November 2026

Manners Cost You Everything

By in ai, fresh hell, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

“Interact with a void as if it had a soul” — is that not Ambrose Bierce’s concise definition of prayer?

Sorry, sorry; I only jest! In fact, believe it or not, this has been a longstanding concern of mine as well. I was always troubled by the cavalier attitude toward artificial intelligence displayed in the popular entertainments of my childhood. While other boys were cheering Luke Skywalker’s adventures, I was wondering whether his familiarity with C3PO and R2-D2 constituted a dangerous erosion of the distinction between persons and things. Were the robots merely sophisticated appliances, or was Lucas insinuating that they possessed souls? And what were the implications for the ontological foundations of human dignity?

My friends seemed indifferent to these questions. Indeed, when I raised the subject during recess, they frequently told me to “shut up, dork.”

Matters grew worse in 1982, with the premiere of Knight Rider. Here was a grown man who not only conversed with his automobile but treated it as a friend and confidant. I tried to explain to my classmates that such behavior contributed to the labefaction of moral order. They replied by stuffing me into a locker.

Even then, I recognized the irony. In their eagerness to defend the supposed humanity of a talking Pontiac, they had lost sight of the actual human being in their midst. Unfortunately, my attempts to explain this through the ventilation slots were not well received.

It has taken long enough, but I am gratified to discover that Leith and Gaskovski have finally arrived at the conclusions I reached in elementary school. I only wish they had been around to offer a little moral support at the time. I might have spent considerably less of my childhood without my underpants yanked up to my ribs.

Now and Long Ago

By in ai, music No Comments

“Es muss einfach geil klingen.”

“It’s just got to sound damn good.”

— Joachim Witt, Rolling Stone Germany, October 2026

Joachim Witt is 77 years old and still making music. In this interview, he mentioned that he uses AI for inspiration, designing album covers, and even some aspects of composition. He knows what he wants to produce, down to the particulars of a figure, its surroundings, and the lighting, and he’s happy to experiment with new tools to get it. He compared the current arguments about AI to the old debates over analog and digital recording. He never thought a recording needed to crackle and hiss to be authentic. It just needed to sound good.

I was delighted to read this. There’s something admirable about a man of his age who has lost neither his creative desire nor his curiosity about new ways of satisfying it. Witt has been making music since the late 1970s, moving from quirky New Wave pop to the dark, thunderous Romanticism that became his signature sound. Apparently, he’s still interested in finding out what else he can do.

This year marks the twentieth anniversary of my discovery of his music. This time of year in particular is indelibly linked to it. I stumbled across Bayreuth 3 in late October 2006 while following a “similar artists” trail from other German bands. I ordered all three Bayreuth CDs together and have been listening to them ever since. I enjoyed the heaviness of bands like Rammstein and Eisbrecher, but Witt offered something different: powerful arrangements with a stronger melodic emphasis, and above all, that extraordinary voice.

The closest English-language comparison I can think of is Peter Steele of Type O Negative. Both men had imposing voices capable of genuine tenderness as well as overwhelming power. There’s something almost operatic about their singing, though I mean that descriptively rather than technically. Much rock and heavy metal singing consists of screaming, growling, or barking in a vaguely melodic fashion. There are skills involved in those styles, certainly, but Witt and Steele offer the pleasures of a powerful voice singing a fully developed melody. Witt’s delivery is controlled, articulate, and forceful. His enunciation is almost theatrical, and his voice occupies the foreground even when the guitars, drums, and orchestral arrangements are threatening to bring down the ceiling.

There’s the booming chorus of “Leichtsinn,” the irresistible percussive chanting of “Hände hoch,” the magnificent combination of strings and power chords in “Jetzt und ehedem.” There’s the plaintive longing of “Immer noch,” the subtle melancholy of “Was,” the crowd-pleasing melodic chorus of “Lebe dein Leben.” He can even make winter sound fun and uplifting in “Eis und Schnee,” which is one of the few German titles I can translate without assistance.

