My guitar hero Martin Simpson has posted a beautiful recording of an old English folk song, “The Recruited Collier” — also known as “Jenny’s Complaint” or “Jimmy’s Enlisted.” These folk songs often have obscure and convoluted histories.
What strikes me now is not that we were careless. It is that we were able, at the same time, to be sincere. To drink and mean it. To feel genuine warmth while knowing, somewhere else in the mind, that the world had already shifted. We inhabited two realities. And we chose, as people always do, to live inside the warmer one.
Nate Anderson (my former student!) on how Reddit is trying to force people onto its app, employing the same enshittifying strategy that Substack does. This is why I’m on micro.blog. Manton makes apps for our convenience but never tries to force us to use them.
When Ford rolls out a new pickup truck, the CEO generally doesn’t go around giving keynote addresses about how much more lethal it will make American highways. But the AI industry is selling a narrative — a mythos, if you will — as much as it’s selling a product, and that narrative is one of revolutionary, transformational power. “Our product can make your life a bit easier, although there are still a lot of kinks to iron out” is not a trillion-dollar sales pitch; “we’ve invented something so powerful that it has the potential to destroy humanity” is. The company that can end the world controls the future, and investors will spend big on that upside bet. After all, if the world ends, an investor’s losses won’t matter anyway.
I think I’ve mentioned that every morning — every morning without exception — I wake up with a different song in my head. Never know what the internal roulette wheel will serve up, whether something from fifty years ago or from last week. Anyway, this morning I got a banger.
Illustrations by Bruno Bamanti for an edition of Caesar's Gallic Wars: 
John Ruskin, The Kapellbrücke, Lucerne (1857)
