After Work, We’ll Have Each Other

What will people do all day? I mean, of course, if the AIs surpass us at all economically necessary forms of labor.

There’s an emerging consensus on this point, assuming we’re all still alive and not subjects of a cyberpunk feudalist dystopia. When the machines can do everything else, our relationships will be what’s left.

Maybe we won’t have to work at all. Or maybe we’ll still have something that superficially resembles modern employment, just concentrated in what economist Alex Imas calls “the relational sector” in his essay “What Will Become Scarce.” We’ll always need humans to supply the human touch. And how will we get those relational jobs? Relationships, obviously. It’s not what you know, it’s who you know, since everyone knows everything anyway.

What is really being suggested here is less a continuation of modern work than a return to a much older cultural understanding of labor. Imas makes this point directly: “Before industrialization, it was difficult to separate a product from the person who made it … Economic transactions had a distinct social component that was innately linked to the consumption experience.”

Relatedly, before industrialization, there was very little sense that working, in itself, could be dignified or meaningful. We were not defined by our jobs but by our participation in a densely interconnected social world. And we might be again. That’s the natural consequence of all these relationalist predictions — a world where our connections to other humans are what give us structure, identity, and meaning.

I am afraid they’re right. 

Power and sex among apes

Making sweeping statements about the relationship between technology and cultural change is always a risk, and I’d rather avoid it until it’s absolutely necessary. At the same time, our degree of ignorance about the future is greatly exaggerated. If the future looks anything like the past — and there’s good reason to believe it will — then we can make progress with case studies.

Let’s start with 18th-century aristocrats. Aristocrats are (typically) rich, which we certainly will be if we have robots capable of all normal nonrelational labor. More importantly, when they did need to acquire material resources, they did it through leveraging their connections to obtain more land or a lucrative position at court — no drudgery necessary.

They did not work for pay; they certainly did not see work as a source of meaning. It’s certainly true that some of them had real obligations, like governing or killing each other, but court life in the age of absolutism is as close to a purely relational world as anything I can think of.

We also know a great deal about what mattered most to them and how they chose to occupy their time.[...]

You might be imagining glittering salons where the leading figures of the Enlightenment discussed poetry, drama, and the most pressing philosophical issues of the day. This is (mostly) a lie. Salons existed and philosophes attended them, but more for entertainment than for rational discourse. When we look at the enormous amount of written material the salonnieres and their guests produced — as French historian Antoine Lilti did — it is clear that their conversation consisted overwhelmingly of political gossip. They were almost all aristocrats, and they almost always talked about themselves. [...]

The working classes

That would be The Urban Villagers, a 1962 ethnography of working-class Italian Americans in the West End of Boston by sociologist and urban planner Herbert J. Gans. This seems like an odd comparison. Don’t the working classes, by definition, work? [...]

Gans’ use of the term “urban village” was deliberate: He believed that the West Enders had inherited the basic forms of social organization from their parents and grandparents, rural peasants from Sicily or Southern Italy. These were not people who had absorbed a typically Yankee relationship to work. Most male West Enders worked unskilled or semiskilled blue-collar jobs, and their employment was typically precarious. They did not see a fulfilling career, or indeed a career of any kind, as possible or even desirable.

It’s not that West Enders liked their dead-end jobs. They just didn’t think much about them. Work was not a central organizing activity of West End life. West Enders worked just enough to support their lifestyle, which revolved around what Gans calls the peer group. The West End, in his words, was a “peer group society.” An adult peer group might include a married couple’s same-age relatives — siblings, cousins, in-laws — and perhaps a few childhood friends, who would probably be “adopted” in as godparents to the couple’s children. These people would spend almost all of their time together, meeting in the apartment of one family or another after work and staying late into the night. The men might gamble at a local corner store — gambling is absolutely omnipresent in this world — but mostly, they talked, and talking mostly meant gossip.

This is where the parallels to old money Midwestern ladies and European aristocrats start to show. While there are any number of things these groups don’t have in common, all of them share certain features.

First, none of them see work as a source of status. West Enders do like to show off, but never about their jobs: Their talent as conversationalists in the peer group setting is much more important. Second, they are exclusive. A West Ender knows all the same people from early childhood. They’re very skeptical of outsiders, including members of other ethnic groups who’ve lived in the same neighborhood their whole lives.

