Last week I announced to my BMAC supporters that I’ll be severely curtailing my Big Blog for the foreseeable future, but I’ve discovered that I have a few drafts of essays ā nearly finished or else complete but with no obvious home ā that I could post. So one of those went up today: it’s on making movies and making war. I wrote it after reading Dan Wang’s Breakneck.
Iām grateful to Amanda Patchin for this generous review of my Paradise Lost biography.
Thinking of buying this house ā I mean, how much could it cost?
I often think of a passage from David Foster Wallace’s famous essay on television, “E Unibus Pluram,” in relation to our current media environment:
TV is the epitome of Low Art in its desire to appeal to and enjoy the attention of unprecedented numbers of people. But it is not Low because it is vulgar or prurient or dumb. Television is often all these things, but this is a logical function of its need to attract and please Audience. And I’m not saying that television is vulgar and dumb because the people who compose Audience are vulgar and dumb. Television is the way it is simply because people tend to be extremely similar in their vulgar and prurient and dumb interests and wildly different in their refined and aesthetic and noble interests.
I would rather call it Writers for Writing, but sure, sign me up.
As a friend who works in Al told me, Al heightens the contradictions. It is a boon to those with the motivation and background to cultivate knowledge but it spells total destruction for the system of universal education and credentialing. My worry is that we may run out of people with motivation and background to learn, know, and do. In the future, Gen X and millennial knowledge workers will be the human capital equivalent to pre-war steel. Just as particle detectors need steel forged before atmospheric nuclear testing gave all newly forged steel unacceptable background radiation, we will discover that even if your job mostly consists of interacting with LLMs, doing so well will require people who remember what it was like to read and interpret a document or contrast two ideas without asking an LLM to do it for you.
I’m very much enjoying teaching Lud-in-the-Mist again. A few years back I wrote a brief essay about it.
A heart-breaking and heart-healing reflection by Rachel Teubner on birth and death in an endlessly mobile world.
