Weekend Reads (October 19): The Cure, the “Satanic Panic,” Artificial Intelligence, Science vs. Religion
Recommended weekend reading material for October 19, 2024.
The Cure’s Robert Smith discusses the band’s upcoming new album, his disgust with the concert ticketing industry, his retirement plans, and growing older.
He pauses and comes back to Songs of a Lost World and its inherent, questioning gloom. “The world is falling apart,” he says of its themes. “It’s insane. It’s greed, inequality, monetisation. I’ve realised some of my reactions to the modern world are a bit extreme, that I’m becoming an old grouch and that it’s easy to tip over to talking about the fond memories of a world that’s disappeared … but there are moments I just want to leave the front door shut.”
Related: NME’s Andrew Trendell gives The Cure’s Songs of a Lost World five stars, calling it “a masterful reflection on loss” and “the most personal album of Smith’s career.”
Sonic Cathedral’s Nat Cramp reflects on the modern shoegaze revival.
This isn’t about numbers — the reason that people are drawn to this music, and have been for the past three decades, is because it has all the feels. And for a generation who has grown up self-isolating and social distancing it provides a convenient short-cut to human emotion. That is why those seventeen seconds of “When the Sun Hits” provide the perfect accompaniment to a slightly self-pitying TikTok post.
Now shoegaze is so far overground, what happens next in this post-revival era is anyone’s guess, but for the time being at least, it still matters, wherever you are.
Related: All of my shoegaze music reviews.
Among cinephiles, the Criterion Collection has an almost legendary reputation thanks to their deluxe treatment of classic films from the world’s greatest filmmakers. And now Criterion is bring their vaunted collection to the masses with the mobile Criterion Closet.
Once I arrived at the closet to create my own Closet Pick, I received a free Criterion tote (yes!) and a pamphlet that contained more than a thousand movie titles available inside the truck. Imagine every film that has ever made you cry, laugh, or gasp, all crammed together in one place. I mean, it’s the spot that made Bong Joon-ho giggle with giddiness and the Safdie brothers bashfully struggle with armloads of DVDs. For the first time, any old schmo who hadn’t (yet) made an award-winning feature film could saunter in and experience the splendors of the closet. The weight of the moment wasn’t lost on me.
More details on the mobile Criterion Closet, including where it’ll be stopping next, can be found here. Everything about this seems really cool, and I’m immensely jealous of everyone who gets to experience it.
Liz LaPoint reflects on the “nontroversy” that was the “Satanic panic” of the 1980s, when people were convinced there was a nation-wide cabal of Satanists who were engaged in kidnappings, child sacrifice, and other horrible things. (Spoiler alert: No such cabal existed.)
The Satanic Panic didn’t just ruin the lives of thousands of innocent people who’d been falsely accused of sexually abusing and/or killing children in so-called “Satanic Ritual Abuse” claims, it had a ripple effect on the entire nation (and maybe even world). Daycare employees, preschool teachers, coaches, and more were accused of the most heinous crimes against children, some so ridiculous it’s amazing anyone thought they were true. One teacher was accused of stripping naked and playing the piano in front of the children, others were accused of practicing rituals in secret tunnels and drinking the children’s blood. It took at least a decade of lawsuits, acquittals, and FBI investigations to determine the whole thing had been a massive witch-hunt. In 1992, the FBI released a report showing over 12,000 allegations had been investigated and no credible evidence of Satanic ritual abuse exists.
I often wonder how much of my innate skepticism and ambivalence towards modern conspiracy theories can be traced back to living through the “Satanic panic.” Early on, I believed it wholeheartedly; I read books like Walter Martin’s The Kingdom of the Cults and listened to Bob Larson with bated breath. But I quickly grew suspect of it; as a conspiracy, it simply seemed too implausible, and its criticisms of everything from rock n’ roll to Dungeons & Dragons seemed incredibly naïve and reductionistic even to my young mind.
The WordPress drama just keeps rolling on and on… This past weekend, founder Matt Mullenweg announced that WordPress had essentially taken over WP Engine’s “Advanced Custom Fields” (ACF) plugin — a very popular WordPress plugin that adds some critical functionality to the CMS — to address a supposed security issue.
