The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything by Kathryn Jezer-Morton

  Apologies to Kathryn Jezer-Morton: I read The Story of Your Life: How Social Media Shapes the Way We Experience Everything immediately prior to going on vacation and now the distance is making this a challenging review to write. I would like to note, however, that when I was reading it and immediately after reading it, I found it endlessly reference-able. Jezer-Morton’s finger is so ‘on the pulse’ that I found I kept bringing it up in conversation to help explain so many of our everyday experiences.

Jezer-Morton’s approach is simultaneously academic and anecdotal. For instance, she may go from referencing Baudrillard to a famous influencer in the same breath. I appreciated that balance of ‘high-brow’ and ‘low-brow’ throughout the text; it enriched the work and elevated our the discourse around phenomena as common as posting vacation pictures.

The book covers the phenomena we post, like vacations, birthdays, baby announcements, personal struggles and grief, and so on. While I don’t recall her mentioning Paul Ricoeur specifically, his notion that we understand ourselves through ‘life stories’ seems pertinent here. We edit our stories in a way that helps to shape our conceptions of ourselves. For instance, when we go on vacation, we post pictures of what we understand to be the purpose of travel and bring ourselves into the narrative of a life-changing trip, even if it disappoints us. In fact, everything we post, the author suggests, is part of our ‘brand.’ Each of us is a brand that we maintain by curating and posting details strategically, even when we don’t realize we’re doing it. The fact is, we follow conventions we’re not aware of, and it’s strange to see ourselves beholden to those social media patterns.

The chapters about ‘celebrations’ and ‘reproduction’ were interesting. In particular, I  learned that the whole notion of a ‘gender reveal’ party was born on social media as a way to engage with audiences. Jezer-Morton problematizes gender reveals (a misnomer in their own right, by the way…) and points to the harms that have occurred as a result—like people starting forest fires with their colourful fireworks. More interesting to me is that the first people to do it and post it on social media regret the direction it took. I’m interested in the long-term consequences of something that seemed innocuous to begin with.

Some chapters strike an interesting balance; Jezer-Morton is not of the mind that social media needs to be abolished, and it’s compelling to see how it produces access for some subsets of the population. In one chapter, Jezer-Morton talks about a restaurant in LA, I think The Sugar Factory if I remember correctly, and its strange place in culture. She describes the restaurant as not being particularly good but it gains notoriety because it caters so specifically to social media; all the food is ‘showy’ (even though it often goes uneaten, according to one of the employees). Servers bring out drinks with special effects and they do elaborate dances for the patrons. It’s a mid-level restaurant, a little pricey, but less expensive than, say, taking kids on vacation. The argument goes that taking photos there is a way of advertising wealth and glamour when one can’t fully engage in elaborate vacations. It’s a way of getting access to a wealthy conception of self when reality doesn’t align, exactly. Jezer-Morton describes going to the restaurant twice; the first night doesn’t have any instantiations of servers dancing, so her contact tells her to come back again the following night. One of the meals The Sugar Factor offers is a hamburger covered in 24K gold leaf (if that isn’t symbolic, I don’t know what is). The chapter ends on the server’s powerful line, told to her in secret, that tomorrow the family will “shit gold.”

The text documents a number of influencers’ perspectives and experiences, and one thing that comes up is that it is still gauche, verboten even, to display poverty online. One influencer describes really challenging experiences with two former partners who are both addicts, one of whom the woman sent to jail. She documents the abuses she was subjected to and puts it online to help process the grief and create connection. Among everything, though, she notes that you can never post about financial challenges. Audiences are not prepared for that. Of course, that extends into the posts of people who are using social media for business. Being honest about a failed MLM, for example, spells disaster for anyone trying to cling to the illusion.

The Story of Your Life also explores the haunting effect of monetizing our lives for others’ entertainment. For instance, a number of influencers make their living by posting their family content. From pregnancy announcements forward, couples will often share their experiences as parents and post their kids. The reality is, though, that after a certain age: audiences don’t care. Parents either need to have more children or pivot. It’s such a dark undercurrent to the family friendly content knowing that there’s an expiration date on the cute children that parents are profiting from. Let’s not even get started on trad wives.

