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Mary Elizabeth Groom’s engravings from the 1937 Golden Cockerel Press edition of Milton’s Paradise Lost:
States struggled to work out their role in these rapidly changing systems. Private mail presented different problems: should couriers working for state-funded postal services be allowed to carry post on behalf of paying customers? For the states that underwrote postal systems, this was risky – it increased the risk of robbery since private mail often included money and valuables – yet attractive: an efficient postal service subsidised by private clients would be less of a drain on state resources. Controlling the carriers of private mail also made surveillance simpler. As time went on, the price of sending a private letter fell, so that more ordinary people were involved in the flow of mail and news: ‘What had started as a state privilege had become a preferred public service.’ Crucially, by the second half of the 17th century, the postal stagecoach had become the essential vehicle of European travel, carrying passengers at the same speed as it delivered the mail. The machinery of the post – its itineraries and printed guides, inns as relay stations, couriers with local knowledge – adapted seamlessly to facilitate a new era of tourism and would form the backbone of the Grand Tour. The infrastructure of posts and couriers that served states and merchants laid the foundations for a revolution in communications.
My friend and colleague Elizabeth Corey:
If there’s anything that could shake the confidence of the conservative warrior, it might be to consider what he’s sacrificing. I would put the question this way: what have you given up in fighting your political battles, in making your shocking and polemical arguments? Have you been calm and open toward your family, receptive toward the people who live alongside you, devoted to your students? Or has your soul changed, such that you no longer speak to old friends or write them off as traitors? Fighting can corrupt the soul. Nobody can be in Ithaka and Troy at the same time. And while you’re in Troy, Ithaka may well be crumbling — especially if nobody is there to tend it.
My disposition is fundamentally conservative, in that I am grateful for the cultural, spiritual, and artistic inheritance I have received and wish to preserve it, contribute to it, and transmit it to later generations. Even my increasing commitment to anarchism arises from my belief that anarchist practices best enable conservation. And like Elizabeth I lament that so many people nowadays call themselves conservatives when they have absolutely zero interest in conserving anything. They’re all fighting like madmen at Troy and have utterly forgotten Ithaka. It’s war for war’s sake.
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.
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?
Me: “From the fall of 2011, when I first stared watching the Premier League regularly and intently, I had what might truly be called an object in fandom: to see Arsenal become champions of the the league.”
Music producer Joe Boyd:
Most music recorded today is created by performers – or operators – sitting beside the engineer; it passes directly on to a hard disk rather than reverberating in the air to be captured by microphones. As a result, the ‘studio’ room itself is often shrunk to a modest space for vocalists or single instruments. The ideal acoustic is now a dead one: digital reverb can supposedly synthesize any atmosphere from Madison Square Garden to your bathroom. In the quest for the perfect track, each part is added separately so that any mistakes can be easily corrected; inflexible rhythms are generated by a machine. Musicians in the sixties were still recording a large part of each track playing together in the same room at the same time, maintaining at least some of the excitement of a live performance, with vocals and solos usually added later. Rhythm sections breathed with the other musicians, accenting and retarding the beat as mood dictated. The acoustics of different studios varied widely, as did the styles of engineering and production. Computers theoretically let musicians and producers choose from an endless palate of varied sounds, but modern digital recordings are far more monochromatically similar to each other than were older analogue tracks.
GOD standeth in the congregation of the mighty; he judgeth among the gods.
How long will ye judge unjustly, and accept the persons of the wicked? Selah.
Defend the poor and fatherless: do justice to the afflicted and needy.
Deliver the poor and needy: rid them out of the hand of the wicked.
They know not, neither will they understand; they walk on in darkness: all the foundations of the earth are out of course.
I have said, Ye are gods; and all of you are children of the most High.
But ye shall die like men, and fall like one of the princes.
Arise, O God, judge the earth: for thou shalt inherit all nations.
Julian Lage’s new album Scenes from Above is FAB. Maybe his best record yet — adding John Medeski to his trio was a genius move. ♫