A point that Neil Postman makes in Amusing Ourselves to Death is that our modern entertainment-based media can’t have a serious discussion when you have to cut to an irrelevant, peppy commercial in the next ten seconds.

Here’s an even more extreme example from a leading Ukrainian newspaper’s website:

The headline is talking about the US embassy in Kyiv and a nuclear threat right next to an ad for an automatic cat feeder. I guess the cat’s not going to feed itself after a nuclear blast, but really?

Besides the completely absurd mismatch of the ad and the headline, there are two other points about entertainment as news culture in this screenshot.

Why do we need a meaningless stock photo of an enormous American flag? It adds nothing to the story. To see how news could be, take a look at the text-only NPR site. It’s no frills, but there’s a gravitas there that stock photos and automatic cat feeders can’t impart.

The reason I haven’t translated the headline itself yet is that it’s a convoluted mess. It reads, “USA explains, why the embassy in Kyiv was closed: not because of the threat of a nuclear strike.” The last of the three lines in the screenshot reads “threat of a nuclear strike”; it’s only buried in the middle of the second line that you get the negation of this. I don’t think this is just bad editing. It’s intentionally dramatic.

A much more informative and less alarmist headline would have been, “US Embassy in Kyiv denies closure is due to nuclear strike rumors”. This has the added benefit of being shorter in both languages.

This isn’t a one off thing. Making everything into dramatic entertainment is so ubiquitous that’s hard to imagine a media environment without it.

One of the key antidote’s to the ills of the modern web that Jaron Lanier proposes is a return to individuals. He’s not talking about radical individualism; he means the writing and thought of an individual, with all of his or her personality and idiosyncrasies on full display. This contrasts with the nameless mashups who repackage generic “content” and memes.

Something nice about reading the thoughts of individuals is that you can easily find people with radically different experiences and views. Freya India is a young woman who writes about ubiquitous technology confronting girls and young women.

The introduction to her latest piece has some bits that resonated with me:

I find myself hard to place politically. I feel alienated by the progressive left. I feel disheartened by the commodification of everything. I have a conservative temperament, and think there is much from the past worth holding onto. But when I look at many conservatives today, all they seem to care about conserving is their own fame and follower counts. They care more about the culture war than their own character. Many fight for Western civilisation but few fight for their own civility. Plenty wish the world wasn’t so prideful or self-obsessed, but seem blind to their own vanity. A lot of talk about faith, little living it.

Yes, yes, and yes.

The MAGA movement is vulgar and base. I will never support it nor vote for its proponents. And tet I feel decreasing affinity towards the progressive left, and even the most pragmatic of centrists have lost their allure for me.

In the tech world, especially among the chronically online, perhaps the most shocking thing is to come out as apolitical. Among Western Buddhists, it’s unheard of to be a disengaged Buddhist.

I’m all for democracy, but I’ve come to stop believing it scales well. The more energy I invest in American and Ukrainian politics, the less I’m involved in my local community in Amsterdam. Although even that’s too big. How about being a good person and sharing my values through spending time with family, friends, neighbors, and coworkers?

I’ll quote Amod Lele again, who wrote the above academic article about disengaged Buddhism. He has a persuasive blog post critiquing the idea that’s come into vogue in progressive circles that you have to be vocally anti-X or you for whatever horrendous thing X is. Yes, you can be not racist is best read in full, but I’ll give a couple of meaningful excerpts:

Therefore, by Kendi’s logic, he and I are “allowing” the war in Sudan to “persevere” – and we are therefore supporters of that war. We are not confronting the persecution of Rohingya refugees in Burma; therefore, we are allowing it to persevere, and we are therefore supporters of that persecution. We are not part of any of these solutions – and therefore, by Kendi’s “no safe space” logic, we are part of all of these problems. One must be a part of the solution to any and all problems in the world, including climate change, gun violence, famine, emerging diseases, biodiversity loss, nuclear proliferation, desertification, AIDS, cyberbullying, sexual harassment, human trafficking, terrorism, inflation, water scarcity, peak oil, cancer, heart disease, traffic accidents, the teen mental health crisis, soil erosion, acid rain, and the Great Pacific Garbage Patch – or else one is a part of each of them. For one who does not confront them allows them to persevere, and by that inaction supports them.

And the conclusion:

Because of course we can’t actually be working to solve every possible problem the world has. There are people who try to do so: they’re called burnouts. If one is to be an effective activist for the causes one cares about most, one must be active in one’s support of those specific causes. One must focus, one must pick one’s battles. An anti-racist activist can be against climate change and nuclear proliferation and Putin’s invasion of Ukraine, but if she tries to confront all of those different issues, she will weaken her own anti-racist activism.

