7 Disappointed Takes
Substack Live, The Technological Society, NYC's Covid Scammer, Steve Lawson, Matt Walsh, Hays and Hays, Glen Sunshine, and the Tweet of the Week
I have the delight of informing you that it is Friday, praise be, and therefore it is time to come up with some interesting takes.
One
Substack has recently—as in this week—made it possible for some of us to live stream from the app. I think it’s called Substack Live. People who use the app would be able to watch and comment (I think) and engage, as it were, with the people they read and follow. I am intrigued by this, except for two small problems. One is that I am a Luddite. While I understand that it is apparently very easy to just film oneself talking or doing things, for everyone does it, I myself don’t know how to do it. My production value, if that is even what it could be called, would be excessively low. The other is that I am worried about becoming an actual content creator. I know I joke about this a fair bit, but I actually don’t want to churn out so much “stuff” that I completely exhaust the reader. I have, in my mind, a sort of thin line separating me from this terrible fate, being that I am, already, what’s the word, prolific.
That said, I’m wondering if those occasions I do podcast, particularly by reading your astute and fascinating comments and commenting myself on what you have said might be lots more fun if it was as a video. One reason this option is available to me now is because so many of you so generously support my work, and so I get to beta test things and get advice from Substack about how to “do better.” Which is a long way of asking if Thou, Dear Reader, think a live stream on the substack app would be fun, or if you would all roll your eyes and mutter that I should just stick to what I know.
Two
Funnily enough, I’ve been listening to Jacques Ellul’s The Technological Society every morning as I labor away in Planet Fitness, the misery of purple and yellow theme and bad lighting pressing down on my aesthetic sensibilities and putting me in a bad mood while I pray for all the lost people around me. There is something sort of ironically satisfying about listening to something on a phone while contorting my own shape into those imposed by the machines while listening to someone explain how all of it was tragically inevitable.
I am not really smart enough to read, or rather listen, to the philosophical arguments set forth by Ellul. I’m going to have, at some point, to sit down with an actual copy of the book and a pen and try to puzzle it out. But for the bits I am getting, I find myself flooded with happiness that anyone would be able to put into words my relationship with my cellphone and my car and my washing machine and the self-checkout.
Perhaps I have clung to the illusion that it is possible to be a Luddite in the realm of content creation because I am already so constrained by a technological mode of being that is so utterly contrary to what I think it means to be human. I know that Elon, for example, thinks it will be so great when we all move to Mars and are partly made out of robots, but I want to move to a village in the middle of nowhere with no electricity and no running water because being able to be connected to the whole world at every moment is not really that great for my mental health.
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