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The Internet lacks closure, not in some cloying therapeutic sense, but literally. At every moment a website can be surfed, linked, crawled, or refreshed by any one (or several million) of billions of browsers. The net isn't "read" like a book, "watched" like a movie, nor "attended" like the theater -- it is "browsed." The word itself suggests a res... See more

Matthew Stadler

Any text is woven entirely with citations, references, echoes, cultural languages, which cut across it through and through in a vast stereophony. The citations that go to make up a text are anonymous, untraceable, and yet already read; they are quotations without inverted commas. The kernel, the soul — let us go further and say the substance, the b

Although millions of people watched Alexander every week, he was the master of collective insanity, and as the decades tick on he will become ever more irrelevant. Most of what we see around us is the ephemeral mainstream, mass-produced populist commercial trash, designed to go straight through us.

Paul Cronin • Werner Herzog – A Guide for the Perplexed: Conversations with Paul Cronin

If you want to look anywhere for the moment when the Romantic idea of genius—the tubercular poet communing with nature—yielded to the modern one—of a workaholic tech bro harnessing the white heat of technological innovation - look to this New Jersey hamlet in the late 1870s.

Helen Lewis • The Genius Myth

The cause is given curtly, mid-sentence: ‘(picnic, lightning)’ and, after a paragraph of tender analogies about his dim recollections of her, she is never mentioned again. This bracketed tragedy is an instant shorthand for Humbert’s sensibility: his ruthless irony and black humour, a flippancy whose source is an inscrutable mix of callousness and p

Laurence Scott • Picnic Comma Lightning: The Experience of Reality in the Twenty-First Century

Rather, the effectiveness of 24/7 lies in the incompatibility it lays bare, in the discrepancy between a human life-world and the evocation of a switched-on universe for which no off-switch exists.

Jonathan Crary • 24/7: Late Capitalism and the Ends of Sleep

“…the stammerings of an old man who does not seem to have achieved a full psychic victory over an awkward adolescence…”

Eugene Thacker • Infinite Resignation

The internet hasn’t killed eccentricity but it makes it harder for anyone who lives (at least partly) online to live a specific life. The internet either crushes specificity, mocks it, ignores it, assimilates and commodifies it, or all of the above. It leads to a personality type that Henry James described in The Wings of the Dove: “You're familiar... See more

Molly Young on Substack

Our natural reaction is to seek out culture that embraces