Canned Dragons

I don’t always read Freddie deBoer because he can sometimes be a bit… well, mean. At the same time, I have to admit that he’s one of the most interesting and insightful cultural critics we’ve got. If you have the stomach to read one more think piece on the bizarre national divide over Taylor Swift, it should probably be his.

deBoer is fully aware of the ridiculousness of this story and the breathless reporting on it. If that were it, I could take or leave his writing on the subject. In the piece, though, he also gets into the tendency in late-stage capitalism to see ourselves through our consumption choices. This has been fascinating and appalling to come to grips with in the last couple of years.

The story represents so much of the detritus of a broken culture: you’ve got the replacement of a nuthouse Jesus-is-coming right wing with a paranoiac and obsessive the-Jews-are-coming right wing, the increasingly deranged worship of celebrity, the endless retreat into a exhausting political binarism, the contemporary liberal urge to treat immensely powerful people as underdogs, the era of mandated artistic populism, the triviality of American collapse, the overwhelming fear people in the media have of looking old. But I want to focus specifically on a topic related to all of that, which is treating consumption as a substitute for politics. This is one of the clearer examples of the way that many people, many political people, now unthinkingly presume that their politics is simply a function of their capitalist consumption, their brand affinities. Who you are is what you buy. (emphasis mine)

I suppose this metaphysical form of capitalism isn’t completely new. Anyone who has seen the footage of screaming fans wherever the Beatles found themselves (which is everyone) can identify with that. Pop culture is loaded with meta-references to worship of pop culture. There was a man named Ove who defined himself by the brand of car he drove.¹ It’s just that this kind of self-definition has reached a level of intensity heretofore unimagined, due mostly to the lack of substance in our lives. Sometimes, stripped of meaning and anything but materialism, consumption is all we have.

The world is a sad and broken place and I forgive people for wanting to invest meaningless symbols with great moral valence. I acknowledge that the collapse of meaning has been real and total and that such lofty celebrity can look, to the adolescent brain (literally or metaphorically adolescent) like a good place to park your beliefs, your need, your palpable longing. As with so many other parts of our culture, the question is whether we want to actively encourage perpetual adolescence. Brodesser-Akner calls Swift fans “a community with a shared, ardent sense of purpose,” and while this is also true of literal cults, I am sympathetic. And I suppose there’s nothing wrong with using cultural consumption as a predictor for someone’s politics, if you’re on Bumble or whatever.

There used to be a show on NPR where people would make recordings about the things they loved the most and the beliefs that drove their lives. It was called This I Believe. I’ll always remember the intro, which featured an audio collage of snippets of the show’s participants listing their beliefs. One man, in a confident voice, proclaimed, “I believe in barbecue.” I can’t have been the only one wondering how far a devotion to BBQ gets you when you find out you have cancer or are holding your dead child in your arms.² When consumption defines your belief system, though, I guess meat is as good of an idol as a pop star.

1. Okay, A Man Called Ove was a work of fiction, but the protagonist’s but it’s not like his love of Saab and dislike of basically anyone who drove anything else felt real enough. ↩︎
2. Both things that I have unfortunately experienced. ↩︎

Lately, when my wife and I are both on our iPads, she watching Law & Order reruns and me reading blogs, I’ve been thinking about the concept of parallel play. Parallel play is something kids do during a certain stage of development.

Parallel play is a form of play in which children play adjacent to each other, but do not try to influence one another’s behavior; it typically begins around 24–30 months.

What we are doing reminds me of that style of play. We are next to each other, but not interacting, just engrossed in our own entertainment. Sometimes, I’ll even be cooking, listening to music on the HomePod, and my wife will be in the kitchen, with her AirPods in, watching Law & Order on her iPad. We’re not dancing to the same beat. We might as well be in two different worlds.

In the past, even if a couple was simply watching TV in the same room, they were at least able to talk with each other about the content they were consuming. There was a shared experience. Now, however, there are ways to achieve isolation together.

Obviously, aside from the stage of child development, this is a new way of being, made possible by ubiquitous devices. It’s another mutation in behavior that technological enhancements have introduced. I’m not sure how many other couples find themselves existing like this. Since the effects probably range from unknown to detrimental, it may be another case for the Luddite view of new tech. That is, the patience and willingness to proceed with caution and view advancements with a trained skepticism.

I suppose I’ve got to take a longitudinal view of things and see how this affects our communication over time. My outlook about it is not optimistic, though. I don’t even want to think about how much worse this kind of dynamic gets when people rush to strap VR headsets on their faces and live in their own little fantasies.