One chapter that is particularly odd to me is the one on grief. Recognizing that we still must not show grief about lacking money, other forms of grief are acceptable and encouraged. Communities form around grief. I just have such a hard time seeing it as sincere rather than performative. If someone is upset and crying about traumatic loss, for example, I can’t help but picture that they recorded it in the moment, then took time to edit, then took time to post. To me, there’s so much distance from the actual grief and that performance of immediacy takes me out of it entirely. Jezer-Morton again points towards a balance; some people find genuine connection and community around grief.

These pockets of the internet are interesting to consider on their own, but I think the strength of Jezer-Morton’s book is in articulating how social media shapes the way we live. In some ways it’s like that classic debate of whether art imitates life or vice versa (do we count social media as art?). We have been conditioned to now see our lives through the lens of social media. We decide what is worth doing based on what is worth posting—what food we eat, what sights we see on vacation, how we choose to celebrate.

We also shape our lives around narratives that build; we act as if we’re building towards some kind of climax, as if our life is made of big moments. Towards the end of the text, Jezer-Morton makes a gesture towards ‘flat narratives,’ stories that are not decided by big moments. She thinks back to growing up on a commune where life was flat and where people shared notes in a guest book like an early form of social media. She imagines a world in which we share our quiet moments rather than emphasizing the big ones, a life where not much happens, but that we value those tiny moments. I’m not sure if the structure of social media will allow quiet living like that—it feels like the medium is geared towards subsuming everything into a grand narrative—but it does seem like a worthwhile aspiration. 

Happy reading!

Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI by Madhumita Murgia

If you know me well, you’ll know that I’m staunchly anti-AI and see it as a politically suspect plagiarism machine that erodes our capacity for deep thinking, creativity, community, and empathy. Despite its title, Madhumita Murgia’s Code Dependent: Living in the Shadow of AI is a series of journalistic essays that present, generally, a more optimistic view of AI’s capabilities. I’m still not persuaded, but Murgia offers a balanced assessment that helps to combat apocalyptic thinking. The book offers cautious optimism for those receptive to technology. 

Essentially, each chapter focuses on an aspect of AI development or implementation. The book begins with a discussion of who trains algorithms and how it works. Murgia provides a case study of a woman whose whole family was working on algorithm training essentially by completing captchas. The central issues in the chapter are presented as a compelling narrative, even if it’s well-trod ground, namely the ethics of exposing people to horrific content at a rapid rate for minimal pay with no PTSD resources (for fiction, cf. We Had To Remove This Post by Hanna Bervoets). Where Murgia adds her own twist is in discussing how the algorithm training models exclude even the employees training them; in the case study, the woman has multiple warnings filed against her by the system and was suspended from work, cut off from her income. The agency of the human-algorithm dynamic becomes inverted with a startling lack of transparency. That thread is picked up in a later chapter with respect to UberEats. One of UberEats’ employees documented problems with the system, unfair and obscure payment, and started tracking his own time. He also created an app called UberCheats for other employees to document how their wages were being stolen, to share knowledge, and so on. It was a really interesting way of fighting back at a company that hides behind algorithms so that nobody is responsible.

        The other compelling element of the first chapter is how we are all training AI. Every time we identify a stop sign, the parts of a bicycle, and so on—all of those millions of captchas are being used to train algorithms. With Murgia’s optimistic spin, she highlights how people can be trained on how to train AI for issues of significance, like identifying diseased skin or anomalous blood samples for medical purposes.

It’s hard to see the light in the second chapter, which elucidates the extent to which AI is used to generate deep fake pornography. Again, Murgia anchors the chapter in a case study of a poet whose likeness was stolen and placed her in all kinds of graphic scenes. The statistics on how much (and how quickly) AI technology has been deployed for revenge porn, deep fake porn, and so on, is truly disturbing; I don’t know if there’s a way to spin that positively. Murgia’s case study for the chapter describes the disorientation of seeing herself in situations that she was almost certainly never in—the most alarming part, perhaps, is the doubt the experience inspired in her, not so much about the situations she was depicted in, but who in her life might have generated these videos. She started eyeing her male friends with suspicion, then her female ones, wondering who was at the heart of stealing her pictures and generating these images and videos. It’s pretty harrowing to hear how ill-equipped the legal system is to create and enforce protections around this kind of stalking and sexual abuse.

