Outis Niemand

About Outis Niemand

http://asundayofliberty.com

Ornamental hermit. Sciolist. Musician manqué. Poetaster. Armchair psychologist. Pseudo-philosopher. Founder of Panta Rheism™. The complete Rabelaisian man. Great eater, deep drinker, stout fighter, prodigious lover; clear thinker, creator of beauty, seeker of truth and prophet of heroic grandeurs. I coalesce the vapors of human experience into a viable and logical comprehension. (Contact: asundayofliberty at gmail)

Posts by Outis Niemand:

The Eternal Recarrance

By in books, bring me the head of nicholas carr, the geist of the zeit No Comments

Henry Oliver:

And it seems to me that The New Dark Ages is largely written for people who struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. That is the personal story James tells, very convincingly and absorbingly. There is a general tendency to admire the Wendell Berry, Against the Machine, dumb-phone view of life, which is a new pastoral image, a utopia in which the problems of being a human are attached to the idols of progress. If only it were so simple!

The entire review is worth reading because of its thoroughness. I don’t think I’ve ever seen such a polite and respectful demolition job. None of the clichés of the decline-of-reading-genre and What It All Means are left standing, and I hope they are never rebuilt. This passage in particular is the goods, as Bertie Wooster would say. It has rung the bell. I examine it narrowly and find no flaws. It makes me smile for two reasons. One, it shows that little has changed since Nicholas Carr was delivering the same jeremiad fifteen years ago, to name just one antecedent, and two, it shows yet again the tendency of public intellectuals to inflate their personal problems into a diagnosis of societal decline. Civilization is collapsing? No, that’s just your self-image. You struggle with smartphone addiction and wish to read more. I’m sure that’s painful, but do be courteous enough to leave me out of your therapy session.

The Data Are Clear

By in jests japes jokes jollies, writing No Comments

Josh Nadeau:

Studies are suggesting (I won’t bore you with a list of citations) that more and more people are beginning to demand more from writing. There are, and it pains me to say, dissertations suggesting that writing seeks to evoke a response of heart and soul, not mind and intellect. These are saying that the era of the think piece, the data driven reporting, the academic cunning, are a thing of the past. There’s a growing constituency that seems enthralled by the very ordinary and very local—personal and particular stories by which the universal scope of experience can come flooding through. And believe me, this will be a fad. It will not last.

I’ve been saying recently that much nonfiction writing would be improved if we dropped our senseless prohibition against first-person perspectives, stopped camouflaging individual viewpoints behind the drab patterns of omniscient narrative, and simply offered up our reflections for whatever they are worth. Nadeau seems to have the same idea in mind, but he says it in a much funnier way. You should check it out.

Take It To the Limit

By in ai, writing No Comments

Matthew Gasda:

What must be preserved from the encroachments of the calculator are forms of writing in which excellence was always an uphill battle: the long-form essay, literary fiction, poetry, plays, memoir, as well as personal letters. But even this preservation must make room for reasonable carve-outs. There’s a difference between a journalist who prompts Claude to generate a sentence, a paragraph, or a whole article, on the one hand; and one who asks Claude a factual question, on the other. The latter is doing something no different from consulting Google (Google results now are AI-driven anyway).

Norms can and should be developed within these professions for certifying organic work, which will no doubt command higher prices, just as handmade furniture from a carpenter comes at a higher cost than a chair from IKEA. If this means fewer people will be thought of as true writers, is that really such a bad thing?

I think we’re in the “bargaining” stage of the AI discourse. “OK, fine, you can have all of this writing. But surely you’ll leave me poetry, literary fiction, and personal letters?”

“Organic work commanding higher prices” strikes me as “capitalism wins again.” If some people get a thrill out of cultivating a New Yorker-type of relationship to writing, good for them. No different than if they spend thousands of dollars sniffing wine corks, even if I think it’s absurd. The human animal will always find a way to turn even a new status quo into a status game. Human writing becomes artisanal cheese. There will almost certainly be people for whom “human-written” becomes part of a cultivated relationship to language in the same way other people cultivate architecture, jazz, watches, coffee, typography, or restaurants. They may possess genuine discrimination. They may also be unbearable about it. Usually both are possible at once.

This is another instance where I wonder if the form of the piece doesn’t cause the tepid conclusion. It’s like: a writer has an insight about AI. He sets out his thoughts. But his thoughts don’t end on a summarizing note, and certainly not an uplifting one. So a “call to action” sort of ending gets perfunctorily tacked on, perhaps at an editor’s urging. Obviously, there’s no way to know. But it’s such a common occurrence that I wonder if it happens often. The conclusions are often so rote and uninspired.

The interesting part of the essay is exploratory. Gasda keeps discovering complications: the AI/non-AI binary is unstable; cognitive outsourcing long predates LLMs; writers have no principled reason to exempt their own favorite cognitive activity without explaining why; detector culture is corrosive; and the boundary between legitimate and illegitimate assistance is difficult to draw. But then, with very little argumentative preparation, we get: preserve literary genres, create professional norms for certifying “organic work,” accept a premium market for it, and perhaps recognize fewer “true writers.” It has the sound of an essay pilot being told, You need to land the plane. But the actual intellectual landing point might simply have been: “I don’t know where the line is. The old line doesn’t survive contact with the technology, and any new one will be contingent, socially negotiated, and probably unstable.” But that wouldn’t feel like an “ending” in the conventional magazine sense. It lacks resolution. It gives the reader no prescription, no hopeful gesture, no institutional program, no “what we must do.” I suspect this produces a great deal of bad nonfiction.

