Jane Freilicher, Study in Blue and Gray
Yeah I’m 😂 as I eat lunch.
Because the truth is, tech doesn’t have an image problem. It doesn’t have a message problem. It has an intention problem. What’s wrong with the axe murderer who broke into my house is not that he hasn’t successfully persuaded me to buy into his narrative. What’s wrong is that he’s trying to kill me with an axe. Similarly, when you launch a product that’s designed to put millions of people out of work, block access to sources of verifiable truth, replace human creativity with slop, and lower the barriers to every sort of atrocity, the problem isn’t that you haven’t told the public a good story about those things. The problem is that you are trying to do them.
Now that I have three blogs — The Homebound Symphony, Cosmos Malick, and micro.blog — I really don’t know what I would do without MarsEdit. What a great app.
The most important point about rising AI use in the arts is simply this: Millions of people desperately want affirmation. They don’t want to go to the trouble of writing or painting or drawing or making music — or maybe they are afraid that their own work won’t be good enough — but they want people to believe that they have made art. We should be thinking seriously about the intensity of the human need to be recognized, to be thought not basic but special.
The best thing I have seen so far on Pope Leo’s encyclical is this reflection by Yuval Levin, in which Yuval notes with pleasure Leo’s use of the story of the Tower of Babel but wishes that the story had been pursued further. For anyone who might be interested, some years ago I wrote a series of posts on the theme of building in the Bible:
I think they hold up pretty well, and some of the comments are quite illuminating. I kinda wish I had turned these posts into a book….
Some years ago Edward Mendelson published an essay about Auden’s secret acts of kindness — sorry about the paywall — and anyone who studies Auden keeps stumbling across his generosities. Just today, for example, I happened to read that (a) when James Schuyler had his first psychotic breakdown Auden paid for his hospitalization, and (b) when Joseph Brodsky was forced out of the Soviet Union Auden arranged for him to have a job at the University of Michigan. One favorite anecdote from Mendelson’s essay:
At times, he went out of his way to seem selfish while doing something selfless. When NBC Television was producing a broadcast of The Magic Flute for which Auden, together with Chester Kallman, had translated the libretto, he stormed into the producer’s office demanding to be paid immediately, instead of on the date specified in his contract. He waited there, making himself unpleasant, until a check finally arrived. A few weeks later, when the canceled check came back to NBC, someone noticed that he had endorsed it, “Pay to the order of Dorothy Day.” The New York City Fire Department had recently ordered Day to make costly repairs to the homeless shelter she managed for the Catholic Worker Movement, and the shelter would have been shut down had she failed to come up with the money.
I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over his war of choice in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.
His Gandalf quote may well be targeted at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it is not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers up a different interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for warfare, technological disruption, tremendous battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.
From the same article, The Eadwine Psalter (c.1155-60)
