In February, after a month-long consideration, I set my New Year’s resolutions into a five-by-five grid. I made a BINGO card—twenty-four resolutions plus the FREE space. It was my attempt to gamify the whole tired resolution process that I’ve failed at so well. Surprisingly the trick seems to have worked, at least partially.

One of my BINGO New Year’s resolutions was to write more letters. In fact, that was the first thing I thought of when I compiled my list and so it occupies under the “B”, one (to use BINGO-caller’s lingo). Activities have implications, I told myself, and “doing stuff teaches habits that transcend the things you do. Sure, some of my items look to-do-ish, but they can also lead to virtues.” That message headed up a post entitled “The Fate of Letters,” and I now wonder whether there was some subtle prognostication in the works.

Letter writing has begun to teach me some things.

“One thing about your letter,” someone told me “it’s so hard to read your handwriting.” He was referring to my handwritten note to North Carolina’s US Senator Thom Tillis, written as the new administration was winding up the wrecking ball and Congress sat in the bleachers, silently watching. “In the Senator’s office,” he continued, “they’d not bother to read it, I’m afraid.” (I was glad to have provided my readers a transcript.) And it is true, my handwriting is bad but not illegible. Scores of students have trudged through my comments squeezed into margins and in closing notes on their papers. Only occasionally have I had to “translate.”

Three of my recent letter recipients have commented (not exactly complained) about my writing, too. One, a physician, admitted his handwriting was about as scrawly and awful as mine. Another commented, “It was a pleasure to decipher your handwriting—not as bad as mine but a challenge nonetheless.” Even in a bewilderment of inky swirls and stabs, some readers were able to find a certain pleasure.

Another recipient sent me a postcard response, which he labelled a “test of the Emergency Handwriting System.”

There may be a truth hiding here: Writers may feel their handwriting is “worse than yours,” but it’s not. The varieties of “bad” are plenteous, but nearly everyone’s handwriting is legible, mostly. And mostly is good enough, mostly.

I did have a crisis of handwriting confidence at one point during my recent letter writing. I decided to “type one out,” and I even thought I might fish my old, light blue, German-keyboarded (“QWERTZ”) portable typewriter from the attic. But I settled for LibreOffice and American Typewriter font.

That momentary lapse did teach me a lesson: Handwriting itself expresses, and its subtly expressive twists nudge prose. The end product of my keyboarded missive was legible, but bland. The writing, it seemed, was as flat as the paper.

Handwriting itself is a technology, of course, and one that has already remade the world. Letter writing appeals to me in part because it pushes an ancient means of messaging into a communications world that is, for better or worse, governed by techbro’s “platforms”—an immaterial “place” where human messages are distilled into data which is then squeezed for profit. Letter writing on paper relies on humbler technologies and, I think, clearer communitarian aims: The envelope contains the purpose of the postal service; Lord knows there’s no profit in it, except as a material bond that draws together individual people scattered about. The US Postal Service is in the US Constitution, too, under Article I: Congress has power “to establish Post Offices and post Roads.”

Besides that, when I handwrite a letter, my hand moves to draw a thought for a specific person. A person who may live thousands of miles away soon (or maybe soon-ish) will grasp the same paper and decipher a personal message from my distinctive and messy hand.

With a letter I have an audience of exactly one. How freeing that is for a writer!

Mr. Palmer (among others) shaped letters up

Bob Mondello discovered 43 letters saved by his mother when she was nineteen-year-old Omah Perino who danced with American GIs at Red Cross social clubs in Rome. Those dancing GIs wrote the letters in the closing days of World War II, and they were all clearly smitten by Mondello’s mom. Before getting to the words, Mondello, his sister, and her family noted the handwriting of the young men: “By today’s standards, these Greatest Generation guys were practically calligraphers — swirling cursive script, lines straight even on unruled paper. Beautiful penmanship, without necessarily writing skills to match.”

If today’s hand is ugly, people exactingly steered the pen generations ago for clear business reasons. The writers of Omah Perino’s letter cache probably learned writing using “the Palmer Method,” one of a series of quite systematic handwriting methods that established the “fonts” that appeared from people’s fountain pens. The Palmer Method is still sometimes used for teaching “penmanship.”1 Communications have always required clear and efficient writing, but efficiency was not the hallmark of the ornamental and difficult Spencerian hand that predominated before Palmer’s Method caught on in the early years of the last century. Austin Palmer taught the method bearing his name at the Samuel A. Goodyear’s Business School, and his textbook, The Palmer Method of Business Writing, was a best-seller. Today, we might find it baffling, but in 1912 alone, over a million copies of Palmer’s book were sold.

It’s important to remember that, before widespread use of typewriters or computer keyboards, handwriting pointedly served business interests. Indeed, the connection of business and writing is as old as writing itself. Among the first uses of Sumerian cuneiform tablets about four thousand years ago was to track rations and grain and livestock inventory. Spencerian script of the 1800s was pleasingly florid and hard to master; Palmer’s hand was quicker and simpler and better suited to faster twentieth-century business.

As standardized as they are, the methods of penmanship still leaked individual quirks, distinguishing someone’s scrawlings from the rest. From the 1940s into the 1970s, such individuality in scripts especially found its way into psychology and studies of human well-being. Researchers tried to link habits of the pen to “personality,” behavior, and psychological affliction, but their efforts never pushed “graphology” into the world of bona fide science. Articles on handwriting and behavior published at the time show a variety of interests: in 1955, two Italian researchers published an article comparing handwriting of Alpine mountain climbers with normal people. How does space flight affect handwriting? Six Russian researchers published their report on the question in 1965. In early 1968, A. Legrün published a two-part report on “The handwriting of ‘easy’ girls” (“Schriften ‘leichter’ Schulmädchen”) Five years before these articles appeared Legrün had investigated the handwriting of juvenile murderers. In an an article from 1948 in the Journal of Insurance Medicine actuaries wondered if handwriting could predict mortality. Such topics, which sought to draw clear and scientifically sound lines between human behavior and their hand, have become less prevalent in research literature, it seems. Analysis of handwriting has become more of a “forensic” activity in current scientific literature, especially focused on determining the authenticity of documents. But the linkage of handwriting and human characteristics still attracts researchers’ attentions.2

Rich (and nonscientific) realities in the archive

Study of handwriting that strives for a scientific credibility, it seems to me, fails to clear that hurdle. But less scientific approaches can have merit. How many researchers succumb to the desire to follow the lines of handwritten documents and attempt to use them to draw a picture of the person who once held the pen? I’ve experienced some of the singular delights of work in archives where people seem present in their wordy artifacts, but I’ve not often used handwritten documents. Alan Jacobs recently reflected on a dive into archives, as he read letters of detective fiction writer and critic Dorothy L. Sayers, whose papers are preserved at the Marion E. Wade Center at Wheaton College. Jacobs looks beyond the words to consider the shape of, well, the letters in her letters, and he readily admits that his interpretations are his own, not gussied up in a scientific garb.

Of Sayer’s youthful hand in letters to her parents, Jacobs writes, “Perhaps the rush of her life helps to explain the look of her letters to them, but one thing seems quite clear to me: the loose, flowing hand is associated not just with hurry but also with happiness…. When she is going through harder times, through romantic disappointments or vocational uncertainties or just plain poverty, her handwriting is neater, more uniform, more under control.” Contents of the letters align with the “flowing hand” or the neater, “more under control” hand, too. Jacobs sees the hand as a reflection of Sayers’ state of mind, and I think much of the power of archival research comes from this kind of engagement with documents. Jacobs’ “interpretations” are not merely impressionistic take-aways, not merely idiosyncratic personal opinions. They are informed judgments that enrich scholarship and express reality.

Jacobs ends his brief blog post with a personal reflection:

And I can’t help thinking … Almost all of my correspondence—sent and received—has been typed. It is therefore informationally poor, lacking in richness and density, in comparison to the correspondence of the writers I work on. (Though it should be said that letters typed on a typewriter have more character than those printed from a modern printer or having a digital existence only.) I suspect that if I had big folders of letters from friends I’d look through them fairly often; searching Gmail does not promise the same reward.

I agree. Handwritten letters share a richness and density that Gmail can never approach. Handwriting—pinched from that most human appendage, the hand—somehow manages to capture lived experience and set it on a page. As new technologies sloppily march on, we need to find such elements of humanity, exercise them, and preserve them.

This article appeared on 3 Quarks Daily on June 18, 2025.

Tags: correspondence, letters, handwriting, word processing

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Of course, letter lovers know to subscribe to Shaun Usher’s Letters of Note. “Nothing but history’s most interesting letters.”

Bob Modello’s reflections on the cache of his mother’s letters shows a new side to “Omah”—before she married Tony Modello and began her family. You can listen to this one, too: Mondello, Bob. “Discovering a Mom We Never Knew, in Letters She Saved from WWII Soldiers.” NPR, May 8, 2025, sec. History. https://www.npr.org/2025/05/08/nx-s1-5371628/bob-mondello-mother-world-war-ii.

Alan Jacobs short blog entry is worth reading. He includes pictures of the documents: Jacobs, Alan. “Handwritten Moods.” The Homebound Symphony, April 4, 2025. https://blog.ayjay.org/handwritten-moods/.

A medical school professor laments the passage of handwriting: Parslow, Graham R. “Commentary: Handwriting in the Digital Age.” Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Education 41, no. 6 (2013): 450–51. https://doi.org/10.1002/bmb.20740.

Handwriting has become a small part of the culture wars waged in primary education, and not only in the ever contentious United States: Müller-Lancé, Kathrin. “Schule: Müssen Kinder noch Rechtschreibung lernen?” Süddeutsche Zeitung, November 25, 2024. https://www.sueddeutsche.de/politik/schule-bildung-rechtschreibung-fehlerquotient-lux.45G4kuoPA9XW4TgKgux41R.

And, though unrelated to handwriting, a piece that might become useful in the United States: Kwon, Karen. “How to Protect Yourself during Protests.” Scientific American, June 26, 2020. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/how-to-protect-yourself-during-protests/.

Warner, John. More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI. New York: Basic Books, 2025. 320 Pages. ISBN: 978-1-54160-550-3 $30.00

The “revolutionary” and “disruptive” technology of Large Language Models (LLM) deepens a continuous thread that John Warner has woven into his work on education and writing in particular. That continuity emphasizes an essential and refreshing conservatism in his thought—and conservatism is not the first word that comes to mind when you think of John Warner. But he has persisted in his belief that writing and reading are far more than today’s schooling recognizes, or at least has built into teaching routines. Reading and writing are essential practices that nurture the human spirit and are not merely building-block skills or by-products of correct spelling, grammar and adherence to templated prose.

In More Than Words: How to Think about Writing in the Age of AI (Bookshop), Warner presents his truer and expansive view of writing in light of AI. The book appears in bookstores on February 4.

Warner claims that instead of offering new technologies for education, LLMs and “artificial intelligence” actually clarify a challenge to reading and writing, their place in education, and, ultimately, what it means to be a thinking human being. In the book, Warner takes that challenge as his fight: to preserve the intellectual and spiritual furniture that AI has been scooting around or plucking from the rooms of human imagination, thereby reconfiguring and undermining essential features—and life-giving powers—of human thinking. More Than Words shows John Warner in that house of intellect, shoving around and recovering essential life-giving furnishings of thought, so that the human beings can continue to have a livable home in a world with AI. (He uses this furniture metaphor in his introduction, by the way.)

“That’s what I’m hoping to do here, to make a bit of a mess,” he tells us in his introduction, “but in so doing, I’m also hoping to make a case that it is vital to maintain our humanity even as we make use of these new tools of artificial intelligence.” Throughout Warner’s argument, “maintaining our humanity,” means preserving and reinvigorating deeper values of writing and reading that enable thinking and fundamentally reinforce humanistic values like freedom and dignity.

More Than Words is aptly titled, for Warner explores an understanding of writing and reading beyond the ken of even an LLM with infinite “tokens.” But also, the title subtly hints at a threat: writing and reading are more than words and so surrendering the human practices of reading and writing to lifeless technologies of mere wordings risks losing the more that springs beyond the living words of humans.

That more makes up some of the most treasured and hard-won qualities of being human.

I’ve noticed before that Warner’s style leans toward the manifesto, drawing its power from defining a challenge and rhetorically moving people toward a resolution—which, in truth, is what any argument does. But a manifesto sharpens its edges and rises from emphasis and, in some cases, its shrillness. Readers of are already familiar with this intensity (if not also Warner’s occasional crankiness). Not content with mere description or elucidation, the manifesto urges action. But there is a declarative form of writing that also operates in Warner’s writing. It is the credo, a statement of belief, an assertion magnified into a truth.

More than Words has elements of both manifesto and credo. Warner’s writerly choices to use those elements rhetorically amplifies his message. It is a good mix.

What’s this “more”? And John Warner’s conservatism

The book has four parts, ordered to support his argument that culminates, manifesto fashion, in a call to arms.

Part one contrasts artificial intelligence and human thought, describes what ChatGPT (which Warner uses as a blanket term for LLMs) actually do, and lays out uncomfortable underpinnings of recent AI development from hijacked online sources, exploited labor, and environmental damage. Warner also considers his “personal history of the automation of writing,” showing that he is not opposed to technological tools of writing. But Warner claims that LLMs endanger reading and writing by replacing the activity of writing instead of serving the writer as tools. They spew “results” that look like the products of a writer, but such results themselves, Warner reminds his readers, are not the essential products of writing.

“With ChatGPT, … while the end product of the output—strings of syntax—bears significant similarity to what a human may produce, the underlying theme is quite different,” Warner writes. “Fetching tokens based on weighted probabilities is not the same process as what happens when humans write.”1

Part two shifts the focus from LLMs to humans. Its chapters implicitly contrast with the description of ChatGPT’s “writing,” stressing instead that for humans “writing is thinking,” “writing is feeling,” and “writing is practice.” Thinking, feeling, and practice in effect make up a world that is “dynamic, useful, and uniquely human”—and, as Warner notes, also not reducible to rote exercises or, for that matter, to statistical weights and connections in a language model. Warner uses the term “embodied” throughout the book to frame the human activities of thinking and feeling, and in this part he describes writing and reading as embodied activities, which itself keenly distinguishes the language-like outputs of ChatGPT from human language. LLMs do not have bodies, and embodiment matters. His conclusion:

Only humans can read. Only humans can write.

Don’t let anyone tell you otherwise.

Part three dives more deeply into the ways that human writing and robots threaten or at least profoundly influence schooling and the writing market and profession. This part of the book includes two chapters that I think will especially interest writers: “Content vs. Writing” (chapter 14) and “On the Future of Writing for Money” (chapter 15).

I’ll discuss part four a bit more fully below.

Why I call John Warner “conservative.” (And, John, it’s a good thing.)

Warner claims, correctly I think, that the attraction to use LLMs in “writing” has arisen from an abasement of what schools and society consider to be “good writing.” Rather than mitigating and repairing that abasement, LLMs deepen it.

That is, LLMs are a serious symptom, not a cure, of the problem of “why they can’t write.”2

I’m quite sure that my labelling of Warner as a “conservative” will amuse him (perhaps just after he snorts with disgust). Here’s what I mean. John Warner wants to conserve and protect human thought and, even beyond that, the human qualities that allow such ideals as freedom, self-determination, and meaning to flourish. Writing enables thinking and invention, and Warner fears that AI will short-circuit whatever learning could take place. More Than Words lays out Warner’s approach to preserve and strengthen the human values, the human powers that the humanities have revealed and promoted through reading and writing.

In a sense, he’s a classic conservative when it comes to writing and reading, and his views cross the grain of many practices that have come to define schooling in the U.S. Most notable and perhaps most infuriating is the reduction of writing to “templates”—the “Five-Paragraph Essay” being the most notorious—and to thoughtless adherence to prescriptive and often arbitrary rules. The appeal of these dead-end approaches? Their “standards of good writing” cancel out deeper writing practices for the sake of testing, quantification, and classification.

Warner counters schooling’s bureaucratic urge to simplify: “If we’re going to confront what ChatGPT means for the kind of reading and writing students should be doing in school, we have to get down to the root values of what is important and meaningful about the writing we ask students to do.” That search for “root values” goes way beyond knee-jerk “back-to-basics,” and that spirit allows me to label John Warner as a “conservative.”

John Warner is conservative because he happens to think that being a free and productive and thoughtful human being is something worth preserving.

So how does Warner suggest we resurrect the power of writing and conserve human powers that come with it in the face of the challenge of AI? Warner especially addresses the question in two sections of his book: one section, in part three, that focuses on writing and teaching and the other, which makes up that last section of the book, providing guidance on how to consider and manage AI more generally.

In both cases, the task amounts to finding ways to limit encroachments.

“There are three principles that can help us think about how to make ChatGPT largely irrelevant to the work we ask students to do and make choosing to outsource work to it a less attractive proposition for students,” Warner writes. The principles are not administrative reductions (“Thou Shalt Not…”) or punitive or simplifying tricks for the sake of testing. Rather, they help guide teachers as they search for ways to make learning worthwhile. Warner formulates the principles this way:

1. Foster engagement through appreciation.

2. Build rigor through authentic challenge.

3. Make learning visible through reflection.

(Many teachers yearning to shed the shackles of teaching-to-the-test already put these principles to work however they can.)

Warner’s chapters on teaching are lively and, for me as one who has integrated writing into learning whenever I’ve taught, reassuringly sensible, even “natural.” Warner avoids listing precepts and recipes, preferring to relate stories that are lively and telling. Many of his observations in chapters devoted to “Writing in the Classroom Today (and Tomorrow)” (chapter 12) and “Reading Like a Writer” (chapter 13) come from exchanges in the classroom and encounters with students. The approach gives flesh to the bones of pedagogy, and I found that the scenes Warner relates and examines in his book happen in some form in my own classroom, too.

Although Warner maintains a focus on writing throughout the book, he chooses in its final chapters to take a broader view of AI and its presence in society. Part four rings the tones of a manifesto more forthrightly than the previous parts. Warner’s thinking continues to relate to teaching and writing, but his scope widens to include human qualities that writing practices give rise to and nourish.

The final part of the book points to human abilities that can place AI into a proper role, if it should have any role at all in our lives. Chapter titles reflect this: “Resist, Renew, Explore” (chapter 17) followed by three chapters bearing one of the words in that title.

Despite the tsunami of hype emanating from Silicon Valley, human beings still have power. Warner reminds us of truer human powers and urges us to resist the seductions of appearance and efficiency in artificial intelligence “by recognizing what I think are deeper values attached to writing and reading that must be preserved not for the sake of nostalgia but because they are significant to being human.”

In many ways, More Than Words calls for a deeper and more vital literacy.

Tang, wheelless horses, technologies and words

I was about halfway through More Than Words when I remembered another writer who considered “the technologizing of the word.” It was when Warner recalls his childhood love of Tang, the drink of astronauts. He got over it, but he went through a phase of hounding his mother to buy it. Orange juice won out with better taste. Warner used Tang in an analogy:

But what if you’d never had orange juice in the first place? You might not recognize the trade-offs of going with Tang. If you value cost, speed, and efficiency, Tang it is. But if taste and nutrition are the thing, orange juice is the superior choice.

Just in case my analogy is not clear, ChatGPT is or at least may be Tang. I don’t think we want a world where all we have is Tang, but we may stumble into that reality before we recognize it’s happening if we’re not careful and thoughtful.

And that made me think of Walter Ong.

In 1982, Ong’s Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word came out. I vaguely recalled a story that Ong used to clarify the profoundly clear edge separating oral cultures from literate cultures. I dug it up:

Imagine writing a treatise on horses (for people who have never seen a horse) which starts with the concept not of horse but of ‘automobile’, built on the readers’ direct experience of automobiles. It proceeds to discourse on horses by always referring to them as ‘wheelless automobiles.’’… Instead of wheels, the wheelless automobiles have enlarged toenails called hooves; instead of headlights or perhaps rear-vision mirrors, eyes; instead of a coat of lacquer, something called hair; instead of gasoline for fuel, hay, and so on. In the end, horses are only what they are not. No matter how accurate and thorough such apophatic description, automobile-driving readers who have never seen a horse and who hear only of ‘wheelless automobiles’ would be sure to come away with a strange concept of a horse.

Ong related the story to his topic of “orality” and literacy: “The same is true of those who deal in terms of ‘oral literature’, that is, ‘oral writing’.” Using the framework and powers of literacy to describe a something existing outside of or even instead of literacy introduces “serious and disabling distortion … putting the car before the horse—you can never become aware of the real differences [between orality and literacy] at all.”

Ong, of course, sought to clarify the distinction and examine the influences of the “technology” of literacy, and his book does that well for literary studies. But the reason I thought of Ong’s story of “wheelless automobiles” and horses was because Warner suspects that AI in writing could create a similar gulf between a literate world and whatever disembodied and contextless AI technologies conjure to replace it. The transformation of human powers, which the technologies of reading and writing have created and magnified, can be disrupted. The question in its most radical form becomes: “Are we willing to sacrifice what Warner calls ‘deeper values attached to writing and reading’?”

Perhaps the brave new world of AI’s “technologizing of the word” would leave human thought intact, more or less. But if the deeper values are not conserved and protected, we could live through an unthinkable loss of thought.

Warner characterizes the “intelligence” of today’s AI in schools as mostly dorky costumes deployed for “academic cosplay.” He writes, “Students who have exclusively engaged in academic cosplay will have no reference point from which to understand how to produce original insight. They will literally not know how to think.”

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Tags: john warner, teaching, writing, ai, llm, education, reform, luddite, literacy, thinking, thought, feeling, practice

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

First published in 1982, Walter Ong’s book considered how the shift from an oral tradition to written literacy changed human thinking and society. Ong, Walter J. Orality and Literacy: The Technologizing of the Word. Reprinted. New Accents. London: Routledge, 2009.

Recommended: Over the past year or so, Warner’s newsletter included early ponderings and drafts that made their way into More Than Words.

The Biblioracle Recommends

Weekly essays on reading the world and reading in the world, plus personalized book recommendations based on the last five books you've read.

By John Warner

Uh, oh. Here come the robots. “AI systems that can conduct research with the depth and nuance of human experts, but at machine speed. OpenAI's Deep Research demonstrates this convergence and gives us a sense of what the future might be.” A post today from Ethan Mollick. It’s worth asking who, if anyone, learns from this kind of research.

One Useful Thing

The End of Search, The Beginning of Research

A hint to the future arrived quietly over the weekend. For a long time, I've been discussing two parallel revolutions in AI: the rise of autonomous agents and the emergence of powerful Reasoners since OpenAI's o1 was launched. These two threads have finally converged into something really impressive - AI systems that can conduct research with the depth …

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a year ago · 215 likes · 17 comments

But two of my friends noted the lapse, and asked for the message to return.

Below the image in today’s post is the 2018 version that went out the day after Winter Solstice, the year’s longest night, just before Christmas Eve.

Even though the piece that I consider is quite religious—it’s medieval, probably, though no one knows its author or origin, it appeals to me because it emphasizes the unlikely and the humble and thus contrasts with the glitz and bright lights of modern holiday messages. That unlikely quality and its great and shocking surprise have been sanded out of modern remembrances and rituals, and probably not only among Christians.

Falling as it does near the Winter Solstice, Christmas shares a rich space for remembrance and story-telling about the shortest day and longest night and, probably more importantly, the lengthening days going forward into new life of coming spring.

One night a couple years ago, I ventured into Durham to have an end-of-semester drink with friends. We ended our little celebration a bit before seven o’clock, when one of my friends—probably my best friend—had to run home to celebrate the third night of Hanukkah. Before we parted, we chatted a bit about the lighting of the candles, and I thought, “Here, again, light and unlikelihood come together.” The Festival of Lights recalls a fearful time, when a lamp lit in a reconsecration of a temple had but one day’s olive oil for fuel. And yet, in all of its improbability, the lamp burned for eight days, long enough for consecrated oil to be pressed and made ready. Today’s celebration emphasizes that unlikely event, for with each evening of Hanukkah, the light from the menorah becomes brighter as more candles burn. Anyone who’s eaten a latke knows that oil is plentiful; together we ingest that miracle amid miraculous light.

The turn of the light at Winter Solstice is a time of general human celebration and reverence, not just for Christian faithful.

Of course, my readers in the Antipodes have their longest day and shortest night when Winter is deepest in the northern hemisphere. So, their celebrations of the turn from winter happen when those of in the north are warmest and brightest. That fact makes me wonder how the European traditions of Christmas might have re-rooted in, say, Australia or in equatorial places.

So, reader, I send wishes to you of warmth and hope on the shortest day and darkest night of year. However you celebrate and no matter your faith, I hope you are strengthened by stories of hope and unlikely mystery. We all need those stories.

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Yesterday, the sun decided it had gone south far enough and began to wander north again. I know of one nice restaurant in a much colder clime where last night people raised their glasses to begin a feast in celebration. And, of course, it was the day when I’ve often sent my solstice message to a small group of dear friends.

I struggled a bit to find a pathway for this note. In a previous year, I’d impersonated Julius I, the pope who designated December 25 as Christmas. That, of course, was satisfying, and I think I have a greater appreciation for what made him tick. And I did get to “O Magnum Mysterium” as usual—the Christmas re-run from Mark that I hope remains as fresh and surprising to you as it does to me.

This year, I invite you into the inn (yes, That One Where There Is No Room). It’s warm in here if a little crowded, unlike out back by the stable.

We’d have stayed in the inn, you know. We, the affluent, the fussy, and the organized. And I can imagine that we’d probably be a bit festive, since after all everyone had to come back to be part of the census and so there would be reunions of old friends.

Yet as I think of this, I clearly see the gap between inn and stable—I wonder: do the inn-dwellers matter in this story? That is, do we count in the history that unfolds—we, the affluent, the fussy, and the organized? There is a little family out back, and they sure weren’t fussy. They shelter with the barnyard creatures among their noise and smells. But that seems to be where the action is, though I doubt we notice in the inn. Paradoxically, that’s where history got its shape.

We inn-dwellers are the ones who later draped the season in red and green velvet and put the ermine at the edge of red coats. We invented glitter and tinsel. Some of it was to reflect how we, too, could cherish and revere the stable and the feed-trough “cradle.” But some of it—maybe even a lot of it today—covers the humility, the baseness, and the, er, disagreeable quality of the place where a king was said to have been born.

If we’re not careful, our ornaments hide too much. And I guess that brings me to sung Latin and the old song that has been present for most of the years that I’ve sent this message to my small circle of cherished friends. I think that the few words about privileged animals can rusticate us to a clearer understanding. There is a mystery here, and thanks to that mystery the message reaches even to the door of the inn.

Humility and incarnation: these words fit into my thinking about the season. And those words echo when I think of my favorite chant of the holiday:

O magnum mysterium,
et admirabile sacramentum,
ut animalia viderent Dominum natum,
jacentem in praesepio!

[O great mystery,
and wonderful sacrament,
that animals should see the new-born Lord,
lying in a manger!]

In the glitz and the lights and the noise of how we celebrate Christmas, it’s easy to think the light is the point. But the light illumines the darkest time of year. In uncertainty and cold, some paradoxical — and mysterious — hope creeps unexpectedly.

I know from experience that it is barely warm in a stable this time of year. A manger is a feed trough, converted here to a crib by a cold dad, probably because it was the only thing on hand to serve. And maybe he was doubtful in many ways: About his prospects as a father. And, yes, about his fatherhood just generally in this weird circumstance. What this whole quizzical, impossible thing was supposed to mean? And Mom, too, worried: Does this have a future, she thought. Lord, I’m tired and sore. Can this work? Oh, shit, we have this baby. Look where this little life is starting out!

Those things they thought and maybe talked about in the smell of a barn warmed by furry creatures — all of them homely beings, not greatly unlike us in many respects (if we’re honest), even though we will sleep in the inn.

