Molly White:

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also joined in concerns about politicians launching tokens, posting: “The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send them any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively.” […]

I think it’s not great that a Senator who personally holds bitcoin can move bitcoin markets by a couple thousand dollars with just a tweet – and it’s not great that someone with a financial stake in crypto is tasked with regulating the sector. – The Subcommittee is stacked with crypto proponents, with pro-crypto Ruben Gallego (D-AZ, recipient of $10 million in crypto PAC funding) serving as the ranking member. Pro-crypto Republicans Bernie Moreno (OH, recipient of $40 million), Dave McCormick (PA, recipient of $35,000), Thom Tillis (NC), and Bill Hagerty (TN) are also taking seats. […]

Meanwhile, various financial firms are eagerly testing the waters with the new, more permissive regulators by filing applications for exchange-traded funds tracking memecoins including DOGE, BONK, and TRUMP. 21 I suppose they made their bed, and now they’re going to lie in it by being forced to review endless applications for the dumbest ETFs possible. If a financial adviser ever recommends I diversify my portfolio by buying shares of a PEPE ETF, I shall take that as my cue to withdraw every penny and place it under my mattress. […]

At least eight people have been arrested in connection to the kidnapping of the co-founder of Ledger, a popular cryptocurrency hardware wallet. David Balland and his wife were kidnapped from their home in France early on January 21 by a group who demanded a large cryptocurrency ransom. The group cut off one of Balland’s fingers, sending it to his associates and demanding ransom from them and family members. However, police were able to locate Balland and his wife on the night of January 22. “That’s 7 crypto wrench attacks in the first 3 weeks of this year. Unprecedented acceleration,” wrote Jameson Lopp, using slang to refer to physical attacks on people known to hold large sums of crypto. Lopp maintains an ongoing list of people who have been attacked in attempted or successful cryptocurrency thefts. […]

Ethereum co-founder Vitalik Buterin also joined in concerns about politicians launching tokens, posting: “The risk of politician coins comes from the fact that they are such a perfect bribery vehicle. If a politician issues a coin, you do not even need to send them any coins to give them money. Instead, you just buy and hold the coin, and this increases the value of their holdings passively.”

Nicholas Carr:

Near the end of “Minerva’s Owl,” in a rare moment of concision, [Harold Adams Innis] summed up his view: “Enormous improvements in communication have made understanding more difficult.” With that one startling and seemingly paradoxical sentence, he called into question a foundational assumption of modern media and, indeed, modern society: that an abundance of information brings a wealth of knowledge. Information and knowledge, he saw, could be adversaries. […]

The early, idealistic view of the Internet proved an illusion. The system went out of balance almost immediately, its spatial reach subverting its temporal depth. Far from alleviating our present-mindedness, the net magnified it.

Innis would not have been surprised. Information in digital form is weightless, its immateriality perfectly suited to instantaneous long-distance communication. It makes newsprint seem like concrete. The infrastructure built for its transmission, from massive data centers to fiber-optic cables to cell towers and Wi-Fi routers, is designed to deliver vast quantities of information as “dynamically” as possible, to use a term favored by network engineers and programmers. The object is always to increase the throughput of data. When the flow of information reaches the consumer, it’s translated into another flow: a stream of images formed of illuminated pixels, shifting patterns of light. The screen interface, particularly in its now-dominant touch-sensitive form, beckons us to dismiss the old and summon the new — to click, swipe, and scroll; to update and refresh. If the printed book was a technology of inscription, the screen is a technology of erasure.

(Also, this line from Carr is too good to pass up: “To use Google today is to enter not an archive but a bazaar.”)

Of course, a failure to communicate is nothing foreign to human interaction. If the dominant media belligerently amplify the failure, they certainly didn’t create it. But if the medium is both the message and the metaphor (and it certainly is), it’s a steeper, uphill battle than it ought to be for us these days.

For all his insight and brilliance, Innis was a largely pessimistic man, Carr tells us. But he ends the piece with what is basically a shout-out to the one glimmer of hope he finds in Innis: a reverence for the spoken word. “A spoken word may be as evanescent as a tweet or a snap,” Carr says, “but the acts of talking and listening — together, in one place — remain unmatched as vehicles for critical, creative, and communal thought.”

Linger on that word: unmatched.

The face-to-face interaction is simply that — unmatched.

In all of human history, is there an older or simpler truth than this? Surely this is because there really is no other human kind of interaction. We replicate this, as humans, with our interactions online, and often do so wonderfully; but it is still a replication, a shadow. And — though a shadow is not nothing — information that spends any extended period of time absent the interacting body through which character and love and community emerge is bound to degrade. And it is bound to degrade everything — the character, the love, the community, and the information itself.