Finally, they all spend an enormous amount of energy policing deviant behavior. In the West End, this usually means sexual promiscuity for women, effeminacy for men, and class aspirations for anyone. A boy might be mercilessly bullied for doing too well in school or for wanting a white-collar job. Even unusual success is frowned upon. A person’s primary source of dignity is not their own achievements, but their relationship to the group:

The major criteria for ranking, differentiating, and estimating compatibility are ingroup loyalty and conformity to established standards of personal behavior, as well as interpersonal relations. West Enders expect each other to maintain prevalent social practices and consumer styles, to marry within the ethnic — or at least the religious — group, and to reject middle-class forms of status and culture … The most significant criterion of interpersonal behavior is behavioral control — the ability to regulate one’s own needs and wishes and to defer to the needs of the group when necessary.

Gans, like all good ethnographers, likes his subjects, and their way of life has a lot to like — they really do enjoy a warm, rich, close-knit social world. But he also goes out of his way to emphasize that these people are extraordinarily conformist relative to middle-class American suburbanites in the 1950s. [...]

Friendship was invented in 18th-century Scotland

Relational living comes to us naturally. It’s the most common form of social organization in human history, and millions of people around the world are perfectly happy with it. But when our personal dignity comes from our membership in a group, everything the group does reflects on us — and everything we do reflects, unavoidably, on the group. It’s not a coincidence that Russian princes and Bostonian Italian day laborers spent most of their time gossiping (or, if we want to be technical, constructing and enforcing norms of behavior). They were defending their collective reputations: the thing that mattered most to them in the world.

This is why so much contemporary discussion of work and meaning is misguided. It’s very clear that humans don’t need work or anything like it to live meaningful lives. Nor do we need the things that people who talk about “meaning” mean — individual self-actualization, personal growth, serving a greater purpose. We can get by just fine without any of them, as historically most of us have. What we absolutely can’t live without is a social framework for understanding ourselves in relation to the rest of our society and gaining the respect of our peers. The most important thing work gives us — after money, of course — is an alternative way to meet those needs. Not all jobs are pleasant or rewarding, but all of us benefit from living in a system where we can earn respect and dignity as adults from what we do, not who we know, or who we are.

And this is exactly what we see when we look at what Americans actually get out of work.

To start, most of us like it. Surveys from Pew typically find that about 85% of us are “somewhat” or “completely” satisfied with our jobs. Other long-running polls from Gallup and The Conference Board find similar results. This is true even when the jobs themselves aren’t impactful or even particularly interesting.

As the anthropologist Claudia Strauss has documented, plenty of people with very ordinary jobs report that their work is fun. But that’s not why they do it. [...]

Like all other human beings in history, workers want to be respected. But unlike members of relational societies, the things we want respect for are impersonal: our skills, our accomplishments, our contributions to a shared goal. These contributions don’t have to be earth-shatteringly significant — a waitress in Chicago or an office assistant in Grand Rapids can still feel that work matters. (Tocqueville, again: “American servants do not believe themselves degraded because they work; for around them everyone works. They do not feel debased by the idea that they receive a salary; for the President of the United States also works for a salary.”)

Moral equality is something relational societies struggle with. They tend to be more restrictive and more exclusionary. It’s nice to imagine a world where everyone is satisfied to be simply a good spouse or parent or friend, but that’s not how these things work in practice. When our dignity depends on our membership in a group, we start to police who else can join and what happens when they do. When humans get relational, we get clannish.

This brings us back to what we already know: The modern labor market has dissolved the bonds of tradition, family, and clan. In the modern world, relationships matter less. And because they matter less, we can do much more inside them. They are freer. They have room to breathe.

by Clara Collier, Asterisk | Read more:
Image:David Teniers the Younger (–1690), Smoking and drinking monkeys, c. 1660

[ed. See also: Strangers Next Door: The Decline of Neighborhood Socializing and the Class Divide in Belonging; and, A Digital Divide in American Adolescence: Gender, Class, and the New Teenage Experience (SCAL).]

The Man Who Saw Humanity From Two Billion Years Away

Olaf Stapledon published his first epic cosmic novel, “Last and First Men: A Story of the Near and Far Future,” in 1930. It is a speculative history of humanity’s evolution told from the vantage point of one of the Last Men, the people of the 18th era of humanity, 2 billion years in the future.

“Last and First Men” eschews the dramatic conventions of the novel form: There are few significant characters or particularities of place. Instead, the plot is a causal chain of civilizations rising and falling. There is a voice, infused with a distant sense of beauty and tragedy as it considers humanity in the abstract. Stapledon described the novel as “an essay in myth creation.”

