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Human experience resists being reduced to data or systems
Marginal Notes by Ingrid Solheim: six links on Culture every week.
TL;DR
- The computist seeks to debug subjectivity out of human knowledge to establish a frictionless world.
- The English Peasants’ Revolt of 1381 was part of a broader European trend of ordinary people challenging authorities who failed to uphold their end of the bargain.
- “The Ford/Hill Project” creates a sense of vertigo by splicing and editing testimonies from the Thomas and Kavanaugh Supreme Court confirmation hearings.
- Jonathan Franzen, author of The Corrections, reflects on his long-held anger and the difficulty of creating new work.
- Lena Dunham’s memoir "Famesick" details the cost of transitioning from independent filmmaking to the corporate requirements of television.
- The Italian diaspora remains in a state of longing, driven by a myth of eternal return involving homecomings, food, and ghosts.
From the curator
Attempts to systematize or institutionalize human life often clash with the messy reality of individual experience. The Aeon article (16 min read) describes the computist dream of debugging subjectivity out of knowledge to create a frictionless world. Meanwhile, the New Yorker article by Richard Brody (9 min read) highlights the friction between independent creative freedom and the corporate demands of television production, as seen in Lena Dunham’s memoir about making "Girls."
This tension appears elsewhere as well, whether through the historical resistance of medieval peasants against rulers who broke their bargains, or the vertigo induced by restaging Supreme Court testimonies. From the longing of the Italian diaspora to the anger expressed by Jonathan Franzen, these accounts suggest that human behavior and memory remain stubbornly resistant to pure, objective categorization.
Ingrid Solheim
Curated for this issue
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