I don’t think this Pope operates according to categories like “throwing shade.” As we saw when Leo tangled with Donald Trump over his war of choice in Iran, Leo sees his job as preaching and proclaiming.
His Gandalf quote may well be targeted at Thiel, or perhaps more broadly at those who think in similar ways. But it is not confrontational or insulting. It is a way of speaking across differences using a line drawn from a shared cultural resource between the two camps. It offers up a different interpretation of Tolkien’s tremendous work to those who see in it a license for warfare, technological disruption, tremendous battles, and global action. Those things exist in the story, and they are exciting, but they are also terrifying and ultimately endured only for the purpose of defending community, hearth, and home.
From the same article, The Eadwine Psalter (c.1155-60)
At the A.I. Epicenter, Technologists Dismiss Pope Leo’s Warnings About the New Technology: Well, of course! Did anyone expect thoughtful response? The people who run the big A.I. companies believe that they are so rich and powerful that they can do anything they want, and don’t require public support to do it. Time will tell if they are correct.
A lot happened in 2016. It would be easy to imagine that the entire reason for this change was the election of Donald Trump as president, and to stop looking for other causes, but something else also happened which I think we should at least consider, and that other thing says something important about how social media and human psychology interact.
In March 2016 Twitter completed their transition to the algorithmic feed, meaning that it was the default for all users to have their timeline populated by what Twitter thought they would want to see, rather than a chronological feed of posts from people they had decided to follow.
Count me a big fan of the infographics the Vatican has helpfully made to illustrate the main points of Leo’s encyclical.
The last few weeks have been pretty miserable, honestly, but tonight I’ve made myself a Frisco and am listening to Ella singing Rodgers & Hart. So for the moment I have absolutely nothing to complain about.
Six years ago, I called for the Gandalf Option — and now I see that Pope Leo has endorsed my call. I admit that he didn’t mention me by name, but come on, the debt is obvious.
Disney was an early adopter of a then-struggling technology called Technicolor: you can see it in the landmark shorts “The Three Little Pigs” (1933) and “The Grasshopper and the Ants” (1935). But while the artwork and animation in those films are first-rate by the standards of the time, they haven’t aged very well. Contrast them to “The Old Mill” (1937) — which looks gorgeous even today. What happened? The animators were working on the first animated feature, Snow White and the Seven Dwarfs, and they were learning on the job at an astonishing rate. “The Old Mill” appeared just six weeks before Snow White; it was a harbinger.