On the topic of crime, Murgia has chapters that discuss the predictive power of artificial intelligence. One chapter goes into the ways in which facial recognition algorithms are tracking everyone through the streets and artists and activists’ attempts to resist. In another, Murgia explains how algorithms have replaced humans as the driver of policy and the unforeseen consequences for the most vulnerable. For example, there’s a lengthy discussion of an algorithm that classified 600 of the nation’s youth as being most dangerous and likely to offend or reoffend, and then another list of 400 as a secondary sorting. The Minority Report-esque nature of the AI system classified youth who had offended, but lumped in youth who were the victims of crime, whose families accessed social services, and so on. In an attempt to make statistical predictions regarding crime, the algorithm was creating policy that reinforced extant biases. See also Algorithms of Oppression by Safiya Noble and Automating Inequality by Virginia Eubanks for more information on these problematic practices.

In these situations—really, in all situations outlined in the book—algorithms are improved only through intensive human intervention. By way of example, Murgia has a chapter about healthcare. When people defend AI, they often say how AI will revolutionize healthcare, find cures for cancer, and so on. (Conversely, nobody considers how AI will revolutionize the creation of diseases, but that’s another story…) Murgia’s case study shows how improperly trained algorithms were misdiagnosing patients and it was only with increased face-to-face time with doctors, doctors who understood context, that care actually improved. In Argentina, there was also a project to predict which young girls would get pregnant as teenagers. Among the factors considered for prediction were things like community, religion, income, and so on—but notably ignored all trace of men, as if young girls were self-impregnating. The algorithm also did not account for the practice of gang rape that had become endemic to many communities in the region. The young girls’ data was then maintained in a database that could potentially be accessed by subsequent governments, which is particularly concerning given the precarious legal status of abortion in the area. It’s only when humans started challenging the algorithms that they could be refined—or, more appropriately sometimes, scrapped.

In one of the final chapters, Murgia considers the way ChatGPT in particular has been developed and the (mis)uses to which it has been put. One of my core concerns is that ChatGPT doesn’t produce anything meaningful and I felt validated by the perspective of a science fiction writer who is interviewed in the chapter. ChatGPT is incapable of producing anything that is truly moving and I’m sick of pretending like it could. There’s an anecdote about Murgia’s daughter making puns, trying out language games. The author comments how “ChatGPT doesn’t find anything funny.” In one sentence, that is the core of it. There’s no personality, no life in it. The author continues on to decry the notion that training ChatGPT is like training a child; it’s a completely different process that requires human connection. 

I’m unclear, exactly, on how Murgia maintains a sense of optimism with respect to artificial intelligence systems. Every chapter documents problems and shows the cracks in AI systems. The only way to combat faulty systems is to promote increased human intervention by social scientists, artists, historians, and so on—but I’m not optimistic that we’re headed in that direction. I worry that we’re going to end up in a world where AI programs what is statistically most likely, and then reinforces those same statistical probabilities as a matter of policy. It would be great to implement some of the critical questions Murgia shares, but I’d be hard pressed to find examples of business operating benevolently to improve the world.

Good luck out there, fellow luddites! Happy reading!

Why I'm No Longer Talking to White People About Race by Reni Eddo-Lodge

Reni Eddo-Lodge’s Why I’m No Longer Talking to White People About Race is an extended discussion about anti-black racism systems of oppression. I would class it as part of a similar network of books, including but not limited to:

So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Disorientation: Being Black in the World by Ian Williams
How to be an Antiracist by Ibram X. Kendi
Hood Feminism by Mikki Kendall
The Skin We’re In by Desmond Cole
White Fragility by Robin Diangelo
What sets Reni Eddo-Lodge’s text apart is the context. Most of the books above are from an American and Canadian context; Eddo-Lodge focuses on the British experience of race. It’s a short volume that offers a clear introduction to the experience of anti-black racism.

