“Most things are never meant”*…
From Dan Russell‘s nifty (and in this instance, all-too-appropriately-named) newsletter, Unanticipated Consequences, an “appreciation” of a gentleman into whom (Roughly) Daily has run before (e. g, here)…
If you set out to design a supervillain to destroy the biosphere, create a jovial, optimistic mechanical engineer from Ohio who wanted to make the world a slightly more convenient place. Thomas Midgley Jr. was not a mad scientist plotting global ruin from a diabolical evil-genius lair, he was an enthusiastic tinkerer, and as a friend once commented, had “ten ideas a minute, nine of them screwy, but the tenth a lulu.” He wrote light verse, loved music, and held over a hundred patents. As a teenager, he used elm-tree juice instead of spit to throw unhittable curveballs. He was, by all accounts, a charming guy who merely sought practical solutions to the day’s pressing technological annoyances. What could go wrong?
Yet, by the time his career was over, Midgley had introduced two of the most globally destructive chemical compounds in human history. He became, as one historian aptly put it, a one-man environmental disaster. His legacy is the ultimate cautionary tale for the modern innovator: a masterclass in the massive, terrifying, and utterly unanticipated consequences of design choices…
[Russell tells the stories of Midgley’s pair of consequential inventions: the additive “lead” (tetraethyl lead, a neurotoxin) in gasoline and the refrigerant CFC (the use of which ripped a hole in the ozone layer). He recounts Midgley’s death (literally) in the grip of another of his inventions, then concludes…]
… What do we do with the ghost of Thomas Midgley? It is easy, with a century of hindsight, to look back at the millions of cardiovascular deaths, the plummeting IQs, and the shredded stratosphere, and label him a monster. But that ignores the fundamental mechanics of innovation. The Midgley story is a stark reminder of the massive delta between human intent and ecological reality.
When we invent, we are almost always trying to solve a local, immediate pain point. Engines rattle and refrigerators explode. Midgley looked at these problems and offered brilliant and simple solutions. But biology and atmosphere are deeply intertwined and heavily networked systems. The consequences of introducing synthetic compounds into these systems don’t spool out in days or weeks; they unfold across generations.
Midgley did not want to poison the world. He wrote poetry about human dominance over the Earth, genuinely believing that science could only make the future better. If forced to concede the environmental damage of his inventions, he likely would have plunged headlong into the lab to invent safe substitutes. But he lacked the conceptual tools, the time horizon, and the humility to imagine that the very things that made his inventions magical—the cheap and effective solution of lead and the unyielding stability of Freon—were exactly what made them apocalyptically awful for humanity.
The history of Thomas Midgley is a brilliantly clear, slightly horrifying reminder: sometimes, the most dangerous things in the world are brought to us by a friendly guy with a periodic table in his pocket, just trying to stop that really annoying noise in his car…
The bane of unintended consequences: “New Ways to Poison an Entire Planet: The Legacy of Thomas Midgley, Jr.”
* Philip Larkin, “Going, Going“
###
As we consider consequences, we might acknowledge that there are some consequences ourecall that on this date in 1908, at around 7:15 am, northwest of Lake Baikal, Russia, a huge fireball nearly as bright as the Sun was seen crossing the sky. Minutes later, there was a huge flash and a shock wave felt up to 400 miles away. Over Tunguska, a meteorite over 50-m diameter, travelling at over 60,000 mph penetrated Earth’s atmosphere, heated to about 10,000 ºC and detonated 6 to10 km above the ground. The blast released the energy of 10-50 Megatons of TNT, destroying 830 square miles of forest and leaving almost no trace of life. (As the area was essentially unpopulated, estimates are that only three people died.) The Tunguska rock came from the Taurid Meteor storm that crosses Earth’s orbit twice a year.
Midgley’s story is a reminder that we need to take all of the care we can to protect ourselves from unintended harms that we might inflict on oursleves. A meteor strike is, of course, not the product of a human choice– and in 1908, outside our control. But today, there is something we can do: check in with the B612 Foundation.