The Eagle soars in the summit of Heaven,
The Hunter with his dogs pursues his circuit.
O perpetual revolution of configured stars,
O perpetual recurrence of determined seasons,
O world of spring and autumn, birth and dying!
The endless cycle of idea and action,
Endless invention, endless experiment,
Brings knowledge of motion, but not of stillness;
Knowledge of speech, but not of silence;
Knowledge of words, and ignorance of the Word.
All our knowledge brings us nearer to our ignorance,
All our ignorance brings us nearer to death,
But nearness to death no nearer to God.
Where is the Life we have lost in living?
Where is the wisdom we have lost in knowledge?
Where is the knowledge we have lost in information?
The cycles of Heaven in twenty centuries
Bring us farther from God and nearer to the Dust.

—T. S. Eliot

And yet, still unmatched is this:

To have turned away from everything to one face is to find oneself face to face with everything.

—Elizabeth Bowen

Nick Catoggio:

At the center is Trump himself, a lifelong con artist and recently convicted criminal who plainly feels more kinship with foreign strongmen than with the framers of the American experiment. Around him is a motley coterie of tech oligarchs, boorish yes-men, authoritarian ideologues, and preposterous grifters, all jockeying to assert themselves. Beyond that lies a ring of servile Republican mandarins who dislike him and his politics but are too cowardly to do anything but kowtow. And beyond that extends the great mass of MAGA fanatics, ever eager to validate any impulse he might have.

Part mafia, part circus, part cult, part scam: I’ve written more than 400 columns for The Dispatch, most of them on this subject, but I’ll never do justice to how comprehensively grotesque Trump and his movement are. At noon today he smarmily swore an oath of office to defend the Constitution in the same building that his goons attacked four years ago, to his delight, in hopes of installing him in power unlawfully. If you watched it and your stomach didn’t lurch then you’re well and truly boiled.

These four years are going to be worse than even I expected. And that’s not just the usual pessimism talking.

Flipping a narrow elm board from the nearest stack, I carefully brush the dirt away from the surface with my palm.

That, from Callum Robinson’s Ingrained, is about as plain a sentence as any. But in the callous-free world of click-‘n-swipe, it’s pure gold. It says something about our time, I think, when a thing so real and so simple sounds like magic.

Want more? Of course you do:

Flipping a narrow elm board from the nearest stack, I carefully brush the dirt away from the surface with my palm. Waiting — half wincing — for the hidden splinter’s bite that mercifully does not come. The board is far too small for my father’s purposes, but it is still rather beautiful. Honeyed browns and swirling reds, slashed through with greens and purples. Colours and features that are just faintly visible beneath its dust-caked surfaces. Pressing my thumbnail into the wood’s flesh, I scrape and drag but it leaves no mark. Even elm so young as this is incredibly tough.

In a sense, I think this is the reverse of Chesterton’s “Ethics of Elfland.” 

“[Fairy] tales say that apples were golden,” Chesterton tells us, “only to refresh the forgotten moment when we found that they were green. They make rivers run with wine only to make us remember, for one wild moment, that they run with water.” 

I have loved those lines from Chesterton since the moment I first read them. But today, it’s more than enough for a craftsman and writer like Robinson merely to say that some fresh, rough-sawn lumber is (wait for it) … honeyed-brown. And the surface of the boards is (oh my) dust-caked and damp and grainy.

He shows us the magic simply by telling us the reality.

I don’t know if one needs to have the automatic memory of running his or her fingers down the wet and granular planks of lumber at a sawmill for this to take effect. I suspect that Robinson’s descriptions are enough to make any technophile or homebody want to reach out and risk a handful of splinters — emphasis on simply reaching out.

To paraphrase (and slightly tweak) part of Chesterton’s argument: You don’t need an entire cosmos to find “largeness;” the nearest tree has always been grand enough — if you actually bother to stand next to it. Which is to say, the natural world you live in has always been plenty big enough and sacred enough for your own hungry soul.

To awaken the soul to the magnificence around it, Chesterton turns us to fairy stories, the genre par excellence for re-enchanting a disenchanted world. “Stories of magic alone,” he says, “can express my sense that life is not only a pleasure but a kind of eccentric privilege.” Though I would take out the word “alone,” this is Chesterton at his finest. And I think it’s quite true that magical stories still hold this valuable and wonderful place for us.

But I wonder if a modern mind which has spent years distracted, indeed, training itself to be distracted from the physical earth its physical body evolved in, was born in, walks in, breaths in — does that mind need anything so extraordinary to wake it up?

What, after all, is gold compared to the smell and texture, and especially (you won’t believe this) the swirling reds, of just one narrow board of elm?

I sometimes suspect that many, many people will soon enough discover a pretty magic- and even dopamine-filled thrill in the plain ol’ naked world. 

