Thread by @glukianoff

THREAD: The winner of my Prestigious Ashurbanipal award for February 2021 is @mgurri’s prophetic book “The Revolt of the Public,” specifically the extended 2018 edition. 1/10

thefire.org/gurris-negatio…

Recommended to me by @kmele, it has had a profound effect on my thinking on the state of the world.

The book introduces two key concepts I’ve incorporated into my “modular argument” for #freespeech. 2/10

1st: “Gurri’s negation,” his observation that the explosion of social media & information technology has tremendous power to tear down institutions, ideas, & people (e.g. cancel culture), but, as of yet, very little ability to create or sustain. 3/10

Social media has empowered vast multitudes to communicate directly with the world, but when the same ideas, institutions, or people are put up to the scrutiny of millions, little can really stand up. 4/10

I liken it to Justice Brandeis’ old dictum that “sunlight is the best disinfectant.” Brandeis meant that transparency is a great way to root out falsity & corruption. Yet if you were to focus all of the light of the sun on a single object, it would instantly be incinerated. 5/10

ZERO TWEET: Click the link below for a detour to check out my Jack Kirby award to John Byrne, for his brilliant run of the Fantastic Four, or keep reading for what I call “Gurri’s nihilism!” 0/10

https://twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1363519703054958596

2nd: “Gurri’s nihilism,” the kind of nihilism in which negation is the primary approach & the lack of constructive or realistic suggestions or proposals amounts to a kind of de facto (& sometimes explicit) nihilism. 6/10

You can see this in American society in everything from “End the Fed,” to “abolish the police,” to cancel culture on both the right & the left, & to the absolute negation of all assumptions represented by the QAnon conspiracy. 8/10

Those are my EXTREMELY condensed definitions meant to make specific points. I emailed @mgurri to see if I had missed anything big, & he graciously sent me his own more rigorous definitions, which you can read. 9/10

thefire.org/gurris-negatio…

AND! My Fats Waller award for February goes to the interstellar rockabilly outfit from the Bay Area, @thephenomenauts. If Star Trek ever comes across a rockabilly band in space, they better be playing Phenomenauts covers! 10/10

open.spotify.com/artist/3IViqpV…

Bonus: In honor #PressFreedomDay check out this thread on #freespeech, #censorship, & college journalism! 11/10

https://twitter.com/glukianoff/status/1327375112937615365