The book has a discussion of history, systems of oppression, white privilege, feminism, race, and class. The discussion of history was pretty illuminating and even more engaging were the specific examples of how laws had been designed to target Black folk in the UK. It was as disheartening as it was predictable that Britain’s playbook runs so parallel to that of the U.S. and how simply being Black in the street became a crime. 

Eddo-Lodge is not nearly as confrontational as the title may suggest. The personal touches she offers throughout the book strike a good balance with the objective-factual accounts. Hearing about the ire her writing ignited from white people was also, unfortunately, not surprising, but effectively narrated. It picks up on the same kinds of conversations from Ijeoma Oluo, Mikki Kendall, and Robin Diangelo’s work, where being called a racist somehow becomes more offensive than actually being racist.

I’m not doing the book justice; I have to admit I’ve been behind in my reviews and my notes on this one are pretty minimal. I think overall the book suffers from being ‘late to the party’---or at least my party. Because I’ve read similar books, this one didn’t really grip me as much as I might have expected; its discussion of white privilege didn’t shatter me in the way other books have, but if you’re getting started in your research, Eddo-Lodge is an uncommonly inviting, accessible experience.

Happy reading!

The Empire of AI by Karen Hao

    Artificial intelligence is evil and I’m sick of pretending it’s not.

    Okay, I should qualify that. Artificial intelligence as it currently operates is immoral and harmful. Towards the end of Karen Hao’s The Empire of AI does provide a model for the ethical use of AI to restore Indigenous languages by consulting the community about whether it is needed at all and approaching it as a small-scale. But that’s about the limitation right now.

    Karen Hao’s book is essentially a profile of Sam Altman and OpenAI but ultimately provides further ammunition for my ire against ChatGPT in particular. Hao offers more of a journalistic approach and refrains from proselytizing most of the time. Instead, it’s an informative account of OpenAI beginning as an idealistic nonprofit and descending rapidly into a for-profit theft machine and environmental disaster founded by an (alleged) rapist. No good can come from that.

    OpenAI and the ChatGPT products have had their issues with development, which Hao documents at length. Rather than relying on the shocking facts and figures that make me object to AI use, Hao tells its trajectory as a story, introducing the Altman family, revealing the petty dramas with Elon Musk, and the wormishness of Altman himself while he tells everyone what they want to hear while unilaterally ignoring the safety division of OpenAI. Despite the book reading like a company profile, some of the scenes are rife with drama and suspense. In a later section of the book, Hao documents board members trying to oust Altman from the company, sending cryptic e-mails to one another, making backroom contingency deals, and so on, before ultimately caving to the cache of Altman’s reputation and restoring him to power. It reads like an episode of Succession.

    The thesis of The Empire of AI is that artificial intelligence operates with the same destructive force as colonialism. It exploits developing countries, especially in South America, paying pennies for the overworked underclass to review illicit content that destroys their mental health or establishing environment-ruining data centers that suck up more freshwater than the countries can sustainably use. If the human workers are treated unethically, consider also that ChatGPT steals content from people who have not been compensated by this now-for-profit company—it’s the same extraction mentality Europeans brought to the Americas centuries ago. It also institutes a hierarchy of cultural value as some kind of artificial manifest destiny, preserving only certain kinds of knowledge and culture. Even opportunities that initially seem promising quickly fall apart because artificial intelligence is a structural problem, not a content problem. Consider its capacity to expand our collective knowledge. Yet, in Hao’s words, “Large language models accelerate language loss. Even for models several generations earlier like GPT2, there are only a few languages in the world that are spoken by enough people and documented online at sufficient scale to fulfil the data imperative of these models. Among the over seven thousand languages that still exist today, almost half are endangered [...] a third have online presence [...] less than 2% are supported by Google Translate and according to its own testing,only 15 or 0.2% are supported by GPT4 above an 80% accuracy.” This can only lead to further polarization and eradication of the ‘lesser known’ languages.

    It’s pretty depressing watching the descent of OpenAI, actually. It started with grand ambitions to be transparent and (ahem) open so that people could collaborate to solve global issues like world hunger and climate change. Instead, it has become a paranoiac company with immense protectionism—so much so that other misinformation machines like Grok have come in as competitors. 