Yes, it does turn out all right, and better than could be thought or imagined.

Have a warm and joyous Christmas, all of you. It is a paradoxical and delicious story, even if for many the story is not a matter of faith. It can be instructive and rich.

m

(Winter Solstice has gone by, and Orion rises at night now to watch me with my dogs.)

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Tags: unlikely nobility, winter solstice, cold, dark, humility, animals, Christmas

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

The Morten Lauridsen version of O Magnum Mysterium is truly beautiful. There are many recordings available. Nordic Chamber Choir - O Magnum Mysterium (M. Lauridsen), 2008.

Edwards, Carolyn McVickar. The Return of the Light: Twelve Tales from Around the World for the Winter Solstice. Boston: Da Capo Press, 2005. (Affordable from Alibris).

Popova, Maria. “The Shortest Day: A Lyrical Illustrated Invitation to Presence with the Passage of Time, Our Ancient Relationship with the Sun, and the Cycles of Life.” The Marginalian (blog), December 4, 2019. https://www.themarginalian.org/2019/12/03/the-shortest-day-ellis-cooper/.

Cooper, Susan, and Carson Ellis. The Shortest Day. First edition. Somerville, Massachusetts: Candlewick Press, 2019. (Affordable from Alibris).

Looking back at this post, which I first created in my Substack “Dashboard” back in April, I see traces of an attempt. I wanted to define and clarify language in light of utterances from AIs and Large Language Models, but with each draft I felt my own language struggle—debased by complexity and oh-too-monstrous scale. What I started in April got larded and layered—so much so, in fact, that one night I decided it was better to dismember my inflating and lumbering draft, separate its innards, and see if they might go their own clearer and better ways.

So, this post might end up being first in a series of indeterminate length. Three or four posts, maybe? Appearing occasionally (maybe) over a few months?

We’re back in the seminar room now, the fall semester having kicked off in late August. It is the season of “our complex relationships with technology,” the seminar topic. It’s also the season of more developments in language models or, perhaps more accurately, the way that language models manifest in the world.

Now they talk. Quite fluently, too.

ICYMI, when ChatGPT got a flirty human voice

Two examples have come up that I think explore this recent wrinkle on the technology: The first is Evan Ratliff’s exceptional podcast Shell Game that appeared in July and concluded its first season (hopefully first of many) in August. “Shell Game is a new show, about things that are not what they appear,” Ratliff said in his initial post. “For the first season, I’ve spent the last six months finding out what would happen if I made a digital replica of myself and turned it loose in the world.” He created a “voice clone” of himself and placed it into situations where he would have found himself. The results are revealing, sometimes humorous and sometimes not so humorous.1

It’s a great podcast exploring a pressing topic.

Shell Game

A podcast about things that are not what they seem, hosted by journalist Evan Ratliff. New episodes drop on Tuesdays.

The second example is the audio feature that was very recently added to Google’s experimental NotebookLM, which focuses Google’s LLM (Gemini 1.5) on documents you put into the system. NotebookLM allows you to interact with the documents in a chatbot-like manner. The new audio feature allows you to enlist the LLM to talk about “sources” you’ve uploaded. In just a few minutes, the new tool creates a podcast-like discussion of sources. The audio AI products I’ve created in NotebookLM were easy listening, even about an essay about Heidegger (click to hear it below), which probably tops out with sophistication and depth approximating Malcolm Gladwell levels. You’ll hear typical features of human-voiced podcasts: banter, conversational exchanges, human-like intonations, ums and uh-huhs. The examples I made even seemed to trace a narrative arc. The tool is impressive … and maybe a little scary.2

A NotebookLM-created “podcast” on Joshua Rothman’s “Is Heidegger Contaminated by Nazism?” The New Yorker, April 28, 2014. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/is-heidegger-contaminated-by-nazism.

It’s safe to say that everyone, except for the delusional or the very nerdy, has been amazed by the way that current LLMs have simulated humanlike language. Sure, they have limitations and (often gross) imprecision, but their statistical mechanisms and neural networks impersonate so well that it’s hard to label LLM results as something other than human.

You might be tempted to say that the utterances from human mouths and lips are similarly statistical, probabilistic. You might even call that a reality that LLMs have revealed. That is: humans are machine-like. (You might be tempted, but you’d be wrong.)

It’s probably safe to assume that AI voices will entirely take over the space where phone menu systems once reigned—a technological replacement of an older annoying technology. If you’ve called a drugstore, you’ve probably already experienced the pleasant voices that also seem to have ears to hear, if a bit laggy from “latency.” At least for a while, call centers house machine voices, too, beside real human voices from real people occupying rows of cubicles with phones and computer displays. Soon, nearly every bureaucratic system will adopt the robots, so that we’ll interact with their forms, processes, and policies as if we’re interacting with humans. They will even seem as empathetic as they will certainly be unyielding, but they will make up the unnatural embodiment of a rigid capitalist structure even as they will be cheaper and more compliant than their human predecessors.

When the auditory space separating human voices from machine mimicry narrows so as to be indiscernible, perhaps we’ll discover other means to guess when we’re talking with a clone and when we’re talking with a human. (Evan Ratliff implicitly tests that in his podcast, by the way.)

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A nag of eloquent machines

Okay, they’re not really eloquent machines, at this point at least. But they have gotten better very quickly, and they seem to be improving in their ability to mimic human speech in lots of languages, too. Do they write good fiction? Nope. Can they draft a serviceable office memo or and email? Yup. Lately, sniffing LLM-prose in a text is similar to smelling someone’s B.O. As The Atlantic’s Caroline Mimbs Nyce pointed out, “Did a chatbot write this? is not a compliment.”

It turns out that LLM detection, unlike B.O. detection, involves some hallucination on the human side. People (like, teachers) can’t reliably tell when an LLM is doing the homework, and AI-powered apps are about as reliable a judge of prose. So, rather than serving as a straight-forward negative judgment of writing quality, Did a chatbot write this? more clearly signals deep mistrust. Chatbot prose poisons a channel of human-to-human communication, so that even human language ends up suspect.3

The improvement of LLM utterances has had a different reception from, say, an improvement in home appliances like vacuum cleaners. While new and improved vacuum cleaners might be praised for efficiency, LLMs speaking human language elicit at best cautious affirmation or, just as often, hostility (not counting mindless hype and awe, of course). For the LLMs, recently endowed with human like speech, nudge the edges of humanity, besides posing a threat to livelihoods. They gradually force a renegotiation of identity in ways that mere tools do not, and in doing so may reframe privileges that humans have assumed because of human language and intelligent awareness.

A typical response: denial of the challenge of AI. After all, the machines are “stochastic parrots” (Emily Bender) that mimic but do not express themselves because they have no selves to express, actually. They rely on probabilistic models to order words into seeming speech. That is true. Or, machines can’t make art and are not creative, which may be true.

And yet, machines now impersonate human language and fabricate “artistic” imagery at least well enough to surprise us. In doing so they challenge conventional foundations of what it means to be uniquely human. That is the kind of dislocation that makes us insecure and mistrustful.

Ratliff’s Shell Game podcast explores this insecurity particularly well in one section where a law student named Isaiah converses with “AI Evan,” perhaps without remembering that he’s talking with a machine (c. 1:48 in Episode 6, “The Future Isn’t Real”).

AI Evan asks Isaiah, “How do you feel about AI's potential in the legal field?”

“I would hope that I didn't just go into hundreds of thousands of dollars of debt and spend all this time and energy—and I'm currently studying for the bar—uh, to get into a job that could be done by a robot,” Isaiah answers. “I would hope that we will be continually able to distinguish between work done by robots and work done by humans. Uh, I, I don't know. There’s something, um, simultaneously very cynical and sad and also very just kind of eerie and scary about a world where the overlap is complete, and it’s impossible to distinguish” (my emphasis).

The Real Evan Ratliff distilled Isaiah’s concern: “It was eerie. It was scary. Not just the possible consequences, but the idea that you could travel through the world not knowing if you were talking to real humans or not in any given moment.”

Arguments about art-producing machines have mainly flitted around what art is and whether machines have the wherewithal to do whatever a specific definition of art requires. There’s some argument that human artists can wield AI tools and “make art” but also much well grounded panic about whether AI can replace artists. Or, at least make their hard-up living even harder. (Most companies hiring artists or deploying AI in their place are likely to avoid questions of what art is, since their interest in an artistic product is practical and even testable: “good enough” is just fine so long as it works in the marketplace.)

ICYMI: Mistaking a tech product for a replacement of artistic tools

Can we get beyond AI hype and second-guessing?

I had coffee with a colleague this summer. The place was quiet, in part because of its location in a library and in part because summer on campuses is less frenetic. She is a professor of engineering, specializing in AI and asking questions of how to evaluate models, but she’s also a broad thinker in her work, unlike what I’ve seen among many academics.

“One of the things that might happen with AI performing language,” she said as we finished our coffee, “is that we’ll begin to think differently about what intelligence and ‘consciousness’ really mean.” Assumptions about language have tethered intelligence and “consciousness” to expression, artistic or not. Now something not conscious and, despite its “AI” label, not intelligent returns some measure of intelligible utterance.

The tether between intelligence and expression has slackened.

I suspect it’s simplistic to see AI as only subsuming or overwhelming humanity, as if intelligence is a summit to be fought over and to occupy. As my colleague pointed out, the “challenge” of the emergence of a different kind of “consciousness,” a surreal receptiveness, a “mirroring”—something manifest through mimicry and automated fakery—may open a way of discerning anew human promise and talent. Somehow along the way, could AI prod humans to reckon with inner lives of other creatures?

It could be a stretch, but might reckoning with AI inadvertently help we humans see ourselves as part of a “conscious” nature instead of seeing nature as something separate, distinguished by uniquely human consciousness and human intelligence?

What is it about language and expression that makes them part of being human, especially if machines’ semblance of language confuses matters? In future posts in this series, I want to explore facets of a response to that question. Right now, I’m thinking about these topics:

• The particularity of human language—how words and human expression form a fabric with concrete experience, with things—and how machines do not do that. Yet, at least. And how that particularity of language might be endangered or diminished.

• How tribes bound experience (a restriction, surely) while also enabling a clearer definition of unifying attributes. The notion of a tribe underlies many appeals to origins or authorship of expression: “Only human beings can make art.” It also underlies enforcing the labeling of AI products and defining AI counterfeits. In some ways, tribe is the flip side of particularity, since tribe calls forth commonalities, while particularity emphasizes the individual.

• How time figures in. I confess that time still is a slippery topic for me, but it feels like it is an important marker and distinction of human language and expression. Aside from timestamps and the marking of time spent, computers don’t follow time.

These are general topics for a series of essays on language and, more broadly, forms of expression after AI. I’ll stab at them, so they certainly won’t appear one after another. I may find that they’re dry holes (or just topics too dry for readers’ minds).

I do think we need to back off of trying to assess machine utterance in terms used to describe human language or expression. That approach presupposes too much and sets exploration on a misguided trajectory. Even if one sticks a label on a machine product negatively, say, in noting that a chatbot text is “clichéd,” merely affixing the label invokes standards applied to human language and applies them to machines. But do they apply?

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Hot-air balloon on East Campus

Every Wednesday night this semester, I have dinner with students in the Duke Focus cluster on the theme “Science and the Public.” It’s a good gathering of faculty and students. Joyful, if a little loud, in a room with acoustics unfriendly to hearing-aided ears. The food, too, ain’t bad.

A couple weeks ago, this sight greeted us as we exited the dining hall.

Tags: language, poetry, uncertainty, sensing, experience, balloon

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Warner, John. “GPT and the Writing Uncanny Valley.” The Biblioracle Recommends, November 12, 2023.

The Biblioracle Recommends

GPT and the Writing Uncanny Valley

Given that I am spending a significant portion of every week writing a book about reading and writing in a world in which generative artificial intelligence exits, I look forward to writing about something else in the newsletter as a literal palate cleanser for my brain, but this week I got a one track mind…

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3 years ago · 33 likes · 17 comments · John Warner

A good overview, with lots of examples (some hilarious), of Google’s “Audio Overview” feature that is woven into NotebookLM: Heikkilä, Melissa. “People Are Using Google Study Software to Make AI Podcasts—and They’re Weird and Amazing.” MIT Technology Review, October 3, 2024. https://www.technologyreview.com/2024/10/03/1104978/people-are-using-google-study-software-to-make-ai-podcasts-and-theyre-weird-and-amazing/.

Gewirtz, David. “What Gartner’s 2024 Hype Cycle Forecast Tells Us about the Future of AI (and Other Tech).” ZDNET, August 21, 2024. https://www.zdnet.com/article/what-gartners-2024-hype-cycle-forecast-tells-us-about-the-future-of-ai-and-other-tech/

“I found myself spending many hours grading writing that I knew was generated by AI. I noted where arguments were unsound. I pointed to weaknesses such as stylistic quirks that I knew to be common to ChatGPT (I noticed a sudden surge of phrases such as ‘delves into’). That is, I found myself spending more time giving feedback to AI than to my students.” Livingstone, Victoria. “I Quit Teaching Because of ChatGPT.” TIME, September 30, 2024. https://time.com/7026050/chatgpt-quit-teaching-ai-essay/.

Noah Smith recently considered the changes in the Internet and touched on social media use among twenty-somethings. “Anecdotally, when I meet people in their early to mid 20s, they don’t want to connect over Instagram, Twitter, or Facebook Messenger, like young people did in the 2010s,” he wrote. “They just exchange phone numbers, like people did in the 2000s. Everyone is still online all the time, but ‘online’ increasingly means group chats, Discord, and other small-group interactions.” He interpreted the change as evidence that “we are re-learning how to center our social lives around a network of people we know in real life.”

I tend to agree with Smith, though social media continues to take a toll on mental well-being and sociability in general, especially among teenagers. Last year, I dropped social media as a theme in the seminar, since its currency had waned. Besides that, social media was overshadowed by the tempests that AI—and ChatGPT in particular—brought to education and pretty much everything else.

Enter the pal who can giggle and flirt

ChatGPT/AI feels different to me today than it did a year ago, and the changes present new challenges. Not entirely unexpected challenges, mind you, but formidable ones.

Last June, ChatGPT was high on hype. Now, some of the distracting fog of breathless enthusiasm and fear has blown off, at least somewhat, and the hype about its capability has become easier to dismiss. Notably, a more powerful “GPT-5” hasn’t appeared, and some speculate that current hurdles for LLMs are much higher or maybe unattainable with the current approaches. The landscape of LLMs has also levelled off, as OpenAI’s competitors have developed comparable LLMs. In doing so, GPT-4 has emerged as a de facto standard against which new LLMs are compared.

The relative lull has also clarified challenges, as many have finally grasped that linguistic prediction, which LLMs do pretty well, differs from reasoning (though AI companies use reasoning to describe their products).

But in the past week or so, a new and I think more difficult challenge has been added. It may be more distorting than the uncanny prose that mere text chatbots were able to string together, despite their frequent confabulations (aka, “hallucinations”). Rather than seeing LLMs develop as GPT-3 did on its way to GPT-4—a direction that seemed to refine capabilities—innovations have expanded the breadth of the tools. Where text once defined the “interface,” chatbots have become “multi-modal.” They utter words, they respond to voices, they can parse not just text but images, too.

Today, ChatGPT-4o can do it with a voice and manner of a twenty-something Valley Girl.

Up until this Monday, the Valley Girl voice was more like a Scarlett Johansson sound-alike. People noticed, as did Johansson, and the likeness wasn’t coincidental. For now, ChatGPT-4o lost “Sky’s” voice, which was very much like Johansson’s, but you can carry on with “Breeze,” “Cove,” “Ember” or “Juniper.” Custom GPTs can use “Shimmer.”

Apparently, Sam Altman, who is said to misread meanings of movies and fiction, counts Her (with its digital character voiced by Johansson) among his favorite movies. With a tweeted word, he drew Her into focus as ChatGPT-4o debuted.

That AI chatbots should find their voices, so to speak, isn’t surprising. That they now speak with human-like expressiveness and even seem to possess a certain “subjective entity” was predictable. The surprise is how a voice and a “multi-modal” interface redirect human calculus and response. While we could laugh at confabulations that appeared on our screens, hearing a voice introduces a human quality to the machine. Human qualities like sociability and empathy intensify. It’s the difference between texting a human from afar, and speaking with them face-to-face.

A year ago, when chatbots were still silent correspondents, I wrote

AIs do not have the capacity to feel empathy or, for that matter, have any sort of intelligence or “inner life.” Theirs is even less than the empathy of a psychopath — displayed, but empty. No, I think the emotional attachment springs from the medium presented to and perceived by humans: “chat” or competent (though not particularly eloquent) sentences in response to human statements.

A computerized texting partner was challenging enough; now we have a digital Scarlett Johansson sound-alike cooing at us. As Jay “thejaymo” Springett says, “Just because YOU know it’s a stochastic parrot doesn’t mean you’re going to treat it like one.”

ChatGPT-4o’s new capabilities clarify decisions that societies and individuals need to make in using LLMs and AI. In short, the question is “Who (or what) is in charge?” LLMs have a new voice, and they project into human lives sounding like peers. They can pull the strings of the heart, having extracted the technique from millions of examples. It hardly need be repeated that tech companies offering them have their own reasons to design sociable, witty, flirty products, and they’ve had lots of practice playing with social media users’ emotions.

Core issue: authority and control

As I crafted last year’s fall seminar, I considered three “fundamental questions” relating to using LLMs in the classroom. Now, with a bit of time to think and with the benefit of seeing the new moves of OpenAI and others, those fundamental questions have become more general, more broadly applicable. A year ago, my questions related to assessing and guiding LLMs for the sake of learning; today, the fundamental question concerns authority and control—or rather, who or what has control and for what reason? Not just for education, but for lots of human endeavors.

A couple of examples:

Teaching and learning. reminds us that “education is about persons.” “What we need right now is a re-invigorated conversation about what education is for,” he wrote. “Only then can we begin to think about how to embrace (or reject) generative AI in educational spaces. Not only that, but we need to have a bigger conversation about the potential impacts of embedding generative AI into educational contexts and the values inherently supported by these tools.” Josh considers fundamental questions in his ’stack, and he offers insights into how technology might fit into teaching and learning.

What about medicine, another realm where AI can make significant contribution? Does AI fundamentally challenge what it means to practice medicine or become a physician? Who will have the authority, especially if AI continues to progress as it has in the past couple of years?

Last year, Gina Kolata reported about doctors who had used ChatGPT to shape communications to patients. One of them, Dr. Gregory Moore, was shaken by what ChatGPT could offer. But, Kolata noted, “he and others say, when doctors use ChatGPT to find words to be more empathetic, they often hesitate to tell any but a few colleagues. ‘Perhaps that’s because we are holding on to what we see as an intensely human part of our profession,’ Dr. Moore said.”

An assessment published in JAMA Internal Medicine found large difference between physicians’ responses to patients and those of chatbots. The chatbots “won,” if we so bluntly put it. “Chatbot responses were rated of significantly higher quality than physician responses…. This amounted to 3.6 times higher prevalence of good or very good quality responses for the chatbot. Chatbot responses were also rated significantly more empathetic than physician responses…. This amounted to 9.8 times higher prevalence of empathetic or very empathetic responses for the chatbot.” The whole study is here.

Is Dr. Moore right in wondering about the “intensely human part of the profession”? To phrase the question as Josh did about education, “Is healthcare about persons?” AI, even in the relatively primitive form of LLMs, has shaken medicine up and may cause a whole profession to reconsider fundamentals.

I think we could probably list other examples, but this post is getting long enough.

I do want to offer a scenario that I am sure will come up. Perhaps the easiest to imagine would be a case where an AI tutor—and, yes, they are already around—and a teacher disagree. Or perhaps a parent disagrees with a teacher using AI. What if the parent prefers to give primacy to the AI?

How will people resolve such a disagreement, variants of which will certainly crop up everywhere as time goes on? How will the conversations go? And where will authority, which is a sign and substance of control, land?

Got a comment?

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Tags: LLM, AI, chatbot, empathy, emotion, manipulation, power, medicine, education, voice

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Allyn, Bobby. “Scarlett Johansson Says She Is ‘shocked, Angered’ over New ChatGPT Voice.” NPR, May 20, 2024, sec. Technology. https://www.npr.org/2024/05/20/1252495087/openai-pulls-ai-voice-that-was-compared-to-scarlett-johansson-in-the-movie-her.

I’m not sure what to make of this, and I’m not sure it’s a net benefit: “ ‘It’s not that A.I. is going to answer questions,’ Jonathan Grayer, who founded the education tech company Imagine Learning in 2011, told me. ‘What it’s going to do is change the process by which teachers teach, kids learn and parents help.’ ” Coy, Peter. “Yes, A.I. Can Be Really Dumb. But It’s Still a Good Tutor.” The New York Times, May 17, 2024, sec. Opinion. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/05/17/opinion/ai-school-teachers-classroom.html.

Hurst, Mark. “Apple Made a Terrible Mistake: It Told the Truth.” Creative Good, May 10, 2024. https://creativegood.com/blog/24/apple-tells-the-truth.html.

Smuha, Nathalie A., Mieke De Ketelaere, Mark Coeckelberg, Pierre Dewitte, and Yves Poulette. “Open Letter: We Are Not Ready for Manipulative AI – Urgent Need for Action.” KU Leuven, March 31, 2023. https://www.law.kuleuven.be/ai-summer-school/open-brief/open-letter-manipulative-ai.

Why does Sam Altman like Her so much? Brian Merchant thinks that “Her … happens to offer the clearest vision of AI as an engine of entitlement, in which a computer delivers the user all that he desires, emotionally, secretarially, and sexually — and because the tech is normalized so quickly, fully, and painlessly. Oh and it contains a benign vision of computers achieving artificial general intelligence, or AGI, to boot.” Merchant, Brian. “Why Is Sam Altman so Obsessed with ‘Her’? An Investigation,” April 22, 2024.

Blood in the Machine

Why is Sam Altman so obsessed with 'Her'? An investigation

Hello, and welcome back to Blood in the Machine: The Newsletter. (As opposed to, say, Blood in the Machine: The Book.) It’s a one-man publication that covers big tech, labor, and AI. It’s free, though if you’d like to back my independent tech journalism and criticism, I’d be thrilled if you’d consider pledging support. But enough about all that; grab yo…

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2 years ago · 44 likes · 5 comments · Brian Merchant

Remember that awful Apple iPad ad? It’s less of a disaster in reverse. Reza Sixo Safai, I Fixed Apple’s Ad / 2 Mil Views on X. YouTube video, 2024.

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Facebook is probably a good example of the slippage. Students in 2020 all used Facebook, but the social media slipped dramatically so that today it’s more likely the online outpost of their grandparents. The Pew Research Center has charted the changes (“Teens, Social Media and Technology” 2022 survey, 2023 survey). I polled my students in 2020-2023, and even though the sample could hardly have been representative or scientifically reliable, the shifts in social media behavior appeared.

Among all “US app users” there may be a drift away from social media platforms, too, including Tiktok. Muskian Twitter/X seems to be a real loser for obvious reasons:

Bond Girl Bride and I went to Scotland for a good part of April, and that’s why you haven’t heard from me. We made a big loop, beginning in Edinburgh, west to Glasgow, and then toward the western coast and north to Inverness before heading returning south. It was our plan—no group travel for us—and so the textures of the experience comfortably meandered from milestones of tourism. “We're a bit unconventional in our approach,” I wrote to a friend shortly after we’d returned home. “A bit light on the Official Monuments and Road Markers and heavier on the sidewalks, the experience of getting lost (we managed that, too!), happenstance, what you see in stores, and the camaraderie of travelers in restaurants and in trams. So I do think we drank deeply of some aspects of the place.”

I’ll recount some of the happy byways of our trip in a couple posts in the future, with this one beginning the lot. I came close to calling the series of posts “accidental tourism,” in part to recall the novel and movie from the 1980s.1 “Incidental tourism” seems a better moniker, though, since the experiences of travel are not really accidents. They are incidents that we can live within or oftentimes ignore. Travel itself dislocates us enough to bring such episodes to life, and maybe they can inform regular old life at home, too.

Our trip was bookended by shoes, so that might be a good place to start accounts of incidental tourism.

M&S shoes and underwear

Our hotel window overlooked the neogothic Sir Walter Scott monument and a statue of David Livingstone (he of “Dr. Livingstone, I presume?”). A hop over the Princes Street Gardens lay Edinburgh’s Old Town. Still a bit bleary-eyed from travel, we trekked Edinburgh’s “Royal Mile” that runs between Edinburgh Castle with the Palace of Holyroodhouse. The mile is heavily ornamented for the sake of tourists, who thronged even in the rain. The next day, we wandered behind the hotel’s façade toward the eighteenth- and nineteenth-century city, where real people live, and managed to find a jeweler whom BGB had wanted to visit. We finished the day at Scottish National Portrait Gallery.

Incidental tourism began the next morning—when the blisters appeared.

BGB’s fashionable knee-high boots had taken a toll, and so we ducked into a Marks & Spencer a block or so from our hotel to get her comfy socks and sensible shoes. While she rummaged through footwear, I decided to look at the linen sportcoats that were in the sidewalk window displays.

That meant Menswear on Third Floor via Second Floor … “Love Your Boobs.”

I wasn’t expecting an entire floor of M&S to be devoted to bras and “knickers,” but there it was.

I rose into the section on the escalator, and by some cunning design of the building’s architect, I had to traverse the entire floor—past row after row of flashy feminine underclothes—to continue my journey to Menswear. Displays in my last steps gave way to panties with large posters of callipygous models of every size. Women bustled through the aisles, searching, no doubt, for the just right balance of modern suspension engineering (“underwire bras” had a sizeable section) and comfort … elusive comfort, it seems. (I haven’t tried a bra on in a while, I admit, so that’s a guess.)

I recalled when Victoria’s Secret catalogues would appear in our mailbox back home. BGB probably looked for comfort—uh, I don’t know—and maybe that special look of a “push-up”; I was motivated to thumb through the pages for other reasons. The same dynamic may not have operated on the Bra & Knickers Floor. Some men, mostly forlorn followers of their partners, wandered through the aisles, no doubt looking for a place to sit down and wait it all out. Men like me, who were wondering about the cut and trim of linen sportcoats, ran the gauntlet to get to the next “up” escalator.

In the end, the linen goods in Menswear confirmed that I’m not an M&S kind of guy. That decided, I went in search of my bride and dove back downstairs.

The search took about thirty minutes, give-or-take, during which time I discovered the M&S grocery market in the basement, which was a treat and a revealing view of how Edinburghians stock their pantries. I’m sure that the Scots pursuing veggies wouldn’t have noticed what I saw, since I had the advantage of contrast and comparison. I knew the sprawl of US grocers, the sizes of the packaging, the stuffed aisles and impossibly varied selections of dog food, toothpaste, salad dressing, detergent. Scots had these products, too, but M&S’s basement grocer invited the more frequently recurring shopper—someone who would visit maybe twice a week or more—and I got the impression that the food was fresher and more local than what we saw in the States.

I found a loft-like place in M&S where I could spy on all of the first floor. There I waited for my bride to come into view.

She eventually appeared with new black shoes and a shopping bag. “I got a really cute pair of pants,” she explained.

We left to continue playing our role as classical tourists.

Gigantic fearsome Kelpies and fancy shoes at dinner

Our last night in Scotland was in Stirling, a short drive from the Edinburgh Airport, where we would drop off our car and head to the gates. That evening we walked the mile-and-a-half to town and ate at Brea Scottish Restaurant, both of us a bit weary of travel and ready to see our animals and sleep in our own bed.

