The Culture is Changing at Warp Speed
Here's my latest briefing paper on arts, media, tech, and society
If you want sports talk or political spin, you’ve come to the wrong place.
I’m concerned about the culture—and you should be too. The changes underway there are just as important as the election.
In fact, they might even be more important. That’s because political agendas change so slowly nowadays. But the culture is shifting at warp speed—and not always for the better.
Here’s my outlook on the next four years:
Media and consumer tech will change much faster than legislative initiatives.
AI will disrupt things more than any vote in the Senate.
More conflict will happen at educational institutions than in Congress.
Mark Zuckerberg, Elon Musk, Sam Altman, and Tim Cook will have far more power over your life than the President’s cabinet appointees.
Dysfunctional tech, manipulative platforms, misleading media reports, and false search engine results will hurt you more than your stupid governor.
Humanistic values can make a more meaningful contribution to a healthy future than political rhetoric.
That’s why I provide these briefing papers on arts, media, and culture.
I report on more than a dozen recent developments below. Some of them may amuse or alarm you, but the main focus is to prepare all of us for what’s coming ahead. Right now it’s still blurry in the headlights, but won’t be for long.
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Colleges are now shutting down at the rate of one per week.
The backlash against college is real. I’ve been a longtime champion of higher education, but even I’ve started to doubt whether benefits outweigh costs for most students.
I’m certainly not alone. According to the Washington Post:
About one university or college per week so far this year, on average, has announced that it will close or merge. That’s up from a little more than two a month last year….
So many colleges are folding that some students who moved from one to another have now found that their new school will also close, often with little or no warning. Some of the students at Newbury, when it closed in 2019, had moved there from nearby Mount Ida College, for example, which shut down the year before.
A side story: My wife has been counseling a teenage girl who is undecided about college. This young lady comes from a poor family, and worked long hours during high school to help pay bills.
My wife offered to help out with college applications, but the teen told her last week that she has already decided on a different path—she is entering a training program for auto mechanics. She has already done some work in the field, and loves fixing cars.
It’s hard to deny the logic of her decision. Auto mechanics earn more than most college graduates, and have a lot more flexibility in their hours, work mobility, etc. She can start earning money very soon, and not live under the debt burden of student loans.
This will be the pathway for many young people—and they aren’t making a mistake.
Meta wants schools to put students into virtual reality headsets for their ‘education’.
Youngsters are already immersed in Meta’s online stimuli during their free time—so why not force them to spend school hours in the Metaverse too?
That’s the current plan coming out of Mark Zuckerberg’s empire. According to a company press release:
To make it easier for educators, later this year Meta will be launching a new product offering for Quest devices dedicated to education….It will allow teachers, trainers and administrators to access a range of education-specific apps and features, and make it possible for them to manage multiple Quest devices at once…..This will save teachers time and allow students to pick up the headsets and get started right away—something that educators using our devices have consistently told us they want.
I’m not sure what is more alarming—a trillion dollar corporation trying to force young people into its dodgy virtual reality Potemkin village, or the total lack of interest from the media in covering these development.
But this latest initiative certainly deserves scrutiny, and perhaps a tough stance from your local school board.
Postmodern novelist Paul Auster is dead at age 77
In its in-depth obituary, the New York Times described Auster as the “Patron Saint of Literary Brooklyn.” There were many ironies and incongruities in both Auster’s life and fictions, and the Times calls special attention to this forward-looking writer’s reliance on backward-looking tech:
He eschewed computers, often writing by fountain pen in his beloved notebooks. “Keyboards have always intimidated me,” he told The Paris Review in 2003.
“A pen is a much more primitive instrument,” he said. “You feel that the words are coming out of your body, and then you dig the words into the page. Writing has always had that tactile quality for me. It’s a physical experience.”
He would then turn to his vintage Olympia typewriter to type his handwritten manuscripts.
I’ve published essays on five Paul Auster books on The Honest Broker:
The New York Trilogy (1987)
Leviathan (1992)
Man in the Dark (2008)
Invisible (2009)
4-3-2-1 (2017)
For newcomers to his work, I’d recommend his short novel City of Glass from The New York Trilogy.
Spotify CEO gets mocked for cluelessness—after expressing surprise that laying off 1,500 employees had negative consequences.
Spotify has finally achieved profitability after 18 years—but only through aggressive price increases, layoffs, and the alleged use of AI tracks to avoid paying royalties.
On the earnings call, the CEO said he was surprised that getting rid of almost 20% of his employees had such negative consequences. He was promptly ridiculed in the media for this obtuse statement.
Russia creates its own propaganda version of Wikipedia—copying the entire website, and censoring everything it doesn’t want people to know.
Russia has replaced Wikipedia with a state-sponsored encyclopedia that is a clone of the original Russian Wikipedia but which conveniently has been edited to omit things that could cast the Russian government in poor light.
This is why I prefer physical books. Nobody can erase facts from my bookshelf. But in the digital world, this is increasingly becoming the norm.
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