Sublime

Puffy was taking obvious sampling to its extreme. The Neptunes were stripping down songcraft to its skeleton and also riding the crest of a cult-of-personality wave. And where were we? Where was I? I was perched on the precipice of what would eventually be called neo soul.

Some chalked up Hurley’s success to “luck,” in having created a workable video site just when Google and the world wanted one. But others credited Hurley’s instincts and sensibility for maintaining a service that normal people, even the less technically adept, found easy to use.

But Dewey, born in 1859 (the same year as Henri Bergson, who shared many of these concerns), was part of a generation whose intellectual formation occurred when it was still possible, if not excusable, for the idea of novelty to be explored independently of the logistics of capitalist production and circulation.