in which i link a fantastic article about post-literacy and class

Happy Halloween! Here’s a link lunchbox for the past month.

I’m shooting this off now before I go to a party with my (maybe) cursed puppet. I have nothing scheduled for next monday, instead I’m going to perform something of a routine assessment of the Substack, might change things around and figure something new out about the blog, about myself, etc…

I’m no longer quite the person I was in 2024 when I started this thing and the BGH might need to change a bit to compensate (as all things do). I’ve been reading some McLuhan recently and have some exciting ideas in store for the future (though this might be the last time I do a link roundup). Anyways, without further ado…

One of the best pieces I’ve seen this month—naturally it’s out of The Baffler, prestige leftist publication that it is—but it’s also a lot to chew on. The framing of the argument is also profound. Here’s an essay in which I find myself diving into my desk for a pen and paper to jot down notes, not just in terms of the content but also the construction of the thing. It makes the argument that the history of literacy is near-perfectly mappable onto the history of class struggle.

I do not hold that “the history of all hitherto existing society is the history of class struggles” for various tedious factual and periodizing reasons, but I would argue that the history of all hitherto literacy is the history of class struggle. If we look back at medieval Europe, the origin of modern Euro-American civilization, literacy was rare. In the early Middle Ages, it was vanishingly so, although perhaps not as scarce as popular stories of heroic monasteries preserving the written word would have us understand. Paradigmatically, Charlemagne was himself illiterate even as he encouraged the Carolingian Renaissance, an organized effort emanating from his court to grow Christianity by reviving classical works, increasing Latin literacy and thus the number of people capable of civil and ecclesiastical administration. As the feudal age began in the eleventh century, literacy was slowly growing among the nonclerical elite, but it remained strictly vocational and concentrated in the clergy. In the centuries after his death, English King Henry I was called Beauclerc (from the French for “good cleric”) because he could read.

and,

“In Charles Tilly’s famous formulation, “War made the state and the state made war.” A corollary can be added: literacy made war and war made literacy. On the eve of the war between Prussia and France, England had already moved toward greater education funding and requirements, with W. E. Forster, the minister responsible, telling the House of Commons: “Civilized communities are massing themselves together, each mass being measured by its force; and if we are to hold our position among . . . the nations of the world we must make up the smallness of our numbers by increasing the intellectual force of the individual.” Gladstone noted that the war was “a marked triumph to the cause of systematic popular education.” By the end of the nineteenth century, England had comprehensive, free elementary education, and annually spent nearly as much on it as it did the Navy—a state of affairs that would have shocked anyone a hundred years earlier.”

and another one,

“One-third of all newspapers in America closed between 2004 and 2025. When newspapers close, local businesses commit more legal violations, local government borrowing costs grow because of decreased public scrutiny of spending decisions, people vote less, and what is inaccurately referred to as “political polarization” increases as social isolation grows and feelings of community diminish. In the first episode of The Sopranos, Tony’s famous monologue about feeling like everything is in decline is overlaid with footage of him getting his daily newspaper, Newark’s Star-Ledger. The Star-Ledger ceased all print operations in February. In The Wire, stevedore and union secretary-treasurer Frank Sobotka mourns the loss of mid-century prosperity as he utters the famous line, “We used to make shit in this country, build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy’s pocket.” Sobotka is a subscriber to the Baltimore Sun, which barely hangs on today, with a fraction of the journalists and sections it used to have. Neither Tony nor Frank’s failsons are readers, and their futures turn out to be poorer and more quotidian, if not outright bleaker. It doesn’t make sense in those fictional universes, or in our real one, to understand the introduction of the newspaper as a backward step in literate culture—it was a form of literacy that appealed to non-elite readers and provided them with information as well as entertainment. In many ways, the current era of Trump results from the fact that it’s easier to put your hand in the next guy’s pocket if he’s illiterate.”

