#24: Email of Laughter & Forgetting
"Postmodernism" is a word that usually makes me tune out whatever source it came from—it's one of the easiest words to use in a meaningless way—but because I myself didn't have the best grasp of what it actually meant, I probably ignored some good along with the bad. Thanks to Frederic Jameson, I finally got a useful definition: If modernism defines itself in contrast to what came before it (for example, the first freeways built through the much older urban areas they divided), then the postmodern emerges when everything is finally modern and there's nothing premodern to compare that against or remind us of what preceded it. That, of course, is an accurate description of the present condition most of us inhabit.
A lot of my writing takes the form of skepticism about the technological present and future, but adopting the simplistic stance of "new = bad, old = good" is a trap I hope to avoid. Jameson's definition of postmodernism, surprisingly, offers a productive way out of that trap: Remembering the constantly-vanishing past enables us to improve upon the present by synthesizing the best of both, rather than being swept away by the tidal wave of the new, which wants us to embrace it uncritically and forget what it replaced.
The late Mark Fisher invokes this role of memory in his term "capitalist realism," (also the book's title), attributing "the widespread belief that there is no alternative to capitalism" to the disappearance of any visible alternatives by the end of the twentieth century. In the present American political landscape, the ability to remember vanished realities and build them into the future feels more urgent than ever.
Reads:
An AI recreated Blade Runner and now keeps imposing the Blade Runner aesthetic on the other films it recreates.
John Robb summarizing how Facebook is turning into a global surveillance platform.
Taylor Pearson compiled the ten best cryptocurrency resources for non-technical people (I can't stop reading crypto/blockchain explanations).
Until next time,
Drew