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Bradley's avatar

Wheels within wheels within wheels... This is yet another excellent piece, John. Digging this low-internet high-octane writing vibe and how you’re leveraging it. I have sometimes used a mental model as a teaching device on topics like this where we take a nuanced complex spectrum and then gird it... For example here: Take an X and Y axis with earnestness at one pole of the X and Cynicism at one pole of the Y.... The use of two dimensions is arbitrary, but 3 is too hard to conceptualize... It’s a construct that allows a mapping of cultural artifacts using pretty much the same set of attributes, but shown on two axes, which is what allows tone and emphasis to pop out, rendering explicit some of the subtleties of dealing with irony that you are exploring here. One can map works of, say, “earnest cynicism” (Vidal?) and one can have very “unearnest uncynical” (Warhol?) work products... At any moment in a culture, all kinds of products are being created... but our tolerance, tastes, favor, exhaustion points us towards highlighting different parts of the grid. Your exploration of how those shifts take place is... neat. (Had to. But seriously: neat. Really.)

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Ayo Hirschman's avatar

Good stuff

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