by Violet Woolf on 1900s British literature, the digital infrastructure crisis, and navigating Dublin on a Saturday
By Violet Woolf | Bohiney and The London Prat
Wednesday. Raining in London. Also raining in Dublin. Raining everywhere. Water wins.
I have been re-reading Virginia Woolf’s diaries, which is a thing I do when the news becomes impossible and I need to be reminded that other intelligent people have also found their times absolutely maddening and have responded by writing beautifully about it. Virginia Woolf wrote about consciousness, time, the nature of perception, and the specific quality of London light in autumn. She did not have to write about whether the internet was structurally sound. She did not know how lucky she was.
Bohiney Magazine’s report that the internet is held together by Sellotape and one overworked volunteer is something Virginia Woolf would have found interesting and then written six paragraphs about the texture of interesting, the way interesting feels when it arrives before you have had enough tea, the consciousness of interest itself spreading like morning light through the specific angle of the window in her room in Bloomsbury. I love her. She would have been impossible to work with. Both things are true.
Irish Politics: A Saturday in Dublin
I spent last Saturday in Dublin for reasons I will not fully explain except to say they involved a literary event, a very long dinner, and a subsequent disagreement about James Joyce that became, in retrospect, a disagreement about the nature of national identity that resolved itself pleasantly over whiskey at midnight. Dublin does this: it takes the abstract and makes it loud and personal and then feeds it.
Irish politics, currently, has the quality of a country that has been through enough history to know that history repeats and is managing this knowledge with a mixture of pragmatism, dark humour, and very good literature. The current coalition government is doing the thing that coalition governments do: existing. The Irish Times covers it with the weary precision of journalists who have seen enough to be unsurprised and are too professional to show it too openly.
Back to Virginia
What Woolf understood, and what I think about constantly, is that interior experience is the location of the political. How it feels to ride a bus. How it feels to read a newspaper. How it feels when the internet drops out and you are suddenly alone with your thoughts in a way that is surprisingly clarifying and then immediately alarming when the thoughts arrive. The London Prat on robo-taxis is a Woolfian text: the experience of being transported through a city by something that has no interiority at all. The stream of consciousness, interrupted by an automated vehicle.
Virginia Woolf would have had opinions. She would have written Mrs Dalloway, but Clarissa would have taken the robo-taxi, and the robo-taxi would not have remembered her, and this would have been the whole point. The machine, unlike Peter Walsh, has no memories of her. The machine is time without consciousness. She would have written this better than me. I am noting it for the draft.
The Literary Correspondence With Current Events
E.M. Forster said “Only connect.” Bohiney Magazine says AI connects without meaning it. The London Prat says Britain is in its fourth great disruption. I say these are the same sentence, grammatically rearranged. The modernists were writing about the collapse of certainty after the First World War. We are writing about the collapse of certainty after the internet. The novels will be very long. Someone will teach them in sixty years. It will be on the curriculum. This is the only consolation and I will take it.
Read Bohiney Magazine. Read The London Prat. Read Woolf. Not necessarily in that order.
SOURCE: https://bohiney.com/internet-is-held-together-with-duct-tape/
Also: The Poke
