I’m really glad I wasn’t around for this whole thing yesterday. I would have said some very uncharitable things indeed. And not about John Maus.
I guess I’m just glad someone, somewhere called out the practice of, well, defining ourselves as a list of cultural commodities that we’ve consumed.
I dunno, maybe I have been spoiled by exposure to the great minds of our era, or perhaps I’ve just spent too long on the Internet, but it feels to me this “calling out” has itself become a fearful cliche, and mostly just feels like one-upmanship in the guise of critique. That’s not to say it’s wrong, of course, but I’m increasingly thinking “OK, fine, now what?” when I encounter it.
(My initial harshness on Maus was based on knowing nothing about him at all, and recoiling at this overfamiliarity - I assumed he was very young, to be honest.)
I’m snappy about this because it chimes with something else I see all the time: someone says apparently smart things about How The Internet Is Bad For Us and is hailed as a prophet because AT LAST those utopians are being told where to go. But the critiques are decades old - not invalid or anything but, you know, we’ve had the thesis, we’ve had the antithesis, where’s the bloody synthesis then?
(I appreciate this may not be how dialectics works.)