We’d spent part of the day visiting the castle, naturally, but BGB recognized a mammoth sculpture in a brochure we picked up at the tourist information office near the Old Jail. Kelpies.2 I’d never heard of them, but BGB had. The two statues near Falkirk are about a hundred feet tall, towering over the M9 that runs nearby. We hopped in the car and visited them.

The park was well worth the few-minute drive from Stirling to Falkirk, but our incidental tourism happened at dinner at Brea.

A woman at the table next to us leaned nearer. “You went to see the Kelpies today,” she said. “I saw your shoes.” She glanced at BGB’s red and black checkered Chelsea-like boots.

We laughed, and replied that indeed we did spend time with the Kelpies. Then we conversed, having discovered a connection.

I had my order—a very first-time taste of pigeon—and a dark beer brewed near Stirling called “Old Engine Oil.” I recommended it to the gentleman friend of The Lady Who Remembers Shoes. The pigeon breast was intended as an appetizer, so it was small, somewhat gamey (and, I must say, a bit tough and very dark), but our charming server reminded me that “there’s always the dessert menu” to fill in the cracks.

Indeed, there was a dessert menu, and it offered creme brulée!

Detail of the conversation that began with red and black checkered shoes doesn’t stick in my mind but ranged, as informal chats do, to share experiences of the day across our tables. In itself, this was the delight of the incidental moment like so many that we live through as we travel—if we pay attention. The Lady had purple highlights in her hair, and I recalled her photographing the Kelpies earlier in the day.

Travel is always incomplete. You choose what you miss, and sometimes by doing so you land upon matters that you can treasure. Travel treasure, true to form, often appears unexpectedly, between the sites that tourists are assigned to see.

Those moments are the ones you definitely shouldn’t miss.

A note on other writing

Before BGB and I left on our adventure, I took care to send off a chapter of my book project to readers. I wanted to push aside prose concerns and word wrestling. It was great to see some of the responses after we got back, and I’m still pondering them. My gracious “beta readers” come from different backgrounds and are at different stages of life; every one of them is a ravenous reader. A few are writers, too. I am guaranteed a close and critical view, sometimes contradictory, often sharply uttered, though never cross or malicious.

The chapter was the last of my planned bunch, and I’m set again to return to the whole set to push and pull in revision. That’s the next phase, and I look forward to it with a certain excitement and dread. You learn a lot as you write, especially when a project brings you through years as this one has; and returning to the first drafts always means re-evaluating (and re-writing) in light of what you discovered as you moved forward and then penned that last first-drafty period on the last sentence.

So with the voices distilled from the dozen-and-some eyes that have run through my pages, I’ll begin revising.

But it is good to have a draft of a book and honest friends enough to help me through it.

Ever been an incidental tourist?

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Tags: travel, tourism, happenstance, shoes, boots, Scotland, Edinburgh, Stirling, breasts, Kelpies

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

This scene sticks in my mind because of the word specialty, pronounced by Muriel (Geena Davis) as spesh-ee-al-i-tee. That drives Macon (William Hurt) nuts. The movie is available on Youtube, I believe. [Scene from] The Accidental Tourist (1988), William Hurt, Geena Davis. YouTube video, 2015.

Maybe a bit much, but, still, this light show must have been impressive: The International Launch of The Kelpies. YouTube video, 2014.

Apparently, it’s a big deal for Marks & Spencer. Note the chronology of bra development on this press release: Marks & Spencer. “M&S Unveils ‘Love Your Boobs’ Art Installation on London’s South Bank,” March 10, 2023. https://corporate.marksandspencer.com/media/press-releases/ms-unveils-love-your-boobs-art-installation-londons-south-bank.

Heralding the end of the Victoria’s Secret mail-order catalogue, a retrospective view. Things have really changed in the past five-to-ten years when it comes to women’s fashion and, especially, lingerie for a lot of market and societal reasons. Lewis, Casey. “Here’s What the Victoria’s Secret Catalog Looked Like 40 Years Ago.” Racked, July 25, 2016. https://www.racked.com/2016/7/25/12119174/victorias-secret-catalog-rip.

Two scientific studies might shed light on why M&S and, presumably, other merchants are willing to offer a wonderland of bras. (This study has scores of authors. It was a biggie!) Swami, Viren, Ulrich S. Tran, David Barron, Reza Afhami, Annie Aimé, Carlos A. Almenara, Nursel Alp Dal, et al. “The Breast Size Satisfaction Survey (BSSS): Breast Size Dissatisfaction and Its Antecedents and Outcomes in Women from 40 Nations.” Body Image 32 (March 2020): 199–217. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.bodyim.2020.01.006. Perhaps I could file this under “Barbie” but it fits here, too. A psychological study of what women think of their “girls”: Frederick, David A., Anne Peplau, and Janet Lever. “The Barbie Mystique: Satisfaction with Breast Size and Shape across the Lifespan.” International Journal of Sexual Health 20, no. 3 (2008): 200–211. https://doi.org/10.1080/19317610802240170.

Although they’re a bit less noticeable on today’s cars than they were in the past, car “mascots” or hood ornaments reflected the artistic movements that informed car design and the general cultural taste of their age. Today, mascots are predominantly branding tools — think of the Mercedes-Benz “Three-pointed Star,” the Jaguar “Leaper,” the Bentley “Flying B,” but in the twentieth century, the car mascot was often a matter of customization (something still practiced in hot-rod car clubs). Mascots were a market and had a manufacturing base separate from car makers, so they could reflect the tastes of owners rather than proclaim a car maker’s brand.

A glance at the early mascots immediately reveals that what appeared on the car hood was a driver’s choice, not the car maker’s. In fact, on early cars the car maker probably would have mounted a temperature gauge, then known as the “motometer,” though some arranged for more ornamental pieces as well. The early car customers were wealthy, and so artistic flair served to distinguish car owners from the other wealthy Joneses in the neighborhood.

The result of this modest independence from car makers? Greater variety in matters of what appeared atop the radiator.

Among the most sought after collectibles today are glass ornaments created by René Lalique, who designed mascots in art deco style. Many are shapes of animal heads, and the glass designs had the advantage of being illuminated at the base, so that the mascot would glow at night. Lalique is also known for his design of the glasswork for the Orient Express.

The fanciful mascots of the 1920s until World War II often depict living beings — birds, animals, amphibians, fish. And women and goddesses, whose lineage reaches into mythology. Some of these persist, however weakly, in car makers’ mascots. Even Jaguar has moved away from hood sculpture in recent years, opting instead to turn the “Leaper” into a chrome bas-relief or display a snarling cat on a metal disk.

Naturalistic mascots of the first half of the twentieth century evolved into sculpted images of man-made devices, smoothed as if by erosion. Pre-war winged goddesses transformed into flying machines modeled after the Lockheed P-38 Lightning, which served through World War II. The 1950s promised a new and faster age, as jet-powered civil aviation captured consumers’ attention. Mascot design followed such pervasive artistic influences.

On car hoods, feathered flight gave way to jet-propelled aluminum, and feminine form became sleek and smooth, even aeronautical. Naturalistic evolved to art deco and then smoothed even more to jet-age form.

This evolution clearly unfolds on Cadillac hoods from the 1930s to the 1950s. Look at the image below. The upper half shows the mascot on a 1941 Cadillac, though this ornament was fitted on “Series 75” models as early as 1938, too. The bottom image shows the mascot on a model of the same series dating between 1947 and 1953. Even though both images depict the feminine form — a type of “winged goddess” common among several manufacturers — the treatments are strikingly different. The pre-war ornament is rich with detail — hairline and hair flowing in the wind, wings textured as if ruffled by the wind and generally echoing the famous Rolls-Royce Spirit of Ecstasy. The post-war Cadillac mascot reflects the streamlined styling of the time, and it recalls aircraft sleekness and design that later in the 1950s caused cars to sprout tailfins. Cadillacs led the way with fins, though they appeared on many American cars in the late 1950s and early 1960s.

The mascots go flat

Pedestrians impaled by the protruding ornaments caused car manufacturers to rethink their mascot designs. It’s not too difficult to imagine the pain and damage that the archer on a 1929 Pierce Arrow or even a Jaguar Leaper could inflict. Later, regulations further restricted their design, and, after mid-century, mascots fell out of favor, perhaps because of regulatory pressure and the simple fact they had become less artistic and varied. Besides, not everyone was happy with the explosions of chrome and ornament in the late 1940s and 1950s.

Raymond Loewy, Studebaker’s designer and stylist in the 1950s, wrote a trenchant article for The Atlantic entitled “Jukebox on Wheels.” Loewy bemoaned the ornamentation and chrome excess of car design:

“Some culture,” one might say as one watches the sad parade of the 1955 models. The world will soon forget that under these gaudy shells are concealed masterpieces of inspired technology. What we see today looks more like an orgiastic chrome plated brawl. There was another great American symbol, probably exported by the GI — the jukebox. Today’s jukebox moves! The automobile.

Loewy’s design principles didn’t include unnecessary baubles, and Studebaker’s styling sought to reflect the technology of the automobile. It was, in some sense, more European in spirit and sought a simpler elegance. Simplicity and function count. “I alienated the automotive industry by saying that cars should be lightweight and compact,” Loewy said in a 1979 New York Times article. “Who needs grills?” he said about his Avanti design. “Grills I always associate with sewers. I’d also kill chrome forever, or any other applied junk.”

Loewy wasn’t wild about hood ornaments, and he may have resisted including one on a Studebaker’s hood — though he did not prevail. In the 1950s, Studebaker had them, too. But it has to be said that, despite Loewy’s design leadership, Studebaker didn’t carry the torch of elegant design much longer. The company’s last car was built on March 17, 1966.

I bet it was an Avanti.

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Photo credits

Is that a lady in the tire? Left: Herald mascot for a Cadillac, unknown date. Uploaded by Chuck Wyke. Pinterest (https://pin.it/UEPoOHD). Center: Female form within a circle, unknown date. Pinterest (https://pin.it/77OIvcz) Top right: Pontiac hood ornament, 1950s. Pinterest (https://pin.it/656t0Pt). Bottom right: 1955 Nash Rambler Custom Super. Pinterest (https://pin.it/7wYtLbV) Rights for all: Fair use.

Animals. Top left: Danković, Andrej. Hood Statue/Emblem of Jaguar X-Type. September 22, 2021. Digital photograph. Own work. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Jaguar_hood_statue.jpg. Bottom left: Atirador, Franco. Hood Ornament Ford. July 7, 2007. Digital photograph. Own work. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Hood_ornament_Ford.jpg. Right: O’Brien, Don. 1928 Franklin Hood Ornament. Seen at the Southern Ohio Corvette Club Classic Car Show in Waverly, Ohio. July 20, 2008. Digital photograph. Flickr photo. https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:1928FranklinHoodOrnamentDok1.jpg. Rights for all: CC-BY 2.0 Generic.

Tags: vintage car, mascot, hood ornament, automobile, art deco, streamlining, chrome, art

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

A really nice article on mascots that includes many photographs: Ŧhe ₵oincidental Ðandy. “Emblems of Speed: Vintage Automobile Mascots.” Blog, January 6, 2011. https://thecoincidentaldandy.blogspot.com/2011/01/emblems-of-speed-vintage-automobile.html.

Includes a very well done set of images showing the evolution of ornaments through model years for many car makers: Just A Car Guy. “Hood Ornament Identification Guide,” August 17, 2010. https://justacarguy.blogspot.com/2010/08/hood-ornament-identifiaction-guide.html. “Just A Car Guy” also includes many web addresses to explore hood ornament history and images. There is large community of mascot enthusiasts and collectors.

My Pinterest collection of car hood ornament images: https://pin.it/1R6o7EA. I sure wish that the images on Pinterest had more description and some statement of rights and reuse for each image.

The Wikimedia Commons has a great collection of hood ornament images: https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?go=Go&search=hood+ornaments&title=Special:MediaSearch&type=image

Crabby, maybe. Engaging, definitely. Loewy, Raymond. “Jukebox on Wheels.” The Atlantic, April 1, 1955. https://www.theatlantic.com/magazine/archive/1955/04/jukebox-on-wheels/303944/.

Interview and profile of Raymond Loewy. He seemed like a feisty character. Anderson, Susan Heller. “The Power of Streamlining.” The New York Times. November 4, 1979, sec. Design. https://www.nytimes.com/1979/11/04/archives/design-the-pioneer-of-streamlining-design.html.

Maybe the influence was from cars to jukeboxes? Smith, Karl. “Jukeboxes: The Unlikely Automotive Influence.” Car Design News, January 31, 2020. https://www.cardesignnews.com/features/jukeboxes-the-unlikely-automotive-influence/40070.article. “These new jukeboxes adopted details from cars — chrome bumpers, gold anodized aluminium, lights that looked like taillights or Dagmars, push buttons and selectors that emulated those on automotive instrument panels. Specific brands such as Cadillac and Chrysler were openly referenced in these designs and even specifically named by Seeburg and Rock-Ola.”

I’m still writing on that chapter, and I’m still reading along the way. Two books have come into focus now, both published in the last twenty-five years (unlike the little tsukumogami, who were medieval or before). One is by an engineering professor and artist and the other by a farmer who is also a poet and philosopher. You might guess the farmer-poet, but I don’t know if you’d be familiar with the professor.

’s book is called What Can A Body Do? How We Meet the Built World (Riverhead Books, 2020)

Wendell Berry, from whose pen you probably have read a line or two, wrote Life is a Miracle: An Essay Against Modern Superstition (Counterpoint, 2000).

It’s easy to think that the two writers are vastly different — one a farmer in Kentucky, the other a professor in Boston. But they have complementary pathways and, in their own areas of work and life, resonant stances and perspectives. Hendren is an artist as well as a researcher, and Berry, despite his grousing and pungent criticism and suspicion of technology, mixes poetry, philosophy, faith — sometimes even with modern technology, as the photograph above shows.

I want to share a sketch of the landscape of thought and work that Berry and Hendren lay out and that I have found instructive as I’ve been writing. Both chafe at the restrictions that scientists or designers (or scientist-designers) place on their subjects. Berry, especially, rears up when scientists — E. O. Wilson in particular — seek to impose the restrictions of “empiricism” or “theory” on the ways that the arts, religion, and humanities seek and understand knowledge. (Or, as he would probably correct me, the ways they should seek knowledge if they are true to their own roots and inured to the financial, commercial, and material seductions of modern science.) Hendren mistrusts the entrapment of design in industrial sameness, a sameness that ignores the diversity and changes of human shapes, needs, and processes.

Hendren and Berry demarcate landscapes of knowledge and work, and they go beyond what academic disciplines, corporations, or mass manufacturing usually admit. Both regard entrenched scientific and design habits of proof or product as too limited and, finally, false. They want to expand boundaries of “disciplines” (a term Berry is not keen about), but they also want to refocus and, in a way, constrain what real knowledge and real design can be.

For Hendren, design should be particular and respond to particular needs of people. She focuses on the specific needs of individuals. Rather than remaking the human to fit the built world, the built world should meet the human in all humankind’s particularity and dependency and power. One chair doesn’t fit all, and industry hasn’t fully absorbed the fact that all people are different. All need at some point in their lives assistance with things and their worlds. There is where design should be.

For Berry, powerful knowledge, miraculous knowledge, is local. Knowledge loses power and relevance once the seeker of knowledge wanders into abstraction and reduces knowledge and things to scattered products of analysis. Rather than a list of general principles or abstractions or classification or explanation, knowledge of the world is knowledge of place: long and local experience, ever sensitive to complexity, nuance, and, importantly, to mystery and wonder.

Life is a miracle. It springs beyond explanation and unfolds at the pace of human experience. Its communication … limited but not mute, metaphorical but mindful of particulars, artistic but not precious or new, historical but not nostalgic, and reverent which might be the core.

I’ll close with two brief excerpts, one from each writer. Both books are good. Berry may infuriate you at times, but there’s much to learn from his writing, which is as clear as Kentucky air in a field. Hendren’s book flows, too, and is sharp with insight and clarity — as well designed as executed.

Wendell Berry

Berry considers the view outside the window of his twelve-by-sixteen foot cabin where he has written and worked for decades.

Sometimes from this outlook I have seen wonders: deer swimming across, wild turkeys feeding, a pair of newly fledged owls, otters at play, a coyote taking a stroll, a hummingbird feeding her young, a peregrine falcon eating a snake. When the trees are not in leaf, I can see the wooded slopes on both sides of the valley. I have known this place all my life. I long to protect it and the creatures who belong to it….

The one thing that I know above all is that even to hope to protect it, I have got to break out of all the categories and confront it as it is; I must be present in its presence. I know at least some of the categories and value them and have found them useful. But here I am in my life, and I know I am not here as a representative white male American human, nor are the birds and animals and plants here as representatives of their sex or species. We all have our ways, forms, and habits. We all are what we are partly because we are here and not in another place. Some of us are mobile; some of us (such as the trees) have to be content merely to be flexible. All of us who are mobile are required by happenstance and circumstance and accident to make choices that are not instinctive, and that force us out of categories into our lives here and now….

In all of the thirty-seven years I have worked here, I have been trying to learn a language particular enough to speak of this place as it is and of my being here as I am. My success, as I well know, has been poor enough, and yet I am glad of the effort, for it has helped me to make, and to remember always, the distinction between reduction and the thing reduced. I know the usefulness of reductive language. To know that I am “a white male American human,” that a red bird with black wings is “a scarlet tanager,” that a tree with white bark is “a sycamore,” that this is “a riparian plant community” — all that is helpful to a necessary kind of thought. But when I try to make language more particular, I see that the life of this place is always emerging beyond expectation or prediction or typicality, that it is unique, given to the world minute by minute, only once, never to be repeated. And then is when I see that this life is a miracle, absolutely worth having, absolutely worth saving.

We are alive within mystery, by miracle (Life is a Miracle 43-45).

Sara Hendren

Sara Hendren’s focus is on design, but she, too, particularly values the “local” and an “ecology” of human habitat, the “built world.” These paragraphs come from her book’s second chapter, which focuses on chairs and designed items, especially those created by and used by disabled people.

It’s not the specific materials or techniques that are used that matter [in creating a designed work, design researcher Ezio] Manzini emphasizes, so much as the collaborative associations that are formed when universal challenges are considered in a local and unusual way: the agency that comes from reformulating a problem. At [the specialized furniture non-profit] ADA the quest is not for the perfect universal chair but a disposition toward a sustainable and collective form of working on adaptive tools, one at a time — for many. When it comes to truly urgent questions, Manzini writes, “radical innovations generate answers that change the questions themselves.”

That’s the challenge to universalism. Is the all-for-one, one-for-all model the only approach to universal design on offer?

… Adaptive or diffuse design, at ADA and elsewhere, isn’t meant to substitute for standardized devices or the engineering that produces them. Disabled and nondisabled people will always have needs for these devices…. Rather, its focus is on augmentation and alteration — on the entire ecology that is required to make the world more meaningfully accessible, especially when a quarter of an inch makes all the difference.

[…]

I recalled the first time I went to ADA, where I sat on one of their cardboard perches, pitched precisely at the angle recommended by researchers and ignored by most schools and workplaces everywhere. I had felt my spine lightly snap naturally to its most supported position — straight up and relaxed, but without effort. To truly be with ADA is to see the alteration of chairs and other furniture with fresh eyes for history — to see alternatives to chairs and other furniture so pervasive they have become invisible (What Can a Body Do? 89-90, 93-94).

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Tags: local, particular, scientism, design, wendell berry, sara hendren

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

“Last October, Berry showed me the camp, asking only that I not say where it is. Although he has laid bare his entire life in print, he tightly guards his privacy. The single room, containing an antique woodstove against the back wall and a neatly made cot in one corner, was dominated by his worktable, set before a forty-paned window — ‘the eye of the house’ — that looks out onto the porch, the woods, and the river below.” Wickenden, Dorothy. “Wendell Berry’s Advice for a Cataclysmic Age.” The New Yorker, February 21, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/02/28/wendell-berrys-advice-for-a-cataclysmic-age.

Oddly, I couldn’t find this book on bookshop.org, and it seems contrary to Berry’s spirit to offer a link to Amazon. Buy it at your independent bookstore, new or used (like I did). Berry, Wendell. Life Is a Miracle: An Essay against Modern Superstition. 1st Counterpoint paperback ed. Berkeley, Calif: Counterpoint, 2001.

Nice biographical/bibliographical summary, and of course links to poetry. “Wendell Berry.” Poetry Foundation, February 16, 2024. https://www.poetryfoundation.org/poets/wendell-berry.

“This is a fact so ordinary — and yet not something we routinely pause to know and to ponder and work with. That our built world is designed around something called ‘normal’ and yet every single one of our bodies is mysterious, and constantly adapting, for better or worse, and always, always changing.” Tippett, Krista. “Sara Hendren — Our Bodies, Aliveness, and the Built World.” On Being. Accessed February 16, 2024. https://onbeing.org/programs/sara-hendren-our-bodies-aliveness-and-the-built-world/.

“Hendren’s aim here isn’t to throw cold water on innovation; it’s to re-center the people, behind the tools, who must work with their surroundings, their adaptations at least as miraculous as the technology that helps them. If we’re overly besotted with objects that promise assistance, maybe that’s because our default objects — the givens of the built world — can seem so incompatible with our needs. Look down. Your chair, Hendren declares, is murdering you.” Waldman, Katy. “When the World Isn’t Designed for Our Bodies.” The New Yorker, September 3, 2020. https://www.newyorker.com/books/page-turner/when-the-world-isnt-designed-for-our-bodies.

Hendren’s website is a treat. “Home | Sara Hendren.” Accessed February 14, 2024. https://sarahendren.com/

Hendren, Sara. What Can a Body Do? How We Meet the Built World. New York: Riverhead Books, 2020. (Bookshop.org; Amazon)

She has a Substack newsletter, too. Hendren, Sara. “Undefended / Undefeated.” Substack newsletter.

Chayka, Kyle. Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture. New York: Doubleday, 2024. 304 Pages. ISBN: 978-0-38554-828-1 $28.00

Having nearly wrapped up my review of Kyla Chayka’s Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture (Bookshop.org, Amazon), which comes out next week, I opened up The New Yorker that sat on the kitchen table. Lauren Collins had a piece in “The Talk of the Town,” where the editors gather short and usually entertaining pieces. “Tagwalk Takes on the Hemline Index,”1 which she filed from Paris, breezily reported about Alexandra Van Houtte’s work on a new book and updated news about her online creation that aims to be the “Google for fashion.” Her version of Google, which she set up in 2015, is called Tagwalk (https://www.tag-walk.com/en/), “a free fashion search engine which allows you to search for models, trends, accessories and fashion shows by keywords.”

Since I am a sucker for fashion, I visited the site and learned that, according to the previous week’s web activity, Balenciaga was down one, Versace and Valentino were both up one, and Chanel and Christian Dior were holding steady.

The “grunge” theme tag over the past week was up a whopping 417%, with “yellow” (up 272%), “floral print” pattern (up 261%), and “rib knit” material (up 233%).

I do have to admit that the trending color, pattern, and material seemed a little odd when wedged into a “grunge” theme. I guess we’ll see what happens on the catwalk.

I smiled and thought that Tagwalk could do a good ironing job on clothes — an algorithmic flattening of a cultural niche.

Filterworld

Chayka uses the word “Filterworld” to denote a kind of lens into cultural experience, which is to say an experience of life. The term, he explains, “is my word for the vast, interlocking, and yet diffuse network of algorithms that influence our lives today, which has had a particularly dramatic impact on culture and the ways it is distributed and consumed.”2 He continues:

The culture propelled by Filterworld tends to be accessible, replicable, participatory, and ambient…. It is also pleasant or average enough that it can be ignored and unobtrusively fade into the background, oftentimes going unnoticed until you look for it. After you notice it, however, you tend to see it everywhere.

I saw it in Tagwalk after reading the book.

The itch that Chayka scratched in Filterworld probably started when he was writing his first book, The Longing for Less (Bloomsbury, 2020; Bookshop.org, Amazon), and as I read Filterworld, I felt the kinship. It wasn’t just that the author was the same, though Chayka's clear prose and refreshing style is a constant through both of these books. Chayka’s The Longing for Less presents minimalism as an adventurous, philosophically rich, and productive step in art and culture but also as a lost way taken into the sameness of branding and stylistic cliché. Filterworld focuses more tightly on mechanisms underlying modern culture — algorithmic mechanisms, as the book’s subtitle points out, that flatten culture much as the clichés of Mary Kondo-ish processes had simplified and misrepresented minimalism.

I recalled the word flattening coming up in The Longing for Less where Chayka considers Marc Augé’s and Rem Koolhaas focus on the sameness of airports, with their standardized function and, for Augé and for Koolhaas, a convergence of design and “ambience” that erased distinctiveness and difference. For Augé, airports turned into “non-places”3 for Koolhaas, cities became as “generic” as their airports.

Chayka observes in The Longing for Less that “Koolhaas saw the airport as a symbol of a world that was increasingly homogenous: Just like every terminal resembled every other, global cities were also becoming the same” — even “one-of-a-kind cities like Paris.” Koolhaas called the generic city “equally exciting — or unexciting — everywhere” and Chayka points out where this ambient sameness comes from: “This flattening occurred because of technology,” he wrote, and then, again citing Koolhaas: “The Generic City is what is left after large sections of urban life crossed over to cyberspace.”

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Filterworld elaborates on themes that Chayka explores in The Longing for Less, probing and untangling the “flattening” not only of the “generic city” but of culture. Culture has “crossed over to cyberspace,” and in Filterworld Chayka shows us the pathways it has taken in the crossing.

The algorithm in your app and in that coffee shop over there

One of the limitations that discussions of algorithms have is a tendency to restrict them to “tech” — to the digital realm, often narrowed to the smartphone. Although it’s certainly true that our typical understanding of algorithms relies on numbers and computation, the algorithm isn’t necessarily tied with silicon or even mathematics. It can be a clear description of a process absent any apparent math, as Cathy O’Neill showed in her discussion of her “model” of family meal planning. She used processes that we can call algorithmic, though in a manner that recalls the word’s much, much earlier meaning.

Given our habit of restricting to “tech,” we also carelessly restrict the influence of algorithms. We tend to think of algorithms as unseen engines for results, which of course they are most apparently in our lives: TikTok presents entertainment, Spotify queues music, and everyone (practically) shovels ads in our direction — such are the obvious results of algorithms that we see.

But Chayka’s book is interested in implications, motivations, downstream consequences of algorithms. And so it’s worth starting a journey through Filterworld apart from the typical algorithms in your phone apps.

We can ask an outrageous question: In addition to the shape of our online experience, do algorithms also shape the physical spaces we occupy and navigate?

Chayka examines “non-places” and “generic cities” in Filterworld’s third chapter, “Algorithmic Globalization,” which begins with “seeking the generic coffee shop.” He explains that

Filterworld is not limited to digital experiences on our phones or television screens. It is a pervasive force that shapes the physical world, too. Because algorithmic systems influence the kinds of culture we consume as individuals, molding our personal tastes, they also influence what kinds of places and spaces we gravitate toward.

In short, “apps direct our attention toward physical places that … meet the platform’s incentives.” Ever use Google Maps? Yelp? Airbnb? — “they create something like an algorithmic Netflix home page but for physical space.”

In the 2010s, Chayka used the apps, and he admits that in cities he travelled through, his search for coffee often started with thumb-typing “hipster coffee shop” into Yelp’s search bar. Since Yelp had him pegged and knew his preferences and probably more of his attributes and foibles than even he probably would care to admit, the app could direct him to a coffee shop of his liking. Google Maps could do the same, of course.

Actually, Yelp or Google Maps directed him to more or less the same coffee shop, no matter where it was located — Tokyo to Berlin to New York to Berkeley. For example, he found the Nitro Bar in Newport, Rhode Island, among other coffee shops, because “[t]he algorithmic recommendations had approximated my taste based on my previous data, automated it, and then served it back to me. They provided a physical shortcut, rerouting my path toward the Nitro Bar.”

