mot juste (n) the exactly right word or phrasing
—Merriam Webster

The most important benefit of reading and listening at length is to develop more felicity with using words. Ways of phrasing and thinking rub off on you with exposure to language as wielded by other people. More so than just acquiring new clichés and newly coined buzzwords, I’m thinking of all the ways which thoughts and perceptions can be ordered and built up and expressed so as to bring you, the reader or listener, into a new relation to the world and everything in it. We learn language every time we partake in it. The reward, in turn, is that one’s own speech and writing and thinking becomes enriched. Our thoughts and utterances become more nimble and nuanced and precise—or, just as importantly, direct and coarse and vague—as required.…

It’s the same with all these authors—are they all falling into the same pit on purpose?

After my deep dive into as much McLuhan as I could lay a finger on, I started digging into the larger Media Ecology scene in 2018. Soon I began charting constellations of intellectuals and writers out of the reoccurring references to their each other across books; the sort of study analogized by hyperlinks on the web.

Out of what I’ve read, I’ll say now that popular books in the ’90s about “cyberspace”—the world behind your screen—had its capstone with Erik Davis’ TechGnosis, most recently updated and reissued in 2015. It’s a wonderful, encyclopedic book—and the reason it so disastrously crashes and burns in the final chapter is very instructive.

Davis references and builds upon the works by nearly all the other ‘90s authors …

Read it at the Default Wisdom Substack: https://default.blog/p/on-jonathan-haidts-anxious-generation

Figures without Ground

As it’s usually understood, post-modernism is a wildly relativistic cultural state of nihilism and social constructivism. Put simply, modernism was when we thought we figured out everything, and post-modernism is when that empowered us to start changing making up everything and we ended up knowing nothing. It’s basically all of “society” Wile E. Coyote running off the cliff while not looking down.

All the books from the ’90s which I read on the subject of media and internet culture referenced the same guy, Kenneth Gergen, as spokesman for social constructivism as a hopeful means for reconciling differences and creating a more tolerant and peaceful world. And so, back in the summer of 2018 or so, I read his most cited book, The Saturated Self, written in 1991. You’ll find this cited in a lot of books—which …

Acting the Age

Competent people are mature people. Competent people are surrounded by incompetence, but they understand why everyone around them is so incompetent. Furthermore, they have means of redressing that incompetence, and faith in their process. And so they aren’t so liable to get angry or upset about that incompetence. That is maturity.

Competent people are necessarily paternalistic in many senses. But with eloquence, grace, and faith in the processes which can reproduce more competence, they can be paternalistic without being condescending or judgemental in a non-constructive way..

By “processes which can reproduce more competence,” I am of course referring to the processes of maturation. Paternalism, of course, means being father-like. We can’t fault kids for being kids. But when it comes to incompetent adults, we also can’t be exactly like their fathers, except that we wish maturation for …