Re: <nettime> 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'

["Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid)" <I.M.Hoofd@uu.nl>]

Dear David and all,

Oh boohoo. Nick Couldry cum suis are rather late to the party of general hopelessness and lack of future perspective that so many others have suffered from for decades already. Who is the 'we' they are talking about - all the white privileged men who could up until recently still believe in the radical progressiveness of higher education and new media technologies? Welcome to the despair of the rest of the world, Nick and Bruce.

Cheers, Ingrid.


-----Original Message-----
From: nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org <nettime-l-bounces@mail.kein.org> On Behalf Of d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk
Sent: Monday, 28 September 2020 10:53
To: Nettime <nettime-l@kein.org>
Subject: <nettime> 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'



Just read an eerie and insightful essay by Nick Couldry and Bruce Schneier's 'The unrelenting horizonlessness of the Covid world'
which Identifies the fact that although we may not all be depressed we are more likely be suffering from  the condition of Acedia. A malady of medieval monks described as no longer caring about caring, a feeling of dislocation when all the normal future contexts that give our lives meaning are suspended no longer providing stable temporal horizon. Here is an extract. At the bottom is a link to the full essay.

"Six months into the pandemic with no end in sight, many of us have been feeling a sense of unease that goes beyond anxiety or distress. It’s a nameless feeling that somehow makes it hard to go on with even the nice things we regularly do.

What’s blocking our everyday routines is not the anxiety of lockdown adjustments, or the worries about ourselves and our loved ones — real though those worries are. It isn’t even the sense that, if we’re really honest with ourselves, much of what we do is pretty self-indulgent when held up against the urgency of a global pandemic. It is something more troubling and harder to name: an uncertainty about why we would go on doing much of what for years we’d taken for granted as inherently valuable."

"It’s here, moving back to the particular features of the global pandemic, that we see more clearly what drives the restlessness and dislocation so many have been feeling. The source of our current acedia is not the literal loss of a future; even the most pessimistic scenarios surrounding Covid-19 have our species surviving. The dislocation is more
subtle: a disruption in pretty much every future frame of reference on which just going on in the present relies.

Moving around is what we do as creatures, and for that we need horizons. 
Covid has erased many of the spatial and temporal horizons we rely on, even if we don’t notice them very often. We don’t know how the economy will look, how social life will go on, how our home routines will be changed, how work will be organized, how universities or the arts or local commerce will survive.

What unsettles us is not only fear of change. It’s that, if we can no longer trust in the future, many things become irrelevant, retrospectively pointless. And by that we mean from the perspective of a future whose basic shape we can no longer take for granted. This fundamentally disrupts how we weigh the value of what we are doing right now. It becomes especially hard under these conditions to hold on to the value in activities that, by their very nature, are future-directed, such as education or institution-building. That’s what many of us are feeling. That’s today’s acedia." Full essay here...

https://edition.cnn.com/2020/09/22/opinions/unrelenting-horizonlessness-of-covid-world-couldry-schneier/index.html

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