June 23, 2025: black holes

Are we living in a black hole? A delightful watch from Neil deGrasse Tyson, exploring the evidence that we might be living inside a black hole. Can we even know that? At some level, it perhaps doesn’t matter, although it makes my head spin and creates that little feeling of amazement that we are here at all. I like that.

Of much more practical concern are the cognitive black holes that we are drifting into. Three readings from this morning that have me reflecting on those. First, from the June issue of Harper’s Karl Ove Knuagsgaard writes about our relationship to technology. Us Generation X folks have our lives split into thirds. The first third, including our formative years, was pretty much digital technology free and the probably our last third will be spent being talked to by inanimate matter: “if I were forced to mention the most distinctive feature of our time, it would be precisely that: everything addresses us.”

These cognitive blackholes created by the digital world that manages us are even countered by the digital world that manages us. Having my heap of papers, notes, links, stories and ideas SEARCHABLE is a major feature of the technology in my life. I have never been able to hold a thought for long, and I’m always chasing that little stimulation brought about by novelty. Adrian Sager writes today about why people of our age and generation appreciate this feature of technology, even as some are finding liberation in deleting their digital memory.

The issue of course is whether it deadens us to the world by stealing our ability to navigate and create. Brian Klaas has written a lovely piece about this and shared the term “an illiterate in the Library of Alexandria” lamenting that “we’re engaged in a rather large, depressingly inept social experiment of downloading endless knowledge while offloading intelligence to machines.”

I don’t want to go down that black hole. But like the one that deGrasse Tyson describes in his video, though, I may already be deep in it and not able to know how deep. There are event horizons like the ones that Knaugsgaard writes about. Remember the first video game you ever played? (yup. Pong, on a Sinclair ZX-80 in 1979 in John Harris’ living room on Muskalls Close, in Chestnut, Herts.) I was 11.