A Note to My Readers
dish.andrewsullivan.com
dish.andrewsullivan.com
When I didn't agree with his perspective I always found it extremely useful to read an honest and solid argument against my own position. I think you can ask no more from a writer than to challenge your assumptions, improve your reasoning skills and help foster empathy for those with whom you disagree.
One could start with his obsession with whether Sarah Palin's son Trig was Sarah's son or grandson.
Or the McCaughey piece widely believed to have helped tank Clinton's health care reform. An article that later had to be retracted because it was written by a republican operative and wildly deceptive. But hey, mission accomplished: health care reform dead for a generation. And the fact that it was completely incorrect, and contributed to an excess of 45k deaths per year, is just another trophy in Andrew's case.
Andrew is similarly famous for "are blacks genetically inferior? Let's discuss! I bet these nazis over here have some insightful opinions on this question!"
And who can forget the way he treated people opposing the Iraq war -- people far smarter than Andrew, who grudgingly was forced to admit his stupidity. Here's a quote for you:
"The middle part of the country - the great red zone that voted for Bush - is
clearly ready for war. The decadent Left in its enclaves on the coasts is
not dead — and may well mount what amounts to a fifth column." [1]
Finally, read anything Sullivan writes on taxes, and you'll quickly discover he's an innumerate idiot.
edit: I knew I'd seen these arguments all in one place before; read Mark Ames's article here https://www.nsfwcorp.com/dispatch/andrew-sullivan/
[1] copied here http://www.slate.com/articles/news_and_politics/chatterbox/2...
A very familiar sentiment shared by myself and many of my peers who are in the technical field. Nostalgic feelings are clearly on the rise, and in fact I think this might be a good thing... and it reinforces my own feeling that "The Internet" might one day be regarded as nothing more than a phase that simply faded in and out of our human evolution.
I have also caught the nostalgia bug, but I suspect that in the future we will come to see this as a bug in people, not in technology. And, eventually, I suspect that we will "fix" that bug, for better or worse, by more tightly integrating our consciousness with the hyper-reality which we have created.
In the end, we won't have evolved beyond the online world -- we will have evolved beyond the "actual" world, or put another way, we will have evolved beyond the human sentimentality that values reality over hyper-reality.
Now I just whisper commands into my smartwatch or wait for it to send me notifications. If anything, the mobile revolution has softened the tired hand wringing of "but but I'm on the computer so much." Yeah, if you are, then that's your lack of discipline and ability to find better solutions to your problems. Everything has been dumbed down and simple. Its actually quite pleasant unless you purposely make yourself a fb, twitter, and instagram addict.
There's probably a larger conversation here about what it means to have a good life and what it means to have the discipline to make it happen. So many people fall into the traps of outrage politics, low information buzzfeed-like articles, mindless skinner boxes posing as games, etc and blame the technology. Sorry hun, the technology isn't the problem - you are. Funny how when we finally get choice, we show the world how little class we actually have.
For those of us with a little self-control, the connected world is beyond amazing. I wish it got more appreciation. I'm so getting tired of the narrative that everything sucks in life. I don't think we really appreciate the wonders at our disposal.
People have always been nostalgic for a simpler time.
The digital world is just another tool in the human toolbox, how you use it is what defines you.
edit - I should have said something closer to "the digital world offers a very large _selection_ of tools added to the human toolbox" my sentence was guilty of the same problem that I was warning against :)
See "The Agenbite of Outwit," a short essay of his that I think is a good introduction.
http://projects.chass.utoronto.ca/mcluhan-studies/v1_iss2/1_...
People need to be more aware of the cognitive results of using their particular selection of tools.
Ah, yes, much like industrialization faded after the transcendentalists. /s
maybe you're just referring to a certain aspect of culture on the web when you refer to "The Internet". the culture of blogging, gossiping, and elevating online personas above other aspects of personality. that might certainly be a phase that fades away. however, there is nothing transitory about the cultural, political, and economic transformation that the global computer network creates.
On the other hand I absolutely loathe the still-spreading BuzzFeedification of virtually everything online.
It is really starting to drive me nuts. If only I knew one weird trick to filter all this shit out from the rest of what I use the Internet for, but even when you try to avoid it it tends to seep in through all of the social connections from other uses of the net.
They also produce actually good quality news from solid reporters.
Agreed.
The analogy I use with my friends is to think of TV and for that matter Cable TV before reality tv and where TV is at this point - 95% reality tv, with little or no substance or redeeming qualities.
This is where I feel the internet is right now, but also take the view, the good stuff is out there, you just have to dig a little to find it.
I started taking this viewpoint after hearing Henry Rollins spoken word tour where he really thought punk rock was dead. He then related an experience where he had a friend of his in Chicago take him to a hole in the wall club where 3 punk bands he had never heard of were playing. He said it was amazing. People smelled, the club was dark, the lightening was terrible, and the sound system was sketchy. But the bands played their guts out and blew him away.
He concluded this had become a theme in his life. A lot of things, like Punk music isn't dead, you just have to dig a little deeper these days to find the good stuff buried underneath all the BS and garbage we get feed everyday.
Outside, with other people building some tangible thing together. Something that years later we can point to and say yep, it was tough, but we did that.
Not only are we stuck with our heads stuck up computers, in 50 years everything we've done will be superceded by something vastly more cool and interesting. Within 100 years it'll all be gone.
There was an article on HN recently about video game addiction. You don't have to be addicted to video games to spend your entire life in front of a screen, being a slave to IM and email, and miss out on all of the important things.
