11th
panel thoughts
Problems: Too long, obviously. We stopped at 9:40! That’s a two and a half hour panel. Every time we do these things I think I’ve got it figured out, but then it turns out I don’t. I should have been stricter with the lengths of the papers, though the papers were uniformly good; and then I shouldn’t have let people go on and on and on with their questions, which for the most part were just too vague. I’ve been spoiled by previous audiences. And maybe we were vague, which was my fault.
Further problems: Despite our avowals, we still sounded like we were opposed to the internet. But what would this even mean? It’s a joke, the idea of being “against the internet.” But I guess it’s a joke that, when we make it, people laugh a little, but then they take it seriously. That girl who asked what people were doing “offline” to ameliorate some of the bad effects of being “online.” The whole point is that there *is* no offline. This is the value of MG’s observation: Once you are Google-able, you have a different kind of ontological status—-whether or not you are aware of your Googleability.
I wonder whether this is related to the general problem of n+1’s negativity. We really do hate a lot of bourgeois lifeways, even as we’re inside them. MG denounced exercise and people said ha ha. BK denounced email and people said ha ha. But at a certain point they started saying, What’s your problem. Don’t you see that the lifestyles you’re opposing are the only lifestyles that exist? Don’t you see there is no alternative?
But those lifestyles are the lifestyles of the Western bourgeoisie at a particular moment in time. They have a social history. And there is an alternative.
If only we knew what that alternative was.
Speaking of which, a final bit of reader mail.
By the way, your tumblr is ridiculous. And frankly gives me pause about your sanity, which I had tried to reserve judgment about until now. One reader suggests you move elsewhere, and I guess you will in a bit. But meanwhile you could at least try not to live in the city that everyone else tells us we live in. This is not how you go about building a new New York.
OK, OK. Let’s build a new New York.
