1) On how quotidian life is like killing zombies
Every zombie war is a war of attrition. It’s always a numbers game, and it’s more repetitive than complex. In other words, zombie killing is philosophically similar to reading and deleting four hundred work emails on a Monday morning, or filling out paperwork that only generates more paperwork, or following Twitter gossip out of obligation, or performing tedious tasks in which the only true risk is being consumed by the avalanche. The principal downside to any zombie attack is that the zombies will never stop coming; the principal downside to life is that you will never truly be finished with whatever it is you do.
2) On the ways technology has replaced memory
It’s uncomfortable to admit this, but technology has made the ability to remember things irrelevant. Intellectually, having a deep memory used to be a real competitive advantage. Now it’s like having the ability to multiply four-digit numbers in your head—impressive, but not essential.
3) On the conundrum of nostalgia
Obviously, most normal people don’t see nostalgia as particularly complex; it merely describes a pleasurable, bittersweet, cerebral sensation. But within culture writing, nostalgia is a fucking minotaur. As a culture writer, you must decide how you feel about nostalgia as a concept, because it usually suggests something deep and insidious. If you’re a nostalgic person, it means you’re mentally projecting a belief that life was better in the past, regardless of the evidence. You are trafficking in sentimentality and arguing that progress has been (on balance) bad for society. If you dislike nostalgia, it means you believe that same projection is an interpretative lie and that the world is constantly improving, even if it feels significantly worse.
4) On why it’s better, as an artist, to be loved than liked
One thing I’ve learned in my life is that—creatively—it’s better to have one person love you than to have ten people like you. It’s very easy to like someone’s work, and it doesn’t mean that much; you can like something for a year and just as easily forget it was ever there to begin with. But people remember the things they love. They psychologically invest in those things, and they use them to define their life (and even if the love fades, its memory imprints on the mind). It creates an immersive kind of relationship that bleeds into the outside world, regardless of the motivating detail. In pop music, the most self-evident example is the Grateful Dead, although Rush and the Smiths fall into the same class. Another example is Fugazi. Two others are Bikini Kill and the Insane Clown Posse. These are artists who diametrically impact how substantial factions of people choose to think about the universe. The social footprint they leave is deeper than their catalog.
5) On the existential self-awareness of Charlie Brown
At the age of eight, Charlie Brown is considering a reality that most people don’t confront until much later: a realization that the future is limited. He’s confronting the central myth of childhood, which is that anyone can be anything. Charlie Brown represents the downside of adult consciousness. And what does Lucy represent? Lucy represents the world itself. Lucy responds the way society always responds to any sudden insight of existential despair: How did you not know this already, Blockhead?
6) On “Smells Like Teen Spirit” as a historical metonym
When a collective history of the 1990s is written (and then rewritten, and then retweeted) in some distant future, all the pop historians will mention the impact of “Smells Like Teen Spirit.” That song will serve as lynchpin for whatever supposedly happened in the cultural chasm between Gordon Gekko and Mohamed Atta. Someday, “Smells Like Teen Spirit” will be part of the public domain, and filmmakers will use its opening riff to specify the ’90s in the same way we use “The Charleston” as shorthand for the ’20s. In a hundred years, it might be the only song from the ’90s the average American can recognize—the title and the artist will be lost, but its abstract sound will be emblematic of an era. Its caricature grungeness will survive, and all those future humans who think about the not-so-distant past will care about that. “Smells Like Teen Spirit” was over-produced and impenetrable, but its impact was organic and interpretative—it was an unanticipated watershed whose meaning changed over time.
7) On the gap between real life and online life
There are now two distinct worlds that people can inhabit simultaneously. But that also creates a new kind of problem: Because of technology, the gap between the life one inherits and the life one creates has become exponentially vast. The fake world is much, much larger. Every online existence is a noncommercial simulation of celebrity culture: Users develop a character (i.e., the best-case portrait of themselves) and then track the size of its audience (via the number of friends they acquire or page views they receive). Private citizens now face a dilemma previously reserved for the authentically famous: How do they cope with the disparity between how they are seen in the communal sphere and how they live in private?
8) On the bizarre loyalties of prestige-TV fans
Because TV is so simultaneously personal (it exists inside your home) and so utterly universal (it exists inside everyone’s home), people care about it with an atypical level of conversational ferocity—they take it more personally than other forms of art, and they immediately feel comfortable speaking from a position of expertise. They develop loyalties to certain characters and feel offended when those loyalties are disparaged.
9) On the ways technology has turned us all into low-stakes journalists
What I’ve come to accept (and this is both good and bad, but mostly bad) is that—for the rest of my life—I will never not instantaneously know about any marginally insane event. There’s just no way to avoid the information. The world is too mediated and interpersonal relationships are too connected. Since most adult relationships are now based around new technologies, it’s almost like there’s a built-in responsibility to immediately distribute whatever interesting information we acquire. People constantly complain about Facebook, but that doesn’t mean it hasn’t changed them; they’re complaining because it has changed them. And they know it. They can feel it. Everyone has become a special-interest newspaper. Everyone wants to break news.
Read the book:
Share This
