https://youtubetranscript.com/?v=mYUNHl5sz3Y
So what we’re doing today is I’m going to try to show you a problem in the language that affects our thinking. And hopefully I can illustrate the problem with the term modern. Why am I on about modern? Well, the problem with using the term modern is that modern is always here, now, today. It’s always in the present. There’s nothing modern in the past and there’s nothing modern in the future. That just breaks the language when you start using modern that way. Modern is only in ephemeral reference. When it’s not in ephemeral reference, you run into all sorts of interesting problems. And those problems are so numerous that I’m not going to attempt to list them. So let’s just take a common way of talking about modern, which is modernity. So a lot of people throw around the term modernity and they blame modernity for all kinds of things. And they located it different, like modernity started here. Okay, no, modernity didn’t start in the past because modernity is the condition you’re in now. And so it doesn’t make any sense to talk about things that started in the past by using a reference that is only about now or the present. It just doesn’t work. And so when you do this, what happens is your brain gets time confused and it starts to compress time to the here and now. And so you’re taking the past when modernity started and you’re taking the future when modernity will end. And you’re just compressing them into this modernity, which is really just now. And so you lose scope and time. You lose the total idea of time. It just kind of vanishes in your brain. And we see the effects of this all the time. We see the effects of this constantly where people can’t put things in proper order. So their ability to order and sequence things is sort of askew and they don’t know how to do it anymore. And they don’t realize the significance of which thing came first matters. It matters who threw the first punch. It also matters why they threw a first punch. It matters whether or not somebody made a statement as though it was fact when it wasn’t yet proven. That actually matters. Like it’s really important, actually. They make a statement about a study that hasn’t been completed and what its contents will be. And that’s often wrong anyway, because that’s a prediction. And this is due to not exclusively the misuse of the term modern, but things like that. You’re misusing something like modern and it’s getting you confused with time. And then you can’t differentiate future from past from present correctly anymore because the language is warping your head. Look, it’s not a complete disaster or anything. But it’s also unuseful when you talk about modernity. You have to define what that is. And my bet is you can’t. And also, if you cast things as a problem of modernity, the solution really is to go back. There isn’t another solution. You can’t say go forward. Go forward to what? Going forward is not a solution to anything. Understanding where you’re at and understanding where you were and understanding that change point might be a solution. Although I would argue probably also not. But just modernity isn’t going to help you because you can’t define it in any reasonable fashion at all. So using this is unhelpful. And that’s what we’re missing. We’re missing that that context doesn’t exist and it destroys the ability for you to frame things correctly. It’s corrupting your thinking and your references so that what ends up happening is you’re referring to something. And it can’t be a thing anymore because it’s ephemeral. You’ve destroyed the thingness of it and attenuated it over time while compressing it to the now all at once. And that actually matters to your thought. It matters to your mode of thought. It matters to how clear your thinking is. It matters to your ability to sequence events. And we don’t realize this. But if the problem is modernity, then the solution is go back. And of course, nobody wants to go back because they don’t know what they’re going to lose. Back to where? Which parts of things are we getting rid of in the going back? And you can always identify modernity at any number of points in the past. But that’s really not helpful because then it’s not modern. Especially if you’re using long timeframes, you know, like you’re going back, say, 30 years. That’s kind of tough. Look, I can make all kinds of crazy arguments and some of them are completely valid about computer technology is one age. All right. Communications technology is a previous age. AI is a further age. There’s three ages right there that are all from like the 1950s onward. That’s one way of looking at it. I don’t think it’s particularly useful because technology follows culture. It doesn’t lead culture contrary to popular belief. And so, you know, the culture of the 1950s and the 1960s is vastly different. And that led up to the 70s. The 80s was a reaction. Right. And then the 90s is just the catastrophe of all catastrophes. And at least for the youngsters. Right. Not for the people who were already of age in the 90s. They have different sets of problems. And that’s the other issue is that when you try to compress things down like that, you lose the generational effects because the generational impact of technology on somebody in the 90s who’s four is totally different from the generational impact of technologies from somebody who’s in their 20s. Right. It’s completely different. And that’s different from 30s and 40s. But you’ve compressed it all down to this time frame in time. And time is funny because culture follows generations and generational like, you know, birthsets. It doesn’t follow decades. It doesn’t follow arbitrary, you know, lines in time. You can’t say the introduction of the personal computer because it’s the adoption that matters, not when it came out. Right. And then what’s widespread adoption? And what does that mean? And then if you if you know, if you frame modernity in terms of, say, adoption of some technology or some idea, it matters which countries came first. So these aren’t helpful ways of thinking about the world at all, as it turns out. Like when you start dividing things up into the pre-modern and the modern and the postmodern and all this craziness and the meta modern and the ultra modern and the super fragile, caloristic, ex be la, docious, modern or whatever other word they’re going to put in front of modern to make