I’ve already been lectured about the dangers of how using [Lensa] implicates us in teaching the AI, stealing from artists, and engaging in predatory data-sharing practices. Each concern is legitimate, but less discussed are the more sinister violations inherent in the app, namely the algorithmic tendency to sexualize subjects to a degree that is not only uncomfortable but also potentially dangerous.
Who could have known?
imagined railways
Matt Yglesias thinks that Amtrak should focus all of its efforts on bringing high-speed rail to the Northeast Corridor, because of course he does. But the distances between those cities are sufficiently small that the speeds don’t matter as much. What this country really needs is high-speed rail connecting more widely-spaced cities. Consider: Houston ➡ Austin ➡ El Paso ➡ Albuquerque ➡ Phoenix ➡ Los Angeles. Or, even more plausibly: San Antonio ➡ Austin ➡ (Waco?) ➡ Dallas ➡ Oklahoma City ➡ Kansas City ➡ Des Moines ➡ Chicago. I don’t think I’m alone in seeing high-speed connections among these cities as dramatically preferable to air travel.
the blog as a seasoned technology
For several years now I’ve been writing about the distinctive virtues of blogging, which has become, I keep saying, a seasoned technology that promotes lateral thinking. When people start talking about the imminent collapse of Twitter — something that now looks like it won’t happen, and I’m inclined to bet that the next year will see a gradual return from Mastodon to Twitter — there was talk of the possibility of a blog renaissance. But I don’t think that will happen either.
You have to have a peculiar kind of mind to enjoy blogging, and even those who have such a mind might prefer platforms that enable certain modes of interaction that blogging doesn’t make easy. (For instance, speedy exchanges.) I dislike those modes of interaction, and I love to blog, so I will continue to do this.
But as Robin Sloan says in a comment I quoted the other day, “Publishing on the internet is a solved problem; finding each other on the internet, in a way that’s healthy and sustainable … that’s the piece that has never quite fallen into place.” A while back I asked a question about this: "How can I encourage readers of my blog to seek some of the benefits that I get from it?”
I do increasingly feel like that Japanese guy who paints in Excel.
An appropriate day to remember one of Waco’s greatest heroes.
Trying out the new global shortcut for microposting in MarsEdit 5 – looks like it works perfectly. Long live MarsEdit and long live blogging!
oh, okay, one more post
On these matters. This from Roald Dahl’s story “The Great Automatic Grammatizator” (1952):
“That’s exactly it, Mr Bohlen! That’s where the machine comes in. Listen a minute, sir, while I tell you some more. I’ve got it all worked out. The big magazines are carrying approximately three fiction stories in each issue. Now, take the fifteen most important magazines—the ones paying the most money. A few of them are monthlies, but most of them come out every week. All right. That makes, let us say, around forty big stories being bought each week. That’s forty thousand dollars. So with our machine—when we get it working properly—we can collar nearly the whole of this market!”
“My dear boy, you’re mad!”
“No, sir, honestly, it’s true what I say. Don’t you see that with volume alone we’ll completely overwhelm them! This machine can produce a five-thousand-word story, all typed and ready for dispatch, in thirty seconds. How can the writers compete with that? I ask you, Mr Bohlen, how?”
At that point, Adolph Knipe noticed a slight change in the man’s expression, an extra brightness in the eyes, the nostrils distending, the whole face becoming still, almost rigid. Quickly, he continued. “Nowadays, Mr Bohlen, the hand-made article hasn’t a hope. It can’t possibly compete with mass-production, especially in this country — you know that. Carpets … chairs … shoes … bricks … crockery … anything you like to mention — they’re all made by machinery now. The quality may be inferior, but that doesn’t matter. It’s the cost of production that counts. And stories — well — they’re just another product, like carpets and chairs, and no one cares how you produce them so long as you deliver the goods. We’ll sell them wholesale, Mr Bohlen! We’ll undercut every writer in the country! We’ll corner the market!”
An anti-slavery medallion by Josiah Wedgwood
But:
Wedgwood seems to have thrown himself behind the cause of abolition out of genuine conviction. The medallion presented a marketing opportunity of sorts, but he manufactured it in large numbers at his own cost and ran the risk of alienating wealthy customers who opposed abolition. At the same time, as Hunt acknowledges, Wedgwood’s business was inextricable from the socioeconomic structures that sustained the slave trade. He depended on secure colonial shipping routes and sold extensively to the American colonies: Boston and Kingston were the perfect place to offload wares that had passed the peak of fashion back in Britain. Closer to home, many of his British customers derived their fortunes, one way or another, from colonial trade, including the trade in human beings. This trade helped to fuel the boom in domestic consumption that allowed Wedgwood to dream of selling high-quality artistic tableware to a growing middle-class market. Colonial commodities such as coffee, tea and sugar, with their accompanying social rituals, provided the raison d’être for many of Wedgwood’s most successful products.