Personalized loneliness: Tailor-made goods have long maintained their allure, but the advent of artificial intelligence-enabled personalization has supercharged individualization. Harper Review contributor Olivia Curran warns us that this rise in custom products will push us further into ourselves, undermining the very logic of consumer capitalism. Curran traces consumption’s appeal to the Calvinist idea that, through our own actions, we can achieve divine salvation. Naturally, consumption is less concerned with eternal souls and more concerned with social status—rather than heaven, it lets us buy our way into a higher class. As Curran argues, customization kills the possibility of membership in consumption communities, making personalized Spotify “daylists” and skincare routines into yet another cause of the loneliness epidemic.
Deniz Kurdi, assistant editor
FOMO and froth: Eager to invest their trillions in what they believe to be a fresh and profitable venture, fund managers are rushing to finance data center construction projects. So far, they have hit a jackpot. Tech companies like Meta and Oracle rely on the centers to exponentially increase computing power for their artificial intelligence (AI) products. Wall Street’s heavy investments in the infrastructure that supports this innovation is one major way it is facilitating an AI boom… and bust? Some data centers are so large they could cover the island of Manhattan, except they don’t. Instead, they cover large swaths of land in places like rural Virginia or Texas, where real estate prospects are slim if AI profits don’t pan out. As evidenced by tech bubbles of times past, investors who lay the infrastructural groundwork for a shiny new product by making large capital investments have missed out on big returns before.
Even as anxiety creeps into big banks that lavish spending on data centers won’t be paid off by future AI profits, fund managers are continuing to plough money into them. Matt Wirz and Peter Rudegeair report on how investors’ fears of missing out on the newest investment fad might lead us into an economic downturn. Still, speculative bubbles are practically providential. Take Adam Smith in Wealth of Nations as a point of departure: “The establishment of … any new branch of commerce … is always a speculation, from which the projector promises himself extraordinary profits. These profits sometimes are very great, and sometimes, more frequently, perhaps, they are quite otherwise.”
Elena Eisenstadt, contributing editor
Not to be: A flurry of reviews followed the Thanksgiving release of Hamnet, a film adaption of Maggie O’Farrell’s 2020 novel. Browsing them, an obedient trend emerges between aesthetic judgement and audience sophistication—for any review, you could guess the sort of publisher based on the critic’s verdict. National outlets felt compelled to admire literary masterworks over commercial media (“Shakespeare, conceived for the TikTok generation”), temper emotions with empiricism (“most of us already know that the death of a child is devastating”), and demonstrate approving disillusionment with progressive politics (“a feminist corrective to the myth of male genius, but it’s a halfhearted rebuke”). Local outlets, less encumbered by such pretensions, suffered cliches that mistake catharsis for quality (“a tearjerker”) and abandon specificity for truisms (“healing power of art”).
Reading these reviews after I watched the film, I had the itchy sense they’d missed the point. Our aesthetic experiences are mediated by social class; that much is unavoidable. But must our criticism display such embarrassing predictability? Another convention delimits these responses, and it is from here that we might squirm out of the bind. Each review makes a claim for what the film is about: “a parent’s closure” in one, “imagining Shakespeare’s life” in another, “a powerful story of love and loss” in its cloying marketing copy. To speak of an artwork, the critic shrinks its field of possible meanings to a single one. But we can restrain ourselves from such lumbering determinism. Hamnet’s Agnes, in the film’s denouement, does. Squeezed between strangers in the dusty pit of the Globe, she watches a play written by her husband that shares a name with their dead son. It is about their son. It is about her husband. It is about something else entirely, something she doesn’t yet know, even as she reaches up to grasp Hamlet’s outstretched hand.
Emily Sun, senior editor
Image: Frans Snyders, Still Life with Dead Game, Fruits, and Vegetables in a Market, oil on canvas, 1614 (Art Institute of Chicago, Illinois).