The Collapse of Ideas in a Pop Culture

[tcmay@got.net (Timothy C. May)]

Someone sent me a note asking about my recent comment that I no longer read
"Wired." I replied to him by citing the trendy, busy,
information-overloaded, and personality-oriented nature of "Wired"...and
its dozen or so direct competitors, mostly GenX rags, plus the several
dozen or so tangentially similar magazines that fill shelf after shelf in
the Barnes and Noble and Supercrown sorts of superstores.

Here's what I said to him:

---

And "Wired" is frustratingly repetitive, trendy, over-busy with graphics,
sidebars, etc. And the mine of good topics is being mined by several dozen
other mags, such as Access, RayGun, Mondo, Details, etc. etc. Many of these
are aimed at GenXers, with an explicit focus on personalities rather than
ideas.

(How many of these mags have had Traci Lords on the cover, for example?)

I grew up with "Scientific American" as my standard: long, detailed
articles. (And even their articles are getting shorter and more
pop-oriented.)

---

The Cypherpunks relevance, I think, is that many of the ideas we espouse
just cannot easily be covered in a "personality" piece, or in a "freak of
the week" (to paraphrase Dave Mandl) photo shoot. Journalists who want
"some quick shots" of "Cypherpunks talking about privacy" do a disservice
to the deeper ideas.

To be fair to journalism, I think several journalists--whose names I have
mentioned before, but won't here--do a fine job of in-depth reporting. They
are the Jules Bergmanns of our modern age. (If you don't know who Jules
Bergmann was, you're a GenXer and can't be held responsible for your
ignorance :-}.)

There is some hope. When people ask questions about what terms mean, about
where to find more information, we don't refer them to articles in "Access"
about how former porn queen is really big on PGP, or squibs in "Interview"
about how Seattle's java houses are going apeshit over Java....we refer
them to "Applied Cryptography," to "The Puzzle Palace," and even to
articles on digital cash in "Scientific American."

I wander through the cavernous bookstores that are so common these days,
with miles of aisles, and wonder how I ever got educated in an era when a
"big" bookstore was a Brentano's that would now fit in just the _magazine_
section of a Borders or Bookstar or Barnes and Noble. (Hmmmmh, attack of
the killer Bs?).

The answer is that in-depth study of ideas hasn't changed much. The
Tofflerian idea of "overchoice" is solvable by simply ignoring the
ephemeral cruft that threatens to engulf us.

--Tim May



Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."