There’s far too much good stuff in this long talk with German culture czar Frank Schirrmacher for me to sum up in a blog post, except to say that it has to do with information overload and the way technology is changing how we think, and you should print it or Instapaper it and read it the next time you have an hour to spare.

A nut graph from Shirrmacher:

What did Shakespeare, and Kafka, and all these great writers — what actually did they do? They translated society into literature. And of course, at that stage, society was something very real, something which you could see. And they translated modernization into literature. Now we have to find people who translate what happens on the level of software. At least for newspapers, we should have sections that review software in a different way, at least the structures of software.

And a response from psychologist Daniel Kahneman:

The interview vividly expresses the sense many of us are getting that when we are bathed in information (it is not really snippets of information, we need the metaphor of living in a liquid that is constantly changing in flavor and feel) we no longer know precisely what we have learned, nor do we know where our thoughts come from, or indeed whether the thoughts are our own or absorbed from the bath.

The other day, I was talking with someone about all the original poetry you can find online now, and she asked me how I keep up with it all. And this was a sincere question, her assumption being (maybe because I do Linebreak and this blog and other such things, and because she knows me as a “computer person”) that keeping up with it all is even possible, possible for anyone, which of course it isn’t — not even in a field as relatively limited as contemporary English poetry.

In some ways, creating Swindle was an exercise in admitting this — that most days I don’t have time to even go and check the handful of places I trust to post new poems online, much less look for new ones — and in looking for a way for the Internet to help me solve a problem that the Internet itself created. Think about those old science fiction movies where people had robotic assistants — big, bulky machines that followed them around serving as maids or security guards, doing some kind of manual labor. The machine assistant I need isn’t a physical entity that helps around the house — it’s a virtual one that lives in Google’s cloud, monitoring the entire real time information stream, and letting me know when someone posts a Jack Gilbert poem I haven’t seen yet.

None of that is half as smart as the stuff waiting behind the link. Really, go read.