TODO_AUTHOR, (Klosterman 2018)

Summary

Thoughts

Notes

But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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I’ve spent most of my life being wrong. Not about everything. Just about most things. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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firehose of falsehoods ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Now, there’s certainly a difference between collective, objective wrongness (e.g., misunderstanding gravity for twenty centuries) and collective, subjective wrongness (e.g., not caring about Moby-Dick for seventy-five years). The machinations of the transitions are completely different. Yet both scenarios hint at a practical reality and a modern problem. The practical reality is that any present-tense version of the world is unstable. What we currently consider to be true—both objectively and subjectively—is habitually provisional. But the modern problem is that reevaluating what we consider “true” is becoming increasingly difficult. Superficially, it’s become easier for any one person to dispute the status quo: Everyone has a viable platform to criticize Moby-Dick (or, I suppose, a mediocre HP printer). If there’s a rogue physicist in Winnipeg who doesn’t believe in gravity, he can self-publish a book that outlines his argument and potentially attract a larger audience than Principia found during its first hundred years of existence. But increasing the capacity for the reconsideration of ideas is not the same as actually changing those ideas (or even allowing them to change by their own momentum). We live in an age where virtually no content is lost and virtually all content is shared. The sheer amount of information about every current idea makes those concepts difficult to contradict, particularly in a framework where public consensus has become the ultimate arbiter of validity. In other words, we’re starting to behave as if we’ve reached the end of human knowledge. And while that notion is undoubtedly false, the sensation of certitude it generates is paralyzing. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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It’s impossible to understand the world of today until today has become tomorrow. This is no brilliant insight, and only a fool would disagree. But it’s remarkable how habitually this truth is ignored. We constantly pretend our perception of the present day will not seem ludicrous in retrospect, simply because there doesn’t appear to be any other option. Yet there is another option, and the option is this: We must start from the premise that—in all likelihood—we are already wrong. And not “wrong” in the sense that we are examining questions and coming to incorrect conclusions, because most of our conclusions are reasoned and coherent. The problem is with the questions themselves. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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According to population expert Dr. Paul Ehrlich, we should currently be experiencing a dystopian dreamscape where “survivors envy the dead,” which seems true only when I look at Twitter. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Yet what is most instructive about The Book of Predictions is not the things that proved true. It’s the bad calculations that must have seemed totally justifiable—perhaps even conservative—at the time of publication. And the quality all these reasonable failures share is an inability to accept that the status quo is temporary. The ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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This brand of retrospective insight presents a rather obvious problem: My argument requires a “successful” futurist to anticipate whatever it is that can’t possibly be anticipated. It’s akin to demanding someone be spontaneous on command. But there’s still a practical lesson here, or at least a practical thought: Even if we can’t foresee the unforeseeable, it’s possible to project a future reality where the most logical conclusions have no relationship to what actually happens. It feels awkward to think like this, because such thinking accepts irrationality. Of course, irrational trajectories happen all the time. Here’s an excerpt from a 1948 issue of Science Digest: “Landing and moving around the moon offers so many serious problems for human beings that it may take science another 200 years to lick them.” That prediction was off by only 179 years. But the reason Science Digest was so wrong was not technological; it was motivational. In 1948, traveling to the moon was a scientific aspiration; the desire for a lunar landing was analogous to the desire to climb a previously unscaled mountain. Science Digest assumed this goal would be pursued in the traditional manner of scientific inquiry—a grinding process of formulating theories and testing hypotheses. But when the Soviets launched the Sputnik satellite in 1957, the meaning of the enterprise changed. Terrified Americans suddenly imagined Khrushchev launching weapons from the lunar surface. The national desire to reach the moon first was now a military concern (with a sociocultural subtext over which country was intellectually and morally superior). That accelerated the process dramatically. By the summer of ‘69, we were planting flags and collecting moon rocks and generating an entirely new class of conspiracy theorists. So it’s not that the 1948 editors of Science Digest were illogical; it’s that logic doesn’t work particularly well when applied to the future. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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With Occam’s Razor is how a serious person considers the past. Unfortunately, it simply doesn’t work for the future. When you’re gazing into the haze of a distant tomorrow, everything is an assumption. Granted, some of those competing assumptions seem (or maybe feel) more reasonable than others. But we live in a starkly unreasonable world. The history of ideas is littered with more failures than successes. Retroactively, we all concede this. So in order to move forward, we’re forced to use a very different mind-set. For lack of a better term, we’ll just have to call it Klosterman’s Razor: the philosophical belief that the best hypothesis is the one that reflexively accepts its potential wrongness to begin with. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Language is more durable than content. Words outlive their definitions. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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It’s possible that no one will buy (or read) books in some remote future, but we can (tentatively) assume that people of that era will at least know what “books” are: They are the collected units containing whatever writers write. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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assuming we continue to write ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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assuming we continue to write; LLMs and whatever comes after ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Moby-Dick is about a dude hunting a whale. The novel includes autobiographical details from Herman Melville’s own tenure on a whaling vessel, so one can conclude that he couldn’t have written a novel with such specificity and depth if it had not been something he’d experienced firsthand. But what if the same Mr. Melville had lived a different kind of life: Could he have written a similar nine-hundred-page book about hunting a bear? Or climbing a mountain? Or working as a male prostitute? How much of this novel’s transcendent social imprint is related to what it mechanically examines? ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Moby-Dick is about a dude hunting a whale. The novel includes autobiographical details from Herman Melville’s own tenure on a whaling vessel, so one can conclude that he couldn’t have written a novel with such specificity and depth if it had not been something he’d experienced firsthand. But what if the same Mr. Melville had lived a different kind of life: Could he have written a similar nine-hundred-page book about hunting a bear? Or climbing a mountain? Or working as a male prostitute? How much of this novel’s transcendent social imprint is related to what it mechanically examines? The short answer seems to be that the specific substance of a novel matters very little. The difference between a whale and a bear and a mountain is negligible. The larger key is the tone, and particularly the ability of that tone to detach itself from the social moment of its creation. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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“What ages [poorly], it seems, are ideas that trend to the clever, the new, or the merely personal,” Saunders continues. “What gets dated, somehow, is that which is too ego inflected—that hasn’t been held up against the old wisdom, maybe, or just against some innate sense of truth, and rigorously, with a kind of self-abnegating fervor. Again and again some yahoo from 1863 can be heard to be strenuously saying the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal thing—and that crap rings so hollow when read against Lincoln or Douglass. It gives me real fear about all of the obvious, self-aggrandizing, self-protective, clever, banal things I’ve been saying all my life.” Here again, I’d like to imagine that Saunders will be rewarded for his self-deprecation, in the same way I want him to be rewarded for his sheer comedic talent. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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When trying to project which contemporary books will still be relevant once our current population has crumbled into carbon dust and bone fragments, it’s hopeless to start by thinking about the quality of the works themselves. Quality will matter at the end of the argument, but not at the beginning. At the beginning, the main thing that matters is what that future world will be like. From there, you work in reverse. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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This is how the present must be considered whenever we try to think about it as the past: It must be analyzed through the values of a future that’s unwritten. Before we can argue that something we currently appreciate deserves inclusion in the world of tomorrow, we must build that future world within our mind. This is not easy (even with drugs). But it’s not even the hardest part. The hardest part is accepting that we’re building something with parts that don’t yet exist. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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(“Time is a motherfucker and it’s coming for all of us,” Lethem notes). ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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apocryphal). ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Look: It’s not like any (honest) writer wants no one to see what he’s writing. If he did, he’d just sit in a dark room and imagine that he wrote it already. Even the self-loathing Kafka sent Brod a copy of The Trial, insisting that Brod destroy it, likely aware that Brod never would. No matter what they may claim, even the most transgressive of writers don’t want to work in a total vacuum; they simply want to control the composition of their audience. