Dear David and all,
Oh boohoo. Nick Couldry cum suis are rather late to the party of
general hopelessness and lack of future perspective that so many
others have suffered from for decades already. Who is the 'we' they
are talking about - all the white privileged men who could up until
recently still believe in the radical progressiveness of higher
education and new media technologies? Welcome to the despair of the
rest of the world, Nick and Bruce.
Cheers, Ingrid.
-----Original Message-----
From: [email protected]
<[email protected]> On Behalf Of
[email protected]
Sent: Monday, 28 September 2020 10:53
To: Nettime <[email protected]>
Subject: <nettime> 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid
world'
Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce
Schneier's 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed
we
are more likely be suffering from the condition of Acedia. A malady
of medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a
feeling of dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give
our lives meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal
horizon. Here is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full
essay.
"Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have
been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress.
It’s a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with
even
the nice things we regularly do.
What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of
lockdown
adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones —
real
though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re
really honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty
self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic.
It is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty
about why we would go on doing much of what for years we’d taken
for
granted as inherently valuable."
"It’s here, moving back to the particular features of the global
pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and
dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current
acedia is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic
scenarios surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The
dislocation is more
subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference
on
which just going on in the present relies.
Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need
horizons.
Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely
on,
even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the
economy
will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be
changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or
local commerce will survive.
What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can
no
longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant,
retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective
of
a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This
fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing
right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold
on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are
future-directed, such as education or institution-building. That’s
what many of us are feeling. That’s today’s acedia." Full essay
here...
https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html
