Study in blue
If you do not believe that it is possible for someone’s life to be changed by reading and thinking together then I wish you well, but I do not think we are in the same profession and I am not sure we’re on the same side. I can tell you that some years ago now, a young man who was still a convinced atheist read Augustine’s Confessions and found in its pages an account of evil and responsibility that overturned his entire moral picture of the world. That same young man took in Plato and Machiavelli and Hegel and Marx in great gulps the following year and felt like he had fewer and fewer solid places to stand but a much better sense of where he was. He was fortunate enough to know other young men and women who felt the same way around the same time, and their late-night conversations (including several genuine toga-clad symposia) changed how they all saw the world and one another. This story is mine; it also looks a lot like the stories of a lot of people who’ve seen that it’s possible to teach and learn in a way that does not speak to making a living but simply to living.
Generative AI sabotages the proof-of-work function by introducing a category of texts that take more effort to read than they did to write. This dynamic creates an imbalance that’s common to bad etiquette: It asks other people to work harder so one person can work — or think, or care — less. My friend who tutors high-school students sends weekly progress updates to their parents; one parent replied with a 3,000-word email that included section headings, bolded his son’s name each time it appeared, and otherwise bore the hallmarks of ChatGPT. It almost certainly took seconds to generate but minutes to read. As breaches of etiquette go, where this asymmetric email falls is hard to say; I would put it somewhere between telling a pointless story about your childhood and using your phone’s speaker on an airplane. The message it sent, though, was clear: My friend’s client wanted the relational benefits of a substantial reply but didn’t care enough to write one himself.
If Frisbee Dan and Sun God can’t get along, what hope is there for the rest of us?
Thomas Pynchon, Inherent Vice (2009):
This seemed to be happening more and more lately, out in Greater Los Angeles, among gatherings of carefree youth and happy dopers, where Doc had begun to notice older men, there and not there, rigid, unsmiling, that he knew he’d seen before, not the faces necessarily but a defiant posture, an unwillingness to blur out, like everybody else at the psychedelic events of those days, beyond official envelopes of skin. Like the operatives who’d dragged away Coy Harlingen the other night at that rally at the Century Plaza. Doc knew these people, he’d seen enough of them in the course of business. They went out to collect cash debts, they broke rib cages, they got people fired, they kept an unforgiving eye on anything that might become a threat. If everything in this dream of prerevolution was in fact doomed to end and the faithless money-driven world to reassert its control over all the lives it felt entitled to touch, fondle, and molest, it would be agents like these, dutiful and silent, out doing the shitwork, who’d make it happen.
Was it possible, that at every gathering-concert, peace rally, love-in, be-in, and freak-in, here, up north, back East, wherever — those dark crews had been busy all along, reclaiming the music, the resistance to power, the sexual desire from epic to everyday, all they could sweep up, for the ancient forces of greed and fear?
Shoutout to Waymo for setting such a good example for the rest of us to follow.
Tell you what, a walk along the Austin riverside (especially on the south bank) is always Life’s Rich Pageant.
Beautiful winter (or if you live in the north “winter”) day in Austin.
One of the phrases I have been kicking around lately is “The Great Forgetting”: a hunch that in embracing AI, as an extension both of our capacity to remember and of our heuristic faculties in retrieving and arranging what is remembered, we run the risk of allowing faculties to wither that are in fact central to our capacity to think. (I made this case, and also that it is unevenly distributed across social classes, recently in the New York Times.) Building on these themes, my working hypothesis is that at least at the collective level AI is survivable, but only provided we counterbalance this effect by deliberately cultivating our human faculty for memory, as distinct from the digital kind.
Again: everybody knows. And 98% of us will simply do whatever their tech overlords want them to do. So the only question remaining is: What will the other 2% do?
