Alexandre Grégoire

Shirky’s and Tooby’s version of Never-Betterism has its excitements, but the history it uses seems to have been taken from the back of a cereal box. The idea, for instance, that the printing press rapidly gave birth to a new order of information, democratic and bottom-up, is a cruel cartoon of the truth. If the printing press did propel the Reformation, one of the biggest ideas it propelled was Luther’s newly invented absolutist anti-Semitism. And what followed the Reformation wasn’t the Enlightenment, a new era of openness and freely disseminated knowledge. What followed the Reformation was, actually, the Counter-Reformation, which used the same means—i.e., printed books—to spread ideas about what jerks the reformers were, and unleashed a hundred years of religious warfare. In the seventeen-fifties, more than two centuries later, Voltaire was still writing in a book about the horrors of those other books that urged burning men alive in auto-da-fé. Buried in Tooby’s little parenthetical—“where they exist”—are millions of human bodies.

"Exposure #44: Barmsee, Bavaria, 08.18.06, 4:37 p.m." (2006) de Barbara Prost

Gangsta rap made the threat of real violence one of its aesthetic criteria, not unlike the role of overdose played in rock in the Sixties and suicide played in poetry of the early Seventies.

À l’avenir, l’éducation aura pour but d’apprendre l’art du filtrage. Ce n’est plus nécessaire d’enseigner où est Katmandou, ou qui a été le premier roi de France après Charlemagne, parce qu’on le trouve partout. En revanche, on devrait demander aux étudiants d’examiner 15 sites afin qu’ils déterminent lequel, selon eux, est le plus fiable. Il faudrait leur apprendre la technique de la comparaison.