I’ve been pretty under the weather since getting back to Amsterdam, feverish and too tired to do anything that involves much thinking, which means it’s Reddit time. I normally don’t spend much time there or any other social media, but when my brain is basically melting, looking at aquariums is kind of relaxing.

One thing I’ve noticed is that more and more people start threads as if they’re asking chatGPT something, not with the language you’d normally use when talking to fellow human hobbyists.

I wrote a long, rambling blog post in 2018 (eons ago in internet time!) about how anthropomorphized chatbots were causing people to be rude. Skip the the the post, and read a few quotes:

Plenty of research has begun to look at how technology is affecting our attention spans, precious little is looking at how human-bot interaction is affecting human-human relationships.

I think bots have their place. If I can resolve something in thirty seconds rather than waiting on hold for an hour, fine. I’m not even against mass emails and have purposefully signed up for plenty of them because I want to hear about products from companies I like.

My quibble is with labelling. Tell me that I’m talking to a bot and do something to de-humanize the experience. Give the bot a non-human name and Jetsons style avatar. Don’t creepily personalize mass emails.

And now in 2024, this is only worse. Are posts on Reddit humans who are now copying chatGPT’s style or bots using LLMs?

And unrelated, I think this thread about a person forced to leave a flight because of a political t-shirt sums up American culture in 2024:

• Everything, including t-shirts, has to be political. I don’t think I’ve ever seen a political t-shirt in Europe.
• The headline has some fake technical sounding word that Americans love, “deplaned”. We have perfectly acceptable verbs such as kicked off, removed, forced off.
• The flight attendant in question was on an absolutely wild power trip, which seems par for the course for anyone with the slightest bit of power in the US.
• People are absolutely gleeful at the prospect of the flight attendant having his life ruined.
• People are also deeply concerned about a big corporation’s image and profits.

It’s all just stuff that I don’t understand.

Inspired by recent museum visits I’ve been thinking about wide, superficial knowledge vs. in-depth knowledge of far fewer areas. I’ve generally found the massive collections but lack of deep, contextual story-telling museums (MoMA, Musical Instrument Museum) to be wanting. I don’t walk away with much. Conversely, the Asia Society and Met were power experiences that I’ll remember for years to come.

I’ve been noticing the same thing lately with journalism. I’ve grown less interested in reading The Economist, which offers a high-quality look at everything. Instead, I’ve been reading long essays from the New Yorker, often an hour-long read each, once a week or so.

Here are three that I’ve recently read and recommend:

1. Russia’s Espionage War in the Arctic: this long, harrowing read shows just how deep Russia’s expansionist agenda runs. Ukraine is just the beginning, and we’re in for a long few decades ahead of us. You can also forget about just replacing the bad tsar Putin with the good tsar Navalny Yashin; this is something deeply embedded in the culture.
2. Silicon Valley, the New Lobbying Monster. Even though I follow tech news, I had no idea just how terrible some of the things big tech companies do in politics are. It’s a chilling read.
3. When the Arctic Melts is not your typical global warming jeremiad. Instead, it’s a look at many of the complex feedback loops that we barely understand and an admission that we really know far less than we think we do. Despite being light on optimism, there is a sense that humanity will figure out what to do and get on with life in some form even in the worst case scenarios.

It’s still nice to spend a few minutes every few days finding out what big events have happened in the world, but there’s a real joy in giving myself some time to really dig into a New Yorker essay.

Ven. Sujato has some interesting thoughts on technology in his essay ‌ Tech is the past—and it’s burying us in it:

We’ve become so conditioned to thinking of the future in terms of tech that we have lost the capacity to imagine any other kind of future. I grew up on sci-fi, which was full of space lasers and FTL, all operating in 17th century ideas of “empire” and “colonies”

The reason why is worth considering, and I would take it a step further and say it’s flawed to speak of computer and human memory with the same word:

There’s something in tech, I think, that enshrines the past in ways beneath our consciousness. Perhaps it’s the concept of “memory”. In humans, “memory” is a creative process, where the past is re-enlivened with emotion and purpose, but also with randomness and newness; each act of remembering is unique. In a computer, “memory” is something fixed. A photo is always the same. the words we say are stuck there in black and white. The past is not a vaguely receding ocean of memories slowly merging into the unknowable, but crisp sharp images, as present as the present.

People get hauled over the coals for something they said on social media 6 years ago. There it is, as fresh and as something they said yesterday.

The Buddhist concept of anattā, often translated as a “not self”, is far simpler than the sort of metaphysical woo that gets lumped in with it. Everything is more of an ongoing process, both shaping and being shaped by the present. And thus human memory isn’t something that’s absolute, but shaped by the present.

