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• Classic-Fiction

Nietzsche goes on to say that while Stoicism might be a wise choice for “those who live in violent ages [or] depend on mercurial people,” Epicureanism is always advisable for “anyone who foresees more or less that fate permits him to spin a long thread.” Paring down one’s own context, he says, is “what those have always done whose work is of the spirit”—alle Menschen der geistigen Arbeit, which in a footnote Nietzsche’s translator and biographer Walter Kaufmann takes to signify “artists, scholars, writers.”

If the road of the Stoic, he who would bear all burdens, absorb all information, was ever truly possible, it is no longer so today. We are all Epicureans now, whether we know it or not, because we each have access to far more inputs than we could ever possibly process. We all choose our own informational contexts today; the only question is how judiciously we choose. And so what we need is an ethos of responsible Epicureanism by which we forbid ourselves to live in entirely harmonious, self-selected fantasy worlds, on the one hand, or in controversy-crazed, novelty-driven data gluts on the other. David Levy, a professor at the University of Washington, has coined the term “information environmentalism” to describe the consciousness we need to foster, and the metaphor is a perfect one. We can no longer believe that our informational context is an infinite, incorruptible resource, a wellspring we can take for granted, an ecosystem we can never permanently pollute. But neither can we stop living within our data streams, shaping them and using them in our daily lives. So we must discover more sustainable approaches to information, to novelty, to storytelling. We cannot unplug the machine, nor would we want to; but we must rewire it to serve us, rather than the other way around. And for that, we must learn how to partially unplug ourselves.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

Thanks are due

• to the co-conspirators: Brian Spinks, Christian Lorentzen, Eugene Mirman, Dan Goldstein, and Genevieve Smith, each of whom had a hand in one or more of the experiments;

• to the early readers: Ben Austen, Jeff Sharlet, Julia Rabig, John Williams, and Bryant Urstadt, who slogged through manuscripts of this book and offered indispensable advice;

• to the staff of Harper’s Magazine: Luke Mitchell, Roger Hodge, Ellen Rosenbush, Lewis Lapham, Rick MacArthur, Ted Ross, and all my other colleagues during a decade there;

• to Paul Reyes, Marc Smirnoff, and Michael Fitzgerald of The Oxford American;

• to the whole crew of Viking, including Wendy Wolf, Lindsay Prevette, Liz Parker, Jennifer Wang, and Daniel Lagin;

• and, most of all, to those without whom this book could not have been written: Josh Kendall, Tina Bennett, Ben Metcalf, Monica Murphy, Monica Murphy, Monica Murphy.

INDEX

Abbey, The

Acceleration detection

Accidental Oracle

Adamic, Lada

Addiction

compulsive gambling

Internet addiction disorder

Advertising

and pop music See also Viral marketing/ advertising

Agnew, Sean

Alexa.com

AllahPundit

Allbritton Communications

Allen, George

Allen, Mike

Anderson, Chris

Annuals

mainstream appearances of

members of

music of

Pitchfork on

South by Southwest festival

Antibuzz, creating

Archers of Loaf

Arctic Monkeys

Art, versus viral culture

Ashong, Derrick

Atrios

Austin City Limits

Authority, obedience to, study

Autoblog

Ayers, William

Baca, Joe

Bacon, Francis

Baker, Adam

Balter, Dave

BandAnd

Bandwagon effect

defined

and Internet

and Mob Project

and viral culture

Bimbo’s

Bittman, Mark

Black Cat

BlackPeopleLoveUs.com

Black Swan, The (Taleb)

Blair, Tony

Blair Witch Project, The

Bleak House (Dickens)

Blogs/bloggers

blogroll data

on judicial system

on Mob Project

political

rankings/most read

Blue State Digital

Bock, Charles

BoingBoing

Book-of-the-Month Club

Boorstin, Daniel

Boredom

assessment measures

as killer of nanostories

and Mob Project

psychological theories