“I believe that a desirable future depends on our deliberately choosing a life of action over a life of consumption, on our engendering a lifestyle which will enable us to be spontaneous, independent, yet related to each other, rather than maintaining a lifestyle which only allows to make and unmake, produce and consume – a style of life which is merely a way station on the road to the depletion and pollution of the environment. The future depends more upon our choice of institutions which support a life of action than on our developing new ideologies and technologies.”— Ivan Illich, Deschooling Society (1971) Programming note: Glad so many of you seem to have found the audio version useful. You are now able to follow the newsletter as a podcast on iTunes, Spotify, and Stitcher, if by “podcast” we understand simply me reading the main essay in a less than animated manner. Just click “Listen in Podcast app” above. Hope that covers most of you who find that feature useful. And sure, feel free to leave a rating or review if you’re so inclined. It’s been just about thirty years since sociologist James Hunter published Culture Wars: The Struggle to Define America. The titular phrase has since become a staple of the public’s discourse about itself, although, as all such phrases tend to do, it has floated free of its native context in Hunter’s argument about the then-novel rifts in American public life. Lately, I’ve found myself taking recourse to the phrase more than I ordinarily would. I’ve typically avoided it because the phrase itself seemed to encourage what it sought merely to describe. In other words, as an analytical frame, the phrase conditions us to think of cultural dynamics as warfare and thus locks us into the dysfunctions such a view entails. “Metaphors we live by” and what not. Despite my misgivings, however, the phrase is undoubtedly useful shorthand for much of what transpires in the public sphere. So, for example, when someone asks about the face mask fiasco here in the U.S., I’ve simply suggested, perhaps too glibly, that face coverings were regrettably enlisted into the culture wars. But here is another problem to consider. Precisely because it is so useful as shorthand, it may be deterring us from the work of thinking more carefully and more deeply about our situation. Concepts, after all, can both clarify and obscure. But I’ve also been thinking about the “culture wars” frame because, whatever else we might say about such conflicts, they have not remained static during the nearly three decades since Hunter wrote his book. One key development, of course, is that those thirty years overlap almost exactly with the emergence of the digital public sphere. In fact, several weeks ago what seemed like a useful analogy occurred to me: The advent of digital media has been to the culture wars what the advent of industrialized weaponry was to conventional warfare. With that thesis in mind, I thought it might be useful to revisit Hunter’s work to see if it can still shed some light on our present situation and, specifically, to explore what difference digital media has made to the conduct of the “culture wars.” For brevity and clarity’s sake, although I’m not sure I’ve succeeded on either front, I’ve chosen to outline a few key points for our consideration. So here we go. 1. The culture wars predate the rise of digital media This may seem like an obvious point, but it’s worth emphasizing at the outset. One consequence of our immersion in the flow of digital media tends to be a heightened experience of presentism, involving both a foreshortening of our temporal horizons and the presumption that what we are experiencing must be novel or unprecedented. The danger in this case is that we mistake the culture wars for an effect of social media rather than under