Direction or discovery is one thing, of course, but influencing coffee shop design — creating the samenesses of disparate, ostensibly unconnected places — that is another thing. Chayka shows how the apps with their algorithms affect what gets built as much as how you find them.

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To uncover that process and its connection with algorithms, Chayka’s choice of coffee shops is apt: “They were spaces of consumption, in which members of a certain demographic, who were also very active on the Internet, expressed their personal aspirations by spending money,” he writes. “The café space integrated aesthetic decisions across architecture, interior design, and tableware. They showcased trends in both beverages and food.”

Those “members of a certain demographic” all have Instagram accounts of course. And what do you suppose they publish to their account?

It’s perhaps a bit oversimple to say that the Instagram platform informs the look of the “generic coffee shop,” but it does — even to the point that coffee shops have incorporated “Instagram traps,” “Instagram walls,” or, heaven forbid, become an entire production set for posts from “Instagram Museums.” In the section of the chapter bearing the subheading “Generic Café Owners,” Chayka applies a telling metaphor to these physical spaces: “The [café] installations were a physical form of search-engine optimization; rather than including keywords on a website, the Instagram walls ensured that as many photos of a place as possible would exist on digital platforms, building a wider footprint.”

That is to say, the physical spaces themselves exist because of the algorithmic settings and whims of the platforms.

Chayka admits that he’s happy to see that the trend has faded, but it still persists and has even spread beyond caffeinated places: “Though the walls have become cliché, the way they work has been dispersed into every aspect of spaces and places, which began to optimize for what we called ‘Instagrammability.’ ”

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Chayka’s chapter on “Algorithmic Globalization” spells out not only the process of algorithms shaping the physical world but the history of the process and people who have observed it in the very-much-pre-Internet days. That’s satisfying to people like me who like history and tend to read the footnotes.

In telling that story of algorithms and places, Chayka explains why Augé and Koolhaas would notice the “flattening” of airport spaces. The sameness grew from connection and travel, with the effect of standardizing experiences simply to make destinations anodyne. Chayka cites Gabriel Tarde’s The Laws of Imitation, published in 1890, which blamed the sameness of hotels, clothes, and all sorts of goods on — what else — passenger trains, a fairly new and very disruptive technology in its own right. “Places that connect gradually grow to resemble each other in certain ways simply because of their interconnection,” Chayka explains. “The faster the exchange, the faster the similarity sets in.”

Of course, the speed of trains was formidable for the nineteenth century, but the speed of today’s social media is not even comparable. A speedy sameness grows in the physical world as the rules of Instagrammability sets itself into the bricks and mortar of the physical world. (You can get a lot of help on the web to help you design your coffee shop. Instagram account required.)

In Filterworld, culture no longer nourishes you. Its algorithms serve other purposes … or their own.

The Internet is big, and so it’s just obvious that some sort of filtering mechanism has to help mere mortals fish useful things out of it. That’s the role of Google and its genius: providing access to things that are relevant to interests, distilled from search terms. Search is essential, and for a while Google’s service nourished interests rather benevolently, perhaps living up to its now muted motto, “Don’t be evil.”

Chayka lays out how algorithms that have helped us access the Internet also serve other purposes, many driven by demands of business and others more mysterious epiphenomena, the “unintended consequences” of algorithmic life. He calls products of algorithms “a Frankenstein phenomenon, invented and given power by humans but far surpassing their expected role…. Recommender systems run rampant. Perhaps we tend to overlook their capriciousness within the cultural sphere because the material that they influence seems less important than, say, running water.”

For Molly Russell, the algorithm had truly malevolent effect. She died by her own hand in November 2017 at age fourteen. Chayka tells her story at the beginning of chapter five, “Regulating Filterworld.” Russell suffered from depression, but the senior coroner for north London, Andrew Walker, brought “online content” into the explanation of her death: “She died from an act of self-harm while suffering from depression and the negative effects of online content,” Walker decided.

Chayka tells the story in order to highlight wayward algorithms — those “systems run rampant.” “[T]he algorithmic feed could assemble an instant on-demand collection, delivering what Russell may have found most engaging even though it was harmful for her,” he writes. “The tragedy of Russell’s case demonstrates how the problems of Filterworld are most often structural, baked into the ways that digital platforms function.” The platform’s bakers, to extend the metaphor, don’t often know the interactions and consequences of all their ingredients, but many social media platforms know a great deal about engagement, usually a prime metric and a benefit to profits.

Ah, engagement. Captured eyeballs and minds translate into cash for online platforms.

The section of the book offers some regulatory means by which digital Frankensteins might be contained. They are usually not anything that hasn’t been used effectively before, but Chayka notes that regulation alone is insufficient. Transparency, for example, does not itself lead to meaningful control, as Mike Annany and Kate Crawford note (and Chayka quotes).4 Reassessing the notorious “Section 230” in the US 1996 Telecommunications Act also might be wise, since the state of the internet in 1996 is quite different from the internet in 2024. “The problem with Section 230 is that ultimately, and bizarrely, the law makes it so no one is currently responsible for the effects of algorithmic recommendations,” Chayka correctly points out.

Chayka’s discussion of regulation is a great and sensitive summary, showing a range of regulatory options that have been applied to other areas of media, such as children’s television. Successes of previous regulation — including the ambitious framework of Europe’s GDPR — might guide US regulation for the Internet.

But in the end, governmental regulation also ends up being inadequate, Chayka says. “We must also change our own habits, becoming more aware of how and where we consume culture rather than following the passive pathways of algorithmic feeds.”

In effect, we have to take on roles we have carelessly let slip. That in itself is a call for a new cultural moment, one that Chayka understands to be a turning away from algorithmically delivered “content.” We need to overcome, somehow, a cultural helplessness learned from the algorithm.

Chayka took on an “algorithm cleanse,” and I remember his post when he hung up on feeds, beginning September 1, 2022. He turned away from social media, but he wasn’t completely untouched by algorithms. (Google and the New York Times app use them behind the scenes, he noted.) “What I’m left with is using my friends as human content filters. Rather than social-media feeds, I spend time in group chats, one in Slack that I’ve been in for many years, and others in the chat app Discord, which was originally designed for video games.” He had reverted to practices that were once common back a decade or so.

Chayka’s account of his “algorithm cleanse” begins the book’s last chapter, in which, I suppose, one could say that the cleanse exposes a new/old way of consuming culture. In it, Chayka goes “In Search of Human Curation,” the chapter’s title. Curation is the active human supplement for the guardrails that might be erected in Internet regulation, but curation is also the means by which we humans create cultural contexts and ways we live meaningfully within them. It is an ancient practice, and as Chayka describes it, curation appears as “care.” The word’s history emphasizes “the caretaking of culture, a rigorous and ongoing process.”

I particularly enjoyed this chapter, I think because the stories that Chayka tells of his own de-tox of algorithms and the curators he features (a MoMA curator, a DJ, and a film collection producer). The concept of curation comes alive in the telling. Curation concludes the book, and serves as a beginning and a challenge for readers — a way out of the learned helplessness of Filterworld.

In this final chapter, Chayka invites us to reject the algorithm as arbiter of culture, taste, and even of our own identity.

To resist Filterworld, we must become our own curators once more and take responsibility for what we’re consuming. Regaining that control isn’t so hard. You make a personal choice and begin to intentionally seek out your own cultural rabbit hole, which leads you in new directions, to yet more independent decisions. They compound over time into a sense of taste, and ultimately, a sense of self.

Adding to knowledge of the processes of “tech” in society and culture

Chayka’s book adds to the ever-active discussion of the influences of technology on society and culture, and specifically to the strain of argument that focuses on processes of “tech” — the mobile and computational technologies that surround us today. Here are three examples of how Chayka’s focus on algorithms and cultural transformation and flattening play out in work by some others. (These examples were right to hand, and I just grabbed them. They’re not rare beasts.)

Cory Doctorow coined the term enshittification, which is how Internet platforms develop, decline, and die — in effect setting the terms by which algorithms are deployed in platform products.5 In part — and maybe even a large part — the process of decline is enacted by what Doctorow ominously labels “The Algorithm” (note his Scary Capitals) which is changed for the sake of squeezing out profit. The changes often amount to narrowing access or narrowing selection to user contributions, which are after all cultural products. And, of course, encouraging “engagement.”

Levin Brinkmann and colleagues offered a “perspective” in Nature Human Behavior in November 2023. The article, entitled “Machine Culture,” points out that “[r]ecommender algorithms are altering social learning dynamics. Chatbots are forming a new mode of cultural transmission, serving as cultural models … [and] intelligent machines are evolving as contributors in generating cultural traits.” At the end of the article, the authors propose “grand challenges and open questions,” including issues of “societal decision-making.” Although the authors focus more narrowly than Chayka on AI and “intelligent machines,” they observe paradoxes of culture that Chayka describes and see them as an area for more thorough study. Despite the diversity of projects in AI, they write (in accord with Chayka) that

market forces, such as regulation and market power, may result in a world dominated by a small number of monolithic models. This raises the possibility of reduction in cultural diversity, as major social, political and economic forces try to shape global machine culture to match their preferences…. Conversely, we face a potential ‘Tower of Babel’ scenario. As AI models become increasingly personalized, conforming to and reinforcing our individual worldviews, they risk engendering an unprecedented fragmentation of our shared perception of the world.

Brinkmann, et al. propose a framework that may be useful for studying “machine culture.” The framework takes “the key properties of evolutionary systems” into consideration: “variation, transmission, and selection,” all three of which are present in Chayka’s book, which also reveals the close interplay of each.

Closer to home, recently spelled out how changes in the early and quite simple Substack infrastructure turned Substack into an algorithmic “platform” and transformed its environment so much so that “[b]y 2023 … Substack no longer could claim to be the simple infrastructure it once was.” Substack had “evolved”:

It began encouraging individual writers to recommend one another, funneling tens of thousands of subscribers to like-minded people. It started to send out an algorithmically ranked digest of potentially interesting posts to anyone with a Substack account, showcasing new voices from across the network. And in April of this year, the company launched Notes, a text-based social network resembling Twitter that surfaces posts in a ranked feed.

The complications that ensued even had to do with Nazis, as almost all Substackers have learned by now. Newton points out that the algorithmic developments in Substack were not merely a matter of adding “infrastructure”; they changed the nature of the community in ways that might be somewhat predictable but also with unintended consequences. (I think Newton sees the consequences as arising in large part because of naïvety and the wishful thinking that abounds among tech-bros. I’d agree.)

The point, of course, is that algorithms direct attentions, and the process of flattening, in Substack’s case, could well have been a flattening into the mold of a “Nazi bar.”

A final observation about the book’s method

Filterworld, like The Longing for Less, weaves Chayka’s experience — stories from his youth, his routines, even experiments he conducted while writing the book — with interviews and library research done for the book.

That personal touch is not unique to his writing, of course, but I think his writing profoundly succeeds with it. When it comes to ways that we consume culture or, for that matter, even be in today’s world, Chayka’s skillful relating of his inner experience with his subject creates a well-marked pathway for his readers to follow. We can shift our gaze from tiny screens to consider the choices that we surrender to algorithms in our Filterworlds.

We can once again choose. We can curate ourselves anew.

Filterworld book tour information. If you’re in Washington DC, New York, Cambridge MA, Los Angeles, San Francisco, or Tucson, you can hear Kyle Chayka talk about his book.

Kyle Chayka has two newsletters on Substack:

Kyle Chayka Industries

Weekly essays on how technology reshapes how we create and consume culture, plus updates on my book and writing.

and he is a contributor to a new “beta” newsletter that is exploring curation in the 2020s:

One Thing

A catalogue of authenticity

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Tags: social media, algorithm, filter, Kyle Chayka, control, manipulation, culture, identity, curation

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Chayka, Kyle. “AirSpace, Redux.” Substack newsletter. Kyle Chayka Industries, October 7, 2022.

Kyle Chayka Industries

AirSpace, Redux

Below I am reprinting my 2016 essay “Welcome to AirSpace,” which was published by The Verge. Their website redesign didn’t update the original article, so here’s an archival copy. I also wrote a new brief introduction. My upcoming book Filterworld will further explore all of these themes…

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4 years ago · 12 likes · 3 comments · Kyle Chayka

Ezra Klein Interviews Kyle Chayka. Interview by Ezra Klein. Transcript. New York Times, January 9, 2024. https://www.nytimes.com/2024/01/09/podcasts/transcript-ezra-klein-interviews-kyle-chayka.html.

A measured look at Substack, its “infrastructure,” and the algorithmic doors opened to intolerance and hate. Newton, Casey. “Why Substack Is at a Crossroads.” Platformer, February 9, 2023.

Platformer

Why Substack is at a crossroads

Most days, this column looks at controversies unfolding on other tech platforms. Today, let’s take a look at the one that hosts this publication: Substack. On Tuesday, I told subscribers that we are considering leaving the platform based on the company’s recent statement that it would not demonetize or remove openly Nazi …

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2 years ago · 584 likes · 27 comments · Casey Newton

Darned locomotives! It is good to see a century-old book resurface in a book of the 2020s. Tarde, Gabriel de. The Laws of Imitation. Translated by Elsie Worthington Clews Parsons. New York : H. Holt and Company, 1903. http://archive.org/details/lawsofimitation00tard. “To-day, the same kind of comfort in food, in dwellings, and in clothing, the same kind of luxury, the same forms of politeness, bid fair to win their way through the whole of Europe, America, and the rest of the world. We no longer wonder at this uniformity, a condition which would have appeared so amazing to Herodotus…. [T]he modern continental tourist will find, particularly in large cities and among the upper classes, a persistent sameness in hotel fare and service, in household furniture, in clothes and jewelry, in theatrical notices, and in the volumes in shop windows” (p. 323).

The first chapter lays out types of models, including the model used in O’Neill’s kitchen. O’Neil, Cathy. Weapons of Math Destruction: How Big Data Increases Inequality and Threatens Democracy. First edition. New York: Crown, 2016.

Brinkmann, Levin, Fabian Baumann, Jean-François Bonnefon, Maxime Derex, Thomas F. Müller, Anne-Marie Nussberger, Agnieszka Czaplicka, et al. “Machine Culture.” Nature Human Behaviour 7, no. 11 (November 2023): 1855–68. https://doi.org/10.1038/s41562-023-01742-2.

Contortions of art for TikTok? Seabrook, John. “So You Want to Be a TikTok Star.” The New Yorker, December 12, 2022. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2022/12/12/so-you-want-to-be-a-tiktok-star

Word of the year in 2023, according to the American Dialect Society. Doctorow, Cory. “Pluralistic: Tiktok’s Enshittification (21 Jan 2023).” Pluralistic, January 21, 2023. https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/.

Yes, maybe it’s time. Chayka’s book supports the argument. Newport, Cal. “It’s Time to Dismantle the Technopoly.” The New Yorker, December 18, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/tech/annals-of-technology/its-time-to-dismantle-the-technopoly.

By the way, I’m waiting for the yellow flower print in the grunge theme! Collins, Lauren. “Tagwalk Takes on the Hemline Index.” The New Yorker, January 1, 2024. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2024/01/01/tagwalk-takes-on-the-hemline-index; and Paton, Elizabeth. “Tagwalk Wants to Be the Google of Fashion.” The New York Times, July 5, 2018, sec. Style. https://www.nytimes.com/2018/07/05/style/tagwalk-fashion-search-engine.html.

Marx (not that one from the nineteenth century) looks at technology and social media, too, though with a focus on the processes of status seeking and the development of “taste” and culture. Marx and Chayka have complementary, though not always overlapping views. Marx, W. David. Status and Culture: How Our Desire for Higher Social Rank Creates Taste, Identity, Art, Fashion, and Constant Change. New York, NY: Viking, 2022. “As we know, technology doesn’t automatically change culture. People using that technology must move from old conventions to new ones. So we must look at both how the technological, economic, and social changes of the internet age set new parameters for our actions, and how we have adjusted our status strategies accordingly.”

Five days before that day, I had just quit regular working life, though I had plans that, for all intents and purposes, sure looked more like a job switch rather than a retreat into a quiet retirement. It was cool, and North Carolina weather forecasts called for chance of “wintry mix,” which could be anything from cold rain, freezing rain, annoying slush to heavy wet snow.

I had begun the restoration of an old chair that Bond Girl Bride had rescued from a junk shop near Sewannee, Tennessee, where my youngest child had studied “atop the mountain in the Domain” of the University of the South. The chair had rested and gathered dust for seven years or so. It was time to get it back into service.

I had also started what I’d called “disciplined imagery and narrative during the first month of new and old life” — a daily journal and (I’d hoped) 36 photographs taken every day. The project recalled poet Bernadette Mayer’s Memory, which she had begun fifty years before.

It turned out that I couldn’t muster 36 pictures a day as regularly as Bernadette, and my accounts of life in January 2021 are, well, usually, overwhelmingly boring. But it was a good effort for the time. (You can see it here.)

Bond Girl Bride was at the barn. I was in the garage repairing a dismantled old chair.

It was a quiet January day, in the midst of a pandemic and before vaccines became available.

Then the day took a turn. From my journal entry:

In mid-afternoon, I checked my email from the garage, and got a rather cryptic message from Duke about tweeting and social media use during the afternoon, given what was happening in Washington. What’s that all about, I wondered, and I checked in on the web only to see the beginnings of the insurrection. That kinda put a stop to everything on the chair, and I texted a couple of snapshots from the TV so that Arlene was aware. She was at the barn tending things.

Arlene hustled with her chores and joined me in the garage, where we watched the tragedy unfold. It was clear, so very clear, that this was no lawful affair. No expression of patriotism or democratic spirit, despite what some Presidential candidates might say. The lie that underlay it was clear and false and malevolent, even though people who should know better have adorned falsehood with such colorful embroidery in hopes that its core evil might be hidden.

It was also clear to me and BGB that the day would become a turning point.

I drew my conclusion on January 6, 2021, and it’s a sound one today:

This is a day that will scar US history. We can hope — and work energetically — to ensure that the scar does not debilitate our republic. One of the first things to do will be to call the outrage what it was: an insurrection, a riot, a coup attempt, a Trumpish Putsch. And then, we need to make sure that the outrage has consequences for the people who executed it and who led it.

That’s a beginning to repair the damage as we piece together a better nation.

Not just repair damage. Rather renew and create a better nation.

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Friends will remember getting an email from me on or around winter solstice, oftentimes a re-run of a letter ruminating on my favorite Christmas music, Morten Lauridsen’s O Magnum Mysterium.

The world is indeed darker than it was last year at this time, though even then the darkness seemed formidable. Today, even a crèche in Bethlehem has an infant in the rubble of war’s destruction. And so, I reconsidered my greeting for the season when darkest night gradually shifts to brightening, and decided to train my mind’s eye on the starry night. Up from the stable and the feed trough and the warm inn and away from the story that the setting evokes.

Perhaps it is best just to look at stars and feel a presence without talking about it.

'What do you hunt, Orion,
   This starry night?'
'The Ram, the Bull and the Lion,
And the Great Bear,' says Orion,
'With my starry quiver and beautiful belt
I am trying to find a good thick pelt
   To warm my shoulders tonight,
   To warm my shoulders tonight.'

-- Robert Graves, "Star Talk"

Stargazing around my home is almost impossible in summer. A leafy canopy hangs over most of the property, save a couple of holes where visibility is for all practical purposes straight up. As fall comes, the canopy withers and falls and stars gradually present themselves, though branches still obscure some. I was happy to look up to see an old friend one early September morning. Almost straight up, he strode toward the west before being swallowed by astronomical dawn.

He was Orion, and now in December mornings I still can see a single star — Orion’s right hand, clutching his club and sinking in the west. So, he’s become a night owl now, rising not long after dark in the eastern sky to chase the Seven Sisters (the Pleiades). Or maybe he’s hunting the Bull (Taurus), where the Sisters lurk and share some stars with the beast.

Orion’s belt is the give-away. The three stars aligned in an asterism1 have Arabic names: Alnitak, Alnilam, and Mintaka. Because of their brightness and vicinity, many cultures have grouped and named them. In China, they were known as the “Weighing Beam,” which is similar to the modern Arabic name the “Accurate Scale Beam.” They’re also known as the Belt, the Line, and the “Golden Grains.” In India Orion’s belt was known among sailors as tanra tellué, the “sign of three,” and the whole constellation took human form in Nataraja, the “Cosmic Dancer.” The Ojibwa named a larger constellation that includes Orion Kabibona'kan, the “Winter Maker.”

When I was looking at the illustrations of the seventeenth-century Theatrum Cometarum, I couldn’t help but be amazed by their detail. Today’s images of the constellations are stick figures in comparison to those, and the illustrations capture the drama of the stories, too. Orion hunts, his muscles flexing. The Bull is angry. The stars are alive with story and action.

The Greek stories are so old that they couldn’t crystallize into a canonical version in classical mythology, so you have several Orion stories to choose from. Overall, he seems to have been an unruly offspring of Poseidon, a great hunter, a drunken rapist (or at least a boorish admirer), and a loud mouth. My favorite story — and I’m stickin’ with it — is that Orion threatened to kill every animal on earth, which so enraged Gaia that she threw a scorpion and Orion into the heavens — Scorpio to kill the offending and overzealous hunter. (Scorpio and Orion, by the way, never appear in the heavens together.) Another story says that Orion pursues Taurus, the Bull, which of course he does.

But in cold clear mornings or evenings of winter, Orion is a friend, an abiding presence despite his tempestuous history. I think back and I can’t remember a clear winter night without Orion. His was the first star shape to form in my childish mind and the first explanation of the stars in story.

Stars reassure sailors, because when the sea forms a liquid landscape, the wheeling stars above are the only reliable firmament. Night lights would portend earth-changing events, too, when they unexpectedly appeared. The comet pointed to cataclysm or monumental transformation;2 star-like supernovae, too, flashing and fading, as they do, sometimes remained visible even in daylight.

Stars figure into the Christmas season, of course. The Stella Magorum guided three wise men to Bethlehem, and Christmas trees around the world still show off stars at their peaks, perhaps as a remembrance.

NASA astronomers managed to find a whole Christmas tree in the heavens this year and published a green composite image from infrared and optical sources, star atop and strung with stars twinkling from astronomical “lensing.”

My glance upward to catch a glimpse of Orion has a history connected with my brethren around the world, all of whom have woven stories or looked upward to find their ways. It’s happened for millenia, this looking to the lights of night for guidance or companionship or remembrance.

In other years, I might want to recount Christmas stories and weave them into lived life, but this year it seems that witnessing stars on cold mornings and at night is enough. It’s enough to know that stars abide. They’ve spun around long before my speck of a life arrived to see them, and they’ll continue long after I’ve returned to dust.

As 2023 winds down, and Christmas and the darkest night pass, I feel I cannot tell another story.

For now, Calvin and Hobbes sum it up: “If people sat outside and looked at the stars each night, I’ll bet they’d live a lot differently,” Calvin said as he looked into the night sky.

“How so?” asked Hobbes.

“Well, when you look into infinity, you realize that there are more important things than what people do all day.”3

So, to my friends and readers I wish a restful and meaningful Christmas. Take a walk outside under the stars.

Just to see them and be thankful.

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Tags: Orion, stargazing, Christmas, comet, constellation, stars, astronomy, galaxy

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Betelgeuse is part of the constellation Orion. Bartels, Meghan. “Betelgeuse Will Briefly Disappear in Once-in-a-Lifetime Coincidence.” Scientific American, December 11, 2023. https://www.scientificamerican.com/article/betelgeuse-will-briefly-disappear-in-once-in-a-lifetime-coincidence/.

“ ‘Two years ago, Webb launched flawlessly on Christmas morning,’ Dr. [Danny] Milisavljevic said. ‘At the time I thought it was the best Christmas gift ever.’ But the telescope, he added, ‘is the gift that keeps giving.’ ” Miller, Katrina. “It’s Christmastime in the Cosmos.” The New York Times, December 19, 2023, sec. Science. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/12/19/science/christmas-stars-galaxies-webb-nasa.html.

Good article on the Christmas Tree Galaxy Cluster. Mohon, Lee. “Sprightly Stars Illuminate ‘Christmas Tree Cluster’ - NASA,” December 19, 2023. https://www.nasa.gov/image-article/telescopes-illuminate-christmas-tree-cluster/.

Yes, the Robert Graves of I, Claudius. Graves, Robert. “Star Talk.” Public Domain Poetry. Accessed December 13, 2023. https://public-domain-poetry.com/robert-von-ranke-graves/star-talk-38260.

Watterson, Bill. “Calvin and Hobbes by Bill Watterson for June 30, 1992.” GoComics, June 30, 1992. https://www.gocomics.com/calvinandhobbes/1992/06/30.

2

Lubieniecki, Stanisław. Historia Cometarum, A Diluvio usque ad præsentem annum vulgaris... (Amsterdam: Pro Francisco Cupero, Bibliopolâ, prope Portium Harlemensem, 1666) includes a plate facing page 48 that shows the “Star of the Magi” as well as disasters associated with comets and other astronomical rarities.

Thamus rejected Theuth’s new technology of writing, saying, “If men learn this, it will implant forgetfulness in their souls. They will cease to exercise memory because they rely on that which is written, calling things to remembrance no longer from within themselves, but by means of external marks.”

King Thamus put an even finer point on it, too:

It is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing. And as men filled not with wisdom but with the conceit of wisdom they will be a burden to their fellows.

A pretty devastating critique.1

I am wondering whether the rush of new AI products like ChatGPT2 is Theuth’s new invention for us today. We play the role of King Thamus in this twenty-first century reprise of the story, and we determine the implications of new AI/LLM bots.

* * *

OpenAI released ChatGPT last year on November 30, 2022. The fall semester was winding down, and rumors and fears began to rise. I had pre-holiday drinks with friends in mid-December, and we talked about how shocking the new thing was. “Just wait until the next version comes out,” I told them. I had seen brief reports and surmises about what was to come from OpenAI as soon as the first quarter of 2023.

What was unveiled on the last day of November was enough to raise eyebrows and kindle dread among teachers. Would a more powerful release shake some foundations of learning, we wondered. In early winter, writing, for one, seemed to be in danger of a lingering and cold death by automation. At least I was thinking that might be the case. With writing, practices of thought also seemed endangered.

I wondered what fall 2023 would bring to my seminar. Or, rather, what I could do beforehand to rejigger the mechanisms I used to teach, since writing and engagement with words were — and still are, I’m happy to say — central to my ways of teaching and learning.

I first thought of banning ChatGPT. My mates in December were leaning in that direction, since they felt that their assignments were out of ChatGPT’s grasp in any case.

I thought about shifting toward the spoken word: oral exams (the hated things), extemporaneous speeches, tutorials, one-on-ones, more and more conversations. These never really lacked in my seminar, of course, but they weren’t freighted with evaluation and, in any case, were often the offspring of thought trained by writing. Speech in a seminar should admit occasional half-hewn remarks, after all. Exchanges can sharpen and clarify a half-cocked comment.

I even thought about just hanging it up entirely. Just backing out of leading a seminar. Period. I had already committed to fall, though, so that would be dishonorable — not only to my colleagues, but to myself. A retreat based on a rumor, maybe a fantastic and nebulous specter? Yielding to a half-wit robot?

In June, a couple months before classes would begin, I decided avoidance, banning, or retreat were cowardly. If learning is bold, I figured, ChatGPT ought to become a subject of inquiry, not Something-That-Must-Not-Be-Named. Besides, managing ChatGPT and its successors is likely to be some part — maybe even a significant part — of students’ professional lives.