“Our country is now taking so steady a course as to show by what road it will pass to destruction, to wit: by consolidation of power first, and then corruption, its necessary consequence”*…
Scheduling Note: as a consequence of long meetings scheduled to start very early, (Roughly) Daily will be off tomorrow/Monday and Wednesday. There should be a post on Tuesday, and regular service should resume on Thursday…
Corruption in the U.S. has a long and costly history, intertwining both government and corporations. Our current moment is feeling especially “dirty“– and disfunctional— at both levels.
Eric Ries was a founder of the Lean Start-Up movement and the founder of the Long-Term Stock Exchange. His new book, Incorruptible: Why Good Companies Go Bad (highly recommended), tackles the issue head-on. Here, a short excerpt, explaining why…
Not all forms of making money are equal. Some create wealth; others destroy it. Over the centuries, when people have gone searching for the moral logic of capitalism, they always hit this same bedrock principle: Fully informed, uncoerced, voluntary transactions create surplus value because both parties end up better off.
Think about your last genuinely good purchase. You valued the product more than the price you paid, so you are better off. But the seller, too, is better off (otherwise they would not have sold). Both parties are wealthier. When this happens, it’s a bit of a magic trick. In an instant, new value exists that did not a moment before. This wealth was not stolen; it was generated.
But this only works when the exchange is truly voluntary and informed. Remove any of these conditions and the mechanism breaks.
This is why embezzlement, coercion, fraud, bribery, and deception are wrong. It’s not only because they are illegal or even immoral. It’s because they corrupt the fundamental premise of our entire economic system. They transform transactions meant to create value into ones that destroy it.
This trajectory is so common these days that we hardly know what to call it. The answer is simple. Since every version of it shares the same value-destroying logic, regardless of whether the violation is illegal or even immoral, we should use the same word to describe them all: corruption.
Our modern sense of “corruption” has become catastrophically narrow. What I’m talking about is something much broader than bribery or embezzlement. (After all, the Latin corrumpere means “to break completely.”) Corruption breaks the logic of capitalism itself.
Every Ponzi scheme, every hidden externality, every unit of extracted value is a drag on our whole economy’s potential. These corruptions don’t just harm their immediate victim; they erode trust, increase transaction costs, and destroy the civic infrastructure that makes efficient markets possible. The hidden economic costs are staggering. The truth is that capitalism succeeds not because of these widespread violations but despite them…
As the “father of capitalism” himself, Adam Smith, said: “Justice… is the main pillar that upholds the whole edifice. If it is removed, the great, the immense fabric of human society… must in a moment crumble into atoms.” (Theory of Moral Sentiments, Chapter III)
Diagnosing the disease that threatens us: “Corruption, Defined,” from @ericries.bsky.social.
* Thomas Jefferson
###
As we grapple with graft, we might recall that on this date in 2002, three days after being found guilty of obstruction of justice for shredding the thousands of documents and deleting emails and company files that tied the firm to its audit of Enron, accounting firm Arthur Andersen was preparing its appeal.
Legal department member Nancy Temple and David Duncan, the lead partner for the Enron account, were cited in the legal action as the responsible managers in the scandal because they ordered subordinates to shred relevant documents. Duncan himself pleaded guilty in federal court in Houston to obstruction of justice on April 10, 2002, saying that he had ordered the destruction of documents and also personally destroyed documents.
The conviction was later overturned by the U.S. Supreme Court (on the grounds that the jury had not been properly instructed on the charge against Andersen). The Supreme Court ruling theoretically left Andersen free to resume operations. However, the damage done to the Andersen name was so great (not just from the Enron scandal but also from others involving Andersen accounting malpractice, such as WorldCom a year after Enron) that it did not return as a viable business even on a limited scale in the years after the ruling.
Although only a small number of Arthur Andersen’s employees were involved with the scandal, the firm was effectively put out of business; the SEC is not allowed to accept audits from convicted felons. The company surrendered its CPA license and 85,000 employees lost their jobs.
