Good morning!
Welcome to Issue 39.1 of Digestable, your daily mouthful of real things happening in the world, minus alarmist pandemic news.
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Today’s news, fermented:
Last week I read The Silence, a staggeringly pathetic excuse for a book by a once-great American writer, Don Delillo. I have a lot of nasty things to say about it, but in short—this book post-moderned so hard that it failed to actually be post-modern, thank you liberal arts degree for equipping me with this language.
The basic premise is that [some part of] the world experiences a power outage to the nth degree—power goes off, devices shut down, screens go blank. [The rest of the book is about these wealthy white people and one exoticized racially ambiguous person trying to figure out what on *earth* to do from their Upper East Side apartment, quoting Einstein, fearing the ‘masses’ on the streets. It’s as bad as it sounds.]
So of course it came to mind when, thanks to Gabriel—who, like any good friend, told me to read this book so we could tear it apart together—told me there had been massive Google outages across the world. At this writing, Google has only said the typically unremarkable things massive tech overlords say when they mess up.
The last paragraph of the Guardian’s reporting jumped out at me, though:
“For those working from home, the outage affected Google’s Smart Home services, including the Google Home smart speakers and the Nest thermostats and smoke alarms. While they operate in a fail-safe mode, users cannot access the services through an app to change their settings.”
I work from home, and am privileged to be able to more or less wait out this pandemic while receiving a salary and doodling around on my computer. I often look out my window and see our USPS mail person, sanitation workers, other people delivering and picking things up—and note the difference between the ‘reality’ of moving things and yourself about the earth, and the decidedly alternate reality of navigating the ‘reality’ inside my screen, with its messaging apps, file storage, word processors, and little glowing face I spend more time with than that of another human.
And what of this alternate reality when it follows you away from your personal screen, to the systems that guard you from internal and external threats? When those systems are connected to a global cloud network that sometimes has yet-unexplainable failures?
Don, I know The Silence was your attempt to get at the oddity and nuance and hardship that sets 2020 apart. I know you might have looked around you, thinking this representation of stricken Upper East Siders would make [some] Americans feel seen. But to me, the true post-modernism—characterized by “tendencies to self-consciousness, self-referentiality”—of this moment is that some, graced by reasonless privilege, have begun to exist almost entirely in an alternate reality that is fueled by the work of an economic underclass that we call ‘essential’ but perpetually undervalue.
For our truest dose of PoMo, we look to the pigeons, one of whom pooped a portrait of itself on a leaf:
(via)
*Hot Goss*
Locked out by the Google outage, back tomorrow from the superb Latifah Azlan!