Exiting Modernity

 

Exiting Modernity by James Ellis
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

For the record, this page is 590 pages long. For whatever reason, Goodreads doesn't have that information. So know when you are going into this, you're getting a lot.

But a lot of what?

Ellis can be, at times, obscure to the point of inscrutable. But his sometimes frenetic approach also allows multiple points of entry to readers who are constantly beset by the incessant demands of modernity. He uses the weapons of modern capital and consumerist social media against them. What I thought was annoying, initially, I eventually found quite brilliant as confusion resolved into clarity.

Ellis is not as a-political as he thinks he is, but I do think he makes a good-faith effort to try to push explicitly political opinions aside. It's not always clear where his loyalties lie, but there is a strong libertarian streak throughout his work, but thankfully without much of the conspiracy-craziness that so often accompanies that bent. When he's talking about personal freedom (whether of expression or work or goals), he is at his best. At times, Ellis tries way too hard to prove he's an iconoclast, and when he gets "in the way" of his thoughts, he muddies the clarity of his own vision. Of course, I'm certain he'd deride any call to tone things down, but really, the guy needs some editing.

And while his ideas are always controversial and often intriguing, the real test of such a book as this rests in the answer to the question "did it make any meaningful change in my life"? And the answer, in this case is, "yes".

Perhaps it's just in the timing, but this book pushed me over the edge of indecision and caused me to drop Twitter. There were a number of touchpoints leading up to that final decision.

It's no secret, at least to those who read my blog, that I have been contemplating a move away from some social media for quite some time. When I took my trip to Europe in 2019, I largely abstained from social media, and it was . . . liberating. The next year, I read the book Digital Minimalism, which led to a short social media fast (among other things!). I recorded some of my findings in this exploratory phase, including falling in love with blogs all over again. Next, I tried to go with a three weeks on, one week off approach. But that only lasted a couple of months until I was scrolling away again - mainly on twitter - to the point where I actually forgot I had committed to that approach. Much later, I watched the Netflix documentary The Social Dilemma. That made me wary for a while, and I set timers on Twitter, Instagram, and Redditt (I had already largely given up Facebook by that point). But it was really this book that finally pushed me over the edge to deactivate my twitter account. Why not delete it? Apparently it's really easy for conniving individuals to "take over" your old account if you delete it. So it sits dormant, now. It's been a few weeks now and I feel . . . liberated . . . again. The point of all this is that Ellis convinced me to drop Twitter, and that is not a decision I made lightly. Since I am an author (albeit very part-time) Twitter was the ideal place to huck my wares, so to speak. But I think I'm content to let my content (books, stories, RPG supplements, etc) speak for themselves. I'll keep blogging, as I feel that blogs are a more "meaningful" medium than social media. Besides, I'm done with doom-scrolling. I only have so much time left in life (could be tomorrow, could be fifty years from now, who knows?) and I don't want to be on my deathbed full of regrets because I wasted so much darned time on Twitter.

But social media critique is only one aspect of Exiting Modernity and, truth be told, it's not even that big of a deal in terms of the percentage of pages devoted to it. Much of the critique is aimed at social engineering at large, with media being only a small portion of "the problem". I'll spare you all the details of "the problem," as I agree with some aspects of Ellis's thoughts more than others and, well, you should read this book and find out for yourself!

Ellis' critique of measurement hues very closely to the critique in Technic and Magic, which I read very recently. I consider it an (improbable) and happy accident(?) that I read these one after the other. This really refreshed some thoughts that have been coalescing in my mind for many years regarding what I really want from life, and what I really don't want!

I was going along just fine until I encountered the section on Accelerationism, where Ellis drops the casual tone and goes for a jargon-filled philosophical analysis, which people smarter than me are likely to love. For me though, hitting this section was like taking my car to top speed on the autobahn, then encountering a wall of feather mattresses around the curve.

That didn't happen. Well, not the part about the feather mattresses. Though I did have to eventually slow down on the autobahn.

I really struggled with this section, then FINALLY! on page 213, Accelerationism was clearly defined. I would have liked this, oh, 120 pages earlier.

The largest fault of this book is not a fault of content, but of order. The last two sections on Accelerationism should have been put at the beginning of that section, not the end. The way it is structured now might have been true to the order in which Ellis' blog was created, but moving from the specific to the general does no favors to readers new to the material. The last 200 pages or so were an utter slog until the last section on "The Genealogy of Foucault's Numeric Power Structures - Man Under Number," but, then again, I read a lot of Foucault back in graduate school, so that background helped, no doubt. My very slight grasp of Deleuze made the section immediately preceding it almost tolerable, but not comfortable. There are obvious gaps in my philosophical knowledge that I'm trying to fix, but the last part of this book came, well, out of order in my philosophical life. I'll have to reread those latter sections again once I've got more philosophical reading under my belt, so to speak.

In time. In time . . .



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