This is insanely ambitious. I'm having a hard enough time synthesizing my thoughts about it, to say nothing of the brainpower that must've gone into pulling all these disparate points together. I'm not sure I understand the initial point about the internet not providing any sort of narrative, especially since I think this essay does a great job of connecting a million things into a narrative; but I do see how it definitely doesn't track with that Cold War-era unification, across all media, of having a single bad guy against whom all narratives are aligned, their faces and outfits and values and all the rest. Branching out from there, the microcosm-ing of media, I see how it's becoming more fractured and bubbly. I just don't know if that constitutes narrative collapse so much as...fracture and bubble.
Regardless -- this was as enchanting and stimulating and thought-provoking as the first Mo Diggs piece I ever read, which is one of the reasons I started writing on Substack.
Flattered, too, that my own extremely long reporting (and the smaller stuff) is favorably shouted out -- honored by the explicit compliments, but more so to think that they might fit that antidote-type media role the author's suggesting.
@Sachin i think this is great writing, and ties together into some of the archival time / carnival time concepts you’ve been writing about. Specifically, the author introduces a few good concepts regarding time and narrative collapse, one of which I really liked they called Past Shock.
Really pulled me in! I was at the TMR reading a couple weeks ago, had heard the first part, but never expected it to pull in all these connections. Started reading it on the train and couldn't put it down; had to switch to the audio player when getting home to hear the rest while cooking dinner. I'm old enough – "first wave" gen-X? to cop a phrase you used – to have witnessed everything mentioned here, down to the Magnavox attached to our 70s era TV growing up. Though I've never read anything that fits ALL these pieces together so elegantly as this one does, self-effacing remarks about think pieces notwithstanding. Really, really well done.
So many takeaways. So many things to ponder. I am indeed an “insight junkie” - I have a fear of self that obstructs my own cultivated view of the world. I would almost call it a mistrust of my own intuition that stems from mental health, status and my family background. But as someone on the spectrum, my perception skills are akin to survival. If I can observe the world and understand the mechanisms of social success, I can (often haphazardly) use it them to navigate the trickiest parts of adult life that stem from agency and maturation.
The chaos of the mind can take us a million places. When I used psychedelics, I felt a sense of my own ego for the first time. This was only 5 years ago. Since then the chaos of the mind has become tangible and my life has become far more chaotic. For bad and good.
A takeaway I have had as a media junkie and former daily pot smoker (I had to drop the delusions of grandeur I received from the authors and protagonists of my favorite stories, and a childhood of escaping the darkness of life into video game narratives) is that I have to find peace to quell anxiety so I can go out and do my best to experience life as much as it has to offer, and then to translate it into a journal for later self-reflection, just as you mentioned in your piece. The more I’ve tried to follow through on that ambition the more I’ve felt a sense of peace within myself. A far cry from experiencing life than looking for a narrative to translate, validate, or contrast it.
Anyways - I am so thankful for this level of writing. Thank you Mo.
This made me genuinely uncomfortable. You nailed it!
In the 2010s, I imagined that someone, maybe me, would write a novel inspired by the form and feel of the internet. Frenetic, associative, Joycean, Kerouacian, but with a deep self-connected structure. It might even exist ON the internet. The era already created the silhouette for something. It just needed to be filled in. I figured whatever would be heralded as the next masterpiece would take this form in one way or another.
But that gave way to what you described above. We are limp.
In some ways in the larger history, the idea that such a large segment of a population would be tuned into one series of a show is really short lived. Even though it maybe all we know. Radio, TV, film, magazines, novels, are all singular mass production media. Yet, in Shakespeare's day, if you didn't live in London, you didn't consume Shakespeare. We only know him today because of print media. In some ways the internet is used for this, but there used to be many start of presses in Boston in Franklin's day, but that consolidated to just a few. Now we are seeing a splitting. It used to really matter what city you lived in for the ideas that might fill your head. Now it seems to matter what Substacks one follows. If we put ourselves in a different frame, we might loose despair and become invigorated. I think the real concern today is the way certain forces try to get us to think the same way.
Great post and reflection. It really helped me think.