I also appreciate his apparent lack of inhibition about emotional extravagance. He’ll deliver a phrase with the grandeur of a tragic soliloquy, or allow a melody to swell with unabashed Romantic yearning. There’s no suggestion that he feels obliged to apologize for his earnestness with a knowing wink or an ironic aside. In an age when an insufficiently guarded display of emotion risks being dismissed as “cringe,” Witt simply opens his mouth and sings.

Bayreuth Zwei contains one of my favorite examples, in the pre-chorus of “Die Flucht.” He stretches a short phrase across a dramatically-building melodic passage, giving a handful of syllables a powerful emotional force. Zieh’n wie Stürme, die Gedanken flieh’n. I’ve listened to those few seconds countless times over the years.

The amusing part is, I don’t speak German.

For most of these twenty years, my knowledge of Witt has been confined almost entirely to his music. German-language interviews and articles were largely inaccessible to me, and English-language media is unfortunately lacking. AI translation has recently made it much easier to keep up with him, which is how I discovered his enthusiasm for the technology in the first place. I can now understand what he says about making music. Whether I want to understand what he’s actually singing is another matter.

For the most part, I’ve experienced his songs as sound rather than stories. His voice is another instrument, and the German language supplies its own rhythms, consonants, and expansive vowels. I don’t need to know what the words mean to be thrilled by the way he sings them. This may actually be an advantage. His extravagant Romanticism might strike me as embarrassingly mawkish if I understood every word of it. I might find myself rolling my eyes at some overheated declaration of anguish or longing. Fortunately, I’m spared the necessity of passing literary judgment. I can surrender to the emotional performance without having to approve of the sentiments being expressed. I can love Witt as a singer without having to love him as a poet.

I’ve followed him through the Rübezahl trilogy, the comparatively lighter Dom, Neumond, Thron and Ich, and even some of his early pop material. (Back in the file-sharing days, a girl named Kristyna from the Czech Republic sent me his early song “Das Supergesicht,” which wasn’t available for download at the time.) Some albums appeal to me more than others, but his voice and theatrical temperament remain unmistakable. And now he’s working on another album, Katharsis, with Chris Harms, whose collaborations helped make Rübezahl so magnificent.

I’m looking forward to hearing what they come up with. Whatever Witt chooses to do with AI, I hope he keeps doing it for years to come. His stated criterion has served him well enough so far. As for the lyrics, I suspect I’m better off not knowing.

The Ghost In the Paragraph

By in ai, writing No Comments

From a different section of that Max Raskin article in the Free Press:

Most people initially reject this premise because they think they can tell whether an essay was written by a human. Enough data and anecdotes are pouring in to show this confidence is an illusion. In a study published in August by Villanova University researchers, 1,682 adults read short fiction written either by AI or human beings. They not only preferred the stories written by AI, but in follow-up experiments, they did no better than a coin flip in determining authenticity.

The educated literary elite performed no better—in a separate study, researchers at Columbia, Michigan, and Stony Brook universities had readers with MFAs try to distinguish between passages written by AI and passages written by writers with MFAs. When the models were trained on a writer’s body of work, the MFA readers preferred the AI-generated passages to MFA-generated passages, and the best detection tools only flagged the AI text 3 percent of the time.

I’ve been running my own little test on the writers and editors I have been discussing this idea with. These are literary minds at some of the country’s most prestigious writing institutions. What I do is I pick a handful of authors they would be familiar with and then create a test—one real passage and one fake.

The first time I ran the test earlier in the year, I had Anthropic’s Claude generate an imagined passage and a real passage from Pride and Prejudice. I asked if two of my literary-minded friends could tell the difference. One could. But that’s because she knew the book chapter and verse. We then tried the same test with Moby-Dick, and although they were both confident in the answer, they both got it wrong.