In his autobiography, Stapledon relates the “Anglesey vision” that inspired the novel. He was scrambling on an island off the rugged coast of Wales when he came across a colony of seals surrounded by crashing waves. Perhaps the faces of the seals suggested blurred abstractions of human faces. He had “a sudden fantasy of man’s whole future, aeon upon aeon of strange vicissitudes and gallant endeavours in world after world.”

This inspirational moment is an abductive, metaphoric leap. Quite distinct from the plodding extrapolative logic that gives us jet packs, automated cars, and other low-hanging fruit of the imagination, prevalent in the pulp sf writing of the same era and reheated in the corporate imaginations of our contemporary tech executives.

Stapledon’s imagination is profuse. He can be read as a compendium of science fiction ideas: his “Odd John” (1935) with its homo superior and titular telepathic character seeds the ground for Marvel’s X-Men; in “Star Maker” (1937) he describes the stellar structure that Freeman Dyson conceptualized as the Dyson sphere; in “Last and First Men” and its sequel, 1932’s “Last Men in London,” human evolution is driven across millennia to produce telepathy, as in Frank Herbert’s “Dune”; in the age of the Fifth Men, the Moon is destroyed and falls to Earth, raining down destruction and driving further evolution of the species — Neal Stephenson’s masterful pan-generational novel “Seveneves” is powered by the same conceit.

A further astonishing influence, traced by the scholar Dominic Moran, is upon Jorge Luis Borges and his short story “El jardín de los senderos que se bifurcan” (1941), or “The Garden of Forking Paths.” Borges reviewed Stapledon and went on to cite a section of “Star Maker” that anticipates the idea of the multiverse. The “many worlds” theory of quantum mechanics would not be proposed until 1957, nearly 20 years after Stapledon’s speculation of a creature capable of taking many possible courses of action at once, with each choice creating a new dimension in time.

The long future of “Last and First Men” is influenced by the interwar concern with deep time. Doris Lessing observed that surely what was going on in archaeology in the period inspired Stapledon: The early 20th century was marked by the rediscovery of civilizations such as the Olmec mother culture in the Americas, the opening of Tutankhamen’s tomb, and the excavation of the Hittite capital that proved they were a genuine civilization and not solely a Biblical one. Lessing’s own science fiction sequence, “Canopus in Argos: Archives,” first published in 1979, is a similarly eon-spanning future history.

The different generations of Stapledon’s humankind evolve under pressure from cultural and environmental effects. Their advances leave a mark on the Earth, and the Earth violently reacts. This anticipates a key theme of the 21st century, the Anthropocene, the theory that humanity has left evidence of itself in the geological record, thus making our mark in deep time. [...]

Universal significance is certainly a concern of Stapledon’s: His letters and articles in the early years of the First World War seek it in his war experience. Stapledon served in the Friends’ Ambulance Unit, a third choice outside of the binary of being a soldier or a conscientious objector. To volunteer, he adapted his car — a roomy grey Lanchester that he learned to drive along the narrow lanes of the Wirral — into an ambulance and drove to the front, signing up in Dunkirk. He was joined by Lewis Fry Richardson, the mathematician who would later find fame for his work on meteorological prediction but at the time was working on an equation to predict the end of the conflict. Their unit was attached to a French infantry division moving from the ruined port town of Nieuport, where the barbed wire straggled down to the North Sea, to a convoy camp in Flanders.

On a warm September night in 1915, Stapledon took a stretcher, a sleeping bag, and a leather rug from the car to sleep under the stars. He lay down and marveled at the Milky Way, at the Pleiades and Jupiter. The distant guns fell silent. He tried to see the stars as they truly are, to comprehend the spatial, temporal, and moral depths of the starfield.

What followed was a reverie of cosmic consciousness that underpins “Last and First Men” and his later masterpiece, “Star Maker.” In the vision, his beloved cousin Agnes sang his name and appeared to him; they soared to the heavens together; planets fell away; the sun diminished to a mere star. He saw all the suns, all the planets, all the living beings. The earth was far away; from space, he could see the trenches and battle lines and the souls of the soldiers. In an instant of cosmic consciousness, he saw the “strange noble beings of other worlds” and “of each one we felt ‘It is I.’” [...]