Sure, there are a few of novels that come to mind. On the Road, Kerouac - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig and Narcissus and Goldmund - Hesse
Each of these books have traveling as a way the main character finds a new sense of self, a new reality if you will. If you wanted to be in the art world before WW2, you had to go to Paris, after New York. Then you had to pick up and move your physical self. There used to be important music studios and labels all over America. Because of the single mode media, it consolidated and then reproduced a single product. Napster started to change that and the iphone allowed people to take professional like photo and post them. Remember photo books on the coffee table?
What we need to do is realize that we are always limited by the things we surround ourselves with. For the longest time, we were surround by limited, curated options. We may be limited by what we surround ourselves with, but we can change the frame. We can choose what we built for ourselves intentionally. The curriculum has been thrown int he trash, so to say, and now we have the chance to self learn in a way like never before. We just aren't used to it. We got used to what's old is new again, but now more than ever, it's more like, what's new is new.
The Internet frees us (outside of social of course) but we fear freedom. Got it. And I may write about that, more or less, in an upcoming piece. We may be free to write from wherever, as whomever, but we seem stuck in the personality matrix.
Truly a great and deep read. I haven't read anything which ties together our collective loss of attention span and frenzied lack of peace of mind to all the technology through which so much of our art (and much more) reaches us. And as someone born in 1967, I've been wondering about this progression to numb that you refer to, aptly, as dream land. Except whatever this "dream land" invented by other people is, it doesn't feel anything like anything warm and human. It's just a lot of aluminum tubes through which we shout stuff constantly. Real applause for this piece, un capolavoro, as they would say in Italian.
I just want to point out the irony of a long (though interesting!) article and mentioning our collective decreased sustained attention. I have had to work on this by listening to articles as I sight read. And the fact that I am ADHD well that doesn't help.
You are welcome. I'll definitely be chewing on it for a few months, which does not happen every time I read something. Thank you for carving off a piece of your soul and letting us see through it.
This is insanely ambitious. I'm having a hard enough time synthesizing my thoughts about it, to say nothing of the brainpower that must've gone into pulling all these disparate points together. I'm not sure I understand the initial point about the internet not providing any sort of narrative, especially since I think this essay does a great job of connecting a million things into a narrative; but I do see how it definitely doesn't track with that Cold War-era unification, across all media, of having a single bad guy against whom all narratives are aligned, their faces and outfits and values and all the rest. Branching out from there, the microcosm-ing of media, I see how it's becoming more fractured and bubbly. I just don't know if that constitutes narrative collapse so much as...fracture and bubble.
Regardless -- this was as enchanting and stimulating and thought-provoking as the first Mo Diggs piece I ever read, which is one of the reasons I started writing on Substack.
Flattered, too, that my own extremely long reporting (and the smaller stuff) is favorably shouted out -- honored by the explicit compliments, but more so to think that they might fit that antidote-type media role the author's suggesting.
the opening to this is so damn good
Wait till you get to the ending (if you get there)
I got there
@Sachin i think this is great writing, and ties together into some of the archival time / carnival time concepts you’ve been writing about. Specifically, the author introduces a few good concepts regarding time and narrative collapse, one of which I really liked they called Past Shock.
Really pulled me in! I was at the TMR reading a couple weeks ago, had heard the first part, but never expected it to pull in all these connections. Started reading it on the train and couldn't put it down; had to switch to the audio player when getting home to hear the rest while cooking dinner. I'm old enough – "first wave" gen-X? to cop a phrase you used – to have witnessed everything mentioned here, down to the Magnavox attached to our 70s era TV growing up. Though I've never read anything that fits ALL these pieces together so elegantly as this one does, self-effacing remarks about think pieces notwithstanding. Really, really well done.
Thanks a lot man. Yeah this shit is deeper than the internet
So many takeaways. So many things to ponder. I am indeed an “insight junkie” - I have a fear of self that obstructs my own cultivated view of the world. I would almost call it a mistrust of my own intuition that stems from mental health, status and my family background. But as someone on the spectrum, my perception skills are akin to survival. If I can observe the world and understand the mechanisms of social success, I can (often haphazardly) use it them to navigate the trickiest parts of adult life that stem from agency and maturation.
The chaos of the mind can take us a million places. When I used psychedelics, I felt a sense of my own ego for the first time. This was only 5 years ago. Since then the chaos of the mind has become tangible and my life has become far more chaotic. For bad and good.
