Jamesian Philosophy Refreshed

It isn't just your grouchy imagination. Everything WAS better in the 1990s, before the "enshittification" of the internet. Or so says a delightfully written screed on the subject, "Disenshittify or Die," by Cory Doctorow. I'll just quote one little detail as a sample of the vigor of the writing. "The last time Congress managed to pass a federal  consumer privacy law was in 1988: The Video Privacy Protection Act. That’s a law that bans video-store clerks from telling newspapers what VHS cassettes you take home. In other words, it regulates three things that have effectively ceased to exist." But the golden age of the internet came AFTER that.  We lost our ability to regulate enshittification before the golden age even happened. That's the hypothesis.  Want to read more? I'll just link: https://pluralistic.net/2024/08/17/hack-the-planet/#how-about-a-nice-game-of-chess   BTW, the line in that URL for this screed, "how about a nice game of...

I'm on vacation this week, so this post and the next three are being written (were written) long ago, and are not at all responsive to current events. Just so you know. I'll throw something quite random out there today. One blog that discusses ancient history recently referenced some ancient Greek ruthlessness with the wonderful line, "Just because they invented geometry doesn't mean they wouldn't mess you up at the drop of a hat." [No, my vacation does not involve a trip to Greece -- this is more random than that -- but it's a good line.] Okay, the "drop of a hat" thing might have been an unnecessary cliche.  The line might have been even better if the final phrase had had a skewed connection to geometry. The Greeks: Just because they invented geometry doesn't mean they wouldn't mess you up at every curve or right angle in the road.

Working writers, aspiring writers, and struggling writers have often encountered the hint, sometimes even phrased as a rule, "Eliminate adjectives." Usually Hemingway is invoked just before or after that is propounded. Since the first word of this blog entry served as its first adjective, you might already have grasped that I don't take that hint to heart. But don't listen to me. I'll invoke a higher authority:  Roald Dahl. "He had a fine white mustache and bushy white eyebrows and a wrinkly pink face." That is how Dahl describes the title character in his short story, "The Umbrella Man." That sentence breaks at least three of the rules associated with the authoritative manuals. It uses a weak predicate (the verb is a form of "to have," which is almost as bad as "to be"!) It says something in a lot of words that it might have said in fewer ("he was old but still healthy" might do it for a minimalist). And i...