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

Storytelling’s relationship to history is a little like interviewing’s relationship to journalism: a flawed process without a better alternative.

“multiple truths” don’t really mesh with the machinations of human nature: Because we were incessantly told one version of a story before hearing the second version, it’s become impossible to overturn the original template.

If you are heavily involved with normal Internet culture, you are partially involved with branding (even if you’re trying to be weird and obtuse on purpose). Internet writing is, by definition, public writing. Which means our Contemporary Kafka must be doing something slightly different.

the functional disparity between that bygone era and the one we now inhabit is vast and quirky—I

There is too much preexisting mediated history to easily upend the status quo. The meaning of rock—at least in a broad sense—has already calcified. “As far as what artists get anointed, I suppose it’s just whoever or whatever embodies those [central] attributes in the simplest, most direct way,” Petrusich concludes. “When I think of rock ’n’ roll,

historians and critics don’t care about 1950s bachelor pad music. They’ve constructed a historical perspective on the period that emphasizes the rise of rock, and that pushes everything else into the background.

Right now, rock music still projects the illusion of a universe containing multitudes. But it won’t seem that way in three hundred years, because nothing in the culture ever does. It will eventually be explained by one artist.

it’s quietly become the most natural way to think about everything, due to one sweeping technological evolution: We now have immediate access to all possible facts. Which is almost the same as having

The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional. But the modern problem is that reevaluating what we consider “true” is becoming increasingly difficult.