Good reader,
I hope this issue of GoodLinks finds you well and at a safe distance from conspiracy theories. There is no secret knowledge here to expose, justify, or prove anything. I am, however, interested to know how you are experiencing lockdown.
Enjoy the articles below, and feel free to reply to this email with your conspiracy theories. I’ll do my best to talk you down.
-Matt
Home Screens - Real Life
Before the virus, many of us were buying what Silicon Valley was selling (or giving away). Drew Austin asks if an extended lockdown will expose the poverty of Big Tech’s utopic vision.
Social distancing plays to digital technology’s immediately tangible strengths: ubiquitous and sanitary access to other people, maximum convenience, broad consumer choice, and endless entertainment at low cost. As the coronavirus brought countless global systems to a halt, the internet kept working, heroically filling the gaps.
Fuck the bread. The bread is over. - The Paris Review
Read this slowly. It is good. Despite the expletive in the title, this is a sensitive meditation on what it means to work and be in the world.
And maybe the bread, as I’ve always understood it, really is over. The new world order is rearranging itself on the planet and settling in. Our touchstone is changing color. Our criteria for earning a life, a living, are mutating like a virus that wants badly to stay alive. I text a friend, “I can’t find bread flour.” She lives in Iowa. “I can see the wheat,” she says, “growing in the field from outside my window.” I watch a video on how to harvest wheat. I can’t believe I have no machete. I can’t believe I spent so many hours begging universities to hire me, I forgot to learn how to separate the chaff from the wheat and gently grind.
Productivity is not working - Wired
Who you are is not reducible to what you do — much less what you accomplish in a given day, week, or month.
But the drive to stay productive is about so much more than making rent. It is a moral discipline.
Reading: Lots on the go these days. I’m making my way through Fleming Rutledge’s The Crucifixion, a small collection of poems, and Peter Kreeft’s The Philosophy of Tolkien, among others.
Gaming: I might prefer hanging out with friends in Sea of Thieves more than Zoom. Not more than face-to-face, though, even if fighting our way out of the Kraken’s clutches brings us closer together.
Cooking: Polish hunter’s stew, bigos. Lots of cabbage and lots of sausage. I serve it over of roast or mashed potatoes.
Listening:
Birdwatching: I watched what must’ve been a filthy sparrow bathe itself for 5 solid minutes. Time is never wasted on birds!