Kevin D. Williamson: “Negative partisanship is the third-strongest force in American politics, coming in behind only inertia and stupidity.”
A few years ago I had the honor of writing a little blurb for a wonderful book called Talking About Race: Gospel Hope for Hard Conversations, by Isaac Adams, the pastor of Iron City Church in my home town of Birmingham, Alabama. In the photo above Isaac is right in the middle, surrounded by other pastors in Birmingham who are part of an endeavor called United We Pray. Christians always say that want the unity Jesus promised to them — well, do they gather to pray for it? These folks do. I can’t be there for the gathering on March 15, but how I wish I could. I will pray from a distance but there’s no substitute for praying hand in hand. A meeting like this is a great sign of hope in a dark time; “For I will pour water on the thirsty land, and streams on the dry ground” (Isaiah 44:3).
Then last year something shifted. I kept seeing people express a longing for the old web. Before social media turned every thought into content and every person into a brand. Before the timeline replaced blogs. I felt it too. I started working on an open-source microblogging tool inspired by Jottit, but at some point I thought: why don't I just build Jottit instead?
Ah yes, I remember it well!
From Cadillac Desert I learned about some absurdly gigantic plans to move water from northern Canada to the American desert Southwest, among other places: the Great Recycling and Northern Development Canal and the even more bonkers North American Water and Power Alliance.
Re: Stewart Brand’s new campaign for maintenance, I’d like to add my own — somewhat neglected recently — project on Invitation and Repair.
WSJ:
Your turn, ChatGPT. According to the OpenAI app, Claude is “an earnest grade student who will not take a position. If you ask Claude, ‘Is this policy good,’ it replies: ‘It can be understood as operating within a broader ethical framework that may, depending on one’s normative commitment.’ By the time Claude finishes clearing its throat, the Roman Empire has fallen again.”
Gemini doesn’t get off any easier. ChatGPT calls it a “corporate intern with a search bar. It doesn’t write essays. It produces deliverables. If Claude is anxious to be ethical, Gemini is anxious to be useful to a product manager.”
Sneering at other writers? Can’t get any more human than that.
The newest issue of Comment, on the need for renewal of our institutions, has a number of smart and provocative pieces. Anne Snyder has done such a great job as editor of that journal.
What is it that MrBeast, as a “creator,” is “creating”? The obvious answer would be “content.” Content, after all, is what we talk about when we talk about digital media. It’s certainly what MrBeast talks about. But the more I think about online programming, the more I’m convinced that content isn’t what matters. What matters is form. Digital media aspires to, and often achieves, a state of contentlessness. Spend some time on MrBeast’s channel, or scroll down your Instagram feed or your X feed or your Apple News feed, or swipe through your For You page on TikTok. What you’re seeing is the repetition of a pattern, a pattern that has been statistically determined to have the highest odds of holding your attention. What fills the pattern at any given instant—what we call content—is fungible and disposable. It’s not important. It’s the pattern, the form the content fits and replicates, that’s important.
Thus: “AI-generated slop marks the triumph of machine formalism.”
Finished reading: Cadillac Desert: The American West and Its Disappearing Water by Marc Reisner, a powerful book that will make you despair of humanity. Representative passage:
“You’re from the Park Service, aren’t you?” Mulholland demanded more than asked.
“Yes, I am,” said Albright. “Why do you ask?”
“Why?” Mulholland said archly. “Why? I’ll tell you why. You have a beautiful park up north. A majestic park. Yosemite Park, it’s called. You’ve been there, have you?” Albright said he had. He was the park’s superintendent. “Well, I’m going to tell you what I’d do with your park. Do you want to know what I would do?”
Albright said he did.
“Well, I’ll tell you. You know this new photographic process they’ve invented? It’s called Pathé. It makes everything seem lifelike. The hues and coloration are magnificent. Well, then, what I would do, if I were custodian of your park, is I’d hire a dozen of the best photographers in the world. I’d build them cabins in Yosemite Valley and pay them something and give them all the film they wanted. I’d say, ‘This park is yours. It’s yours for one year. I want you to take photographs in every season. I want you to capture all the colors, all the waterfalls, all the snow, and all the majesty. I especially want you to photograph the rivers. In the early summer, when the Merced River roars, I want to see that.’ And then I’d leave them be. And in a year I’d come back, and take their film, and send it out and have it developed and treated by Pathé. And then I would print the pictures in thousands of books and send them to every library. I would urge every magazine in the country to print them and tell every gallery and museum to hang them. I would make certain that every American saw them. And then,” Mulholland said slowly, with what Albright remembered as a vulpine grin, “and then do you know what I would do? I’d go in there and build a dam from one side of that valley to the other and stop the goddamned waste!”
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Here’s my first post as a contributing writer for The Dispatch: an essay on how the rise of AI has changed my teaching.
Timothy Lee, whose newsletter is consistently the best guide to developments in AI: “I’ve read all of this information carefully, and it sure looks to me like OpenAI gave the Pentagon what it wanted and undercut Anthropic in the process. The contractual language shared by OpenAI does not appear to meaningfully restrict the government’s ability to spy on Americans or build fully autonomous weapons.” Unsurprising.
Also in this new edition of Hedgehog, another, shorter piece by me on how not to save the planet. Sample:
This marks for me my problem in reading [Jonathan] Schell and [Bill] McKibben: My “slow, unreckoning heart” is unable to keep up with the abstractions of “the Earth” or “Nature.” It needs something smaller to capture its power of affection. Schell himself wrote at the outset of The Fate of the Earth that “in spite of the immeasurable importance of nuclear weapons, the world has declined, on the whole, to think about them very much. We have thus far failed to fashion, or to discover within ourselves, an emotional or intellectual or political response to them.” Precisely.
New issue of The Hedgehog Review out today, with an essay by me trying to outline the conditions under which a new understanding of humanism might be forged and sustained. I’ve been thinking and writing on this topic for several years now, and this essay is my best attempt to map the territory.
A few years ago Reclaim Hosting (which hosts my big blog) decided to increase protections against hacking, so if I try to refresh the blog in MarsEdit it shuts everything down for an hour, making the blog inaccessible to readers as well as to me as editor. I like using MarsEdit to back up my blog to my computer, but I can no longer do that. Similarly, we’re about to change banks because our current bank repeatedly declines to honor obviously legitimate charges, like purchases at our local grocery store. I understand the need to protect against fraud, but not to the point at which a service regularly becomes completely unusable.
Watched: The Awful Truth. Not only the movie in which Cary Grant became CARY GRANT, it’s the very best of the Hollywood screwball comedies. I watch it almost every year. 🍿
Watched: Star Trek: The Next Generation S5E2, Darmok. A justly famous episode, and one day I need to explain why Ian Bogost gets it all wrong. 🍿
UPDATE: I did it.