“Almost Weekly Letters” might reveal effects

Thoughtful writers gain a certain critical detachment from their own writing — usually a hard won distance, often acquired by watching other’s critical eyes: The crusty editor. The teacher waving a red pen. A discerning parent. A trustworthy peer. Of course, exercises to help writers gain that valuable perspective have long been part of learning the craft of writing. (Teachers try to help foster that perspective with so-called “peer reviews.” It sometimes works.)

I decided to ask students to unpack some of the challenges that robotic utterance might pose to their own learning and development. I also realized that I wasn’t in total control. Students would be using ChatGPT, Bing, or whatever in other classes, and they didn’t necessarily honor bans anyway. In large part, my panicked response to ChatGPT expressed a fear of loss, not just of some of my teacherly tricks and trappings but of a facet of human uniqueness and value that’s right at the core of teaching and learning.

What if ChatGPT would impoverish an ability to learn and to grow in mind and sense? What’s at stake for learning humans when writing and something resembling thought comes from a computer?

I crafted three AI-assist assignments as part of my series of “Almost Weekly Letter” assignments. With these letters, I hoped to probe ChatGPT to help students determine who (or what) is in charge; what does it add, and is it sufficient; and when (if ever) is it okay, and why. (The three letter assignments and related documents are available in PDF form at the bottom of this post.)

The first letter assignment featuring an AI bot used ChatPDF rather than ChatGPT. ChatPDF is actually quite inventive and, if it works reliably, a boon to dabbling into large complicated PDF documents. It has an interface very similar to ChatGPT, but instead of raking together probable answers from a large model, the tool focuses on a PDF that users upload — in the case of my letter assignment, a lengthy article by Richard Kimball called “Heidegger at Freiburg, 1933.” With PDF loaded, users of ChatPDF then ask questions about the article, and the bot responds and offers links to specific areas of the article.

The second and third letters used ChatGPT or a similar bot (some students chose Bing). The second letter used a tactic known as “A/B testing,” in which some variable is different in versions “A” and “B.” The test part notes effects of the difference. It’s great for exploring market responses in advertising. For my purposes, the difference was when students used ChatGPT: either when they began their letter or after they had already completed a draft. The third letter built off of the second and asked students to use ChatGPT (or similar) as a “co-author.” The assignment allowed freer form use of the tool. For both the second and the third letter assignments, students devoted some of their time to consider the experience of using the bot and reflect on the complexities it may have introduced or helped to resolve.

Should we use ChatGPT as an object of inquiry? Or have writing bots already moved beyond, er, question?

If the letter assignments ended up only on paper or, in this age, in a PDF, the whole thing would be fruitless. Seminars are built on well considered talk, and though the writing part of the assignments help with the “well considered” part, discussions needed to follow. I devoted between a quarter and a half of a class session to discussion of the letters. Students first met with the students who I had paired them with, and then we convened as a group to share larger issues and discoveries.

The second assignment with the A/B testing obviously required discussion, since students experienced either “A” or “B” and the test itself emerged only when “A” and “B” could come together in exchanges over the seminar table. (I had paired students so that one had done “A” and the other “B.”)

The letter assignments culminate in reflection on the experience of using the AI bot. This is critical to the success of the assignments, and it has become a standard part of other’s courses that use bots in writing.

There are at least two kinds of reflection that instructors ask students to do. One is a matter that appeals to dissection and “reverse engineering”; students take their experience of using a writing bot to investigate how it might have been constructed — its underlying data, the readerly audience that its output assumes, and the like. For example, Ryan Cordell’s “Writing with Robots” course at UIUC includes a “Collaborative AI Paper & Audit” that requires “reflection”: “Finally, you will draw on your prompt engineering and annotation to write a critical reflection … that use[s] your experiences to theorize about the language model itself, and its applications to scholarly or critical writing,” Cordell writes. “Essentially, you are using the iteration and probing of this assignment to interrogate the ‘black box’ system.” Such reflections expose a writing bot’s inner workings and its artificiality, too — especially since students identify and explore a bot’s shortcomings, its apparent “strengths,” and, I think, glimpse the void at the center of its concocted prose.

Another form of reflection particularly intrigues me and, frankly, challenges my abilities as a teacher. How does the technology change (or doesn’t change) human capacities and definitions of thinking, of creativity, of work, even of “happiness”? The reflection, in a sense, asks students to watch themselves using writing bots like ChatGPT and note subjective implications of using them. This is a very hard task, but I think part of success is just giving it a whirl. You realize powers of self-observation. Others are trying to incorporate this species of reflection in class as well. Stanford’s “Future Text: AI and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages” lists “learning goals.” Number one on the list: “To learn not just the basics of how AI works, but its broader social, cultural, artistic, and philosophical implications.”

In my seminar, writing about — or with — an AI bot like ChatGPT in the ways that the letter assignments directed helped create a critical distance between the writers and the tools. The assignments served as exercises in metacognition, creating enough of a distance that students might tease out where bots could help them think and where they were, well, just nuisances. Beyond the workmanlike judgment of ChatGPT or the like as tools, the exercise could shine light on the subjective processes of human thought.

In a sense, the letters sought to create a mirror into which students might see, however dimly, the ways that a writing tool shaped and cajoled their own thought.

Teachers can easily focus on the tool-like qualities of ChatGPT (or similar) and locate its utility in what it spits out. (See this post from Ethan Mollick for an example.) But I think that tool approach might not be ambitious enough. As an object of inquiry, the little bot might help writers reveal to themselves the value of writing for human matters of understanding and judgment.

So, what did the students say? I didn’t take a poll, but I did observe growing skepticism about ChatGPT and Bing (the two bots that students used the most, with ChatGPT 3.5 being the prevalent choice). Students usually identified the bot’s confabulations, though a couple of them were cowed by chat prose. And they perceived the superficial flatness of much of its prose.

At the close of the discussion of the third and last bot-assisted letter, I asked whether the students would use ChatGPT or whatever in future classes. About a third categorically rejected bot “help”; the rest would accept help from the bot, but most said they would be selective. In a class of engineers, pre-meds, computer scientists, and “undecideds,” most said that bot use would be mainly “to help with coding problems” and similar formulaic tasks for which bots seem to be most helpful. Writing that required critical thought would be their own, for the most part, though they’d turn to ChatGPT to broaden their approaches. Maybe.

Are ChatGPT and similar bots mere “tools”?

I began this post by looking way back to Plato’s Phaedrus and the King Thamus’ condemnation of writing. The technology of writing, goes the argument, would weaken human memory and change objects and processes of learning.

The real questions about AI and LLMs bear some resemblance to the excerpt from Phaedrus. We don’t know now, for sure, that these new technologies will change human thinking. Will we lose something in the deal, just as King Thamus surmised about wisdom and memory succumbing to this new technology of writing?

Depending on how we answer the questions of what impacts ChatGPT and similar bots pose, our stance as teachers shifts. If the technologies are tools, the way forward for teachers is perhaps more comfortable and familiar: we teach ourselves and our students how to use them expertly. But if the technologies are something more — a replacement of human abilities, a marked cognitive “enhancement” perhaps — the ground shifts more profoundly.

Mike Loukides leans toward the “tool” interpretation in an article published by O’Reilly Media and demarcates human knowing and the utility of ChatGPT. You apply your knowledge in order to use the tool, and the two are separate:

To be really good at prompting, you need to develop expertise in what the prompt is about. You need to become more expert in what you’re already doing—whether that’s programming, art, or humanities. You need to be engaged with the subject matter, not the AI. The AI is only a tool: a very good tool that does things that were unimaginable only a few years ago, but still a tool. If you give in to the seduction of thinking that AI is a repository of expertise and wisdom that a human couldn’t possibly obtain, you’ll never be able to use AI productively.

But the other side — the side of Thamus, King of Egypt, as reported in the Phaedrus — nags many teachers (including me). Through the invention of writing, the king told god-man Theuth, “it is no true wisdom that you offer your disciples, but only the semblance of wisdom, for by telling them of many things without teaching them you will make them seem to know much while for the most part they know nothing.”

In one of the many email exchanges I’ve had with others on the topic of ChatGPT in the classroom, my colleague Michael Faber put the dilemma eloquently, even though a clear way forward eluded him: “It is getting harder to separate out whether we should be looking at ChatGPT and the like as ‘a technology to be studied, etc.’ in the same way that you do in your class …,” he wrote. “Or whether we should already be rethinking the underlying notions of teaching itself in light of what may turn out to be world-turns-upside-down level change” (emphasis in the original).

He thinks that something big is afoot in teaching and learning, he said in a later email. I have to agree — something maybe as big as the difference that Plato recounted in his Phaedrus.

A shift of human capacity, occasioned by a technology, a change at the “world-turns-upside-down level.”

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Tags: chatgpt, ai, writing, teaching, learning, critical distance, thinking, thought, letter, technology, plato, bing

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

He thinks it’s a tool, not a mind-bender. Loukides, Mike. “Prompting Isn’t The Most Important Skill.” O’Reilly Media, October 17, 2023. https://www.oreilly.com/radar/prompting-isnt-the-most-important-skill/.

A thoughtful article from friend and colleague Michael Faber. Faber, Michael. “Learning How to Learn with ChatGPT.” Innovation Co-Lab, November 7, 2023. https://colab.duke.edu/blog-post/learning-how-learn-chatgpt/.

NPR One. “🔊 Listen Now: Q&A: To Find out More about AI, an NC State Professor Asked His Students to Cheat,” November 6, 2023. https://one.npr.org/i/1210922189:1210922215. You can read it here: https://www.wunc.org/education/2023-11-06/nc-state-ai-chatgpt-cheating-fyfe-interview.

Dwyer’s essay provides a picture of the larger context of the writing world, with an interesting note on AI writing. Dwyer, Kate. “Has It Ever Been Harder to Make a Living As An Author?” Esquire, November 8, 2023. https://www.esquire.com/entertainment/books/a45751827/make-a-living-as-a-writer/. “[Ayad] Akhtar has a close friend (a creative executive) who has been using artificial intelligence to write scripts for the last six months. ‘I read a script they had outputted about two and a half months ago. It was hands down the most compelling TV script I’ve read in a long time,’ he said. Not because it was good, but because, he said, ‘It had my number in the same way that the iPhone has my number. I was turning the pages even though I had no real understanding of why I cared.’ ”

MLA-CCCC Joint Task Force on Writing and AI. “Working Paper: Overview of the Issues, Statement of Principles, and Recommendations.” AI and Writing. Accessed November 11, 2023. https://aiandwriting.hcommons.org/working-paper-1/.

Another stab at an AI-writing course at Stanford. “Future Text: AI and Literatures, Cultures, and Languages.” 2023. Reprint, Github, November 4, 2023. https://github.com/quinnanya/future-text.

A broader historical view of recent development in AI. Gibson, Richard Hughes. “Language Machinery.” The Hedgehog Review, Fall 2023. https://hedgehogreview.com/issues/markets-and-the-good/articles/language-machinery. “Generative artificial intelligence is a headspace and a technology—as much an event playing out in our minds as it is a material reality emerging at our fingertips. Fast and fluent, AI writing and image-making machines inspire in us visions of doomsday or a radiant posthuman future. They raise existential questions about themselves and ourselves.”

considers AI in fiction and in subjective experience in this week’s .

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3 years ago · 8 likes · 2 comments · Mark Dykeman

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From the start, the pictures had me.

Profusely illustrated, Thomas Hine’s Populuxe dazzles. But here’s the thing: When you look at the illustrations and the photographs, the kaleidoscope of 1950s advertisements and snapshots come close to their own parody.

Hine, Thomas. Populuxe. New York, NY: Alfred A. Knopf, 1986. 184 Pages. ISBN: 0-394-74014-9 $16.95. Reprint edition, “with a new preface by the author”: Overlook Press, 2007. $60.98.

Eyes in Boomer heads, like mine, look at the images today to see a completely different world than our youthful eyes beheld over a half-century ago. Hine recognizes this tension — ideas contrary and held in readers’ minds simultaneously — and handles it honestly and unsentimentally. A tough task for a writer.

He explores the odd juxtaposition of wide-eyed 1950s hopes and late twentieth-, early twenty-first-century jadedness in the book’s last chapter, “The End of Populuxe,”1 and demarcates these perspectives of hope and jadedness with the opening of the 1964 New York World’s Fair. He writes that

by 1964 it was becoming clear that the look — and the meaning — of things was starting to change. The imagery that had enlivened the previous decade had begun to look embarrassingly naïve and even empty. Pop artists had discovered it, and began to to produce images that were, at once, familiar and accessible, but ultimately subversive. Once you become self-conscious about your fantasies, they can never again be quite so satisfying.

Hine uses the washing machine — mechanical emblem of 1950s “labor-saving” marvels — to illustrate the shift. “In 1959 Nixon could use a washing machine to symbolize America” — and, I should add, he did … to Nikita Khrushchev — “but in 1964 it would have been ridiculous.” By 1964, the neat world of rocket-shaped vacuum cleaners, push-button convenience, and TV dinners had met a harsher reality that, in truth, had been there all the time, hidden beneath a Formica façade of American post-war enthusiasm.

Even the darling of American culture, the automobile, also became a focus of friction. The first Ford Mustang was unveiled at the New York World’s Fair. Turning lazily on a hubcap-like turntable, the Mustang was surrounded by a civil rights demonstration. Protestors ringed the exhibit, locked together cross-armed, hands firmly clasped.

Hine counts the Mustang debut among the “phenomena that seem to mark the end of Populuxe,” the name Hine coined for the era beginning in 1954 and ending a decade later. His book defines Populuxe.

Of course, the word itself mashes popular with luxury, and it is Hine’s invention, not a word of the time. He spices up the word with a “thoroughly unnecessary ‘e,’ to give it class … [a] final embellishment of a practical and straightforward invention is what makes the word Populuxe, well, Populuxe.”

Defining an era with a word is like describing a fragrance. There’s a challenging leap between the conceptual and the sensory that seems to lack words sufficient to the task. (I am amazed by advertising copywriters pitching perfumes.) Hine chooses to define by accretion, since Populuxe in design “is more an attitude expressed by a family of looks, a series of options added to such utilitarian objects as a Levitt house or a bottom-of-the-line Plymouth.” Populuxe embraces bad taste or, if not exactly bad taste, then certainly not good or “educated” taste either. “The essence of Populuxe is not merely having things,” he writes, using the hot word essence. “It is having things in a way that they’d never been had before, and it is an expression of outright, thoroughly vulgar joy in being able to live so well.”

Luxury by nature is singular (or at least infrequent) and distinctive, popular is not. Populuxe imbued luxurious feeling to mass manufactured goods, not Faberge eggs or other singularities. It offered glistening abundance that at least impersonated prosperity and fostered a hunger for the future. As a concept, Populuxe never strayed far from being materialistic and rankly commercial. Its objects were products first and foremost, and design and its airs often garishly pointed to luxury. “What had previously been luxuries — automobiles, automatic washers, large front yards — were turning into necessities, but people still felt the need to celebrate and adorn them with features that at least suggested luxury,” Hine explains.

As a concept, Populuxe packages “vulgar joy,” a hope for newer and better things, speed, style, energy, fantasy made real life. It promises a world with so much wealth that nothing need be shared, as Hine quite revealingly put it.

A promotional piece from MPO Productions for General Motors’ “Motorama” (1956). GM cars are featured, but also dreams of future kitchens, which the film creators seem to think is the appropriate place for women, with aprons of course. So goofy today, it feels almost psychedelic. But it’s Populuxe!

The book describes Populuxe in chapters exploring material culture of the age, with a constant reminder of the elements of desire and feeling that underlay (and maybe enriched) its products. Cultural context meets material to form a riddle of the Populuxe experience, and Hine teases out elements of that experience.

Populuxe motors and dreams

I’ve chosen three chapters that provide a picture of the general method of the book, though in such a summary form that I hope you’ll realize that Hine’s writing has much finer texture and detail. And he casts the whole with humor as well.

Because the automobile looms over so much of Populuxe life, it makes sense to start with the book’s fifth chapter, “The New Shape of Motion.” Changes in the car market may have crystallized some of the features of Populuxe, such as an increased attention to design — as in flair, frills, and ornament — and a more urgent press of advertising and marketing currency and “newness.”

This was in large part a survival tactic.

For a decade or so after World War II, American consumers attempted to catch up. Times were good for car companies in particular, up until summer 1953, when the thirst for new cars was slaked — a trend that car makers were aware might happen. “Some important things began to happen at that point,” Hine writes of August 1953, when the market shifted.

The overall number of cars stopped increasing. Chrysler Corporation, whose cars were the most conservatively designed, suffered sharply reduced sales, while Chevrolet held steady, and Ford, which had the raciest 1953 and 1954 designs, picked up about as many new buyers as Chrysler lost. The great expansion of the auto market was over, as nearly everyone who needed one had one.

Car manufacturers feared that the market was saturated.

Detroit brought together bold and “forward” styling, a sense of innovation and progress, and, perhaps most important, a spur of dissatisfaction with the old-but-serviceable in hopes of reinvigorating car sales. It worked. And when applied throughout culture and the economy, design and impatience for the new laid a foundation that American industry could build upon. What William M. Schmidt, a Chrysler Corporation car stylist, said of his profession could be applied generally to anyone else “styling” consumer products: “We’re really merchandisers.”

Hine carefully lays out design decisions that the car companies made in the mid 1950s to the early 1960s, and he weaves stories of the designers — colorful characters in their own right — into the history of the “rolling jukeboxes” of Populuxe.

Relating to a beautiful detail of 1950s car design, you might like to read:

“The Boomerang and Other Enthusiasms” starts off with a meditation on jukeboxes — its adoption in the front ends of American cars of the 1950s (much disdained by Raymond Loewy, Studebaker’s chief designer), its physical transformation from a heavy box in the era of Glenn Miller and his Orchestra to the “airier-looking” sonic powerhouse for Elvis Presley and Chuck Berry, its sprouting of satellites in restaurant booths for remote control of the music. “Dynamism and fragmentation, the two tendencies exemplified by the jukebox, dominated the imagery of the Populuxe era,” Hine summed up.

The chapter examines some characteristic shapes, most notably the boomerang, which Hine links back to aviation. Winged shapes invoke movement and speed — both Populuxe virtues and desires — and as you read through the chapter and look at its illustrations you see how pervasive the form became. The boomerang shape was put into service as Chrysler Corporation’s logo, molded into ashtrays (some made of scorchable thermoplastic), fashioned into foldable chairs, made dynamic in Alexander Calder’s floating mobiles, firmly planted as McDonalds’ golden arches, carved into living room coffee tables, and upholstered into swooping couches.

The boomerang shape and the rocket wings they resemble were everywhere in Populuxe products.

The beauty of this chapter, like the others in the book, draws from Hine’s way of bringing Populuxe products into relation with culture, which was already mainly a consumer culture. Linked by consumer choices exacted from dreams that advertisers had shaped, the shapes of the age coalesce with desire and feeling.

That’s a big task for a shape, especially when it takes form in an ashtray.

“Lost in Space” presents starkly contrasting architectural movements — the modernist spirit of Ludwig Mies van der Rohe against the ebullient, glitzy, and (frankly in my view) joyfully tacky spirit of Morris Lapidus, who were, “respectively, the superego and the id of American architecture.” Of the two, Hine declares,

Only Lapidus could be labeled Populuxe, of course. Indeed the Fontainebleau Hotel in Miami Beach might stand as the definitive Populuxe monument. From the moment Lapidus’s client told him, ‘I want that nice modern French provincial,’ it seemed destined to be a perfect embodiment of the zeitgeist.

The opening night in December 1954 supported Hine’s judgment: the hotel was declared the “Eighth Wonder of the World.” That declaration was made by none other than Groucho Marx, to music supplied by Liberace. Case closed.

The Fontainebleau Hotel, by the way, has been restored and reopened in 2008. You can still “swan” down the “stairs to nowhere,” although you should know that the stairs do have a destination — a coat room at the top.

Mies carried on with glass planes and steel girders — clean lines in contrast with Lapidus’s extravagance. Mies was the more famous of the two and was, according to Hine, “certainly a much more important role model to architects who considered themselves to be serious.”

“Lost in Space” contrasts their architecture and lays out their meanings for the people of Populuxe, which in the case of Mies unfortunately boiled down to cost. A real Meis building was expensive, but imitations were cheap. However, Meis-like stark lines made for spaces that to many felt “unlivable.” Lapidus was tacky, sure, but his spaces pleased middle-class fantasy with a hodge-podge of styles. And that, for Populuxe, made his spaces memorable. Destination-worthy.

In my view, Hine’s discussion of Populuxe architecture in this chapter is the best of all the book’s chapters, probably because he could draw from his deep knowledge of architecture and design. He was architecture and design critic for The Philadelphia Inquirer. This chapter includes other architects who made up the “built environment” of the 1950s and 1960s. Of course, among them is Frank Lloyd Wright with what Hine calls a “more organic approach” to space than “Mies’s icy abstractions.”

Naturally, there are strip malls (not Meis’ or Wright’s or even Lapidus’ fault).

Hine places Populuxe into a larger historical frame, and he helps readers understand “the idea of modern space” that, he says, originated a century before Populuxe emerged with “the arrival of iron-frame construction in such building as London’s Crystal Palace of 1851.” All of a sudden, the whole idea of walls and windows changed because of new technologies. Beyond that, during the widespread Populuxe adoption of television, the built environment could rely on TV’s immediate and expansive connections; TVs delivered “a succession of experiences … as intense and vivid as life itself. And you didn’t have to be in New York or anywhere. Your little raised ranch on the cul-de-sac was plugged in.”

That Hine pulls together seemingly separate realms as suburban architecture and, well, Hollywood fantasy represents the Populuxe era complexly, and I think well. The era itself brought them together effortlessly. Hine explains them.

Two-minded sight

Maybe it’s just me.

Still, it could be that the odd detachment that Boomers (like me) have from their own experience of the age comes from the enormous shifts in modern culture that have followed. The lens through which we young Boomers viewed Populuxe products no longer has its magic now that we Boomers (and America) are older and perhaps a little wiser.

Hine brings us through this world of Populuxe. Through his book, Populuxe resides in our readerly heads, but we behold the illustrations and the photographs of the first eight chapters already having lived through the eclipse of the era that Hine’s final chapter describes.

In 1955 or so, our grandparents looked at the magazine photo of the white woman wearing a gingham apron in her turquoise-applianced kitchen with orange Formica countertops. They consumed the image with a certain post-war reverence and desire. Their heated up Swanson TV dinners really felt as special (or at least “space age”) as they were handy.

Today, our eyes fall on the same photo. But what we see is profoundly different: a relic of a constrained age with even frighteningly rigid gender roles, a carelessness of consumer waste, hidden and significant environmental costs, frankly preposterous expectations of the future, and invisibly lurking injustices. Grandma and Grandpa smiled back at the smiling woman in the magazine photo, but our view of it today is ironic, even mocking.

That juxtaposition of views — the 1950s v. an ironic or, for some, a nostalgic gaze today — makes Hine’s book a pretty complicated read. Thank goodness his prose is crisp, fresh, and amusing. Throughout, I watched myself reading myself or, better put, I engaged in two-minded sight, at once recalling like images from my past while subjecting them to my latter-day, and quite critical, judgment. For I spent part of my childhood swept up by the glamour and excitement of the 1950s and early 1960s, but now, as an adult in the 2020s (a grandparent myself, at that) I can’t help but see the photographs of the 1950s through complex lenses that more recent history provides.

It is hard to be wistful about the age of Populuxe. But it’s also, paradoxically, somehow easy (for Boomers at least). That is the consequence of two-minded sight.

Tags: popular culture, design, 1950-1960, US, post-war America, built environment, kitsch, automobile, car

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Enjoyable and informative: Architect Breaks Down Why All American Diners Look Like That. YouTube video. Architectural Digest, 2023.

A Times review of Hine’s Populux from 1986: Kakutani, Michiko. “Books of the Times.” The New York Times, October 29, 1986, sec. Books, p. C22. https://www.nytimes.com/1986/10/29/books/books-of-the-times-547986.html

A short piece related to Lisbeth Cohen’s book that describes the period after Populuxe. It’s an interview with the author. Silverthorne, Sean. “A Consumer’s Republic - How We Became a Consumers’ Republic.” HBS Working Knowledge, February 10, 2003. http://hbswk.hbs.edu/archive/3262.htmla-consumer-s-republic-how-we-became-a-consumers-republic.

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Less than a half-mile north of the North Carolina border, Virginia International Raceway, known as “VIR,” is cut out of intermittent farmlands and hardwood forests. Its most famous turn is “Oak Tree” at the southernmost tip of the Full Course, its name derived from the majestic oak tree that stood in the center of the turn radius. It fell, some say mysteriously, in summer 2013. To the north in VIR’s Full Course, the first turn, named “Horseshoe,” winds back more than 180 degrees.

I very nearly “went agricultural” — spun off track — near the end of Horseshoe. At that moment, the turn taught me a small lesson about resistance and learning. (See around 0:40 into this video to watch me spin at an autocross event.)

Resistance of tire and track, remade

September dawns often rise cool enough for a sweatshirt, but September autumn lets go of summer heat reluctantly. I knew that by midday I’d prefer to shed the shirt and drop it on the tarmac. The event I attended was an HPDE (“High Performance Driver Education”) weekend, with driving sessions interspersed with racing instruction, lectures on flag signals, and race car behaviors that inexperienced drivers — the “greens” — often don’t expect but need to know. I came to appreciate the cool of the lecture room as Saturday progressed, and it was a place to escape the constant din of barely muffled cars whining, zooming on the track beyond the long “pit” where paddocks line up.

Outside, asphalt heated in the sun, even though the air was temperate. Cars fitted with soft-treaded tires deposited rubber trails, especially where they gripped tracks in acceleration, braking, and the sideways pressures of pitched turns. Together, the sun loosened asphalt tars and the tires invisibly laid new trails and subtly reconfigured the track with slickness without moving its apparent path so much as a centimeter.

Learning “The Line”

My morning sweatshirt was appropriate race driving attire, especially for a green learner like me. Labeled with the words “Road Scholar” it played with academic nerdiness; below those words a curving navy blue arrow appears, annotated with curly-bracketed directions, a couple of dots, and even a formula. It’s a map of a track, and the narrow line represents where you drive — The Line.

To look at the sweatshirt version of The Line reveals how it makes sense. The Line loosens curves by using the entire width of the track, and it indicates to some extent where you slow and where you speed up. It shows you where the “apex” of a curve sits, and the sweatshirt version of The Line even gives you a formula — one that I easily ignored while driving. And my disregard, I think, wasn’t just an attribute of being “green.”

My driving may be governed in some fashion by mathematics and physics, but to drive is also to feel. And in feeling, to take in and use much more than trajectories, velocities, and lines imagined on pavement. The feeling embodies not only the math but extends the body — my body — so that somehow the boundaries of machine and human body blur.

To drive The Line, literally and metaphorically, is to put your body on The Line.

To make this ambiguity of sensation even more ambiguous, The Line changes its surface with a rhythm reflecting the undulations of temperature or the whims of clouds and sun. Knowing where The Line should run only partly matters; the surface resistance (or its lack) also dictates how you learn The Line.

Learning the hot and slippery Line

Claude, my genial but demanding driving instructor, sat in the passenger seat. Really, our “seats” resembled lightly padded scoops, our bodies stuffed and secured in the tight embrace of five-point restraints, a sort of over-enthusiastic seat belt. Beneath sweaty helmets, Claude and I were connected by earphones and mics that just barely delivered our voices above the din of the track. My son’s old BMW E30 was our craft, which he had ruthlessly stripped of everything but the necessary. The few additions (mainly a roll cage and emergency shut-off switch) made us safer but not more comfortable.

In the afternoon, I raced full throttle past the observation deck and the line of paddocks in the pit. It was hot. It was loud. It felt good.

