{"id":252129,"date":"2022-06-10T18:53:24","date_gmt":"2022-06-10T18:53:24","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/?p=252129"},"modified":"2022-06-10T18:53:24","modified_gmt":"2022-06-10T18:53:24","slug":"hamlet-is-actually-about-doomscrolling-on-twitter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/2022\/06\/10\/hamlet-is-actually-about-doomscrolling-on-twitter\/","title":{"rendered":"Hamlet is actually about doomscrolling on Twitter"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

This is the only slightly tongue-in-cheek thesis of Allegra Rosenberg, writing in Ryan Broderick’s excellent “Garbage Day” newsletter. In a section of the newsletter<\/a>, Allegra talks about reading and trying to memorize Hamlet’s soliloquy, how it reminds her both of Twitter and of Derrida, and of a recent edition of Charlie Warzel’s\u00a0Galaxy Brain newsletter<\/a>\u00a0in which he discusses theories of contemporary society as posed by L.M. Sacasas:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Hamlet\u2019s keen analysis from inside his own cloud of hesitation, it is the fear of the unknown which prevents him or anyone from taking the craved-for plunge into the sweet release of death. It\u00a0makes us rather bear the ills we have \/ than fly to those we know not of.\u00a0<\/em>He understood how stuckness self-perpetuates. The equally frustrating presentness perpetuates, too, in Sacasas\u2019 contemporary formulation: when everything is commentary, what else is there to comment on, but prior commentary?<\/p>

He says: \u201cWe\u2019re not building toward new ideas; we\u2019re relating things that just happened to other things that happened before that\u201d \u2014\u00a0and thus the native hue of resolution \/ Is sicklied o’er with the pale cast of thought.\u00a0<\/em>The internet is a forest of inscriptions, so dense that we are far too caught up in infinite fractal brambles of things said and done to actually make any real choices, and\/or to understand our situation insofar as we can affect it.\u00a0<\/p>

This got me thinking about Jacques Derrida (I know\u2026). In\u00a0Archive Fever,\u00a0<\/em>a later work dealing with the looming digital age, he speaks about how the titular fever \u2014 what he identifies as a death or destruction drive \u2014 allows in itself for the ongoing existence of the archive: \u201cThere would indeed be no archive desire without the radical finitude, without the possibility of a forgetfulness which does not limit itself to repression.\u201d Basically the only reason we\u2019re stuck in the \u201cdoom loop\u201d of forever talking about the past, as Warzel puts it, is because the internet contains both the constant production of the past\u00a0as well as<\/em>\u00a0an intense feeling of ephemerality.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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This is the only slightly tongue-in-cheek thesis of Allegra Rosenberg, writing in Ryan Broderick’s excellent “Garbage Day” newsletter. In a section of the newsletter, Allegra talks about reading and trying to memorize Hamlet’s soliloquy, how it reminds her both of Twitter and of Derrida, and of a recent edition of Charlie Warzel’s\u00a0Galaxy Brain newsletter\u00a0in which … <\/p>\n

Continue reading “Hamlet is actually about doomscrolling on Twitter”<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_crsspst_to_mathewingramblogwordpresscom":false,"mf2_syndication":[],"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-252129","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack-related-posts":[],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252129","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=252129"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/252129\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=252129"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=252129"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mathewingram.com\/work\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=252129"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}