It’s here! Part two of my review of Jonathan Haidt’s The Anxious Generation, covering not only the book itself but the predicted monumental policy changes which the book’s release has achieved.

Hosted on Katherine Dee’s Default Blog, which is definitely worth your subscription.…

Ratios

Let’s figure out just what analogy and metaphor meant for Marshall McLuhan. To begin, here’s an early summary of his conception spelled out for Modernist poet Ezra Pound. As Pound’s technique drew a great deal on his study of Mandarin, McLuhan frames his argument in terms familiar to his correspondent: that of the Chinese ideogram.

The American mind is not even close to being amenable to the ideogram principle as yet. The reason is simply this. America is 100% 18^th century. The 18^th century had chucked out the principle of metaphor and analogy— the basic fact that as A is to B so is C to D. AB:CD. It can see AB relations. But relations in four terms are still verboten. This amounts to deep occultation of nearly all human thought for the U.S.A.

My recent dive into anthropology has taken its inevitable post-human turn with a book a friend gave me today, purchased from Book Bazaar here in Ottawa. It’s a collection of academic papers titled Cyberspace: First Steps, edited by Michael Benedikt and published in 1991.

It has inspired me to finally tell you what’s turning the frogs friggin’ gay. And, to be perfectly honest, I’m as pissed as Alex about it.

After the introduction by—of course it is, who else would it be?—novelist and founder of the cyberpunk genre William Gibson, the first paper by Canadian artist and cinema scholar David Tomas provides the perfect interpolation of Arnold van Gennep’s Rites of Passage into the realm of computer-created spaces, via the retrieval of Van Gennep’s theory by American Victor Turner.

If you don’t know what the hell I’m …

I’ve been doing my thing on this website since June of 2018, and doing it on ConcernedNetizen.com since February 2019. That’s nearly six years of blogging!

Some deep dives I’ve done in the past month into the nature of metamorphosis and transformation have pushed me into some deep introspection. And so, with much deliberation with my friends, I have made a decision to open up a bit more online, and have started a second blog over on Substack.

It’s called Less Mad.…

mot juste (n) the exactly right word or phrasing
—Merriam Webster

The most important benefit of reading and listening at length is to develop more felicity with using words. Ways of phrasing and thinking rub off on you with exposure to language as wielded by other people. More so than just acquiring new clichés and newly coined buzzwords, I’m thinking of all the ways which thoughts and perceptions can be ordered and built up and expressed so as to bring you, the reader or listener, into a new relation to the world and everything in it. We learn language every time we partake in it. The reward, in turn, is that one’s own speech and writing and thinking becomes enriched. Our thoughts and utterances become more nimble and nuanced and precise—or, just as importantly, direct and coarse and vague—as required.…

It’s the same with all these authors—are they all falling into the same pit on purpose?

After my deep dive into as much McLuhan as I could lay a finger on, I started digging into the larger Media Ecology scene in 2018. Soon I began charting constellations of intellectuals and writers out of the reoccurring references to their each other across books; the sort of study analogized by hyperlinks on the web.

Out of what I’ve read, I’ll say now that popular books in the ’90s about “cyberspace”—the world behind your screen—had its capstone with Erik Davis’ TechGnosis, most recently updated and reissued in 2015. It’s a wonderful, encyclopedic book—and the reason it so disastrously crashes and burns in the final chapter is very instructive.

Davis references and builds upon the works by nearly all the other ‘90s authors …

Read it at the Default Wisdom Substack: https://default.blog/p/on-jonathan-haidts-anxious-generation

Figures without Ground

As it’s usually understood, post-modernism is a wildly relativistic cultural state of nihilism and social constructivism. Put simply, modernism was when we thought we figured out everything, and post-modernism is when that empowered us to start changing making up everything and we ended up knowing nothing. It’s basically all of “society” Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff while not looking down.

All the books from the ’90s which I read on the subject of media and internet culture referenced the same guy, Kenneth Gergen, as spokesman for social constructivism as a hopeful means for reconciling differences and creating a more tolerant and peaceful world. And so, back in the summer of 2018 or so, I read his most cited book, The Saturated Self, written in 1991. You’ll find this cited in a lot of books—which …