Silence
Silence… is necessary for the emergence of persons. It is taken from us by machines that ape people. We could easily be made increasingly dependent on machines for speaking and for thinking, as we are already dependent on machines for moving.
Ivan Illich, ‘Silence is a Commons’ (1982)
Substack has been constantly reminding me of my failure to publish new notes. This is not exactly surprising. It is a model that encourages a ‘pump and dump’ approach to writing, the content monster is always hungry. Now as Substack pushes to benefit from the slow implosion of Twitter, it is showing signs of being dragged down into the platform lifecycle that Cory Doctorow has proposed:
Here is how platforms die: first, they are good to their users; then they abuse their users to make things better for their business customers; finally, they abuse those business customers to claw back all the value for themselves. Then, they die.
Even if his attempted neologism misses the mark, Doctorow’s article is worth reading, as he offers a convincing account of the temptations that lead platforms to make the experience of using them progressively worse. Lets hope Substack can avoid this fate. Like many other writers, I have greatly benefited from having this way of sharing my work, especially as academic publishing continues to involute.
The current digital media ecosystem is one that emphasises voice. The combined logics of acceleration and escalation that Hartmut Rosa identifies as being distinctive of late modernity generate a fear of missing out by not participating or speaking up. The pressures and incentives are ones that mediate towards voice. Returning to Illich:
Unless you have access to a loudspeaker, you now are silenced.
He continued:
Just as the commons of space are vulnerable, and can be destroyed by the motorization of traffic, so the commons of speech are vulnerable, and can easily be destroyed by the encroachment of modem means of communication.
What Illich powerfully gestured towards is the importance of silence, and that it is something actively shared, it is a common good. Our attention suffers from the same overexploitation that marks so many spheres of human behaviour.
With that all in mind, I will continue to publish notes here when time, space and thought all align. I have a number of pieces I am hoping to share relatively soon. In the meantime, I remain open to invitations, collaborations and the like. I can be reached at either: info.hobson@gmail.com or christopher.hobson@anu.edu.au