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.
Watched: Blue Moon. Ethan Hawke’s performance as Lorenz Hart has been getting raves that it thoroughly deserves, but the story starts jumping off the screen when Andrew Scott’s Richard Rodgers shows up. The two of them together are electrifying. 🍿
(Over the next few days I’ll be recording some movies I’ve watched in the last couple of months, just to see if I like using this cool micro.blog feature.)
Listening to Peter Gregson ♫
People still do read, make music, watch films, and visit art museums. There is a culture, high and middle and low, even if it’s under attack. There’s an awareness, too, of the cultural and spiritual sickness of anti-humans. The AI revolution is not very popular. None of its progenitors are celebrated in a way Steve Jobs might have been, when Americans still had great faith in their tech innovators. Writers endure and readers endure. Print book sales are not in decline. Neither is live music. The imagination has an audience and a market. The question will be whether, in the next half century, it can keep both. We have to believe it will. That belief will come with friction; the stakes will grow ever higher. Much is on the line for the AI oligarchs. If enough of us do not take to their creations and make them economically viable, they will be out many billions, maybe begging for federal bailouts. They’ll battle to avoid that outcome as much as they possibly can. This next decade will be pivotal, for both the anti-humanists asserting their market position and the humanists trying to lay claim to what is sacred—and what has driven the progress of human civilization for thousands of years. We will have to preserve our right to imagine.
Terry Godier on his new RSS app:
When a source floods your feed with eighteen posts in a day, a quiet card appears between articles: “The Verge posted 18 items today.” With options to rate-limit or quiet the source. When you've skipped ten straight articles from the same source, Current notices: “You've skipped 10 from TechCrunch. Quiet or remove?” When you keep reading everything from a particular source: “You keep reading Craig Mod. Pin to the top?” When you keep reading about the same topic across different sources: “You keep reading design. Want a design Current?”
To which I want to say: I’m reading my RSS feeds, I’m not taking questions right now. This seems far more intrusive than having an Unread count on your app’s icon (and I have that disabled in NetNewsWire anyway).
We know that the best, most effective users of AI platforms are people with highly developed skills and domain knowledge that they acquired independently of any AI use. So if we want our young people, who will become adults in an AI-dominated world, to navigate that world wisely and skillfully, we need to teach and train them as though AI does not exist. Only then can they use AI rather than be ruled by it.
This story about a universally despised, utterly useless, and yet widely deployed e-learning app should remind us of a key truth: American schools at all levels will buy and mandate the use of anything that promises them cost savings. (And “cost savings” = “employing fewer humans.”)
The liberal tends to hold that once we’re allowed to be free, our better natures will flourish; the conservative believes that only by the strict application of order and discipline can anything morally valuable be squeezed out of our selfish, indolent make-up. Christianity is both a great deal more pessimistic than the liberal and considerably more optimistic than the conservative. The doctrine of the Fall, which has nothing to do with a divinely prohibited apple, suggests that we’re in a sorry mess, as a quick glance around the globe might confirm; but the Christian Gospel also holds that we have a capacity for self-transformation, and that if only we can let go of the present there’s a glorious future in store for us. It isn’t, however, attainable without passing through loss, deprivation, suffering and death, if only in symbolic terms.
What Eagleton defines as Christianity is in fact the opposite of Christianity. If we have “a capacity for self-transformation,” then we have no need for a Christ, and are culpable before God for any failure to transform ourselves. What Eagleton calls the Gospel (good news) would if true be very bad news indeed. Also: Jesus didn’t pass through suffering and death “in symbolic terms,” nor did and do the martyrs.
This is not to say that the unremittingly bleak view of human nature seen in Lord of the Flies, which is the subject of Eagleton’s post, is correct. But that’s a subject for another post.
Yesterday we began discussing The Lord of the Rings (Book I) and the first question was: “Can you explain Tom Bombadil?” So we plunged in to a discussion of old Tom, who in fact is a key to the whole novel. At one point G, sitting next to her dear friend A, raised her hand.
G: There was a time when A’s greatest wish was to marry Tom Bombadil.
A (covering her face in her hands): I was twelve!
The one I need to paste on myself is “DON’T CRUSH.”
