Since 2007, Maly has, like so many others, written a blog on subjects he cares about. His is called Quiet Babylon, where he writes about technology, architecture and urban spaces. But in 2010, Maly made the brave and unusual decision to quit his regular job, dip into his savings, and set himself a deadline to turn Quiet Babylon into his livelihood. Now Maly spends his time collaborating, thinking, and “creating cool stuff.”

Some examples? He curated the “50 Cyborgs” project, which celebrated the 50th anniversary of the term “cyborg” by gathering 50 blog posts on the topic from an array of writers—from fellow bloggers to the founder of Wired magazine. In April, he set up a design studio that will generate art and ideas about the concept of border towns.

Part of what enables Maly to do this is the web, which has allowed him to find and foster a community of like-minded people, while drastically cutting the risk involved in creating and publishing work. It’s an approach that in its collaborative, creative nature is eminently contemporary—futuristic, even.

In a sense then, Maly is sort of from the future. His practice speaks to the possibility that we will increasingly carve out careers in the spaces made by new technology—inventing ways to merge what we love with how we live.

Tumblr reflects contemporary pop culture: not so much like blogging, more like collage. Illustration by Dave Donald.

[Editor’s note: If you’re curious, This Magazine has its own Tumblr blog. Visit quote.this.org]

I have never left a cinema with as big a grin on my face as when I watched the spectacularly awful Transformers: Revenge of the Fallen. Every complaint I had heard was spot-on—that the acting was abysmal, the plot incomprehensible, the camerawork confusing and hyperkinetic—and so I was as stunned as anyone when, at the end of the film, I turned to my brother and said, “That may have been the greatest thing I have ever seen.”

Maybe I shouldn’t have been surprised. When I read a blistering review of the film on sci-fi site io9, I assumed the author was being tongue-in-cheek when he suggested Michael Bay had finally made an art movie, its genius that it was “like 20 summer movies, with unrelated storylines, smushed together into one crazy whole.” Turns out there was a kernel of truth in there: the insane, glorious mess that is Transformers 2 is not only a culmination of 21st-century pop culture, it’s also a sign of where our new web-centric world is taking us.

Lately, I’ve been spending a lot of time on Tumblr, a site that, like Transformers 2, may very well be the future of pop culture. On the surface, Tumblr is like any other free blogging service: you log in, add text or photos or links, and, presto, you have yourself a blog.

But Tumblr is a stripped-down, sped-up kind of blog, and in practice many people are using it for something quite apart from blogging. More often, it’s closer to collage. Unlike the text-heavy feel of a traditional blog, the ease and speed with which users can post their own material and quickly republish others’ means Tumblrs are often head-spinning catalogues of media, a mind-bending mishmash of images, videos, and words.

Take a popular, prolific Tumblr called— and I quote—“holy shit, it’s a fucking rainbow.” Day after day, the site gathers an overwhelming array of, well, stuff: hazy photography of models in sundresses; arty experiments in design and typefaces; literary quotes and other fragments; and the occasional link to a video, maybe accompanied by effusive comments about the “goddess-like hotness” of Emily Haines. Though there’s no explicit theme to this and many other Tumblrs, it’s still tied together by what you might call a vaguely 21st century vibe: aesthetics come first, overlaying both a fascination with the future and nostalgia for the past.

All the while, the site careens back and forth between ironic detachment and a profound respect for art and beauty, posting goofy comics just before or after heartbreakingly gorgeous experimental photography. Nothing captures this “Am I serious or not?” tone better than the site’s deadpan name. It’s as if its author can’t decide whether this Tumblr comes with a wry smirk, a friendly smile, or both.

And though the thousands of Tumblrs out there don’t share a focus, many do share this blank, post-ironic feel. From absurd art experiments (photos of people with their heads in freezers), to enthusiastic single-topic blogs to viral sites (such as the popular “Look at This Fucking Hipster,” which features annotated photos of 20-something fashion disasters), Tumblr is home to a strand of culture that resists neat packaging or easy explanation. It’s this love of value-free pastiche that makes the genre so interesting. In the last century, popular culture always put things together for us, into stories or artistic wholes; neat, recognizable packages like superheroes or formulaic soap operas.

Tumblr does the opposite. It throws interpretation to the wind and embraces every cliché about postmodernism you’ve ever heard, collapsing the difference between high and low, celebrating aesthetics and kitsch, and, most of all, revelling in the death of the idea that there is only one way of looking at the world. In an odd way, this approach puts Tumblr at the bleeding edge of pop. You find a similar approach in the kaleidoscopic riot of mash-up artist Girl Talk or in the dark ambiguity of cult TV series like Arrested Development. And yes, you also found it this summer in Transformers 2, with its stunning replacement of logic and narrative coherence with expensive, disjointed scenes of robots doing…something.

This self-conscious refusal to judge has been slowly filtering its way through pop culture for decades, but it’s proliferating rapidly on the web. Trend-aggregation site Buzzfeed places links to Barack Obama’s speeches on health care next to posts informing readers that Harry Potter’s Emma Watson is “now legal.” Everything is fair game, and at the end of the day, that isn’t as scary as it seems.

Spend a lot of time on the Tumblr-ized web and you grow accustomed to its unending torrent of images and ideas, eventually just letting it all flow over you. You take serious things seriously; get choked up when you see something beautiful; and take the fluff for what it is. And if that simple approach to pop culture is our future, I look forward to its arrival.

The CBC could be a force for CanLit. Why isn't it? Illustration by Dushan Milic

If Clive Owen were a Canadian author, maybe the CBC would finally review books. Katrina Onstad, a film columnist for CBC.ca, begins a recent review: “The International opens with a long, extended close-up of Clive Owen’s face, following which I jotted in my notebook: Five stars!” As a taxpayer and a citizen who believes in a public arts dialogue, I’m glad that the CBC pays Onstad to write intelligently and entertainingly about Hollywood film. Notably, however, our taxes don’t fund Hollywood film.