The first-person writer can stop at the exact point where his judgment stops. He can say, “I noticed this. I followed it as far as I could. Here is the shape it seems to have. I don’t know what follows from it.” No editor needs a call to action. No audience-development person needs the reader to leave feeling empowered rather than vaguely unsettled. Blogs at their best have a quality that magazine essays often lack: they preserve the scale of the thought. The writer doesn’t have to inflate an observation into a thesis or a thesis into a program. He can just say, “Here’s how I see it. Take it or leave it.”

I Would Be Lying If I Said That It Wasn’t True, I Only Want Bad Things to Happen to You

By in ai, media/propaganda No Comments

Charlie Warzel:

Of course, I’m gonna be defensive about this. I don’t want something to come out there and take the one marketable skill that I have and just make it irrelevant. But I also think that there’s something else going on here.

No, Charlie, that’s about it. You don’t want AI to put your worthless journalist ass out of work. There’s no deeper subtext to it.

This is from an Atlantic podcast summary titled “AI Writing Has Entered Its Post-Shame Era.” The subtitle is “Media Already Have a Trust Problem.” One of Warzel’s guests is Elizabeth Spiers, the founding editor of Gawker. All this reminds me for some reason of when OJ promised to find the real killer.

On June 3, 2020, J.D. Vance tweeted, “I’m still amazed at how quickly the moral scolding ceased as soon as elite-favored protests began taking place. (I guess I shouldn’t be amazed anymore. I should just expect it.) But it has further eroded trust in our country’s experts.” The tweet has since been deleted, but you can find it quoted here. He was talking about the fact that following George Floyd’s death, the media and public health experts suddenly became supportive of mass gatherings and street protests for favored causes, after three months of insisting that lockdowns were absolutely necessary. This wasn’t some conspiracy theory from the fever swamps of right-wing Twitter. Some publication called the Atlantic granted space to two epidemiologists, one from Harvard, one from Yale, to argue exactly that case in response to growing outrage: “Public-Health Experts Are Not Hypocrites.” The argument was so appallingly weak that even some idiot blogger could dismantle it in a paragraph. But enough reminiscing. The reason I thought of it was because Vance’s tweet was what inspired this response from some guy named Charlie Warzel:

Sigh. It’s all just so much. Pity the poor establishment hack, forced to explain that the Emperor’s fly is not down, and that is not his shriveled hypocrisy dangling in the breeze there, all while enduring calumnies from fishwives and costermongers. Can you believe the impertinence? Frightfully bad form! People are going to use our brazen double standards against us! Is that cricket? Is that Marquess of Queensberry rules? I ask you!

Six years ago, Warzel was not concerned with truth, trust, or institutional credibility, and God knows he was far beyond shame. He only cared about his job, his status, and the party line. Today is no different. His “one marketable skill” is being a propagandist and empty-calorie content-dispenser for Acela corridor midwits, and now comes a machine that can do it better and faster without even having a soul to sell first. OpenAI should incorporate this into their marketing. If they promise me that upgrading to Professional tier would help put Charlie Warzel and canutes like Spiers out of work even faster, I would smash that subscribe button hard enough for it to be measured on the Richter scale.

465

By in battling personal entropy, books No Comments

And so I think that in all languages the word meaning virtue did not originally have any other meaning than strength, vigor (of mind or body or both, or some mixture of the former and the latter, but certainly first and foremost the latter). So much so that primitive man and antiquity does not and did not recognize any other virtue, any other perfection in man and things except force and strength, or certainly didn’t recognize any virtues that were separate from those qualities or whose essence, and main character, and form of being, and rationale as virtues and perfections was not contained in them.

— Leopardi, Zibaldone

Squatted 465 this week. Am I especially virtuous? Well, that’s not really for me to say, but…

All We Are Is Piss In the Wind

By in ai, education, foolosophy, the geist of the zeit No Comments

David Shapiro:

What really needs to happen, and what has happened many times throughout history, is that we need to integrate the new technology into society. Like coal and steel, like electricity and radio, and like the internet before it, AI will have its pros and cons. That’s just a fact of life.

As some like to say in the South, fighting that is like pissing into the wind. I will pick my battles, namely about Post-Labor Economics, but that’s integration work, not unserious “shut it all down or everyone dies” nonsense.

