Nearly 50 years ago, long before smartphones and social media, thesocial critic Lewis Mumford put a name to the way that complextechnological systems offer a share in their benefits in exchange forcompliance. He called it a “bribe.” With this label, Mumford sought toacknowledge the genuine plentitude that technological systems makeavailable to many people, while emphasizing that this is not an offerof a gift but of a deal. Surrender to the power of complextechnological systems — allow them to oversee, track, quantify, guide,manipulate, grade, nudge, and surveil you — and the system will offeryou back an appealing share in its spoils.

This is a story we need to know. Industrial transformation turned out tobe a bubble of promise followed by lost livelihoods and damaged landscapes.And yet: such documents are not enough. If we end the story with decay, weabandon all hope—or turn our attention to other sites of promise and ruin,promise and ruin.

This is a story we know. It is the story of pioneers, progress, and the trans-formation of “empty” spaces into industrial resource felds.

Furthering this thought, Foer invokes philosopher Simone Weil, who claims that “Attention is the rarest and purest form of generosity” (qtd. in Foer).

Whereas Marche’s focus is primarily inward, on what participation in social media does to one’s self-actualization, Foer turns his view outward, claiming that increased engagement with our devices leads us to apathy and distraction, turning us into people who are “more likely to forget others.”

While Marche argues that social media impedes our ability to achieve meaningful self-knowledge, essayist Jonathan Safran Foer, in his 2013 New York Times article “How Not to Be Alone,” suggests a broader criticism of digital technology’s impact on our interpersonal relationships.

Proof of this is elusive. We’ve all seen war photographs that are mere grist for thejournalistic mill. Some photographers are addicted to war; some viewers arevoyeurs. And yet photography is not limited by these ways of seeing. Photographyworks and doesn’t work, it is tolerable and intolerable, it confounds and oftenexceeds our expectations.

Conflict photography arises out of a huge set of moving variables that inunpredictable, unreliable but unignorable ways help make the demands of justicevisible. Taking photographs is sometimes a terrible thing to do, but often, nottaking the necessary photo, not bearing witness or not being allowed to do so, canbe worse.

But what does the photograph, by itself, tell us? Not much. Unless it is supportedwith extraphotographic evidence, it will be mired in platitudes about humanbrutality or the universality of grief, truths for which no photographic argument isrequired.

His images, initially made for one purpose (asthe regime’s records of its enemies), came to take on a different significance (asevidence of astonishing crimes against humanity).

But the images, once they were released into the world, had a muchmore shocking and enraging meaning.

If, asAzoulay argues, photography deterritorializes citizenship, then these imagesaccuse, they interrogate and they put us in the same boat with those we are lookingat. “What have we done,” they ask us, “to create the conditions in which others, ourfellow citizens, undergo these unspeakable experiences?”

This is one of the pointsAzoulay makes at length in her lucid and indispensable 2008 study, “The CivilContract of Photography.” She pins her argument on the civic relations betweenpeople: “When and where the subject of the photograph is a person who hassuffered some form of injury, a viewing of the photograph that reconstructs thephotographic situation and allows a reading of the injury inflicted on othersbecomes a civic skill, not an exercise in aesthetic appreciation.”

The challenges of viewership have onlyintensified in the 21st century. Images of violence have both proliferated andmutated, demanding new forms of image literacy.

Sontag wondered, near the end of “Regarding the Pain of Others,” whether “one hasno right to experience the suffering of others at a distance, denuded of its rawpower,” and she came to the conclusion that sometimes a bit of distance can begood. “There’s nothing wrong with standing back and thinking,” she wrote.

Sontag believed that acertain passivity was inescapable in spectatorship, and that any image of violencewould be tainted by this passive distance.

Mr. Salgado's work is ultimately separated from its art-historical references by itsspecificity: these are not ancient martyrs, apostles and saints but modern-dayfellow world citizens -- real, specific people, whom Mr. Salgado endeavors to makeinto generalized saints and apostles, except that we know they are not.

emotional blackmail

Should pictures of suffering ever be so beautiful?

The greater the suffering, the grander his artistic ambition, naturally. His is theparadoxical situation of being a celebrated artist of forgotten people, which is astarting point for much of the carping.

That said, the good photographs are so stupendously gorgeous that they make youforget everything else while you are looking at them.

But is it enough that a poem “remembers” when we are now entrenched in an era of total recall?

The actual presence of I, the viewer, is required to truly apprehend the absence of you, the Other.

To give form to memory, one must also forget.

When a poem becomes commemorative, it dies.

Celan grew to loathe “Death Fugue.” It dogged him, overshadowing his other works, and fearing he was becoming a mouthpiece for Jewish Holocaust poetry, Celan later refused to let “Death Fugue” be further anthologized. Meanwhile, “Death Fugue” became a German obsession, a fixture at commemorative events.

Yet witness accounts matter little when prosecutors can mishandle evidence and mislead the jury, when evidence is up against the Law that makes impossible the criminal conviction of police officers who act with impunity. When the verdict was announced, one felt robbed of one’s eyes.

To have grown up through San Francisco’srecent history is to be haunted by the visions of progressivism that did not end upwhere they were supposed to, that did not think far enough ahead and skiddedpast the better world they planned

We say,We’re doing something for our children and our children’s children. We say, Wewant to give our kids the things we didn’t have. But every palace is someone’sprison; every era’s victory the future’s baseline for amendment. Our children andour children’s children: they will leave our dreams behind.

By 1998, the concept had begun, quietly, to change. Four developers submittedplans focussed on making the bottom oor what one reporter called a “globalmarketplace.”

My parents hadplanned a dinner party, but the phones were giving busy signals, and it was unclearwhether anyone would come. They did, though. Everybody came. We lit thedining room with candles, and the guests gripped the edge of the table throughthe aftershocks. Dinner was warm, intimate, vulnerable. It seemed to show that aprivate order among people you knew persisted, like a painting, in the absence ofcivic structure in the world

In California, the norm was to spend hourswandering in and out of doors, in and out of social spaces, in and out ofconversations, in and out of paradigms of thought.

“The physical remaking of San Francisco, its culture and countercultures, wasinseparable from the ux of people and neighborhoods,” Isenberg writes.

eople like my grandparents, freedfrom the old hierarchies, joined a growing crowd of Bay Area residents trying tobuild a more open society. Rules changed. Social structures recombined. A newlocal culture was formed out of the shards of small, personal dreams.

The marriage was an act of quiet liberation.

While the Ghirardelli Square model of public-private developmenthad emerged from integrative pluralism, the Ferry Building, like the Sea Ranch,evolved to gratify a new and widespread tribal life-style ideal.

The private-ownership model now held as good faith started to seepout.

If Ghirardelli Square epitomizedcollaborative and participatory urban planning, the Sea Ranch, a hundred miles upthe coast, helped presage its demise

saeculum

Commercial imperatives

local cosmopolitanism

pluralism

It’s to have seen how swiftly righteous dreams turn into cloister gates; to noticehow destructive it can be to shape a future on the premise of having found yourpeople, rather than nding people who aren’t yours. The city, today, is the seat ofan atomized new private order. The lessons of the saeculum have not stuck.

Though the Bay Area has recently become aseat of cultural power—the place where digital life is dened, where pathways forcommunity, news, and people-meeting are set—its recent ascent to uky wealthmarks only a return to olden forms.