It’s not clear what security problem Mullenweg is referring to in the post. He writes that he’s “invoking point 18 of the plugin directory guidelines,” in which the WordPress team reserves several rights, including removing a plugin, or changing it “without developer consent.” Mullenweg explains that the move has to do with WP Engine’s recently-filed lawsuit against him and Automattic.
I logged into one of my WordPress sites that uses ACF and sure enough, when I clicked on the update details, I was presented with WordPress’s version, which is titled “Secure Custom Fields.” This is absolutely nuts, and feels like little more than a crass power grab by Mullenweg. I think Nick Heer sums up the situation well:
It is nearly impossible to get me to feel sympathetic for anything touched by private equity, but Mullenweg has done just that. He really is burning all goodwill for reasons I cannot quite understand. I do understand the message he is sending, though: Mullenweg is prepared to use the web’s most popular CMS and any third-party contributions as his personal weapon. Your carefully developed plugin is not safe in the WordPress ecosystem if you dare cross him or Automattic.
In light of this, I wonder how all of those employees who stayed on board after Mullenweg offered them a severance package now feel about their decision. And how many of them will take Mullenweg’s latest severance offer?
In last week’s newsletter, I mentioned that I was working on a piece about artificial intelligence for Christ and Pop Culture. That piece, titled “Living for Truth in the Age of AI,” was published this week, and I’m pretty proud of it.
AI poses a more fundamental threat to society than energy consumption and copyright infringement, bad as those things are. We’re still quite a ways from being enslaved by a machine empire that harvests our bioelectric power, just as we’re still quite a ways from unknowingly living in a “neural interactive simulation.” And yet, to that latter point — and at the risk of sounding hyperbolic — even our current “mundane” forms of AI threaten to impose a form of false reality on us.
Put another way, AI’s ultimate legacy may not be environmental waste and out-of-work artists but rather, the damage that it does to our individual and collective abilities to understand, determine, and agree upon what is real.
I’d love to hear what you think about this.
The name Ward Christensen probably doesn’t mean much to most people, but as co-inventor of the computer bulletin board system (BBS), he helped lay the foundation for today’s online communities. He died earlier this week at the age of 78.
Christensen and Suess came up with the idea for the first computer bulletin board system during the Great Blizzard of 1978 when they wanted to keep up with their computer club, the Chicago Area Computer Hobbyists’ Exchange (CACHE), when physical travel was difficult. Beginning in January of that year, Suess assembled the hardware, and Christensen wrote the software, called CBBS.
[…]
Their new system allowed personal computer owners with modems to dial up a dedicated machine and leave messages that others would see later. The BBS concept represented a digital version of a push-pin bulletin board that might flank a grocery store entrance, town hall, or college dorm hallway.
One of my friends in high school ran a BBS — this was during the early ’90s — and it was my first exposure to any form of online communication. (IIRC, my first online argument was over the merits of the TurboGrafx-16.) Needless to say, the realization that I could communicate with people around the country, and even the world, blew my mind, and I started fantasizing about running my own BBS.
That didn’t happen because my dad didn’t want me tying up the family computer, but I still spent many hours thinking through how my BBS would run, what sort of content it would allow, etc. I even drafted up a welcome message and other text for it. Looking back on it all now, I have no doubt that planted the seeds for my interest in the internet, which I would discover several years later as a college freshman.
On a sidenote, it’s interesting to compare an “old school” innovator like Christensen to today’s “tech bros.” By all accounts, Christensen was a very humble and unassuming fellow, and willing to share his inventions and knowledge with others. That stands in marked contrast to the popular image of today’s tech innovators and disruptors, where ego and profit seems to rule the day. (See Elon Musk, and sadly, Matt Mullenweg, it seems.)
In 2023, “mommy vlogger” Ruby Franke was arrested and charged with multiple accounts of child abuse; this past February, she was sentenced to prison. Earlier this week, her daughter Shari spoke out against family vlogging and influencers.
