If I had to get all mathematical and imagine a topology for US narrative space, I'd make it a planar graph of charismatic cities, with an extra node in the middle titled "heartland" to which all of flyover country is mapped. Sounds callous, but that's really it.
-
Show this thread
-
The American heartland is a trope more than a place. Specific interstices within the city graphs do not have strong identities. At best, you can decompose "heartland" into "Midwest", "Texas", "Prairies" and "Old South", and those are not intrinsic, but artifacts of global history
2 replies 0 retweets 6 likesShow this thread -
By contrast, agrarian heartland of India for instance, is strongly differentiated. Starting with entire mutually unintelligible languages. If you did a narrative-space graph of India, ratio would be reversed. There would be few charismatic cities, many charismatic heartlands.
1 reply 0 retweets 5 likesShow this thread -
This means, as narrative spaces go, the US is peculiarly tractable. Stories that play out on the charismatic-city narrative graph are unusually legible in way old world stories are not. That's why, for instance, a road trip is a better narrative template in the US than elsewhere.
1 reply 0 retweets 5 likesShow this thread -
this is also why attempts to predict the future of the US in response to the Great Weirding by looking at countries that got hit earlier (USSR, Japan, Greece, Britain) are misguided. American exceptionalism in classical terms may be dead, but this is still a weird country.
1 reply 0 retweets 4 likesShow this thread -
Hmm... I'm now thinking of the Great Weirding as a shock wave that unfolded in at least 4 parts: USSR (1989-2000), Islamic sphere (1992-2007), West (starting with Greece, 2009), and finally Asia (China and India, both around 2017-19: Xi elevation and Modi 2nd term)
2 replies 0 retweets 5 likesShow this thread -
Hmm. The Great Weirding in this 4-wave form kinda follows the logic of clash of civilizations huntington model. It didn't go from localized weirding to great weirding until it hit America though. That's when the whole thing came together as a global shitshow.
2 replies 1 retweet 3 likesShow this thread -
A lot of my thinking/ideas now are of the sort that would best suit a sort of sprawling podcast format rather than essay... mainly because I'm getting increasingly lazy about writing up all but the tightest, hardest ideas in longform
3 replies 0 retweets 8 likesShow this thread -
Replying to @vgr
I have lived my life with this feeling! But for the first time, I'm writing up works-in-progress and publishing them -- my first issue goes out Wednesday


(http://innovationatscale.substack.com )1 reply 0 retweets 2 likes -
Replying to @dmcdougall @vgr
I always admired Kojeve, perhaps the most influential French intellectual of the 20th Century, because most of his influence was from his lectures and teaching. That seems *so much easier* to me than writing anything down
1 reply 1 retweet 2 likes
Loading seems to be taking a while.
Twitter may be over capacity or experiencing a momentary hiccup. Try again or visit Twitter Status for more information.