“Paper is to write things down that we need to remember. Our brains are used to think.”*…
Henrik Karlsson argues that it can be more symbiotic than that…
Every few months I will read a tweet, or have a conversation, that makes me feel this is important, I must remember this. Often, these epiphanies are accompanied by a sense that I actually know this already, it had just somehow slipped my mind.
And for a few days, I do remember: my life shimmers with a new intensity, and I live the truth of what I grasped. But then, inevitably, the conveyor belt of things to pay attention to keeps churning, and my mind gets filled with small problems I need to solve, or new epiphanies or random noise, like news, and the shining fades from my eyes—I regress to being the same person as ever.
The Latin word for the tendency to lose track of what matters in the cacophony of things that attract our attention is stultitia. “Stultitia,” writes Michel Foucault in “Self-writing,”
is defined by mental agitation, distraction, change of opinions and wishes, and consequently weakness in the face of all the events that may occur; it is also characterized by the fact that it turns the mind toward the future, makes it interested in novel ideas, and prevents it from providing a fixed point for itself in the possession of acquired truth.
You can’t just read a blog post about high agency, get filled with a sense of possibility, and become, from then on, an agentic person. As John Gray puts it in his monograph on J.S. Mill, our character is “a cluster of habitual willings.” For changes to our behavior to become permanent, we must become different people.
In the same way that it is not enough to make a resolution that you will learn the piano, it is not enough to realize that when the kids act out, you shouldn’t lose your temper but slow down, listen, and regulate their nervous systems with the help of yours. Imagine how good a person I would be if having insights were enough! But reacting to the frustrations of your children with calm and curiosity is a skill as much as playing the piano is—and as with the piano, the act of learning it requires rewiring your nervous system through sustained attention and practice. Realizing the value of acting in a certain way might give you a temporary motivation to do it. But in order to actually live in accordance with what you believe in long-term, you must make it a habit.
And this is much harder than making a habit out of playing the piano. When you’re trying to make something like piano practice a habit, the standard advice is to chain it onto some already existing habit—to practice immediately after you brush your teeth in the morning, for example, or after you change out of your work clothes in the afternoon. Chaining the new habit to an already existing one provides a predictable trigger that helps remind you to practice. But the habits that make up our characters often do not follow a predictable schedule like this. I never know, for instance, when our children will act out (except that it will usually be when I’m least capable of handling it with grace—whenever both they and I are unusually hungry and tired). The conflicts seem to come out of nowhere, so I have to, somehow, always be ready to act in the proper way. I need to have the right reaction “ready at hand” (procheiron), as the Greek-philosopher-Roman-slave Epictetus put it. If Johanna and I talked about how we want to deal with the kids’ conflicts the night before, I will nearly always handle the situation well. The problem is to keep it top of mind.
During the first two centuries of the Roman Empire, there spread a practice known as hypomnēmata, a type of notetaking system, used as a tool for meditation, in which the writer would store quotes from books they had read. Each day, often in the morning, the notetaker would open their notebook and look for a passage relevant to something they were struggling with, and then they would meditate on that—unpacking it, making the idea top of mind, ensuring it was alive in them. If they needed courage, for instance, they could meditate on an anecdote that made it real for them what it meant to act bravely. The idea was that over time, the insights they gathered by reading would be transformed into character, something deeply ingrained in their way of thinking and seeing and acting.
This was, as I understand it, an exercise designed to combat the problem I outlined above. Meditating on what matters is a simple habit, which you can chain onto your morning routine, but it reinforces the habits you can’t plan, the habits that make up your character. It was, in the words of the French classicist Pierre Hadot, a spiritual exercise—an exercise because it required work and discipline, spiritual because it engaged the whole person, not just their intellect, but their emotions and their moral character. It was an attempt to treat the formation of character as a skilled practice, as something you can deliberately train and improve through targeted exercises…
…
… I have often noticed that my experience of reality improves if I write and think about something.