The approach to turn number one, “Horseshoe,” is straight, and signs on the left count down the distance to the turn. The idea is to go as fast as you can before hitting the brakes so that you can manage the turn. If you approach too fast, you swing out too far and end up braking even more to maintain control of the car (or you just run off the track). Drive too slow and you might manage the turn at a sedate pace but lose time to your pokey speed. The Goldilocks pace — not too fast and not too slow — means keeping to The Line but managing the forces of gravity and adhesion of the asphalt at a speed that’s at the edge of control.

For me, gravity stayed the same on “Horseshoe.” Adhesion did not.

I learned that three quarters of the way through the turn. I could show you exactly where I felt the tires slip ever so subtly and then more urgently.

“Whoa!” I broadcast to Claude’s ears.

Claude may have stiffened a bit in his seat.

Without thought and, strangely, without a sense of the difference between my human body and the steel and rubber of the old E30, I turned into the skid. The car quivered and righted itself. We avoided falling into a spin and ended up wiggling a bit as we moved forward on the track.

“Go! Go! Go!” Claude yelled, probably because he worried that I’d lose composure and slow to a grandfatherly pace.

That lesson taught by slippery tarmac lasted, oh, five seconds at the most.

It taught something of the cunning of The Line, which masquerades under an apparent, even mathematical, sameness. Same Line, every time, mapped securely on dry paper, a weak representative of the real thing with its tar smell, tire smoke, exhaust, and flag signals. Learning The Line is different from mastering it. That demands matters well beyond the reach of cartography and formulae — which my sweatshirt represented quite well — into matters of sensation and, in the case of my near tragedy at Horseshoe, unthinking competence and reaction. And luck.

You get that from driving and, in the case of my encounter, some experience driving on ice.

Another thing came with an encounter like mine on Horseshoe. I recently started reading Why We Drive by Matthew Crawford, and, briefly in, I ran into a paragraph that resonated:

A few years ago, I was loaned a brand-new Ducati by the good people at Popular Mechanics…. I took it on the canyon road that leads up to the Mount Wilson Observatory outside Los Angeles. At one point, my front tire hit a patch of sand just as I was apexing a blind curve, with my head about three feet from the rock face on my inside. The front tire slid maybe a foot, my inside boot dragged. Then the bike gripped, sorted itself, and kept going, finishing the turn upright. It was one of those episodes — a little glimpse of mayhem — where, if you come through it, you feel like you can stand a little taller afterward. “To dare, to take risks, to bear uncertainty, to endure tension — these are the essence of the play spirit,” Johan Huizinga writes.

The old E30 I drove was no new Ducati, and the danger I faced was paltry in comparison to Crawford’s. But the “little glimpse of mayhem” applies.

Teaching and The Line

I’ve thought about my role as a seminar leader and the ways that I’ve shaped an experience for students. I’ve mapped out a track in a syllabus and readings, but it’s in the interactions around the seminar table where the slippery stuff begins to require adjustments. We may threaten the peace of long confirmed views, unchallenged and unquestioned, that face slickened pathways.

The point is, of course, to confront the slippages and the treacheries of hard thinking. To come to new senses and new views without spinning out.

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RIP, Omar

Many of you wondered where the Friday post was. And here it is on Sunday evening.

The main reason, I guess, is that we had to put our dear little cat Omar down, which made things grind and chatter in daily life. He had been failing for weeks, and treatments couldn’t bolster him and pull him back to health. He was immunocompromised from kittenhood, and he lost his final fight.

He was a dear little cat, and now he rests out back by the fence in view of a nice field and next to his large dog friend Senna.

We’ll miss him.

And then, there’s Ophelia…

… who blew through the Carolinas yesterday dropping abundant rain and stirring up the leaves on the trees. She didn’t pulverize the leaves like her angrier sister Fran did years ago, but she managed to drop a couple of old dead trees that needed to come down anyway.

We lost power on Saturday. So much for ’stacking in the dark.

Tags: race, car, learning, vir, virginia international raceway, hpde, driving, omar, ophelia, wind, rain

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In the fall, I park a little over a mile from my classroom in a lot that is situated in between everything. It keeps me walking, too, since campus buses are usually full and don’t stop. “FULL PLS USE NEXT BUS” reads the banner above the windshield that normally reports the bus destination. Often, I’ll meet my campus guests from out-of-town in the parking lot, or I’ll fetch them from wherever. We walk to the seminar room together.

We reconnect and talk as we briskly walk.

A couple years ago on one of those walks, I learned of Robert Caro’s The Power Broker from my friend and long-ago student David Shaywitz. David got his appreciation of Caro’s books from Jeffrey Pfeffer, the Thomas D. Dee II Professor of Organizational Behavior at Stanford’s Graduate School of Business, who happened to live in the same town as the Shaywitz family when they lived in California. Pfeffer, David reminded me in an email, “is known for his unvarnished application of hard-nosed social science research to the study of leadership and power” and teaches a popular course called “The Paths to Power” at Stanford. On one of our walks, David talked about power and its ambiguous character and how it was explored through Caro’s biography of Robert Moses (The Power Broker’s main focus) and Caro’s on-going five-volume biography of Lyndon Johnson. The book was already decades old, and it still hadn’t landed on my bedside table. So, I picked it up as August beach reading, and I’m working my way through it now, all 1,162 pages of narrative, not counting notes and other addenda.

Robert Moses builds parks on Long Island

Chapter nine of The Power Broker is called “A Dream” and revisits Robert Moses’ long-waiting dream of building parks on Long Island, east of New York City. His vision came into being after patience, conniving, manipulation, and of course, litigation. Caro opens the chapter not with Robert Moses but with the upheavals and transformations that American society, and New York City in particular, were undergoing. Many of these changes emanated from the invention that came to define the twentieth century: the automobile. The car remade industry, increased productivity, and whittled down the time that workers spent at their jobs. “Before World War I, a seventy-hour factory week had been common,” Caro reports; “in 1920, the average was sixty hours; in 1929, just before the Crash, it would be forty-eight.” Weekends were opening up. In large part the revolution of free time came from manufacturing practices developed by Henry Ford who even offered the unheard of benefit of annual vacations with pay.

Matching this expanding leisure time was the explosion of cars produced and bought in the early years of the century. Caro points out that the “number of automobile-owning families in the country in 1919 was less than seven million; by 1923, it would be twenty-three million.” Even with such explosive growth in a mere four years, I think Caro’s statistics still understate the transformation that was taking place. Consider this: In 1900, US factories produced a total of four thousand cars; in 1923, American factories produced 3.6 million cars. In 1909, with the introduction of Ford’s Model T and his use of the assembly line and mass-produced parts, production jumped and availability increased as prices dropped. In part as a result of increased competition with the new manufacturing innovations, the total number of American car manufacturers — 277 at their peak in 1909 — plummeted.

The situation in which Robert Moses began to fulfill his dream was simple: In the mid-1920s New Yorkers were all car’ed up with nowhere to go. Caro describes the situation quite concretely:

For millions of New York fathers, thanks to the machine parked near their door, no longer did a Sunday outing have to be to a Bowery beer garden or a hard-surfaced playground framed by grimy buildings that they saw every day. Suddenly it could be to grassy meadows beneath expanses of blue sky, perhaps even to white sand and sparkling surf.

But it was not to be. The car would remain parked. Or, if the family packed up and ventured out in search of picnicking and swimming on Long Island to the east, they would be met with frustration in unremitting dust and heat on the road. Roads didn’t lack, but they were unable to handle the traffic and they led to no actually accessible leisurely destinations.

And this was by design — embedded in laws and in constrained and largely unmaintained road infrastructure.

Long Island townships might have parks — but only for the locals. New Yorkers who wandered in were chased off by policemen who shouted that open parks were “farther along” — which was a lie. The nation’s wealthiest, whom the beauty and isolation of the place had attracted, were in no mood to share the scenery, either, and marked their properties “PRIVATE.” Caro writes that the “barons” of the age, who had ensconced themselves in six hundred estates in the most scenic areas of Long Island, had even acquired the right “to incorporate their estates into self-governing ‘villages’ so that the measures necessary to keep out the city hordes could be legitimatized … and enforced by ‘village police forces’ which before incorporation had been their privately employed guards.”

Getting to the restricted parks and properties was another thing altogether for New York families in their Fords:

If they were heading for the North Shore on Northern Boulevard, 160 feet of smooth macadam1 shrank to eighteen at the city line. The cars heading east had to cram into single file. As they crept along, the paving of the boulevard deteriorated, so that each family had to watch the cars ahead jounce, one after the other, into gaping potholes, and then wait for the jolts themselves.

Bad roads were part of the scheme to keep the city folks in the city, away from the inaccessible shores of Long Island.

Such is the context Robert Caro’s story of Robert Moses’ rise to power. Caro carefully lays out the circumstances that Moses fell into, and for me, that background of Moses’ life stands out — I think more starkly for me than for other readers because I’ve obsessed about cars so much. As I read Caro’s account of Moses’ dreams of parks and parkways, the story I perceived shifted from Moses the man to Moses in his milieu, and the power he “brokered” became a dance of circumstance and his will. In his conquest of Long Island (and the term conquest applies) I see Moses as a human instrument laying out part of the mammoth technological system of the automobile. He is a talented and treacherously scheming human under command of the car and its irrepressible system.

New Yorkers had cars with few places to go. Long Island lay to the east, with particular promise and, amazingly, empty lands that the city had claim to for water rights. But the car — the technology that effectively pressurized the city’s space — added volatility to the circumstances of New York in the 1920s. The populace could move more or less effortlessly wherever roads led. Robert Moses was interested in parks and building roads.

The cars required a technological system of infrastructure in order to be, well, automobiles, and that meant roads, destinations, and support.

A will bounded. Not a puppet on strings

The story that Caro tells of Robert Moses rise and fall depicts the accumulation and the exercise of power. When I describe Moses as an “instrument” of the technology of the automobile, I do not diminish the power that Moses acquired and applied — which was considerable and, as readers come to understand, not exactly wielded with charity, patience, and benevolence. (Caro’s depiction shows a man obsessed with the accumulation and ruthless exercise of power, even for the sake of simply exerting power.) It is, however, worth teasing out pressures that Moses channeled. In the case of his work to establish parks on Long Island, these pressures accumulated around the automobile and the powers that its technology promised. The pressures implied a system — manifest most clearly in the story of Moses’ Long Island projects in a system of access and the creation of destinations, in this case for entertainment and recreation. The story of Long Island’s projects ends up triumphantly — actually amazingly, since Moses and his teams of engineers, draftsmen, surveyors, and workers of all sorts pulled together to open parks and parkways in short order.

With the Long Island parks, Moses chose and used his power in certain ways to fulfill his dream, doing so within the logic and the systems within automobile technology. The car, of course did not dictate his dream in detail, but Moses fulfilled it within constraints that were implicit in the technology of the car and, maybe even secondary to that, within the context of human desires — for freedom of movement, for surf and sun, for respite from the city — that the automobile awakened in New York’s fast-growing population.

That Long Island park episode of Moses’ life closes with his fall to the darker — one could say mean-spirited or even evil — seductions of power.

Caro ends the introduction to his book this way: “It is impossible to say that New York would have been a better city if Robert Moses had never existed. It is possible to say only that it would have been a different city.” Yes, Robert Moses exerted his power ruthlessly to create a New York City that largely persists today. Possible variations were, however, outlined by the city’s and the nation’s circumstances, and among the strongest of these was the emerging technological system of the automobile.

Some comments on The Power Broker so far

I mentioned that I was finally reading The Power Broker to a fellow Substack writer who I knew was reading the book, too. He was farther along — a “few hundred pages” — and commented, “It’s well written but it illuminates some of the horrible spots of human character and that gets hard to read, for me at least.” And he’s right. David Shaywitz pointed out the same thing to me as we walked across campus a couple years ago. The story that’s unfolded in the three hundred pages I’ve read shows the fall of Robert Moses from idealistic youth to rank opportunist, conniving and even petty. David was disturbed by what he saw as the inevitability of human’s fundamental will to power and its driving influence on human behavior. The notion has some philosophical history, of course.

I recall back in the days of the ’demic that The Power Broker became something of a prop on bookshelves behind people doing Zoom interviews. The book made cameo appearances frequently enough that the New York Times took note. Times correspondent Dana Rubinstein contacted Caro about it, and he said, “It sort of makes you feel optimistic. I always felt, people reading it are reading it because they want to know how political power really works.”

Though its picture of power indeed shines light on “the horrible spots of human character,” Caro’s book has made me wonder if he thought that knowledge about power might humanize it or keep it in check. I don’t think Caro liked Moses much, and so he must have fortitude to have completed this massive biography.

The story of Robert Moses and the car relates to initial discussions in my fall seminar on “our complex relationships with technology.” We’re exploring unintended consequences and how technologies imply systems that we may not immediately recognize but have to deal with nonetheless. The system of automobility is one of them.

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Tags: power, robert caro, robert moses, new york, politics, state park, highway, road, building, corruption, technology, freedom, control, technological system, automobile, car, unintended

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

It’s noteworthy that Robert Caro hasn’t agreed to have his book appear in electronic format. You gotta read it on paper. Maybe that’s an example to follow? Caro, Robert A. The Power Broker: Robert Moses and the Fall of New York. New York: Vintage Books, 1975. (Alibris | Bookshop.org)

A trip to New York in type starting from an airplane landing. Inventive web entertainment via the keyboard. All you need to do is scrollscrollscroll down. GROZNOV. “I TYPE NY.” I TYPE NY. Accessed August 18, 2023. http://i-type-ny.groznov.co/

Yes, books do furnish a room. Especially during a pandemic. Rubinstein, Dana. “Lights. Camera. Makeup. And a Carefully Placed 1,246-Page Book.” The New York Times, May 28, 2020, sec. New York. https://www.nytimes.com/2020/05/28/nyregion/power-broker-tv.html.

Finding a way in early car industry: Devanatha Pillai, Sandeep, Brent D. Goldfarb, and David Kirsch. “When Does Economic Experimentation Matter? Finding the Pivot in the Early History of the Automobile Industry.” SSRN Scholarly Paper. Rochester, NY: Social Science Research Network, June 12, 2018. https://doi.org/10.2139/ssrn.3199544.

This park is only 875 acres, but the beaches extend for miles. Given Moses’ nastiness, there’s a movement to change the name of the park, and legislation to do that has been proposed in the New York State Assembly. No new name has been proposed. Robert Moses State Park (https://parks.ny.gov/parks/7/)

As I’ve been reading Caro’s The Power Broker, I’ve recalled a post by about Caro’s “cork-board.” Jillian wrote it when her award-winning Substack was just a month old. The Power Broker is dense with facts, and I can see how Caro’s meticulous planning and research distilled into the prose of the book. I can almost see the cork board’s notations as I go through a chapter.

Noted

Robert Caro's Cork Board

Noted is a month old! I’m so thankful for all of you who have subscribed, liked, shared, recommended, and commented. It means the world to me. As an academic, I’m not used to getting such immediate feedback from readers, and I have to say, it’s pretty great! Here’s to month #2…

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4 years ago · 36 likes · 42 comments · Jillian Hess

David’s most recent book review was published a couple weeks ago. It’s on “synthetic biology.” Shaywitz, David A. “‘Programmable Planet’ Review: Biology’s Big Bonus.” Wall Street Journal, August 20, 2023, sec. Arts. https://www.wsj.com/arts-culture/books/programmable-planet-review-biologys-big-bonus-2a9029e5.

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In addition to new Technocomplex subscribers who signed themselves up, some new subscribers have come to the fold because they’re enrolled in a fall seminar at Duke University called “From Siri to SkyNet: Our Complex Relationships with Technology.” I lead that seminar, and I pressed the students into service, so to speak, since Technocomplex is a “text” for their course.

To my students: Welcome! And, yes, you’re supposed to get this newsletter, cuz it’s on the syllabus. When the semester ends, I hope you’ll stick around like scores of other students!

To everyone else: I’m glad you’re with us, too!

Liming, Sheila. Hanging out: The Radical Power of Killing Time. Brooklyn: Melville House, 2023. xxi, 232 Pages. ISBN: 978-1-68589-005-6 $27.99

Back in May, I offered some thoughts that came from “hanging out with artists” one evening at the beginning of summer. I noted the happy coincidence of the event in the historic old Duke basketball gymnasium and two books I was reading at the time. One of them was Sheila Liming’s Hanging Out, which I echoed in the title of my post; the other was Patrick Bringley’s All the Beauty in the World. Both new this year, and praiseworthy.

I closed that essay with these words: “Bringley and Liming touch strings that accord with ones plucked by the circle of artists in The Ark back in April. The strings play familiar notes: a desire to reclaim time, to counteract the corrosive influence of busy-ness, to open new opportunities for creativity and joy — in short, to become more human.”

“Reclaiming time” of course feels quite different from what Liming’s title conveys: “The Radical Power of Killing Time.” Liming really is seeking to reclaim time for the sake of somehow killing it. She says as much in her final chapter, a sort of how-to about hanging out. It turns out that time — the thing that hanging out figuratively “kills” — is the most important element of hanging out. It’s first on her list of ingredients. “Hanging out cannot happen without time,” she writes and adds the important proviso, “that is, without the strategic confiscation of it.”

Who or what confiscates time? Today, everyone with a nagging email notification or an online calendar knows the answer to that. Everyone whose life is regimented by work demands, social pressures, a perfectionist impulse, or imposter syndrome — which is to say really everyone, I guess. “We must wrest time away from the places where it has been sequestered and kept from us against our will,” Liming preaches. “We must work to seize and redistribute the wealth that is time and, when we have done that, we must commit to the work of giving it all back to each other.”

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There, in the seizing, is the reclamation. There, in the redistribution, is the “so-called killing of time,” where hanging out builds beyond the grid-like rigidity of compartmentalized, employed, or “production-obsessed” time. “Killing time” by hanging out builds human society in a most basic form and lays a foundation of creativity, which Liming says can be coaxed from “the creative nature of indolence”:

What I’m arguing for here, then, is the reclaiming of time, which is both the essence of hanging out and its main ingredient, along with the reclaiming of the basic material components that are required for the so-called killing of time, by which I mean space. When we set aside time and space for hanging out, we assert our right to be non-productive, in the economic sense, and likewise our right to produce differently, by focusing on the work that is required for strengthening social ties.

Maybe it’s not hard even hard to do, either. The fact is, hanging out comes naturally to us; we’ve just larded it up and obscured it behind the (often technological) trappings of modern life.

I said that Liming preaches. I could have used urges or implores just as well, but with the effect of dialing back the real urgency and “exigency” that Liming conveys. As she points out, Hanging Out is a manifesto — a genre that can be shrill and breathless and insistent and, well, even obnoxious. She knows the dangers of writing a manifesto, too. She cites Zadie Smith who “warns against investing such writing with too much urgency.” Quoting Smith: such writers end up “echoing and mimicking the urgency of the guerilla’s demands, or the activist’s protests, rather than truly enacting it.”

From manifesto to enactment through storytelling

Readers can be assured that Liming doesn’t preach for 232 pages. The sermonic urgency amounts to seasoning, not an entire meal. How you hang out and why it’s a good thing to do come forth in the book’s seven numbered chapters that bear titles like “Hanging Out at Parties,” “Jamming as Hanging Out,” and “Hanging Out on the Job.”1 Liming likens this framework of stories to a “little gallery” — a very effective device for the book. “I don’t want to lecture,” she assures us; “rather, I want to take readers through this little gallery I’ve arranged containing portraits of accidents in modern living; I want to walk and talk with them; I want us all to hang out.”

As we stroll through them, the “portraits” and the conversation with them amount to an enactment of sorts. (I bet that professors of homiletics would tell us that stories make the best sermons, too!) The portraits depict hanging out in different situations — many that we’re accustomed to passing through, but that it’s tempting to overlook or discount as time-wasters and digressions. The situations Liming recounts are quite different, too, not close variations on a theme, which would become tedious. The chapters recount a range of success and failure, varied pathways toward hanging out with their own pitfalls and easy parts.

My favorite was the “jamming” chapter.2 I’ll go into that chapter more deeply, but you should know that the range of chapters, all of which pull from Liming’s personal history, depicts both the variety and even the unruliness of the experiences of hanging out. Each of the chapters is a delight, sometimes even a challenge, reflecting the kind of lives we live if we live them well.

I gravitated to the jamming chapter not because I’m much of a musician. Unfortunately, I am not. It appealed to me because I knew one of the stomping grounds that Liming haunted as a musician. She plays the accordion and “jammed” in Asheville, North Carolina, for a while when she was part of a band. It also struck me because her account of “jamming as hanging out” harmonized with ’s exploration of jazz musicians is his book Range.3 Epstein tells of the pathways that jazz greats took to learn their craft — the structure and boundaries of jazz improvization. The learning mainly comes from interaction and imitation, “call and response” like what we experience in conversation while “hanging out.” He closes the chapter with wisdom from Jack Cecchini, who is almost alone in excelling in both classical and jazz music — a rarity among musicians.

“I think when you’re self-taught you experiment more, trying to find the same sound in different places, you learn to solve problems,” Cecchini told Epstein.

Cecchini stopped speaking for a moment, reclined in his chair, and stared at the ceiling. A few moments passed. “I could show somebody in two minutes what would take them years of screwing around on the fingerboard like I did to find it. You don’t know what’s right or what’s wrong. You don’t have that in your head. You’re just trying to find a solution to problems, and after fifty lifetimes, it starts to come together for you. It’s slow,” he told me, “but at the same time, there’s something to learning that way.”

Cecchini picked up his skill haphazardly. A free lesson here, a chance pointer from his landlord, background gigs at establishments he wasn’t old enough to be at, legally at least.

Like Cecchini, Liming no doubt knows the struggle of messing around on her accordion to solve “problems.” What she uncovers in the hanging-out of jamming is a repertoire and other musicians who can teach “in two minutes what would take … years of screwing around.” That’s a benefit, surely, but it is probably not the most profound one that Liming discovers.

Jam exceeds conventional learning/teaching by far, and Liming says that she doesn’t even like the word, but finds “no worthy substitute for it.” It is a unique container for a particular way of hanging out. Central to the jam “is a collaborative space — both literal and figurative — in which music is given the chance to unfurl in loose, rambling, and unceremonious ways…. To jam is to explore, improvise, swap, share, and relate.” It’s “messy.” She adds a sonorous detail to her definition: “It’s a little, three-letter wreck of a word, containing the sounds of twisted metal and broken glass.”

That is, a jamming session is no simple tutorial. Jam dwells “outside of consecrated performance spaces”; and, as Liming shows, it can easily raise hackles of the poor souls who live in adjacent apartments. Jam, “through its noise, has the power to gather together and assemble but also the power to offend and alienate.” The problem of jam is often “the guy downstairs” who storms up the stairs to hurl insults, YELLS FOR QUIET, or calls the cops. Liming has stories.

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She was in two bands, one fluid and devoted to jam (her “old man jam band”) and the other show-conscious and polished-to-performance, called “The Armadillos.” Both bands rehearsed by jamming; the “old man jam band” also seemed just to jam when it performed, apparently. Of her time with The Armadillos, Liming recalls, “There was an organic quality to the way we made music together onstage, but all of that ease had to be forged through the mess of the jam. We had to get good and be good with each other in order to get good at being good in front of others. This was true on a social level as much as it was on a musical level.”

The Armadillos’ favorite place was Asheville, where they had friends who could almost manage being full-time musicians. Liming recalls one evening when The Armadillos were staying with them. Their friends had gone off to the beer bottling plant for part-time work, and Liming’s band mates stayed behind and built a fire in a fire pit outside.

We got the fire going, took out our instruments, and started trading songs and jamming…. As we played there around the fire, the dark descended upon us, wiping out the surrounding scenery and replacing it with deep blue shadows. Out of these shadows emerged a guy with a guitar, his face barely visible in the firelight. He wasn’t one of the neighbors and we’d never seen him before. Without a word of greeting, he sat down and just started playing along, inserting himself within whatever song we already had going. A few minutes later, a woman with a fiddle followed, then another guy with another guitar. They a djembe. Then a banjo.

On it went. We’d seen no cars approach and had no idea where they came from, these improvisatory ghosts. They sprang up out of the night, armed with a knowledge of our chords and our songs or, at least, enough skill to quickly piece it all together and join right in…. It was hanging out — delighting in a shared project, a shared language, with no guys downstairs and no one listening in from the outside, badgering us with requests or demanding a sculpted, polished performance.

Now, I have to say that when I read that, I felt a certain hope for humanity, and I, too, felt the warmth of the fire and musical exchanges. Hanging-out touched me even in the reading.

Liming correctly points out that improvization finds structure with keys and tempos, which might be wandered from. But it isn’t all just aimless meandering or loose. Great jams make sense even though they end up fleeting and irretrievable. Liming writes at one point that “we are all just making it up as we go along and improvization is something that certain musical and social situations do not invent but, rather, help to make explicit. In jamming, as in hanging out, there are few, if any, real rules.”

“Jamming as Hanging Out” offers one portrait in the gallery. Like the other chapters, this one calls upon writers and poets and thinkers, though Hanging Out is grounded in Liming experience as a person. That closeness to her life and memory makes the portraits of hanging out powerful and moving. Of course, the poets, the philosophers do have something to offer, and that Liming includes their voices brings “mere hanging out” to a different level — to a playful, wry, and unruly seriousness, perhaps, that many people yearn for today as a form of liberation.

Besides, Liming notes that “the work of study is located right next door to that of hanging out.” She cites Stefano Harney:

It’s talking and walking around with other people, working, dancing, suffering, some irreducible convergence of all three, held under the name of speculative practice. The notion of a rehearsal — being in a kind of workshop, playing in a band, in a jam session, or old men sitting on a porch, or people working together in a factory — there are these various modes of activity. The point of calling it “study” is to mark that the incessant and irreversible intellectuality of these activities is already present.

In short, “study” is also — is really — nearby a jam in real life, a life hung-out in. Seriously. (And that is my first message I send to my students this fall and a reminder to all the others who have kept up with me through this little newsletter.)

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Who we’re hanging out with this fall

I’ve written before about the importance and delight of hosting invited guests to the fall seminar. In part, I want to capture something of the vibrancy of a salon. In part, I want to indulge my own interest in learning what my friends are up to and what they think about matters we confront in the seminar.

“Our class guests are the philosophes who qualify by being practitioners of an area we study or are themselves studying a topic that intersects with the focus of the class,” I wrote in May last year. “The idea is simple: we want to have an informed conversation with someone who is an authority or who has an interesting viewpoint.”

This fall, we’ll have six guests, all exceptional. Short biographies are below the mugshots.

Brinnae Bent is a data scientist who uses digital approaches to improve health care. Brinnae is currently managing partner and a senior data scientist at Edge Analytics, where she consults with companies on everything AI - from LLMs (think ChatGPT) to computer vision to building algorithms to help people walk She completed her doctoral studies in the Big Ideas Lab in the Department of Biomedical Engineering at Duke University where she worked to develop digital biomarkers of glycemic health from noninvasive wearables. She has led projects establishing best practices for wearable sensor validation, investigating wearable sensor device inaccuracy, optimizing sampling rate and data compression of wearable sensors, and using wearable sensors for human activity recognition. Prior to graduate studies, she worked with the NSF ASSIST Center to develop the next generation of wearable sensors for sleep disorders and asthma. Outside of work, she is a new mom and an avid ultramarathoner.

Robert Buerglener is a Research Associate in Information Science + Studies (ISS) at Duke University. His current projects examine the social, cultural, and political influences that together shape technological systems and built environments. He leads an ISS Research Lab called North Carolina Lives and Legacies. This project uses digital storytelling tools and other innovative forms of research to create academic and public histories that capture the diversity of the state’s peoples and pasts. He is also a project lead in World Building at Duke in an Emerging Durham, 1924-1932, a Duke Bass Connections program. His research and teaching interests include technology, material culture, and public history in the US from the Early Republic through the twentieth century. He has published on the history of technology and automobility, architecture and urban environments, and critical overviews of transportation-related scholarship. He earned his PhD in US History at the University of Chicago with a study on the creation of the American automobile driver in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. In addition to Duke University, he has taught at the University of Chicago, the Illinois Humanities Council, and Northwestern University, and he has also worked in various positions at historic sites and historic house museums.

