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- Most of what constitutes culture is really a system of mutually-assured repression. Creativity and originality are collectively willed away, and in a deep sense, forbidden. The draw of mass/pop culture is that it never tells us anything we don’t already know — and thus resists the dangerous urge to create. Mass culture decreates, warps, creativity by mocking it.
- Tyranny was possible before mass media, but totalitarianism was not.
- The deep distraction of smartphone culture is more than an iteration of mass culture, it is an evolutionary step forward, so I wonder then, what evolutionary step totalitarianism will take. My speculation is that totalitarianism will, like media, become decentralized, evenly distributed, and essentially invisible — by which I mean: totally integrated into the stream of our lives, if it is not already.
- I read a remarkable essay today. It was written in 1936 by Georg Lukacs about Goethe’s The Sorrows of Young Werther.
Since Goethe starts from actual human beings, actual human destinies, he grasped all these problems in that concrete complexity and mediation in which they manifest themselves in the personal destinies of individual men. And because he fashioned his hero as a man remarkably differentiated subjectively, these problems emerge in a very complex manner which enters deeply the realm of ideology. But the relationship is visible everywhere and is consciously understood throughout in some way or other even by the characters involved.
