Less measuring! More slummocking!
Postcards from Readerville
This is post No. 4 (out of 7) for Give-a-Buck-for-Kids-Books week. I invite you to tip me one dollar, max, for the year. That’s it. One buck. Once a year. No AI. No auto-renew. No shenanigans.
320 Sycamore Studios publishes original kid stories served fresh monthly, plus essays, book recommendations, and postcards from Readerville. Everything is completely human-written.
slummock (verb intr.): To idle or loaf.
Of uncertain origin. Earliest documented use: 1877.
I just saw that there are smart-phone apps to measure your reading productivity.
Sigh.
We keep using that word “productivity”. I do not think it means what we think it means.
“The technology is just gonna get better and better and it’s gonna get easier and easier and more and more convenient and more and more pleasurable to sit alone with images on a screen given to us by people who do not love us but want our money. And that’s fine, in low doses. But if it’s the basic main staple of your diet, you’re gonna die.”
— David Foster Wallace (played by Jason Segel) in “The End of the Tour”
“It seems very clear that [Silicon Valley is] trying to create a world where virtually everything that we do is mediated by a screen and a digital platform or an app of some sort, because that not only allows them to collect immense amounts of data on us, but also to have some degree of control over, basically all of the interactions that we have in our lives, whether that’s communicating with people, whether that’s buying things, whatever it is, they want to be in the middle of that interaction or transaction so that they can get a piece of it or they can get something from it or they can understand something about us as a result of it.”
— Paris Marx (host of the “Tech Won’t Save Us” podcast), in an interview with Rachel Donald.
“The neoliberal imperative of self-optimization serves only to promote perfect functioning within the system. Inhibitions, points of weakness and mistakes are to be therapeutically eliminated in order to enhance efficiency and performance. In turn, everything is made comparable and measurable and subjected to the logic of the market. It is not concern for the good life that drives self-optimization. Rather, self-optimization follows from systemic constraints — from the logic of quantifying success on the market.”
— Byung-chul Han, Psychopolitics
Now in College, Luddite Teens Still Don’t Want Your Likes (NYT)
Three years ago, I praised the new boss at Barnes & Noble—a man named James Daunt who actually loves books. Back then, he was already infusing new life in the struggling company, and I predicted good things to come.
They have now arrived in full force.
— Ted Gioia, The Surprising Return of the Bookstore
I started this beast a year ago. Finished last night. Understood some of it.
I feel so productive.
Kid-lit riches for you
Happy reading.
— Jeff
320 Sycamore Studios is 100 percent AI-free.