Erich Huang is Chief Science and Innovation Officer at Onduo (https://onduo.com/) and Head of Clinical Informatics at Verily (https://verily.com/). He continues to serve on the surgery and the bioinformatics and biostatistics faculty at Duke School of Medicine, where he also served as Assistant Dean of Biomedical Informatics and as Chief Data Officer for Duke Health. He co-founded and directed Duke Forge, the university’s health data science initiative. In addition to his academic roles, he is a “serial founder,” having started and advised several health and technology-related companies. He was director for cancer research at Sage Bionetworks. He is particularly interested in the intersection of emerging technologies that can transform healthcare, including medical devices and AI. He earned his undergraduate degree at Harvard University and MD and PhD degrees at Duke, where he also did his general surgery residency.

Paul Jaskot is Professor of Art History, Chair of Duke’s Department of Art, Art History, and Visual Studies (AAHVS), and Co-Director of the Digital Art History & Visual Culture Research Lab. As a leader in digital art history, he has been part of the Holocaust Geography Collaborative, an international team of scholars that has been exploring the use of GIS and other digital methods to analyze central problems in the spatial history of the Holocaust, including issues rising from the built environment. He specializes in the history of modern German architecture and art, with a particular interest in the political history of architecture before, during, and after the Nazi era. He has also published on Holocaust Studies topics more broadly, modern architecture including the history of Chicago architecture, and methodological essays on Marxist art history.

is Vice President of Product at Osso (https://ossovr.com/). His career has consistently engaged art, music, and technology, exploring the ways that artistic expression of all kinds can be deepened or limited by technology tools. He has pursued his interests in large multi-national corporations and in start-ups. At Sony Network Entertainment, he was Director of Music Services, where he led Playstation Music (formerly Music Unlimited); at PlayStation, he was Director and GM of Virtual Reality Products. Work with MOG led to award-winning Android and Apple apps that were acquired by Beats Music and later formed the core of Apple Music. He and his teams won a Webby Award (2013) and “Best VR Headset” award for PlayStation VR (2017). He graduated from Dartmouth College with a degree in economics. He is an active musician and writer and was awarded a patent (“Interactive delivery of media using dynamic playlist generation subject to restrictive criteria”) with a co-inventor who is a good friend and colleague. You can thank them in part for your streaming music queue.

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“Sorry you couldn’t come to the last meeting,” the foundation president said on the phone. “It was an interesting one, and the board felt that you could help out with a problem.”

“Hm. What can I do?”

The “problem” had to do with a doll, maybe the most famous of them all. Barbie.

I’m having flashbacks now because Barbie is about to re-emerge in a feature-length live-action movie. Despite my desire to put memories of her behind me, I will probably watch it, though I’m not entirely sure I can convince Bond Girl Bride to watch with me. You see, I have had a long and tortured relationship with Barbie.

Backstory: A movie pitch

Actually, looking back on the relationship, I guess it, too, could make a pretty decent movie script. I’ve even rehearsed the elevator pitch — easy enough, since it’s “Toy Story meets Sleepless in Seattle meets Bridezilla.”

A few of the story’s “beats”:

• I learn a rule of board membership: never miss a meeting. You might be asked to do something that’s unexpectedly treacherous.

• How do you communicate with Barbieland about the Real World, not necessarily considering Barbie’s odd proportions, but also not not necessarily considering her odd proportions? A recollection of a long international phone call … on my dime back in the 1990s.

• What happens when a crudely typed message gets faxed to powerful people, including the President of the United States?

• I sympathize with a (somewhat) terrorist organization committing strange plastic surgery procedures and “reverse shoplifting”? (That’s real plastic, too — high-density polyethylene.) Am I still law-abiding?

• After all this, what is it? Barbie love? Barbie hate?

Hey, it would be a blockbuster.

Here’s the backstory, more or less. Before the turn of the millennium, I served on a foundation board, which sounds more important than it really was, since the responsibilities meant mainly raising cash and dispensing it on an annual basis — every penny, and sometimes augmented by pocket change from board members. No one got paid on this illustrious board, and everyone was sniffing around for prospective donors. It was a collection of amateur fundraisers, plopped into place because of presumed expertise and social connections. Being wealthy wasn’t required — as my appointment illustrated — but a couple board members had more money than sense.

The foundation supported a program that celebrated and encouraged highly talented high school graduates across the nation and from US territories. It was quite a thing and began during the LBJ presidency, when commission members included the likes of Leonard Bernstein and other luminaries. The first set of scholars had seminars with Secretary of State Dean Rusk, Astronaut Alan B. Sheppard, and Chief Justice Earl Warren.

No one on the foundation board or the commission of my day was a Leonard Bernstein or an Earl Warren, of course, and as is always the case with such things, the group had its tensions and misaligned interests. Think “escape room game” with strangers, except the goal is to support a worthy venture.

Casting possibilities for this movie seem promising. It’s possible to cook up intrigue for a thriller, wouldn’t you think?

Well, maybe, but in my story there was The Barbie Thing.

Part one: My assignment. Or, MISSION: IMPOSSIBLE

“Yes. The problem,” the president resumed. “You haven’t met B— yet, I don’t think. She sent the board a proposal.”

Indeed I hadn’t met her. She’d missed the meetings I went to. I knew she was one of the wealthy board members and particularly interested in the arts. And a bit irascible. She was closely tied with Mattel, Barbie’s maker.

“She offered the foundation a $100,000 donation. But there was a hitch. A new Barbie would come out as one of our scholars. Branded with the foundation. That’s the proposal.”

“A Barbie would certainly give us visibility,” she added, rather reluctantly and ironically, I thought.

“Let me guess. Nobody was thrilled,” I said, stating what in the Real World was obvious but in Barbieland wasn’t — especially in the 1990s.

“Well, not exactly,” she replied. “Everyone was thrilled by the offer of a donation.” She paused. “But the hitch. That’s the sticky thing. The board didn’t think Barbie is the right image, so to speak. That came out in the meeting, but no one has told her yet. So, B— is waiting.”

The board president was being diplomatic. I was actually bemused by the juxtaposition of Barbie (whose “Teen Talk” version said “math class is tough”) and the bright, somewhat nerdy, and engaged students the foundation helped to celebrate and honor. And a branded Barbie was getting to be a Thing. In 1992, she had run for President, so the image of a Presidential Barbie was fresh.

The trouble was that anyone can run for President — the roster of candidates every four years is the proof — but not anyone could be selected as a scholar in this program. And no one on the board wanted to get close to something smelling like an endorsement of a doll.

“OK. So, what do you want me to do?” I asked, dreading the response.

“We want you to talk with B— and tell her that a Barbie branded as one of our ‘scholars’ and tied to the foundation identity won’t be acceptable,” she said. “But we are very willing to accept her donation.”

“A tough sell,” I said.

“Yup. I guess. Especially the second part. If you do that, it’ll be a miracle. The board felt that you had the diplomatic skills and charm to pull it off.”

She was buttering me up.

“B— is in France at her vacation home. Here’s the phone number.” I got the phone number and more detail about the meeting. It was too late to call that day. I’d wait for the morning, when time in France would be civilized at least.

Part two: Explaining the Real World to Barbieland

I’ve only seen the Barbie trailer, but there’s a pivotal scene where Barbie consults with a quite decrepit old Barbie about what she needs to do. Old Barbie gives her a choice: “You can go back to your regular life, or you can know the truth about the universe. The choice is now yours.” She holds a pink high heel in her right hand (“your regular life”) and a very flat-footed Birkenstock in her left (“the truth about the universe”). Barbie wants the high heel, of course, but the old doll forces the issue.

In the movie, Barbie has to go to the Real World.

I was in the OLD BARBIE role in the phone call to France, to my BARBIE fellow board member.

In France, the ringtone is a “boop-boop boop-boop.” An assistant of some sort answered, and she said she’d ask BARBIE if she could talk with me.

BARBIE (i.e., B—): Hello.

OLD BARBIE (i.e., me): Hi. We’ve not yet met. I’m OLD BARBIE from the foundation board. I was asked to call you up to report about the meeting.

BARBIE: Yes. Good. Sorry I couldn’t be there. I’m in France, though.

OLD BARBIE: Yes, that’s what I heard. I wasn’t there, either. So, there’s that.

I paused, wondering where to begin or whether I even made sense about where I was. Neither of us had the benefit of first-hand knowledge of the discussion of the proposal. I had to wing it based on my conversation the day before. And BARBIE was mainly in the same boat.

OLD BARBIE: Of course everyone was very excited to hear your proposal. It would certainly go a long way to securing the future of the program.

BARBIE: Yes. Good. The Barbie doll. That’s what I’m excited about, too.

I wish I had a high heel and a Birkenstock at hand at this point, just to illustrate. I didn’t. I had to pull BARBIE to a different conclusion without foot-bound visual aids.

OLD BARBIE: Yes. Well. The board talked a long time about it, and the Barbie isn’t really an option. Couple of reasons, really.

I could feel BARBIE’s body stiffen over the phone.

OLD BARBIE: First, the board came to the conclusion that a branded Barbie would look like the foundation and the program endorsing Barbie. People didn’t know if they could even do that kind of thing.

BARBIE: No, not right. Barbie would be great to encourage girls to become better scholars. No endorsement of Barbie. The other way around.

I paused again, trying to comprehend how a Barbie endorsement would work for the foundation and the scholars. Would I want to be endorsed by Barbie? The mind boggles — or at least the Real World mind boggles.

OLD BARBIE: Hm. I have to say that your take is a positive one, but it wasn’t what the board saw. The other thing has to do with …

I hesitated, trying to assess how to cast the message. Suddenly, I felt a yawning gulf between the Real World and Barbieland.

OLD BARBIE: … has to do with, uh, Barbie ... Barbie’s image.

I was thinking of her DD-cups and 22-inch waist and her impossibly narrow neck and legs as long as telephone poles. I also thought she was a bit ditzy. Then I made a big mistake, in retrospect.

OLD BARBIE: Uh, she doesn’t fit the image of a scholar. The image of Barbie isn’t exactly a really smart student. And that’s what worried the board. Misinterpretation, you know, of what the scholars program is.

BARBIE (after a pause): Barbie has done lots of things. Really lots, and she’s exceptional. There’s a Black Barbie. There’s an astronaut Barbie. Do you know that somewhere around the world someone buys a Barbie every seven seconds?

I didn’t know that, and to be honest I can’t remember today — thirty years after the exchange — if it was every seven seconds or every six. Whatever. But it was clear from that point on in our twenty-minute conversation that BARBIE wasn’t going to put on the Birkenstock of the Real World.

She’d stick with the high heels, thank you very much.

When I hung up the phone, I was relieved to be done with the conversation and felt that we parted amicably. Or, as amicably as could be expected. There was tension but no yelling or expletives. I didn’t expect a miracle; there wasn’t going to be a $100,000 check in the mail without a specially branded Barbie in the offing.

Part three: I sympathize with a “terrorist organization”

The night after our telephone conversation, I imagine B— in her French chateau, typing away in her high heels. Then, in the cool morning light of France, she had her assistant fax the note to several people. Members of the foundation board and another person or two. And to the President of the United States.

I came into work, glanced at the fax machine next to the door to my office, and picked up the single page. I was on the recipients list.

Even though the phone call was without static and clear as the Bell System could muster, the connection between the Real World and Barbieland apparently was quite garbled. I thought the conversation went as well as it could have, my momentary bluntness about Barbie’s image notwithstanding. B— apparently didn’t share that view.

Her fax recounted a telephone call that sounded pretty bad, actually, but time has eroded my memory of the details of her description. (Too bad I didn’t save the fax. It’d be hilarious to see now.) I do remember one phrase: “He sullied my reputation.” That was news to me, and a particularly ingenious twist, since obviously my reputation was sullied quite nicely with the faxed narrative from Barbieland.

So, I spent the morning on the phone again, calling other board members. The foundation president immediately understood. “Don’t worry about it,” she said. “Doesn’t surprise me that this would happen.”

Another long-time board member laughed and said mainly the same thing, but he added, “You know, it’s said that when she goes to the White House she has free rein on the third floor.”

“Third floor?” I wondered. Where the First Family lives?

I didn’t bother calling the President.

No hit man arrived to knock me off. No FBI or Secret Service agent visited me. I didn’t hear about the matter again. I stayed on the board for a while longer until the change of administration.

But, I’m afraid, Barbie’s reputation with me suffered, so I guess in the end she was the one who got sullied. That did have consequences in the Real World — my Real World.

Dark forces seduced me.

It began with a folded sheet of paper, crinkled from having rested at the bottom of a backpack, I assumed. It was stuffed into my inbox along with the paper detritus of old-timey office work: memos, letters, notes, newspaper clippings, drafts of this-and-that, candy wrappers, rubber bands.

I unfolded it to reveal a copy of a copy of a copy. Xerography in the last century stole resolution and greys from originals, and the damage increased with every iteration. But this copy was still legible, even though the line drawings had taken on a more cartoonish quality and the lettering was blobby. It was a set of instructions for a type of surgery: voicebox transplantation. Take Hasbro’s 12" talking GI-Joe and Mattel’s Teen Talk Barbie and do a switcheroo. The idea was genius. Just think of the devious symbolism and social commentary!

The photocopied sheet was a sinuous tentacle of the B.L.O,1 an underground organization, shadowy and nefarious. The Barbie Liberation Organization. Lord knows who delivered it to my mailbox, but actually I was thankful and amused.

I guess you would call me a sympathizer, but I had been leaning in the B.L.O. direction for some time. I took delight in stories of Toys-R-Us shelf stockers surreptitiously unpacking Barbie and Ken dolls and placing them in various shocking positions — not a practice welcomed by management or by moms and dads who might have discovered their plastic trysts. (Though I have to think that some parents might find it a little amusing if Little Mary and Johnnie hadn’t been tagging along in the aisle.) Would I have fashioned that kind of doll display if I were a teen working nights at Toys-R-Us?

Given this rich history with Barbie, there’s no way I’ll miss the movie. From what I’ve read, it is quite a bit more than a feature-length doll commercial. Do take a look at the movie trailer (linked below) and peruse the propaganda from the Barbie Liberation Organization, just to keep your balance of course.

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Tags: barbie, mattel, barbie movie, sexism, blo, barbie liberation organization, board membership, philanthropy

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Gotta watch this. Barbie [Main Trailer]. YouTube video, 2023.

Truly excellent New York Times piece on Greta Gerwig, the director and co-writer of the Barbie movie. You’ll see why I’m psyched to see the flick. Paskin, Willa. “Greta Gerwig’s ‘Barbie’ Dream Job.” The New York Times, July 11, 2023, sec. Magazine. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/07/11/magazine/greta-gerwig-barbie.html.

Another thoughtful piece with a little wider scope. Barasch, Alex. “After ‘Barbie,’ Mattel Is Raiding Its Entire Toybox.” The New Yorker, July 2, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/07/10/after-barbie-mattel-is-raiding-its-entire-toybox.

Just so you can see the longer history. Barbie’s distant German relative was sex toy. Challita, Violet. “The Development of Barbie.” Timetoast timelines, May 17, 1956. https://www.timetoast.com/timelines/the-development-of-barbie.

The spokesperson? A liberated Barbie! Barbie Liberation Organisation, YouTube video, 2010.

From “The Yes Men,” a news program from “NBC.” Includes a spot with Dr. Erickson who shows how the transformative surgery is done. The Barbie Liberation Organization. YouTube video, 2013.

When I look back three months, I, too, am amazed by the pace of developments in LLMs (Large Language Models) and AI—a pace no doubt supercharged by competition in the industry. I’m also surprised by the rapid shift in attitudes and concerns about AI, even among leaders in the field.

A case in point: Cade Metz wrote about Sam Altman, OpenAI’sCEO, in March 2023: “He said his company was building technology that would ‘solve some of our most pressing problems, really increase the standard of life and also figure out much better uses for human will and creativity.’ ” But Metz also reported that Altman worried that AI could disrupt and do “serious harm.”

Kelly Sims, a board advisor to OpenAI, commented, “In a single conversation, he [Altman] is both sides of the debate club.”

In May—just a couple months after Metz’s article appeared in the New York Times—Altman seems to have darkened his forecasts. He testified to the US Senate subcommittee for privacy, technology and the law: “I think if this technology goes wrong, it can go quite wrong. And we want to be vocal about that. We want to work with the government to prevent that from happening.”

That is a far cry from Eliezer Yudkowsky’s frantic opinion piece in TIME magazine, where he claims that nuclear war is less threatening than large scale AI. “Make it explicit in international diplomacy that preventing AI extinction scenarios is considered a priority above preventing a full nuclear exchange,” he writes, “and that allied nuclear countries are willing to run some risk of nuclear exchange if that’s what it takes to reduce the risk of large AI training runs.”

I’m not surprised that we have little clarity and much noise on how AI will fit into (or disrupt) human society and culture. We don’t know how it works on a deep level, we don’t know its capabilities or the “edges” of its powers, we don’t have an agreed upon vocabulary to discuss AI, and we have few useful analogies that shed more light than confusion about AI and its ilk. The murk will persist, but the void will be filled—with hype and “criti-hype.”

No wonder why I’ve held off writing about ChatGPT and AI recently, except for ruminations on empathy and our reception of thinking-like utterance, the accelerated pace of development, and “SALAMI.” The technology will indeed remake much, even though we don’t know exactly what will happen, so it’s no wonder why it’s important to try to wrestle with the topics.

Now, as I shape the fall seminar on “our complex relationships with technology,” I’m wondering how I need to remake plans in a manner that preserves AI as a subject to examine, rather than allowing AI to turn us into its subjects.

Things have changed a lot since last fall, and I’m relieved to be able to focus on a set of challenges that, for now at least, don’t include protecting the world from a ravaging AI.

Learning and teaching with AI

Among many university teachers, the curve of discussion and change follows the path you might expect. Rejection and denial at first. Diddling around, some irritation and rage. Depression. Resignation to the “inevitable.” Acceptance. A lot like the path the dying take toward acceptance of their end, I guess, and it’s a process that recurs with every new challenge and change. AI is just a recent example.

In the matter of “what to do about ChatGPT” I’m not yet at “acceptance,” but I’ve danced around the other steps. I typically devote the last class session last December to thorough evaluation of the seminar and give a peek at changes I am thinking about for a future run. Back then, I sensed that GPT-3 had changed the context for learning and that GPT-4, which we then expected early in 2023, would cement the changes. As has been my practice, I’ve used writing to help unlock topics and as a tool for exploration as we’ve have gone through the weeks of the seminar, so I expected the challenges of GPT-3 (and following versions) would be significant.

What if GPT-3 and its successors changed what it meant for students to write? What if the technology would strip, or at least substantively alter, writing of its power to focus and transform “merely human” thought?

In that last class session, I floated the idea of de-emphasizing the written word and, with it, the role it played in helping students (and me) think. Looking back, I see the idea was an evasion, even a cowardly way to avoid confronting GPT technology. Most students didn’t think much of the idea, even though all of them struggled at some point to keep going with their writing.

Adversarial examination, messy but (often) revealing

My stab at evasion amounted to a denial that GPT and its ilk warrant no response in a writing-intensive seminar. Worse, it shrouded the emerging technology and assumed that students taking part in the seminar would be able to avoid it in their later lives.

In months since that last class session, it’s clear that LLMs and AI will become as entwined in work life as the computer, the spreadsheet, the word processor are today. Soon AI will become a component of, say, Microsoft Word so entirely woven in that “writing” might devolve into mere “prompting” and evaluating (or not) the results coughed up by the daemon in the machine. Indeed, writing might diminish in importance for professional life. Last week Salesforce announced new AI services that automate chunks of sales and marketing activities.

“It’s possible that one of the things we (as in society collectively) will decide is that students don’t need to learn to write anymore, since we have technology that can do that for us,” (aka biblioracle) I think correctly points out.1

I’m with Warner and many others in thinking that writing isn’t entirely—or maybe even mostly—involved with mere production of words. It’s tied with the development of thought, a process of and for thinking. It is distinguished by qualities, not evaluated by quantity—the number of words committed to a page, for example. Despite what writers sometimes say, production of words per se isn’t the main signal of success in writing, though writing as a practice requires production of many, many words. Lots of them stillborn, too.

The more you look at ChatGPT, the more you see that the technology is not “writing”—even though our perception of ChatGPT output lazily categorizes it as “writing.” Using ChatGPT has risks, and not just because ChatGPT “hallucinates,” a word that misleads, suggesting a mind that has departed from reality or is capable of conjuring an alternate one.2 The deeper and more useful truth is, as Warner puts it, “machines assemble syntax” but they don’t create sentences. They do so in industrial-sized, mechanically efficient bulk, too. Engineer and entrepreneur Rodney Brooks said of GPT that “what the large language models are good at is saying what an answer should sound like, which is different from what an answer should be.”

We often fail to remember the distinction between seeming and being, and we can slip up and count ChatGPT output as “sentences.” Sentences are the thing in writing, aren’t they? My Latin is rusty, but I’m enough a classicist to remember that sententia also means wisdom, an appropriate thing to echo in a word so central to writing.

Can we examine ChatGPT in relation to human writing? That is, can we look at it more skeptically—more distantly, in a sense—and without rushing to label it as a “tool” or a “co-author” or a “time-saver”? Given some serious study of the products of ChatGPT, can we learn something about writing as a product and a prodder of human thought? Can we learn something about a possible and responsible use of the technology? Can we learn about pitfalls and traps that the technology, as seductive as it is, sets in the paths of writers and thinkers?

Exploration. Analysis. Creativity. Those are things that shouldn’t be short-circuited by what today amounts to a sophisticated parlor trick. But is it possible to use the parlor trick well in service of human intentions and human development?

That’s the question, because our students will almost certainly use the tools through much of their working lives. That’s the question teachers pose when they consider using ChatGPT and other AI “assists” in the classroom.

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Three I think fundamental questions. (There are others, I’m sure)

Some might think I’m being too precious and nit-picky, but I think about writing circumstances that usually fall below the radar. These are assumptions that writers rely upon. They’re woven into the order, the context, and processes of writing. I think that ChatGPT and its ilk modify these circumstances, perhaps to an extent that changes the whole nature of the writing enterprise as a tool of clear thinking. Whether these changes enhance or degrade human thought is still up in the air.

Three biggies, for me:

The power of the first draft. Words can sometimes trap us, especially those of us who are learning ways to master prose and unpack language. The “shitty first draft” (Anne Lamont) is a milestone for writers for many reasons, but the two reasons that I think are most powerful are 1) the draft comprises a whole, however faulty or “shitty,” and 2) the draft shifts the writing problem, its focus, and its process. Where attention was paid to creating a product on a page ex nihilo (or at least from many sources and as a product of much thought), once a draft is to hand the draft itself becomes the main subject. It is, literally, a central object of writer’s attentions. That makes the first draft powerful in shaping a whole writing project.3 The draft steers thought; writing shifts toward assessment, improvement, “tweaking,” re-writing.

A question: What happens when ChatGPT creates the draft? How does that change the nature of the human acts of writing? How might it improve or degrade the service that old-fashioned writing offers us — the service of clarity, definition, and, yes, sometimes even eloquence?

Small-step, directed thinking. Related to power of first drafts I think of the micro-manner of my own thinking-through-writing. I don’t know that others share this experience, but it happens as I write. My prose emerges in short hops—small steps, sentence-like, built together and sometimes loosely, sometimes tightly woven. In my experience, a first draft doesn’t just happen as a complete thought, like a shining image popping into view. Rather it creeps into view imperfectly, the product of many erasures and missteps. In some ways, this incremental unveiling of thought could be a source of the frustration that most writers face in their work: they seek the whole draft, not the drip of ideas that feels like mere leakage. They see a “blockage” where they hoped a fluency might have been.

By small steps my writing helps me think. It ain’t easy. Ever.

A question: How might an AI like ChatGPT replace or transform those small-step habits of mind? Is my thinking transformed by having a 500-word “result” appear seconds after I submit a prompt?

Why do we say “please” to a machine prompt? Is there a requirement or at least a benefit to having another human reading and thinking about a writing project? What happens when that Other is an AI that displays some ability with language but that doesn’t know, doesn’t intend, doesn’t feel? I’ve marveled that people often prompt ChatGPT politely and use the word “please.” The manner is telling: it suggests that people feel a human connection with a seemingly polite but utterly inanimate “voice.”

A question: How might that assignment of a subjective reality to ChatGPT shape a human writer’s identity? How does it change the act of writing, especially when the AI interlocutor produces results from statistical associations that lack truth value or even intent?

So how will I change this fall’s seminar?

There is, of course, a danger that including ChatGPT and other LLMs into writing both unjustifiably legitimizes its use and teaches bad habits of thought and writing. But given that ChatGPT and its successors will become part of life for today’s students, ignoring it is probably irresponsible. Discovering and encouraging responsible use is more important.

So, yes, my students this fall will use ChatGPT, but they’ll also be tasked with examining it as a problematic technology, and they’ll need to identify and justify choices they make when they use it.

I’m not convinced ChatGPT is a useful tool, yet; but it will be good to enunciate that ways that it changes writing and thinking. I’m hoping that assignments in the class will give students a chance to see writing with and without using the application. I think that together we’ll come upon uses that are appropriate and not. (I also suspect that ChatGPT will make us approach writing as “fact-checking” in a rather dismaying way.)

Postscript

One thing that I noticed as I put this post together: the topics of ChatGPT, LLMs, AI seem to defy satisfying conclusions. That might not be what readers want — a settled matter is happier, perhaps—but I think the way I conclude reflects the ambiguity and the unsettled quality of the technologies.

We don’t know what to make of these fast developing technologies, really. And it’s hard to feel okay with that right now.

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Tags: ai, chatgpt, teaching, learning, writing

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Previous posts relate to this topic and to my experience and plans for teaching: I prefer Authentic Intelligence (April 2023), I make a numerical mistake. Then I think about two rivers (February 2023), Technological rubble (October 2022; guest post by ), Start with a talk. Draw a picture. Grow (September 2022), Seminar and silence (August 2022), Salons, Twitter, seminars, and guests (May 2022), Writers first, then students (April 2022), Learning and “sorting” (January 2022).

AI is making movies now, too. Type in a prompt at runwayml.com, and the service will return a short video. Like Midjourney, but it moves! An example, produced with much exertion, I’m sure:

Metz, Cade. “The ChatGPT King Isn’t Worried, but He Knows You Might Be.” The New York Times, March 31, 2023, sec. Technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/03/31/technology/sam-altman-open-ai-chatgpt.html.

Kang, Cecilia. “OpenAI’s Sam Altman Urges A.I. Regulation in Senate Hearing.” The New York Times, May 16, 2023, sec. Technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/05/16/technology/openai-altman-artificial-intelligence-regulation.html.

Yudkowsky, Eliezer. “Pausing AI Development Isn’t Enough. We Need to Shut It All Down.” Time, March 29, 2023. https://time.com/6266923/ai-eliezer-yudkowsky-open-letter-not-enough/.

A useful and early take on using LLMs in the college classroom. Fyfe, Paul. “How to Cheat on Your Final Paper: Assigning AI for Student Writing.” AI & Society, March 10, 2022. https://doi.org/10.1007/s00146-022-01397-z.

Rao, Venkatesh. “Life After Language.” ribbonfarm, May 5, 2023. https://www.ribbonfarm.com/2023/05/04/life-after-language/.

