Take things seriously doesn't mean being serious about them all of the time. In contrast, considering the entire world to be an exercise in irony reduces everything to the purported laugh, the trolling or the rise. Its ultimate expression is deeply political: the real is so subordinate to the virtual that a country can be ruled from a phone. Real pain is inflicted entirely gratuitously in the name of slogans, memes and the most prosaic bigotry. ' Every day we were seeing new evidence that suggested it was the portal that had allowed the dictator to rise to power. This was humiliating. It would be like discovering that the Vietnam War was secretly caused by ham radios, or that Napoleon was operating exclusively on the advice of a parrot named Brian." Yet the portal (Lockwood's term for the internet) is also the means of growth and development and escape for many. The virtual also has in itself a certain beauty. No One Is Talking About This conveys the lapidary
Occasional musings about time spent in museums, galleries, theatres, cinemas and other dark settings ..