Links/Sprouts February 19 - March 26, 2023
It’s spring here now and the valley is mostly free of snow. It’s shoulder season and the hills are still icy and the trails muddy. I can wear a light jacket during the day and this morning I pulled out all my winter gear to put into storage. The bear spray is in my backpack again. I’m excited about summer.
I’m still finding my writing groove and trying to remember to pay myself first by working on major goals first thing instead of using my most productive hours to answer emails. It’s hard when you’re responsible for keeping other people’s work going because I can’t just ignore these things, but I’m convinced I can find a better way to balance maintenance with doing new things.
I still want to use this space to sharing very early experiments with some ideas I’ve been thinking about in my work. I need to make more time for that and also become more comfortable with sharing things that are barely coherent. For the moment I like putting together these link roundups. They force me to go through my notes and consider what I’ve been reading and if I still find it meaningful.
Looking at this a final time, I think it’s interesting how artificial the distinction between information/nature/politics is starting to feel to me.
Information
This Changes Everything - Ezra Klein
It’s becoming harder for me to believe that what we are witnessing with AI isn’t going to be the 3rd major disruption of my adult life (9/11, 2008). A few months ago it was easy for me to believe that the limitations of these systems meant they were interesting but not fundamentally disruptive. I am less sure of that now, even as I do believe they are not intelligent in the way a person or a animal is intelligent.
Since moving to the Bay Area in 2018, I have tried to spend time regularly with the people working on A.I. I don’t know that I can convey just how weird that culture is. And I don’t mean that dismissively; I mean it descriptively. It is a community that is living with an altered sense of time and consequence. They are creating a power that they do not understand at a pace they often cannot believe.
I love the strangely hopeful idea that in trying to create Artificial Intelligence we are finally going to come to recognize the intelligence of the non-human life that surrounds us (also in this podcast: the link between building networks and coming to see networks in nature).
Then we’re going to put all of our work into this. We’re going to put all of the billions of dollars and we’re going to put all of this press and we’re going to put all this tech and science into making this thing real, because we want it to exist so much. The end result is that we are going to notice that non-human intelligence exists. That’s from here is the thing that happens at the end of that, is that we lose some kind of grip on our solipsism as being the only intelligent things around. There’s so much strangeness in that desire, because it’s somewhat self obliterating. The fact that we want it so much tells me that we yearn towards not being this incredibly remote, special thing. We understand that there’s something wrong with that belief and that it doesn’t match reality. That’s why something like AI has to exist, because there’s something so at odds with our being in the world that we could be, so singular and strange.
Dots Will Be Connected by L. M. Sacasas
Growing up during the birth of the Internet this feels very right to me. We no longer live in the age of narratives; we live in the age of the database.
Narrative is our primordial tool for sense-making, but in digital information environments narratives are framed by a more immediate experience of the Database. I’m using the term Database loosely to capture how, especially when an event is unfolding, we confront a cacophony of data points (videos, statements, claims, images, etc.) before we encounter anything like a compelling narrative of the event from a source with broad cultural authority.
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We are all conspiracy theorists now: When we have a superabundance of information and/consequently a failure of trusted institutions, any effort to make sense of a situation, to connect the dots, will seem to others making a different run through the Database (and perhaps even feel to us) not unlike conspiracy theorizing. The materials are there in the Database, which is to say the massive digital archives we all dip into constantly. The urge to make sense of things is more or less a given.
My Class Required AI. Here’s What I’ve Learned So Far by Ethan Mollick
If you are interested in how to use AI effectively, this post gives some tips for experimenting with different types of prompts. I find this sort of thing interesting and also wonder how quickly it will become irrelevant as these systems progress faster than we can try to adapt to them.
By far the best approach, which led to both the best essays and the most impressed students, happened when people took the co-editing approach.
I hate that I’m suddenly the age where I’m being sold nostalgia almost as much as I hate how susceptible I am to it. Specifically the show Yellowjackets, the Woodstock 99 documentary, and the podcast 60 Songs that Explain the 90s. And yet this feels right to me…
There was an immediacy to experience back then. I know what you’re thinking: that’s just because you were young. But honestly, there was something different, an intentionality and a lack of a certain sort of self-consciousness. Of course people were still anxious and shy and overthought everything. But there wasn’t yet this second mind thing going on, this sense of another consciousness that’s welded to your own consciousness and has its own say all the time. Your own mind might have been mixed up and gripped by worry but it was still one linear mind. Nowadays people have both their own anxious and worried mind and another mind that worries about how they’re anxious and worried and whether they should be. This is the part of the mind that’s concerned, bizarrely, with how the mind might appear to others, despite the fact that the mind cannot be observed by anyone but the self. And that’s a creation of the internet. I think you can best understand what I mean if you consider the difference between 90s politically correct culture and today’s social justice culture; in many ways, the concerns and vocabulary are the same, but the latter entails a type of mental self-surveillance that’s new. It’s how you think eating what you think.
Nature
On slime molds - Creatures That Don’t Conform by Barry Webb
I am now a slime mold fanboy. This was probably inevitable.
Myxomycetes have two main life stages but four in total. First, they exist as amoebae and dwell in high numbers in soil. Then they become a free-moving, hunting, foraging, predating, exploring organism in the plasmodial stage. We know more about this stage because scientists and artists have been able to observe the behavior in laboratory settings, showing that plasmodium can solve various complex problems, such as finding an optimal way home through mazes, or, famously, mapping the car and rail networks of Tokyo more efficiently than humans are able to
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As our systems fail and break down, what will map our exodus? Slime molds invite us to look with wonder at what is small and overlooked. Perhaps they can help dismantle our delusions of human exceptionalism—with their absurd hidden ethereal beauty. They can dissolve the boundaries we pretend exist—with their remarkable metamorphoses. They can challenge our stagnant cultural notions—with their existence as both collective and individual. They can humble us—with their complexity which is beyond our understanding. We think we have mastered the natural world, yet we don’t know how a slime without an apparent brain can conduct itself intelligently. We think we can bend the Earth to our will, but we know barely anything about microorganisms. We think we are in charge, yet we know next to nothing about the slime around us that reigned on Earth for a billion or more years.
Listening to the Creatures of the World by Karen Bakker
On planetary computation. This article starts out on a fairly depressing note, before exploring ways that networks are being used to better understand and protect nature:
Planetary computation and planetary governance are thus not merely extensions of the old engineering mantra of “command and control.” Instead, they offer us a new paradigm: “communicate and cooperate,” which extends a form of voice to nonhumans, who become active subjects co-participating in environmental regulation, rather than passive objects. The environmental becomes inescapably political, but the political is not solely human. Digital Earth technologies offer the possibility of creating what Bruno Latour once called the “Parliament of Things”: a digitally-enabled Parliament of Earthlings.
On Caterpillars - The Little-Known World of Caterpillars
Caterpillars, for their part, are continually reinventing themselves. They emerge from tiny, jewel-like eggs and for their first meal often eat their own egg cases. Once they reach a certain size, they sprout a second head, just behind the first. They then wriggle free of their old skin, the way a diver might wriggle out of a wetsuit. (In the process, the old head drops off.) In the course of their development, they will complete this exercise three, four, in some species sixteen times, often trying out a new look along the way. The spicebush swallowtail, for example, which is found throughout the eastern U.S., emerges from its egg mottled in black and white. This color scheme allows it to pass itself off as a bird dropping. After its third molt, as a so-called fourth instar, it turns green (or brown), with two yellow-and-black spots on its head. The spots, which look uncannily like a pair of eyes, enable the swallowtail to pretend it’s a snake.
Politics
If You Read the G.O.P.’s Anti-Trans Policies, You’ll See What It Really Wants - The Ezra Klein Show
A good podcast on the goals of anti-Trans policies in the United States. If you or someone you love doubts the importance of standing up against these policies, or thinks they are somehow just identity-politics rhetorical battles with no consequences, please give this a listen. We are watching the a full scale attach against our trans family and friends, and the creation of a framework that will be used against many of groups in the coming years.
| [“There’s a Lot More That Needs to Be Done” | an Interview With Barbara Smith](https://www.thedriftmag.com/theres-a-lot-more-that-needs-to-be-done/) |
On identity politics:
It’s very distorted. There are people on the left who also really don’t like the concept of identity politics, and that’s much more disheartening. I’m known for using diplomatic words — it’s actually much more infuriating and dangerous that people on the left also make a case against identity politics. They didn’t go to the source and they didn’t think about what we meant. We saw identity politics as a way of connecting with other struggles, not of becoming so self-involved and internal that we didn’t relate to anyone else. We believe in coalitions, and we believe in multi-issue struggle. We certainly didn’t mean that the only people worth dealing with were people identical to ourselves, or at least similar to ourselves. The left hasn’t done its homework. It’s almost like they take the right-wing definition of it and believe that’s true.
Living
If You Were Rich, Would You Fold Laundry? by Rae Katz
You might respond that paying other people to do all of the maintenance tasks would allow free time for all the things the I want to do, my hobbies and passions, my creative pursuits. But my experience with extravagant amounts of undirected free time is that it’s pretty stressful. One can easily feel adrift and useless. Just a guess, but it seems to me that it’s a rare person who can enjoy many weeks of time with nothing particular they need to do, and not fall into some version of depression or numbing (television, drugs).