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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For most of the twentieth century, there was an ever-growing realization (at least among intellectuals) that the only way to understand the deeper truth about anything complicated was through “shadow histories”: those underreported, countercultural chronicles that had been hidden by the conformist monoculture and emerge only in retrospect. Things that seem obvious now—the conscious racism of Nixon’s “Southern Strategy,” the role the CIA played in the destabilization of Iran, how payola controlled what was on FM radio, the explanation behind America’s reliance on privately owned cars instead of public transportation, et al.—were all discussed while they were happening . . . but only on the marginalized periphery. They were not taken that seriously. Over time, these shadow ideas—or at least the ones that proved factually irrefutable—slowly became the mainstream view. Howard Zinn’s 1980 depiction of how America was built in A People’s History of the United States is no longer a counterbalance to a conventional high school history text; in many cases, it is the text. This kind of transition has become a normal part of learning about anything. In literature, there were the established (white, male) classics that everyone was forced to identify as a senior in high school. But once you went to college—and especially if you went to an expensive school—you learned about the equally important works that were mostly hidden (and usually for nonliterary reasons). That was the secret history of literature. But this process is fading (and while it’s too easy to say it’s all because of the Internet, that’s inarguably the main explanation). The reason shadow histories remained in the shadows lay in the centralization of information: If an idea wasn’t discussed on one of three major networks or on the pages of a major daily newspaper or national magazine, it was almost impossible for that idea to gain traction with anyone who wasn’t consciously searching for alternative perspectives. That era is now over. There is no centralized information, so every idea has the same potential for distribution and acceptance. Researching the events of the 9/11 attack on the World Trade Center is no harder or easier than absorbing the avalanche of arguments from those who believe 9/11 was orchestrated by the US government. There will be no shadow history of the 2008 financial crisis or the 2014 New England Patriots’ “Deflategate” scandal, because every possible narrative and motive was discussed in public, in real time, across a mass audience, as the events transpired. Competing modes of discourse no longer “compete.” They coexist. And the same thing is happening in the arts. The diverse literary canon Díaz imagines is not something that will be reengineered retroactively. We won’t have to go back and reinsert marginalized writers who were ignored by the establishment, because the establishment is now a multisphere collective; those marginalized writers will be recognized as they emerge, and their marginalized status will serve as a canonical advantage. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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ephasis ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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the future is a teenage crackhead who makes shit up as he goes along. The ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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[7]So what will this impossible-to-visualize person write about? Or—more accurately—what will this person have written about, since the comprehension of its consequence won’t occur until he (or she) has already vamoosed? The first clue can be extrapolated from a single line in Kurt Vonnegut’s A Man Without a Country: “I think that novels that leave out technology misrepresent life as badly as Victorians misrepresented life by leaving out sex.” In the context of day-to-day publishing, that sentiment is 100 percent true. But when you’re trying to isolate unique transcendence, it’s not quite that simple. The reason Vonnegut’s writing advice remains (mostly) correct has to do with the myth of universal timeliness. There is a misguided belief—often promoted by creative writing programs—that producing fiction excessively tied to technology or popular culture cheapens the work and detracts from its value over time. If, for example, you create a plot twist that hinges on the use of an iPad, that story will (allegedly) become irrelevant once iPads are replaced by a new form of technology. If a character in your story is obsessed with watching Cheers reruns, the meaning of that obsession will (supposedly) evaporate once Cheers disappears from syndication. If your late-nineties novel is consumed with Monica Lewinsky, the rest of the story (purportedly) devolves into period piece. The goal, according to advocates of this philosophy, is to build a narrative that has no irretraceable connection to the temporary world. But that’s idiotic, for at least two reasons. The first is that it’s impossible to generate deep verisimilitude without specificity.9 The second is that if you hide the temporary world and the work somehow does beat the odds and become timeless, the temporary world you hid will become the only thing anyone cares about. Vonnegut’s reference to the Victorians is the superlative example. Jane Austen (as timeless a writer as there will ever be) wrote about courtship and matrimony in an essentially sexless universe. As a result, the unspoken sexual undercurrents are the main gravitational pull for modern readers. “When a character in an Austen novel walks into a room and starts speaking,” wrote Victorian scholar Susan Zlotnick, “we understand the words . . . but not always the layers of