But it strikes me now that the practice Foucault wrote about was probably more transformative than what I’ve ended up doing. Essay writing is incredibly time-consuming, and a lot of that time is spent on things that aren’t self-transforming: I spend less time reshaping my mind than I spend solving literary-technical problems that help me write more functional and beautiful essays, for the joy of the craft and for the benefit of readers. Another limitation of my practice is that when an essay is done, I move on. The ideas—though they have been much deepened and more firmly lodged in my mind—fall out of attention and start to fade.
There is an element of self-deception involved here. I like to write essays, so it is comforting to think of it as a powerful practice, something that helps me live more fully and grow as a person. But if I look at it soberly, it is clear to me that essay writing is not a practice that is ideal for the purpose of ethopoiesis.6 It is common to think that what we do achieves what we want it to achieve, even if there is no evidence for it. There are many practices that promise to transform and improve us—therapy, meditation, psychedelics—, but that branding doesn’t mean that they actually do much for us: it is common to see people use these techniques for years without any obvious progress on their problems. If you want to achieve a particular outcome, it is important to start from that goal and evaluate which practices actually help you.
The most important ideas we need to return to weekly, even daily. Essay-writing, then, is not a functional substitute for having a practice that keeps the important truths top of mind, day after day. But it did help me reach that conclusion…
On a particular kind of commonplace book and staying centered: “How not to forget what matters,” from @henrikkarlsson.bsky.social.
* Abert Einstein
###
As we contemplate contemplation, we might that it was on this date in 1949 that the first science fiction series debuted on American television, the DuMont Network’s Captain Video and His Video Rangers. Written by such luminaries as Isaac Asimov, Arthur C. Clarke, James Blish, and Jack Vance, it was– even in its time, when early television productions often were thrown-together affairs– considered crude, owing much to the fact that the daily show was done live on a meager budget. Indeed, the actors were paid so little they actually made more money from appearing in character at supermarket openings, county fairs, and the like than they did from their salaries.
Still, it ran for a total of 1,537 episodes, and quickly spawned competitive sci-fi offerings like Tom Corbet, Space Cadet and Space Patrol.
For episodes on YouTube, see here.
“The unpredictable and the predetermined unfold together to make everything the way it is.”*…
Thinking– worrying– about the future occupies more and more of our mindshare. How do we ready ourselves for the impacts of the playing out of the myriad uncertainties we face? Your correspondent’s approach-of-choice has been scenario planning (see, e.g., here and here), a method of thinking through and making sense of those unknowns. But as we do that, we have to think against the backdrop of “pre-determined elements”– forces that are going to accrue no matter how the uncertainties resolve, no matter which scenario unfolds.
Old friend and colleague Art Kleiner has dropped a thoughtful– and provocative– reminder of just how important understanding pre-determined elements is…
Pierre Wack, the scenario pioneer who built Royal Dutch Shell’s celebrated foresight practice, sometimes explained his methods by talking about the Ganges river in northern India. If there are heavy monsoon rains over the Himalayan headwaters, you can tell with certainty that there will be a flood five days later at Allahabad, which is 650 miles downstream. Five days after that, he said, the floods would reach Benares.
“Now the people down here in Benares don’t know that this flood is on its way,” he said, “but I do. Because I’ve seen it! This is not fortune telling. This is not crystal-ball gazing. This is merely describing future implications of something that has already happened.”…
… Most of us, peering ahead, fix on anxieties and uncertainties that may or may not happen: elections, technologies, and potential crises. We imagine what might happen, and get into the habit of thinking that our fate depends on this contingency. For instance, we pin our hopes on a particular candidate getting into office.
An alternative [your correspondent would suggest: “a critical complement”] is to look at the predetermined elements in our world as the playing field. When we recognize the true certainties, we can leap ahead to framing our choices and modulating our expectations. For example: We know it will take a long time to mitigate the effects of the climate crisis, so we invest accordingly in renewable energy. We also know our efforts to manage artificial intelligence need to happen practically overnight, so we work to rapidly build the necessary skills.
There are two kinds of predetermined elements. The first-order trends are basic and happening now. They follow directly from events that already took place — children already born, tons of carbon already in the air, debts already incurred. The second-order ones arise from the combination of first-order forces. Their effects are less predictable, but we can’t avoid the pressures they will place on us.
