Welcome Distractions
A better way to waste your weekend.
books | music | short stories | rambling
Hi! You’re here! Thank you.
I’ve always been a nerd. I had an email address before anyone else I knew, then my buddy JP got one. We’d email each other because we could (we could also have stepped outside and yelled to each other. At any rate, I owned JP in Command and Conquer.)
In another universe, that would have made me a bazillionaire by 25 and I’d be writing this from my superyacht. Instead, I choose to read a dozen books about AI and have opinions for free. Wouldn’t have it any other way.
I like Naomi Aldermans’s idea that AI is a normal technology, like spell check or YouTube or power steering. It’s very cool and allows us to do new things, and it will become a ‘how did we get by without it?’ tool. Work will continue. Life will continue. We’ll figure out that the art and writing and other things that make life worth living are not redundant. Mostly, things that humans aren’t ideal for will be automated.
What’s missing is writing about how we will take care of the people whose livelihoods are automated. That’s the substance of Brian Merchant’s work — the Luddites’ protests against the automation of textile manufacturing wasn’t about being anti-technology, it was about fair treatment of the workers who built the business that’s casting them aside.
My dad was a uranium miner. He drove a scoop tram, and when I grew up, the understanding was that there would be work in the mines for anyone who wanted it, forever.
Which of course turned out not to be the case. All the mines in my town closed in the 90s, putting a bunch of 50-something guys out of work. The town turned into a ghost town overnight, and despite all the retraining they provided, he didn’t work again.
We were lucky: our house was paid off and my mom was a schoolteacher with a good income. Many of my friends weren’t - moving across the country, or losing their dad to camps that took them away from home for weeks at a time. Or worse, families destroyed by financial distress and a suddenly worthless home. One friend’s dad sometimes had to choose between keeping the home phone or electricity.
Here’s an excellent documentary about the town, if you’re really keen.
At any rate: while we sit here trying to figure if this Yudkowsky weirdo is right about the Terminator 2 future we’re building, or if Adam Becker’s mockery in More Everything Forever is a safer bet, it’s easy to get distracted from the people who are affected by this today: translators, coders, people in data-oriented careers. Again, Brian Merchant is great on this: even if it is ‘normal technology’, that doesn’t mean that a whole lot of families aren’t upended by it.
That’s the problem that all these goons should be putting their energy into rather than writing bad books or bastardizing Wikipedia (while getting fully rinsed by Joyce Carol Oates). Also, read this piece by Naomi Alderman that I kinda riffed on here.
And now:
Offsite: links you shouldn’t miss
The couch that Addison Barger slept on before hitting the first ever World Series pinch hit grand slam is on display at the SkyDome hotel.
Canadian musicians can now submit their own music for the Polaris Prize. I applied to be a juror again, you can do that too.
Chris Dalla Riva has a great little video on The Tragically Hip - the best Canadian band that never broke containment.
I implore you to read Niko Stratis’s blog (and her book too). This piece is about the Edmund Fitzgerald, and it’s incredible:
I have never liked the taste of Tim Hortons coffee, but I have always craved the way coffee feels, and like all addictions it is sometimes less about the quality and more about the seconds you get to feel alive before you fall back into the familiar comforting of wanting to die.
Soundcloud is going royalty free. Bandcamp could use the competition.
Someone stole a bus in Hamilton, Ontario. They drove for about 15 minutes. They kept making the stops. Everything is Seinfeld.
That dapper dude in that photo of the Louvre heist? A random teenager. Somehow that just got even more French.
Kate Wagner writes about being obsessed with the optometrist. Sounds dumb, IT IS GREAT:
The optical tasks themselves are almost obscenely regressive. Read these letters! Touch the circle on the picture that looks like it’s floating! Follow the letter A with your eyes! Look at this slide as I move it back and forth! Put these prisms over your glasses! The only thing more delightful than doing these tests is failing them.
Let’s talk about discovery. Terrence O’Brien writes about how the algorithm sucks for music discovery. Anne Trubek writes about book discovery. I used to use Goodreads and Reddit, now I rely on RSS feeds. More on that soon. How do you discover new stuff?
Here’s Megan Greenwell on how private equity eats profitable business. If that resonates, read her excellent book on the subject.
Bad writing? Let’s do it: In Praise of Making Bad Art. Maria Kuznetsova writes about writing a dud. Finn McRedmond writes about how Anthony Bourdain wasn’t a great chef or writer (I agree, but still would have loved to hang out with him).
Here’s the unbeatable Mary Roach on the evolution of the Brazilian Butt Lift:
I sent an email using the address on a more recent journal paper. There was no reply. Ramón Cuenca-Guerra’s buttocks are in worse shape than mine. He has been dead for some time.
Some AI stuff: Elon Musk’s Wikipedia clone is ridiculous. It’s also a glimpse of the future. A University professor writes about that shitty ChatGPT short story, and what it means for the humanities. Advertising is having a Minority Report moment.
Lastly, Naomi Alderman on raising kids in the age of AI, linked above as well:
…anyone who’s talking about AI becoming a god or a monster is almost certainly an idiot and is not going to help you get a job much less a career.
What got your attention this week? Got a hot take on something? Hit reply and let me know.
On the Blog
Listening:
The transformation into a Yada Yada fan site continues. Their Backstory is great.
So is the Backstory from Abi Crisp, aka Queen of Nothing.
Tiberius’s “farm emo” is lights-out good, as is the weird new indie rock record from Star Card.
Glich3 is an indietronica guy, who made a great record about modern anxiety.
This week’s Lunch Break featured EPs by Lia Kuri, TJE and Linnea Awad.
The Setlist: New design! Simpler with more video! Check it out.
Listen on Apple Music or Spotify.
Reading:
Read the newsroom crime story A Fatal by Stephen Baily.
Don’t read the AI Doomer book, but read my snark about it.
The memoir about building the open web by Tim Berners-Lee is mind-expanding
The Shortlist has a half dozen short fiction works that are outstanding. Read em here.
Something I should read or hear? Send it my way
Next week: No more AI books. Another short story! The new book by M.L. Rio! Music from Seaside, Scarlet Fever! And a bunch more.
-hugh
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