"a dangerous ceding of ideological territory"

in

Enjoying Naomi Klein’s trip into the “Mirror World” and its implications. This passage particularly stood out:

"It is, moreover, extremely dangerous and troubling that corporate platforms can arbitrarily delete users and cut them off from the web of connections they built with their own words, images, and labor over years... Yet in North America, raising the alarm about the fact that we have outsourced the management of our critical information pathways to algorithms run by for-profit companies, working hand-in-glove with governments, somehow became the terrain of the Bannonite political right, which points to a dangerous ceding of ideological territory."

note to self

in

Trying to keep this bit – for my money, the finest bit of wisdom in a book full of it – at the forefront as I navigate my own resoundingly unproductive (and maddening) creative period:

"The word block suggests that you are constipated or stuck, when the truth is that you're empty... The problem is acceptance, which is something we're taught not to do. We're taught to improve uncomfortable situations, to change things, alleviate unpleasant feelings. But if you accept the reality that you have been given – that you are not in a productive creative period – you free yourself to begin filling up again."

"ask yourself in the stillest hour..."

in
"You are directing your thoughts outwards, and that above all is what you should not do at present. No one can advise and help you. No one. There is only one way. Withdraw into yourself... ask yourself in the stillest hour of the night, 'Must I write?' Dig deep into yourself for an answer. And if this answer should be in the affirmative, if you can meet this solemn question with a simple strong 'I must,' then build up your life according to this necessity. Your life right down to its most indifferent and unimportant hour must be a token at a witness to this compulsion."

"… but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture"

in

While Gibson fuses the idea of "personal micro-culture" here to writing fiction, I've long considered not only all of my writing, fiction or non–, but also my postings into the ether of here as the digital representatives of the personal micro-culture that makes me well, me:

"And thus we are shaped as writers, I believe, not so much by who our favorite writers are as by our general experience of fiction. Learning to write fiction, we learn to listen for our own acquired sense of what feels right, based on the totality of the pleasure (or its lack) that fiction has provided us. Not direct emulation, but rather a matter of a personal micro-culture."

Recording (and refreshing my memory of) it in this space as a sort of statement of creative intent for the incoming year.