Screaming
Formerly, one wished to acquire fame
and be spoken of.
Now that is no longer enough
because the market has grown too large;
nothing less than screaming will do.
As a consequence, even good voices scream
till they are hoarse,
and the best goods are offered by cracked voices.
Without the screaming
of those who want to sell
and without hoarseness there no longer is any genius.
This is surely an evil age for a thinker.
He/she has to learn how
to find his/her silence between two noises
and to pretend to be deaf
until he/she really becomes deaf.
Until he has learned this, to be sure,
he runs the risk of perishing of impatience and headaches.
–excerpt The Gay Science, Book 4, Section 331 by Friedrich Nietzsche
These lines hardly merit comment. Twitter, Meta, the entire panoply of social media behemoths filling the information sphere — crowd what was formerly a relatively quiet mind-space.
Everybody’s screaming.
