Distraction

'Harvard Magazine describes how “faculty members across Harvard are exploring and inventing new ways to engage students and reimagine education in today’s global, digital, and fast-changing world,” (there are those catchphrases again!) and “adding a digital twist [...] to enhance teaching and learning on campus and beyond.”

We’re told that, to remain competitive economically, we need to forget about the humanities and teach our children “passion” (to use Thomas Friedman’s word in a 2013 Times column) for digital technology and prepare them to spend their entire lives incessantly reeducating themselves to keep up with it. [...] We need to become as restless as capitalism itself.'

--A. Winer.

~

There's that dreaded word: capitalism!

Much of the analysis of the effects of the internet is about the psychological impacts (on the ability and desire to read, say) on the individual. Skimming, surfing, procrastination, attention deficit, verbal hyperinflation, the lack of silence and stillness in our lives. But, again, it's very much the individual and not really about society. Fair enough. But what you'd rally like to see is an analysis of how this fits into the narrative-economic and political-of capitalism. 

'Still, we and our ways of living are dying all the time. The tech giants will continue to ply us with their addictive products, personal devices will proliferate, and we’ll keep looking for ways not to feel alone...techno-consumerism couples Enlightenment, humanist rhetoric like freedom and empowerment and connection with an unabashed pursuit of profit and monopoly-building.'

It is game over; you know that in your heart of hearts. The things you take seriously are a laugh; and what people take seriously you can't but help feel amused by. Sounds patronizing, I know. 

In the time that remains. D'Est.

Today, the ancient light falling all around you; the darkness of your hands.