I don’t think of myself as a Stoic, but I recognize that Stoic psychology is awfully useful. I just accept that change is always uncomfortable to those who have stakes in the status quo. How I feel about that is irrelevant, and childishly indulgent if I make it the centerpiece of my reaction. I also don’t need to be a Hayekian to notice that social orders routinely produce outcomes that no one designed. If a tyrant confiscates ten million homes for some vanity project, there is a decision-maker, an intention, a victim class, and an obvious moral question: was this act justified? Anger has a target because agency is concentrated. But if ten million people gradually decide they prefer streaming to DVDs, online shopping to department stores, AI-assisted work to unassisted work, or automated service to paying another human to perform the same task, what exactly is the corresponding moral event? There usually isn’t one. There are ten million little decisions, each of which may be perfectly intelligible from the standpoint of the person making it. The video-store clerk loses his job because nobody in particular decided that video-store clerks ought to suffer. People just stopped renting DVDs.  But ideologues, demagogues, and everyday morons turn “millions of people are voluntarily adopting a technology because they find it useful” into a story about a handful of sinister executives doing this to us. The moral grammar is much more satisfying that way. Someone can be blamed, resisted, or forced to stop.

I am mostly tired of what I think of as “theorizing from 30,000 feet.” The discourse around AI is full of humanities blowhards pontificating about What It All Means, despite the fact that none have them have even tried to use it, or understand how and why others have used it. I see Jonathan Pageau eructating about “shining souls” who want to “foster wisdom and virtue” and “practice truth and love,” in opposition to the tech lords building island fortresses who want to force AI on us, a moral framework better suited to Saturday morning cartoons. “Who does it serve?” he asks ominously, with the flashlight under his chin for spooky effect. Well, as Hayek might interject, it serves countless people in countless different ways, like all complex phenomena, and you would have to demonstrate some attempt at understanding those people’s perspectives if you want to be convincing. “The 1% vs. the 99%” was retarded demagoguery when Occupy Wall Street types said it, and it’s no less so when Christian humanists say it.

Most disappointing to me is the fact that so many of the humanities types, who I would expect to have greater-than-average perspective gleaned from engagement with thousands of years’ worth of culture and literature, are disproportionately among those panicking over their own high-altitude, worst-case theorizing. I don’t expect ideologues, demagogues and everyday morons to be capable of sober reflection. I did expect better from anyone who has actually absorbed thousands of years of literature in which we encounter human beings finding ways to be vain, lazy, brave, stupid, ingenious, loving, self-deceiving and disciplined under an astonishing variety of material conditions. But exposure to history does not automatically produce historical perspective. A person can spend decades reading old texts and still experience the present in a radically presentist way. In fact, expertise can sometimes make that worse. You acquire a vast stock of analogies, concepts and quotations, but those can be used either to relativize the present or to dramatize it. If you use them to enlarge your sense of the range of ordinary human adaptation, AI looks like another extraordinary circumstance imposed upon a very old animal. If you use them chiefly to furnish grand analogies, every new circumstance can become Armageddon.

You Are Not Yet the Person That You Are

By in aphorisms, books, identity, jests japes jokes jollies, the big sleep No Comments

No phenomenon excites me more than waking up. Nothing tends to produce a more extraordinary idea of…everything, than this autogenesis — This beginning of what has been — which itself has its beginning = What is, — and that is all shock, amazement, contrast. As a result, a state of equidifference occurs as if…there were a moment (extremely fragile) in which you are not yet the person that you are, and you could come back to life as someone else!! A different memory would develop. Whence fantasy — the external individual unchanged, and the whole psyche replaced by another…!

— Paul Valéry, Cahiers / Notebooks 3

Been there, done that. It never gets old for me. Every morning, consciousness returns before the person quite does. Memory restores the name, the history, the attachments, the unfinished business. Within seconds the seam disappears and we say: I woke up.

Perhaps memory is the nearest thing we have to a personal essence. Infancy suggests as much from one direction. Logically, I know I suffered, feared, and was comforted as a baby, but I remember none of it. Those first few years belong to my biography almost as though they happened to someone else. Dementia approaches the same condition from the other end: consciousness may remain after much of the remembered person has vanished. Eventually others can remember your life better than you can.

Death ordinarily hides the distinction because body, consciousness, and memory usually expire together. Imagine, then, being offered immortality on different terms. You may live forever, but every so often you will go to sleep and wake without a single memory. A new personality will form, live for decades, and in turn be erased. The cycle will continue eternally.

Would you accept? Probably not. What most of us want preserved is not consciousness in the abstract but this accumulated life: these people, these memories, this particular past. An immortal succession of amnesiacs sounds less like eternal life than endlessly repeated death. And yet infancy presents the puzzle in reverse. We readily say that the memoryless child was me, while recoiling from the idea that a future memoryless consciousness could also be me.

But there’s no reason to make this an entirely serious thought experiment. Comedy is as much the stuff of life as anything else. I can easily envision this as a warehouse snafu from my own experience. Picture it:

Two people fall asleep at 11:17. During sleep, whatever process normally returns yesterday’s memories to the correct waking consciousness routes them incorrectly. At 6:42 the next morning:

“Why am I in this house?”

“Who is this woman?”

“Why do I apparently know how to drive a tractor-trailer?”

“Why do I have seventeen years of memories of being married to some guy named Dennis?”

If you swap autobiographical memory only, the body retains procedural knowledge. So the concert pianist wakes with the truck driver’s childhood and marriage but discovers that her fingers can still play Chopin. The truck driver remembers conservatory training in exquisite detail but can’t make his hands perform it. Each possesses somebody else’s explanation of skills that remain physically lodged elsewhere. Emotional residue could make it stranger still. You wake with no memory of your wife, yet her presence produces an inexplicable feeling of safety. Or you remember being desperately in love with someone else’s husband while your own nervous system recoils from him because it has never met him.

