https://fickleears.blogspot.com/2021/04/the-latest-unavoidable-editorial-notice.html
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COMMENTS
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Christopher Lasch
The True and Only Heaven: Progress and Its Critics
(1991)
Lasch on Orestes Brownson:
"He conducted his self-education in public, in the pages of magazines written entirely by himself."
(p. 185)
Yet another reminder that internet users did not invent such things but rather have been gifted more potent (not to say better) tools with which to pursue them.
(If these tools are in fact worse, perhaps it is because they seduce us into pursuing certain things at the expense of other things, whether this is good for us or not; and perhaps *this* is multiply determined both by emergent properties and by conscious+intentional design decisions by our new techbro overlords.)
No doubt the public performace element is itself Janus-faced and enigmatic. It is necessary, I think, to compel one to do one's best work, yet it also threatens the dissolution of the entire effort in self-styling and social pressure to conform; that is, in communication rather than exploration.
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