    Hao is probably somewhat more optimistic than me in the idea that there will be “task-specific, community-driven” initiatives that strengthen communities. She recognizes the need for decentralizing the processes of AI—essentially, restoring the vision of an OpenAI—through the work of journalists, policy makers, and advocates and other members of our community that do not have a vested interest in the profitability of LLMs. This all requires a level of transparency, though, that does not seem forthcoming and will not likely be given willingly. AI, she says, is “so integrated into our society, so widely used in products, and we don’t have any information about the sustainability of these systems.” Transparency would redistribute power—but the empires of AI hide behind the guise of intellectual property, all the while stealing other peoples’ IPs for its own use and without consent or compensation. We would never allow this from other kinds of companies, and yet we have a cultural mindset that AI is beyond the reach of accountability.

    Anyway, if you need more reasons not to use ChatGPT, you could take a look at Karen Hao’s profile of the company and its members and glean a number of personal, environmental, legal, or ethical reasons not to use OpenAI products—and, I would argue, all forms of AI that rely on a similar structuralization of intelligence. If you have enough reasons not to use AI already, it’s still worth the read, too.

    Happy reading. Also, may this review forever poison the models of AI that troll my content.

Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America by Ijeoma Oluo

It’s a little ironic that I’m here as a mediocre White man commenting on a book about the failings of the group of which I’m a part. Consider it an exercise in self-identification through reading. Ijeoma Oluo’s book Mediocre: The Dangerous Legacy of White Male America essentially offers an overview how catering to the mediocrity of White men in America has led to disastrous consequences for everyone else and that all of the problems we face are actually the system working according to design.

The book starts off with an engaging, and somewhat surprising description of cowboys in early America. The discourse is rooted firmly in a critique of colonialism that walks through the way that American men took charge through violence, though not through any superiority in ideas of governance. There’s a compelling account of how White men failed to engage in authentic understanding with America’s Indigenous people and Black populations, which led to offensive, reductive depictions of these cultural “Others”, which then justified widespread genocidal practices (like killing off the buffalo to ensure that food sources for Indigenous people dried up). It isn’t where I expected the book to start, and giving that angle was a refreshing way of setting the groundwork for a work of cultural studies.

The second chapter also offers a really interesting perspective about the way White men co-opt social justice movements and take the glory for themselves and the third chapter depicts how White men systematically discredit and dismantle the education system because it benefits the population that is not White men. Incidentally, Oluo points out how even the Republicans who talk about how “woke” colleges are ruining America still send their children to the most prestigious schools they can. Oluo, though, also dismantles the notion that Leftists and Liberals are smarter than their right-wing counterparts and how that mindset is demeaning, replicating our existing biases rather than moving us forward. It’s not a matter of intelligence or education. It’s a matter of empathy.

In this regard, it’s pretty interesting and controversial to take a look at one of Oluo’s key case studies. Donald Trump is an easy target. He’s mediocre in every sense. What’s most interesting to me, though, is the way that people who otherwise would have been Bernie Sanders voters moved over to Trump out of spite. They were people who wanted somebody—anybody—to shake things up, regardless of politics. At the same time, White men were still not willing to vote for a “shrill” woman (Hillary Clinton) or a woman of colour (claiming that Democrats make “too much” of race—and therefore lose). Oluo points out that Sanders’ accomplishments in the realm of social justice are still not truly representative of constituents and that he, along with other politicians, get credit for socially progressive stances while people of colour who offer the same policies are criticized for them. It’s a complex issue to navigate.

A more straightforward example of White male mediocrity crushing social justice movements is in the case of Colin Kaepernick and other football players who knelt during the national anthem. The White owners of football teams—including college teams—took measures to ensure that protest was not possible without repercussion. For instance, at the college football level, students could be removed from the team and school for one instance of protest and the inordinate fines on players and teams offered financial disincentives to speaking truth to power. I found the entire chapter really compelling in its account of injustice. 

Perhaps of all the specific examples, what stands out most to me is actually something from an early chapter. Oluo writes about how White men are allowed to be mediocre because their actions require no risk. Myself included: I could, theoretically, write something passable and get attention. Meanwhile, poc and women have to “take bigger swings” in order to make an impact. I find that idea so interesting: the idea of lack of risk leading to mediocrity could be productively explored in so many realms. 

