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

[d.garcia@new-tactical-research.co.uk]

Boohoo indeed Ingrid,

strange that you think this is a condition only suffered by white males 
in these weird and particular times.
In the UK at least Black and Asian minorities are disproportionally 
affected by the pandemic and so also highly likely to
be disorientated not just in the old but also in wholly new ways.

And from the giddy heights of the middle class privileged life (not) my 
youngest daughter is currently locked down in a small room in her 
university housing in Scotland unable to leave her room or mingle with 
fellow students and neither she nor I have any idea what kind of 
education she will get. There is no horizon as the lock downs will be a 
feature for a while to come. And along with the parents of colour this 
worried white parent is on the phone every day struggling to figure out 
how to help her get through it. But maybe (as Higher Education is also 
one of your targets) you think she is also one of the privileged whose 
turn it is to taste a bit of despair. And maybe my white privileged 
worry for her future is also richly deserved. But your right we could 
have it a lot worse so lets reach for the world's tiniest violin 
Boohoohoo

David

On 2020-09-28 12:40, Hoofd, I.M. (Ingrid) wrote:
> 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
>
> #  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission #
> <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism, #
> collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets #  more
> info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
> #  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org #
> @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject:
#  distributed via <nettime>: no commercial use without permission
#  <nettime>  is a moderated mailing list for net criticism,
#  collaborative text filtering and cultural politics of the nets
#  more info: http://mx.kein.org/mailman/listinfo/nettime-l
#  archive: http://www.nettime.org contact: nettime@kein.org
#  @nettime_bot tweets mail w/ sender unless #ANON is in Subject: