✱ Bulletins

The Economist’s Next Year in Moscow is an incredible podcast series. (So is Scam Inc).

No Linux on the beach!

A directive received by your author.

If you are considering an “AI” therapist, I urge you, with a shaking bordering on the feverish, to reconsider seeking a cure from the forces that pour gasoline on the fire of disease.

And it might be hopeless but if I lose hope
I bring on that еnding
And it might be hopeless but if I losе hope
I bring on that ending
And it might be hopeless but if I lose hope
I bring on that ending
And it might be hopeless but if I lose hope
I bring on that ending

…

I could stockpile in the basement, be a ruthless
Survivor itching to prove that violence is our
Nature and society was fleeting and futile
Take the satisfaction when my cynical
Conclusions come to fruition
Will I win then, when everyone is as selfish
And careless as me?
And if I can’t hope, nothing’s ever gonna change
So let your eyes roll, you’ll still be cool
When we’re in flames

And if I can’t hope, nothing’s ever gonna change
So let your eyes roll, you’ll still be cool
When we’re in flames

…

And it might be hopeless but I’ve gotta try it
It’s better than lying down and bringing on
Our fate

Lately I’ve been appreciating the distinction between “computing” and “tech”. Once upon a time they meant the same thing, now not so much. I always have and always will love computing. Computing is delight. Tech (now) is the culture of applying dark patterns and nihilistic capitalism to computing.

Imagine having more money than god, master and mistress of all you survey, then being handed the chance of a time and place to take a stand and be remembered for greatness, only to throw it all away to be a nobody who licked a boot for an extra dollar. Imagine that.

Everybody knows that I’m five foot five
But don’t come around here when your likkle man talk
I’ll punch man down to my size, yeah.
I make a man think twice
I make a man go look for advice

Damn. How hard are the last two lines?

Happy new year. May you too make a man think twice and go look for advice in 2025.

🎵

Jeremy Bowen: Syria’s new ruler is politically astute - but can he keep his promises?

I love a textbook example of Betteridge’s law.

Gregory Sholette, the author of Dark Matter: Art and Politics in the Age of Enterprise Culture, describes how workers in a Pennsylvania factory spent their break covering a wall of the plant with “newspaper clippings, snapshots, spent soda cans, industrial debris, trashed food containers and similar bits and pieces.” They called it “Swampwall.” It reminds me of the sculpture on a high shelf in the back of a diner where I worked, composed of unusually shaped potatoes. Its form changed with each new tuber contributed by the cook on prep shift.

Such spontaneous projects are signs of life: physical evidence of the liberating fact that not all time at work can be measured or processed into productivity. Swampwall was inutile: a means to itself. It was allowed to flourish until the company was bought out by a global corporation, at which point the massive collaborative mural was “expunged.”

The Collapse of Self-Worth in the Digital Age - Thea Lim

We are not giving away our value, as a puritanical grandparent might scold; we are giving away our facility to value. We’ve been cored like apples, a dependency created, hooked on the public internet to tell us the worth. Every notification ping holds the possibility we have merit. When we scroll, what are we looking for?

Some photos from Squamish, BC.

‘HOLIDAY PARTY 2024’, WITH MERLIN MANN

The 2024 Gruber/Mann ‘Holiday Party’ episode cannot arrive soon enough.

He said, “How did we get here? We started as skaters
Then you got your license and then graduation
Then I changed medications and everything after went sideways including tonight”

You had a Screamer with trackers and OJs
And I had a Steadham with Bones and a dome tail
And if failure’s a trick then we learned pretty quick
It just took a few times to get right

Man, we used to glide
We used to hang like the smoke
We’d show off for my sister
We didn’t mind being broke

Now every conversation I have’s about money
And I leave home in the morning but then I just keep driving
Kill off the day until you guys stop working
Then pitchers at Skippers now Carlos is crying

If you work on generative models that create hyperrealistic photos or videos of people, and you are not scared shitless of what you’re working on, I do not understand you. My humanity can’t connect to your humanity. In fact, the nihilism of your eagerness shakes me to my core.