Brian Eno - A Year With Swollen Appendices: Brian Eno’s Diary

This book was first published twenty-five years ago. What has happened in those twenty-five years?

I started out by making a list of new words ideas that either didnt exist or werent in the air when I wrote the diary. What astonished me is how many of them there are. Some of these words and the ideas and activities they relate to have become so normal that we forget theyre only a few years old.

A friend told me a story that captures how quickly things become taken for granted indispensable parts of our lives. He was on a flight and, after take-off, the pilot announced that the airline had just introduced Wi-Fi to its fleet of jets, so everybody could now use their phones on the plane. There was delighted applause and many of the passengers immediately took out their devices and began doing all the things we do with them. After about thirty minutes the Wi-Fi stopped working, for some technical reason. Within seconds, people were complaining angrily about the terrible service: it had gone from miracle to expectation in half an hour.

Looking at this list of words makes me realize that we live in a profoundly different reality now than we did in 1995. I assume new language evolves when there are new things that need to be talked about so the faster those new things are coming at us, the more new language we need for them. Perhaps we would expect there to be lots of new words to do with the Internet and social media, but whats noticeable about the list is that there are some areas of human activity that hardly figure in it at all: for example, art, religion and philosophy. Does this mean that we arent so interested in those things any more and have stopped talking about them? Could it mean that they just arent changing so quickly to need new language? Or does it mean that theyre changing so much that we no longer recognize them in their new forms? For example, is QAnon actually an emerging religion? Is CRISPR gene-editing technology possibly a new form of art? Is decluttering, la Marie Kondo, a sort of spiritual discipline that operates in the space where religion operated? Is TikTok a new mass art form that we arent taking seriously? (Will we, in another twenty-five years, reverently scroll through old TikTok videos, recognizing them as the beginnings of a truly universal, democratic art form?) Is binge-watching Netflix the future of art, as galleries and public spaces become more dangerous?

Completely missing from the diary is any mention of climate change, populism, pandemics or China, just to mention a few of the things that occupy a lot of our thoughts now.

Looking at any item on the list I ask myself: In which category of human experience does this particular phenomenon belong? It turns out that a large fraction of the new words are, perhaps unsurprisingly, to do with interpersonal relationships how we relate and present ourselves to each other.

Body-shaming, cancel culture, chatlines, Chaturbate, cisgender, Creative Commons licence, crowdfund, crowdsource, distance learning, DM, dox, emoji, emoticon, follow/unfollow, friend/unfriend, and then all the new language around social media. This category is where there seems to have been most activity. Are humans communicating more than they ever did in the past? Is this process of community forming now in hyperdrive because our old ways of making communities (i.e., by growing up and living and working with other people, or by engaging with them in common causes) are no longer working? Or do we just need more forms of community? And from whence arises this insatiable appetite for constant conversation? Is it a case of, in Eric Hoffers words, you can never get enough of what you dont really want?

And what are we not doing when were doing all this chatting?

Novelty in the world isnt the only thing that spurs new language. New people want new language because its a way of distinguishing themselves from old people. This driver of linguistic evolution has to do with another kind of communication. Its often not about saying new things but about saying the same things differently and, in doing so, indicating which tribe you belong to (and which ones you dont). Language is a badge of membership or affiliation, and sometimes thats most of what its saying. Language of that kind is designed to tell you more about the speaker than of what is being spoken.

One of the things that seems to have happened in the last twenty-five years is that the distinction between these two kinds of language has blurred in the public sphere. This era has been called post-truth because language is increasingly intended to be instrumental that is, intended to bring about an effect rather than accurate. Theres a difference between shouting FIRE in a crowded theatre that is actually on fire as opposed to doing so in one that isnt. Increasingly the role of the media particularly in England, Australia and America; the Murdoch constellation has become to trigger volatile public response by shouting FIRE almost all the time. When its all about clickbait grabbing attention it turns out you dont actually need much news. Just a flood of red flags will do the job.

This confusion between language as the articulation of meaning and language as trigger or mood music has now penetrated thoroughly into public discourse. Twenty-four-hour rolling news and the Internet have created a demand for content that apparently cant be met with actual news and has to be augmented by opinion columnists, shock jocks, influencers and Twitterati. Churnalists, freed of the need to actually conduct research and fact-checking, trade in recycled news about as substantial as smoke. But if you know that people are inclined to believe theres no smoke without a fire, then all you have to do is keep producing more smoke.

Many of these new words suggest the dissolution of a certain quality of public discourse that we have taken for granted since the Enlightenment, which hinged on the possibility of reaching evidence-based consensus albeit even temporarily about what constitutes reality. The post-modern scepticism of any distinction between ideologically derived value systems and evidence-driven science is now grasped at gratefully by libertarians, populists, identitarians and tax evaders the world over: Why shouldnt there be a special reality just for me? they demand. An early warning sign of this attitude creeping into politics was when a member of Dubyas entourage, questioned about the veracity of some claims hed made in support of the Iraq war, said: Were an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality.

Its interesting to watch that kind of hubris crash up against a little strand of RNA and conspicuously lose the battle. As I write this, were five months into the Covid pandemic, and it turns out that even an empire cant change biological reality. I wonder if it will make any difference to how we view the role of leadership in the future, when we evaluate the various national responses to Covid and notice that the people who dealt with it more successfully were not the macho braggarts, not the we-make-our-own-reality brigade, not the man-up populists, not the Panglossian libertarians, but the people who had the humility to listen to the science and the humanity to care enough to act upon it.

3D printer

4chan

9/11

AI (artificial intelligence)

Airbnb

Alexa

algorithm

alt-right

alternative facts

Amazon

Anonymous

Anthropocene

anti-natalism

Antifa