I’ve read a few conservative reactions to the pronouncement from Pope Francis that Catholic clergy can now offer blessings to those who are in same-sex relationships. What I was more interested in, though, is hearing from those who are most directly affected by the change. Namely, those who are in same-sex relationships and seeking blessings. Michael J. O’Loughlin provided just that perspective (gift article) for The Atlantic. O’Loughlin’s view is that it isn’t just those in relationships that the church does not recognize that can face difficulty staying in the church. Rather, that challenge is common to everyone.

When I’m speaking to groups of Catholics, I often talk about how it isn’t easy for anyone to remain part of the Church. At some point, I say, something in your life will conflict with the Church’s ideals. Theology is pristine; life is messy.

I think back on my own life and the times I’ve been ready to throw in the towel because something just didn’t line up with the church. It even caused me to join a new denomination. Something has always compelled me to stay, though. As my friend JB perhaps put it best, it makes you think of St. Peter’s words in John chapter 6: “Lord, to whom shall we go? You have the words of eternal life.”

It’s rarely a good idea to look at someone through the lens of one characteristic of their humanity. Whitman wrote, “I am large, I contain multitudes.” The sentiment might be more universal, though. Most of us contain multitudes. We have contradictions sometimes and certainly incongruities. So the many facets of the believer fuse into one whole spiritual person.

O’Loughlin answers why he doesn’t depart Catholicism for another church.

I could choose to leave the Catholic Church and join any number of denominations that are more welcoming to gay and lesbian believers. I’ve stayed for many reasons, not least because of Catholicism’s diversity, whose benefits far outweigh the challenges it poses. But mostly I stay because I believe that my otherwise ordinary life has been made sacred by my faith and the sacraments.

As he says, we all have difficulties staying with the church on occasion, but some have it harder than others, and more is the admiration that’s earned.

This seems to have been the week for feed aggregators, with The Icon Factory and Silvio Rizzi (creator of the Reeder RSS reader) both announcing new apps in the space. Both are well-regarded developers with history behind them and the announcements have generated considerable interest.

The Icon Factory’s new app is called Project Tapestry and has a Kickstarter campaign as its entry into the new space. The scope of the project sounds ambitious.

With Project Tapestry, we’ll create a universal, chronological timeline for iOS for any data that’s publicly available on the Internet. A service-independent overview of your social media and information landscape. Point the app toward your services and feeds, then scroll through everything all in one place to keep up-to-date and to see where you want to dive deeper. When you find something that you want to engage with or reply to, Tapestry will let you automatically open that post in the app of your choice and reply to it there. Tapestry isn’t meant to replace your favorite Mastodon app or RSS reader, but rather to complement them and help you figure out where you want to focus your attention.

I have to admit, like many others, I find this idea appealing. Then again, I was excited about the concept of Readwise Reader, which was similar in nature in that it aggregated different types of media together in one place and standardized ways you could harvest information from those sources. I ended up being disappointed by the bloat in the application, though, and abandoned it. This is why, after initially thinking I would back the Kickstarter for Project Tapestry, my enthusiasm for it has cooled some.

I suppose I’m just not convinced you can lump together different media types in a way that works on a lowest-common-denominator basis. Each of these different feeds has a certain level of interoperability (like RSS), but with an additional feature set assumed when you are using it. Mastodon, for example, has all sorts of context of what you can do to interact with a post that won’t be available in an app that generalizes its consumption.

While I’m also excited to have come across a post on Mastodon from Silvio Rizzi describing the app he is working on, I was relieved he stated that Reeder was not going away. Rizzi will no doubt build something with utility and polish, but maybe all we need are the RSS readers we’ve had for years.

As of the writing of this post, Project Tapestry has raised almost enough to be funded.

This video for the song “Blame Me” by Bathe Alone is described as a “short film.” It’s full of symbolism depicting the recent dissolution of singer/instrumentalist Bailey Crone’s marriage, with the gleeful destruction of wedding props including the recognizable and iconic white dress. The lyrics to the song indicate infidelity, which is typically going to make a divorce less-than-amicable.

Cyndi’s right again

I told her everything

She got it all from start to end

How she just a friend

I remember when you were on my team

There wasn’t any picking
But I chose you and she chose in between, oh

It’s too late for you to change your mind
Homewrecker’s fighting for her life
And you got a weak spot for listening to lies

I hate to see these kinds of circumstances, with relationships shattered in the wake of deception. I’m thankful for music as an outlet to express the emotions that accompany betrayal, though.

Bathe Alone - Blame Me

Jane Penny, the frontwoman for TOPS is following in the footsteps of her bandmate Marta Cikojevic (aka Marci) and releasing a solo EP. The song features the satiny smooth vocals we’ve come to expect from Ms. Penny. I can’t confirm, but I would assume the music was composed by long-time collaborator David Carriere. There are sleek, modern sensibilities throughout the track that mix with a style that is in some ways congruent with decades old pop radio. This one will make for some pleasant repeat listens.

Via Gorilla Vs. Bear

The new 7-song EP, Surfacing, will be out April 5, 2024 on Luminelle records (which I believe is in some way affiliated with Gorilla Vs. Bear)

Spencer Kornhaber covers the merger of Pitchfork with GQ for The Atlantic.

Yesterday, Condé Nast’s chief content officer, Anna Wintour, announced plans to merge Pitchfork into the men’s magazine GQ. “This decision was made after a careful evaluation of Pitchfork’s performance and what we believe is the best path forward for the brand so that our coverage of music can continue to thrive within the company,” she wrote in a staff memo. On social media, many of the site’s key writers and editors, some of whom had been on staff for more than a decade, announced they’d been laid off. Much is still unknown about Pitchfork’s future, but music fans have reason to worry we’re losing the most important culture publication of the 21st century.

Pitchfork has had an outsized influence on the musical landscape over the years. That much is indisputable. Whether they has been a positive force is probably debatable. I remember a listening party with Josh Kolenik of Small Black a few months ago where he related that he stopped reading reviews of the band's work after a negative Pitchfork review. Scathing criticism from Pitchfork can have a chilling effect on album and concert ticket sales and affect a musician's livelihood. I'm not sure that they deserve a pass on their snobbery, especially when their dismissiveness is so impactful.

Ernie Smith from Tedium is effusive in his praise of the online publication.

I would argue that Pitchfork, despite the criticism it has received, has often been great, but its efforts in the past few years to rethink its approach to music coverage have been welcome. I think a telling moment in Pitchfork’s history came on August 19, 2019. That was the day that the website, in a clear course correction from its past, did an appraisal of Taylor Swift’s first five albums, records that it would not have been caught dead reviewing a decade earlier. It was a statement of the kind of site Pitchfork needed to become—one that accepts that our influences come from the mainstream and the underground.

It's great that Pitchfork broadened their horizons. They needed more diversity. There is only so much we can read about bands with animals in their names or that sound like plumbing companies, and heaven knows Sufjan Stevens has had enough coverage to last him a lifetime. However, I'm not going to pretend like it's super brave to give Taylor Swift some attention. Sailing with the prevailing cultural headwinds doesn't take heroic effort. I read the occasional article on the site, but I'm just not sure that they are doing anything that's particularly laudable or that we should have a day of national mourning for their declining fortunes.

Casey Shutt considers an article on AI by Paul Kingsnorth for Mere Orthodoxy. Kingsnorth sees demonic forces at play within technological advancement in general and AI in specific. Shutt expands upon the concerns expressed by Kingsnorth in his own piece. He hones in on the sense of real foreboding that plagues some who work with the technology.

The Godfather of AI, Geoffrey Hinton, seems genuinely haunted by AI’s mysterious power and the astonishing speed at which it is advancing. Hinton said in a 60 Minutes interview that humanity does not know what it’s doing with AI, and he fears that we’ll get it wrong, something we can’t afford to do. Scott Pelley followed up, asking why. Hinton replied simply: “Because they might take over.”

And Hinton’s not alone. Technology reporters Casey Newton and Kevin Roose describe what they call “AI vertigo,” that is, the dizzying possibilities that could flow from AI technology and the unease it produces in its creators. In Newton’s reporting on the topic, he has found that those working with AI often have AI nightmares. Even Sam Altman, chief executive at OpenAI and as optimistic as they come regarding the technology, admitted feeling “very strange extreme [AI] vertigo” at different moments, especially surrounding the launch of ChatGPT-3.

Perhaps the most disturbing element of the piece is when Shutt introduces a woman called "Loab," a creation of AI who seems to be cobbled together from the fragments of nightmares interrupted by the blessed relief of waking hours. I had to stop reading the story of Loab only part of the way through, so unsettling was the tale and the accompanying images that were generated by AI.

However, not content to stop at scaring us with Loab, Shutt brings the devil himself into the picture. Pointing out that the devil is known for his dishonesty, Shutt points to the fact that most of the concerns about AI center around deceit.

It is striking that when it comes to most of our AI fears, deception is the common denominator. In academic settings, concerns abound as to how the technology might be used by students to deceive their teachers into thinking AI generated work was student generated. Similar worries can be found in creative enterprises like music, visual arts, and writing. And let’s not forget that one of Sydney’s “dark fantasies” is to spread misinformation. Whether it’s misinformation, deepfakes, AI-generated work presented as one’s own, a faux romance with AI, deception is the common thread. The fingerprints of the “Father of Lies” seem to be all over the technology.

