Review: But What If We’re Wrong
Ah, Chuck Klosterman, how I love your mind. I love watching a deep and brilliant analyst apply his considerable intelligence and skill to nigh pointless issues in popular culture. I spend way too much time doing this myself, and it’s delightful to bask in Klosterman’s pop culture nature walks. Better than that, I generally get a new insight from it.
Klosterman’s organizing issue in But What If We’re Wrong is how much predicting the future successfully depends on absolutely invalidating a fundamental assumption or two. Researchers and pundits try to do this all the time, of course, but what sets Klosterman apart is how both how powerfully he buys into the premise and how he applies it to pop culture. He aggressively looks for fundamental bases to negate rather than surface distinctions to poke at. Serious futurists should take note. As should I.
Then he points that basic principled analysis at rock music, for example.
The result is good fun – for me and Klosterman, I suppose. He writes brilliantly and insightfully but there’s no risk of AbyssGaze.
Strongly Recommended.