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.