https://www.thenewatlantis.com/publications/the-analog-city-and-the-digital-city

I stumbled on this from Cassidy Williams’s newsletter

Interesting article about how the evolution of our technological mediums, leads sometimes to cultural and social revolutions.

Takeaways:

As Neil Postman once put it, “In the year 1500, fifty years after the printing press was invented, we did not have old Europe plus the printing press. We had a different Europe.

Information super-abundance, or the condition of “digital plenitude,” as media scholar Jay David Bolter has called it, encourages the view that truth isn’t real: Whatever view you want to validate, you’ll find facts to support it.

And in the “digital city” we mostly accept that, don’t we? We have moderators, we block people, and we have a part of our favorite site that feels kinda “not for us”, like Kpop Twitter for example.

Free-speech maximalists, who believe that there should be no limits to what you can say regardless of how odious the opinions may be, are distressed by the alacrity with which some are prepared to call for the speech of others to be curtailed or circumscribed. But free-speech maximalism flourishes in print culture; in the Digital City it appears less desirable, for two reasons. First, print culture sustained the belief that, given a modicum of good sense and education among people, truth would triumph in the marketplace of ideas. Writing and reading are slow and deliberate, encouraging the belief that false ideas will eventually be rejected by anyone trained to think. Second, we experience the written word as an inert reality — it is the “dead letter,” it has lost the force and immediacy of the spoken word. Because writing is less volatile than speech, it makes freedom of expression seem relatively harmless.

Wonder if we should call it “freedom to write” lol

Taylor’s discussion of disenchantment begins with the question of meaning. In our disenchanted modern world, meaning arises only from minds, and the human mind is the only kind of mind there is. Nothing external to the human mind bears any meaning in itself. Moreover, there are no non-human agents, either made of matter or spirit.

By contrast, in the enchanted world things and spirits have the “power of exogenously inducing or imposing meaning,” … These “charged” objects, Taylor explains, “have what we usually call ‘magic’ powers,” and they can be either benevolent or malevolent. They may bring blessing or trouble, cure or disease, rescue or danger. “Thus in the enchanted world,” Taylor writes, “charged things can impose meanings, and bring about physical outcomes proportionate to their meanings.” The vulnerable self sought refuge in a well-ordered society whose ritual life was designed to protect its members from malign forces.

This is a very interesting concept even outside this story: Things can be infused with meaning. Like, Scrooge’s first penny, or the bullet that killed Lincoln have been infused with meaning. And that’s not quite “magic”, but it can appear implicit to the object, even if was given by human minds. See Enchanted Objects.

We are troubled not by spirits but by bots and opaque algorithmic processes, which alternately and capriciously curse or bless us. In the Digital City, individuals may be refused credit, passed over for job interviews, or denied welfare on the basis of systems built on digital data against which they have little to no recourse.

We appear to be both obsessive documenters of our experience, yet largely indifferent to or overwhelmed by the archives we create.

Yes. I know I can keep Obsidian Daily Notes - Journaling - but what’s the point if I never have the time to get back to it?

digital reproductions of the self do not elicit the moral recognition that attends the embodied self in the here and now. I can tear a reproduction of a Rembrandt without repercussion and without much hesitation; I cannot do so with an original. So I might feel myself at liberty to tear into a digital reproduction of a person in a way that I would not if he or she were present before me.