Irina Dumitrescu:

Lately I look at the way people around me accept technology without question and worry that I’m becoming a reactionary. I don’t want to be that person — the one who grumbles about cell phones in children’s hands and social media and the polished bilge of ChatGPT substituting for the writing people make, writing that’s unexpected and chaotic and brilliant and disappointing. If I felt we could have both — the efficiency of the ever-improving machines and our sweaty, bumbling, warm humanity — I’d celebrate both. But I don’t think that’s what happens in real life. In real life, there’s only so much time, and only so much attention. And only so many values we can claim to hold at once. Something will give.

Co-sign—even though the thought of doing even a remotely formal style of dancing, whether with strangers or a loved one, makes my skin want to crawl right the way off my body and into a wardrobe. It is not reactionary to question technology; on the contrary, solutionism is so much a part of the hegemonic dogma at this point that it is more reactionary to insist on technological solutions to the heaping social problems of the moment.

Re: “something will give”, I know that such a claim is liable to accusations of wishy-washiness, but nonetheless, as I was saying to L____ over the weekend, there is nonetheless a feeling in me that something will give, indeed that something must give. The obvious retort would be “that’s wishful thinking”, and maybe that is so—but the counter-retort would be that the collective feeling that something must give is surely a precondition of something giving. If the litany of capitalist realism is “There Is No Alternative”, then the inchoate and yearning sense that there must be an alternative is perhaps akin to the scent of the rains coming after a long drought.