Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

Comment by voidhorse | Hacker News Reader

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Interesting article. I pretty much agree with most of the political and economic points, but one thing that’s palpably absent is an analysis of the structural patterns and habits inherently imposed by technologies, beyond their ties to the political economy.

So many of the systems and technologies for discourse we engage with have reduced the amount of content presented on a given topic at a given time down to the smallest micron possible. Even this “essay” is just a list of bullet points, each of which alone is a thesis that’s probably worth significant reflection and elaboration, but that’s simply not the dominant modality anymore. We’ve come to expect, and only make room for, bite-sized discourse. This helps ensure we remain in our internet bubbles and never develop the critical stances and motivations necessary to drive toward change because we don't make room for the complexities and nuances that inevitably arise when exploring any topic seriously.

The technologies we use to engage in discourse today establish patterns that are anti-discourse. They only support a vapid form of commentary, “takes”, reactions, but hardly discourse. Twitter has an extremely compressed character limit. Facebook is limited to similar snippets of information. Tiktok and Instagram reduce discourse to series of images with at most small snippets of text. Furthermore, there is no “program” as there was with television—we’re completely free to sporadically jump between a thousand different topics at will, ensuring the 21stcentury schizoidization of our brains really takes hold.

I agree. “The medium is the message” comes to mind [0]. I think it has something to do with broadcast media of all kinds.

When reading works from before the broadcast era, I remember authors would somehow try to converse with the reader with via their writing style as in the writer acknowledged the existence of a reader in their writing explicitly (“Dear Reader”) or via a narrative (the narrative style of Plato) and acknowledged that the reader was somehow capable of responding and that the writer could listen. Over time, writers started acknowledging that the reader was one amongst many (“Dear readers”), but still capable and worthy of being conversed with. Moving further along, wartime recruiting posters are what comes to mind of when I think of broadcast media when there is a short message often written in the imperative: the reader exists and expected to do something, but has no avenue or agency to discuss the message. There are examples and counter-examples of the styles I mentioned, but my observation has been that the prevailing writing style has changed from expecting/demanding a two-way conversation to a sort of “speaking at each other not to each other” unless negotiated differently otherwise.

[0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_medium_is_the_message

I took the "numbered theses" format as being a deliberate reference to the Central European writing tradition to which you allude, e.g., Benjamin's theses on history, or Marx' theses on Feuerbach. Writing in the "merciless telegram style" implies that the reader is expected to fill in the gaps with their own store of knowledge and their own effort. Like modern mathematical writing, it's more about "high bandwidth" scholar-to-scholar dialogue than explication for a broad audience. Taken in this light, it's has the opposite intent of compressing down to "hot takes" (sparking internal dialogue with the reader vs. sparking lazy emotional acceptance of the argument).

Or maybe she's just a lazy writer who clicked "numbered paragraph," who knows.

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