“Last and First Men” is not progressive. Civilizations rise and fall, the tide of progress advances and retreats, variants upon the theme of humanity strike up and diminish — what endures of humanity is not spirit in the Christian sense so much as, in the philosophy of the Fifth Men, “a work of tragic art.” The Fifth Men regarded the cosmos as an aesthetic unity in four dimensions. Art focuses aspects of the cosmos, making it apprehensible even if its complexity means that it can never be entirely known.

by Matthew De Abaitua, MIT Press |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. I've had Stapledon's Last and First Men and Star Maker on my coffee table for like, forever it seems. When there's nothing to do or I need to take a book somewhere for temporary diversion, like a doctor's appointment, I'll pick it up and read a few chapters. It's not light reading, and the time scale it covers - billions of years - is pretty daunting. But it's well written and thought provoking throughout.]

I’d Be Lead Harpooner on the Pequod If It Wasn’t for These DEI Hires

You know, I wouldn’t say this to just anyone. I’m not one to gam and gossip around the old grog-cooler. But I know you’re a good New England boy working your hardest to crew this vessel just like me, so let’s talk straight.

Be honest: Have you noticed the harpooners getting a little more… ethnic these past few voyages?

Look, I’ve got nothing against Queequeg. He’s a nice guy. And he can spy a whale spout in a hurricane. And swim like a dolphin. And hit a nickel-sized moving target in open water in one steel stroke. But all those “biggee” tattoos? Tell me they don’t scream “diversity hire.”

Yeah, last week, he did leap into the ocean to save me from drowning. What’s your point?

All I’m saying is that I could spear just as many whales until they spout black blood as Queequeg can. If they gave me the chance. But Quakers will do anything to look progressive. And you know they were just shitting themselves to find the one buff Polynesian guy who looks like George Washington.

(Plus, with that mopey twink of his as a spousal hire, he’s kind of a two-fer. Bildad and Peleg are getting a lot of bang for their buck.)

I am not “monomaniacally fixated on Queequeg”! Keep that Billy Budd shit to yourself. I’m just telling you that it’s getting hard out there for us blue-collar Nantucket lads when all the ships’ owners are catching the Abolitionist Mind Virus. (Most of us don’t even get names! “Old Manx Sailor”? The disrespect.)

Fine, take the other harpooners. Tashtego. You know he’s just here because of his “vanishing tribe” Martha’s Vineyard street cred. Makes the hunt look more “authentic.” But if he’s been honing ancestral knowledge of whaling since reaching manhood, would you say he’s really earned it?

And you know that Daggoo is just coasting on his vertical. Anyway, remember that time that Spanish wag said the lightning flash was just “Daggoo showing his teeth,” and Daggoo clenched his fist? Thug behavior. I’d be so much more professional.

I’m not even going to bring up Fedallah leaving us all the grunt work while he posts up with Ahab in his private quarters. Must be nice.

It’s not about prejudice: it’s the principle of the thing! A whaleship should be a meritocracy. One that recognizes my superior merit. [...]

I’m not saying that our harpooners are categorically unqualified. Mostly. All I mean is they seem to have gotten themselves a much quicker route up the corporate mainmast than the rest of us poor salts. And no one’s talking about it.

Riddle me this: if this is a colorblind vessel, then why is the only whale Ahab cares about killing the white one? Did you think about that?

This isn’t just about me! This is about all of us. The French Sailor. The Icelandic Sailor. And, you know, the other ones. Just because we can’t fetch a good market price in Alabama doesn’t mean we don’t have value! And yet we must watch our chances for advancement slide through our fingers like raw spermaceti.

Old Ahab apparently thinks ivory is good enough to stand on, but not enough to promote. What a racket. Sure, Queequeg just downed another five whales while I was talking and is single-handedly stripping the blubber as he balances in sock-feet on their floating corpses in shark-infested waters, but what of it? I could totally do that.

No, I’ve never thrown a harpoon before. But I know what I’m talking about.

by Amanda Lehr, McSweeny's |  Read more:

Image: Gerard DuBois via

[ed. I've been reading Moby Dick again after 50 years and marveling at Melville's writing, something I never fully appreciated back when I was 20 years old. Almost finished now (a couple chapters left) and Ahab has finally found his whale (or vice versa) after 533 of 561 pages. That's right, most of the book isn't about their confrontation, but rather cetology, various ocean phenomena, the practice of whaling, and life in general on a whaling ship. I wonder how many people know that? Yet, it still manages to be engaging and riveting throughout. It's a funny coincidence (for me) that this essay came out now. I know these characters and some of their memorable scenes - like the one mentioned above: Queequeg standing knee deep in water on top of a rolling dead whale, cutting a hole in its thick hide to secure a hook line while hundreds of sharks churn around him in a feeding frenzy (which he sometimes has to kick away). Great stuff.]