The models have improved even since then. I went to the most well-read person I know—a rapacious (I used that word even though voracious is better because you have to know it wasn’t an AI who wrote this) consumer of 18th- and 19th-century British historians. He had a failure rate of 100 percent of the passages he did not already recognize. He was unable to tell the difference between genuine and faked Gibbon and Macaulay.

For reasons I can only speculate about, the “educated literary elite” — I will resist paraphrasing Voltaire here — have decided to stake the honor of thousands of years of literary achievement on a parlor game. They have foolishly attempted to claim territory they haven’t a chance of holding. In order to defend the merits of organic human prose, they have committed themselves to the proposition that AI prose is so clearly inferior and predictable that a trained eye can spot it at a glance. Thus they suffer the embarrassing routs described above. All because they decided to tie their credibility to a cheap conjuror’s trick. They act as if the essence of literature depends on them being able to “read” maximum information from a minimum of clues.

I picture a gathering of the educated literary elite in a darkened room, seated around a table draped in black velvet. Incense curls through the air. A bust of Shakespeare presides from the mantelpiece. Their most distinguished colleague, eyes closed, presses a scrap of paper to his forehead. “I’m sensing a presence,” he murmurs. “A grave, magisterial presence. Long, rolling cadences. An eighteenth-century energy.” The others lean forward. His brow furrows. “I’m seeing ruins…columns…a great empire in decline. A man is trying to communicate with us. His name begins with G. Goblin? Gaboon? Gibbles?” He begins to tremble. “Gibbon!” A gasp goes around the table. Someone faints. Somewhere in the darkness, a tambourine rattles. The medium collapses backward in his chair, exhausted by his exertions. After a respectful silence, a janitor changing the wastebasket asks, “Why don’t you just look up the passage?” He is immediately expelled for disrupting the vibrations.

Seriously, though. Just concede the indefensible territory. AI can already convincingly imitate style and voice, and it will only improve. Unless you, too, know an entire oeuvre by heart, you will be capable of being “taken in” by a pitch-perfect pastiche presented in isolation. I am by no means a Nietzsche “expert,” just an enthusiast who is familiar with most of his writing. I often see quotations attributed to him that are better credited to that prolific author Apocryphal. What do I do when I see one that doesn’t sound familiar? I look it up. I ask an LLM to verify it and link to a source. If I knew any actual Nietzsche scholars, I’d ask them. If the purported quotation names a particular book as the source, I’ll check it myself. If it doesn’t name any particular source, I’m already suspicious of it anyway. The point is, there is absolutely no need to make instant recognition the gold standard here. There is no prize for being the first to cry fraud. A paragraph may be superficially plausible while not standing up to further scrutiny. Further scrutiny should always be the standard, whether the work in question is a purported quotation of a famous author, or just the office blowhard sounding off about something he saw on Facebook.

Suppose AI eventually becomes capable of imitating Gibbon so perfectly that no scholar can reliably tell the difference. What exactly will have been lost? Gibbon’s achievement was not merely his ability to arrange subordinate clauses in a particularly recognizable fashion. It was his historical imagination, his skeptical temperament, his judgments about Rome, Christianity, and civilization, the intellectual undertaking that produced The Decline and Fall. None of that disappears because a machine can reproduce his cadences. We don’t accuse Frank Caliendo of stealing John Madden’s soul when he imitates him; we laugh and applaud precisely because the imitation is so good. If someone passes off a counterfeit passage as genuine Gibbon, that’s simple fraud, hardly a novelty in literary history. We have perfectly mundane ways of dealing with such things. But an imitation honestly presented as an imitation? Where’s the injury? Someone still has to want to make it, for whatever purpose: an argument, a joke, an experiment, a bit of harmless amusement. Someone has to care.

