Viruses, power, art, and journalism (Across the Sundering Seas, #9)
Hello, friendly readers! You may have noticed that you did not get a message two weeks ago. This is not because I failed to write, but because I failed to properly click the Send button! I did not forget you, however, and so here is that week's email, two weeks late!
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Robin Sloan’s Fusion of Technology and Humanity, Dan Cohen – Alan Jacobs has been shouting from the rooftops (or, well, his blog) for the last few years about how interesting Sloan’s novels are, and I subscribe to Sloan’s own newsletter (as I did to his previous newsletter!). But Cohen’s write-up on Sourdough was the thing that actually pushed me over the edge into “Okay, I really need to read these books” mode. Cohen himself is the kind of scholar I find most interesting: someone doing serious work in his chosen field of history and engaging richly with new media and the implications of digital technologies.
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a plea to journalists, Alan Jacobs – speaking of Jacobs, this is an important complement to my ongoing musings on social media:
It’s really astonishing how few people can summon the critical facility necessary even to ask whether a person who claims to speak for all black or Latinx or trans people actually does. But I think it’s very relevant that this dance between triumphant resentment and instantaneous appeasement happens on Twitter: the pace of the medium seems to activate users’ fight-or-flight instinct. And then the ordinary mechanisms of human pride kick in, and people double down on their first responses rather than step back and question themselves.
Notice that the point here is not whether you support better treatment of various marginalized groups. It is specifically whether a self-appointed representative screaming on Twitter genuinely represents the whole of that marginalized group.
Given that one of the most important points many members of historically marginalized groups have had to make is precisely that they aren’t homogeneous groups you can lump under one description, the answer is self-evident. But as Jacobs points out here: the structural incentives of Twitter and spaces like it push us away from that kind of thinking and therefore toward the dehumanization of whole swaths of people—perhaps worst of all, of those very people we purport to help.
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A New Discovery Upends What We Know About Viruses, Ed Yong, The Atlantic – I have a (weird?) side interest in biology, and particularly in weird microbiology things. Like viruses. (Are they alive? How do we even answer that question?) In this case the virus only works by using using multiple different cells to reproduce itself. As one of the researchers put it, the fact that this virus exists at all indicates “that something must be wrong in the conceptual framework of virology.” These kinds of things make for the most fun moments in science: when we have to step back and totally rethink something we thought we understood to some extent.
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Apologies, Power, and Martyrdom in a Decadent Age, Jake Meador, Mere Orthodoxy – my friend Jake basically takes a specific bit of recent nonsense from Tucker Carlson and uses it to reflect on the broader problems around power, morality, and culture war—and what our responsibilities are, especially if we are public figures:
It may well be the case that public apologies are weaponized in the culture wars. But that has no bearing on the fact that a man who made such awful remarks ought to apologize for making them. To suggest otherwise is merely to engage in a slightly more clever form of rationalizing sin.
But, of course, the bigger story here isn’t just about Tucker Carlson; the story is about power and specifically about things greater and higher than power.