short bluesky summary
⌘ Capitalism with no "off" switch creates an exhausting world of informational flows which demand constant engagement and management. True on the face of it, but Crary won't acknowledge that these flows also can yield joy and delight
⌘ In other words, the book badly needs a theory of pleasure
⌘ Crary's argument is simply that we're in a straight-up ongoing nightmare, and the critique is bracing, but I also feel that he overplays his hand, that he flattens the moment in his attempt to describe it
⌘ All evidence suggests that people really do enjoy sharing, remixing, curating, reviewing, and discussing media—does Crary see them as so many brainwashed capitalist dupes, victims of false consciousness? He doesn't say, perhaps because it would run the risk of sounding profoundly patronizing
⌘ Somebody like Henry Jenkins suggests that there's cosmopolitan pleasure to be derived from access to exploring the actions and choices available to us in the current cultural sphere. I DO think Jenkins's ultimate implication that this constitutes a liberatory act overstates in the other direction—
⌘ —but I think that the truth of the matter lies somewhere between the poles represented by these two thinkers, that all of us from childhood on navigate our relationship to the incessant flow of capitalized phenomena with at least a partial awareness of both the pleasures and the dangers
⌘ In a long-ago blog post, @fraying.bsky.social argues that it is wholly possible to rationally navigate an ongoing bargain with social media: "You are not the product. You’re a smart person making an educated decision about which companies you trust with your time, attention, and contributions."
⌘ so… yes, exposure to endless flows of media is corrosive and numbing, and platforms are extractive and exploitative, but these things also provide novelty, delight, connection, expressive capabilities, publicity, and more. Most crucially, we have *agency* in assessing when the bad outweighs the good
⌘ and I say this as someone who quit twitter, left substack, and have reduced instagram use to a bare minimum, but who uses ghost, loves bandcamp, and just paid for a letterboxd pro account.
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Notes [oldest to newest]
33. 1968