In tying the supernatural to novel technology, Kingsnorth and Shutt are playing with ancient fears. Of course, it isn't safe to assume that the notion of evil has simply become outdated. It makes sense to view evil as a shapeshifter, adapting to the new ways in which it can infiltrate our lives more easily.

Jess Weatherbed writes for The Verge about members of the European Parliament targeting Spotify with regulations to make sure European music is well represented and that artists are compensated more fairly.

The proposition was made to ensure European musical works are accessible and avoid being overshadowed by the “overwhelming amount” of content being continually added to streaming platforms like Spotify. MEPs also called for outdated “pre-digital” royalty rates to be revised, noting that some schemes force performers to accept little to no revenue in exchange for greater exposure. Imposing quotas for European musical works is being considered to help promote artists in the EU.

Meanwhile, Professor Alan Jacobs is fond of ranting to his college students about Spotify.

I’ve made it a classroom practice in the last year or so to indulge in theatrical rants against Spotify, which is fun for me and for my students. They argue with me and I denounce them, all in good humor. But for all the smiles, I am quite serious. Spotify is creating in millions and millions of its users a new kind of Attention Deficit Disorder, not one that has them jumping from one thing to another, but rather has them in a kind of vague trance state. Spotify is like soma from Brave New World in audio form. And to be in such a state is to experience a deficit of attention, an inability genuine to attend to what one is hearing.

I've noticed I have a lot less desire to skip around when listening to music on CD than I do when listening to a streaming service. Roon helps with this somewhat, but even it's not quite the same as having a physical object that has to be switched out if you want to play something new. I've listened to albums end to end so much more since getting a CD player.

Spotify: A gram is better than a damn.

Rowan Williams says that “undifferentiated time” is one of the hallmarks of secular societies, and we are all dancing to its catchy, repetitive tune. Largely detached from the seasons, time feels like a headlong linear rush of news cycles punctuated by the commercial breaks of Black Friday and Starbucks Red Cup Day. Williams believes that one of the hidden gifts of communal religious practice is the way it helps us locate ourselves in, and stay in fruitful relationship with, time.

I wonder about "undifferentiated time" and its relationship to boredom, and the lengths to which we go to keep boredom at bay. When we consume too much of the cultural waste products because we feel like we have nothing better to do, it feels like we are doing a disservice to the soul. I know that I have a problem sometimes becoming too entrenched in online culture, much of which is, at best, unhealthy filler. I have to step outside that pattern and into a new relationship to time and transcendence. It seems even those with more secular inclinations recognize this need. Oldfield cites Oliver Burkeman, author of Four Thousand Weeks, who is widely read for his commentary on time.

Burkeman argues powerfully for the importance of collective time, the sharing of regular rhythms and practices with other people. For his audience, it sounds surprisingly radical. In language that could easily be heard in a sermon, he expounds the way collective committed rhythms actually liberate us, in contrast to the individualized, flexible, autonomous schedules we mainly keep, which Burkeman calls “the freedom to never see your friends.”

Communal activities centered around sacred traditions can, in the right circumstances, build connections. Of course, the time spent on these activities takes away from time for other things, at a time when it feels like there are endless ways to spend our most precious resource. Not all the ways we spend our time are equal, for sure, so it's up to us to be judicious in this area. This calls for a kind of discernment that is unfamiliar in its sheer scope. Jeremy Abel writes about our inability to process the overload of information at our fingertips.

As we face a time of uncertainty and increasing demands on our attention, we need to decide now: will we pretend to be God, who can see and know all with perfect love and equanimity? Will we sell ourselves short by imagining our minds to be made of silicon, capable of handling the endless flow of data? Or will we accept ourselves as organic life: limited, frail, and worthy of peace and compassion, come what may?

The commentary from Abel fits in well with how Burkeman describes our relationship to the glut of information out there. We have to resist succumbing to FOMO in an environment where that is a constant nagging feeling. It seems to me that this takes a very deliberate decision to turn away from that path. To reorient ourselves to the world around us, both material and spiritual.

Some people share the fact that going to the gym is the only way they can keep themselves to an exercise routine. They don't get the same motivation from having exercise equipment at home. I feel much the same way about worship. I use my prayer books and pray at home, but there is something to be said for traveling to a destination for corporate worship that forces focus and attention. There are no distractions. Everything around you points to toward a particular focal point. The presence of others forces you into a rhythm.

Though I fear I may have quoted too liberally from her piece (seriously, go read it), I'll give the last word to Oldfield.

I’m more and more convinced that the way we structure our time—collectively, not only individually—is the key factor in our discipleship. The only way we can be formed to stay loyal to the logic of a different kingdom is to focus as much repeated, intentional attention on its stories and rituals and songs as we do on our phones, our televisions, and our shopping centres.

That sums it up nicely.