I'm extremely skeptical of digital-media rah-rahism because I find it's in itself ahistorical and insensitive to the small revolutions of the past - none of this remixing-and-reinterpreting the past is new, either - it's been going on as long as there were self-conscious humans, and if you don't believe me, here's some Renaissance, colonial neoclassical, and colonial-revival architecture for you, as just one of limitless examples. There really is nothing new under the sun, and making-the-new-look-old to play with the references to previous times is also not a new human inspiration.

Though the author of the first piece, I think, makes some good points, and there has been a huge democratization of self-documentation because we've improved the tools, certainly anyone who ran around in high school decades ago with a sketchbook or notebook knows what it is to consider the present a place to mine for contributions to a documented past.

I thought this was going to be about those "vintage photo" establishments with sets and costumes, about which I have been internally ranting for years. I hope some PhD candidate is mining their sample books for a glimpse into America's weird psyche as it expresses itself around guns, crime, and sexuality.

I liked this:

And this is how you know that the sort of person who uses the word “simulacra” with disdain doesn’t use tools, and only inhabits the realm of ideas as one inhabits a titanic, steam-driven airship; a fictional craft that never lands, never makes contact with the industrial revolution changing the world down here on the surface. There is no “inauthentic” in the machine shop. There are only tools, better tools, and tools that need to be fixed.

I liked:

There is no such thing as un-cool. You just haven’t found the other people who think it is awesome yet.

I thought this was going to be about E.F. Schumacher's Guide for the Perplexed.

I found the whole thing very disorienting. But then again, I was raised during the Temporal Age.

Things are ending, though. We are at a singularity in time. When I was a kid, you could look at the past and have some comfort in extrapolating that into the future. The future would be the same as the past, except newer.

We are at a moment in time, though, where you simply can't extrapolate the past. It's hard to know what the direction of the future will be.

Take for instance the plight of the Los Angeles Unified School District librarians. Some have been librarians since the 1970s; it's the only career they've ever known. A big part of their mission was to teach, but unless they can prove they have been teaching all these years, their livelihoods will vanish. Can you imagine working for 20 or 30 years in a field that, in a few short months is virtually eliminated?

And if the old standby's- library science, teaching, who knows what's next- vanish, what will replace them? Will there just be vacuum? What will there be? It's all a little unsettling, especially for us who were raised in the Temporal Age.

I wonder if he's a Walter Benjamin fan.