All the people

Leo XIV is not only the Pope. He is, of course, also the first American pope, as in, from the US. (Francis, as an Argentinian, was American in a more general sense.) That brings a couple of things to the fore, especially when he weighs in on something like AI.

Firstly, while various waves of immigration have made the US more Catholic in a demographic sense, it remains in a real sense a very Protestant country. A Catholic prelate reflects in public in what the right thing to do is, what it means to follow the example of Christ. But for those who believe on some level in predestination, this moral angst is faggoty at best and possibly blasphemous.

Secondly, more specifically, a kind of Protestant ethic―certainly not endemic to all Protestants, but prevalent―sees wealth as a virtue in itself and an earthly measure of wisdom. Thus Silicon Valley honchos have leveraged being billionaires with at least one trillionaire among them into a new status as public sages. This is not a first.

This thoughtful article gives a counter-read on the Dark Enlightenment, possibly the most common philosophy used in justifying the elevation of tech CEOs into a new aristocracy. Which is something that they support for obvious reasons, but there's no reason for the rest of us to roll over for it. At the very least we can dare to call it the Dork Enlightenment. 

Product to move

In recent ads for Grammarly, a digital typing assistant that touts its AI components, an executive looks for some of her top employees in the office. Someone else who works there tells her that they're all lost in the composition of emails, sucked into a time-consuming task. Visually this is represented by their being sucked into literal space vortices, only their feet visible. 

This is not a thing that happens. Email is mostly used as an internal form of communication in the workplace. Workers only send each other the bare minimum. Nobody is spending upwards of an hour on an email.

Whether or not AI represents an innovation into actual artificial intelligence (it doesn't) there is something artificial about the process. That something is artificial demand. This is a product that was yoked together with no real concept of whether anyone actually wanted or needed it. Now there's a full court press to convince you that you asked for it.

What's wrong with this picture?

I'm not going to stop you if you want to have a good laugh at Google's Gemini fiasco. It's both embarrassing and funny that it proved almost entirely unwilling to create images of white people, even where appropriate. A search for "America's founding fathers" returned a George Washington who looked like Barack Obama in the middle of a wig party (not to be confused with the Whig Party.)

But I have to ask, what even is the purpose of this thing? Assuming they get the bugs out, what then? An AI-generated image isn't informative in the same way a photograph is, because it doesn't focus on an object outside of itself. It's not in and of itself art, although an avant-garde artist could conceivably use it in a larger piece. 

If this is going to be treated as a big deal, it sounds like an admission that flesh-and-blood human beings are giving up on creating anything themselves.

Training and taming

During the Summer of 2020 unrest following the death of George Floyd, I was fairly sanguine. Whatever else resulted, I was sure, at least the public encouragement to go and join protests meant that COVID panic must be over. 

Needless to say, this did not turn out to be the case. But as to why we continued to live under the thumb of public health after they'd seemingly voided their authority, well, that's a rich topic. It's one that Matthew Crawford addresses here, suggesting that both COVID and the racial reckoning shared a common purpose. A new―or at least unfamiliar to us―ethic was being put into place, placing the utmost importance on deference to authority.

This antihumanism, as Crawford calls it, also extends to the apocalyptic embrace of artificial intelligence in recent years, which is based on the concept that human thinking and mechanical computation are in essence the same thing, a task the machines do better. In the opening anecdote a Google engineer sees the malfunction of one of the company's autonomous cars as prove that humans need to become "less idiotic." Sadly this does not seem to have been self-deprecation on his part.

Another one on the pile

Apple's big new product is, I guess, Apple Vision Pro. Which I guess is some kind of AR/VR device with which you can interface with and control...the usual. Granted, looking like a pair of ski goggles makes it sleeker than the VR headset I saw when I was in college, quite some time ago. And I'm sure a few gamers will be interested. But, well, meh.

But this is the thing. Apple is going hard on advertising on YouTube. They seem to put an ad for it on every other video. And the ad in over nine minutes! Whoever watches the whole thing without skipping is already sold, I assure you.