And, okay okay, one more (I’m sorry I can’t stop myself—it’s so easy to copy and paste these and this article got me excited in a way):

Controlling the media effect is possible even in America; we have simply reduced it to a class privilege. I love the First Amendment and abhor censorship, and yet I have reluctantly come to believe that the Great Firewall of China will be a long-term benefit to that country. What China shows us is that, contra the whole line of technology-first scholarship following McLuhan, it’s the social system technology is embedded in that matters. China is not a utopia, but its citizens have a brighter future than ours, and they will be able to read about it, thanks to a sociopolitical system that still sees literacy as necessary and retains primacy over private capital.

Ireland is supporting their artists! The government itself! What began as an attempt to keep artists afloat during the doldrums of the pandemic has become a long running program. $1,500 a month to 2,000 selected artists around Ireland. Pretty brilliant idea and it’s sure to float the Irish cultural export, which is already on the rise what with Fountaines D.C. breaking out into the international mainstream ~3 years ago and, ofc, Sally Rooney’s recent run of novels.

First off, here’s a run-down of the American tech canon, the kinds of books and writers who steer the thinking of our most delusional captains of industry (looking at you, Sam Altman and Elon Musk).

China was mentioned in the link above, in the (again, amazing) article from the Baffler, but here’s a more focused dive into the ways that the Chinese tech industry thinks of itself. Interestingly, it seems like most of their gusto comes down to an obsession with Silicon Valley’s golden days. A lot of Chinese V.C.s are obsessive in studying the history, combing the books, looking through every bit and piece of Silicon Valley information they can get—not as much out of a sense of competition but out of a sense of fascination. And, unfortunately,

Most of all, their thinking shows the influence of Peter Thiel. Wang frequently cites Thiel’s concepts in both public speeches and internal discussions, and regularly recommends Zero to One, Thiel’s 2014 bestseller. He even frequently poses Thiel’s signature question: “What important truth do very few people agree with you on?” Thiel argues successful companies should pursue “monopoly profits,” escaping endless price competition to focus on innovation and long-term value creation. Meituan exemplifies this theory applied to Chinese internet markets — achieving dominance through patient market-building rather than direct confrontation.

An important point to recognize: China’s V.C.s are not any morally superior to the United States’s. The difference is, as the Baffler article above points out, that China has a more sustainable social structure in which to embed new technologies. America on the other hand, after over half a century of attempting to eradicate “society” in favor of individual actors, has left itself wide open to whatever strange forces and hallucinations might emerge out from handing venture capitalists the keys to the culture and the country.

Well maybe not dead, per se—going viral is probably more un-dead. Happy Halloween, I guess.

From the piece:

“Going viral online often involved ordinary people stumbling into transcendence. It held the potential to change your life. It could give a small business an enormous boost overnight. It could land you a walk-on spot on “The Ellen DeGeneres Show” and a comically oversize check from that day’s corporate sponsor. You could become the face, briefly, of Ocean Spray, and give a rock song from the 1970s its biggest streaming week to date.

These mass, attention-getting events had nothing to do with world leaders or extreme weather or tragedy or Hollywood celebrities. They were low stakes, but they became a global pastime.”

There was a time, not so long ago, when a person might go viral and build a rather lucrative career starring in Geico commercials. A ladder was created, in a way, but an algorithmic culture doesn’t do much in terms of solid construction.

The kaleidoscope is always turning and what goes up will come falling down: for every “hawk tuah spit on that thang” breakout there’s a Hawk Tuah Coin crash out and subsequent disappearance from the public eye, be it steady or swift.

The platform internet that once promised connectivity has now opted for personal (and often mindless) curation.

“There’s been this sea change from content that is shared by people in your networks to this automatic feed of content based on your own interests,” said Caitlin Dewey, who writes the Substack newsletter Links I Would GChat You if We Were Friends. “Anything that could fairly be called a viral moment,” she continued, “just sort of dissolves and dissipates across many billions of people’s highly individualized feeds.”

I wrote more about internet virality and how it’s probably not something you want here.

But this is the best one I’ve read so far.

