Member-only story
- Psychological bullshit — self-help and pop psychology — is dangerous: it convinces people that they know themselves, when in fact, they are starved of self-awareness.
- Magic gives way to religion, religion to science, science … to magic, magical thinking. In an era of increasing technological mastery—the domination of our choices by rational data-based algorithms — we simultaneously turn to bullshit: astrology, yoga evangelism, transhumanist evangelism, various Silicon Valley evangelisms.
- The book — the technology through which Montaigne, Emerson, Nietzsche, and Freud conveyed their wisdom — is a technology uniquely suited to self-inquiry. The de-prioritization of the bound-codex means the de-prioritization of the self; the end of a six hundred year old practice of self-care.
- Contemporary media — mediated by our phones — is designed to reinforce self-image. Media deploys and redeploys illusion. The future of illusion is the future of technology.
- There is something pathetic about replacing ritual magic with the magic of opening the latest delivery from Amazon; that is, there is something pathetic about the gradual ‘progress’ of civilization over the past five or so thousand years.
- Human existence is incredibly fucked up — and we have to face this reality soberly. The only sin in a Godless world is to deny that our world is Godless: abandoned and in pain.
- Netflix isn’t better than Shakespeare — so why the hell do we need so much Netflix? Let alone Netflix at all.
- Hunger for novelty…
