It’s always fun when Neal Stephenson goes down a physical-mechanics rabbit hole.
Finished reading: The Rise and Fall of the Artificial State by Jill Lepore. It’s a brilliant book — right down my alley in a dozen different ways. There’s a problem, though: it’s a book, and the people in government and the tech sector who most need to understand the story it tells don’t read books.
Oh, a few of them read books for entertainment and maybe even inspiration, though, as Lepore points out, they reliably misunderstand the ones they do read. (One darkly enjoyable chapter is essentially an expansion of Alex Blechman’s famous Torment Nexus tweet.) But both Silicon Valley and our governmental offices are dominated by people who would never think it a good use of their time to read a book in order to understand what it is they’re doing. And while once upon a time such leaders would have relied on book-reading advisors — Tyrion Lannister types — I don’t think that’s true today. People making massively consequential decisions for the U.S.A. and indeed for the whole planet desperately need to know the history that Lepore tells. The question is, How can they be brought to know it?
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“Mr Pochettino? Call from London for you.”
She called herself a “gregarious recluse,” but there was in her single-mindedness no retreat from the world. She had simply found her place in it, and through luck and privilege (which is also, finally, at the individual level, just luck), been allowed to stay there. How few people get that opportunity! The Annie Dillard who celebrated her mother, in An American Childhood, for teaching her daughters to hate bullies and withstand oppressors, the Annie Dillard who mourned and memorialized anti-Chinese violence in The Living (1992) and who asked, in her great essay on the Book of Luke, why Christian churchgoers have so much money, would not want us to forget that everybody deserved the opportunities she got. But also: nobody else would have made of them what Annie Dillard did. Whether you looked at the hand, or at the things it pointed to, she shone.
A beautiful tribute by Phil. I was still reckoning with the loss of John Crowley when Wendell Berry died, and now Dillard! It’s going to take me months to sort out my thoughts and feelings about these writers, all of whom have meant a great deal to me.
On wherewithal and the lack thereof, for my BMAC supporters.
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.