ADD: Instead of 50 and 100 years, make that 20 and 40 years. We'll still be here when it all vanishes.
Which professions don't have that property? Not many. Science and writing/art give you a chance for that kind of longevity, I suppose -- although even then, doing something that has any real impact 50+ years later is difficult and very rare.
If you choose for example math, if you are very lucky you will get your own course in a math degree, like Fourier or Galois. The problem is that "your" course will cover not only your work but also the improvements of the next generations, and your exact work will be only a small part. Another problem is that there are only about 10 places for a full math course with a mathematician name, so it's a very difficult to enter this club. (It's easier than building a transoceanic channel, but much difficult than building a cathedral.)
Relationships are created, prolonged, and destroyed every single day online. Business deals, friendships, everything, and that integration is only going to get tighter as time goes on.
The idea that no "important things" are happening in front of a screen, in 2015, doesn't even pass the laugh test.
When I was in journalism school, I had several classes that were basically "do reporting." Deadline was 5pm and we had to produce radio, TV or newspaper stories by then—whatever the news of the day happened to be. During those semesters I was stupendously well-informed. I'd be monitoring the news wires all day, updating or reshuffling stories to keep up with events, writing and rewriting stories on the stuff that I thought was most important. Sure, we were just students, but I got a taste of the whole "fast-paced newsroom" thing.
Right after graduation, I completely unplugged and went on a 3-month bicycle trip. I rode all day and camped near the road each night. Sometimes I'd make detours to go hiking or canoeing at a particular spot. That summer I hardly spent any time indoors, let alone looking at screens or connected to the internet.
The effect on my mind was stunning. I had a completely different perception of time, distance, the weather, food, my own body, other people... everything! Afterwards I joined an internet startup, and went back to the connected lifestyle, but wow, I'll never forget it.
So go for it. There are ways to escape the screens, for a summer or a lifetime, if you want.
As others have pointed out in the past, I'm old enough to remember how much the days before ubiquitous internet sucked. It was hard to connect with like minded people, hard to find and cross verify information, hard to communicate with the few people that you were close to. Everything was just hard. The internet makes all the things that are important much easier, in ways that are difficult to imagine and easy to take for granted. Nostalgia has always existed and will always exist, and for understandable reasons. I'm sure there were cavemen who said "Things were so much simpler before fire. Now it's always burn this and cook that. Who can keep up?" But it doesn't last, nostalgia gives way to convenience every time. People want to think about the past, but live in the future.
If I had to guess, Sullivan's problem isn't so much with the digital life but with the fact that he makes a living from being a media personality. When you have millions of twitter follows and facebook friends and whatever instragram has, life must be very overwhelming indeed. The PBS special on Edison last night mentioned that the inventor felt overwhelmed receiving a dozen letters per day. Poor Sullivan might get that many communications from strangers every minute. Of course he and others feel like they need to unplug from time to time. But that's the price we pay for the opportunities afforded us by such a powerful medium, especially those of us who choose to profit from a culture of attention and celebrity.
My lack of friends has created a digital Walden Pond of sorts. I don't use facebook, twitter or any software with insta/snap/what in it's name. Don't get a lot of email and few texts. I'm sure that most people are better informed, better connected and generally cooler than I am. But it's quiet here on the pond, and I wouldn't trade it for anything.
I agree, and would like to add I find it odd to differentiate between a digital world, and a somehow more real world, as if the digital world isn't real. The people we interact with are real, the words that form in my head as I type them are real, and the social interactions are very much real.
Unfortunately I can't remember where I heard it first, but someone said that people on their phones all the time are not anti social, but hyper social.
I feel like Ta-Nehisi Coates Matthew Yglesias, and Johnathan Chait are the only other voices that come close.
I generally always feel like Taibbi is deliberately writing to get a rise out of people. I didn't particularly like Sullivan --- my opinions of him hardened during the first term of Bush II --- but I did feel like he was trying to be careful.
I dispute the idea that it's hard to find similarly careful journalists today. What's perhaps hard is to find blogospheric gravity wells like Sullivan. This thread compared him to Ta-Nahisi Coates and Matt Yglesias, but neither perfectly fit Sullivan's mold. Coates doesn't cover politics, and Yglesias is an econ reporter. You have to assemble a Sullivan out of parts now, but I think those parts are of higher quality than Sullivan's (say) 2005 competition.
What's going on here? I think we can agree we're all sad Andrew Sullivan is quitting The Dish, but are we symbolically sad over what that blog represented which will now never exist again, or are we just sad that a pretty great blogger won't be blogging any more?
Long-form blogs are perhaps less suited to the mobile era, but who can say for sure?
One thing I've admired him for was he was one of the few high profile supporters of the Iraq war who changed his mind and publicly announced it.
I can't say I'm surprised, his announcement is perfectly understandable!
Andrew identifies as a conservative of some flavor, which I certainly am not. As a result, on the days that I only have 20 minutes to spend on current events, getting the news from his site made me feel like I am doing something right.
What other comparable resources exist?
Is this an increasing trend?
After about 3 months, I realised I didn't need to ALWAYS be on twitter to be updated about the latest piece of tech news. I didn't need to ALWAYS be on my RSS feeds for every possible update in my other fields of interest.
As a result I have occasionally missed out on updates of new programming language features, and some security updates. But none of it has ever affected me in a way that made me wish I was on to things sooner. (except for effing shellshock. I just backed up, wiped, and switched off both my servers till it became safe)
He/She wants to write a book and has time for his family and take care of his health.
The writer seems to be very good: A world of mass intimacy with their reader, he loves them, he cares and that is the reason I find so hard to go away.