meaning compressed into those words.” Reading Pride and Prejudice requires the reader to unpack the sex—and if you love Austen, the unpacking process is a big part of what you love. A book becomes popular because of its text, but it’s the subtext that makes it live forever. For the true obsessive, whatever an author doesn’t explicitly explain ends up becoming everything that matters most (and since it’s inevitably the obsessives who keep art alive, they make the rules). Take Beowulf: While there is a limited discussion to have about Grendel and his mother, there’s a limitless discussion to be had about ninth-century England, the nature and origin of storytelling, and how early Christians viewed heroism and damnation. Consumed today, Beowulf is mostly about what isn’t there. And that will be the same for whatever ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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it needs to include something that taps into what matters about the world now. There has to be something at stake that involves modernity. It can’t just be well written or smartly plotted; a well-written, smartly plotted book can absolutely be “great,” but—within the context of this debate—“great” is not enough. (A list of great books that have been forgotten completely would be exponentially longer than the book you’re reading right now.) In order to overcome such impossible odds and defeat the unrelenting ravages of time, the book has to offer more. It has to offer a window into a world that can no longer be accessed, insulated by a sense that this particular work is the best way to do so. It must do what Vonnegut requests—reflect reality. And this is done by writing about the things that matter today, even if they won’t necessarily matter tomorrow. Yet herein lies the paradox: If an author does this too directly, it won’t work at all. The aforementioned “unpacking” of literature isn’t just something people enjoy. It’s an essential part of canonization (and not just in literature, but in every form of art). If the meaning of a book can be deduced from a rudimentary description of its palpable plot, the life span of that text is limited to the time of its release. Historically awesome art always means something different from what it superficially appears to suggest—and if future readers can’t convince themselves that the ideas they’re consuming are less obvious than whatever simple logic indicates, that book will disappear. The possibility that a cigar is just a cigar doesn’t work with literary criticism, and that’s amplified by the passage of time. Gary ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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So this, it seems, is the key for authors who want to live forever: You need to write about important things ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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The reason so many well-considered ideas appear laughable in retrospect is that people involuntarily assume that whatever we believe and prioritize now will continue to be believed and prioritized later, even though that almost never happens. It’s a mistake that never stops being made. So while it’s impossible to predict what will matter to future versions of ourselves, we can reasonably presume that whatever they elect to care about (in their own moment) will be equally temporary and ephemeral. Which doesn’t necessarily provide us with any new answers, but does eliminate some of the wrong ones we typically fail to question. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Space at the top is limited. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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The world happens as it happens, but we construct what we remember and what we forget. And people will eventually do that to us, too. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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the post–World War II invention of the teenager.20 ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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So what we have is a youth-oriented musical genre that (a) isn’t symbolically important, (b) lacks creative potentiality, and (c) has no specific tie to young people. It has completed its historical trajectory. It will always subsist, but only as itself. And if something is only itself, it doesn’t particularly matter. Rock will recede out of view, just as all great things eventually do. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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As a younger man, Ross was also a top-shelf rock writer (his 2001 article on Radiohead remains the best thing ever written about the group). ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Ultimately, the repertory operates on a celebrity logic. These happen to be celebrities of thundering genius, but we’re still giving in to a winner-takes-all mentality. There’s a basic human reason for this simplification: It’s difficult to cope with the infinite variety of the past, and so we apply filters, and we settle on a few famous names." ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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To matter forever, you need to matter to those who don’t care. And if that strikes you as sad, be sad. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Related quote:why mars speech; “Future people will remember what we did to make their civilization possibe”. The futurr is like the present — selfish. ======== But What If We’re Wrong? (Chuck Klosterman)

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Burn Thy ========

Bibliography

Klosterman, Chuck. 2018. But What If We’re Wrong? Thinking About the Present as If It Were the Past. New York: Penguin Books.