Everyone spends the first half of the story insisting, “I am obviously the person whose memories I have.” Then somebody asks, “But if his memories are in your brain and your memories are in his, which one of you is actually you?” And both reply: “Jesus Christ, not now.”

I could see this being something like Monsters, Inc. rather than Freaky Friday. The comedy lies in the collision between the sacredness of personal identity and the banality of inventory control. Sleep already has a vast, hidden logistical infrastructure, and most nights it works so efficiently nobody notices. Memories are processed, sorted, tagged, and returned before waking. Dreams are damaged packaging. Déjà vu is a duplicate shipment. That thing where you walk into a room and forget why you’re there is a partial pick error. Then one morning somebody opens the wrong carton. The person wakes up in the correct body. Name on the outside is right. Address is right. But the contents don’t match the manifest.

“Package says Robert Ellis.”

“Yeah.”

“Body says Robert Ellis.”

“Yeah.”

“Memories are for Angela Martinez.”

“Shit. Check the invoice.”

Two clerks start frantically pulling records, comparing timestamps, discovering that Robert and Angela entered REM sleep within three seconds of each other and somebody scanned the wrong tote. Meanwhile both humans are already awake and wrecking each other’s lives.

As usual, I’m just giving away great ideas for free here.

Nothing to Declare But His Genius

By in ai, writing No Comments

Venkatesh Rao:

Starting with this essay, I will no longer be explicitly declaring AI use, or segregating my AI-assisted writing in a separate experimental section. You should assume by default that I’m using AI. See my revised About page for a detailed update on my AI use philosophy.

Rao to the Pangram police:

I love the judo move here, simply sidestepping the attempted thrust of moral authority and using its momentum against it. And I’m glad somebody prominent in this particular intellectual neighborhood is willing to say it plainly. The more respectable writers behave as though being “Pangram’d” is a reputational catastrophe, the more they hand detector companies and accusers the authority to define legitimate writing. But authorship is an agency problem, not a particle-analysis problem. There are no disputes over royalties to settle. Anyone for whom AI assistance is disqualifying has the information needed to stop reading him. Everyone else can go back to asking the old-fashioned question: Is the writing any good? Anything beyond that would only become interesting to a reader if, upon follow-up discussion, it became evident that Rao wasn’t capable of expanding upon “his” ideas. The reader might think, “Wow, Claude must have been doing all the heavy lifting for this guy.” But that’s a risk for Rao to be concerned with, and if he isn’t, I’m not either. Too bad for all the newly self-appointed commissars who will lose their jobs if this example spreads. On second thought, swive ’em.

A Pot of Message

By in foolosophy, music, the geist of the zeit, writing 3 Comments

I’ve never considered what it would look like if someone made a connect-the-dots sociology book, but suddenly I have a clear image of it.

I particularly enjoy the implied metaphysics of “confidence needed for rock.” Apparently rock requires some national reserve of psychic testosterone, and the towers falling depleted it. Green Day, the Strokes, White Stripes, Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Interpol, Queens of the Stone Age, Franz Ferdinand, Arctic Monkeys, the Killers, My Chemical Romance, Fall Out Boy, Mastodon, etc. must have been operating on the strategic confidence reserve.

The fact that the stakes are so low here is what allows you to see how easily confidently-stated bullshit can sound authoritative if you’re primed to take it seriously. You begin with an outcome: rock lost cultural centrality. You select a major historical event: 9/11. You invent a mushy intermediate variable: “confidence.” You attribute the outcome to the event through that variable. Then you narrate the sequence with enough certainty that the story feels like an explanation. Nothing in that procedure actually demonstrates causation, but it has the shape of analysis. That shape is what’s persuasive. A happened. Then B happened. Here is an abstract concept that connects A to B. Therefore I have explained B.

Again, it sounds hilarious when a bloviator on social media is trying to explain such a gaseous topic as “the death of rock.” Hell, any post or article about “the death of X” is like a porch light on a humid summer night: guaranteed to attract a cloud of the dumbest moths pontificating in circles. But move exactly the same method into geopolitics, sociology, macroeconomics, institutional decline, technological change, whatever, and suddenly the subject itself supplies prestige. The nouns get heavier: “legitimacy crisis,” “late-stage institutional decay,” “neoliberal subjectivity,” “civilizational exhaustion,” or “loss of social cohesion.” Now you may not know enough to say, “Wait, that doesn’t line up with what actually happened.” And because the speaker sounds fluent in the domain’s vocabulary, you mistake facility at constructing an explanatory narrative for evidence that the narrative is true. It’s sort of like Gell-Mann amnesia, but in relation to methods of inference. You recognize the bogus reasoning instantly when its inputs are familiar, but fail to recognize the same reasoning when it is dressed in unfamiliar facts and consequential abstractions. So just remember our friend Reuben Rodriguez the next time you see some blowhard posing like Spengler and portentously analyzing the deep structure of history, technology, populism, etc., and say, “Wait; is this another ‘9/11 killed rock music’ moment?”