I’m reminded of the people who insist that without God, an immortal soul, or an afterlife, human existence would be meaningless and scarcely worth living. I’ve never understood the logic. Why should the absence of some supernatural guarantee invalidate the pleasures and satisfactions of the life I’m already living? Now I’m confronted with people who seem equally convinced that literature loses its value unless some irreducible human essence can be found lurking inside every paragraph. Once again, I’m baffled by the non sequitur. If a sentence is beautiful, an observation perceptive, an argument persuasive, why must my appreciation of it depend on discovering a ghost in the machinery?

The point of writing, surely, is to have something worth saying, not to possess a skill that nobody else can reproduce. If the latter is what we’re really defending, perhaps we should stop invoking the soul of literature and admit that we’re worried about the price of labor.

The Wheel In My Mind Keeps On Turning, I Don’t Know What I’ll Think Tomorrow

By in ai, identity, writing No Comments

Max Raskin:

Second, if we maintain that there are those who read because they want to hear the voice of another human being, we must ask: What if AI can communicate your voice better than you can, including all your errors and idiosyncrasies? It is a strange thing to consider, but just as AI can mimic your speaking voice indistinguishably, it certainly can mimic your written one. It knows what kind of adjectives you like, the length of your sentences, and your political opinions. If it doesn’t, it can easily be trained to.

I’m open to the possibility that AI could learn to imitate my writing with considerable accuracy. I’ve been blogging for twenty-one years, and there’s plenty of material available to establish my stylistic habits, favorite subjects, recurrent obsessions, and peculiar sense of humor. Given enough training, it might produce an essay that even I would have trouble identifying as counterfeit. But I can upload my entire blog to an AI. I can’t upload my brain. And I’m not entirely sure what’s in there myself.

Forgive what may appear to be self-indulgence in the following. I promise there’s a point to all this.

A couple of weeks ago, I wrote a post called “Ye and the Devil,” an exercise in silliness involving Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez, Paul Valéry, Kanye West, and the Devil. It began with AOC’s declaration that reading was an act of resistance against AI, which apparently aims to reduce us all to citizens of Camazotz. I rolled my eyes at the shallow demagoguery, but chuckled at the thought that the literati would eat it up regardless. This suggested the comic possibility of AOC as the Devil discovering how easily the self-appointed guardians of critical thinking could be seduced by a little flattery about their intellectual independence.

While discussing the possibilities with ChatGPT, he suggested giving the Devil a moment of exasperation at how little effort the seduction required. Devil. Exasperation. Click.

Months earlier, while reading Valéry’s Analects, I had tagged an aphorism in which the Devil finds himself frustrated by his inability to tempt a moron. The circumstances were slightly different, but the underlying joke was similar: the infernal machinery of temptation rendered useless by human stupidity. I’d tagged the passage because it was suggestive, funny, and potentially useful. I periodically flip through books, revisiting tagged passages in the hope that something might strike me differently. This time, two words in an AI-generated suggestion brought the aphorism back to mind.

Suddenly, I knew I had something. Until then, I’d merely been playing with an amusing premise. Now the disparate elements were beginning to form a recognizable composition. Other associations followed, and the finished post eventually acquired Kanye West as its visual punchline and a title recalling Robert Johnson’s “Me and the Devil Blues.” It was like a musician noodling around on a scale when a few notes suddenly resolve themselves into a distinctive riff. His eyes light up. He can hear a song beginning to take shape.

I would never claim that any of this is profound. It was an elaborate joke, after all. But I put a lot of thought into constructing it just so, and it’s one of my favorite posts of recent memory because of how much fun it was to put together. I love it even if no one else does.

Something similar happened with another recent post, “Do You Choose What I Choose? More Alternatives.” I’d been thinking about the provenance of art and the familiar observation that beauty is in the eye of the beholder. That phrase reminded me of Metallica’s “Eye of the Beholder,” which happened to be unusually prominent in my mind because a coworker had been playing Metallica albums at the warehouse that day. The reason he’d been doing that is because we had just learned that a former client of ours was a member of the studio crew during the making of one of their albums. These little coincidences eventually converged on a lyric that suggested a title for the developing essay. To a reader, the title was simply appropriate to the subject. To me, it was also a private souvenir of a particular afternoon, with associations that nobody encountering the finished essay could possibly recover from the text alone. It reminds me of how much I used to enjoy taking apart my mom’s Russian nesting dolls and putting them back together. The outer shell is pleasing enough, but it’s fun to know that there’s more hidden inside.