Sen. Tammy Duckworth to Pete Hegseth:

How can we ask these warriors to train and perform the absolute highest standards when you are asking us to lower the standards to make you the Secretary of Defense simply because you’re buddies with our president-elect. 

Sen. Angus King’s questioning of Hegseth was also significant. Honestly, if I hear another Trump appointee evasively say (i.e., in a way devoid of any meaning whatsoever) that they “will follow the rule of law” one more goddamn time I’m gonna flip over a table. The man despises the Geneva Conventions — and, ipso facto, the Uniform Code of Military Justice and the Federal Criminal Statute, which also encode the laws of the Conventions — and believes that torture and slaughter are useful tools of war as long as it’s some ever-justified us who does it to some never-justified them.

No one need don rose-colored glasses when it comes to the U.S. and the Geneva Conventions to see that an ominous defining down of deviance continues.

Hua Hsu, on Spotify’s “strategies for soundtracking the entirety of our days and nights”:

As a former Spotify employee once observed, the platform’s only real competitor is silence.…

Just as we train Spotify’s algorithm with our likes and dislikes, the platform seems to be training us to be round-the-clock listeners.

I don’t think too much emphasis could be put on those words: they are training us.

As Hsu points out, this sort of “practice” is on top of the quite common criticism of Spotify’s treatment of the streamed artists themselves. But the deal is just too good — and by now, too utterly normal — to refuse, so most people don’t bother to take issue with any of this, any more than they bother to take issue with the platform’s refusal to pay any royalties to artists who aren’t popular enough while the billionaire C.E.O. (ahem) cashes out $340 million in stock.

But all of that is an old song (especially for readers of Ted Gioia). Hsu goes on to talk about Liz Pelly’s book, Mood Machine: The Rise of Spotify and the Costs of the Perfect Playlist. Pelly, says Hsu, is “aggressively moralistic,” (which, despite the phrasing, I can only read as a compliment in this context), and her book, which covers the history of streaming, from Napster to the present, is primarily about what is, for Pelly, an even greater concern than the musicians: what all this has done, and what all this is doing, to the listeners.

For us, the all-day-anytime-anywhere streamers, it’s hard to say we’re even capable of loving the music we hear, in any meaningful sense of the word “love,” since these new sounds, says Hsu, “float largely free of context or lineage.”

Instead of a connection to history, we’re offered recommendations based on what other people listened to next. I’ve never heard so much music online as I have over the past few years yet felt so disconnected from its sources.[…]

Before, it was impossible to know how many times you listened to your favorite song; what mattered was that you’d chosen to buy it and bring it into your home. What we have now is a perverse, frictionless vision for art, where a song stays on repeat not because it’s our new favorite but because it’s just pleasant enough to ignore.

I admit that when people talk about the “attention economy,” I automatically grant a certain amount of truth to that description: I have generally assumed that these companies are, in fact, vying for our attention. But this can only be true if we have no idea at all what attention actually is.

There is a famous line from Simone Weil’s Gravity and Grace where she says that the cure for our faults is true attention, and that true attention, being so different from a tightening pride or will, is the same thing as prayer. But what she also says in that wonderful little notebook of hers is that attention “presupposes faith and love.”

In another, more famous line in an April 1942 letter to Jöe Bousquet, Weil says, “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity.”

And in another letter to Bousquet a month later, Weil says that from the age of fourteen she had been sustained by a faith “that no true effort of attention is ever wasted, even though it may never have any visible result.”

So it begs the question: in what possible way are these companies actually getting or even wanting our attention?

I think the answer has to be that they don’t want to have anything to do with attention. What they want is less attention in the room — any room, anywhere, for anyone. What they are doing is making attention less of a possibility at all.

(Pelly does, according to Hsu, come back around to what all this does to the artist. By increasingly curtailing their music to the Spotify method and market, they essentially become Spotify employees. That is, if they’re actually getting paid for their music at all.)

I know the Spotify criticism is an often repeated story, but this was a good reminder for someone who, like Hsu, sometimes borrows the “family account” and has been especially lazy about it lately. (And, in my case, annoys the shit out of his wife by flooding the queue with Chris Stapleton and Luke Combs.)

The real question sits randomly and hardly even acknowledged in the middle of Hsu’s piece: “I wonder if any of Pelly’s arguments will inspire readers to cancel their subscriptions.”

Doutbful, of course. But more imporantly, will it (or this meager post, for that matter) inspire anyone (myself included, for that matter) to find a better way to support, attend to, and enjoy the music they love?

One can certainly hope.

So, with any luck, for 2025, it’s gonna be Bandcamp, CDs, 98.9 WCLZ, and that greatest of all Spotify competitors: silence.

Weil again, to Bousquet:

The moment stands still. The whole of space is filled, even though sounds can be heard, with a dense silence which is not an absence of sound but is a positive object of sensation; it is the secret word, the word of Love who holds us in his arms from the beginning.