Dangerous toys

I sometimes wonder if we're experiencing some kind of delayed millenarian mania. That is, to many it doesn't seem right that the year 2000 came and went, disappearing in the rearview mirror, and yet the world failed to end. So they look for a reason why the world will end now. The inflation of a souped-up cold virus into Pestilence on his horse was but one example.

AI could be another. While I don't agree with everything Jaron Lanier says here―if Russia is using AI to sow division in this country it's a matter of carrying coals to Newcastle―he's right to emphasize that it's a human creation, rather than some alien new intelligence. Thus anything done by artificial intelligence, be it creative or destructive, is ultimately done by humans.

It's true that there's also a threat that we will downgrade human intelligence in order to make the machines look smarter. To an extent it's already happening. And the same principle could apply to creativity. If AI is now the best at creating stories, making art, making music, why should anyone put in the effort to be the next Debussy or Picasso? Especially if we assume they were all just abusive white males.

backseatdriver.exe

Grammarly strikes me as an early version of the AI-powered chatbots that have been in the news lately. Or at least  a product of the same process. Both are canned, reflecting committee thinking in a depersonalized way.

Of course it's natural that such a technology would spread. A lot of people are required to write for their jobs and/or forms and applications, but don't consider themselves writers. Since they're not trying to express themselves, it's no surprise they're happy to delegate a lot of it to an app in their computer. Still, it's a simple way to get your work hijacked.

No service

Web surfing recently I saw an article on Stephen King's Salem's Lot and the difficulties of adapting it (as the studio keeps shifting the release date of an upcoming movie). It's not a bad piece and I certainly don't want to pick on it given the paltry sums that online entertainment pieces tend to bring in. But a passage stuck out to me:

Salem’s Lot also, in the final analysis, needs to be a period piece like Scott Derrickson’s recent The Black Phone. In the current age of smartphones, GPS, internet, and social media, there’s no way that the population of an entire American town, no matter how small, could disappear into thin air without the outside world noticing.

How long have I been hearing variations on the argument that horror and thriller plots are obsolete because cell phones? If this observation were human it could vote, join the army, and―this is the good news―go into a bar for a drink. So I guess that's why nothing bad or weird ever happens anymore.

Salem's Lot is about an ancient vampire traveling with a fussy antique dealer as his Renfield and how they cause havoc in an already soapy Maine town. It's far-fetched by definition. I'm not sure how putting it in the present would strain your suspension of disbelief any further.

Pacifier

There's an ad that sometimes plays before YouTube videos. A bunch of people are boarding a plane. An announcement comes over the PA that there's a surcharge for wi-fi. Everybody in line melts down, saying that there's work they need to get into that only exists in the cloud, yadda yadda.

It seems like a prime opportunity to tell these people to breathe. You can survive a three hour flight without Internet service. But it's an ad for a telecom, so that's not the way they go.

Pixel addiction

The dangers of relying too heavily on technological shortcuts.

A show called Grimm ran in the 2010s and acquired something of a cult following. I never watched it back then but I've tried giving it a chance these past few weeks. Some good guest stars show up and it was shot in Portland, Oregon, a beautiful city when nihilism tourists aren't setting it on fire. Nonetheless, I can't get into it. 

The premise is that there's a kind of enchanted aggregate race called the Wesen, who have mystical animal traits and can transform. Only a few people, called Grimms, can see the Wesen for what they are. The lead character is a Grimm and also a PPD detective. 

Every episode has a few sequences where Wesen characters exhibit their true animal faces. The show seems really proud of these scenes, considering them pivotal to the episode. And no, they just don't work for me. With very few exceptions these reveals are done purely with CGI, no practical effects involved. So my eyes tell my brain, "Nothing happened just now. The actors just stood there inert. Some guy at a computer fixed it up a week later." So it kills the whole effect for me.

Of course a lot of the facial designs are kind of silly, too.

A marriage made in hell

 "Is this the end of the world?" asks this essay by the Canadian novelist Douglas Coupland. Mercifully it's less literal and more philosophical than the header might make you believe. The end of the world lies somewhere in the future, but what space does it occupy in our consciousness.

