Cover of the first edition of To the Lighthouse (1927), designed and drawn by Woolf’s sister Vanessa Bell.
John Piper, Llan-y-Blodwell, Shropshire 1964
In art, I argue, process matters as much as product.
In his famous 2021 essay, “Moore’s Law for Everything,” [Sam] Altman made the following grandiose prediction:
“My work at OpenAI reminds me every day about the magnitude of the socioeconomic change that is coming sooner than most people believe. Software that can think and learn will do more and more of the work that people now do. Even more power will shift from labor to capital. If public policy doesn’t adapt accordingly, most people will end up worse off than they are today.”
Four years later, he’s betting his company on its ability to sell ads against AI slop and computer-generated pornography.
Finished reading: Yeah! Yeah! Yeah! by Bob Stanley. The first half is brilliant; then, starting around 1970, the pace picks up and Stanley’s attention starts to grow variable. There’s a bit of a British tilt: though he knows that country, and later alt-country, are important, he doesn’t have much to say about them — Gram Parsons, one of the most lastingly influential musicians of the last half-century, goes wholly unmentioned. Also, he is quite dismissive of Joni Mitchell; and inexplicably, given his British vantage-point, he has next-to-nothing to say about Led Zeppelin. Reading this book, you’d think that Marc Bolan was far more important than Zep. All that said, I learned a great deal from the first half of the book, and hope soon to make a playlist of cool & unusual songs Stanley mentions. 📚
I don’t know what makes a good social media network, but I do know what makes it so that when they go bad, you’re not stuck there. You and I might want totally different things out of our social media experience, but I think that you should 100 percent have the right to go somewhere else without losing anything. The easier it is for you to go without losing something, the better it is for all of us.
This is why I’m on the open web.
Two questions:
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Do I want to read/watch/listen to this?
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Should I read/watch/listen to this?
When I was younger the second question often dominated my decision-making. Now that I am officially ancient that question has virtually disappeared and the first one is usually the only one I ask. That’s been the single most notable change in my personality in these my declining years.