Taken together, they tell us the world of the 2030s will be markedly different from today and from most predictions being made today. For system leaders, a good list of predetermined elements gives you a start on developing scenarios that help you move to a creative orientation: creating the future you want.
I do a lot of work with scenarios, particularly at New York University’s Interactive Telecommunications Program, where I teach a graduate-level course on the future of media and technology. Here is my list of predetermined elements facing us today…
[Art shares a meaty– and bracing– list of both first- and second-order “pre-determineds.” He concludes…]
… The persistence of the ordinary. Against all the above sits the most underrated predetermined element of all: most people, most days, will live recognizable lives. The school, the clinic, the shop, and the family table endure because institutions change far more slowly than the forces acting on them. This is not complacency; it is the buffer that keeps the surprises survivable — and the reason that system leadership is generally local.
It’s as if we’re all driving down a treacherous highway. We notice the accidents and cars being towed off the shoulder, and the road rage as cars cut each other off. We don’t pay attention to all the drivers who stay in lane, leaving enough space between themselves and the car in front of them. Many of those drivers have experienced past accidents; they don’t want any more. If there were more of them, the road wouldn’t be nearly so scary. Uncertain: the prevailing attitudes and what it takes to bring people to a more system-oriented perspective...
[He then turns to the implications of his insight…]
… The discipline of scenario thinking is a discipline of attention. It tells us where to pay attention. Which predetermined elements affect us most? Which opportunities should we focus on? And which changes do we care about most urgently?
It is humbling and steadying at once: humbling because so much of the future is already decided, steadying because so much of it depends on what we do together.
The predetermined elements provide a working map. The first-order forces — the aging, the warming, the sun, the grid, the genome, the debt — are the ground on which the next decade must be built. The second-order combinations — cities, pressures, robots, possible relief — are where our work takes place…
Art’s conclusion is worth underling: first-order predetermineds are the terrain on which we will have to build our future; second order-pre-determineds are (a large part of) the agenda of issues we’ll have to address as we do; uncertainties are the unpredictable “weather” in which we’ll have to do that– guided throughout by our values and the hope that powers them. As Dennis Gabor said: “The future cannot be predicted, but futures can be invented.”
We already know much of what’s coming in the 2030s: “The Futures We Can’t Avoid.” Eminently worth reading in full.
* Tom Stoppard
###
As we buckle up, we might recall that it was on this date in 1927 that “The Cyclone,” a wooden roller coaster in Luna Park at Coney Island, opened to the public. It wasn’t the first roller coaster at Coney Island; but with total track length of 2,640 feet, a maximum height of 75 feet, and cars that reached 60 miles per hour on a ride, The Cyclone became a signature attraction. Operating still, it was declared a New York City designated landmark in 1988 and was placed on the National Register of Historic Places in 1991.
“Some confuse authenticity, which they ought always to aim at, with originality, which they should never bother about”*…
Critics mourn a bygone cultural era. But, as Audrey Wollen reminds us, nostalgia for the new isn’t new…
You could be forgiven for thinking things—art, books, music, clothes—were irretrievably dire. Almost a decade ago, Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that “culture appears more monolithic than ever. . . . Technology conspires with populism to create an ideologically vacant dictatorship of likes.” In a 2023 piece in The New York Times Magazine, Jason Farago claimed: “We are now almost a quarter of the way through what looks likely to go down in history as the least innovative, least transformative, least pioneering century for culture since the invention of the printing press.” A headline last year at The Atlantic read: “Is This the Worst-Ever Era of American Pop Culture?” New York recently released “The Stupid Issue,” asking, “Is 2025 the stupidest year on record?” and answering with “12 signs of a culture in decline,” in the same listicle format often blamed for dwindling journalistic standards.