And there's a crystal-clear passage.

The thing is, in the Seventies, the end of the world seemed much nearer than it does right now. Nothing worked back then, and everything was fading and imploding and being smothered in oil and soot. The Seventies with an internet would have been an utter pit of despair. Which reminds me: I was in Toronto in 2003 during SARS Classic, which had a 16% kill rate and, to be honest, the city didn’t feel even remotely as doomy as it does now during Covid, which has a pathetic kill rate of, what, 0.3%? That’s what happens with an internet everywhere around you: it’s this sleepless beast that roams everywhere, poking shit with a stick all along the way, and waking up every conceivable sleeping dog it finds with a clanging pair of concert cymbals.

Obvious facts, but not put together all that often. Of course the SARS virus of 2003 was objectively scarier than the COVID bug that came 16 or 17 years later. And obviously it didn't have the same kind of impact. SARS made it into some panicked headlines and gallows humor jokes, but national stay-at-home orders and universal masking that extends into the next year? No one was even thinking about it.

Yet Coupland is a little off. There was, of course, an Internet in 2003. I know, because I was on it. Different, more primitive and at the same time more variegated, but it was definitely there. 

People had cell phones at the time as well. Maybe not quite as many. But that's not the real difference. 2003 was still the flip phone era. If you had a cell phone, you used it for phone calls and not much else. Now millennials and zoomers have become acclimated to an etiquette where making a phone call when you don't absolutely have to is a faux pas.

Somewhere along the line phones became wired so that you could easily reach the Internet from them. For some it was more convenient. But that's the problem. When you can plug into the infosphere from anywhere you happen to be, then the Internet and all the people on it become the "it all" that you can't or won't get away from. That's how problems get blown up into 800 lb. gorillas.

The obsolete man

In the process of writing a story and it's occurring to me that to a lot of people it's not going to seem like it's happening in the present day. Basically just because it's me writing it.

For one thing the main character comes home and calls his semi-estranged girlfriend. Could have done that from anywhere, right? And everyone says now that you don't call someone out of the blue, text them first. But from a drama and scene-setting vantage point, texting lacks something for me.

For the same reason I'm more likely to write someone channel surfing than just selecting what they want on Netflix or what have you. The latter seems to me to close off more storytelling possibilities than it opens.

In part I guess this is a function of age, but not just that. Kit Reed, who wrote in science fiction and a number of related areas, was born in 1932. She passed on in 2017, but up until that time she was very savvy about young people and their relationship to technology. Different people have different gifts.

Siege mentality

You may have seen this whatever it is and you may not. It's taken a few lumps already. I don't feel a need to lash out. Far be it from me to say that I've seen pictures of the author, who brags about turning his house into Wakanda, and he really shouldn't be inviting comparisons to Chadwick Boseman.

In its way it's honest. There is a lot of rudeness out there, although the idea that one race is behind it is dodgy at best. But it's revelatory of something else, which is becoming a hobbyhorse of mine. 

When across-the-board lockdowns in response to the COVID-19 pandemic started about a year ago, media support for it was unanimous in the way that seems to only happen with really bad ideas. And it took months for any kind of dissent to work its way into mainstream discussion, to the extent that many still seem unaware that there is any.

All this support comes from and through the media, of course. And it's no secret that you get a lot of media workers are better able to earn while working from home than the average fellow. But there's more to it than that. A lot of them are―or consider themselves to be―activists. And a certain kind of activist is apt to support quarantine for the express reason that it depersonalizes.

When people are free to congregate where they like, with whom they like, social groups mix. You are apt to be in proximity to people superficially unlike you, maybe even conversing. It promotes a sense of common humanity. But if your ideology rests on the absoluteness of group differences like, say, race, this can all seem intolerably reactionary. The more people only interact with each other as abstractions on a screen, the more chance you have to convert others.

