Big data

On first blush, so much obfuscation and frivolity in the media today seems to be descended from the substance-free electronic culture of the very late twentieth century. And that's true, but only up to a point. 

On June 12, 1994, former Buffalo Bills quarterback OJ Simpson was arrested for the murders of his wife, Nicole Brown Simpson, and a waiter Ron Goldman. The news traveled worldwide in hours if not minutes, and in the same span of time everyone across that wide world had an opinion on the case. I was on the opposite coast from Los Angeles and I certainly found out about it soon enough. But in material terms, the case had exactly as much of an effect on me as I had on it, which is none. The details were awful, but they were being conveyed to people who could get nothing out of them except for titillation.

Was this a first? In the underlying principles, far from it. So says Neil Postman in his 1985 book Amusing Ourselves to Death: Public Discourses in the Age of Show Business. Postman finds the onset of the process in the nineteenth century spread of telegraphy and photography, which may appear to be unlikely culprits from the perspective of 2026.

But the sense of context created by the partnership of photograph and headline was, of course, entirely illusory. You may get a better sense of what I mean here if you imagine a stranger's informing you that the illyx is a subspecies of vermiform plant with articulated leaves that flowers biannually on the island of Aldononjes. And if you wonder aloud, "Yes, but what has that to do with anything?" imagine that your informant replies, "But here is a photograph I want you to see," and hands you a picture labeled Illyx on Aldononjes. "Ah yes," you might murmur, "now I see." It is true enough that the photograph provides a context for the sentence you have been given, and that the sentence provides a context of sorts for the photograph, and you may even believe for a day or so that you have learned something. But if the event is entirely self-contained, devoid of any relationship to your past knowledge or future plans, if that is the beginning and end of your encounter with the stranger, then the appearance of context provided by the conjunction of sentence and image is illusory, and so is the impression of meaning attached to it. You will, in fact, have "learned" nothing (except perhaps to avoid strangers with photographs), and the illyx will fade from your mental landscape as though it had never been. At best you are left with an amusing bit of trivia, good for trading in cocktail party chatter or solving a crossword puzzle, but nothing more.

Postman elaborates on the growth of newspapers in this time, which of course made their living on the reporting of news. But in order to fill their quota, they needed to create news to report. Or at any rate, to gather news only available via the use of these new technologies. The news would not have been found worthy of attention by anyone outside of the immediate vicinity of the events before this time.

From here, the development of our own rootless media product was natural enough, although it took time. And there are gratifications to it. I have no plans to give up crossword solving. But we should know that our knowledge is only considered knowledge because of a rather twisted history.

After these messages, and these

At breakfast today I saw the start of an infomercial. It was for some kind of dental-related practice. That's as specific as I can get right now, but it got me thinking. 

Infomercials are an annoyance when you're waiting for and expecting something else. Say, if it's 11:30 at night and you know The Twilight Zone is scheduled and it might be one you haven't seen before or not, but you like The Twilight Zone. Because infomercials get slotted in at the last moment, and the things they replace have some viewers, but not enough so that the station owners are worried about annoying them.

Conversely, these spots might strike you as funny. Groups of two or more people have been goofing on their canned awkwardness basically forever.

And a third reaction is just wonder. Some of these things are so odd that you can only ponder what unintended messages they might carry, how they reflect the unconscious of technological civilization. One might even find a kind of inspiration in them.

Infomercials aren't something I'd spend a lot of time looking at, but it's interesting to think about what they imply. In the streaming world they're probably doomed, as hardly anyone would be interested in ordering them in a service. But then streaming itself, at least its most heavily promoted side, shows signs of being a bubble. So who knows?

Exemplar

In Pawtucket, there's a mural on the side of a two-story building. In bright colors sure to draw the curious eye, it reassures the viewer of human things that it's okay to do. This is obviously a well-intentioned work, responsive, made by and for people who have been there. So what could be the problem?

I've thought about it for some time now, and I think Ashley Frawley might have stumbled on it. If everyone is always thinking about mental health, what else is there?

This is a microcosm of where the rest of the world is headed or has already gone. In England and Wales, where mental health promotion has been in overdrive for decades, working-age claimants of incapacity and disability benefits rose from 2.9 million in May 2019 to 4.5 million in August 2025, with mental-health conditions driving the increase. Meanwhile, in the United States, young people self-diagnose from TikTok reels whose creators doubtless feel they are doing a public service. After all, they are only echoing the common sense of our time: There is no shame in seeking help; “the more awareness, the better.”

That's about the size of it. There are vulnerable people out there taking drugs so strong that they'd have once gotten the dealer a life sentence, ceding control over who they talk to and how they live. Our society encourages this and will never stop, because it's a plainly virtuous and necessary mode of treatment. The whole cycle becomes self-justifying and self-perpetuating. The increased availability of resources for the mentally ill is a good thing. The outsized public focus on their maladies is not.

Vive quoi?

It is beyond bizarre that France has outlawed drinking at state-sponsored events, as well as banning unplanned gatherings in general. In response to a heatwave, so the measures could be temporary, but they're set down as law, so who knows? And this is on top of an outdoor smoking ban. If France wants to completely refute its own nationhood the only thing left to do is order their women to stop putting out.

