The Jenner Millennium Goes Bust

I recently heard that Frank Zappa used to refer to recordings as “trapped air,” which seems like such an apt phrase. The first sound recordings, as scratchy and ghostly as they were, amazed the world because they did something that basically seemed impossible before: inscribing our ephemeral bleats and blips into a medium – tin foil, wax, shellac – that could be replayed.

It was the biggest leap forward in our fruitless quest for immortality since writing, a very old technology, and photography, which was, in the nineteenth century, a much more recent one. You could hear your dead grandmother’s voice again, basically forever. A transcendent performance of a particular musical composition could be captured, rather than stored in your fading memory.

We take these things for granted nowadays, the fact that almost anything can be recorded. But meanwhile, technology has played another trick on us: the idea that “the Internet is forever.” Your racist tweet, the photo of you smoking on Facebook, your DMs with an ex, all these things are permanently pressed on the face of the Earth and can never be “deleted.”

But of course this is wrong. The Internet Archive and the Wayback Machine heroically try to “keep the receipts,” but so much of what we say and create these days will go poof in the air in a few short years. It’s like the winding of the gear of time has reversed – the media technologies that helped us affix things in a lasting medium like vinyl or print have given way to the highly disposable, like tweets or iPhones.

This curious change has occurred without a lot of notice, because we as humans are hardwired, in a way, not to think about eternity. It’s like how our memories are not as vivid as our immediate perception; as someone said in the 2001 film Waking Life, if every time a caveman thought about a saber-toothed tiger they once saw, they were completely terrified, they wouldn’t get much done. So it goes, and so we go.

So goes the great human pageant, as we see in this week’s recommended readings. We saw friend-of-the-blog Caitlyn Jenner advance a completely wild crypto scam, and then brokenly back-pedal. Canadians are worried about a U.S. civil war, maybe because they saw that awful movie. Radiolab told us about the cassette tape origins of the self-help movement. Software engineer Teresa Ibarra gave us a truly unique view into the inner worlds of our romantic communication. We learned about the moving tale of Liu Ting, a transwoman who became acclaimed as China’s “National Moral Model” (please keep the Kleenexes close). Dr. Pepper became America’s #2 soda. And there was an amazingly Keystone Kops-style coup attempt in the Democratic Republic of Congo.

As Nic Cage’s redneck boss in Raising Arizona said, “it’s a crazy world.” Here are our reading/listening suggestions for the week:

The Los Angeles Leaf Blower Wars (99% Invisible)

Michael S. Judge on the work of David Lynch and the Êlektron Nekrópolis

Canada’s Big Worry: A U.S. Civil War (Politico)

Mustafa Shares Video for New Song “Gaza Is Calling” (Pitchfork)

Liu Ting: From Hero to Heroine (Global Times)

@cloudcloutclaud
Liu Ting, Filial Piety, and National Moral Model Background Music: Empty World – Karen Mok covered by 夜色钢琴曲我 – Jolin Tsai covered by 龚明威violin #lgbtq #trans #pride #chinese #china #home #women #rolemodel
♬ original sound – Cloud Wang