A theory, yes, but backed up by experience. Are black people getting more hostile toward whites? Based on my daily interactions with people in 3D space, I'd say that's a pretty resounding "no." Most people are just trying to get by, and they know you're trying to do the same. It's only in looking at media, social and otherwise, that I might get the opposite impression. Which is why journalists coming up with pseudoscholarly ways to say "Fuck I hate crackers" wouldn't bother me in the context of a healthy and vibrant democratic society. Which we don't have.

And on that topic, here's something else I read today. The kind of institutions that need to function if the idea of democracy is going to be a bad joke are mainly local in nature, and it's these that have been most devastated over the past year. Along with the apparently irrelevant lives of children and other common folk.

Feel like I'm running a little long here but there's another article that suggests ways of fighting back, or at least holding out. See what you think.

The actual madness of virtual crowds

 Being human and fallible and having at least a toe in the water of the autism spectrum―mixed metaphor, I know―I've been known to miss or misinterpret social cues. Yet I get the big one, which is that other people exist. They aren't just bundles of stimuli that amuse or annoy me. They have their own subjective worlds, their own ways of thinking and feeling.

One byproduct of people being physically separated by government policy and brand new social conventions is that this gets forgotten much of the time. You become aware of people who may live far away from you, but you know them as words on a screen, a thumbnail picture, maybe some kind of video if they or someone else provide it. So it's easier to reduce them to one thing they've said or done, especially if it's something you hate. And with no presence or awareness of another person who can feel and be hurt, there's less disincentive to act hurtfully towards them. I often suspect that some activists know this and like it, that they've long thought that compassion and empathy are reactionary forces and that putting them aside will allow for actions that will improve the world in the long run. But is that a ride you want to get on?

And then one day it hit me. Something of real consequence was happening. We were at the start of a great renaissance of public shaming. After a lull of almost 180 years ( public punishments were phased out in 1837 in the United Kingdom and 1839 in the United States), it was back in a big way. When we deployed shame, we were utilizing an immensely powerful tool. It was coercive, borderless, and increasing in speed and influence. Hierarchies were being leveled out. The silenced were getting a voice. It was like the democratization of justice. And so I made a decision. The next time a great modern shaming unfolded against some significant wrongdoer―the next time citizen justice prevailed in a dramatic and righteous way―I would leap into the middle of it. I'd investigate it close up and chronicle how efficient it was in righting wrongs.

Jon Ronson's book So You've Been Publicly Shamed came out in 2015, approximately a half decade ago but a time that in some ways feels an eon away. But in it you can see an awareness dawning on Ronson of what's coming over the horizon. 

One of his first subjects is Jonah Lehrer. I've read Lehrer's book How We Decide but I probably wouldn't have given him much personal thought in most circumstances. In the course of writing another book, Imagine: How Creativity Works, Lehrer quoted Bob Dylan saying things that he might not have actually, you know, said. In Ronson's book, another journalist catches him out in a sequence that somewhat recalls the movie Shattered Glass. Recriminations follow, contracts are canceled. In trying to recover, Lehrer delivers a public speech on mistakes. His sponsors place a large screen behind him, displaying Twitter comments in real time. If you're guessing it devolves into an electronic theatre of cruelty, you're quite right.

There's also Julie Sacco, a publicity consultant who, about to depart on vacation to Africa, tweeted "Hope I don't get AIDS. Just kidding, I'm white." A kneeslapper that leaves my knee unslapped, to be sure, but it's not hard to dig beneath the surface at what she was actually trying to do. The comedians Sarah Silverman and Amy Schumer climbed to prominence doing this sort of humor, exposing prejudice by stating it baldly and blithely. They've largely phased out those jokes, after learning firsthand and otherwise that social mores have changed. Sacco got hit head-on with those changes, and among other things lost their jobs. 

These are both cases of people with status and position losing it, which in some cases means that the person can live to fight another day, building their image back up. But mob justice doesn't just come for the rich and famous. Nor does it require in all cases the person to have actually done what they're accused of. In the past few days a retired firefighter was tarred in social media for throwing a fire extinguisher during the MAGA riot of January 6, despite his being home halfway across the country at the time. Society is creating new sins for the thrill of punishing them, and this is something we need to be able to name and recognize if it's to be fought. 