None of this requires supernatural powers of creativity. An AI could possibly have suggested the Valéry aphorism or the Metallica lyric independently. But why would it have thought to assemble these particular ingredients, at these particular moments? Why would anyone besides me have prompted it to do so? And among the innumerable possible combinations it could generate, who would decide which were worth pursuing? The question of judgment may have been pushed to the other limits by technological advances, but there it still sits, awaiting an answer.

I’ve spent decades reading, observing, remembering, and forgetting. A gigantic quantity of miscellaneous material has accumulated somewhere in the attic. Sometimes I can retrieve something deliberately. Sometimes an unexpected phrase pulls on an invisible thread and something I hadn’t thought about in years comes tumbling out of the rafters. Frequently, I’m as surprised as anyone else.

This happens during conversations as well. I may know only that there’s something interesting in a particular direction, without knowing what it is or how to find it. I’ll say to ChatGPT, in effect, “I think there’s something out there. Let’s go look.” We wander around, trying analogies and following associations, until occasionally something clicks. Sometimes we’ve recovered an old memory; sometimes we’ve discovered a connection that didn’t previously exist. What interests me is that the activity depends upon a perspective I can’t fully describe, even after dissecting its individual components.

My published writing records the connections I’ve already made. It doesn’t disclose all the memories I haven’t yet recalled, the experiences that haven’t acquired significance, or the circumstances that may suddenly bring them together tomorrow. Nor can I predict which possibilities will strike me as compelling. I’ve spent decades inside this head, and it still surprises me regularly. “We are changed by what we change.”

I think of the passage in the Tao Te Ching about thirty spokes converging upon the hub of a wheel, whose usefulness depends upon the empty space at its center. It’s a useful image of the individual consciousness. All sorts of memories, influences, preferences, experiences, and passing impressions converge upon a common center, acquiring relationships they might never have possessed otherwise. We can identify the spokes easily enough. But where, exactly, is the essential thing that makes them belong together?

This begins to resemble the old metaphysical problem of the soul. We can describe the constituent parts of a person, observe their characteristic interactions, and recognize a coherent individual without necessarily identifying some additional substance responsible for the whole arrangement. Perhaps there is no such substance. Perhaps the mystery is simply a measure of our ignorance. Calling it a soul doesn’t explain anything, but neither does cataloguing its components necessarily tell us everything we want to know. And perhaps the same is true, on a smaller scale, of a writer’s voice.

Raskin may be right that AI will eventually imitate my prose better than I can produce it myself. But I’m not especially concerned about that. I don’t write because the internet suffers from a shortage of paragraphs bearing my stylistic fingerprints. I write because something catches my attention, reminds me of something else, and occasionally produces an irresistible desire to see what I can make of it.

I’ve offered two unusually detailed accounts of how particular posts came into existence. I’ve identified the literary influences, private associations, accidental circumstances, and AI contributions. There’s no secret ingredient I’ve deliberately withheld. And yet, having explained all that, I still couldn’t begin to tell you what I’m going to think of next.

Thirty spokes converge upon an empty hub. Somehow the wheel keeps turning.

Don’t Ask Me Why, It’s Just the Nature of My Grooves

By in aphorisms, books, bricolage, foolosophy, writing No Comments

She concludes that writing on the internet, particularly in spaces where it’s simple to charge money for it, tends to push writers toward the confessional, the self-helpy, and the soothing.

