Greenland Standard Time
Wherein we oscillate between personal time zone choices, political silliness, and the lengths people went to entertain themselves when history ended.
This is gabestein.com: the newsletter!, which is a completely irregular note primarily focused on the intersection of culture, media, politics, and technology written by me, vitalist technologist Gabriel Stein. Sometimes there’s random silly stuff. If you’re not yet a subscriber, you can sign up here. See the archives here, and polished blog versions of the best hits at, you guessed it, gabestein.com.
I’m slightly beyond the Larry David statute of limitations, but please indulge me in wishing you a quick Happy New Year! I hope you had a nice holiday season and were able to do what you need to do to prepare for the year to come, which, by all accounts, is going to be a crazy one.
Just a few quick, disjointed thoughts today, starting with a very silly one: are some of you really running around the globe not setting your calendars to your local time zone? Last year, while spending some time in France, my mind was blown by the fact that my wife always keeps her calendars in Eastern Time so she can stay in sync with her colleagues.
I must admit that it had never occurred to me that anyone would not center their calendar’s locale on their physical location. But, of course, there’s a good reason for adopting the practice: not changing the time zone greatly reduces the need to convert times when scheduling with colleagues, users, or customers. But when I’ve contemplated adopting the practice myself, it makes me feel personally unmoored from time, as if I’m perpetually floating in a bubble of neo-Eastern that only resolves to my local time zone when the event horizon approaches. For me, not knowing when I am when I contemplate scheduling is just too awkward.
Anyway, am I selfish for centering time on myself and not my coworkers? Am I the only one? Are the rest of you also not changing timezones? Please tell me, I’d really like to know.
Let’s oscillate now, like good metamodernists, to a more serious topic: whether or not Donald Trump is actually going to annex Greenland, and, I guess, Canada (sorry). I bring it up only because it demonstrates almost perfectly what I was getting at in my first-ish newsletter on the right’s embrace of metamodernism, the native language of internet culture.
As a reminder, metamodernism is characterized by oscillation between modernism’s idealism and postmodernism’s cynicism. A phrase often used to describe it is “informed naiveté” — that is, knowing an idea is silly and pursuing it despite that knowledge.
In many of the cases examined by theorists, this “structure of feeling” is positive, even artful, because it can imbue seemingly pointless acts with meaning. In the case of Greenland it is, to use a technical term, just deeply stupid, but that does not make it less metamodern.
My point in drawing the connection is merely to observe that, like it or not, metamodernism is now the country’s dominant cultural mode, and the right, broadly, is particularly good at using it to attract adherents. Here’s Josh Marshall, founder of TPM and one of the people I trust most on American politics, discussing how Trump’s Greenland obsession is playing out via a Silicon Valley huckster named Dryden Brown who wants to found a “network state” called Praxis on Greenland:
In this viral Twitter post introducing some of his plans, he revealed that he got the idea to buy Greenland from none other than Donald Trump back in 2019. There’s the kernel of a sort of darkly comic version of a Spinal Tap-type documentary where Dryden goes (he’s actually done this) to various poor countries and tries to buy part of their country. He arrives, looks up the local officials on LinkedIn and is often able to set up meetings where he discusses Praxis’s plans and the possibility of an acquisition.
Again, it’s all deeply, hilariously stupid (and fwiw, Marshall is a firm no on the possibility of an actual invasion). But in a country with a deep culture of individualism and entrepreneurialism, where people increasingly understand the world via Instagram and TikTok reels, “yeah, go ahead, try to buy Greenland, why not!” just plays a lot better than “well, actually, you see, NATO…” And not just on the silly stuff Trump tweets about, but on the serious issues, too, like health, where, as dangerous as RFK Jr. is, he at least acknowledges the very real problems with Big Pharma’s influence on American healthcare and wants to do something about it, even if most of his solutions are insane.
All to say: it’ll look very different, but I suspect we could use some informed naiveté on the left, too. Our discourse doesn’t all have to be messaging campaigns, policy papers, protests, theories of change, vision statements, and incremental policy, all of the time.
Before the end of The End of History. I’ll leave you with a fun one. Back before all this crap started, you know, in the 90s, when history ended, there was apparently so little to do that Paramount broadcast a live, 90-minute primetime network special dedicated to celebrating the 30th anniversary of Star Trek, that beacon of hope (and neoliberal propaganda). Staged like an awards show, the elaborate pat on the back was hosted by Ted Danson and features tributes from Kenny G and Ben Stiller, among many others. It serves as a pretty amazing marker of a specific point in cultural and political time that we’ll never see again. You probably have better things to do, but if not, grab yourself some Klingon Bloodwine or a Tea. Early Grey. Hot. and enjoy.