Apparently, I’ve been living in this arid desert of innovation for my entire adolescence and adult life. In 2011, the year I turned nineteen, the music critic Simon Reynolds made the following diagnosis in his book Retromania: “Instead of being about itself, the 2000s has been about every other previous decade happening again all at once: a simultaneity of pop time that abolishes history while nibbling away at the present’s own sense of itself as an era with a distinct identity and feel.” In 2014, in the introduction to his influential essay collection Ghosts of My Life, the cultural theorist Mark Fisher wrote, “It’s clear to me that now the period from roughly 2003 to the present will be recognised—not in the far distant future, but very soon—as the worst period for (popular) culture since the 1950s.” (An odd claim, as the 1950s saw the birth of rock and roll in the United States, major breakthroughs in jazz, and Singin’ in the Rain.)
“Very soon” has arrived, the simultaneity of time notwithstanding, inaugurated by W. David Marx’s recent book, Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century, which aims to historicize the years from 2000 to 2025 as a period of creative emptiness and stagnation so intractable that it will be remembered (or, rather, is being remembered, through the anticipation of remembrance) as voided time, a dark age. Blank Space offers 281 fast-paced, rollicking pages that provide an overview of an extraordinary number of cultural events—including the flourishing of reality television, Web 2.0 and social media, monumental social and political movements from Occupy Wall Street to MAGA—only to culminate with the bewildering conclusion that nothing artistically transformative has occurred.
In his closing chapter, Marx writes, “Culture has been central to the narrative of the last twenty-five years—but merely as entertainment, commerce, and politics. In reliving the first quarter of the century in these pages, we can feel what’s missing—there is a conspicuous blank space where art and creativity used to be.” It is, by its own admission, history presented as negative-space drawing: if you write down all the “entertainment, commerce, and politics,” the absent shape of “art” might become visible. Art evades definition—you’ll know it when you (don’t) see it.
No one could argue that people are making less of it, as this is also an era defined by unprecedented access to the tools of production and distribution. The means to edit a short film, design a poster, or record an album in your bedroom, and then publish that work directly to an audience, are newly affordable and widespread. For Marx, however, most of that creation (or should we call it content?) is not creativity; it is a surplus of material, propelled and inhibited by a wish to make money and gain attention. Poptimism—the idea that commercial pop should be accorded the same critical attention as traditionally “serious” genres such as rock or jazz—has wrenched away our critical ability to assess something’s worth outside of metrics defined by mass-market success: if it makes money, it must be good. (I would argue that the floundering of critical thinking in public life, and of criticism as a professional practice, is not due to the scholarly appreciation of Mariah Carey songs, but that is a minor point.)
According to Marx, nothing “feels new” or “radical enough to outmode the past,” resulting in a terrible state of affairs in which “Audrey Hepburn, Miles Davis, and Joan Didion remain iconic because no one has emerged who can compete with their cool.” Yet it is the narration and re-narration of Hepburn’s, Davis’s, and Didion’s “cool” that cements them so firmly in our firmament. Not only have all three appeared in mainstream fashion campaigns in the past twenty years (the Gap, Supreme, and Celine, respectively), but each has been the subject of a full-length documentary in the past ten (Audrey, 2020; Miles Davis: Birth of the Cool, 2019; Joan Didion: The Center Will Not Hold, 2017), and at least one major book about each has been released in the past five (Intimate Audrey, 2026, by Sean Hepburn Ferrer and Wendy Holden; 3 Shades of Blue, by James Kaplan, and Didion & Babitz, by Lili Anolik, both 2024). To allow others to “compete,” the cultural historians of the recent past would have to find something to historicize other than the current generation’s perceived inadequacy.
History, as usual, presents a Goldilocks problem—never “just right,” it is always ballooning into overwhelming excess, filling up the room and weighing down the present, or deflating into a slippery pellicular film, impossible to handle or understand. Popular internet discourse delivers jokes about millennials “watching their 173rd once-in-a-lifetime historical event unfold,” as one recent meme put it, as though my generation suffers from too much history, a “too much” that also signifies the end of itself, like the home of a hoarder that has accumulated so many mountains of life detritus that it ceases to function as a place where a person can live. This surplus of past in our everyday lives, which Reynolds has dubbed our retromania, is eased by the flattened, instantaneous libraries of Babel in our pockets at all times, and causes what the Italian philosopher Franco “Bifo” Berardi described as “the slow cancellation of the future,” a feeling of time’s forward propulsion gradually decelerating until it barely moves at all. If the second half of the twentieth century was a rushing river of culture, many feel that the present has become a brackish wetland, a marsh. This is found in the ubiquity of reboots in our movie theaters, the diffuse archive-jumbling of our fashion trends, the collapse of unifying -isms in our contemporary art, the citational frenzy of our popular music, and, most nefariously, the conservative nostalgia that currently dominates Western politics.
