But What If We're Wrong?

This note is about a R:book Author: Chuck Klosterman

The book really is an interesting speculation of what can be timeless, and the reductive aspect of it. The subtitle of the book goes “Thinking about the Present as if it were the past”

It’s divided into multiple chapters

• The first couple of chapters talk about R:music and R:literature and what aspects of today’s culture will be reduced and cannonized in future. The ideas of rock’n’roll being interpreted through singular artists’ work, or exploration on where the next Kafka will come from.

• Ideas on the paradox of timelessness, and how timeless things reveal themselves only in works that were focused on documenting their own era without trying to be timeless

• (Burn Thy Witches, The World That Is Not Here) One of the chapters explores the various ways we perceive R:time, and pasts. It talks baout the speedy occurences in history and the washy slowness of dreams

• There’s also a brief segment on the aging of mass-media, specifically television. But also a chapter dedicated to dicussing being wrong about physics. An interesting point on how Aristotle’s theories seemed very intuitive and convincing until galileo, coppernicus and newton debunked them centuries later. It speculates on what current theories we will be wrong about in future.

• The conclusion is a bit long-drawn, but it vaguely hints at the possibility of us being entirely wrong about democracy being the best system of government, and how our current ideas of freedom might come back to bite us in the future

Overall a pretty interesting book that temporally detaches reader from their immediate realities to get a bird’s eye view of what’s going on