The iPod’s popularity has always implied the inevitability of a universal music library that anyone can tap into at anytime from anyplace. It would be a realization of the dreamspace in Twin Peaks: “Where we’re from, the birds sing a pretty song, and there’s always music in the air.” I figured people would ultimately pay a subscription fee for “all music anytime”—much as Netflix is evolving toward a monthly fee for “all movies anytime” (assuming bandwidth can keep up).

I have an essay up at the New Inquiry about shyness and social media. The basic argument is that social media helps shy people extract social capital from friendship but it doesn’t alleviate the allergies to human reciprocity that go along with being shy. Instead, social media naturalize the pathologies of shyness, generalizing them as more convenient than legacy modes of social interaction. What’s ultimately lost is the unmeasurable benefits of physical social presence and the intersubjectivity it facilitates, which I am coming to see as the only hope for escaping the insecurity that stems infinite reflexivity about our individual identity—a condition that only worsens if we try to combat it on its own terms (the more we try to define ourselves as isolate individuals, the more precarious that identity seems). It seems hopeless to strategize for social recognition rather than simply existing in the field it generates, yet that is precisely what social media tend to encourage with their “architectures of participation.” Anyway, I hope you will check it out—

I went to a talk last night at NYU by Mark Fisher about “hauntology,” which refers to a kind of intermediate space-time between places palpably shaped by organic time and nonplaces (shopping malls, etc.—see Marc Augé), which are wrenched out of time and posit an unending nontime, the end of history, an undisruptable retailing present that perpetually recurs. I didn’t really get what hauntology was all about: it seemed to have to do with cultural productions that are aware of the nonplace/nontime crisis—the way neoliberalism has foisted non-space/time on us, along with a subjectivity without depth that must flaunt its requisite flexibility by shuffling the deck of floating signifiers—and are “reflexive” and “critical” and “negative” about this condition. Fisher made this point with music: British pop music now is blithely appropriational of the past without foregrounding that in any particular way; retro has ceased to be a meaningful descriptor. So music made now would not be at all disruptive, he argues, if someone living in 1979 heard it. There would be no retroactive future shock. It doesn’t sound like the future; the future that should be occurring now has been thwarted, lost, effaced. The sense of cultural teleology is gone, vanished, perhaps, in the now pervasive relativism that regards all culture product as potentially valuable.

The instantly iconic photo of the Situation Room reminds me of Thomas Eakins’s masterpiece, The Gross Clinic.

This morning I opened a tub of yogurt and was confronted with the above image…

I was somewhat skeptical. If rewards are easy to get, maybe they are not actually rewards at all, and the word reward is being used to disguise what is really going on. At first I was thinking this was just another example of advertisers luring me into a species of magical thinking in which my specialness (that the company has somehow managed to recognize) allows me to take shortcuts not available to all the other losers out there. It tempts me to believe that what is true for me is different from what is true for the others, because after all, it is my world and the others are bit players in it. Almost all ads play on that sort of solipsism, dissolving the reality of other people’s claims, the interdependencies of society, to present a far more convenient world where our consumer decisions are sovereign in the broadest sense—the only kind of power that is real and worth exerting.