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Pascal would also tell us that the stakes are high, quite high. “The only thing which consoles us for our miseries is diversion, and yet this is the greatest of our miseries,” he writes. “For it is this which principally hinders us from reflecting upon ourselves, and which makes us insensibly ruin ourselves. Without this we should be in a state of weariness, and this weariness would spur us to seek a more solid means of escaping from it. But diversion amuses us, and leads us unconsciously to death.”
Desire, Dopamine, and the Internet
The Convivial Society
Every form of rule has its own devotional objects. The theologian Ernst Troeltsch speaks of 'devotional objects that fascinate the imagination of the people'. These objects stabilize rule by making it habitual and anchoring it in the body. In German, devot also means submissive.
Smartphones have established themselves as the devotional objects of the neoliberal regime. As apparatuses that serve the purpose of submission, they resemble the rosary, which is just as mobile and handy. The like is the digital amen. By clicking on the like button, we submit ourselves to the context of rule.
Non-Things
Byung-Chul Han and Daniel Steuer
Despite Berry’s veneration of his ancestors, he can be unsparing about their sins. “I am forever being crept up on and newly startled by the realization that my people established themselves here by killing or driving out the original possessors, by the awareness that people were once bought and sold here by my people, by the sense of the violence they have done to their own kind and to each other and to the earth,” he wrote in his 1968 essay “A Native Hill.”
Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age
newyorker.com
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