And my challenge to you if you’re reading this: Think of an artist who you enjoy who you have no recent memory of directly supporting, and — today, right now — support them.

I kicked things off with Bandcamp this year by preordering Jason Isbell’s “Foxes in the Snow.”

Happy listening!

David Frum:

Trump swore to uphold the Constitution in January 2017. He violated that oath in January 2021. Now, in January 2025, he will swear it again. The ritual survives. Its meaning has been lost.

Chad Holley’s Shield the Joyous is a beautiful story of boyhood in all its over- and under-confidence. “How these things crowd in!” the narrator, Michael Haley, parenthetically notes as he recalls another memory.

That nearly says it all.

Being a boy myself who grew up in the 80s and 90s, so much of it was deeply relatable. From the jambox cassette player — both the “let it be so” soft-open version and the “boxy” one the that “sprang open like a mantrap”; to the Honda Big Red three-wheeler, which I can only assume from the descriptions is exactly the one I spent the 90s bombing around the Sidney, Maine farmland on; to the Episcopalian-Presbyterian divide — “We were not merely Presbyterian, but of the unabashedly Calvinist stripe, so I was not raised to believe in good people”; to the casual appearance of .410s and .22s — respectively, the first gun I ever fired, in a pasture across from the house, and, a thousand shells and 25 years later, the last gun I ever fired (hopefully forever), at a gun range for a friend’s birthday; and so much more — this was a torrent and a treasure of memory to read. There were many wonderful smiles and chuckles reading it.

I have mentioned before (in a post on Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual) that I think often of this quote from Julian Barnes, on the front-loaded nature of childhood:

In those days, we imagined ourselves as being kept in some kind of holding pen, waiting to be released into our lives. And when that moment came, our lives—and time itself—would speed up. How were we to know that our lives had in any case begun, that some advantage had already been gained, some damage already inflicted? Also, that our release would only be into a larger holding pen, whose boundaries would be at first undiscernible.

True as that may be, there is a much more positive vision than the one found in Barnes. As I said in that post mentioned above, it is out of such unknowable, uncontrollable, chaotic childhood sludge that come all the tainted goodness and glory and light worthy of the name “life.”

I think the emphasis for Holley is on plain goodness. The goodness that, even with all the pain and tragedy and death life carries with it, a healthy memory — whether of the past 30 years or of the past 30 seconds — can both find and inspire… and perhaps even create.

Michael Haley may not, as he half-jokingly puts it, have been raised to believe in good people. But he has this to say about the father of the only Episcopalian family he knew growing up, which I think says “it” perfectly:

But good people, I would have to say, are the most compelling glimpse I’ve had of Goodness. And whenever in my life I have chanced to meet or so much as recall him, Mr. Peterson has offered to guide.

I have dwelt on the man’s good cheer. Equally evident, however, was what I think of as his honesty. There was something in the way he entered a crowd, the way he addressed people, the way he looked at you: he just seemed un-subject to the fear that makes others of us ignore things, like people and their pain. About his manner in this there was an unmistakable hint of choice. Perhaps even of formality. Or, better, form. But certainly nothing prim or prepared or, least of all, rigid. Rather the opposite: he seemed to have achieved in his bearing, by his choice, a sustained demonstration of openness, a continual and un-resented relinquishment.[…]

In him it seemed to answer all the oppressive strangeness and beauty of this life in a gentle and knowing spirit of paradox. In him it seemed to say, Yes, existence is indeed a flipping miracle, and if you care to see aught below the surface you must not swoon or rant or panic, but dial it back a touch, young man, and risk the restraint to settle in, deep enough, long enough, to observe the endless and exquisite ramification—from surface to bottom and back again—and even to glimpse, if you should be thus blessed, the true scope and nature of what is so miraculously on offer: what we, crushed by our wonder and our longing and our inability to summon the Name of Names, have denominated Love.

You can buy the book here.

Leszek Kolakowski:

To conceive of the ‘self’ as an ontologically autonomous entity that is made actual (or becomes a person) through communication with the realm of good and evil also implies that the self is located in a historically continuous community and is aware, even if only dimly, of this belonging. In other words, a community, in order to be real, must include past and even hypothetical future generations, and to live in a spiritual space in which the past is actual. Respect for tombs and attempts to communicate with ancestral spirits are natural expressions of our awareness that this spiritual space is real. And here, again, the link between the reality of the self and our feeling of belonging to a historically defined community is confirmed by the way the two have declined together in our civilization. Our respect for tombs and for the bodies of the dead, our awareness of living in a human city that stretches back to the past and beyond the present to future generations, all fade away pari passu with the collapse of the reality of the self. The more the historical community is perceived as unreal, the less ‘I’ am real myself.