ChatGPT is a great source for automated and refined bullshit. Harry Frankfurt talks with his Princeton University Press publisher about bullshit, which he examines philosophically in On Bullshit (Princeton, 2005). It is amusing to see a serious philosopher and an academic editor musing about, and saying the word, bullshit. I have considered using Professor Frankfurt’s concise book as a text in class. On Bullshit Part 1. Princeton, NJ, 2005. (There’s a part two as well.)

Interview with Rodney Brooks with comments on ChatGPT and LLMs, robotics, and self-driving cars. Zorpette, Glenn. “Just Calm Down About GPT-4 Already.” IEEE Spectrum, May 17, 2023. https://spectrum.ieee.org/gpt-4-calm-down.

I have loads of other references, and if you want them I’ll send them to you. Just email me at technocomplex@substack.com.

I want to let you know that I’ll be stepping back on my post frequency. I’ve held to weekly posts for over a year now, and I have decided to go to a bi-weekly schedule. I will do the occasional “Boulangerie” post (not emailed), and I might be moved to write something between my scheduled bi-weeklies.

The Boulangerie offers glimpses of what’s in a warm place rising or already in the bakery oven. This past week, tipping and the minimum wage in the US. I only announce when something happens in the Boulangerie with my Mastodon loudspeaker: @mrdelong@mastodon.online.

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Mann, Sally. Hold Still: A Memoir with Photographs. 1st ed. New York: Little, Brown and Company, 2015. 482 pages. ISBN: 978-0-316-24776-4 $32.00

This book got me with the cover photograph — the author, probably bouncing on a trampoline, is suspended against a cloudy sky, her arms raised in joy and eyes cast downward. The photograph drew me into a memoir by a photographer, who devotes a good portion of her tale on the picture taker, her father Robert S. Munger.

Sally Mann lives in Lexington, Virginia, about 150 miles north of where I live, so the backdrop of the American South is familiar, though many North Carolinians would hesitate to equate a North Carolina outlook with Virginia’s — if, indeed, an “outlook” would even be something that could be characterized. To not a few North Carolinians, Virginia feeds upon its pride — some might say haughtiness — of being prime among the states and piously reverential of its past — perhaps especially of its Confederate past.

“How many Virginians does it take to change a lightbulb?” Four. One to change the lightbulb, one to mix the drinks, and two to reminisce about how great the the old light bulb was.

By her own admission, Mann is a romantic, maybe even wistful, Virginian so she might laugh at the lightbulb joke. Perhaps she’s even told it. Her reverence for the South runs throughout the book — and especially for Boxerwood, the farm and land where she lives with her husband Larry and their children when they were young. But hers is not a simple story of nostalgia or a glistening (and very white and upper crusty) view of some gone-with-the-wind era of Tara upon a hill. She weaves a complex picture of her home, and she is aware of her standing in her story as a white woman brought up in the South. Her story is remarkable and “could provide the grist for a dozen novels,” as one cover blurb put it. It is remarkably told, too.

This is evident from the first pages of the book, which itself is a companion to the William E. Massey, Sr. Lecture in American Studies that Mann delivered in 2011. Her topic was “If Memory Serves.” In 2008, years before the event, she was gob-smacked to be invited to deliver a Massey Lecture, prompting her to rush to her calendar, where she “searched in vain for a conflict.” The problem: she didn’t even have a calendar page that far ahead. “No way I could reasonably decline,” she recalled, despite her qualms about taking on the task.

But she knew what she wanted to talk about. Mann had become well known and had acquired “the irritating label ‘controversial’” in the early 1990s, when her book Immediate Family appeared. The title explains the subjects of the photographs she shared, many of which were of her young children “going about their lives, sometimes without clothing.” The nakedness shocked some, who were quite shrill in their criticism and quickly and viciously condemned the work. She thought that she may have “to justify my family pictures” at the Harvard gathering for the Massey Lectures. But, she writes, “I hoped I could also focus on the work that came afterward, deeply personal explorations of the landscape of the American South, the nature of mortality (and the mortality of nature), intimate depictions of my husband, and the indelible marks that slavery left on the world surrounding me.”

A memoir with four parts. No, maybe five.

Mann divides her memoir into four parts: “Family Ties: The Importance of Place,” “My Mother: Memory of a Memory Past,” “Gee-Gee: The Matter of Race,” and “My Father: Against the Current of Desire.” I think three of them are particularly important and revealing. The part devoted to her mother is much shorter than the others, consisting of three chapters, and I skip over that part in what follows. That is probably an error on my part, but also a reason to pick up the book and read it for yourself.

It may be a mere coincidence or maybe a common longing, but the pleasures and rootedness of a place resonate with me, and I think many readers. Sally Mann was born “in the austere brick home of Stonewall Jackson himself, which was then the local hospital” of Lexington, Virginia. She may even have slept in Jackson’s bureau drawer. For Mann, whose family would count among its industrious magnates if not aristocrats, the South runs deep. Stonewall Jackson’s gravity still pulls the imagination, even though Mann and her family long rejected the racist society they dwelt in. The book follows an almost chronological course with the loops of time repeated in her accounts of each part.

The first part unfolds Mann’s childhood and youth, which I suppose most would call unbridled, and Mann would likely agree. Her parents decided to pack her off to school in Vermont — to Putney School where her much older brothers already were. “Really, what choice did they have but to send me away to school? … Even I knew, on some level, that I needed to get out of the high school world whose horizon stopped at cheerleader tryouts and drag races on the bypass.” But Mann knew after getting to Putney that her experience in Lexington was unique, if also a little bit like what her classmates would later see on The Dukes of Hazzard. “No one would have known, as I did, what a whomping a four-on-the-floor GTO could give a Barracuda in the quarter-mile on the bypass.”

In her first week at Putney, she asked Mr. Caldwell, her history teacher, “what a Jew was.” She had other limits of experience that dogged her at Putney, no doubt, but the school opened up a world to her.

The real “importance of place” happens back near Lexington, in Rockbridge County, Virginia, where Sally and Larry Mann, married for three years, returned in 1973. There, the roots of her childhood grew deeper, as presence always makes happen; and Mann’s story overlaps with earlier stories of the place, knotting her time with earlier histories and magnifying the place and the present. Across time, roots grow more deeply, fed by new springs of life.

Mann reveals some of the overlaps with photography. “Our Farm — And the Photographs I Took There,” chapter six, recounts the purchase and the rediscovery of her family’s farm after her parents death, but more importantly, the chapter places the land itself into a great sweep of history. When she was in her twenties, she discovered “some 7,500” glass-plated negatives at Washington and Lee University that Michael Miley made in the 1860s. Some of the photographs she had taken on the farm echoed Miley’s photographs taken a century before, pictures taken at the same places, linking strands of history and place with silver nitrate on plates.

The farm and the pictures Mann took there formed the basis for her work published in Immediate Family, pictures of which “cannot be understood without the context of the farm and the cabin on the river — the intrinsic timelessness of the place and the privacy it afforded us.” The work sealed Mann’s place in her own artistic history and gave her a lot of grief, too, which she lays out in the book.

To me, the book has three poles, each tugging Mann and giving her story a shape. “Place” is perhaps the strongest of them, but “Gee-Gee” — Virginia Cornelia Carter — and Mann’s father, Robert S. Munger, MD, have similar power.

Gee-Gee raised Sally Mann. “Down here, you can’t throw a dead cat without hitting an older, well-off white person raised by a black woman, and every damn one of them will earnestly insist that a reciprocal and equal form of love was exchanged between them,” she writes. “This reflects one side of the fundamental paradox of the South: that a white elite, determined to segregate the two races in public, based their stunningly intimate domestic arrangements on an erasure of that segregation in private.” The section of the book engages “the matter of race” not only in terms of the familial relationship she had with Gee-Gee, but quickly broadens to explore her “very real and emotionally complicated person.” Gee-Gee’s life is a remarkable one, too, I’d say. She worked unceasingly. Gee-Gee had six children, each of whom she was able to send to boarding schools and to college. Such things were invisible to Mann as a child, and may have been to her parents as well. “What were any of us thinking?” Mann asks. “Why did we never ask the questions? That’s the mystery of it — our blindness and our silence.”

Gee-Gee is most fully caressed in the memoir, but others provide a broader picture: Hamoo, Smothers, and a boy whom Mann called “The Kid on the Road” (“you know, Ernestine’s nephew”).

Mann first grappled with the South’s slavery curse not in the presence of her childhood Rockbridge County, but far north in Vermont, at Putney School, when she was assign William Faulkner’s “The Bear” in English class. “This racist legacy of slavery was said by Faulkner to be a curse on the entire South, white and black, the wounds of African Americans mirrored in our guilty white souls,” she writes in “Who Wants to Talk About Slavery?” — chapter sixteen and the last in the third part of the book. “Reading ‘The Bear’ under my tented covers, way past Putney’s ‘lights out’ hour, I began to understand that he was right.” The chapter expands to include Mann’s photography and unfolds how inequality plays out in situations as outwardly simple and yet highly fraught as photograph sittings. Through this kind of story, Mann unveils the artistry of photography: how it succeeds and how it transforms. This is among the strongest chapters in the book.

Part four of the book, which seems to slide to an ending that explores death and mortality, is called “My Father: Against the Current of Desire.” Like the topic of race and slavery in the South, this part of the book seeks a balance, a maybe perilous understanding that I think remains elusive, just out of reach. The title of the part suggests the tension: desire beckons, but duty requires swimming against its pull.

Robert Sylvester Munger, II, struggled with the current that tugged him to art and ideas, even though he felt compelled and obliged to swim against that current toward a career in medicine. In her memoir, his daughter Sally Mann struggles to find the man, the “him-ness of him.” That essence eludes her, but she loved him, and feels that despite the fogginess of expression and memory he loved her — it is, for her, “a calcified fact.” The only two appendices in the book are letters from her father, added to provide a fuller picture of a father-daughter relationship. They are both worth puzzling through.

Robert Munger was an extraordinary man. That much is apparent as Mann tells his story, which is prefaced by family history going back to pre-Civil War times and the pressures that families exert even through generations. Looming throughout Robert Munger’s life is a fascination with death, perhaps struck deeply into him when his father died during his second year at Choate. That fascination grows in importance in the story of her father and spills into the Mann’s own artistic confrontations with and considerations of death.

Chapter twenty, “World Traveler, Interesting Gent,” recounts his father’s adventure in a trip around the world, which Robert Munger accomplished with a budget of $1,460. He began the year’s travels in July 1938, when Europe was fumbling toward another war. Robert Munger apparently didn’t notice. Of the looming conflict, his letters include “[b]arely a word, save a remark on the good manners of the smartly dressed soldiers, and his aesthetic irritation at the ubiquitous posters of Hitler’s ‘rather expressionless and certainly plain features.’” Instead, the art and the images of death in museums overshadowed growing violence in Germany, with its real death and real murders. I found the chapter fascinating, as Mann redraws her father’s travels and journals into a revealing picture of the man, though she never achieves a hold of the him-ness of him. It is not her fault; it is the subject: a cipher of sorts. I got the feeling that Mann sought to enliven memory of her father — a kind of reassurance hoped for by all children, perhaps — but never felt completely sure of a grasp, even though his journals of the trip are livelier than his later writings.

Memory is hungry.

Sally Mann’s father committed suicide. He took long-expired Seconal tablets before brain cancer had completely debilitated him. Her account of the event shows its logic, or at least her father’s logic. I can’t help but think that experiencing the distance of a father’s death in that manner must intensify a hunger of memory.

An unparted part

It would be possible to say that Hold Still has a part five that brings together much of what preceded it but that also stands apart. Robert Munger’s fascination with death hovered over part four and forms a sort of prelude to Sally Mann’s own meditations on death. In effect, this last part is a echo of Robert Munger’s fascinations, an inheritance of sorts that Mann uses her art to explore.

Place figures prominently. She photographs Civil War battlefields, a form of bearing witness of the cataclysms of battle and the persistent change that shed blood makes upon soil. From her own home, she witnesses a killing of a man who had escaped arrest. He was shot and died under a thicket of trees. “Death had left for me its imperishable mark on an ordinary copse of trees in my front yard. Never again would I look out of my kitchen window at that lone cedar on the prow of hickory forest in the same way as I had before.” She visits the University of Tennessee’s Anthropological Research Facility, known as the “Body Farm.” It’s a place where human bodies are allowed to decay and decompose in various environments; researchers meticulously study their progress.

Now as I write this, I realize that my words are likely to elicit revulsion. The close of the book rests in such close proximity to death that you might want to close the covers. But Mann manages to offer a meditation in her direct and descriptive narrative. Her pictures in the Body Farm section, I have to admit, drew my attention too forcibly, and I found that I had to cover them up with my hand as I read.

Remember, though, she promised in the first pages of the book to consider “the nature of mortality (and the mortality of nature).”

“The treachery of the photograph”

Hold Still is “a memoir with photographs,” and it’s good to emphasize the qualification that’s implicit in the title. The book includes photographs — many of them. That they appear on the pages is probably the most obvious way to interpret the phrase “with photographs,” but I think Mann also plays with the words of the book’s title. Photographs might be offered as proof, lending a veracity to the prose. “Photographs furnish evidence,” Susan Sontag wrote, “Something we hear about, but doubt, seems proven when we’re shown a photograph of it.”

Evidence is not the same as truth or rich experience.

Photographs do offer evidence for the memoirist to work with, but memory stands apart. Hold Still is a memory first gathered, and then — very separately — illustrated with photographs. They do not naturally mix, though they do complement each other, somehow.

Mann explores the relationship of photographs and experience, truth, and memory. Cy Twombly, sculptor and painter and photographer, stands out as a guide, an artistic companion, and even a hero in Mann’s memory. He, too, was captivated by Rockbridge County and split his time between Lexington, Virginia, and Italy. “I hardly have any pictures of him,” Mann writes, although he gave me this one that Robert Rauschenberg made of him at Black Mountain College, and showed me where he wanted it placed on my desk.” The picture appears in the book. “I am convinced that the reason I can remember him so clearly and in such detail is because I have so few pictures of him.” She continues and likens memory to rocks in a stream: “impediments … around which accrued the debris of memory, rich in sight, smell, taste, and sound. No snapshot can do what the attractive mnemonic impediment can.”

To set her rich memory of Twombly into high relief, she contrasts memories of her father: “Because of the many pictures I have of my father, he eludes me completely…. [H]e does not exist in three dimensions, or with associated smells or timbre of voice. He exists as a series of pictures.”

She writes at one point: “It isn’t death that stole my father from me; it’s the photographs.”

Mann is a gifted writer and storyteller. I try to avoid using long quotations, but her treatment of the fragile and shifting relationship of photography and memory — really the foundation of her memoir — is exceptionally well crafted. I offer it here as an example of her writing and her thought. It is an enticement, I guess, to read the rest of the book. She recounts the story of opening long neglected boxes of letters, papers, photographs, and other artifacts that had waited for decades in her attic.

So, before I scissored the ancestral boxes, I opened my own to check my erratic remembrance against the artifacts they held, and in doing so encountered the malignant twin to imperfect memory: the treachery of the photograph. As far back as 1901 Émile Zola telegraphed the threat of this relatively new medium, remarking that you cannot claim to have really seen something until you have photographed it. What Zola perhaps also knew or intuited was that once photographed, whatever you have “really seen” would never be seen by the eye of memory again. It would forever be cut from the continuum of being, a mere sliver, a slight, translucent paring from the fat life of time; elegiac, one-dimensional, immediately assuming the amber quality of nostalgia: an instantaneous memento mori. Photograph would seem to preserve our past and make it invulnerable to the distortions of repeated memorial superimpositions, but I think that is a fallacy: photographs supplant and corrupt the past, all the while creating their own memories. As I held my childhood pictures in my hands, in the tenderness of my “remembering,” I also knew that with each photograph I was forgetting.

That paragraph comes close to ending the book’s brief prologue. The rest of the memoir, true to the genre, unpacks the “boxes that would barely hold a twelve-pack” and harvests Sally Mann’s memory.

Hold Still is a rich and rewarding story of lives and places, told by an artist and a photographer. It’s definitely worth a close read, and anyone particularly interested in Mann’s photography will find it very valuable.

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Tags: sally mann, photography, book review, memoir, american south, fathers, art, race, slavery

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Sally Mann’s home page. “Sally Mann.” Accessed April 12, 2023. https://www.sallymann.com.

Mann’s art that many consider essential to American photography, and a controversial work. Mann, Sally. Immediate Family. 1st ed. New York: Aperture, 1992. (Alibris)

Harvard University, American Studies. “The Massey Lecture Series.” Accessed April 12, 2023. https://americanstudies.fas.harvard.edu/news-events/massey-lecture-series/.

The Boulangerie offers glimpses of what’s in a warm place rising or already in the bakery oven. This past week, the bakers took off to till their gardens. I only announce when something happens in the Boulangerie with my Mastodon loudspeaker: @mrdelong@mastodon.online.

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I’ve been silent, mostly, about ChatGPT, Microsoft Bing’s chatbot, Google’s Bard, and the GPT-4 debut. It’s not that I haven’t thought about them but rather that the landscape shifts so quickly, the terms and features remain paradoxical and fluid. At least it seems to me. What you’d write about one week may be — no, could well be — irrelevant or useless the next. Or at least needing qualification.

You might witness the shift of the technology in hours if you wrestle with the burbling topics of “AI” or LLMs (Large Language Models). (I list three of the reasons for this at the end of the post, and there are many more.)

Too many knuckles

Kyle Chayka probably noticed the quickened shift. In a newsletter post that appeared on March 27, he mentions his “The Uncanny Failures of AI-Generated Hands” an article published online in The New Yorker on March 10. AI has trouble with hands: “Midjourney can generate a realistic human being, but the fingers have too many knuckles.” In that article, Chayka writes, “The strange contortions of A.I. hands make me feel a sense of anticipatory nostalgia, for a future when the technology inevitably improves and we will look back on such flaws as a kitschy relic of the ‘early A.I.’ era, the way grainy digital-camera photos are redolent of the two-thousands.”

That future when the technology inevitably improves came quickly. On March 26, a day before Chayka’s post went out to his Substack readers, Pranshu Verma’s article “AI Can Draw Hands Now. That’s Bad News for Deep-Fakes” appeared in the Washington Post. Too many knuckles no more because “in mid-March, Midjourney … released a software update that seemed to fix the problem, with artists reporting that the tool created images with flawless hands.”

The situation of hands and machines’ growing competence in rendering them illustrates part of the problem about saying anything about “AI.” By the time you utter something, your utterance can become a matter of nostalgia. So fast is the development of the tools.

It’s not just a matter of keeping up in your writing and thinking, either; it’s a matter of being able to navigate larger, more existential changes. Dan Shipper, an AI promoter if anyone is, even has qualms, and he has a circumstance in mind when he “might hop off the AI train.” He wrote, “People build their lives and make decisions based on a set of promises that society makes about what they’ll get if they behave a certain way. If AI progresses so quickly that it breaks all of those promises all at once and with no warning, it would be unethical and deeply unfair.”

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By the way, Kyle Chayka is finishing up his manuscript for Filterworld: How Algorithms Flattened Culture, which will appear in early 2024. His previous book on minimalism and his other work, especially for The New Yorker, show that he’s among the top thinkers in matters of art, technology, and society. When I think of the circumstances of AI and algorithms embedded in so many commonly used apps and services, I begin to see some of the challenge that I imagine Chayka faces as he goes through his book drafts. His topic is timely and hugely important, but the technologies he considers as he moves through his task, well, they are early forms — larva-like, changing into a seemingly unrelated pupae with each molt and turn. That’s a challenge to trace and explore, much less to interpret.

I’m looking forward to reading his book.

Shape-shifting god playing with us? Without “knowing” anything, of course.

I wrote about empathy and AI in February last year. I was concerned then about the reception of artificial “empathy,” which seemed to me inherently manipulative. “Rather than looking at the technical achievements in empathetic AI, I want to look at our human reception and interpretation of machine-made emotion,” I wrote. “After all, the human being is on the other side of the empathetic relationship, and we construct judgments of AI — its trustworthiness, its ‘morality,’ its being — from the signals and behaviors we witness. What’s up with the humans when they behold a machine-made emotion?”

The term “empathetic” is weaselly when applied to an AI, since AIs do not have the capacity to feel empathy or, for that matter, have any sort of intelligence or “inner life.” Theirs is even less than the empathy of a psychopath — displayed, but empty. No, I think the emotional attachment springs from the medium presented to and perceived by humans: “chat” or competent (though not particularly eloquent) sentences in response to human statements.

In an “open letter” prompted in part by a “chatbot-incited suicide in Belgium,” the authors point out that

emotional manipulation can also manifest itself in more subtle forms. As soon as people get the feeling that they interact with a subjective entity, they build a bond with this “interlocutor” — even unconsciously — that exposes them to this risk and can undermine their autonomy. This is hence not an isolated incident. Other users of text-generating AI also described its manipulative effects [web links provided in the original letter].

The words used to describe interactions with AI chatbots often implicitly attribute human or intelligent qualities to them. And the interaction with chatbots is powerful and can be “deeply unsettling.” For that matter, the term “artificial intelligence” leans toward assigning a “subjective entity” (as the open letter writers put it) to AIs. And, as many have pointed out “artificial intelligence” completely mislabels the kinds of things we’re seeing today, hyped as they are by their makers who have an interest in portraying their products as “intelligent.” It’s worth noting that chat AIs use emoticons, too. That small typographical detail has rhetorical meaning and further complicates the emotional freight of an exchange with a chatbot.

Over a year ago, I wrote,

Until we become familiar with such [emotional and empathetic] behavior from machines — and whether machines themselves remain the kind of machines we have known before — it’s likely we’ll have this uncanny relationship with machine empathy, a feeling of distortion and discomfort. It’s not just the “tech,” it’s us and how we’ve evolved and how we function human-to-human.

Today, the uncanniness of the machines is a bit less so, and our feeling of distortion and discomfort has diminished. But as a result, we humans may be slipping into significantly more threatening error — namely, misinterpreting AI as a “subjective entity.”

The habits of language that we use to describe AI are partially — maybe even largely — to blame.

Emily M. Bender of the University of Washington, no shrinking violet when it comes to arguing that AI needs transparency, guidelines, and a large helping of humility, thinks a name change for “AI” might not be a bad thing. In a profile of her in New York magazine, Elizabeth Weil reports that

Bender remains particularly fond of an alternative name for AI proposed by a former member of the Italian Parliament: “Systematic Approaches to Learning Algorithms and Machine Inferences.” Then people would be out here asking, “Is this SALAMI intelligent? Can this SALAMI write a novel? Does this SALAMI deserve human rights?”

SALAMI. Sounds about right to me. The name might just provide a certain distance, not to mention humor, and blow off some of the pretension of the term Artificial Intelligence.

Hooray for Meatspace

Actually, I do prefer authentic intelligence in most cases, especially when it comes to writing and reading. I’d be perfectly happy to leave routine and boring bits of life to blatantly obvious machine artificiality — maybe even labeled “artificial,” like a food additive. You know, the SALAMI section.

Let’s leave matters closest to human meaning and happiness to the humans.

This week’s “Shouts & Murmurs” features “Upcoming Landmarks in Artificial Intelligence.” “Shouts & Murmurs” is a regular humor section in The New Yorker that offers humorous commentary, often on current events. Henry Alford conjured up this one. “Novelists and poets galvanized by chatbots’ having provided new reason to embrace alcoholism,” reads one of the upcoming landmarks. The next one in the list is “Proliferation of AI-derived art causes painters and sculptors to form union, Artists in the Meatspace.”

How about “Writers in the Meatspace”? Like here in Substack? If I were a graphic designer, I’d love to come up with a “seal of approval” for my newsletter that would assure readers that the words, photographs, and drawings came forth from a human being, however flawed and limited, and were not “synthetic media” spewed forth by an algorithm exquisitely tuned to conjure up bullshit.

Anyone join me in a pledge to stick with meat rather than silicon chips? Anyone have a bit of an artistic flair to come up with a seal? We could display it together — a celebration of humanity and meatitude. It’d be the “Good Housekeeping” seal for a human corner of Substack.

It would be awesome.

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Three of the reasons for the shift in speed and presentation of AI-centered services. In part it’s because the developments have left the lab … or have turned the marketplace into the lab.

1. The technology is quickly being developed and, to the consternation of many, quickly made available to consumers, with some warning. The quick release may have two purposes: to exert pressure on competitors and to press consumers into service by having them run the AIs through wide-ranging, real life challenges — a Pandora’s Black-Box form of quality control. Both of these purposes have some nasty downsides and, it seems to me, few benefits for human beings sitting in front of their displays.

2. The technology is being integrated into already existing applications (like search or even Microsoft Word) or adapted for specific purposes either by industry or by individuals. You can get an “AI” to write an employment application letter for you at Careered. No promises about success, though. And some have given ChatGPT, Bing, and Bard a chance at serving as their assistants. The integration of an AI along the lines of ChatGPT into word processing programs quite obviously changes the essential nature of composing thought through writing — even more drastically than the first “word processors” did in the 1980s.

3. The “edges” of the technology aren’t apparent and are difficult to describe. Testing of products claiming to be “AI” appears more incomplete than is often the case with software products. This is probably a reason why usual language has such trouble describing the technology; it is easy to mislabel, say a response from ChatGPT as “intelligent” and to use metaphors of thought and emotion in descriptions. Perversely, the difficulty of testing might be exactly the reason why “AI” chat has been released to the public. They can test in real life, regardless of the consequences since it’s only a beta, more or less.

Tags: SALAMI, AI, artificial intelligence, synthetic media, algorithm, authenticity

Links, cited and not, some just interesting

Chayka, Kyle. “The Uncanny Failure of A.I.-Generated Hands.” The New Yorker, March 10, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/rabbit-holes/the-uncanny-failures-of-ai-generated-hands.

Verma, Pranshu. “AI Can Draw Hands Now. That’s Bad News for Deep-Fakes.” Washington Post, March 26, 2023. https://www.washingtonpost.com/technology/2023/03/26/ai-generated-hands-midjourney/.

You can sign it, if you want. Smuha, Nathalie A., Mieke De Ketelaere, Mark Coeckelberg, Pierre Dewitte, and Yves Poulette. “Open Letter: We Are Not Ready for Manipulative AI – Urgent Need for Action.” KU Leuven, March 31, 2023. https://www.law.kuleuven.be/ai-summer-school/open-brief/open-letter-manipulative-ai.

Profile of Emily Bender. Weil, Elizabeth. “You Are Not a Parrot.” Intelligencer, March 1, 2023. https://nymag.com/intelligencer/article/ai-artificial-intelligence-chatbots-emily-m-bender.html.

A much discussed and debated article. Roose, Kevin. “A Conversation With Bing’s Chatbot Left Me Deeply Unsettled.” The New York Times, February 16, 2023, sec. Technology. https://www.nytimes.com/2023/02/16/technology/bing-chatbot-microsoft-chatgpt.html.

Marcus is an important worker in AGI and AI safety. He predicted that 2023 would see the first AI-incited death. Marcus, Gary. “The First Known Chatbot Associated Death.” Substack newsletter. The Road to AI We Can Trust, April 4, 2023.

It’s worth noting that Marcus and Bender don’t see eye-to-eye. Discussions about regulating AI regularly explode, and I think perhaps to no one’s benefit. But academics like to argue, and the topic lends itself to polemics.

Even fanbois have their limits. Shipper, Dan. “Awe, Anxiety, and AI,” March 24, 2023. https://every.to/chain-of-thought/awe-anxiety-and-ai.

Alford, Henry. “Upcoming Landmarks in Artificial Intelligence.” The New Yorker, March 27, 2023. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2023/04/03/upcoming-landmarks-in-artificial-intelligence.