Our taxes do fund Canadian literature. Most CanLit gets some level of government subsidy. We pay millions each year to support CanLit through writing and publishing grants, libraries, and literary festivals. That’s a good use of public funds. Unlike our support for the auto industry or Bombardier, we actually get profitable job creation from arts funding. But we subsidize CanLit with one hand and then give the CBC more than a billion dollars a year with the other. Why, why, why does the CBC pay people to review Hollywood films that will cost you $13 to see but refuse to tell you whether the $25-$40 books you subsidize are worth your time and money?

Book reviewing in Canada has never been strong and recently got worse. Last year, several papers, including the Toronto Star, reduced their book coverage by as much as 50 percent. The Globe and Mail’s stand-alone books section ceased to stand alone and was folded into another section of that paper. Last spring, CBC Radio cut the literary debate show Talking Books so Shelagh Rogers could tug her aural smile through some author interviews. Interviews do a good job of showing us which authors interview well. But they don’t tell us what makes novel X better than novel Y. Noah Richler’s book about CanLit, This Is My Country, What’s Yours?, repeatedly mentions that the 2002 Booker Prize shortlist was half-full of Canadians but never once concedes that only two people in Canada—the Toronto Star’s Geoff Pevere and the National Post’s Philip Marchand—make a living reviewing books.

As a nation, as a culture, we have only two salaries devoted to helping us choose where to invest our reading time and money. Two! (Note to bloggers: I said “make a living reviewing books” and “salaries.”)

CanLit has been a big industry since the late ’60s (when government funding created it). That our literature now wins international renown and our private media doesn’t reliably tell us, or the world, what does and does not make for good CanLit is lamentable and, quite simply, immature. That we spend more than a billion dollars a year on the CBC and they don’t review Canadian books is unthinkable.

Oh, wait, right, we’re supposed to think that the annual CBC Radio shouting match Canada Reads counts for book reviewing. After all, it allows Olympic fencers to give sound bites of literary analysis. Each year, a different aging Canadian musician gets a few minutes to champion one book and pooh-pooh four others. Not enough.

The show can be fun and informative. As a judge, comedian Scott Thompson got to say (while speaking of Frances Itani’s Deafening) that describing the contents of a handbag is not literature. Amen. But as a genuine book-reviewing vehicle, the inadequacies of this show versus an Onstad-like book columnist on CBC.ca are many. First and foremost, as radio and a five-sided debate, the format is too unwieldy for a reader who wants to do an informative search about a particular book. Second, we can’t ever forget the show’s Survivor-style elimination gimmick. Lastly, the show is doubly ruined by its (pointless) devotion to celebrity panelists and the flawed CBC celebrity barometer. Former Prime Minister Kim Campbell was a panelist in 2002. If I want advice on how to keep David Milgaard in prison, Kim Campbell’s the source. But for book reviews? Aside from Canada Reads, CBC books coverage consists solely of interviews and reporting, and nowhere tells you what books are good and why.

Qualified, incisive, and accessible critics shape the culture they analyze. Filmmakers as diverse as Quentin Tarantino and Wes Anderson have expressed their debt to New Yorker film critic Pauline Kael. As director of Britain’s National Theatre, Laurence Olivier brought in influential critic Kenneth Tynan to help run it.

Dear CBC: give me a reliable, regular and intelligent book reviewer. Not more Randy Bachman.

How big is the internet in Iran?

There are more than three million internet users out of a population of 70 million, which is not bad. They’re mainly students and middle- and upper-class. The access is now much easier than it was six, seven years ago. For the past five years, there are different ISPs, private ISPs, and they have calling cards that they sell. Ten hours of internet access is 10 bucks. It provides people with anonymity, because that’s a big thing for internet users in Iran. And it gives them an option not to stick with one ISP; if the service goes down and anything happens, they can change to another ISP. But recently there have been regulations passed, both in government and the judiciary, that want to limit this anonymous access through these cards. This is a very important development, and it could harm the increasing number of internet users in Iran.

Is it fair to say that the government sees the internet as a threat?

The government is good toward the internet. It’s not controlling it. It’s helped to develop the infrastructure and they’ve allowed private ISPs to operate. But there is another part of the regime, which is more powerful than the government. The leader himself and security organizations have been trying to shut down the internet or, as much as they can, prevent people from accessing the political opposition websites or anti-religious websites.

How bad is web censorship?

Since [May], it’s stepped up very, very heavily. You can say that almost every popular website, whether it’s political or entertainment, has been filtered and has lost almost half of its users. Several years ago, on July 9, there was a student protest. Every year, on the anniversary of that day, [the regime] gets paranoid. They always think that the CIA or [Israel’s intelligence service] Mossad is conspiring against them. On the eve of this day, or one month before that, they start to shut down everything, to effectively disconnect Iranians inside from the outside world.

Does the Iranian regime consider you a public enemy?

Unfortunately, yes. That’s why I can’t go back. I mean, I can go back, but it’s risky. One of my friends was arrested—he was a blogger and journalist—and now he’s in Holland, because he escaped after he was held for 20 days. We have had phone conversations, and he said they were interested to know about his relationship with me, and the part that I’ve been playing in promoting these weblogs, who’s supporting me, what kind of family I come from. It wasn’t good news for [the regime] when they heard that my family was very religious. For example, my uncle was among the top officials. In the beginning of the revolution, he was killed in a bombing. He was very close to the party of the current leader, the hardliners. When they heard that I came from that kind of family, they were disappointed, but still very suspicious. They can’t believe that one person with his laptop can still start this whole thing.