But What If We're Wrong? Thinking About the Present As If It Were the Past

I typically describe Klosterman as the authorial equivalent of “fridge logic” - really interesting stuff in the moment that starts to logarithmically decay the moment you close the book until it settles in around 50 percent of where it started from. But, given that Klosterman often succeeds in nimbly managing previously less-explored areas of your mind, this is not at all a bad thing.

BWWW is a series of thought experiments that attempts to examine modern life through the same lens we view the distant past: What is likely to survive, what artist or author will emerge to represent his or her medium as Platonic ideal (for example, were we in Ancient Greece Klosterman might be telling you that this Plato guy that no one's heard of [at the time] might make it big because he's not as popular now).

As thought experiments, they're mostly interesting but even more so than traditional futurology, it suffers by virtue of being unprovable and contrarian. I don't even think most of them are wrong - all at the very least have inner threads of logic that seem more or less resilient when you tug at them. But my mind can only be so elastic, and building up one brain-stretcher upon another leaves me weary, and accepting of arguments if only to prevent defeat by them - not out of any real consideration or judgment.

Then again, I'm not sure the specific arguments were the point, anyway. The main takeaway seems to center around the idea of being open to new ideas - not in the traditional sense of “maybe I should do something different” but “maybe ideas or formulations I possess that are central to my understanding of reality might be completely wrong.” The point is not to run screaming in the streets, tearing out your hair and warning everyone you meet of their inevitable doom. It's to leave space in the your mind (and in the world) for possibility, to not let things go unexamined simply because they're familiar or widely accepted. Interrogate reality, so that you might make sure there's no unreality simply cloaking itself in the veil of normality.

But who knows? Maybe I'm wrong, too.