#187: A Rainbow in Curved Air

without the spatial filtering of culture, time is the only source of amplitude. Counterintuitively, this ensures that the past keeps recirculating, always presenting itself as new.

Marshall McLuhan wrote that every new technology was an extension of the human body but also an amputation of the same function from the body itself, and computers’ ability to furnish us with a second brain implies that our first brains have correspondingly atrophied.

We are all constantly starting from scratch now, and if you actually remember the past, your curse is to get annoyed when others naively unearth it.

As the ‘00s progressed, it became clear that internalizing information—memorizing, cataloging, recognizing—was precisely what we would no longer need to do. Memory was outsourced to the cloud as taste became the individual’s burden: We all found ourselves adrift on an unbounded sea of content, suddenly responsible for doing our own canonization.

At the height of their prowess, pre-internet cultural elitists tapped into veins of esoteric knowledge via subcultural infrastructure that the mainstream could not or would not access, and then imprinted that knowledge upon themselves thoroughly enough that they could reliably transmit it to others.

you distinguished yourself from the masses not by deciding what was good, but by having better access to the sources of taste and then merging them into your own identity, thereby becoming a beacon for others to follow.

The snobs’ core competency, which also dates the onset of their extinction, was the act of codifying and internalizing canonical taste—a vocation that ultimately amounted to an act of memorization.

Time is the new space. The digital annihilation of physical distance means that culture must be organized temporally.