In addition to warning against the dangers of rhetorical slickness, I want to reiterate what I said recently: this sort of thing is what happens when writers are trained to channel their thoughts away from personal reflection and toward cultural analysis and criticism. Rodriguez might not be embarrassing himself with this pretentious twaddle if only he had the confidence to talk about his own perspective instead. “Rock used to feel dangerous and exciting to me. Now most new rock sounds derivative.” That could lead somewhere interesting. When did it stop working for you? Did the music change, or did you? Does novelty in music depend partly on being seventeen? Does acquiring a huge library of antecedents make genuinely new music harder to hear as new? How much of the pleasure of rock was inseparable from youth, friends, cars, clubs, clothes, sex, rebellion, the whole surrounding context? How much of rock’s essence owes to its roots in baby-boomer hedonism and rebellion, and can it survive being transplanted into less-libertine soil?

The “I” forces you to acknowledge contingency. “I don’t hear much interesting new rock” leaves open the possibility that interesting rock exists somewhere you aren’t listening. Once you remove the I, however, your disappointment acquires the dignity of analysis. I suspect the grand sociological explanation exists precisely to protect the writer from the less-flattering autobiographical one. “The culture changed” feels much better than “I aged out of this.” “The medium became hollow” beats “people stopped reading me.” “The scene lost its vitality” is preferable to “I don’t know where the interesting people went.” “Audiences no longer have the attention span for serious work” sounds nobler than “my work isn’t attracting an audience.” It is a perverse exchange: abandon the one subject on which you possess unique authority in order to make an authoritative pronouncement about the subject on which you possess almost none.

Joseph Epstein once quipped about ideological hacks who have traded their literary birthright for “a pot of message.” The birthright is the one thing the essayist actually owns outright: his experience, his perception, his peculiar angle of vision, the embarrassing detail, the contradiction he can’t quite resolve. Then he gives it away for some portable conclusion about Society, Technology, The Culture, The Death of Rock, The Decline of Blogging. Esau gives up something uniquely his for a bowl of stew; the essayist gives up something uniquely his for a thesis anybody could have written. What a tragedy.

How Much Do I Love You? How Hard Must We Try?

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, foolosophy, technology, writing No Comments

Derek Thompson:

In my corner of the world, which is journalism and academia and writing in general, Pangram has become nothing less than a cultural force. A meme, even. I’ve seen prominent politicians, chief executives, and public intellectuals exposed as slop-slingers. Their public humiliation sometimes fills me with righteous indignation. But it also makes my toes curl a bit, as I think about people spending all day policing the internet for slop and attempting to Pangram-shame people with a technology that can make mistakes.

Today’s interview is with Pangram founder and chief executive Max Spero. Among other things, we talk about:

  • what if AI writing takes over the internet and nobody cares?
  • how Pangram works—and how and when it makes mistakes
  • why AI writes “like that”
  • my fear that AI-writing witch hunts would be an unwelcome addition to online life
  • Pangram’s relationship with Substack
  • what if a big tech company, like OpenAI or Google, creates their own AI detector that puts Pangram out of business?

Evidently, I’m destined to be a gadfly, though with any luck not the kind that earns a glass of hemlock. I just think that most of what our commentating classes produce is empty verbiage that avoids the ostensible subject. What I find interesting here, as always, is what our choices reveal about our deeper sentiments. Fifteen years ago, when Nicholas Carr was beating the drum over how hyperlinks, search engines and the internet itself were making us dumber, I was zeroing in on an assumption he took for granted. He assumed that we truly wanted to do more difficult tasks like read challenging books, and that we were being prevented, more or less against our will, by technology. I simply noted that this was a big ol’ fat-ass begged question. Maybe all technology did was reveal our base inclinations once given multiple choices.

There was a whole hierarchy of “wanting” worth reflecting upon in Carr’s case. I want to read difficult books. I want to have read difficult books. I want to be capable of reading difficult books. I want to think of myself as somebody who reads difficult books. I want other people to regard me as somebody who reads difficult books. And, at 8:45 tonight, I want to aimlessly scroll around on the internet instead of reading one of the fifteen difficult books I have piled up on the nightstand. Those desires can all coexist, and they tend to be knotted together like last year’s strings of Christmas lights. Untangling them is hard. It’s much easier to blame an outside agent for “rewiring my brain” and preventing me from being my true self.

Now, here we are, where people are driving themselves crazy wondering who is using AI and to what extent, and they’re in agreement that this is unquestionably a bad thing. And once again, I say: isn’t it interesting that the thing we all profess to want is the thing to which none of us apparently want to devote time and energy? To me, all LLMs are doing is finally providing an equal alternative: you mean I don’t have to waste any time trying to write some LinkedIn bullshit? And it turns out that no one actually wants to devote time to writing LinkedIn bullshit!

