Perhaps now we can begin to grasp the words the chaplain will eventually say to Josef K.: “You don’t have to regard everything as true, you only have to regard it as necessary.” Nothing is stranger, or more misleading, or more deceptive, than necessity. In this sense, Josef K. has grounds for declaring: “The lie becomes the order of the world.” But as soon as it becomes such, it spreads out over every manifestation, and hence even over the judgment that condemns it. Without knowing it, Josef K. himself belongs in that moment to the court and to its lie.
Roberto Calasso, K
This month will already be the fourth anniversary of ‘Imperfect Notes’, which commenced in February 2021. It would seem that time flies when you are having fun, and when you are in a pandemic, and when wars are proliferating, and when the climate is warming... In a later note, I reflected on one of the rationales for writing here is that academics tend to love their cages, there is ‘an odd kind of learned helplessness, where we passively accept and replicate these flawed systems.’ The sharper, less generous rendering of this comes from an unpublished piece:
Contemporary academia, ceaselessly warped and worsened by the collision of petty politics and neoliberal nastiness, constantly demands more and more. As researchers, we are expected to produce research™: commodified, packaged, ready to be sold back to universities. The type of scholarship and thinking encouraged by such conditions is not only increasingly incremental and irrelevant, it tends to be narrow and banal.
Writing on Substack has been an attempt to look beyond the involuting world of academia. It took about 1.5 - 2 years to find an audience, and since then it has grown into a steady and healthy readership. I’m hoping to continue to slowly reach more people willing to think alongside me. The growing challenge is how to do so in conditions in which ‘“enshittification” is coming for absolutely everything’.
Once more, returning to Neil Postman’s Technopoly:
When the supply of information is no longer controllable, a general breakdown in psychic tranquillity and social purpose occurs. Without defenses, people have no way of finding meaning in their experiences, lose their capacity to remember, and have difficulty imagining reasonable futures.
True to form, the US and the internet / world is jumping ‘right to ludicrous speed’, increasingly lost in an ever-widening attention vortex. Our digital existence disintermediates and disorientates, trapping us in immediacy and reactivity. And yet, it is possible to make certain judgements in real time, for some things one does not need to ‘wait and see’. One can recognise and judge destructive and stupid behaviour for what it is, as it happens. In 2002 it was obvious that the US invading Iraq was a terrible idea, many experts said so, and literally millions of people protested against it. The main thing people got wrong was not that it was a bad choice, but how big a disaster it would become. At the time, many argued that the war was ‘really’ about oil. In 2024, the biggest importer of Iraqi oil was China, with 1.19 million barrels of oil per day being sent to America’s greatest strategic rival. If it was about oil, that oil certainly means something different now.
One notable difference between 2002 and 2025 is how much our capacity to think and judge has been degraded and denigrated. Neil Postman strongly sensed the direction of travel for a society that becomes overloaded with information, conditions in which capacities to read and reason erode. Again, the main thing he got wrong was how bad it would become.
The point to linger on is how poorly our information ecosystem is serving our need to comprehend, to communicate, to judge, and to think. Presently there is much that is happening (and not happening) that people are talking about and responding to, the vast majority of which seems unlikely to address or advance what they profess to care about.
In the prologue to Responsibility And Judgment, Hannah Arendt reflected:
thinking itself, as distinct from other human activities, not only is an activity that is invisible - that does not manifest itself outwardly - but also and in this respect perhaps uniquely, has no urge to appear or even a very restricted impulse to communicate to others.
Recall in a recent note, I quoted how Arendt kept ‘thinking without a banister’ for herself as a private metaphor. There is something quaint and special about this. Can one imagine that happening now? The demand is to share and comment. In a frictionless world of immediacy and transparency, the incentive and logic encourages posting and positioning, reacting and responding. The time for thinking shrinks, the space for thinking collapses.
She further reflected:
Philosophy is a solitary business, and it seems only natural that the need for it arises in times of transition when men no longer rely on the stability of the world and their role in it, and when the question concerning the general conditions of human life, which as such are properly coeval with the appearance of man on earth, gain an uncommon poignancy.
And so we are again in times in which there is a demand for difficult and deep thought, and yet our digitally mediated world largely works to impede and impair this from occurring. There is much to suggest that we are in conditions of genuine flux and transition, with the scope for agency being extremely unevenly distributed. And yet, we should all have some capacity for considering what we are attending to and how we do so. Increasingly it feels that one must be more conscious and deliberate to avoid being lost in a world of immediacy and reactivity. One must actively ‘opt in’ for thought and dialogue.
Recognising and reckoning with this, what I will be doing this month is sharing some unpublished writing and revised notes, as well as certain texts I have been learning from. The hope is that this is a way of continuing the practice of thinking through and with, but doing so in a way that allows for pacing and spacing.