…But in the new writer economy a “desperation for attention” is practically “an industry command,” Brouillette writes. The platform may not save journalism as a whole, but it certainly helps prolong the careers of those willing to play the “game,” as McKenzie put it, of cultivating their personal brands.

— Kyle Chayka, “Did Substack Fix the Internet?”

****

My purpose is to make people think – and make myself think too, – about things we didn’t think about, because they were too close or too constantly present, – i.e. because of their very importance. Normally speaking, our thought is naturally drawn towards the things that aren’t immediately resolved or that require a response specially adapted to the circumstance. We pay no attention to the even ground we walk upon, and the walking itself allows us to think of other things. Thus the incidence and the natural role / movement / of thought is seemingly opposed to the natural course of this walking. Both pursue separately their trains of substitutions etc. But when the terrain becomes difficult, this freedom is doubly renounced. Either the walking has to ally itself to the thinking, or the thinking stops the walking, and either the shock of the thought, or else that of the accidents of terrain cause a change of pace.

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

****

The ‘crowd’ is really what I have made my polemical target, and it was Socrates who taught me. I want to make people aware so that they don’t waste their lives and fritter them away. The aristocrats take for granted that a vast number will always go to waste; but they keep quiet about it and lead sheltered lives pretending that all these multitudes of people simply do not exist. That is the ungodly aspect of the aristocrats’ superiority – not even making people aware, just so that they can have a good time themselves.

That’s not what I want. I want to call the crowd’s attention to their own ruin. And if they don’t want the good, I will compel them with the use of evil. One understands me or one doesn’t.

— Kierkegaard, Papers and Journals: A Selection

Whose Problem Is That?

By in foolosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

When the Lady of the House was a teenager in the hinterlands, she and her friend Britney drove to a “nearby” town to see a movie. On the way home, Britney spotted her ex-boyfriend’s truck pulled over by the police. As one does in a small town, she pulled up alongside to see what was happening and everyone chatted amiably.

When the Lady arrived home, her mother greeted her at the door: “So, I heard you talked to the cops!”

Furthermore, the family chiropractor had apparently been at the movie theater and reported that she’d walked right past him without saying hello. All this intelligence had reached headquarters before the Lady had even returned from her outing. The Stasi could have learned a few things from rural prairie life.

The Lady’s mother also used to make something of a sport out of spotting people around town. “I saw you at Costco, but you didn’t wave!” There was a harrowing competitive element to this social vigilance. Failure to reciprocate would get you roasted at best, shunned at worst. I wouldn’t want to live under that sort of surveillance — I don’t even enjoy visiting it — but at a safe distance, I can respect the culture that produced it. In a sparsely populated agricultural region, knowing your neighbors and maintaining good relations with them wasn’t merely a pleasant social custom. When blizzards, farming accidents, and vehicle breakdowns miles from town were among the ordinary hazards of life, your social network was part of your survival equipment. You helped people because someday you might need them to help you. The custom had become a duty, and the duty had become a habit.

She has carried those habits into the digital age. On my birthday, I received her customary text greeting, bearing the signature “(sent with Echo).” At some point in the past, she arranged for her electronic assistant to send me a birthday message at the appropriate time. It doesn’t matter to me whether she made that arrangement the day before or six months ago. She thought of it at some point, decided it was important, and made sure it happened. Given the likelihood of being somewhere out of cellular service on the day itself, she may have been especially prudent. I don’t take it as a sign of inauthenticity that she didn’t hand-craft those characters in a fit of affection mere moments before they appeared on my end.

I mention this because I’ve recently read two essays about the supposed difficulties of maintaining friendships in the technological age. In UnHerd, Matthew Gasda worries that AI assistants will rob friendship of its essential friction. In the Atlantic, Julie Beck confesses to being a chronically bad texter. She describes setting a daily reminder to answer her accumulated messages, which helps, but makes her uneasy about treating her loved ones as though they were a productivity problem rather than a source of joy. I agree with Gasda’s skepticism of Silicon Valley’s perennial promise that removing obstacles to communication will somehow produce better relationships. Short of implanting chips in our brains that allow us to transmit messages as soon as we think of them, I don’t see how communication could possibly become much easier. And yet people still neglect to communicate. Beck’s complaint, by contrast, strikes me as more evidence of the self-absorption that inevitably accompanies the therapeutic concern with personal feelings over obligations to others. I can easily imagine the Lady’s mother listening to this elaborate account of emotional ambivalence with mounting impatience.