But — crucially — we can’t bring ourselves to be honest about this, especially when it turns out that we don’t particularly want to devote time to writing posts and essays, either. We fear what it might say about us if we spend most of our lives wishing we could be elsewhere doing other things. We fear an honest accounting of our sunk costs and an honest reckoning with our regretted compromises. We fear an honest look at how much of our lives we would happily automate away if we had the option. Rather than face that squarely and decide what to do about it, we retreat to the earlier stage: proclaim that, say, writing LinkedIn posts by your own unaided effort is a good and worthwhile thing to do, and anyone who doesn’t want to do it is a bad, shameful person. It’s like a religious fanatic who catches himself thinking sinful thoughts and responds with horror and redoubled efforts at prayer and self-flagellation. Pray the AI away is a strategy, I guess, but I don’t think much of its chances.

We have spent ages assigning moral dignity to activities partly because we had to do them. AI is forcing us to discover how many things we called “meaningful work” because, until about five minutes ago, we had no practical way not to do them. As usual, sudden exposure to undiluted self-awareness sends us into a pants-pissing panic. Who are we in the absence of compulsion? How much choice is too much choice? What are my true desires, or are “desires” too ephemeral to bear the weight of a personality anyway? This sort of reflection seems much more penetrating to me than counting em dashes, which is probably why we’re talking about the latter.

Digging For Gold In My Neighborhood

By in technology, the geist of the zeit, writing No Comments

Daniel Oppenheimer:

I’m not naive about why writers write what they write. We do it for the love of the game, certainly, but most of us also need to get paid, whether the essential currency is prestige, attention, career advancement, or … currency. The blogosphere worked as it did, in the ways that I so loved, because it evolved in a way that rewarded writers and aspiring writers for doing that kind of work. When the incentive structure changed, it stopped working.

For the conversation to return, we’ll need a new structure where the right mix of incentives, disincentives, technology, UX decisions, norms, etc. are in place to make it worth our while, as writers, to write to each other in the way bloggers used to write to each other. I don’t expect it to happen, but consider this my plea to the universe (and, what the hell, the Substack Team as well) that it will.

There’s a funny little circularity to a man asking, on Substack, “Can we bring back blogging? I miss it.” Well, you’re not asking this on Blogspot, so I guess the answer is no, at least in the sense you mean it. Which raises the obvious question: why act like a hapless bystander, pleading to an indifferent universe? It looks like you’ve already got danieloppenheimer.blogspot.com set up and ready to go. All you need to do is delete the Notes account, stop relying on Substack recommendations, give up the subscriber count, publish an RSS feed, build a blogroll, and send readers away from your site constantly, accepting that many of them may never come back. Ah…

It’s almost a textbook collective-action problem. Someone wistfully says, “I’d love a decentralized blogosphere.” Then he says, “But I’d rather not give up my 18,000 subscribers.” Then he looks around and asks where the decentralized blogosphere went. All of that illustrates why things are the way they are. The early-oughts blogosphere was something of a gold rush, unsustainable by its nature. The evolving technological development of the time made visible a deposit of talent that the old distribution system had been bad at finding. Under the old arrangement, being an excellent political or cultural essayist wasn’t enough. You also had to get yourself onto the institutional map. That might mean going to the right university, moving toward the Acela corridor, knowing which magazines took pitches, cultivating editors, acquiring credentials, tolerating junior positions, and generally possessing enough career orientation to enter the pipeline. There must always have been people who could write wonderfully but who were badly matched to that process: the insurance adjuster in Nebraska, the teaching professor at a small liberal-arts college in Ohio, the lawyer who had no desire to become a journalist, the housewife with encyclopedic knowledge of some obscure subject, the obsessive amateur reading three books a week. Their talent was economically and culturally stranded.

Then Blogger and Movable Type arrived. And like a gold rush, the first people into the territory could obtain wildly disproportionate returns. If you were unusually good in 2002, there weren’t yet ten million people competing with you for attention. A link from the right person might expose your work to thousands of readers. Those readers might link it again. Within a short period, somebody who had never been through the institutional filtering machinery could acquire a readership, something that previously required an editor to bestow. And a readership was convertible into columns, magazine assignments, book proposals, speaking gigs, and a professional network. Indeed, that’s where most of the talented bloggers ended up. But for every one of them, there are probably a thousand blogs adrift on the Sargasso Sea, abandoned shortly after launch with no signs of struggle.

There’s a sentimental suggestion here that the blogosphere was wonderful because people once possessed better norms of conversation. Well, I was there, and while things were certainly more decentralized, which is generally a good thing, it isn’t hard in retrospect to see how social media was just an intensification of already-existing trends rather than a qualitatively different thing. People linked, posted constantly, picked fights, sought recognition, discovered unknown writers and answered one another partly because there were enormous potential rewards for doing so. The frantic cross-linking Oppenheimer remembers wasn’t merely a lovely communal custom. It was also prospecting behavior. There was gold in them thar hyperlinks. “Can we bring the blogosphere back?” in 2026 sounds slightly like asking “Can we bring back the California Gold Rush?” in 1900. You can move to California and pan for gold. Gold still exists. You may even find some. But you can’t recreate the historical moment when somebody discovered that an enormous previously unknown deposit was sitting there and word had only just begun to spread.

The gold-rush people came to the blogosphere hoping something might happen to them. Blogging was only a means to a professional end. The people still out here twenty years later are the ones who discovered that they rather liked living in an abandoned mining camp after everybody else left. It’s a good life, if you like wide-open spaces, little excitement, and sparse conversation with the cacti, coyotes and tumbleweeds. But if you think a bunch of urban Substackers are going to give up their careers and move back out here, well, I have a deed to a mine I’d like to sell you.

