Is it possible for the ontological content of the world to drain out? in Murphy by Beckett there is a phrase ‘the quantum of wantum does not vary.’ but is that true?
Perhaps another way of putting it is to ask whether it is possible for the ontological content of the world to reduce in resolution, become graphically more basic like going travelling backwards via games consoles? (not perhaps a great analogy as there is a decent argument for saying that the games we have now are less imaginative and interesting than the ones we had then, but you get the idea)
Looking at the richness of the world (in fact the house around him) in his journals, and noting how everything was retained, RF Langley asked the question ‘but does it leak?’
But is it also possible for the rendering of information to become less rich?
After all, it is perfectly possible for artistic forms to degrade.
Or is this only entropy, that is to say a loss of informational structure, a loss of form. Or is that the same thing? A loss of form is an ontological drain.
it feels like the world… by which of course i mean the western liberal world… which immediately confines it to that small-ish percentage of the world that has a history of liberalism, and the people who have experienced and remember that period of liberalism… i write this in Càdiz, the birthplace of liberalism, with its fine civic statues around the city commemorating sober people whose lives constituted public and cultural liberal duty and responsibility…
but let’s take that subset…
it feels like the world is undergoing a massive anxiety attack, where the resources of the mind and body, as well as our emotional content and responses, are consumed by a single, ramifying set of events emanating from the the United States. that there is no repose, or deep well of emotional response and cultural apparatus with which to draw on.
it was earlier last year i realise that i was often tired to the point of exhaustion by anxiety, intense anxiety that i didn’t even realise i was holding, but which by three o’clock had exhausted me so much I had to lie down.
And that i wasn’t able to do anything outside that anxiety. It was like a jumping nerve in my body, i was in perpetual fight or flight mode, paying attention to every piece of information.
your brain cracks each day from information anxiety
Don’t Take the Pizza – The Fall
And it is easy to get addicted to that feeling… or rather, it is hard to know what to do without it driving an immediate sense of purpose. We become thin, etiolated, or flabby yet jejune, suffering from anomie.
Listening to the most recent Know Your Enemy podcast, with John Ganz, you can hear they are in a fever of intellectual activity. This is their metier. Their stock is ‘up’. Never had they felt so alive.
These are good, smart people, but the incentives here are bad. The intellectual energies of the world become consumed by chaotic actors who reduce the quality of information in the world and break its structure. We spend time and energy trying to manage and structure information that is completely chaotic and unable to be transmitted with any sort of success, because it’s not clear the bits you can compress out and the bits you need to keep for comprehension and decision making appropriate to the information author.
Adam Tooze is in a similar space and does a remarkable job, but why are you always operating at the front edge of history?