“Well, make up your mind! If you can’t remember to send the message on your own, then use the automation! But if you don’t like automating it, remember it yourself! Nobody’s making you use the damn thing!”

“But it makes me feel—”

“Well, whose problem is that?”

Pace Virginia Woolf, on or about 2011, human character changed. The smartphone had arrived, and with it a new incapacity to remember birthdays, answer messages, or arrange meetings. Armed with devices capable of performing nearly every clerical function formerly entrusted to a secretary, we apparently became less able to fulfill our social obligations. According to some demographics, at least. The younger people I know are quick to offer therapeutic explanations. They have ADHD, depression, anxiety, insufficient emotional bandwidth, or some other impediment to remembering that the rest of us exist. I couldn’t help but notice that many of my younger friends, despite living with smartphones grafted onto their palms, forgot to text on my birthday. I can’t help but think that rehearsing a steady narrative about your inability to perform the normal functions of “adulting” becomes a self-fulfilling prophecy.

The older generation, to which the Lady’s mother belongs, was taught to regard such difficulties as problems to be managed, not as permissions to disappoint other people. If you couldn’t remember something, you wrote it down. If you weren’t in the mood, you did it anyway. Your feelings didn’t automatically settle the question of what you owed somebody else. One advantage of cultivating discipline is that you don’t have to consult your feelings every time an obligation presents itself. You have already decided what matters and developed habits accordingly. Why should today’s mood automatically overrule yesterday’s considered judgment that a particular relationship is worth preserving?

We increasingly hear complaints about loneliness and the difficulty of maintaining adult friendships. Yet many of the supposedly antiquated conventions of social obligation existed to prevent precisely that difficulty. You acknowledged birthdays, returned invitations, checked on sick friends, and occasionally contacted people for no particular reason. These rituals kept relationships alive during periods when nobody was feeling especially inspired. If the human species were worth a damn, you might think we could use our vaunted powers of reflection and foresight to steer a middle course between the Scylla of stifling village life and the Charybdis of atomized isolation. Perhaps we could voluntarily choose to live up to challenging obligations out of a considered conviction that doing so avoids the worst of each extreme. Obviously this is too idealistic. We prefer to swing like a pendulum from one extreme to the other instead and complain either way.

Imagine a society in which everyone habitually asks, “How will the other person feel if I don’t?” Everyone who has friends will have people looking out for them, just as they look out for others. Now imagine one in which everyone defaults to asking, “How do I feel about doing this?” Everyone enjoys complete freedom to disengage whenever the inclination strikes, while wondering why nobody ever bothers to contact them. It’s almost a reversal of Adam Smith’s famous insight about self-interest. In a functioning marketplace, pursuing our individual interests can produce benefits for others. In this social marketplace, everyone pursuing their own emotional comfort can produce a general shortage of the very consideration everyone wants to receive. An invisible hand that leaves everyone sitting at home waiting for someone else to message.

Three Bouncing Dots

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Ian Bogost:

Though it is harder to find reason to crank (or dial, or strike, or pedal), nothing is stopping you from doing so. Perhaps it even makes sense to own supposedly outmoded apparatuses just because they exercise those muscles—a crankable pepper grinder, for when you can’t get your hands on a penny press. To feel your body carry out forgotten gestures anew is even more pleasurable than the gestures on their own. Rediscovering them proves that they are not bygone, but obscured by the changes that made them rare.

