Member-only story
Moderns are uneasy with the question of whether the past was better than the present; we really, really want to believe in progress, so we cherrypick-out our understanding of how other eras work so that they appear utterly backwards and hopeless and regressive. The past was violent and smelled bad and everyone who didn’t die of war died of plague: that is what popular historical understanding tells us; we assume that elements of the truth are the whole truth, content with our own suspect intellectual synthesis. Thus we allow ourselves to plunge into the pseudo-progress we call the future, build the pseudo-tools we call technology. We do not distinguish between tools that provide real, analog enjoyments and tools that merely speed up the rate at which something hits our cognitive bloodstream (infotainment). Our default assumption is that newer, faster, extra is better — that we should want more content, more stuff, more ‘connection’ (people). Quality has been conflated with quantity, speed with purpose.
