Blank Spaces, Radicalised Offlineness
Issue 109 of Roden, Craig Mod's long-running monthly newsletter, written from Japan. It braids a review of W. David Marx's book Blank Space with Mod's account of his own deliberate protest against being permanently online: no phone before lunch, one to two hours of reading each morning. Along the way it works through Booker winner Flesh, Peter Miller's Shopkeeping and the Train Dreams adaptation.
Roden is Craig Mod's monthly letter, written from Japan, funded by his SPECIAL PROJECTS membership rather than by advertising. Issue 109 runs to roughly four thousand words and is a good demonstration of what that funding model buys: nothing here is optimised for anything.
The argument at the centre
Mod reviews W. David Marx's Blank Space: A Cultural History of the Twenty-First Century*, around *380 pages on twenty-five years of largely American pop culture, and on politics as it has "veered firmly (entirely?) into mostly bad-faith entertainment". He quotes Marx's core claim:
> The first step in reversing cultural stagnation is to accept that artistic invention is a social good. And like so many other social goods, it isn't necessarily going to have its production prioritized by the market.
Mod's response is personal rather than theoretical. The book made him grateful for work "grounded in the world, physicality, relying on social media as little as possible, operating at 'human scale'". He describes a ruthlessness across all strata of cultural making, "everything turned into a casino", achieved celebrity converted immediately into a coffee or gin brand, "leave nothing on the table".
The protest
The practical bit, and the reason this sits under attention rather than criticism:
- No phone or internet until at least lunch.
- One to two hours of reading every morning.
- His stated result: you get through a lot of books.
He calls this a protest against "the speed of onlineness, the way culture seems to be compressed and homogenized, pushed through the beef-grinder of social media".
What he read and watched
- Flesh (David Szalay), the Booker winner, with a protagonist so passive his commonest line is "Okay."
- Shopkeeping (Peter Miller), a lifetime of running a shop. Mod pulls the line that does the work: "A true shop has a life, a breath, a status, set not by algorithms but by minds and hearts."
- Train Dreams, Clint Bentley's adaptation of Denis Johnson, which Mod thinks mostly delivers but shoots too sharp, too digital, too 2015 for 1915.
- PLUR1BUS* versus Solvej Balle's *On the Calculation of Volume, same premise, opposite outcomes. His conclusion: a protagonist does not need to be likeable or even sane, but does need to be curious.
Why it matters
The kissaten passage is the sharpest thing in the issue. Mod argues those cafés feel otherworldly because an owner decided fifty years ago that this is the place they will invest in and be present at until they die, a commitment structurally unavailable to anyone optimising for growth. That is the whole argument about attention, told sideways: care compounds only when you stop reallocating it.
Key takeaways
- Cultural homogenisation is a market outcome, not a mystery. Marx's case, Mod's lived corollary.
- The counter-move on offer is boringly concrete: no phone before lunch, an hour or two of reading, work at human scale.
- Depth is a function of duration. Forty years in one shop is the mechanism, not the anecdote.
· End of dispatch ·
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