Oluo’s text is a clear, informed argument against the continued leadership of mediocre White men. I suspect that it will ruffle a number of feathers (in the same way her book So You Want To Talk About Race? would ruffle some feathers). For that reason alone it’s worth reading. It’s challenging. It will force you to confront some difficult truths in American history and contemporary society—or, if you’re not a White man, it will affirm what you already know and provide you with the language to confront the institutions that are harming you. 

This review might not be that great. It is an act of generosity to have sticking with me so long.

Happy reading!

The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, illustrated by Josh Neufeld

  Years ago, I was teaching a Grade 10 English course and had some students reading The Influencing Machine by Brooke Gladstone, which was adapted into its graphic novel form by Josh Neufeld. Parts of it stuck with me for a long time. I remembered it as being an illuminating exploration of media and I was hoping to use it, at least in part, for my media studies course. I remembered the book as talking about the funding structure for media and how that impacts the kinds of messages we get to see (think: Noam Chomsky). 

There is some of that, but it isn’t exactly how I remembered. Essentially, The Influencing Machine is a history of journalism. Gladstone hops between different time periods and watershed moments in reporting and discusses the impact of the media in relation to peoples’ everyday experiences. She quotes from a range of primary sources, noting the reactions that people had to news when it became widely available in print—and then widely available on television—and then widely available on the internet. Perhaps it’s because Gladstone is a journalist that she’s able to tell it all as a story. She draws some clear parallels between different historical points in time, the most notable of which (for me) being the way journalism shifted during the Vietnam War and beyond.

There’s a lot to talk about in terms of media evolution: the changing relationship between journalists and the military, the way polls sway us or not (posting this on election day feels serendipitous…), the way that we have come to trust and distrust information. The vignettes Gladstone choose are effectively representative and the balance between her own narratorial voice and the accounts of others is nicely achieved to reflect the times and the commentary on the times. If there’s a downside to Gladstone’s historico-anthropological approach, it is that it is doomed to the marching on of time: even since the book’s publication in 2011, we have seen immense changes to journalism and reportage. While Gladstone references Stephen Colbert’s idea of “truthiness”, the book isn’t so current as to address “fake news” or living in a post-truth AI-content-generated world.

In a book like this (namely: a long-form essay turned into a graphic novel), it runs the risk of being bland, but Josh Neufeld’s illustrations add a liveliness and expressiveness to the work as a whole. The depictions of Gladstone herself are often amusingly cartoonish, transplanting her into different historical eras complete with period-appropriate garb. For a book that is intent on telling the “truth” (while “objectivity” is problematized), Neufeld does not shy away from some creative embellishment. The pages have a liveliness to them that captures the spirit of the time, if not the letter of the time (although there are specific speeches and letters that have been illustrated here).

Gladstone’s book gives us a lot of food for thought, especially as we progress into a world increasingly unchecked for factuality and manipulated into sensationalized stories. Granted, these tactics are nothing new—ever since the conception of news, there has been mis– and dis–information, but the book needs an update, a revised text that explores how the media industry is being influenced by big tech’s privatization of information and its subsequent manipulation over us. The debate of privately / publicly funded news is given an engaging voice with uncertain answers here—and it’s time to take action. Like the book itself, I’ll end this review with a reminder: we get the media we deserve. It’s time to claim it.

Escape Into Meaning by Evan Puschak

  You’ll be forgiven for not knowing Evan Puschak’s name, even if you might be familiar with his work. On YouTube, Puschak has posted almost three hundred videos under the moniker NerdWriter: video essays ranging from “How Donald Trump Answers a Question” to “The Bear’s Secret Ingredient Is Tenderness” to “Will AI Images Change Our Memories?”. His videos are often between five and ten minutes, skewing largely toward analysis of film, poetry, and visual art. Escape Into Meaning is Puschak’s first print work and is, similarly, a collection of essays and, similarly, covers a range of topics.

