Lately there’s been a great deal of handwringing about “cancel culture” as evidence of increasing intolerance, even a rejection of liberalism. Instead of addressing these ideas, however, every essay on the topic seems to be about things that happened on Twitter. Maybe I’m being dense, but doesn’t this suggest the fault is the design of our spaces for conversation with their binary logic of like and mute, or follow and block? Stare at these buttons long enough and of course their language will infect how we think.
Meanwhile, I scroll past headlines that say things like “you won’t believe the fifty most incoherent things from the president’s rambling speech.”
I had big plans for today, but they went unfulfilled. I make demanding schedules then punish myself for breaking them. Thumbing through an old notebook tonight, I came across this quote from Ingmar Bergman: “I make all my decisions on intuition. But then, I must know why I made that decision. I throw a spear into the darkness. That is intuition. Then I must send an army into the darkness to find the spear. That is intellect.”
And what is my intuition telling me? To turn down the volume on the world so I can hear.