And yet it is hard not to hear the claims of our missing originality as a kind of nostalgia in its own right, hearkening back to a semi-mythical past when artists were brave and fun, rent was cheap, and everything was new and meaningful. (Nostalgia for those material conditions, rather than a generalized haze of rebellion and inspiration, is well placed; as Fisher wrote, “If there’s one factor above all else which contributes to cultural conservatism, it is the vast inflation in the cost of rent and mortgages.”) On a rhetorical level, Marx’s sweeping judgment is very difficult to contest: either you dredge up a few artifacts of novelty that have gone ignored, which reads as a little pathetic (please, sir, what about hyperpop?), or you are forced to defend the material he has dismissed as worthless (Addison Rae, Paris Hilton, the Real Housewives; his harbingers of cultural apocalypse—my harbingers of a great night!), which reads as a naive defense of late-capitalist consumerism. It is true that we are a generation stuck in a loop: many tiny loops, looping at different speeds, looping into other loops, as if we were all wedged inside an undulating Ruth Asawa sculpture, but instead of wire it is made of time. Maybe we are living in a marshland. Many creatures do.
“What’s so bad about repetition?” the compulsion asks. But, no, really, what’s so bad about repetition? Or perhaps it would be better rephrased as: What’s so good about innovation?…
… It does not surprise me that millennials and zoomers might be wary, unconsciously or otherwise, of contributing anything “new” to a stretch of history that has voraciously eaten newness only to cough up suffering. What about the past fifty, seventy-five, one hundred years makes barreling toward the future seem like a good idea? The Doomsday Clock reads eighty-five seconds to midnight, and for many across the globe a more local apocalypse has already arrived. Some of the archive fever of the past twenty-five years might be a form of emotional anti-accelerationism, a generation desperately trying to produce a wind drag on the forward velocity powered by the deathly machinery of the twentieth century. To approach the world “anew,” we might need to embrace the word’s cyclonic strangeness, its inherent paradox, defined as “once again” (and again, and again, and again, and again, and again), “in a different way.”…
Read on: “Is the Twenty-First Century a Creative Void?” (a perfect example of Betteridge’s Law :-) from @yalereview.bsky.social
* W. H. Auden
###
As we rethink repetition, we might recall that it was on this date in 1955 that a man who used something old to make something new– and played a key role in transition from the blues to rock and roll– had his only #1 hit: Bo Diddley‘s eponymously-titled debut single reached the top of Billboard’s R&B chart.
Five months later– and five months before Elvis Presley’s first appearance– Bo Diddley, born Ellas Otha Bates, made his television debut on The Ed Sullivan Show… and introduced the mainstream American audience to the 4/4 wonder we would come to know as Rock and Roll. He performed his signature tune, “Bo Diddley”– which prefigured such classics as Buddy Holly’s “Not Fade Away” and the Stangeloves’ “I Want Candy,” among countless others. In the kinescope of the show (below), the studio audience can be heard clapping heartily along.
Diddley later recalled that Ed Sullivan had expected him to perform only a cover version of “Tennessee” Ernie Ford’s “Sixteen Tons” and was furious with him for opening with “Bo Diddley”– so furious that Sullivan banned him from future appearances on his show. But the damage was done: as George Thorogood told Rolling Stone: “[Chuck Berry’s] ‘Maybellene’ is a country song sped up… ‘Johnny B. Goode’ is blues sped up. But you listen to ‘Bo Diddley,’ and you say, ‘What in the Jesus is that?’”
You must be logged in to post a comment.