Monday, January 05, 2009
HAPPY (?) NEW (?) YEAR (?)
... and a note about fantasy
In earlier times, this blog had an impressively large readership, given its modest scope and narrow personal focus. Months of neglect should have done away with that. For the friend, acquaintance or random web surfer who stumbles into this dusty, neglected corner, I offer the explanation for the unkempt condition here that I have been working on a major project that has taken up all of my free writing time. Whether that project will ever come to anything is a question that won't be answered for some time and, until it does, I shall leave it as a matter that won't be addressed here: To disclose it publicly would be to doom it to certain failure.
In the meantime, the world as we knew it continues to unravel. More than once I have considered beginning the project of recording some thoughts about that here ... but the job of doing so systematically is more than I can undertake now. On the other hand, I may well jot a note or two here from time to time about the nature and extent of the disaster overwhelming the world. In that vein, consider the following:
There were a number of absurd fantasies abroad these last ten years or so upon which much of the now-disappearing world was premised. One of them was that the swift erosion of the American industrial economy was somehow made irrelevant by the rise of "the information economy." The absurdity of this notion can now be seen clearly. You can't eat bits. Nor can you wear them, drive them to the store or live inside of them. And bits are the first thing to go when people are forced to retreat to primal priorities such as the simple survival of the flesh. At a certain level, a great deal of the illusory growth of the American economy over the last twenty years boiled down to a mutual fantasy pact: We all agreed that information was something it wasn't.
Consider how seductive this mutual fantasy was for intellectuals: The very stuff they were good at -- ideas -- was the thing we shall build our lives on. The age-old Platonic dream of a world where Idea literally is Real was to ... become Real. Literally saying so would make it so; the ultimate wish-fulfillment of the intellectual.
As they say, NOT.
GB, THHotA
posted by Greg 8:43 AM
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