Jill Lepore, The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State:
This book is an inquiry into what humans mean and intend in abandoning constitutional democracy, the liberal nation-state, and even humanity itself for rule by automation, government by machine, and replacement by artificial intelligence. Much in history is headlong but few grand transformations have been more precipitate or more heedless than the rise of what I call the Artificial State. Yet little seems to me more inevitable than its eventual fall, the exhale that follows every inhale, the day that follows night, Icarus’s plunge to the ocean after flying too close to the sun. The Artificial State is a fantasy about humans, machines, and the earth. This book is an archaeology of that fantasy.
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Endgame for the Open Web - Anil Dash:
Now, the hectobillionaires have begun their final assault on the last, best parts of what's still open, and likely won't rest until they've either brought all of the independent and noncommercial parts of the Internet under their control, or destroyed them. Whether or not they succeed is going to be decided by decisions that we all make as a community in the coming months. Even though there have always been threats to openness on the web, the stakes have never been higher than they are this time. […]
Creators who fight hard to stay independent are often choosing to make less money, to go without winning awards or the other trappings of big media, just in order to maintain control and authority over their content, and because they think it's the right way to connect with an audience. Publishers who've survived through year after year of attacks from tech platforms get rewarded by … getting to do it again the next year. Tim Berners-Lee is no billionaire, but none of those guys with the hundreds of billions of dollars would have all of their riches without him. And the thanks he gets from them is that they're trying to kill the beautiful gift that he gave to the world, and replace it with a tedious, extortive slop mall.
A distressing but compelling essay.
A tech story that I think has been underplayed: Google’s collapse into incompetence. There’s been widespread frustration with the worsening quality of web searches, but in addition:
- Search in Gmail often fails utterly, turning up no results even when I am looking right at an email containing the string that I’m searching for;
- On recent trips, Google Maps has failed to find prominent destinations and has sent me on strange detours (I’ve had to delete it from my phone);
- Gemini is still offering the kinds of comically inaccurate, hallucinatory answers to questions that Claude and ChatGPT overcame two years ago.
Some services are still functional — as far as I can tell, Docs still works — but the company overall is starting to look like a dumpster fire.
Showed up in class today and found on the desk flowers, chocolate, and a consolation card signed by my students. That is so sweet.
My old friend Carlos Eire:
Ever since 2013, this class [The Catholic Intellectual Tradition, at Yale] has attracted highly motivated students who are eager to explore a dimension of thought previously hidden from them, simply because the texts we read and discuss have not been part of their education. Surprisingly — and shamefully — this applies to Catholics who have attended Catholic schools from kindergarten through high school as much as to those who haven’t. Unsurprisingly, it also applies to Protestants, non-Christians, and others with no religious affiliation. It is easy to notice the intensity with which students in this class grapple with the reading, regardless of their background. I have always gotten the impression that for a large number of them, the reading is more than an assignment. Of course, this can happen in other classes too. But I’ve been teaching for over fifty years, and I’ve never felt or seen this kind of intensity in any other course of mine, including those, many years ago, in which all the students were monks and seminarians.
One of my students in last semester’s Great Texts in Fantasy class gave me a copy of Robert Macfarlane’s Is a River Alive? and added some highly appropriate notes to the title page.
Known Unknowns
When you’re writing a historical narrative, you can’t explain everything — you have to assume that your audience has a certain level of knowledge. But it’s tricky to establish just what that baseline should be. You don’t want to insult your readers’ intelligence by overexplaining, but you also don’t want to leave them confused.
And as a reader of historical narratives, you want to look for books that set that baseline appropriately for you. (Of course, the same general principle applies when you’re reading anything, from a cookbook to a treatise on mathematics, but I’m focusing on history here.) I find it helpful to have this issue in mind whenever I begin reading a work of history, because if I’m alert, I can know within a few pages whether a given book will work for me.
