Join 📚 J'S Highlights
A batch of the best highlights from what J's read, .
Jesus no, he said. I fucking hate the place. But they wouldn’t be paying me to do something I liked, would they? That’s the thing about work, if it was any good you’d do it for free.
Beautiful World, Where Are You
Sally Rooney
Zadie Smith saw all this coming more than a decade ago. Writing about the rise of Facebook, and by extension all the other social media platforms, she observed, “When a human being becomes a set of data on a website like Facebook, he or she is reduced. Everything shrinks. Individual character. Friendships. Language. Sensibility. In a way it’s a transcendent experience: we lose our bodies, our messy feelings, our desires, our fears.”
Still, I’m troubled by the comfort this analysis implies, the fact that it places the denial all on those who inhabit the Mirror World. It’s similar to the problem of climate change denial: There are the hard deniers, who are easy to spot, saying it’s all a hoax. But the bigger obstacle may always have been the soft deniers, the rest of us who know it’s real but act like it’s not, who keep forgetting, in myriad ways, both large and small.
...catch up on these, and many more highlights
Readwise