This is such a good, thoughtful essay Stefan. Deserves a wider readership.
Last May, I attended a conference for charities on the gloomy state of the world, and one talk stayed with me, about how people in the past used to think about life 100 years from now (let's say, what the 21st century might look like) and how nobody today is thinking of the 22nd century. We are too caught up in this never ending present, which you've laid out here.
This past December, I quit Spotify for various reasons and I'm now using YouTube Music. I'm curious to see what the algorithm will cough up this December as my account is still there, but unused. (I decided to keep it as its Weekly Discovery and New Releases playlists are fine tuned to my tastes, so I copy over their suggestions to YouTube Music while I train the algorithm over there...)
"A vibey liturgy confirming the triumph of aesthetics over progress, branding over self-expression." My favorite kind of acerbic but also deeply thoughtful critical prose. I love this, and looking forward to more :)
Loved this piece! You’ve encouraged me to contemplate topics I wouldn’t have otherwise this year. Thank you.
The last lines of this quote from What Can we Hope For? by Richard Rorty.
„Jefferson and Kant would have been bewildered at the changes that have taken place in the Western democracies in the last two hundred years. For they did not think of equal treatment for blacks and whites, or of female suffrage, as deducible from the philosophical principles they enunciated. Their astonishment illustrates the antifoundationalist point that moral insight is not, like mathematics, a product of rational reflection. It is instead a matter of imagining a better future, and observing the results of attempts to bring that future into existence.“
Why the muscle of imagination is so f‘n important.
Thank you!! I’ve never encountered that quote, really interesting! And you’re right, imagination and political justice, equity etc are fundamentally linked x
Call me a snob, but I've never been interested in these annual summaries. They just clutter my user interface with needless navel-gazing, I feel like. Not that I never navel-gaze, but what's the point of telling me I've been listening to this video game soundtrack on repeat for weeks? It sounds like an indictment rather than a celebration of my musical tastes. "You definitely lacked variety there, what an obsessive weirdo you are" is how I sometimes read it. And even if I can't deny my obsession with certain content, I'd like to be proposed different stuff, not a validation of my addictive tendencies. Which is why I simply unplug from time to time and try to change habits, as difficult as it is.
And while I'm saying that, I feel a soft existential dread rising in me about Substack becoming this very thing Spotify and Youtube are. I don't know exactly what shape it might take on, but there's always this risk of enshittification everyone is talking about, and imo it's primarily linked to it being an American platform. All these new features almost no one asked for, and this constant drive towards profit and acceleration when what so many people like about this place is precisely its slow-paced, reflexive atmosphere. I'm regularly downloading my archives in case it becomes as uninhabitable as much of the Internet.
This is such a good, thoughtful essay Stefan. Deserves a wider readership.
Last May, I attended a conference for charities on the gloomy state of the world, and one talk stayed with me, about how people in the past used to think about life 100 years from now (let's say, what the 21st century might look like) and how nobody today is thinking of the 22nd century. We are too caught up in this never ending present, which you've laid out here.
This past December, I quit Spotify for various reasons and I'm now using YouTube Music. I'm curious to see what the algorithm will cough up this December as my account is still there, but unused. (I decided to keep it as its Weekly Discovery and New Releases playlists are fine tuned to my tastes, so I copy over their suggestions to YouTube Music while I train the algorithm over there...)
Thanks Ollie! x
"A vibey liturgy confirming the triumph of aesthetics over progress, branding over self-expression." My favorite kind of acerbic but also deeply thoughtful critical prose. I love this, and looking forward to more :)
Ahh thank you so much!
Any time! Looking forward to what you'll come up with next.
Loved this piece! You’ve encouraged me to contemplate topics I wouldn’t have otherwise this year. Thank you.
The last lines of this quote from What Can we Hope For? by Richard Rorty.
„Jefferson and Kant would have been bewildered at the changes that have taken place in the Western democracies in the last two hundred years. For they did not think of equal treatment for blacks and whites, or of female suffrage, as deducible from the philosophical principles they enunciated. Their astonishment illustrates the antifoundationalist point that moral insight is not, like mathematics, a product of rational reflection. It is instead a matter of imagining a better future, and observing the results of attempts to bring that future into existence.“
Why the muscle of imagination is so f‘n important.
Thank you!! I’ve never encountered that quote, really interesting! And you’re right, imagination and political justice, equity etc are fundamentally linked x
Call me a snob, but I've never been interested in these annual summaries. They just clutter my user interface with needless navel-gazing, I feel like. Not that I never navel-gaze, but what's the point of telling me I've been listening to this video game soundtrack on repeat for weeks? It sounds like an indictment rather than a celebration of my musical tastes. "You definitely lacked variety there, what an obsessive weirdo you are" is how I sometimes read it. And even if I can't deny my obsession with certain content, I'd like to be proposed different stuff, not a validation of my addictive tendencies. Which is why I simply unplug from time to time and try to change habits, as difficult as it is.
And while I'm saying that, I feel a soft existential dread rising in me about Substack becoming this very thing Spotify and Youtube are. I don't know exactly what shape it might take on, but there's always this risk of enshittification everyone is talking about, and imo it's primarily linked to it being an American platform. All these new features almost no one asked for, and this constant drive towards profit and acceleration when what so many people like about this place is precisely its slow-paced, reflexive atmosphere. I'm regularly downloading my archives in case it becomes as uninhabitable as much of the Internet.