin: Capitalism as Religion
(1921)
ALEX ROSS - Walter Benjamin, Theodor
Adorno, and the critique of pop culture.
Saladdin Said Ahmed: Mass Mentality,
Culture Industry, Fascism
Theodor Adorno - Education After
Auschwitz (1966)
Tanya
Gold - How materialism makes us sad
How
capitalism created the post-truth society — and brought about its own undoing.
By Keith Spencer