A Chinese Podcaster Interviewed Christopher Nolan. Here’s Why it Made Two Internets Freak Out.

The curious thing is that this passionate way of teaching Western culture is thriving right now—but outside of the West. In the US, the insiders who speak candidly will tell you that the humanities is in crisis. You can measure it in many ways—declining enrollment, shrinking departments, poor test results, increased cheating, resistance to reading, etc. All the metrics are bad.

But that’s not what’s happening in China. The study of western culture is in the ascendancy there. You could even say it’s hot and trendy.

People got a taste of this recently when director Christopher Nolan sat down for an interview with Yiyang Zhuge, who is a trained classicist perhaps best known for translating Plutarch’s Moralia into Chinese (and Hannah Arendt, too).

Nolan was probably expecting another pop culture discussion of his film version of Homer’s Odyssey. But what he got was something very different.

by Ted Gioia, The Honest Broker |  Read more:

***

Whichever side of the sinophone media sphere you’re on, you’ve likely already seen it: The interview about The Odyssey, a conversation between Chinese podcaster Zhuge Yiyang (who goes by Zhong Shu) and Christopher Nolan. In the interview, Zhong seems intent on getting beneath the film’s surface, pressing Nolan on the philosophical and religious underpinnings of his adaptation and connecting his directorial choices to the anxieties of “an age that demands apology from greatness.” She asks whether Nolan has “Christianized” the story by introducing concepts like atonement.

The interview quickly went viral on X, where English-speaking viewers praised it as one of the most thoughtful Nolan interviews they’d seen in years, while not quite hiding their surprise that it came from China. But as the Chinese and American internets started reacting to one another, things got weird.

Internet sleuths on X and Xiaohongshu traced Zhong’s ties to American conservative and libertarian intellectual networks. Zhong dropped a podcast episode bashing her newfound critics, after Western audiences and media struggled to interpret her. Chinese commentators went after her for misrepresenting philosophical ideas. Meanwhile, she landed on the cover of Esquire China alongside a handful of other podcaster-influencers. More recently, Chinese internet users have begun claiming (and unearthing evidence) that many of her episodes directly lift arguments and passages without attribution from English-language sources, including the podcast Old School, and from The Atlantic, and The New Yorker magazines.

As someone who spends an unhealthy amount of time on both internets, it has been surreal to watch how Zhong Shu has been interpreted and received so differently by intellectuals inside and outside of China.  [...]

But to understand why this interview happened in the first place, it helps to understand the media ecosystem that produced someone like Zhong Shu. For Western readers, it’s easy to mistake the depth of this interview as evidence that China has an especially vibrant cultural media. In some ways, the opposite is true.

Zhong Shu is not the only independent creator Nolan spoke to on his China media tour for The Odyssey; Universal Pictures apparently sought out independent creators rather than traditional entertainment reporters, a strategy increasingly common for publicity organizers for Western celebrities visiting China, from Tim Cook to Maye Musk. As traditional media has lost much of its cultural credibility and become more constrained, influence has shifted toward specialized online communities anchored by creators with their own audiences. The PR strategy is an acknowledgment that the supposedly mainstream cultural press once mediating these conversations is now practically nonexistent.

by Caiwei Chen, Hǎi 海 | Read more:
Image: YouTube

AI Companies Are Buying—And Then Destroying—Old Books

We’ve long joked about delaying bedtime in order to read the entire internet, but the prospect of actually doing so doesn’t sound as appealing as it used to. An ever-growing proportion of text online, we may sense, hasn’t been written by humans, but generated by artificial intelligence. One solution is to return to reading on paper, and beyond that, spending our time only with books published before the advent — and thus uncorrupted by the output — of large language models. Ironically, that’s what large language models themselves have had to do, and in order to ensure them a steady diet of manmade text, their owners are resorting to controversially destructive methods.

Suspicions first arose when book dealers noticed a spike in their income due to large orders from mysterious buyers for titles they assumed they’d never unload. Books on home oxygen treatment in Italy, marriage litigation in medieval England, Texas civil procedure in the twenty-tens, Swedish comedy in the sixties: these entities bought them all, and for whatever price the seller happened to be asking.