A takeaway I have had as a media junkie and former daily pot smoker (I had to drop the delusions of grandeur I received from the authors and protagonists of my favorite stories, and a childhood of escaping the darkness of life into video game narratives) is that I have to find peace to quell anxiety so I can go out and do my best to experience life as much as it has to offer, and then to translate it into a journal for later self-reflection, just as you mentioned in your piece. The more I’ve tried to follow through on that ambition the more I’ve felt a sense of peace within myself. A far cry from experiencing life than looking for a narrative to translate, validate, or contrast it.
Anyways - I am so thankful for this level of writing. Thank you Mo.
Keep going!
We have been a post-literate society since the cathode tube. The first post-literate book was McLuhan’s The Medium Is The Massage.
This made me genuinely uncomfortable. You nailed it!
In the 2010s, I imagined that someone, maybe me, would write a novel inspired by the form and feel of the internet. Frenetic, associative, Joycean, Kerouacian, but with a deep self-connected structure. It might even exist ON the internet. The era already created the silhouette for something. It just needed to be filled in. I figured whatever would be heralded as the next masterpiece would take this form in one way or another.
But that gave way to what you described above. We are limp.
Let’s fucking gooooooo
Best piece I've read in ages. Thank you.
this was great.
What a great essay! A thousand thoughts bloomed in my head when reading this. Thank you.
In some ways in the larger history, the idea that such a large segment of a population would be tuned into one series of a show is really short lived. Even though it maybe all we know. Radio, TV, film, magazines, novels, are all singular mass production media. Yet, in Shakespeare's day, if you didn't live in London, you didn't consume Shakespeare. We only know him today because of print media. In some ways the internet is used for this, but there used to be many start of presses in Boston in Franklin's day, but that consolidated to just a few. Now we are seeing a splitting. It used to really matter what city you lived in for the ideas that might fill your head. Now it seems to matter what Substacks one follows. If we put ourselves in a different frame, we might loose despair and become invigorated. I think the real concern today is the way certain forces try to get us to think the same way.
Great post and reflection. It really helped me think.
Interesting...can you expand on that last different frame part?
Sure, there are a few of novels that come to mind. On the Road, Kerouac - Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance - Pirsig and Narcissus and Goldmund - Hesse
Each of these books have traveling as a way the main character finds a new sense of self, a new reality if you will. If you wanted to be in the art world before WW2, you had to go to Paris, after New York. Then you had to pick up and move your physical self. There used to be important music studios and labels all over America. Because of the single mode media, it consolidated and then reproduced a single product. Napster started to change that and the iphone allowed people to take professional like photo and post them. Remember photo books on the coffee table?
What we need to do is realize that we are always limited by the things we surround ourselves with. For the longest time, we were surround by limited, curated options. We may be limited by what we surround ourselves with, but we can change the frame. We can choose what we built for ourselves intentionally. The curriculum has been thrown int he trash, so to say, and now we have the chance to self learn in a way like never before. We just aren't used to it. We got used to what's old is new again, but now more than ever, it's more like, what's new is new.
The Internet frees us (outside of social of course) but we fear freedom. Got it. And I may write about that, more or less, in an upcoming piece. We may be free to write from wherever, as whomever, but we seem stuck in the personality matrix.
Truly a great and deep read. I haven't read anything which ties together our collective loss of attention span and frenzied lack of peace of mind to all the technology through which so much of our art (and much more) reaches us. And as someone born in 1967, I've been wondering about this progression to numb that you refer to, aptly, as dream land. Except whatever this "dream land" invented by other people is, it doesn't feel anything like anything warm and human. It's just a lot of aluminum tubes through which we shout stuff constantly. Real applause for this piece, un capolavoro, as they would say in Italian.
I just want to point out the irony of a long (though interesting!) article and mentioning our collective decreased sustained attention. I have had to work on this by listening to articles as I sight read. And the fact that I am ADHD well that doesn't help.
This was so damn elegant and impressive. I'm going to be chewing on it for awhile.
Thanks! Took about a year to write lol
Selfishly, as a reader, I'm very glad//grateful you gave it the time and attention!
Believe me, I was selfish in constantly telling my poor editor "Just wait another month, trust me!"
Really beautiful and seriously thought out piece. The golden thread of attention that you weaved throughout was masterful.
Thank you!
You are welcome. I'll definitely be chewing on it for a few months, which does not happen every time I read something. Thank you for carving off a piece of your soul and letting us see through it.