The Sign Said You Got to Have a Membership Card to Get Inside

By in identity No Comments

“I’m free from the walled gardens out here on the IndieWeb! Now let me put up a ring of signs and warnings around my garden.”

I kid, sort of. It’s just that whenever I browse these indie sites, I can’t help thinking of the old joke: “you nonconformists are all alike.” It’s like seeing a rear hatch full of bumper stickers and being glad that you never have to be trapped in a conversation with the driver.

Ripe For a Fall

By in books, history, jests japes jokes jollies No Comments

[B]ut in 470 a general impoverishment of fields and cities, of senators and proletarians, depressed the spirits of a once great race to an epicurean cynicism that doubted all gods but Priapus, a timid childlessness that shunned the responsibilities of life, and an angry cowardice that denounced every surrender and shirked every martial task. Through all this economic and biological decline ran political decay: aristocrats who could administer but could not rule; businessmen too absorbed in personal gain to save the peninsula; generals who won by bribery more than they could win by arms; and a bureaucracy ruinously expensive and irremediably corrupt. The majestic tree had rotted in its trunk, and was ripe for a fall.

— Will & Ariel Durant, The Age of Faith

A modern Westerner reading this:

But He’s So Pretty and I Don’t Mind

By in education, ohferfucksake 2 Comments

Justin Smith-Ruiu:

I suppose now is the appropriate moment to run through the expected reassurances. No, I don’t condone plagiarism or fabrication of data. And neither do I share, at all, the institutional priorities that got Arday hired in the first place. His dissertation looks like a hot mess — a simulacrum of a contribution to a slapdash field that itself, in my view, should have no place in any institution bearing the name of a university. But who gives a shit? The integrity of our institutions —obviously, unquestionably— is not worth a single human life.

I can only read the first four paragraphs, because I let my subscription to Smith-Ruiu’s Substack expire some time ago. On this evidence, I see it as money well saved.

One might argue that a concern with “the integrity of our institutions” is about honoring the best of countless previous human lives, and that squandering it on any individual, let alone a simple con artist, is — obviously, unquestionably — a stupid thing to do. And even leaving that Burkean argument aside, institutional integrity has present human beneficiaries. If a university knowingly protects fabricated scholarship because exposing it might devastate the fabricator, who pays? Honest scholars. Students. Other applicants who followed the rules. Researchers who rely on the literature. The institution’s future graduates whose credentials become marginally less trustworthy. The costs disperse, so none of them produces the emotionally overwhelming image of one dead man. But dispersed costs are still human costs.

Put one identifiable person on one side of the scale and an abstraction on the other. A human life vs. “institutional integrity.” Well, naturally the human being wins. But describe the conflict charitably and the picture changes: “One individual’s interest in avoiding the consequences of exposure vs. the interests of thousands of other people, living and dead, in maintaining a system in which fraud is investigated and standards mean something.” Now we actually have a moral problem. One might expect a professional philosopher to have an interest in such things.

Arday himself seems to possess remarkably little agency in this telling. He “only ended up” producing a fake dissertation because the university forced a storyteller into the mold of scholarship; then the exposure of that fraud had his death as its “direct result.” At each morally significant juncture, circumstances and other people act upon Arday, while the bean counters retain enough agency to bear full responsibility for their actions. The fabulous protagonist gets causes; the “little nerds” get culpability. And those “little nerds” he contrasts with the fabulous are, in large part, the people who keep the inheritance intact: checking citations, preserving records, refusing fabrication, teaching what they actually know, and doing their small part without expecting the institution to reorganize itself around their personalities.

Amusingly, Smith-Ruiu concedes that the bean counters are technically correct, but they’re evidently correct for the wrong reasons. Plagiarism, fabrication of data, DEI programs, even the fraudulent soft sciences themselves have no place in a university, according to him. So far, so conservative. But if higher education is really so debased that Arday’s dissertation was merely a simulacrum of scholarship in a field that should not exist, then why is the tragic injustice that Arday could not flourish within it? Why should this magnificent storyteller have wanted its professorships, titles, salaries, prestige, and symbolic capital? Why are we supposed to care either way that a conman came to a bad end in a den of thieves?

Let me put it this way. If Arday had been a colorless fifty-eight-year-old departmental administrator with a bad comb-over and clothing from Kohl’s who fabricated precisely the same material, I strongly suspect nobody would be writing elegies about his Promethean imagination. But he was not. He was young and photogenic, with “exquisite locks and threads and general self-display.” (George Santos’s self-invention, by contrast, looked tacky, ridiculous, and grasping. He did not receive the aesthetic subsidy of tragic grandeur. He was short, pudgy, and worst of all, a Republican. No paeans for him.)

Aside from the absurdity of seeing a philosopher pompously proclaim vacuous refrigerator-magnet slogans about “a single human life,” this is what repulses me the most: seeing one becoming so enchanted by charisma, style and transgression that the dull virtues begin to look contemptible by comparison. If all it takes to make those virtues seem petty is a handsome man in eyeliner, then perhaps the bean counters are not the people displaying the shallower moral imagination.

