Sublime

Musing on the perennial suspicion of mass media—as a dystopian deluge of details that dulls the mind and deadens the will—Foucault instead insists upon the proliferation of information and its inherent importance for curiosity.

This is why, with the internet, it’s so easy to stop trying to be decent, or reasonable, or politically engaged—and start trying merely to seem so.

When the figure of the buffoon becomes central to public life, the problem is not only that they say foolish things but also that everything they touch becomes foolish, including—especially—the powerful language we need to talk about them and what they are doing.

internet sociologist Zeynep Tufekci

In the absence of time to physically and politically engage with our community the way many of us want to, the internet provides a cheap substitute: it gives us brief moments of pleasure and connection, tied up in the opportunity to constantly listen and speak. Under these circumstances, opinion stops being a first step toward something and starts

So I come to the abiding paradox that defines our predicament. An affluent, well-educated, hyper-connected public is in revolt against the system that has bestowed all of this bounty upon it. The great motive power of the revolt isn’t economic resentment but outrage over distance and failure.

I have benefited, I mean, from the internet’s unhealthy focus on opinion. This focus is rooted in the way the internet generally minimizes the need for physical action: you don’t have to do much of anything but sit behind a screen to live an acceptable, possibly valorized, twenty-first-century life. The internet can feel like an astonishingly direc