curation

Entropic Apex

In sum, to really try to be informed and liter-ate today is to feel stupid nearly all the time, and to need help.

You’d simply drown. We all would. It’s amazing to me that no one much talks about this—about the fact that whatever our founders and framers thought of as a literate, informed citizenry can no longer exist, at least not without a whole new modern degree of subcontracting and dependence packed into what we mean by ‘informed.

Gathering is the tender and thoughtful collection of goods for your kin, and a moment for reunion, for celebration, and for introspection around those goods.

It’s going to be an expert through the proving of data — an expert through action, rather than an expert through appointment.

Fiction’s abyss is si-lence, nada. Whereas nonfiction’s abyss is To-tal Noise, the seething static of every particu-lar thing and experience, and one’s total free-dom of infinite choice about what to choose to attend to and represent and connect, and how, and why, etc.

I know that many of these virtues have to do with the ways in which the pieces handle and respond to the tsunami of available fact, context, and per-spective that constitutes Total Noise. This claim might itself look slippery, because of course any published essay is a burst of infor-mation and context that is by definition part of 2007’s overall r... See more