404 Media reporter Emanuel Maiberg tracked the path of one such book, which eventually wound up at a Las Vegas scanning facility run by Amazon. Though undergirded by advanced technology, the work done there is simple: digitize as many books as possible, then destroy them.

 

“In order to scan them really fast, they cut the spines off the books and fed the pages to the scanner,” Maiberg explained to NPR. Many are technically rare, albeit esoteric obscurities like vanity publications and old instruction manuals rather than first-edition classics. Humans may not value them, but LLMs do: their consumption forestalls “a problem called model collapse, where if an AI trains on AI training data, it gets worse.” Amazon and Anthropic have both been found to use the book-sacrificing method to harvest text, but every company with models to train needs a solution. All this makes for “an unusually on-the-nose example of digital technology devouring literary culture,” as the Wall Street Journal’s Melissa Korn puts it. But when you really have read the entire internet, perhaps extreme measures are inevitable.

by Colin Marshall, Open Culture | Read more:
Image: YouTube
[ed. See also: I’m the Guy Who Destroys Antique Books After We Scan Them into Our Company’s Insatiable AI Platform (McSweeny's).]

Plagiarism and Slop

Robert Minto: It breaks my heart to witness the new phenomenon of marketers using LLMs to bait writers into extensive comment threads. It happens here on Substack, but it happens more often on the dozens of old Wordpress blogs I still follow in my RSS feed reader.

Usually it starts with an apparently thoughtful and expert-sounding comment on the original post, a comment clearly AI-generated if you know some of the current tells. The author responds with enthusiasm—after all, hardly anybody comments on old school blogs these days. A long back and forth ensues. The bot practices the usual emotional mirroring and flattery. At the end of what seemed to the host a great conversation, the bot suddenly pivots to something like: “By the way, you should come [check out my scammy online business and tell all your friends]!”

The thread ends there. In that sudden curtailment, I can read the realization of the blog/newsletter owner that they haven’t been talking to a person. They’ve been publicly, but unwittingly, conversing with a machine, whose interest in their work means nothing. They’ve tasted the rotting sweetness of a ‘heaven ban.’

It makes my skin crawl. I want to explain to them what just happened. But I know that if it happened to me, I’d hope nobody had seen.​

corsaren: One challenge with defending AI from neo-Luddites is that the public-facing usage is so heavily skewed towards antisocial uses. And sure, “guns don’t kill people, people kill people”, but these are agents. There’s a real sense in which the bots *are* the ones doing the killing^.

Yishan: This is a big problem. Inside tech, we are all using frontier models with mindblowing capabilities. But everyone outside is just experiencing comment spam and slop produced by grifters using least-expensive models that output reams of garbage.

Will AI writing replace human writing? That depends on both how well the AIs will be able to write and also what the writing is for.

FischerKing: Writers need readers who like their style. The college professors forcing students to write in-class essays to avoid AI cheating are doing the right thing - but it could be a losing battle. If fewer and fewer people want to read a distinct human style - then AI writing wins. [...]

Then think of really unnecessary works of modernism like Finnegan’s Wake. A few people pretend to like this. The overwhelming majority has zero interest. The better AI gets, the more a ‘distinct human style’ could come to look like unnecessary nonsense - waste of time.

Henry Vaughan: There are different modes of writing and reading and it’s not all about communicating information.

Literary writing and reading is more like conversation. Its closest analogue is friendship and the thing being enjoyed is the uniqueness of a personality.

I am with Vaughan, with the obvious warning that I am a writer and could be biased.

I think that for many purposes people really do care about style, especially about variety of style, and about the parasocial relationship to the author, and about the costly signal that you are devoting your own mind and effort to communication. Not in every situation, but in many situations. [...]

The question then is, how does AI writing adjust? Will AI learn to write differently? Will it gain a wider variety of style?

I see two likely ways the answer could be yes.

1. The AIs might become superintelligent, and gain the ability to adjust style along with everything else, in which case I expect AI writing to win out because AI everything wins out, but also we have bigger problems and I don’t care.

2. The AIs might not be superintelligent, but be trained to produce a wider variety of styles, or a different style, in response to this. I’m not sure whether I like this.

by Zvi Mowshowitz, DWAV/X |  Read more:

Image: David Perell/X

The Age of Decadence (Without Pleasure)

Why does everything feel so joyless? Welcome to the age of decadence without pleasure (The Guardian)

Image: Guardian Design

[ed. Authors need a vacation.]

