Linear, please. (6m25s)
Our boys come home from school with "viruses" like curse words and references to pop culture.
The other day I heard them share a snippet of a joke that involved Stephen Hawking, whom they knew only from The Simpsons.
So I played A Brief History of Time for them and, already familiar with its proto-YouTube visual and narrative logic, they absorbed it, fully.
It was my first time watching it in some 30 years and I was more impressed with its love of humanity, having myself become more of a human being.
But the moment that clawed its way into my conscience was not about courage or hope; it was about reading.
Halfway through, Hawking’s assistant remarks that the professor reads very slowly because he knows he won’t be able to easily return to the book.
Those of us with full control over our bodies can skim a text. We need only retain a trace. We assume we can always pick up the book again (or “Google it”.) Not the late Hawking.
I had lunch with a friend who works in radio. He remarked that podcasters in their 20s show no interest in radio; they don’t understand its structure.
Will radio survive?, he wondered.
I told him my theory that TikTok is a tool for forgetting. The more we use it – swipe, swipe – the easier we forget. I then told him about Stephen Hawking and his approach to reading.
I likened our memory to soil. Hawking made his mind soft and rich so that he could plant ideas deep enough to take root. Whereas our minds – swipe, forget, swipe – are shallow, hard and sandy.
I joked with my friend that as long as car manufacturers include radio receivers, there will be a market for his labor. But the hardware follows the software; and the software – our culture – is currently testing the limits of how much we can forget; how shallow we can become.
For work, I try to capture the attention of distracted Americans by giving them a little of what they know and a little of what they don’t. Of course, they don’t want the latter. Few of us do! It robs our minds of glucose – energy.
We all come to (social) media for dopamine: to re-enforce, to repeat, to pacify ourselves, to confirm our priors. We turn away from the world of unknowns in the hopes that we might find ourselves, again, on familiar ground.
How then do I manage to steal their energy and trick them into paying attention to something they don’t know, something they don’t want to know – an unsettling idea, an inconvenient truth.
In the days of linear media – of television news shows and radio programs – it was relatively easy to pull this off.
You began with something familiar, something “sexy” and easy, and then follow it with something hard.
A story about cute puppies is followed by a quick hit on Trump’s oligarchic patrons is followed by a longer story about ice cream floats.
On the algorithmic platforms (TikTok, Instagram, Facebook) this sequencing is literally impossible.
They are machines built to maximize shareholder value, not social cohesion. Thus, they are optimized to only serve puppies and ice cream.
Of course, my puppies are not everyone else’s puppies. On X, Elon Musk has built a pretty hate machine. (In typical Musk fashion, he merely copied 4chan, 8chan, etc.) Black people are cannibals. Mexicans are rapists. Whites are besieged. Thus, it produces the same pleasure: reinforcing our priors.
In the late 1900s, when I was a college student, non-linearity was the cutting edge; it was freedom, itself.
Digital collage and hypertext would liberate the reader/writer from the constraints of the rote.
Finally, technology was catching up to the progressive intellectual movements of the 20th century: Cortazar’s Hopscotch, Godard’s Breathless, video art, epigrams.
Today, on social media, non-linear is the norm and video art is the default; dozens of filters are published daily and ludicrously capitalized corporations have decided the unreal – AR, VR, XR – is our future.
We mistook the tools for the product, the scaffolding for the structure.
Yes, non-linear editing (video, sound, image, text) is a wondrous advance. But non-linear storytelling is at best a counterpoint and at worst (i.e., most of the time!) an evasion.
Our ability to work together to help one another depends on our ability to learn new things. That does not happen by chance.
Linear media (beginning, middle and end) are how we make sense of the world.
Remembering – i.e., not forgetting – are how we create lasting progress.
Platforms that promote forgetting and non-linearity for profit are a threat to civilization.
Postscript
Above us are 777 words. If I were more dedicated to the bit, I’d rewrite it to land at exactly 737.
The story of a technology company (AIRPLANES!) that became just another stock market company.
Yes, Jean Baudrillard was a bullshit artist. But dematerialization is real and a really big fucking problem.
The people – their companies, lawyers and lobbyists – who benefit materially from dematerialization (financialization) have lodged themselves into the commanding heights and will only be removed if we take them on.
This is not only a political project.
For example, we can insist on richer chronological listings on social media.
We can choose randomness instead of repetition. We can reward curators.
We have every reason to be optimistic.
The current condition is a deviation from the norm.
Just as we are hardwired to avoid thinking hard we are also built to be together, IRL and in real time. (Which is linear.)
For example, here’s a YouTube “channel” from Japan that celebrates a “live” recording.
https://www.youtube.com/@The_FirstTake
That too, is progress.
Likewise, here is another channel, also from Japan, the memorializes how things are made:
https://www.youtube.com/@processx
All around us are the fruits of linear experiences.
Order some & Enjoy!
Thank you for your time!
Jose
p.p.s.
Who mistakes the tool for the product? Engineers! It is not by chance that the political alignment that threatens humanity is one of engineers and speculators. People for whom the tool is the product and the sale is the endpoint. (What happens next? Who cares!)
Bonus
Timely agitprop from the Internet:
