Yes always good to attack each other's pain.
On Mon, 28 Sep 2020, Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) wrote:
Dear David and all,
Oh boohoo. Nick Couldry cum suis are rather late to the party of general
hopelessness and lack of future perspective that so many others have
suffered from for decades already. Who is the 'we' they are talking
about - all the white privileged men who could up until recently still
believe in the radical progressiveness of higher education and new media
technologies? Welcome to the despair of the rest of the world, Nick and
Bruce.
Cheers, Ingrid.
-----Original Message-----
From: nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-boun...@mail.kein.org> On
Behalf Of d.gar...@new-tactical-research.co.uk
Sent: Monday, 28 September 2020 10:53
To: Nettime <nettim...@kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier's
'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we are more
likely be suffering from the condition of Acedia. A malady of medieval monks
described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of dislocation when all
the normal future contexts that give our lives meaning are suspended no longer
providing stable temporal horizon. Here is an extract. At the bottom is a link
to the full essay.
"Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been
feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It?s a nameless
feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we regularly
do.
What?s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown adjustments, or
the worries about ourselves and our loved ones ? real though those worries are. It
isn?t even the sense that, if we?re really honest with ourselves, much of what we do
is pretty self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It
is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go
on doing much of what for years we?d taken for granted as inherently valuable."
"It?s here, moving back to the particular features of the global pandemic, that
we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and dislocation so many have been
feeling. The source of our current acedia is not the literal loss of a future; even
the most pessimistic scenarios surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The
dislocation is more
subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on which
just going on in the present relies.
Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons.
Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if
we don?t notice them very often. We don?t know how the economy will look, how
social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be
organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive.
What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It?s that, if we can no longer trust
in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that
we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for
granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing
right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value
in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or
institution-building. That?s what many of us are feeling. That?s today?s
acedia." Full essay here...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html
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