Shari said her goal for speaking was to not present any idea of a solution to this problem, but to shed light on the ethical and monetary issues that come from being a child influencer.
“I want to be clear that there is never ever a good reason for posting your children online for money or fame,” Shari said. “There is no such thing as a moral or ethical family blogger.”
I know that some will say that “not all” family vloggers are the same, and that most are fairly innocuous. And they’re not wrong. Heck, my family has watched a few vloggers from time to time, especially when our kids were younger. But if “family vlogging” as a whole were to suddenly disappear from the internet tomorrow, it’s hard to see that as anything but a net positive for society.
Jake Meador discusses the modern writing economy and its conflicts with the traditional newsroom journalism model.
In short, we have a writing economy that is almost lab-engineered to produce lots of noise and lots of writers willing to do whatever it takes to rise up. Our current economy actually discourages slowness, reflection, and care because writers need those bylines and magazines need stories filed and amidst all the rush there isn’t time for slower conversation. We have a writing economy that is entirely concerned with the mechanics and economics of the writing life, and that is almost completely blind to the formational aspects of the writing life.
After Ken Klippenstein posted the Trump campaign’s dossier on J.D. Vance, he was banned from X/Twitter at the campaign’s behest — highlighting the undue influence that social media platforms have.
When Musk purchased Twitter in 2022 for an eye-popping $44 billion, it was unclear how the business mogul would manage to make the investment profitable. Initially, he promised no censorship or suppression and restored several previously banned accounts, including that of former president Donald Trump. But now that Musk has become an outspoken advocate of Trump’s presidential campaign, it is clear that his investment was always about political influence. Now, he is wielding that influence in increasingly brazen ways.
Finally, Derek Rishmawy tackles that age-old question: Is science incompatible with Christianity? (Spoiler alert: The answer is “No.”)
We’ve become so familiar with the conflict thesis that it’s taken for granted today. We assume there’s a worldview generated by science (including the hard sciences) and worldviews generated by religion, and you must choose: one means thinking, the others feeling.
While these are the choices presented to us, it’s worth taking a step back and asking whether this is the right framing of the debate or if there’s a more truthful and compelling starting point to the relationship between science and Christianity. I believe there is, and the starting point may be surprising: Genesis 1. The basic worldview Genesis 1 provides is necessary to the practice of science as we know it. As Alvin Plantinga suggests, while at first it may appear there’s a deep conflict between Christianity and science, it’s only superficial. There’s actually deep concord.
I grew up in a Christian subculture that was, shall we say, skeptical of science, and especially of anything (e.g., evolution, the Big Bang) that seemed to challenge a literal reading of the Genesis creation account. At the same time, I was a science nerd. Stephen Hawking was my hero in junior high, for instance, and I was convinced that I was going to become a cosmologist or theoretical physicist when I grew up — until the math did me in, anyway.
It wasn’t until after I graduated college, however, that I came to see — like Rishmawy — that much of the antagonism between science and religion wasn’t actually a thing. It didn’t help that cranks like Richard Dawkins and Douglas Wilson comfortably lobbed shots at each other from across the apparent divide (and had vested interests in keeping the divide nice and wide).
There’s undoubtedly a tension between science and religion and I’m OK with that, especially to the extent that it challenges fundamentalism in either camp. In the simplest terms, I’ve come to see science as a way to explore, understand, and exult in the glories of creation and its Creator, and religion as something that inspires, undergirds, and guides scientific research and discovery.
From the Blog
In light of the aforementioned new Cure album — due out on November 1 — I thought I’d share some of my favorite songs by Robert Smith and Co., such as “In Between Days” from 1985’s The Head on the Door.
After several albums’ worth of unrelenting gloom and doom, it was time for The Cure to kick out the jams, so to speak, and that’s precisely what they did with “In Between Days.” With its explosive drums, bouncy melodies, and acoustic guitar strumming, “In Between Days” feels like the product of an entirely different band than the one that wrote songs like “The Holy Hour,” “All Cats Are Grey,” and “One Hundred Years.”
Related: Back in 2010, I shared another list of my favorite Cure songs in anticipation of the impending Disintegration reissue.
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