Weekly Reviews 3 and 4 - April 17 - 30, 2023
“I think the meaning of life is to let your heart be broken.” Stephen Levine quoted here
Recently I’ve been thinking a lot about the purpose of post-secondary education and about who and what gets valued. I’ve also been thinking about the way power sometimes operates in environments where decisions are at least theoretically meant to be shared and transparent and ostensibly everyone believes in dialogue, ideas, and critical thinking. Given this, I’m always surprised when power is willing to simply lie, knowing most people know they are lying, and rely on power alone to get away with it.
This will all sound vary naive, and it is naive. I don’t call power on these rhetorical moves. I have my own things to protect. But it breaks my heart a little, and when I stumbled upon this quote from poet Stephen Levine I realized that it’s important that it breaks my heart, and continues to break my heart. When it stops it will be time to take a job in tech.
Books
The best thing I’ve read recently is “A Psalm for the Wild-Built” by Becky Chambers, the story of a tea monk who meets a robot and heir walk together up a mountain:
“Insects!” Mosscap cried. Its voice was jubilant, as if it had spent every second prior waiting for Dex to broach the topic. “Oh, I love them so much. And arachnids, too. All invertebrates, really. Although I do also love mammals. And birds. Amphibians are also very good, as are fungi and mold and—” It paused, catching itself. “You see, this is my problem. Most of my kind have a focus—not as sharply focused as Two Foxes or Black Marbled Rockfrog, necessarily, but they have an area of expertise, at least. Whereas I … I like everything. Everything is interesting. I know about a lot of things, but only a little in each regard.” Mosscap’s posture changed at this. They hunched a bit, lowered their gaze. “It’s not a very studious way to be.”
Links / Fragments
When the World Feels Wrong - Jessica Joy Kerr
“Is it enough? There is no “enough” in systems so much bigger than us. It is only something. My focus and brainpower goes into my job, so I can support my family. This is my dharma, my calling for me-in-this-situation. Fortunately my work affords working on systems at large (industry) and small (team) scales, giving me certain opportunities to make someone’s day better, plus hope that someday I’ll boost some people who can do more. The world is wrong, and I can still work. “
You Have a New Memory - MERRITT TIERCE - Slate
“Barely more than a decade later, the internet is not the tool. I am the tool. Somehow, I have been instrumentalized by the internet, which operates me through my phone. It often feels like the internet is reading my mind.”
All the Nerds Are Dead - Sam Kriss
“That was the theory, at least. In fact, the hipsters were generally very bad at their job. Most of the stuff they liked was awful. They flourished in a brief gap: after we started producing impossible volumes of information, but before we had the technological means of efficiently processing it. In the 2000s, the best tool available was keyword search, the utility of which drops in line with the size of the data set. We still needed people to like things manually. But in the 2010s, we developed algorithmic processes capable of efficiently discerning patterns in the ungodly excess of human cultural production and sorting it appropriately. The hipsters were no longer required. So we shot them all and burned their bodies on a hill. Today, the hipster era survives only as an aesthetic : flash photography, guitar music, tits out. The particular form of snobbery and disdain that powered it is entirely extinct. In the post-hipster era, you listened to what Spotify told you to listen to. If you read a book, it was because the precise pattern of blobby pastel-coloured shapes on its cover contained coded instructions to TikTok’s algorithm that sent it zooming to the top of your feed. Your tastes and preferences were decided for you by vast crystalline machines coiling and uncoiling in the livid molten core of the earth. But these algorithms tend to work in a very particular way. At best, they present you with a caricature of yourself that you then have to conform to. At worst, their processes of cumulative reinforcement serve you up the exact same bilge as everyone else, but shrouded in the aura of individuality. It was at the dawn of the algorithm era that all my Dalston friends started playing Taylor Swift at their parties. A few years ago, I was dragged to some fashion-world event in the Bowery in New York: the room was full of cool young people there to be seen, and they were listening to a playlist of Top-40 pop music curated for them by a proprietary mathematical equation. As someone who had grown up in the hipster age, all these people seemed incredibly lame. The world had been given over to the nerds.
But now, the nerds are dying too. “
AI Is Life - Sara Walker - Noema Magazine
“The discovery of new forms of life requires the advent of technologies that allow us to sense and explore the world in new ways. But almost never do we consider those technologies themselves as life. A microbe is life, and surely a microscope is not. Right? But what is the difference between technology and life? Artificial intelligences like large language models, robots that look eerily human or act indistinguishably from animals, computers derived from biological parts — the boundary between life and technology is becoming blurry.”
Deskilling on the Job by danah boyd
“Efficiency isn’t simply about maximizing throughput. It’s about finding the optimum balance between quality and quantity. I’m super intrigued by professions that use junk work as a buffer here. Filling out documentation is junk work. Doctors might not have to do that in a future scenario. But is the answer to schedule more surgeries? Or is the answer to let doctors have more downtime? Much to my chagrin, we tend to optimize towards more intense work schedules whenever we introduce new technologies while downgrading the status of the highly skilled person. Why? And at what cost?”