I Got a New Disease, I Saw It On TV

By in foolosophy, identity, psychology 2 Comments

Strong views go naked.
But if they need to be dressed up and armor-plated—what a devastating argument against the speaker’s audience!

— Paul Valéry, The Collected Works of Paul Valéry, Vol. 14

Ben Sixsmith:

But laziness is not simply a failure to accomplish things. It is also a failure to try. We can accept that X and Y might be valid obstacles in front of doing Z. The point is that we should try to do it anyway.

This isn’t always possible — at least for everyone. It would make no sense to tell someone with clinical depression, say, that they should be more active. But our state of mind can make things more difficult without making them impossible. If my femur has been broken, I can’t walk. It’s as simple as that. If I have a twisted ankle, I can walk. It might be painful and tiring. I might need a rest sometimes. But light my chair on fire and I’ll walk away from it.

I’m fairly sure that Sixsmith wouldn’t use AI to write a post. I’ve known of him since the earlier blogosphere. That’s why it’s funny to me to see this sort of rhetorical padding in his post, which is a characteristic I associate with LLMs. We’re talking about some ridiculous, boutique condition called “high-IQ ADHD” here. What does clinical depression have to do with it? Of course some conditions are truly debilitating, but we’re focusing on the majority that aren’t. Does this even need to be said?

Well, maybe. “Mental health” is a sacred cause, particularly for those who have made their diagnoses into an identity in pursuit of status. The times call for anticipatory exoneration: “Before I say this perfectly ordinary thing, please understand that I am not also saying this monstrous and stupid thing which no charitable reader would have thought I meant.” But excessive defensiveness gives hecklers editorial control. Once you start revising every sentence around the possibility that somebody might maliciously paraphrase it, the malicious reader is effectively in the room helping write the post. If you want an intelligent readership, maybe you shouldn’t write as if addressing a crowd of slow children. Send your views forth, strong and naked.

In person, most of us will generally try to be tactful and understanding, but a blog is the perfect format for such full-frontal nudity. I’m free to say what I think is obvious: “mental health awareness” has the unintended consequence of stimulating mental hypochondria; much of what sends us to the therapist is just the innate human condition and requires perspective more than medication; and most of us are indeed lazy and don’t try very hard to overcome our flaws and shortcomings, especially if we can use a diagnosis as an excuse. You’re free to think this jackass is full of shit and angrily close the tab. But later on, as you lie awake staring at the ceiling, you might allow yourself to think: Am I trying as hard as I can to overcome my shortcomings, or am I just making excuses? I can’t peer into your soul and know the answer. Only you can know that, and, given your human nature, you might be lying to yourself anyway. But I can at least put it out there for you to consider.

Celebrate Yourselves, Sing Yourselves

By in foolosophy, socmed, writing No Comments

I’ve read Jacobs for many years. I don’t think I’m revealing any sensitive information when I say that he has made clear on many occasions that he has a problem with social media. Many people, myself included, can take it or leave it. They scroll a bit, maybe comment here or there, and then go back to everyday life and forget about it. Jacobs may start by saying “Just a brief scroll; just a couple comments,” but by the end of the evening, he’s blotto and in a holding cell after starting a brawl and kicking out the window of a police cruiser.

I don’t begrudge anyone his choices about how to manage his free time. I do feel a twinge of irritation when “I hate social media” morphs into “and that’s why we should all do this instead.” I’ve also made clear many times my distaste for social media. But I was around during the early blogosphere a quarter-century ago, and all the same pathologies were represented there too, if less concentrated. His beloved “IndieWeb” will be no different. Human beings are garbage wherever you find them, which is why I’m not in any hurry to herd them in this direction or that. They’re still going to behave the same way when you get them there. And thus, to my chagrin, I’m forced to agree with Ezra Klein (another product of that early blogosphere) — let people make their own choices, however poorly. Set a better example if you want, but leave your shepherd’s crook behind.

At first, I wondered if this proselytizing instinct was just a natural outgrowth of his evangelical background. But then it occurred to me that he is also a professional writer and an academic. What is one of the first rules we learned when doing serious, formal writing? To never use the word “I.” First-person writing is usually seen as overly subjective and self-indulgent, which is why it’s left to lowly bloggers. “I keep checking Twitter and it makes me miserable” can feel embarrassingly confessional, even narcissistic. “Social media destroys tranquility and habituates us to pointless conflict” sounds like cultural criticism. It has altitude. It places the writer above the phenomenon rather than inside it. If I say, “This thing has a peculiar hold over me,” I admit weakness, susceptibility, perhaps lack of control. If I say, “This technology is engineered to addict and deform human beings,” then my struggle becomes evidence of the enemy’s power rather than evidence of my particular vulnerability.

So now I lean toward the idea that this prohibition against first-person perspectives has unwittingly caused the plague of crusading busybodies. Denied the opportunity to do what they really want — to talk about themselves — they are forced to sublimate their desires into sociology and punditry. So let me contradict myself in the spirit of Whitman and call for a collective change in focus. Let’s put the “I” back in writing and see if the performative political grandstanding doesn’t fade away.

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