It's another mark against the EU. Governments all over the place are getting bolder in deciding how for their citizens how they should live, yes. But the official governing body of Europe is especially addicted to nanny state authoritarianism, and it's hard to believe that hasn't had an effect on France.

Under your spell

One of the most interesting role-playing games out there is Mage: The Ascension. This is part of the World of Darkness, a shared world that dates back to the peak-Trent Reznor years of the 90s. The game centers on magical warfare between different camps of wizards, so obviously it's in the fantasy zone. But what's most interesting about it are the ways it's grounded in reality.

To begin with, there's the actual practice of magic in the game. You can't actually, for example, just point at someone and make them disappear to Elsewhere. People who have been doing magic for a very long time might be able to do something like that, but player characters start out as newbies, so it's out of their league. Besides which, big shows of force are called "vulgar" and the universe tends to punish them. So what the player's character actually does is a variety of small rites and procedures that may influence things in a supernatural way, but not so's anyone would notice.

Morality is relative, but the mages most aligned with "good" values of freedom and equality are in the Council of Nine Traditions. The Nine Traditions are aligned but varied. There's a shaman tradition, a witch tradition, a tradition that draws on the beliefs of Western religions, and a couple of "magic from science" traditions, for example.

The players on the other side(s) provide the second dose of realism. While the Nephandi are the most evil and the Marauders are probably the most dangerous, the most persistent opponents are the Technocracy. Descended from the groups who first invented money and agriculture, among other things, they've made their form of magic so commonly accepted that it just gets called "science" and "technology." The technocracy can be represented by telecoms who've vanished phone booths so that their mobile phones will have a place in every pocket, and pharmaceutical companies who can "treat" any idiosyncratic belief with SSRIs.

Are corporate America and the tech world literally run by sinister warlocks with a tight grip on arcane powers. No, I don't believe this. Again, not literally. But on another level, maybe? The COVID panic felt like something akin to the Technocracy flexing its muscles.

Young, man, there's no need to feel down

I was listening to a DJ today and could tell by her voice that she was in her twenties. At one point she said that she had "missed the blog era". I'd known for some time that blogging wasn't the craze it once was, but it hadn't occurred to me to think of it as a bygone era, one that youngsters don't recall. Welcome to my fossil collection.

That's as good a setup as any to a music post. I've been thinking about the late 60s emergence of Neil Young as a solo artist, something of a classic reversal. Just a couple of years earlier, he had been a guitarist and secondary vocalist in Buffalo Springfield. And in that time, at least as I see it, he was in Stephen Stills's shadow. Stills, who'd turned down the chance to be a Monkee*, had a great husky voice and a precocious collection of songs. Young was clearly talented, but seemed destined to be in the background.

Once the band broke up, things changed. Stills didn't stop being a good singer or songwriter. But it started to become apparent that the gawky Canadian was just on another level. Which might be why Young didn't have a consistent interest in being the fourth side of Crosby, Stills, and Nash. He was already flying.

*The guitarist job in the Monkees went to Stills's fellow Texan Mike Nesmith, although Stills sounds a lot more Texan than Nesmith when he talks.

Bye for now to the big blue box

One recent bit of news is that Doctor Who's 2026 Christmas special has been cancelled. With several other factors―lead Ncuti Gatwa leaving with no replacement, Russell T. Davies stepping down, Disney pulling its stake, etc.―this essentially means that the second age of Doctor Who is coming to a close. The age, that is, that started in 2005 when Christopher Eccleston debuted as the Ninth Doctor. 

There are many things that could be said about Doctor Who and the artistic decisions that led to this point. But what I feel more like talking about now is the Whovian culture war.

When I started paying attention to the fandom early in the century, when rumors started that the show would soon be revived, I found that a number were quite right wing. This is meant as a statement of fact, not an insult. These were often more personable than the average internet poster. But they had very set notions, one being how the Doctor should never be played by a woman or by a person of color. Now that both things have happened and the show has been canceled, you might expect them to be very smug. If you could still find them, that is.

These attitudes have more to do with history than anything else. Doctor Who has always been a fairly liberal enterprise, taking stands on war, pollution, and economic exploitation since the early 60s. This form of conservatism is really a kind of nostalgia for the British Empire. The Empire was dead by Doctor Who's 1963 premiere, being one big casualty of World War II. But it would stay in living memory for years afterward.

More recently a rival ideology has arisen amongst Who fans. Inevitable, perhaps. These have taken an extremely forward, borderline nihilistic line on social progress. Doctor Who must always make itself queerer and more rainbow-colored, in order to lead humanity to its post-gender and post-whiteness future.

The thing is that this newer ideology is just as much a product of historical forces as its opposite. It's a product of Britain's folding into the American Empire, and then copying the trends and manias that arise in the States.

And that historical circumstance is also changing. The 21st century's exact balance of power is still being decided. But what is for all intents and purposes certain is that China will ever rise as an economic and military power. Some others might as well. In any case, neither the UK nor the US will be an unrivaled power. If Doctor Who comes back for a third go-round―which is likely―it will be into another new world.