It’s crepe myrtle season here in central Texas.
Spending some quality time with the awesome Father’s Day present Wes got me.
I understand that many people work in soul-sucking corporate jobs that remind you of the uselessness of your efforts while keeping you shackled to doing them. And that sucks. But that’s a symptom of a much larger toxicity within late capitalism, and I can assure you that figuring out how to just do nothing is not going to fix your feelings of purposelessness and malaise. Indeed, many people find that they achieve escape from the drudgery of contemporary white collar existence through finding avenues to actually work in more intuitively meaningful and purposeful ways. Sometimes that means leaving their actual jobs for other types of employment that are more tangible and satisfying, oftentimes at the expense of making less. For others, this means embracing hobbies enjoyed in their off-hours that look an awful lot like jobs — building things, crafting things, fixing things. People get through “work” to then go engage in activities that many human beings once regarded as enervating labor. We’re a funny species like that. And yet alongside this persistent human attachment to various forms of effort and creation that sure do resemble an unpaid job, you have this seemingly limitless ambient sense that all forms of effort are best avoided, that if you can find a way to fob work off on someone (or some algorithm) else, you should, that we are all looking to find more time in which to be in a state of total leisure. But leisure is only really satisfying when it exists in contrast with purposeful effort.
A couple of years ago I wrote something along these lines.
As someone who has unwittingly and unwillingly donated millions of words to train LLMs, I’m quite interested in the possibility of a class action settlement. But I’m not sure whether I’d prefer cash or an end to current training practices.
Finished reading: The Magic of Code by Samuel Arbesman 📚. I really enjoyed this book, and may have more to say about it later; it put me in mind of a period in my life when I was first discovering the fascination of code. I wrote about that in a series of essays for Books & Culture, and have re-posted those on my big blog, all 18,000 words: “Computer Control.”
My review of Martin Woessner’s brilliant book on the philosophical significance of Terrence Malick’s films is out from behind its paywall.
I’m conscious of the fact that it is, in some sense, stupid of me not to be on Substack. At the very least, I could be sending my newsletter for free, instead of paying a hundred bucks a month! Yet I suppose I think it’s the stupid choices that are the important ones. And I suppose I think the standard for art is that it doesn’t just play the game, but invents it. On an internet crowded with creators climbing over each other to obey each platform’s demands, follow its Best Practices (which harden into mandatory genres: quick-setting concrete), there is, I believe, an incandescence to stubborn specificity.
Everything in this post could’ve been siphoned straight from my brain. This is exactly why I’m on the open web rather than on a platform that, while increasingly prominent, is also increasingly enshittified.