I don’t think this goes far enough. The trendy term “compassion fatigue” is a real thing, I suppose. But there’s an underlying assumption that I disagree with. We don’t, nor can we have perfect knowledge about that long laundry list of all the world’s ills. Most of those issues flat out don’t have a single right answer, and the oversimplification of every global problem to a solution that neatly fits into an Instagram story is, in fact, part of the very problem.

I like the general ideas on the YouTube channel Not Just Bikes, and Jason Slaughter, the owner of channel, has probably done more than anyone else to popularize the ideas behind Dutch transportation engineering.

His latest video on autonomous vehicles is the summary of years of work and one of the best attacks on the tech-utopian ideas underlying the autonous vehicle movement.

The video is long, but it’s really worth watching whole thing. Enjoy!

I’m fascinated by the idea that whales are an advanced civilization right in front of us that we have haven’t given much thought to communicating with. Our idea of aliens has been shaped by Star Trek, and we think that we’ll happen upon some green creatures that conveniently speak fluent English.

There’s increasing hope that we’ll be able to understand whale speech, and this short podcast with one of the professors leading the effort is worth a listen if you’re interested in this sort of thing. Sperm whale vocalizations are like clicks rather than the more familiar whale sounds that have become favorite ambient noise tracks. It’s not exactly soothing background music, but interesting to listen to this clip.

Going back to my reading of Jarod Lanier, I think he’d caution against the whole hyped up title of the podcast that boldly claims we’re using AI to communicate with whales. To quote from his piece There is no A.I.:

A program like OpenAI’s GPT-4, which can write sentences to order, is something like a version of Wikipedia that includes much more data, mashed together using statistics. Programs that create images to order are something like a version of online image search, but with a system for combining the pictures. In both cases, it’s people who have written the text and furnished the images. The new programs mash up work done by human minds. What’s innovative is that the mashup process has become guided and constrained, so that the results are usable and often striking. This is a significant achievement and worth celebrating—but it can be thought of as illuminating previously hidden concordances between human creations, rather than as the invention of a new mind.

This is no way undermines the technological achievements behind an LLM. It’s changing the accent. Instead of a futuristic machine magically solving problems, the work of thousands of humans is being compared by a fancy calculator to make guesses how other humans and possibly non-humans communicate.

I’ve started to get more interested in the thought of Jaron Lanier. What My Musical Instruments Have Taught Me is a short look at some of the points he originally wrote about in You Are Not a Gadget.

Music operates on a plane separate from literature, and a lot of information about it isn’t written down. Most of the world’s compositions were never notated, and what was written down is often minimal; although scores do exist for very old Chinese music—some of the oldest are for the noble guqin, a kind of zither—they amount to mnemonic devices, lists of strokes and playing positions. The earliest European scores are similar, with lists of notes. What we now call “early music” is largely a modern stylistic invention.

Western historiography excels at things that fit into the modern Western paradigm of writing, data, and computation. Music is a prime example of something that doesn’t fit into that mold. Meditation, spirituality, and religious practice are even harder nuts to crack.

What frustrates me is not that we don’t know many things and likely can’t know many things, it’s the lack of humility to assume that there’s nothing to be known if it doesn’t fit within the framework of Western knowledge.

The exquisite skills involved in making instruments can seem to hover just beyond the edge of scientific understanding, and can easily be lost when war, plague, and famine break the chains linking masters and apprentices. And yet the traditions of a lost musical culture can sometimes be revived.

And these oral traditions are exceedingly fragile and easy to lose forever. What I think is also often overlooked is that reconstructions based on written fragments are still fundamentally different than the original thing.

Changing course slightly, there’s a beautiful commentary on how true luxury comes from the from the physical over the digital:

The deeper difference is that computer models are made of abstractions—letters, pixels, files—while acoustic instruments are made of material. The wood in an oud or a violin reflects an old forest, the bodies who played it, and many other things, but in an intrinsic, organic way, transcending abstractions. Physicality got a bad rap in the past. It used to be that the physical was contrasted with the spiritual. But now that we have information technologies, we can see that materiality is mystical. A digital object can be described, while an acoustic one always remains a step beyond us.

And it’s the imperfections of the physical world that make it so much more beautiful than the cold sameness of the digital world:

Much of the music we enjoy today makes use of audio loops, by means of which a note can be repeated with absolute precision. Because of my work with computers, I had early access to looping tools, and I was able to play around with loops earlier than most musicians. At first, the techniques didn’t speak to me; music is about change, I thought, while loops are about artificially preventing change. When so-called minimalist composers—Philip Glass, Terry Riley—ask musicians to play the same phrases repeatedly, what emerges from this technique isn’t repetition but an exquisite awareness of change: using a traditional, physical instrument, each repetition reflects your breath, your pulse, the weather, the audience, the light, bringing subtlety into consciousness.