Try it right now. Imagine a tomorrow where tech is not the center of things. Imagine a future where what evolves is humanity. Where we have better societies, better politics. Where human consciousness is more free, more open, more wise. Where we indulge in the creative possibilities of the human mind. Where tech, if we allow it to exist, serves humanity. Imagine a world with less, not more.

Star Trek sort went there. When Asimov couldn’t figure out how to end Foundation, he went there. Both are flawed. Dune might actually fit the bill since there was a conscious choice to ban computers.

Maybe I’m drawing a blank because this is further outside of my favored sub-genres of sci-fi and fantasy, but I can’t think of a lot of fiction that imagines this sort of future of moderate de-growth, the great wealth of humanity is used to ensure there are no starving children, but it’s also not some weird utopia.

After our whirlwind stop in New York, we’ve made it to Arizona. I didn’t expect it to still be over 40 degrees (or triple digits at they say here). For the 15 years or so since I’ve left, I’ve made it a point visit in the winter. I naively packed a light sweatshirt thinking that October would be cooler.

As we were on an early-morning walk, the conversation turned to why so many Americans think the idea of colonizing Mars is self-evident. It’s easy to forget that pre-Twitter, Musk and Muskian ideas were widely respected across partisan lines. Much like a museum often tells more about the culture of the curators than culture that produced the collection, hence my thoughts on MoMA, literature is way to look at the culture which produced it rather than just the product itself.

Everything in Arizona is artificial. Everything. When it’s this hot people hide in the air-conditioned homes much of the day and only leave to air-conditioned offices and shopping centers in their air-conditioned cars. And thus the idea of living on Mars isn’t categorically different. You’re colonizing a completely inhospitable environment and building a type of civilization that simply doesn’t belong. Eventually the cheap energy and water will run out. It’s a civilization living on artificial life support.

Nearly the entire American West is clinging to this sort of life support in one form or another. If life on earth is essentially a technological enterprise in a hostile environment, what’s the difference between the earth, moon, mars, and further afield?

Azimov was famously fond of underground spaces, and this fascination of life going on despite an inhospitable environment permeates much of his work. The unmooring of life from its natural habitat is so engrained in American culture that that other science fiction writers and popular thinkers don’t question it. And there’s still this deep sense, albeit more hiddne these days, of winning the West: the ultimate victory and goodness of settler colonialism. There will be hitches and struggles, but the good guys will prevail and tame Mars. We’ve just replaced injuns with engineering problems and solar radiation.

Stanisław Lem is a stark contrast, and I would guess his view of technology comes from growing up in a society where people weren’t that far removed from living off of the land with rather little technological assistance. Instead technology was something dark. It was the killing machines of two world wars. The meeting of cultures was mostly non-understanding and killing.

I want to live in the world of American optimism and rocket ships, but it’s hard to see Lem’s view of humanity as flawed.

Oddly enough the MoMA ended up being one of the most disappointing museums I’ve been to. Perhaps my expectations were simply too high. On the other hand, I think the MoMA says far more about American culture and the American approach to museums than the collection itself.

It was way too crowded. I figured the whole point of advanced online booking was to limit the number of visitors, and this is why even the most popular Dutch museums aren’t completely packed to gills. The flip side is that you have to book anywhere from days to months in advance at popular exhibitions in Holland.

There was no story. Especially the temporary exhibitions at the Rijksmuseum and Van Gogh Museum do an amazing job at explaining the context of the art and giving a wider view of how it influenced other artists and society.

For me, a good exhibition is about having some sort of deep connection to what’s being displayed. In that sense, the overall experience is far more important than seeing a couple of big name pieces. Quality over quantity. The Van Gogh Museum’s exhibition about the last three months of Van Gogh’s life was profoundly emotional, drawing on letters, photographs of where he was staying, and showing his how descent into melancholy was visible through his art. Seeing The Starry Night at MoMA was impressive, but it simply didn’t carry the emotional, even spiritual weight of a well organized exhibition of pieces that aren’t household names.

So in that sense, MoMA felt like a disjointed list of greatest hits rather than a curated collection with each piece building on the others. Yes, I know I’m making a wildly sweeping generalization, but that’s the key difference to much of American vs. Northern European culture. The Americans like a few big name, power pieces. The Europeans prefer curation and a larger narrative. Individualism vs. a collective culture.

I couldn’t shake the feeling that I had many years ago at the Hermitage in Saint Petersburg. The Russian elite tried to buy their way to Europeaness with paintings, operas, and high-brow culture without ever really becoming European. American art snobs give off a similar air, whom I picture rattling off some list of important paintings they’ve seen but never talking about how an artist has moved them and inspired something in their lives.