Here are some recent writings I had hoped to blog about but failed to:
Hunter R. Rawlings III, “Information, Knowledge, Authority, and Democracy”
Michael Francis Booth, “Social Networks: Stop Designing Out The Fun”
Jaron Lanier, “Long Live Closed-Source Software!”
Steve Gillmor, “Overnight Success”
Werner Vogels, “Eventually Consistent”
And then there was this, in today’s NY Times Book Review, from Lee Siegel:
We have exhausted Romantic individualism, and we have twisted the uniquely individual, modernist escape from the self into “self-expression.” Expression is everywhere nowadays, but true art has grown indistinct and indefinable. We seem now to be living in a world where everyone has an artistic temperament — emotive and touchy, cold and self-obsessed — yet few people have the artistic gift. We are all outsiders, and we are all living in our own truth.
Siegel’s piece is itself romanticism defined!
There is no escape from the fact the whilst feeding the American Dream the unique individual in us is hard pressed to do any other than pant and attempt to maintain. Everyone does indeed have an artistic temperament that has little chance of expression either as outsider or otherwise. The consensus trance that has pulled the blinds closed on those things that might, in time, make most of us outsiders stuck on the inside of a system that denies us any real freedom or self-expression that is worthy of collective note!
Of course we are living in our own truth and I would argue that “artistic gift” is to narrowly defined both by Siegel and society in general “The truth” is conventional life, and if we are awake our psyches will be that source of pain and hopefully some gain to-boot! Aesthetic rebellion or any rebellion has little to do with objective reality but he has it right, more to it than meets the eye! Matthias Grunewald’s Isenheim Alterpeice and Bansky’s wilderness surveillance are essentially comments albeit complicated to more or less degree!
Alan
Oh no you don’t. We (I) want to hear what you think about Jaron Lanier’s latest polemic (and his generally curmudgeonly take on the new digital economy).
You don’t get off that easily…