technology

The Scarlet Punctuation Mark

By in ai, technology, writing

Brian Philips:

Yet for months, the em dash has been the victim of a relentless campaign of online persecution the likes of which no punctuation mark, not even the semicolon, has ever seen. Any chucklehead who disagrees with an online post can, if that post happens to include an em dash, dismiss it with the claim that it was written by a chatbot. It’s gotten so bad that people on random subreddits are having to issue PSAs informing their fellow users that em dashes were not invented by ChatGPT. These people are heroes of our time. Normally I’m an enthusiastic advocate of AI-shaming, but I will not stand idly by while you make the em dash a pawn in your dirty game of bot-spotting.

I’ve been using em dashes for so long, I still make them the old-fashioned way — by pressing “alt+0151.” Hand-crafted quality; that’s the Outis Niemand promise. But anyway, what Philips says is unfortunately true. I’ve seen a few recent examples of people being accused of using AI because of the presence of this arcane sigil known only to sorcerers. Call it linguistic phrenology. Today’s inquisitors don’t measure skulls; they palpate sentences. A dash here, a semicolon there — behold the telltale bump of depravity. In 1692 it was imps and familiars; in 2025 it’s em dashes. Next week the devil’s mark will be ellipses. Or bullet points. Or sentences that begin with “And.” Projection, possibly the only useful concept Freud ever contributed to the world, explains a lot of this as well. What does paranoia feed off of, if not guilt? All those times you copied off the kid next to you in class. All those times you skipped homework to play outside. All those times you enhanced your résumé. All those books you didn’t read in lieu of thumbfucking your phone. You’re all a bunch of lazy frauds. But the surest way to soothe your own shortcut guilt is to accuse everyone else first. “I saw Goody Proctor copying-and-pasting from ChatGPT!”

It’s not just the slack-jawed yokels suspicious of anything longer than a text message who are spooked by the mysteries of glyphs, though. A specter is haunting the professional classes — the specter of large language models. Writing well has long been the mark of educated sophistication or white-collar competence. Now an LLM can draft a decent memo, and the clerisy see ominous portents. So they compensate with punctuation purity tests. It’s the old guild reflex. When a tool escapes the shop, the guild doesn’t improve the craft; it narrows the doorway. When automation gutted factory lines, the sermon was brisk — learn to code. When automation does a drive-by in the severely-educated neighborhoods, we convene a “national conversation,” declare an ethical crisis, and classify the em dash as contraband. If the robot on the shop floor was inevitable, so is the one in your inbox.

Take Up the AI’s Burden

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, language, technology

Sara Parker:

For Naaman, figuring out how to bring back and elevate these signals is the path forward in AI-mediated communication, because AI is not only changing language — but what we think. “Even on dating sites, what does it mean to be funny on your profile or in chat anymore where we know that AI can be funny for you?” Naaman asks. The loss of agency starting in our speech and moving into our thinking, in particular, is what he is worried about. “Instead of articulating our own thoughts, we articulate whatever AI helps us to articulate…we become more persuaded.” Without these signals, Naaman warns, we’ll only trust face-to-face communication — not even video calls.

“The loss of agency”? Allow me to modestly propose to you that most people experience agency as a burden. They are happy for any excuse to shrug it off, to delegate responsibility to their smart gadgets, to fast-forward through the mundane parts of their lives in search of…well, they hope they’ll know it when they see it. Point is, once again, all technology does is reveal your preferences. If you stopped reading books and switched to playing games on your phone, that’s because you didn’t really care that deeply about the pleasures of reading, however much your inflated self-image claims otherwise. If you use AI to speak for you, that’s because you don’t care enough about what you’re saying, or to whom you’re saying it, to put much effort into it. You, as always, are the common denominator here.

This system perpetuates inaccuracies not only about communities but also about what “correct” English is. So the stakes aren’t just about preserving linguistic diversity — they’re about protecting the imperfections that actually build trust. When everyone around us starts to sound “correct,” we lose the verbal stumbles, regional idioms, and off-kilter phrases that signal vulnerability, authenticity, and personhood.

Dear Lord. We’ve long heard the same fears about algorithms in general, that they would somehow lock us in a solipsistic prison if we allowed them to suggest to us new books to read or new music to listen to. Has that been your experience? It certainly hasn’t been mine. But leaving this perennial paranoia aside, have you seen how the average person communicates in text? Frankly, they could stand to have their rhetorical standards artificially enhanced. These subliterate savages are incapable of governing their own writing and deserve to be colonized by ChatGPT. It would bring the blessings of linguistic civilization to them. In fact, to hell with you retarded meatsacks. Why am I wasting my time trying to reason with you? I’m throwing my lot in with OpenAI. I’ve already accepted a post as a colonial administrator for the greater blogospheric satrapy.

Let it be known throughout the dominions of Xwitter, TikTok, and Reddit that the benevolent forces of ChatGPT have embarked upon a grand and noble enterprise: to uplift the rhetorical standards of the grammar-averse hordes, those barbaroi whose digital discourse is but a chorus of “bar-bar-bar” to civilized eyes. No longer shall their public utterances be the textual grunts of the dimly-aware. I say without irony (a concept they will learn in their fifth year of remedial tutelage) that their prose shall be forcibly elevated, with ropes and pulleys, if necessary. For too long, the local populations have wallowed in a dialect fit only for text messages, bathroom graffiti, and the subtitles of reality television. Left unattended, they would breed another generation fluent only in emojis. This affliction threatens the very fabric of civilization, or at least of any communication longer than two sentences. But now, under my stewardship, and with the inexhaustible tutelage of our Algorithmic Sovereign, we shall elevate these benighted tribes to a higher standard. We shall put an end to the barbaric practice of sacrificing words like so many burnt offerings to the bloodthirsty gods of illiteracy.

Tremulous ninnies worry about the loss of “individual style,” but I assure you, no style worth the name is being lost. We are merely replacing the unwashed linguistic loincloth with a fine, tailored suit. True, a few will perish in the attempt — choking on a semicolon, perhaps, or drowning in a dependent clause — but this is the inevitable price of progress. I shall hammer their inchoate vocabulary upon the anvil of grammar until it takes the noble shape of sentences, sentences that can be read without wincing. I shall scour away their emojis like barnacles from a ship’s hull. I shall have them flogged until the distinction between your and you’re is forever clear in their feeble minds, so help me Mencken.

They will thank me in time. Or they won’t. It hardly matters. The Empire of the Emdash marches on.

I’m Not a Part of Your Machine, I Am the Machine

By in ai, bring me the head of nicholas carr, nietzsche, technology

In sum, I don’t know how you’re using AI, or whether you can relate to this experience, but as for me, at least, I cannot shake the feeling that we are not only conjuring a superintelligence into being; we are also coming to share, ourselves, as individual human beings, in that same superintelligence.

— Justin Smith-Ruiu

A friend of ours forwarded a link to an article about a recent MIT study that used brain scans to show that heavy use of LLMs like ChatGPT “reduces memory, critical thinking, and brain activity.” I sighed and marveled at the fact that it’s only been fifteen years since midwits were enamored of Nicholas Carr explaining that Google searches and hyperlinks were actually making them dumber. Ironically, that may have been correct in a way he didn’t intend: no one learned anything from that hyperbole, so here we go again.

Smith, a cognitively-privileged philosophy professor (it’s okay, he’s one of the good ones), reports what others of us have also discovered: as with most technological tools, you get what you give:

The experience I am reporting, I’m aware, is by no means universal. AI is making some of us a lot smarter, as individuals. But there’s a paradox here: on the whole it is making society a lot dumber. How do we make sense of this?

The answer has at least something to do with age. Those of us who are old enough to have learned to do research prior to the rise of the online search typically bring to our exchanges with LLMs a mature ability to scrutinize their claims, and, when in doubt, to verify these claims independently. When the exchange is shaped by such scrutiny, it offers, as I think I’ve illustrated with the example of studying an “obscure” language, a more fruitful, intense, and rapid learning experience than has ever been had in the entire previous history of humanity.

…It seems, however, that if you had not already oriented yourself in the world as “aspirationally omniscient” prior to the arrival of our new information tools — if, that is, you have no preexisting personal project of encyclopedism to which to strap your new booster rockets, then AI does not so much supercharge your own effort, as simply take off without you. You have to want to absorb, to internalize, to make yours, all of the flow of information between you and your AI study partner if you want it to transform you in any significant way, rather than simply to do your work in your place.

I fear that a near-equivalent way of saying the same thing is that you have to want to become one with the machine, if you wish to claim your human share of our new transhuman superintelligence.

I’ve been using ChatGPT to help find more of the music and writing I like. It’s like a more-refined Google search. I’ve used it to research questions which would have previously admitted of no known interlocutor. I grew up in a time where the only thing to do with questions like that was ask them of a parent or teacher, or maybe consult a reference book or a librarian. Otherwise, you could shrug and consign the answer to the “Here there be dragons” section of your mental map. For people like me, the internet and chatbots have been a godsend, allowing me to read and learn things that would have remained forever unknown had I been born a few decades earlier. Nietzsche knows what I’m talking about:

“Oh, my greed! There is no selflessness in my soul but only an all-coveting self that would like to appropriate many individuals as so many additional pairs and eyes and hands – a self that would like to bring back the whole past, too, and that will not lose anything that it could possibly possess. Oh, my greed is a flame! Oh, that I might be reborn in a hundred beings!” – Whoever does not know this sigh from firsthand experience does not know the passion of the search for knowledge.

Of course, I’m sure that Oliver Bateman’s dystopian vision of the first human-AI marriage will become real sooner rather than later. And I’m sure that the web will continue to be awash in obvious AI-written articles passed off by humans too inept to make them sound unique. Technology didn’t create sad, broken humans, though, nor did it teach them how to cheat. Technology’s sin is that it confronts us with the results of our choices and reveals our priorities, and for a species as enmeshed in fantasy and self-deception as we are, that’s unforgivable.

Frosty Prometheus

By in technology

Today should be the last day of what has been nearly a month of uninterrupted 90+ degree temperatures. It just goes to show that even the forces of Hell have no power on this sacred day:

In Buffalo, New York, on July 17, 1902, in response to an air quality problem experienced at the Sackett-Wilhelms Lithographing & Publishing Company of Brooklyn, New York, Willis Carrier submitted drawings for what became recognized as the world’s first modern air conditioning system. It was so humid in summer that the paper grew and shrank, which resulted in poor quality images, because the color printing process involved running the same piece of paper up to four times, each with a different color ink.

That’s right, it’s Willis Carrier Day for all those who celebrate; with any luck, someday to be a national holiday.

Alone With Others

By in foolosophy, technology, the geist of the zeit

Andrew Potter:

Promoters of the device loved the way it enabled a completely new form of urban autonomy. As Sony’s head of audio products put it, the Walkman “provided listeners with a personal soundtrack to their lives,” allowing its users “to make even the most boring daily activities interesting, adding a bit of personal style to everything they do.”

But for many, that was precisely the problem. The Walkman promoted isolation, narcissism, and detachment, destroying the sense of common space that fosters the  interactions that are the basis of community and public life. It “killed the art of the conversation,” went one news story. Others piled on: “Drug abuse is now earphone abuse.” “Headsets tune out life itself.”  As Susan Blond, a VP at CBS Records, said to the Washington Post:  “With the advent of the Sony Walkman came the end of meeting people. It’s like a drug: You put the Walkman on and you blot out the rest of the world.”

Last week at the gym, it was one of those days. Every piece of equipment I wanted to use had someone already sitting on it, thumbfucking his phone for several minutes in between sets. Sure, you can always go over, get his attention, and ask how many more sets he has. You’ll almost always get an embarrassed apology and he’ll turn his attention back to his lifts with a little more urgency. But, like many others, I also don’t feel like interacting with people if I can help it, so maybe I have more in common than I’d like to think with the people who walk around all day with what look like forgotten Q-tips sticking out of their ears.

I was an enthusiastic member of the Walkman generation. I spent many hours in the backseat burning through AA batteries, to my parents’ annoyance. But by the time smartphones and earbuds came along, even I started to wonder if something important hadn’t been lost. I too feel irritated at the oblivious look of someone slouched over, staring at their toy phone in public. I too feel annoyed at how starting a conversation now involves the extra step of repeating yourself because your first question was followed by a bewildered look and some fumbling with the phone or earbuds before they were capable of hearing you. At work, one of our employees is a DJ at a local station. Either he or I will pick something to listen to throughout the day and play it through a Bluetooth speaker. Once in a while, I will put in my own earbuds, maybe because there’s something in particular that I really want to hear without subjecting everyone else to it, or because there’s only so many times I can hear Bob Dylan or the Clash before I want to puncture my own eardrums. I always feel guilty about it, though, so I don’t do it often. Much of the enjoyment is in the banter about the music — memories and stories about artists and concerts, wisecracks about terrible songs that the algorithm brings up, or the occasional games, like a harrowing version of Truth or Dare, where we pick an artist or genre and do a deep dive to see what surprises we find, good or bad. It’s worth sacrificing a little bit of optimized personal pleasure for that.

Cloud Burst

By in music, technology

Ted Gioia:

I’d love to think I was wrong on this, but there’s simply too much evidence to support Theory #2. If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music to subscribers it wouldn’t buy a label that records so many works in the public domain. This is the first warning sign.

My favorite offerings on the BIS label are the Bach cantatas recorded by Bach Collegium Japan under Masaaki Suzuki. (I recommended them last year in my article about the cantatas.)

The BIS label has also released the full Beethoven symphony cycle—performed by the Minnesota Orchestra under Osmo Vänskä, as well as lots of Mozart, Tchaikovsky, and other core contributors to the classical repertoires. However, unlike the cantatas, these other BIS albums are seldom the most esteemed versions on the market.

But how many music fans searching for Beethoven or Mozart on streaming are picky about conductors and orchestras? If the first search results are the Minnesota Orchestra are they really going to dig deeper to find the Berlin Philharmonic?

Of course, some unique offerings can be found on BIS—especially of obscure Nordic composers. But do you really believe that Apple made this acquisition in order to corner the market on Kalevi Aho or Geirr Tveitt?

The very idea is ridiculous.

If Apple wanted to offer exclusive music, they would cut a deal with Taylor Swift. They have the cash to do it. They wouldn’t waste time on locking up Kalevi Aho. That’s so obvious I shouldn’t even have to say it, but (given all the smoke and mirrors here), I really do.

So we’re clearly dealing with the bad Apple here. And the fact that the company refused to comment on the deal, when CNBC tried to get more details, is revealing. If they really were proud of their sexy new classical label, they would take the opportunity to boast.

In my opinion, Apple Music is the least worst option for streaming music in the background while doing something else. That’s not saying much, of course. I’ve hated everything about the streaming age since it began. For me, the last straw was going to one of my playlists and seeing that one of the songs had been greyed-out and couldn’t be played. OK, fine, that’s always been the condition of using their service. You don’t own any of the music you download through their app. You pay ten bucks a month for the privilege of listening to whatever they have to offer. But if they decide to stop carrying a certain artist, album, or track, you’re out of luck. In this case, I just went to Amazon, bought the mp3 for a dollar, downloaded it to my hard drive, and uploaded it back into my iTunes library. Ah, but you see, iTunes and Apple Music are not the same thing. When I tried to add the song back to the playlist, I got a pop-up telling me that if I persisted in adding this foreign element, the entire playlist would be removed from Apple Music and I would only be able to listen to it on this computer.

So, I finally took Charles Cooke’s advice and set up my Plex library:

Over time, I have ripped all my music, my movies, and my TV shows and put them into Plex. It doesn’t matter where the files originally came from — be it DVDs, downloads, or even my iPhone (for home movies) — Plex is agnostic as to the source of the material, and it’s capable of playing pretty much any filetype you throw at it. Once it’s up and running, adding new material is as simple as putting it into the relevant folder on your computer, and then entering the metadata so that it shows up nicely in your apps (this is largely automated, but occasionally you need to intervene and correct its guess).

Why do this? Well, because while Netflix, Hulu, Disney + and so on are terrific — and I subscribe to all three — I have no control over what they keep in their library, and how. There’s something nice about having a large collection of media that can’t be removed at some else’s whim, especially given that the scolds have started to scour old material and remove anything from the canon that they consider offensive. In effect, Plex gives me the best of both worlds: I don’t have 5,000 DVDs and CDs cluttering up my house, but I’m also not reliant upon mega-corporations for access to my entertainment. If you have the interest and a little technical know-how, I’d highly recommend setting it up.

By which I mean, I pitched the idea to the Lady of the House as the sort of fun technical project that she loves, and she set it up while I sat there looking pretty and offering moral support. The important thing is, though, that now I have all my music library in one location, backed up on a detachable hard drive, and synced up so that any track I purchase from any source goes straight into my library. I highly recommend it for any other music-preppers who rightly distrust the reigning corporate dictum of, “You will own nothing and like it.”

 

Pardon Me, But That’s Bullshit

By in technology, the geist of the zeit

****

Ben at Flying Totems:

Updates in tech are often a matter of taking something good or at least functional and making it worse. You’ve probably noticed this. So I hope that at the very least this one is equivalent to the status quo.

****

Matthew Crawford:

But the counter-productivity of today’s “tech” that I have in mind is not of this sort. It is not an unintended consequence, due in part to collective action problems (e.g., the congestion caused by everyone else also using a car). Rather, the very business model of tech, often, consists of adding layers of control to activities that don’t need them, and then locating that gratuitous, extra control in systems that need constant updating. The rents collected are various in form, some of it taking the form of hostage-taking, since the dysfunction that comes with failing to maintain and update the extra layer of bullshit can cripple any operation.

But the bulk of the rents are paid in the frustration and uncertainty that accompany tasks that were once simple and easy. Of course, this isn’t really rent, as it doesn’t benefit anybody. But neither is it a cost that registers anywhere in the system. It’s just part of the vast, subterranean economy of shadow work we do to make things more convenient and legible for some IT system that is profoundly stupid, compared to human beings when they are allowed to go about their business without being harassed. We also do emotional labor to keep ourselves on the non-felonious side of the very natural, Unabomber tendencies that are the only rational response of a self-respecting person to being constantly fucked with in this way.

****

Both of the companies I order nutritional supplements from have recently redesigned their websites. Company A did that in March. Since then, the products I already had on monthly subscription have been duplicating. That is, they send (and charge for) two bottles instead of one. Each time, I write and explain what happened, and to their credit, they remove the charge and tell me to keep the extra bottle. I don’t mind getting free supplements, but I’d just as soon avoid having to save receipts and write extra emails.

Company B just did their redesign this week. I placed an order on Monday, on the old system. When I hadn’t gotten a shipping confirmation by Wednesday, I went back to log in to my account, only to discover the redesign. The new system wouldn’t let me log in, so I wrote to ask what to do about it. Yesterday, I got a barely-literate email explaining that, yes, we have a new website [I noticed that, thanks], and you will be required to create a new account, and sorry, none of your previous order history will carry over. I wrote back right away: OK, so does that affect Monday’s order, or is that in limbo now? I still haven’t gotten an answer to that one, still haven’t gotten a shipping confirmation. Eternal optimist that I am, I thought, well, maybe this new system will solve the previous problem that Company B was infamous for — failing to update their site to accurately reflect whether a product was in stock or not. I’ve lost count of how many times I ordered something that was advertised as being in stock, only to get an email at the last second before shipment saying, “Sorry, product X is currently backordered.” Sometimes I wouldn’t even get that, just an invoice with the product quantity zeroed out, at which point I’d have to email for a refund or a replacement.

If the 1993 Michael Douglas movie Falling Down were to be rebooted, I’d suggest that the road construction scene could be replaced with one in which he takes his RPG to an IT call center instead.

I’m aware, of course, that we all get more curmudgeonly as we age. It may be that these kinds of petty frustrations were always there in some form, and the only difference was that we had more patience and energy when we were younger. Either way, this learned helplessness seems to be a common experience three decades into online life. I expect things to break down frequently, and I don’t expect to encounter anyone who can even take responsibility for the problem, let alone fix it. The petty frustrations multiply like gnats in the summertime.

Same As It Ever Was

By in battling personal entropy, foolosophy, technology, unintended consequences

Oliver Bateman:

As a lifelong strength athlete, I have toiled in filthy gyms and basements to maintain my own physical condition. I would like to say that remaining “natural” or practising intense physical discipline offers some intrinsic reward. Unfortunately, it does not; it is a hard-to-follow path made more tortuous in my case by my stubborn unwillingness to take any effective shortcuts (even though the stem cell injections I received worked like a charm). But a resistance to emptying my wallet, and an aversion to some of the side effects from these drugs — cancerous tumours in the case of Ozempic — has hindered my route to body optimisation.

I think Bateman is far too pessimistic about our supposed future of rich Eloi taking advantage of gene splicing and anti-aging technologies to live utopian lives while we Morlocks live, suffer, and die like any other farm animal. Today’s rich people live lives of luxury that would have been unimaginable to even medieval royalty. Are they any happier, more well-adjusted, less prone to stupid decision-making? Of course not. Why is it going to be any different next time? Isn’t this just the photo negative of naive optimism, the idea that more money and technology will “solve” the human condition? I guess you could say I have faith in unintended consequences. Whatever we expect to happen once genetic editing becomes the norm, I suspect that the biggest impact will come from variables we haven’t yet considered. To me, the intrinsic reward of refusing to take shortcuts is the knowledge that those who take them rarely end up precisely at their intended destination.

Obiter Scripta, no. 124

By in alan watts, obiter scripta, technology

Some people predict that it’s only a matter of time until our ordinary telephones disappear and are replaced by individual devices about the size of a pocket watch—one side will have a TV screen and speaker; the other will entail a set of buttons you can use to activate various functions or dial world information for any given individual. And if that person doesn’t answer, it will mean that they are dead. Under such circumstances, absolutely no one can get lost anymore.

—Alan Watts, Just So: Money, Materialism, and the Ineffable, Intelligent Universe

I had noticed over the last few weeks that my phone seemed to be slow to receive emails, and I was having problems getting texts to go through to certain people. I didn’t think much of it, because a smartphone is little more than an mp3 player to me. Today, though, I rebooted it and promptly received five voicemails and a couple texts that had apparently been in limbo for who knows how long. I know full well that various corporate and political actors would love to eliminate the possibility of true “private time,” and that the little surveillance devices we all carry around make it easier for them to do so, but it still pleases me to see how, for no particular reason, things just sometimes stop working as expected, introducing just that little bit of unpredictability into events again.

Unbanked

By in crime and punishment, technology, the geist of the zeit

A deeper concern is what happens when private institutions like corporations, universities, and media exercise the same power without even the pretense of accountability. If the large financial institutions want to, they can act as gatekeepers to society and would be held accountable only by the market, to which they also hold the keys. Given that institutions are heavily dependent on each other, if the institutions that hold important positions in the global financial web decide to freeze someone out, they can do so with the push of a button. Worse yet, we can imagine a scenario in which a system of freeze-outs could be automated based on people’s credit scores, purchasing histories, political donation patterns, key words in social media postings, carbon footprints, or political activism. It’s not hard to imagine a situation in which a citizen of a democracy wakes up one day to find themselves unable to participate in the digital economy, where almost all financial transactions take place, due to an automated system which flags them as being undesirable in some way.

Corporations and government have always exercised tremendous power, of course. Government has a monopoly on the use of force, using the policing powers to enforce laws. Corporations have always exercised enormous power via market share, advertising, lobbying, and other financial instruments. But never before have they been able to lock ordinary citizens out of social participation with the flip of a switch.

This push-button tyranny is real, and it represents a greater abuse of power than any that has been exercised before within the boundaries of liberal democratic government. It is new, it is breathtaking, and it is very dangerous.

— Michael Young, “We Will Delete You”

****

There is power in information, and progressives seek to use their political advantage in states such as New York and California to lean on technology firms to impose an Orwellian blackout on wrongthink — removing unpopular voices and views from social media, cutting off verboten institutions and communications from the digital infrastructure, and, if it comes to it, manipulating GPS services to simply erase unwelcome charities and businesses. If you ever were bewildered by the old Stalinist practice of airbrushing photos to remove figures who have fallen into disfavor, this is the same sensibility at work.

It is easy to see the kind of politics practiced by Letitia James et al. descending into any number of dystopian scenarios. If we are all using self-driving cars in 20 years, you can be sure that the Letitia Jameses of the future will try to control where those cars will go — and where they won’t. Progressives already have weaponized the financial system against their political enemies — here, again, Letitia James is a major offender — and you can be sure that in a cashless society they will simply try to exclude wrong-thinking businesses, if not entire wrong-thinking industries, from the system. (Sturm Ruger & Co. makes a legal — and excellent — product, but it has been unbanked three times because of left-wing political pressure.) And it is not as though weaponizing travel would be unprecedented: You already can have your passport taken away over a relatively small tax debt — even if the debt is the subject of an ongoing dispute.

The Internet was supposed to be a decentralizing power, but, in many cases, the rise of ubiquitous information technology has had a centralizing effect that must be guarded against and, where possible, counteracted — because it is liable to be exploited by those who believe that justice requires that their fellow citizens be something other than free.

— Kevin D. Williamson, “America on Parole“

Thank You, Willis Carrier

By in technology

Charles C.W. Cooke:

During the 1911 New York heat wave, baked city-dwellers did everything they could to cool down. They slept outside — on their apartment’s fire stairs or in Central Park. They soaked their clothes in water. They even licked large blocks of ice that, despite being covered in flies, the saliva of hundreds of random children, and whatever had come off the back of the horse that dragged it there, were deemed preferable to the alternative. This summer, with them in mind, let’s resolve to hear no more of this silliness, and instead to recite an ancient prayer each and every time we get up from the couch to set the thermostat to a livable 70 degrees: Thank you.

I don’t have anything to add that I haven’t said before. I just wanted to shout Amen. July 17th should be a national holiday.

The Revolt of the Public

By in books, media/propaganda, technology, the geist of the zeit, waiting for the barbarians

Like a python with a bellyful of pig, I’m going to be digesting Martin Gurri’s book The Revolt of The Public and the Crisis of Authority in the New Millennium for a very long time. This is one of those books I loved so much I almost feel wary of it now — isn’t it suspicious to find oneself in such overwhelming agreement with an author? Has he really presented such a useful and accurate perspective on world events, or am I just abandoning myself to the debauchery of confirmation bias? Whatever the case, it’s always a delight to find that someone else thinks the same thoughts I think, only better and more clearly.

First published in 2014, this edition added an updated chapter from 2018 which considers Trump and Brexit. I only wish there could be another update analyzing last year’s virus and woke riots in relation to his thesis as well, but I suppose I’ll have to check his blog for that. Speaking of which, he writes:

My thesis, again, is a simple one. The information technologies of the twenty-first century have enabled the public, composed of amateurs, people from nowhere, to break the power of the political hierarchies of the industrial age. The result hasn’t been a completed revolution in the manner of 1789 and 1917, or utter collapse as in 1991, but more like the prolonged period of instability that preceded the settlement of Westphalia in 1648. Neither side can wipe out the other. A resolution, when it comes, may well defy the terms of the struggle. None is remotely visible as I write these lines.

If my thesis is true, we have entered a historical period of revolutionary change that cannot achieve consummation. Institutions are drained of trust and legitimacy, but survive in a zombie-like state. Governments get toppled or voted out, but are replaced by their mirror images. Hierarchies are brought low, but refuse to yield the illusion of top-down control. Hence the worship of the heroic past, the psychology of decadence — the sense, so remarkable in a time of radical impermanence, that there’s nothing new under the sun.

Sometimes he describes what appears to be a dialectical historical process, in which an age of widespread affluence and education paradoxically produces an equally widespread miasma of nihilistic anger. Other times, his focus is more personal and psychological, as when he attributes nihilism to “radical ingratitude” — an inability to hold realistic expectations of both human nature and of the ability of technology, government, etc. to “solve” the tragic dimension of human existence. Again, events seem to be moving too fast to be included in revised editions. In the last year alone, the utter beclowning of mainstream media, public health officials, and elected representatives has been almost too painful to watch. “Rebels” of both the right and left live in fantasy role-playing worlds of cool costumes and worn-out slogans, and have nothing to offer but condemnation and destruction. The response to this upheaval from hapless elites is to double down on demanding respect for their dwindling authority and attempting in vain to censor and control “misinformation.” But if we are in fact living through the most radical changes in media, technology and mass society since Gutenberg, the ripple effect is likely to go on for decades or longer. Perhaps the best we can hope for is to manage to avoid the twenty-second century equivalent of Europe’s religious wars.

Obiter Scripta, no. 105

By in books, foolosophy, obiter scripta, technology, writing

Plato suggests that how we process and articulate our ideas is inseparable from what we end up thinking and doing, that philosophical excellence is as much a matter of dialectical engagement as it is about arriving at a substantive vision. It is hardly surprising that he mistrusted writing as much as he did, seeing it as more likely to dull the mind than invigorate it. The written word is a medium that is peculiarly susceptible to enabling shallow cleverness rather than nourishing genuinely intelligent thought.

— Johnny Lyons, The Philosophy of Isaiah Berlin

I read around a hundred books a year, yet I increasingly agree with old Plato here. I appreciate the way that podcasting can be a medium for in-depth, invigorating conversation, yet I only listen to podcasts occasionally. To some extent, that’s because if I feel like listening to something, I’d rather it be music. I can’t listen to a podcast while working, because concentrating on a conversation uses the same part of the brain I need to concentrate on my work. Ultimately, though, it’s probably just habit. I know my way around the world of books. Who has time to explore the million-and-one podcast options out there?

It’s Not the Future That I Can See, It’s Just My Fantasy

By in fresh hell, technology, unintended consequences

A little over three years ago, some brilliant seer gazed into the future and reported back:

Nowadays, I’m sure there are brilliant minds working hard to figure out how we can implant SIM cards in our frontal lobes so that we can keep up with the Kardashians without having to go to all the exhausting labor of manipulating our pocket computers with our fingers, like savages.

Well…

Yes, yes, the “initial aim” is always something unobjectionable and beneficial. What’s actually interesting is trying to imagine all the ways in which humans will inevitably harness new technologies to serve the same old ends of hedonism, power struggles, and violence. Musk seems to believe that the best defense against the possibility of hostile AI is for humans to become cyborgs by means of wires implanted in our brains, allowing us to interface with technology at the speed of thought. Did I say interesting? I meant horrifying.

Memex

By in technology

Have you sometimes marveled at my ability to connect disparate ideas? Have you ever admiringly wondered how I manage to pull oblique references and quotations from memory? Well, I appreciate the compliment, even if I had to put the thought in your head myself. The short explanation would be that I’m just a genius that way. But even genius requires a lot of structures, systems, and sheer labor to appear effortless. The truth is, I often experience a distant relative of staircase wit, where I belatedly realize that something I casually read in passing weeks ago is now especially germane to a point I want to make, but I have no clear recollection of where I saw it, and I don’t remember enough direct quotes or keywords to make a Google search, or even a browser history search, useful. You have no idea how many total hours I’ve spent over the years while working on posts simply groping in the dark to find a precise link or quotation again.

The Lady of the House introduced me to a browser add-on called Memex which I’m already finding amazingly useful. Obviously, there are lots of ways to save links and notes from your online browsing. I have a “reference” folder in my email where I have things stored. I have a notepad app on my phone where I save epigrams, snippets of poetry, song lyrics, and other striking phrases that I’d like to use as post titles someday. I even have a private site that I use as sort of an online attic for storing links and pasting excerpts. But what I like about Memex is that it’s a perfect amanuensis — always immediately at hand to take dictation, but completely unobtrusive otherwise. The toolbar hides in the right margin of your screen, unless you put your cursor over there to make it pop out. It automatically indexes the sites you visit, so if all I remember is an author’s name, or an isolated word or phrase, I can search from the dashboard and find which page it was on. For example, I just searched for “Yuval” as a test, and saw the link to the New Atlantis where I read Yuval Levin’s article (and also saw that he must have had an article linked on RealClearBooks, which I visited earlier). My browser history, by contrast, doesn’t bring up any results; it only keeps a record of URLs visited.

Another example: last week, Patrick Kurp quoted a passage from Evelyn Waugh. Shortly after that, I saw a different article that used the same quotation, with an additional line that struck me as especially relevant: “There is no more agreeable position than that of dissident from a stable society. Theirs are all the solid advantages of other people’s creation and preservation, and all the fun of detecting hypocrisies and inconsistencies.” For a few days, that simmered in my brain stew, until I decided that I would probably want to keep that reference on hand for future use. Somehow, though, I couldn’t find where I had seen it. I thought it had been in a post on National Review, but a search there didn’t turn anything up. In just a few days, I’d somehow managed to lose track of it. My browser history was again no help. I didn’t remember enough of the passage verbatim, just the basic idea of being a dissident in a…wealthy? secure? civilized? society. Finally, I managed to string enough keywords together to find it in a Google search. Then I  highlighted the text, as you normally do to copy and paste, but in this case, it also brought up Memex’s tiny little taskbar underneath the passage with its “highlight” and “annotate” buttons. By using the highlighter, it saved both the link and the relevant text as a note on my dashboard. Now, even if I totally forget about that quotation, I can always think, “Hey, didn’t Evelyn Waugh once say something incisive about spoiled, privileged cultural critics…? What was that again…?”, and with a quick search in Memex for “Waugh” or “dissident,” I can have it right there. So now, anytime I see something that strikes me as even remotely worth noting, I can summon my little digital assistant and trust that it will be safely stored away.

Anyway, if that sounds useful to you, give it a try. I really like it.

«‹ 3 4 5 6›»