One of the most famous classics of historical writing is Jacob Burckhardt’s The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy, first published in 1860. Here is a characteristic passage from the early pages of that book:
The internal condition of the despotically governed States had a memorable counterpart in the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily, after its transformation by the Emperor Frederick II. Bred amid treason and peril in the neighbourhood of the Saracens, Frederick, the first ruler of the modern type who sat upon a throne, had early accustomed himself to a thoroughly objective treatment of affairs. His acquaintance with the internal condition and administration of the Saracenic States was close and intimate; and the mortal struggle in which he was engaged with the Papacy compelled him, no less than his adversaries, to bring into the field all the resources at his command. Frederick’s measures (especially after the year 1231) are aimed at the complete destruction of the feudal State, at the transformation of the people into a multitude destitute of will and of the means of resistance, but profitable in the utmost degree to the exchequer. He centralized, in a manner hitherto unknown in the West, the whole judicial and political administration. No office was henceforth to be filled by popular election, under penalty of the devastation of the offending district and of the enslavement of its inhabitants. The taxes, based on a comprehensive assessment, and distributed in accordance with Mohammedan usages, were collected by those cruel and vexatious methods without which, it is true, it is impossible to obtain any money from Orientals. Here, in short, we find, not a people, but simply a disciplined multitude of subjects; who were forbidden, for example, to marry out of the country without special permission, and under no circumstances were allowed to study abroad. The University of Naples was the first we know of to restrict the freedom of study, while the East, in these respects at all events, left its youth unfettered. It was after the examples of Mohammedan rules that Frederick traded on his own account in all parts of the Mediterranean, reserving to himself the monopoly of many commodities, and restricting in various ways the commerce of his subjects. The Fatimite Caliphs, with all their esoteric unbelief, were, at least in their earlier history, tolerant of all the differences in the religious faith of their people; Frederick, on the other hand, crowned his system of government by a religious inquisition, which will seem the more reprehensible when we remember that in the persons of the heretics he was persecuting the representatives of a free municipal life.
That’s only part of a paragraph, by the way. Historians wrote long paragraphs in those days.
Here are some of the things that Burckhardt expects that you already know:
- What the Norman Empire of Lower Italy and Sicily was
- Who Emperor Frederick II was
- What the Saracenic States were
- What struggle Frederick had with the Papacy
- What “measures” Frederick took, especially “after the year 1231”
- What “Mohammedan usages” are
- What the “cruel and vexatious methods” of Frederick’s tax-collecting were
- In what way the University of Naples “restrict[ed] the freedom of study”
- What Burckhardt means by “the East”
- What “Mohammedan rules” Frederick followed
- Who the Fatimite Caliphs were
- What their “esoteric unbelief” was
- What the nature of Frederick’s “religious inquisition” was
- What heresies he attempted to put down
- Who “the representatives of a free municipal life” were
Now, I have firm knowledge about a couple of these things and an in-the-ballpark awareness of a few more, but beyond that … the less said, the better. So maybe this book is not for me.
But The Civilization of the Renaissance in Italy is a very important and influential book! Yes, it is. But that doesn’t mean that it’s something I need to read – not until I acquire the requisite knowledge, which, let’s face it, I am not especially likely to do.
Currently listening: Mingus Ah Um. Never gets old. 🎵
To Daniel Moran's question about the reasons for the decline of The Simpsons, I have an answer: There are only so many stories you can tell and jokes you can make about characters who are forbidden to change.
I keep hoping for the barrage of AI-generated author-scamming emails to slow down, but instead they keep coming — and are getting worse. This morning I find in my inbox fulsome praise of me for having written a book I only wrote a foreword for and an invitation from the (imaginary) host of an (imaginary) podcast focused on “stories of Texas” who wants to talk with me about Dorothy L. Sayers, because, really, who’s more Texan than Dorothy L. Sayers? It seems that the worse these phishing expeditions are the more likely they are to get past the spam filters.