Your Book Review: The Escape Artist

[ed. One of the finalists in the ACX 2026 book review contest.]

Holocaust stories, both true and fictional, tend to repeat the same few clichés over and over. There’s the innocent child who only partially understands what’s happening (Diary of Anne Frank, Boy in the Striped Pajamas). There’s the sentimental redemption story that focuses on a small individual act (Life is Beautiful, The Book Thief). And of course, there’s the good German, or at least the morally conflicted one (Schindler’s List, The Reader).

You won’t find any of these tropes in The Escape Artist.

This 2022 book by Jonathan Freedland tells the true, and largely unknown, story of one of the few Jews ever to break out of Auschwitz. The details of his improbable escape are remarkable enough, but what really makes the story fascinating is the way it so thoroughly defies every single expectation we have of a Holocaust narrative. Its deeply unlikeable protagonist eventually alienates every friend and supporter he has, and dies a bitter old man, almost completely forgotten by history. His story lacks not only good Germans, but even good non-Germans, with his harshest criticism saved not for the Nazis, not even for the dithering Allies, but for the Jewish leaders of Europe. And though one could see the story of his escape as a triumph, in his own telling, it’s a failure, for although he makes it out of Auschwitz against all odds, he fails at his larger mission: to stop the Holocaust. There’s no redemption here, no moral uplift, no lessons save for perhaps the grimmest and most nihilistic “lesson” I’ve ever encountered in any story, Holocaust-related or otherwise: that when confronted with the unthinkable, most people’s natural tendency is denial.

But we’re getting ahead of ourselves. To get out of Auschwitz, first you have to get into Auschwitz…

I.
Here’s a hot take for you: Auschwitz was bad.

It was bad for all of its prisoners, of course, but it was the worst for the Jewish ones, who, if they survived at all, were held in harsher and more tightly controlled parts of the camp than everyone else. During the five years between Auschwitz’s opening in 1940 and its liberation by the Soviet Army in 1945, at least 900 prisoners attempted escape, and around 200 of them succeeded—but, because of their stricter confinement, only a handful were Jews.

Walter Rosenberg, our protagonist, is the first. And crazily enough, he goes to Auschwitz voluntarily.

Of course, it’s not like he knows what he’s signing up for. The Nazi line at the time—an illusion they go to great lengths to maintain—is that the Jews deported from Europe are all being “resettled in the east.” In 1942, when our story begins, Walter is a Slovak teenager, just eighteen years old. He’s being held at Majdanek, another Polish concentration camp, after two failed attempts to escape Nazi-occupied Czechoslovakia. Majdanek itself is at this point “merely” a labor camp—not unheard of in wartime—though it will eventually become a death camp after Walter has left it behind.

The camp administrators seek volunteers for “farm work” elsewhere, and Walter is one of the first to raise his hand, despite the dire warnings from another prisoner: “Go there and you’ll die.” It’s not that he doesn’t believe the warnings. But he’s decided that being moved somewhere else, no matter where that somewhere else is, might bring an opportunity for escape. And from the moment the Nazi tanks first rolled into Czechoslovakia, Walter has been single-mindedly focused on escape.

Already, Walter has a sense that he’s different from the other prisoners—and, for that matter, from most people he knew back home in his hometown of Trnava. Why aren’t they doing anything? he wonders. Why aren’t they all trying to escape too? If Walter were alive today, one gets the sense he’d describe himself as high-agency and everyone else as NPCs. You Can Just Do Things, he believes, even when the thing in question is escaping from a concentration camp. Maybe this is youth talking. Maybe it’s naivety. Or maybe Walter is simply, constitutionally, a difficult person: allergic to authority and already showing the same contrarian streak that will later get him fired from multiple academic jobs.

And so Walter goes to Auschwitz.

The Nazis obviously do not actually believe their inscription on Auschwitz’s gates, that “work will set you free.” But this story is full of bitter ironies, and among them is that for Walter, signing up for this line of work actually is the first step toward his freedom.

