Tea at Trianon: The Medium is the Message

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Monday, September 22, 2025

The Medium is the Message

On disembodiment and the anti-sacrament of violence. From Helen Roy:

I have about four different essays I’ve started and stopped since seeing Charlie Kirk’s throat torn open by a bullet in high definition last week. Every thought, none of them original, feels like quicksand, collapsing into horror and confusion just as soon as I can articulate it. I probably wouldn’t have this sensation if I wasn’t so online, willfully consigning myself to the great suck of the discourse every day, as if it helps make sense of anything.
Ignorance isn’t bliss. Neither is omniscience. I’m clearly still learning to look without staring.
One of the long running themes of this publication is embodiment, which I see as a deeply important yet underexplored principle for living a good life in the digital epoch. Embodiment as I understand it is the state of mind-body connection, a sense of mental presence in time and place, undistracted and unmediated. It is a phenomenological reality, but nevertheless, one that scientists have found ways to measure.
Its flip side, disembodiment, has become the default mode as our lives migrate more and more into the online space. This is the mental deracination I described at the outset: the rush to scroll TikTok when real life bores, the identity-experimentation and cultivation of the self as avatar, the tendency to forget the humanity of users on the other side of the screen, the endless doom scroll, the frictionless spinning in a black hole of information, the feeling of all possible human emotions one after the other without pause, so much feeling, in fact, that you end up feeling nothing at all. As Sam Harris wrote this week:
If the medium is the message, the message is mass psychosis—and it will send us careening from one political emergency to the next. The fact that some of the most deranging and divisive content is being created (or amplified) by foreign adversaries—and that we have literally built and monetized their capacity to do this—beggars belief. We are poisoning ourselves and inviting others to poison us.
(Read more.)