I don’t live in NYC. I can’t afford NYC. But NYC is important to watch because most of the good ole’ U.S. of A is downstream of what happens there. And a figure like Zohran could really only emerge out of New York (especially as it’s finally—and thankfully—emerging from its late 2010s and early 2020s Dime’s Square moment).

Anyways, this a great profile of him, and applies the right amount of nuance. It doesn’t praise exceptionally and doesn’t demonize. It tells the facts like any good profile should. Also, there’s a bit of it describing Mamdani and Spike Lee watching an Arsenal game and freaking out about it. Great stuff. Mamdani, in my estimation, and this is for better or for worse (though mostly for the better), still feels like a distinctively FDR figure and considering FDR was who pulled the United States out of the great depression in the 1930s, it’s reassuring to see politicians of his ilk emerging from the woodwork just as we’re entering into the next one (seriously, when the AI bubble bursts, shit’s going to go south fast). The reason I mention this is that Mamdani is actively reaching out to the Capitalist class—much like FDR would—to try and bridge their support with the grassroot support he’s gotten the past few years. Unfortunately, this is often the best way to actually make things change in the United States’ wealth driven politics.

But of course we have yet to see how the guy actually governs, but no matter how the cookie crumbles he represents a rather welcome development for America’s greatly-diminished Left and I would rather have Sewer Socialism in stead of Ezra Klein’s Abundance agenda any day of the week.

Here’s a snippet of the article linked above:

Mamdani said he remembers once telling his father, a professor of international affairs and anthropology at Columbia, that he was exhausted with “always feeling like a minority.” But his father’s reply changed his perspective. “I was an Indian in Uganda. I was a Muslim in India. And I was all of these things in New York City,” Mahmood Mamdani explained to his son. And “to be a minority is also to see the truth of the place amidst the promise of it.”

“It was this moment which took me from a view of the world where I had this chip on my shoulder,” Mamdani told me, “to one which made me understand instead both what the world took — and what it offered.”

This is how Mamdani talks: in parables. He leans close and locks eyes. He collapses the room with held eye contact. He sprinkles in references to World Cup soccer and the English Premier League, as he knows I’m a fan of Tottenham Hotspur (Mamdani supports its rival club, Arsenal). He is one of the few politicians I can remember who sat for a 30-minute interview without a press person at hand and didn’t even bother recording themselves. Sanders was another.

There was a lot of moaning and groaning on X The Everything App last week about the rise of personal essays but (I may be biased) I think they’re neat.

Linked above: a good breakdown of the Braided Essay format, which the author renames, tactfully, Laptop Nonfiction. Of the Carrie Bradshaw variety, I suppose.

Mathematicians discovered a new shape. Until now, it was assumed that all convex polyhedrons could be angled in such a way that they could pass through a copy of themselves. It’s called the Noperthedron. Welcome to the world, shape.

A robbery at the Louvre! Action! Suspense! Resolution? Perhaps. The real thief certainly still runs free in our dreams.

I have… a lot of thoughts about this. Give it a read! I’ll have a lengthy essay about gooners, dating apps, and internet pornography becoming spiritual practice for some later this month or in December.

I genuinely believe History textbooks will remember the next eight or so years in the United States as what happens when the internet is not properly regulated; specifically what not to do.

Here (above) is Max Read putting forward a theory that the brewing “techlash” has a fairly straightforward analogue in the Temperance movement in the 1920s and 30s.

This, I think, is the basic dynamic from which Platform Temperance evolves: a general, non-partisan, somewhat moralistic disgust at even the non-political outcomes of unregulated and unmoderated platforms; a dissatisfaction with both the “revealed preference” framework and the more rigidly behavioralist explanations of platform activity; and a sense of an accelerating downward spiral with the advent of generative A.I., which both further debases the platforms and provides a possibly even more tractable and dangerous user experience itself. In response, Platform Temperance offers a focus on health, social welfare, and the idea of discipline and restraint in the face of unmoderated consumption--that is, temperance.

Annd that’s all, folks. See you soon.

-gbe