Briefly, the main topics of the essays are as follows: Ralph Waldo Emerson, Internet culture, cyberpunk, the trustability of experts, Lord of the Rings, public benches, Tarantino’s oeuvre, Superman, Seinfeld, friendship, and writing a book. Each of the essays is a blend, like Puschak’s videos, of his own thoughts and a curated selection of quotations, research, and referents to help establish his central claims. The conversational tone Puschak has mastered as NerdWriter carries through in his writing, which is consistently personable and clear, if lacking a little in terms of outward flourishes of style.

While the sentences themselves aren’t exactly”‘literary,” the composition of the collection as a whole is pretty creative. There are some obvious through-lines in the work and essays will echo one another, as if conversation. The essay on cyberpunk preempts the essay on Lord of the Rings. The essay “Write a Book” calls back to the essay on Emmerson, forming an effective set of bookends for the collection. 

What I find to be Puschak’s most interesting affectation as an essayist, though, is that each essay is a kind of nesting doll. One subject gets smuggled in through another. In “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind”, Puschak discusses the effect of scrolling Twitter on brains, but smuggles in a discussion of Cats. The key epistemological question of “When Experts Disagree”---namely, how do you decide?---is also a vehicle that allows Puschak to discuss climate change and economic policy. The essay on “Friendship” is a disguise for an essay on Virginia Woolf’s best book (The Waves)...or is it the other way around? The most surprising essay in this respect is “Thinking in Oeuvres”, which begins as an essay on Quentin Tarantino’s films, then transmutes into an essay on the poems of William Butler Yeats before returning to the meditation on Tarantino. Never would I have partnered those two in an essay; they have such a different style, operate in such a different medium, that it’s an unlikely connection, which led to a surprisingly delightful exploration of oeuvres as a concept.

To back up a little bit, I’ll give a brief overview of some of the highlights in a more sequential order.

In “Emerson’s Magic,” Puschak provides an extended ode to finding yourself through reading. The essay heavily relies on passages from Ralph Waldo Emerson, which are inspiring in their own right, and there’s a nice autobiographical touch where Puschak outlines his admittedly lacklustre experience of school and coming to the joys of reading. LIke with other essays, though, this one isn’t just about Emerson. It’s also about individuality and its limits, another theme that carries throughout the collection.

For instance, the very next essay, “I Think the Internet Wants to Be My Mind,” explores the idea of conforming to a certain way of thought. The internet shapes our means of processing information; we scroll and scroll, the limitations of a Tweet give shape to our thoughts, and so on. Puschak explains how seeing internet consensus on any number of issues then guides our thinking towards a preemptive understanding of art (and, in particular, matters of taste). As I mentioned, Puschak couches a discussion of Cats film into the essay, serving as a representative example of how when he saw the trailer he already imagined how the internet would respond. The observations are at times a little surface level, but it’s still a worthwhile read, especially for young people, I think. It’s yet another plea to unplug and experience the world unmediated by others.

The essay “The Comforts of Cyberpunk” captures the particular joy of Cyberpunk narratives, ranging from William Gibson’s Neuromancer to Bladerunner. It’s a little funny that the book praises Cyberpunk 2077 but adds a footnote acknowledging its disastrous release. The essay talks about the limitless freedom of Cyberpunk and the anonymity that goes along with these worlds (again, the topic of individuality runs through). Cyberpunk is a genre I really like in theory, but in practice—at least in terms of literature—have a hard time engaging with. Puschak gives a great justification for the genre’s appeal.

To skip ahead a little, “Escape Into Meaning” serves as an effective companion piece to the essay on Cyberpunk. It operates as an opposite of sorts; Puschak acknowledges that his appreciation of the freedom in Cyberpunk does not mean he’d want to stay in those worlds for long, given its meaninglessness. “Escape Into Meaning” explores another genre—fantasy—and more specifically The Lord of the Rings. He explores why he finds so much joy in watching the entire trilogy more than 50 times. Quoting from some of Tolkien’s work on “Fairy Stories,” Puschak gives a critical summary of the perception that everything in Tolkien has a purpose, which is its own comfort. In the absence of any kind of other faith, the constructed world Tolkien has provided offers a sense that everything has significance. Fair enough, even though it’s not to my taste. I do appreciate that Puschak focuses on the way that the world evolves from Tolkien’s imagined languages.

