The Golden Sardine

Tell you what: if I was Europe, & I was feeling feisty, I’d imagine some new kind of “dig­ital tariff” & slap it on all the big tech plat­forms.

I’ve sensed a thaw lately in the cosmos of letters: an energy, an urgency. Maybe it’s because people fear this might be the last good season before the end of the world, so we’d better get it all out now. Maybe it’s just because it’s spring.

The odd & antique thing about tar­iffs is that they only apply to phys­ical goods, even as more & more of the economy has become intangible. For the U.S., this is very convenient. What do we export? Software, light as air.

A cer­tain strand of tech­nology might be accelerating, but cul­ture is going nowhere in par­tic­ular — a decaying orbit around a decades-old gravity well; cycling & recycling; pas­tiche & déjà vu; playlist set to loop.