Bogost is nostalgic for the days of hand-cranked mechanisms — pencil sharpeners, manual car windows, and their relatives. Nothing inherently wrong with a little eccentric appreciation of life’s tiny details, of course, but just because something is evocative doesn’t make it intrinsically significant. He seems to me to be treating the objects of his attention as though they were the source of his appreciation, rather than asking what his own capacity for appreciation might discover elsewhere. By the time he’s lamenting the “sense of loss in my low-crank-lifestyle,” or finding romance in the act of rolling a car window down by hand to talk to a love interest, the words “crank-yanking” are starting to appear in my mind.

Bogost, are you yanking
My chain about society’s de-cranking?
It is the present you draw a blank for.
It is Bogost you crank for.

If he were just describing a scene of winding and unwinding himself in the telephone cord during a conversation, you might feel a little warm nostalgia about being reminded of a true-to-life detail that you knew well, once upon a time, but had forgotten. But he evidently wants you to find something profound in the physical act itself, and it just isn’t necessarily that deep. Were you so inclined, you could moon over the three little bouncing dots that show your friend is composing a text at this moment. It could be framed as a little drama: anticipation, impatience, uncertainty, perhaps even anxiety. Someone is composing a message. What are they going to say? Why have the dots disappeared? Have they changed their mind? Are they thinking? Deleting? You could invest all that with spiritual meaning, the poignant longing of wanting to know but having to wait. But that’s now, so it doesn’t have the sepia tint of times gone by. It will take a few decades before a future Bogost will be writing an article about “gestures of connection,” what we lost when the “so-and-so-is-typing” indicator went away, and future me will think, with a touch of exasperation, Why didn’t you appreciate that at the time you had it?

His recollection of winding himself in the telephone cord is charming precisely because it isolates one tiny physical detail from all the unremarkable business of an ordinary conversation. It doesn’t follow that the experience was especially charming while he was having it. He might have been bored, annoyed, preoccupied, or impatient to get off the telephone. Reflecting on this should lead you to the conclusion that “I’m probably ignoring something right now that I will only appreciate in hindsight. What is it?” But often, it seems the past receives contemplative attention; the present receives merely functional attention. That seems to me like someone sitting in a car, facing out the back window. “Ah! Look at that mountain disappearing into the distance! How poignant! How sublime! How…” And I think, “If you would just turn around, you could see all this coming, as it happens.” If you sincerely believe that the mundane experiences of your youth possessed a richness you failed to recognize, shouldn’t that discovery change the way you attend to mundane experiences now? Otherwise, you’re simply arranging to have the same revelation again twenty years hence, about a different set of vanished conveniences.

As we saw above, he suggests that readers might want to own outmoded apparatuses in order to “exercise those muscles,” to feel your body “carry out forgotten gestures anew.” There’s nostalgia, and then there’s locking yourself in a 1980s museum and refusing to come out. Seriously, if you make a personal ritual out of the mere act of dialing a rotary phone, or turning a pencil sharpener, this might suggest autism more than spiritual depths. Why are we looking for an excuse to crank our arms in a circle? Because it evokes a bygone age when there was a practical meaning to the gesture. Now, it’s just a form of Ghost Dancing, as if we’re going through the old motions and chants in hopes that the Great Spirit will roll up all the fiber-optic cables and wash all the smartphones into the sea. But even if that happened, we would just find ourselves back in the 1980s again. Where we already were once before, and just as restless and dissatisfied then.

The three bouncing dots aren’t made of brass or oak. They don’t have a satisfying mechanical resistance. Nobody’s grandmother operated them. Yet they can represent the thrilling possibility of communication from someone you love, or the suspense of a conversation whose outcome matters deeply to you. Someday they’ll be gone, too. And the poignancy will come rushing in, right on schedule. You don’t even have to wait until then. You only have to recognize that the particular conversation they’re announcing, with this particular person, on this particular day, will never happen again. Are we commemorating or cultivating the experience of being alive?