For further reading, two insightful essays from the past couple of days by Bari Weiss and Alana Newhouse.

Jobsworth

You're saying it's not a film about the technology, it's a film about values, and Jobs comes back to values several times. You very sharply highlight how his early, rebellious values about controlling a large system don't necessarily mesh with his later values about protecting his own large system. As a person who covers Apple frequently, that’s fascinating. It's almost like, I think about it so much that I stop thinking about it.
It was to me one of the most striking things about him and his growth. Even though he thinks he didn't grow out of those countercultural values, I think he took certain affectations from the counterculture and left some of the more deep-seated values, both from the counterculture, and frankly from his "search for enlightenment," quote-unquote, behind.
And I think he didn't really fully appreciate that he had left that behind. He starts out doing blue boxes with Woz, right? And yet by the end he's going after the guys at Gizmodo. Who you'd think actually had that same kind of renegade blue box spirit that he celebrated himself and liked to believe that Apple still represented. It’s the idea of this plucky startup. Apple wasn't a plucky startup anymore! And he never was able to reconcile himself with that idea.

It's an interesting interview and there's a good chance that I'll see Gibney's Steve Jobs documentary at some point. How much weight I actually give to the Citizen Kane aspect of Jobs' life is another story..

The Apple vision is a seductive one from an aesthetic point of view. In a way this has only become more true over time. In the eighties they stood out from the pack because they had a piece of fruit in their logo and because of Steve Wozniak's involvement in the US Festival, one of the first attempts at building a branded Woodstock. Their line of personalized - or seemingly so - software and gizmos would take time to develop.

It's also true that the results of this vision haven't entirely been benign. There's been a decay in the whole idea of shared physical space, as "bricks and mortar" locations for businesses are considered atavistic and people in public gaze into their devices to avoid acknowledging each other's existences. To say nothing of how much the "sharing economy" looks to be a fancy name for letting proles fight over a shrinking number of tables scraps while the table groans with food.

But how much of this is down to the foible's of Jobs' personality? I don't know. The truth is that even the CEO of a very powerful company doesn't reset the course of society by himself. Others have to invest in the idea, directly and indirectly. A lot of people who already had money chose to use it to certain ends.

In other words, you can hate the player, but what really counts is how the game has been gamed.

Silicon Valium

There would seem to be two wildly different, even opposite reactions to technological change in the popular media.  "Seem to be", yes, but this is an illusion.  For the most part there's only one.  But it wears two faces.

The first face is frown of resigned worry.  It's going to take all our jobs.  There's no stopping now.  The momentum is too great.  The machines want what they want.

What these jeremiads miss is that technology doesn't want your job.  It doesn't think or wish.  Despite some recent manias , we haven't developed artificial intelligence.  If we do I have to assume it will be intelligent enough to know that it doesn't need to pay for food or shelter, and thus doesn't need a shitty job washing dishes at TGI Fridays.

No, technology doesn't want your job.  Your boss wants to not pay you.  And yes, lots of people's bosses have the tools to make that decision or are in the process of acquiring them.  But we in America - and not only America, really - make it easier for them by valuing capital so much higher than labor.

That's the deflated, pessimistic side.  The face of desperate optimism is something that Maria Bustillos Maria Bustillos and Andrew Leonard deal with in recent articles.  Bustillos, always one of my favorite writers to link to, sees the way that Silicon Valley magnates such as Marc Andreessen promise that Big Tech development and startup money will revolutionize that society and points out what a blinkered revolution it is.

The classification of human inquiry into the Sciences and the Humanities is a rough but useful one. In essence, the part that concerns itself with what can be measured, we call "science," and that concerned with what cannot be measured, we call "the humanities”. The former field of study provides us with the means to operate more effectively in the material world. The latter (and the latter alone) grants us the ability to judge what goes on out there. This is a question of balance. The study of the humanities is for judgement, and it’s judgement that our age is sorely lacking. We seem to have forgotten that we even need it.