it better or to fix it or whatever unhelpful, unhelpful. This is enchantment. It is unhelpful enchantment. There’s helpful enchantment. This ain’t it. And that’s the problem. So we have to look out for terms like modernity or modern or modernism. You know, not that they’re not applicable. And maybe the fact that we use them in art first is a problem. And maybe we didn’t see that problem then because we were too caught up in, well, it’s art and they’re crazy people. So artists are supposed to be crazy or whatever excuse we’re using. But the bottom line is unhelpful, thoroughly, totally ridiculous. Totally ridiculously, absurdly unhelpful. Just not a good way to talk about this stuff. And that’s the problem. It’s not a good way to talk about this stuff. It really is destroying time because, again, just the decade of the 80s, it really matters how old you were when you grew up in the 80s or the 90s or the 70s or the 60s or the 50s. It matters a lot. It matters a real lot. Like whether or not you or your relatives were in a war, like that makes a big difference in the 50s and the 60s. Right. Or even in the 70s, Vietnam or Korea. These things matter a lot. And that impact matters a lot. And so compressing it down to one time frame and just saying, well, you know, and then saying, well, here’s what was introduced in that time. That doesn’t work. That doesn’t work. It’s not a good way to think about the world. So it’s a misuse of language. It cannot exist. It’s an impossible situation because what is modern is always right now. And it does not help you to say right now plus whatever comes after right now. Like, no, no. Now you’re talking about the future. Don’t use the word modern anymore. Don’t try to modify the word modern. Just use a different word. Really, it’s OK. And if you want to talk about a specific period in the past, give it a better name, the one that’s not tied to time, especially not ephemeral, temporal words like modern. It’s not helpful. So the way this affects your framing is that when you’re thinking of things in terms of time spans like decades, for example, or a 30 year time span or whatever modernity is defined as, it doesn’t really make any difference. You can’t because your attention is focused on the time frame and all maybe all the things in it or all the things that could be in it, which is way worse because a lot of things can be in just a decade. You’re not able to focus on the change because you’re bounded by your attention in terms of this time frame. So you can look at time frames, but it helped better to look at seminal events. You could look at something like Kurt Cobain’s suicide, right? As an event. And yet it happened at a certain time, but it affected a certain group of people really significantly. All right. Due to a number of factors. And you say, well, which, you know, it doesn’t make any sense to talk about his suicide without talking about his music that he made before his suicide and how impactful that was. And sure. But the event is the event and the group it affects is the group it affects. And then that group 10 years after that gets into the workforce, gets into power, gets into, you know, gets to starts to vote like things like that. And so and that pattern is not unusual, by the way, right? Because the age at which, you know, most populations start to vote is actually fairly stable. It’s not it’s, you know, it’s not super stable, but it’s fairly stable. So as people get older, they tend to vote and then they it tends to drop off. So. Understanding the difference between having your primary attention, we’ll call it, or your primary focus of attention on time on a time frame can be very unhelpful. Now, it’s easier to do in hindsight, which is great, but that doesn’t work going forward. And it doesn’t work when you’re talking about where you are now, because you don’t actually always know where you are now. Sometimes you do. Some people do. Right. They’re called prophets. Some people know where things are going. They’re called prophets. That’s what they’re called, technically. And that’s what they should be called, because that’s the right word. So when you’re not acknowledging that, when you’re trying to cast things into time frame, you’re setting your focus. All kinds of things can be put in that time frame that destroy your thesis. So really, almost any thesis you come up with is going to be incorrect. And that’s the real problem with modernism. You can look at modernism and go, well, you know, modernity went, the reason why modernity went wrong is because in modernity, you know, there was the rise of science. Well, yeah, there was also the rise of technology, which is not science. It’s engineering, by the way. And those are different things entirely. There’s no science in Edison inventing the light bulb. The science was already done. All right. The science didn’t produce anything. The engineers produced it. You can look at that. Or you can look at the change that was enabled by the legal setup. Right. There’s an excellent argument to be made that the DMCA nearly destroyed not only the Internet, but pretty much all the economy. That’s a thing. That’s a way of looking at it. I’m not claiming it’s especially useful, but it’s there. And that’s the problem. Like, I can play this game all day. I can just add stuff into whatever time frame you want and destroy your thesis and then come up with new theses to explain what you’re trying to do in a different way. And it just gets crazy. That’s why you don’t want to focus your attention on time frames so much. You want to focus your attention on events of change or points of change. That’s a better way to think. But talking about time frames will make it more difficult to do that if not impossible for most people. And you may be able to do it, but maybe everyone else can’t. That’s a thing, too. So it’s worth considering. So that’s why I wanted to sort of push back on modernism. It is a misuse of language. It’s one of the many, but it’s sort of the most egregious thing popping into my head in terms of misuse of language. If you’d like misuse of language sort of stuff and this was clear or even if this wasn’t clear, leave a comment. Let me know. I can do more potentially if I come up with them or if they’re somewhere in the scrolly notes that I have on videos I want to do. So, yeah, let me know. Leave a comment. Leave a like. And thank you for your time and attention.