But What If We're Wrong?: Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

During the last half of the nineties, the Internet still felt highly segregated—to a mainstream consumer, it was hard to see the ideological relationship between limitless porn and fantasy football and Napster and the eradication of travel agents. What unified that diaspora was the rise of blogging, spawning what’s now recognized as the “voice” of

We spend our lives learning many things, only to discover (again and again) that most of what we’ve learned is either wrong or irrelevant. A big part of our mind can handle this; a smaller, deeper part cannot. And it’s that smaller part that matters more, because that part of our mind is who we really are (whether we like it or not).

Even when the Internet appears to be nostalgically churning through the cultural past, it’s still hunting for “old newness.” A familiar video clip from 1986 does not possess virility; what the medium desires is an obscure clip from 1985 that recontextualizes the familiar one. The result is a perpetual sense of now.

a greater detriment with our escalating progression toward the opposite extremity—the increasingly common ideology that assures people they’re right about what they believe.

There is no intellectual room for the third rail, even if that rail is probably closer to what most people quietly assume: that this is happening, but we’re slightly overestimating—or dramatically underestimating—the real consequence.

something people really, really need to feel right about, often for reasons that have nothing to do with the weather.

modern culture of certitude,

The thirty-plus years this book was ignored no longer exist. Technologically, 1976 and 2013 exist in the same moment.

The third rail is the enemy of both poles.