Finished reading: The Way of Dante by Richard Hughes Gibson. Full disclosure: Rick is one of my dearest friends. But by any measure this is a wonderful book. Lewis, Williams, and Sayers were all serious readers of Dante, but they read Dante in sustained and energetic conversation — often amounting to disputation, especially when DLS was involved — with one another. Rick beautifully traces this evolving dialogue, with the unique genius of Dante at the center of it all. 📚
Maybe you, like me, woke up last week and found yourself faced with a series of auto-playing videos of agents mobbing Alex Pretti in Minneapolis. Maybe you watched as an agent shot him while he lay on his knees on the street. Or maybe a few weeks ago, your phone showed you the amateur video taken from multiple angles of Renee Good’s last moments before she was shot by an ICE agent at close range. Or maybe you logged on this fall and had to witness Charlie Kirk’s gruesome assassination in your feed.
No, none of these things happened to me, because I don’t have anything on my phone that would make such experiences possible. And on my Mac I don’t go to the kinds of sites that would show me such things. You don’t have to set up your tech life that way — even journalists don’t have to, though they always say they do. We have choices.
Mark Twain, from “Advice to Youth”:
Now as to the matter of lying. You want to be very careful about lying; otherwise you are nearly sure to get caught. Once caught, you can never again be in the eyes to the good and the pure, what you were before. Many a young person has injured himself permanently through a single clumsy and ill finished lie, the result of carelessness born of incomplete training. Some authorities hold that the young ought not to lie at all. That of course, is putting it rather stronger than necessary; still while I cannot go quite so far as that, I do maintain , and I believe I am right, that the young ought to be temperate in the use of this great art until practice and experience shall give them that confidence, elegance, and precision which alone can make the accomplishment graceful and profitable. Patience, diligence, painstaking attention to detail — these are requirements; these in time, will make the student perfect; upon these only, may he rely as the sure foundation for future eminence. Think what tedious years of study, thought, practice, experience, went to the equipment of that peerless old master who was able to impose upon the whole world the lofty and sounding maxim that “Truth is mighty and will prevail” — the most majestic compound fracture of fact which any of woman born has yet achieved. For the history of our race, and each individual’s experience, are sewn thick with evidences that a truth is not hard to kill, and that a lie well told is immortal.
From the Introduction to my Breaking Bread with the Dead, published in 2021, though these words were written probably in 2019:
Often at the beginning of a class I will give my students a brief reading quiz — unannounced in advance; yes, I’m that kind of teacher — which has the salutary effect of making sure that everyone is in class on time. The room is always full when I walk in, and fairly regularly the first thing I see is every head bowed before a glowing screen. Sometimes they don’t even look up when I say hello. Often their brows are furrowed; they may look anxious or worried. They dutifully put their phones away as soon as class begins, whether it does so with a quiz or a question, but during the discussion I occasionally see hands twitch or reach toward bags. If I see phones left on the seminar-room table I lightly (but seriously) suggest that they be put away to minimize temptation. All my students have mastered the art of packing up their bags at the end of class with one hand while checking messages with the other. They leave the room with heads once more down, and brows once more furrowed, navigating like a blind person through a familiar room.
Such behavior is noticeably less common now than it was then. My current generation of students seem far less phone-addicted. This is of course merely anecdotal, but since (despite what you often hear) the plural of anecdote is data, I offer it for your edification.
Walter Martin hipped me to this awesome cover of “Subterranean Homseick Blues” by Dan Hicks and the Hot Licks. First got into Dan & co. via a college radio station, but then over the decades lost track of them.
My colleague Philip Jenkins on Groundhog Day: “I will explain just how that bizarre celebration came into existence. My story begins in the Jewish Temple, with stops en route in Dark Age Ireland, medieval Germany, and Victorian Pennsylvania.”
T. S. Eliot, writing during WW2: “I see a great many American sergeants and they all write poetry: nobody realises that I HATE poetry.”
No, I do not want to install your app.
No, I do not want that app to run on startup.
No, I do not want that app shortcut on my desktop.
No, I do not want to subscribe to your newsletter.
No, I do not want your site to send me notifications.
No, I do not want to tell you about my recent experience.
No, I do not want to sign up for an account.
No, I do not want to sign up using a different service and let the two of you know about each other.
No, I do not want to sign in for a more personalized experience.
No, I do not want to allow you to read my contacts.
No, I do not want you to scan my content.
No, I do not want you to track me.
No, I do not want to click “Later” or “Not now” when what I mean is NO.