Theater Ideas Newsletter
January 3-9, 2025
As Garrison Keillor used to say, it’s been a quiet week here in Lake Wobegone. No long posts, and only a few short ones.
January 2, 2025
Michael Rushton asks “what is public funding for the arts for?” He offers a starting point for reflection.
My rejection of public funding for sustainable theater (not of public funding in general) is a desire for independence from artistic meddling. I want artists to pursue a unified vision that is their own in relationto their audience, unsullied by funders' priorities. Basically, artistic cussedness.
January 4, 2025
It seems to me that what micro.blog is helping me to do is avoid what Ed Zitron describes here.
January 6, 2025
Tracing My Influences
For quite a while now, I’ve been trying to find a through line for the thinkers I’ve admired, and I think I may have discovered it. The umbrella term is (true) anarchism (not the incarnation with violence). Here is how it seems to connect (in chronological order):
Peter Maurin –> Dorothy Day –> Ivan Illich –> John McKnight –> David Graeber –> Murray Bookchin
January 7, 2025
Lately, Alan Jacobs (social.ayjay.org) has been the source of a lot of new thoughts and new reading for me. One thing about social media is that the changes that happen incrementally sometimes aren’t noticed until someone like Nick Carr adds them up for you. Add in Musk and Zuck eliminating fact checking and social media is a quagmire.
Jacobs:
An excerpt from Nick Carr’s outstanding new book:
In their early form, online social networks reflected, at least by analogy, traditional patterns of socializing. Their design maintained divisions of space and time. Each member of a network had his or her own “place,” in the form of a profile page, and people traveled, through hyperlinks, from place to place to “visit” friends. Status updates and other postings were arranged chronologically. They unspooled sequentially through time, as thoughts and experiences had always unfolded. When Facebook introduced its automated News Feed in 2006, it replaced the familiar structure of the social world with the logic of the computer. It erased the divisions and disrupted the sequences, removing social interactions from the constraints of space and time and placing them into a frictionless setting of instantaneity and simultaneity. Socializing in this new sphere follows no familiar, human pattern; it vibrates chaotically to the otherworldly rhythms of algorithmic calculation.
The consequences have been dreadful — as we all know, though sometimes we try to pretend otherwise.
Thanks for reading! — Scott