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Sugestão de leitura: o ótimo texto de Jonathan Franzen publicado pelo New York Times: “Liking Is for Cowards. Go for What Hurts”. Abaixo, destaco um trecho.

“(…) A related phenomenon is the transformation, courtesy of Facebook, of the verb “to like” from a state of mind to an action that you perform with your computer mouse, from a feeling to an assertion of consumer choice. And liking, in general, is commercial culture’s substitute for loving. The striking thing about all consumer products — and none more so than electronic devices and applications — is that they’re designed to be immensely likable. This is, in fact, the definition of a consumer product, in contrast to the product that is simply itself and whose makers aren’t fixated on your liking it. (I’m thinking here of jet engines, laboratory equipment, serious art and literature.)

But if you consider this in human terms, and you imagine a person defined by a desperation to be liked, what do you see? You see a person without integrity, without a center. In more pathological cases, you see a narcissist — a person who can’t tolerate the tarnishing of his or her self-image that not being liked represents, and who therefore either withdraws from human contact or goes to extreme, integrity-sacrificing lengths to be likable.
If you dedicate your existence to being likable, however, and if you adopt whatever cool persona is necessary to make it happen, it suggests that you’ve despaired of being loved for who you really are. And if you succeed in manipulating other people into liking you, it will be hard not to feel, at some level, contempt for those people, because they’ve fallen for your shtick. You may find yourself becoming depressed, or alcoholic, or, if you’re Donald Trump, running for president (and then quitting).
Consumer technology products would never do anything this unattractive, because they aren’t people. They are, however, great allies and enablers of narcissism. Alongside their built-in eagerness to be liked is a built-in eagerness to reflect well on us. Our lives look a lot more interesting when they’re filtered through the sexy Facebook interface. We star in our own movies, we photograph ourselves incessantly, we click the mouse and a machine confirms our sense of mastery.

And, since our technology is really just an extension of ourselves, we don’t have to have contempt for its manipulability in the way we might with actual people. It’s all one big endless loop. We like the mirror and the mirror likes us. To friend a person is merely to include the person in our private hall of flattering mirrors. (…)”

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Via The New Yorker.

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Via The New Yorker.

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Este link dá acesso a várias matérias (de vários jornais e revistas) que o editor da The Atlantic considera exemplares. Boa leitura.

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Via The New Yorker.

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No Daily Beast, uma boa sacada: encomendaram ao escritor Bret Easton Ellis (“Abaixo de Zero”; “Psicopata Americano”) um texto sobre Charlie Sheen. O título do artigo: “Notes on Charlie Cheen and the End of Empire“. O destaque do editor ficou assim:

“With his tweets, his manic interviews, his insurgent campaign against the entertainment world, Sheen is giving America exactly what it wants out of a modern celebrity. In the full version of an article that appeared in this week’s Newsweek, Bret Easton Ellis explains how you are completely missing the point if you think Sheen’s meltdown is about drugs.”

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Folheando a New Yorker encontrei um texto de ficção inédito de David Foster Wallace, ótimo escritor americano que cometeu suicídio em 2008. O trecho inicial:

“Every whole person has ambitions, objectives, initiatives, goals. This one particular boy’s goal was to be able to press his lips to every square inch of his own body.

    His arms to the shoulders and most of his legs beneath the knee were child’s play. After these areas of his body, however, the difficulty increased with the abruptness of a coastal shelf. The boy came to understand that unimaginable challenges lay ahead of him. He was six.”

Por falar em Wallace, seu livro póstumo (e incompleto), “The Pale King”, será lançado no dia 15 de abril. Já dá para reservar um exemplar na Amazon.

PS: É sempre muito bom revisitar este discurso de Wallace, traduzido pela Piauí.

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