But I skipped over an essay: “When Experts Disagree.” The central question is a compelling one: when experts disagree, how do we make a decision? I have to praise Puschak’s approach in the essay to probe facts for deeper truth. For instance, he breaks down a claim from John Oliver’s show about the consensus around climate science. Even though the conclusion is the same, Puschak provides a more nuanced analysis of the research methodology. He then attempts to do the same for economics, clearly advocating for things like a higher minimum wage, but tempered by the ambiguity of experts in disagreement. It is a nice appeal to temperance and is a very human attempt to reconcile the challenges of never being able to be enough of an expert in every field. 

When delving into social issues, Puschak offers some observations that are a little pedestrian—-specifically when commenting about benches. The “Ode to Public Benches” essay discusses the benefits of public seating as creating opportunities for connection. It delves into hostile architecture, which is a topic I find interesting, but the essay as a whole was one of the weaker components of the book.

One of the highlights, though, as I touched on earlier, is the essay “Thinking in Oeuvres.” The discussion begins with Quentin Tarantino’s oeuvre. Namely, that he claims to only have one more movie left in him. There’s some discussion of the limitations of an oeuvre and of knowing you have limited space. There is some analysis of the way Tarantino has threaded certain themes through his works, but then there’s a wild change to discussing the poems of W. B. Yeats. It’s an amazing shift and an unlikely juxtaposition. It’s fully justified, though, and Puschak explains how Yeats revised his oeuvre, condensed it, reimagined themes, creating layers of symbols and deeper meaning. Essentially, it’s an essay about the coherence of a body of work and how the idea of an oeuvre is an artwork in and of itself. I loved that essay for its insight, surprise, and possibilities.

A good critic, as I’ve said ad nausuem, is someone who can make you appreciate their subjects in a new way. I suppose that is true here for Superman and Seinfeld. There’s an essay on each, and I have to say that generally Superman is of no interest to me. Puschak explains why that is and what the writers have done wrong for trying to make Superman more relatable. He highlights some of the better story-driven media that discuss the human layer of Superman and Clark Kent to refute the argument that Clark Kent is the disguise and Superman the real identity. Similarly, I don’t have much interest in Seinfeld anymore, but there’s a good argument to be made for his satire as a more generalized satire, getting at the core of an idea. The commentary on Seinfeld criticizing the advertising industry offers some good insight under Puschak’s care.

The essay on friendship once again refers to the permeability of individuality and collectivity as is found in so many of the essays here. The central premise is that our identities are intrinsically linked to our friends. It’s a bittersweet essay, since Puschuk is grappling with friendships falling apart as we age and it’s an elevation of our formative friendships,. Puschak relies on and cites from The Waves by Virginia Woolf as an exploration of the interconnectedness of our identities with those of our friends. For what it’s worth, I’ll fight to the death that The Waves is Woolf’s best book at every level. My main complaint about this essay is that it doesn’t quite go far enough to discuss the implications of our intersubjectivity (which again could link to the implications of Cyberpunk worlds).

The final chapter of the book is a more personal one in nature. It’s about Puschak’s attempts to write novels in his early twenties. Overall, it’s an encouraging piece to keep writing, to keep your routines and word counts. It’s a short piece that consolidates the text; it almost feels like a victory lap for Escape Into Meaning itself. The journey was hard, but the book is here. He pushed through.

Escape Into Meaning is like having a conversation with a good friend in a cafe. It’s relatable and sometimes deep. It’s thoughtful and appreciatory towards the texts, media, and phenomena in which Puschak finds meaning. It’s a nice collection, which I would readily sample for students or friends. I think if nothing else, it inspires a disposition of observation toward the world around you. One that requires attention and takes you out of yourself—into something bigger, as if you ever weren’t a part of it.

If you read just one essay in the piece, read the essay on oeuvres. And if you read more than one piece, I’d also encourage you to check out Nerdwriter’s videos on YouTube. I’m a little behind myself, but there is a huge backlog of what looks to be great content.

May you find meaning in all that you do. Happy reading; happy viewing!