Alan Jacobs

Today I was dicing a ham steak for risotto and dropped a few pieces on the floor, which Angus vacuumed up. Here he is a minute later, looking for all the world like Oliver Twist in the workhouse: “Please, sir, may I have more?” 

Daring Fireball: ‘Your Frustration Is the Product’:

You read two paragraphs and there’s a box that interrupts you. You read another two paragraphs and there’s another interruption. All the way until the end of the article. We’re visiting their website to read a f***ing article. If we wanted to watch videos, we’d be on YouTube. It’s like going to restaurant, ordering a cheeseburger, and they send a marching band to your table to play trumpets right in your ear and squirt you with a water pistol.

No print publication on the planet does this. The print editions of the very same publications — The New York Times, The Guardian, The Wall Street Journal, The Atlantic, The New Yorker — don’t do anything like this. The print edition of The New Yorker could not possibly be more respectful of both the reader’s attention and the sanctity of the prose they publish. But read an article on their website and you get autoplaying videos interspersed between random paragraphs. And the videos have nothing to do with the article you’re reading. I mean, we should be so lucky if every website were as respectfully designed as The New Yorker’s, but even their website — comparatively speaking, one of the “good ones” — shows only a fraction of the respect for the reader that their print edition does. 

This is why my primary use for chatbots is searching the web — getting the information I need without having to traverse ad after ad, video after video, popup after popup. The periodicals I value the most — the Economist, the London Review of Books, the Times Literary Supplement — I subscribe to in print. Print resists enshittification; the web embraces it. 

Richard Beer, Tresham’s Triangular Lodge (1971)

The Last Quiet Thing | Terry Godier:

What if the exhaustion everybody feels isn't a moral failure but the completely rational response to being made responsible for an ecosystem of objects that never stop asking? 

Reuters tries to out Banksy:

We concluded that the public has a deep interest in understanding the identity and career of a figure with his profound and enduring influence on culture, the art industry and international political discourse. In so doing, we applied the same principle Reuters uses everywhere. The people and institutions who seek to shape social and political discourse are subject to scrutiny, accountability, and, sometimes, unmasking. Banksy’s anonymity – a deliberate, public-facing, and profitable feature of his work – has enabled him to operate without such transparency. 

The idea that an artist, like a government agency, cannot be allowed to “operate without transparency” is ludicrous. This is idle curiosity masquerading as social responsibility. 

Cal Newport:

This is a worst-case scenario: you work faster and harder, but mainly on shallow, mentally taxing tasks (because of all the context shifting they require) that only indirectly help the bottom line compared to harder efforts.

It’s not quite clear why AI tools are having this impact. One tantalizing clue, however, comes from Berkeley professor Aruna Ranganathan, who is quoted in the article saying: “AI makes additional tasks feel easy and accessible, creating a sense of momentum.”

This points toward a pattern similar to what happened when email first arrived. It was undeniably true that sending emails was more efficient than wrangling fax machines and voicemail. But once workers gained access to low-friction communication, they transformed their days into a furious flurry of back-and-forth messaging that felt “productive” in the ​abstract, activity-centric sense​ of that term, but ultimately hurt almost every other aspect of their jobs and ​made everyone miserable​. 

I’m increasingly inclined to believe that we’ll soon see a Great Sorting with regard at AI at work: coders and scammers will love it, everyone else will hate it. 

A wonderful essay on Constable’s The Leaping Horse and … other matters. 

I’m in The Dispatch this morning on Christopher Beha’s new book on unbelief, belief, and skepticism. And, I am told, if you use the promo code JACOBS at checkout you can get 15% off an annual Dispatch subscription. 

Novelists who help us think theologically about this country’s racial history:

• for 1850–1900: William Faulkner
• for 1900–1950: Ralph Ellison
• for 1950–2025: Albert Murray

These are people to read after you’ve read the ones I name in my previous post, to see what got left out. 

Silicon Valley spirituality:

[Richard Zhang] said the members of his group had many questions about how to deploy Al in their lives, such as: “Can I have an Al pastor? Should we have Al-generated worship music? Should I get an Al to read the Bible or pray with me, to judge my spirituality?”  

I’m gonna say

(a) Are you out of your mind?

(b) Lord have mercy, no

(c) Absolutely not

(d) Oh HELL no 

My suggestion to pastors who are tempted by this stuff: Read Brad East’s book on the screen-free church when it comes out, and read Matt Erickson’s book on The Pastor as Gardener now. 

Science versus Superstition

Paul Kingsnorth:

The thing is, once you begin to examine those delusions, you see that one of the most pernicious is the construction of a self-identity. This is necessary to survive in the world, probably, but soon enough it becomes a yoke around the neck. This construction labelled ‘Paul Kingsnorth’, for example, now has a public reputation as a writer with certain opinions and a particular history. His future work, and indeed his income, is in some way reliant on keeping this fiction going. It is not a ‘fiction’ in the sense of it being a deliberate falsehood, but it is a construction, which means it is a story, which means that the actual me has ended up stuck inside it, as we all do with our stories in the end.

Things are particularly bad for this ‘Paul Kingsnorth’ character, because he makes his living writing articles like this one. Not only does he need to do this to eat, but more existentially, he has written for so long that he now sees the world almost entirely through the lens of the written word. Even if he wasn’t getting paid to write things down, he would be writing them down anyway, which would just continue to encrust the artificial world around the artificial self, and make it harder to escape from both. 

This is too true to be good. 

Romare Bearden, The Visitation (1941)