Since reading Timothy Snyder’s On Freedom several weeks ago, I’ve been ruminating on books and other printed media as refuges. Synder discusses how enshittified social media empowers oligarchs to manipulate, control, and stultify common people. On page 258, he began summarizing this part of his argument by writing:
“A touchscreen is no prison wall, but we are surrounded and surveilled and nudged and controlled. We have consented to a grim behavioralist grid of stimulation. We are being predictified.”
Snyder opposes screen-based brain-scrambling and recommends prioritizing real-world embodied experiences, writing paper letters, and reading physical books. While I’ve benefited from cultivating connections on social media, I’ve waded through enough sewage and addled dupes to agree. The flat-earther, xenophobe, cryptoganda, hustler, and manosphere misogynist pipelines that hornswoggle suckers into right-wing troll politics and oligarch fluffing make the case.
My sister recently wore a Reading Rainbow T-shirt, so I’ve been hearing the show’s theme while imagining printed refuges. The two threads met this morning when I told my son I was “building a reading rainbow today.” By this, I meant I would reorganize my house’s second floor to encourage my family to engage with select books in a screen-free space.
Also, this morning, via Instagram, ironically, I saw Levar Burton’s video about being awarded The National Endowment of the Humanities Medal. His words show and prove the beauty of his work and person. Burton said:
“The arts and humanities, in my view, are the underpinnings of civilization. Without the arts and humanities, we don’t know who we are [or] where we’ve been. They give context for where we’re going.
All of our hopes, all of our dreams, all of our ambitions — they are all contained in these disciplines.
Without them, we are lost.
And I believe that humanity is meant to thrive and flourish.
And that doesn’t happen without context. And the arts and humanities — they are our vessels for context.”
As the Lakansyèl Koulèv, Ayida Wedo, transports Mawu-Lisa during creation, our arts and humanities inform humanity’s world-shaping and enrich it with beauty and pleasure. They may help safeguard our minds against dangerous gibberish and the real-world equivalent of Darkseid’s Anti-Life Equation attack from Final Crisis 4 (published in 2008).