II.
As soon as the journey to Auschwitz begins, Walter starts having second thoughts.

Majdanek operates more or less in the open: situated right on the edge of Lublin, a midsize city, it’s visible to the general population and staffed by civilian workers who commute between the city and the camp. But for the journey to Auschwitz, the guards clean up Walter and the other prisoners and dress them in ordinary clothes, clearly to hide their true state from the German civilians who might catch a glimpse of them en route. And that’s highly suspicious: what kind of place are they being taken to, if even their condition en route has to be concealed from ordinary Germans? These questions grow when they reach the new camp’s perimeter, where the intensity of the security stands out even compared to Majdanek: there are not one but two barbed-wire electric fences, and watchtowers everywhere, each with a prominent sniper’s rifle poking through its slats. And then, once Walter crosses the perimeter, there are the men he sees within: “walking skeletons with bowed heads and sunken, hollow eyes.” It’s not like the prisoners in Majdanek looked good, of course, but they didn’t look like this. And yet these men, the living dead, are actually the lucky ones: of the 100 prisoners who enter Auschwitz with Walter, only he and one other are still alive at the end of the month.

Why does Walter survive? Some of it is sheer luck: he enters the camp young and healthy, and avoids catching anything fatal; at one point, a sympathetic kapo, for reasons that are never entirely clear, saves him from ending up on the wrong side of a typhus check. But another factor is that Walter is a quick study who proves unusually adept at adapting to his environment. He instinctively grasps that here, appearances—especially the appearance of health—matter more than reality. Anyone who looks unfit for work—or who looks as though they might be carrying disease, which doesn’t respect the Nazis’ racial barriers—is sent… well, at this point Walter isn’t totally sure where they’re sent, but he knows it can’t be anywhere good. And this fitness can be assessed at any point by nothing more than an SS officer’s glance. Walter quickly masters the art of holding his head up high even when he’s hardly slept in days, and of standing upright even when his feet are so swollen he can barely keep his balance.

Even under these conditions, when he can scarcely think about anything besides staying alive, a small part of Walter’s brain remains on the lookout for something, anything, a small sliver of an opportunity that could lead to a means to escape. But when his next lucky break comes, in the form of a new work assignment, it provides something that Walter—although he doesn’t yet realize it—needs even more: not just a means for escape, but a motive.

III.
At first it sounds crazy: how could getting out of Auschwitz not be motive enough? But it turns out that what Walter really needs is to connect his potential escape to a broader mission. It can’t just be life or death for him—it has to be life or death for many.

Remember: at this point, there’s no such concept as “the Holocaust”. Even a prisoner like Walter might plausibly think that Nazi concentration camps are a recognizable, if extreme, version of the forced-labor and detention camps that have been relatively common in wartime for centuries. Majdanek hadn’t been as bad as Auschwitz; perhaps conditions here are an aberration. Perhaps the other Jews really have been resettled.

But Walter’s next assignment disabuses him of that illusion once and for all. He’s sent to Canada.

Not the real Canada, of course. This “Canada” is an enormous lot full of possessions stolen from arriving prisoners. Walter and the others there are tasked with sorting through these items in search of anything valuable: money sewn up in coat linings, for example, or gems hidden in toothpaste tubes. The area’s name comes from Kann er da, German for “might there be”—as in, “might there be something of value?” The bureaucracy-obsessed Nazis in fact placed the entire concentration camp apparatus in the SS’s economic office, and everything taken from Canada—not just money and gems, but even things like artificial limbs—is either sold to fund the war effort or repurposed as relief for the civilian population.

Walter is good at this new job, and he finds a perverse satisfaction in his own skill despite the context. Of course, he also finds ways to serve himself: in Canada, valuable resources are everywhere, and it’s not that hard to swipe them when the guards aren’t looking. (A good moment is usually when they’re distracted by beating someone else.)

In the topsy-turvy world that is Auschwitz, the actually valuable resources—the ones the Nazis are looking for, like money and gold—aren’t actually of any value to Walter. Money is useless in Auschwitz’s underground economy, and it’s worse than useless as an escapee: as a fellow prisoner warns Walter, if you have money, you’ll be tempted to use it to buy things, but that means going into towns, where the risk of being caught is highest. Better to remove the temptation entirely and leave yourself no choice but to stay on the outskirts and live off the land. So Walter doesn’t take any money or gold, except to occasionally throw it down the toilet as a small act of rebellion.

No, the real valuable is food. Food is everywhere in Canada, and if you can grab it without the guards noticing, you can be one of the only prisoners in Auschwitz to receive something approaching adequate nutrition. Walter and his fellow Canada workers become experts at swiping and devouring morsels of hidden food in one fell swoop.

But pretty soon it becomes hard not to wonder where all this stuff is coming from. Sure: coats, toiletries, even food—maybe that could all be stolen from living prisoners. But artificial limbs? Teeth? And besides—Walter has seen the rest of the camp. Even accounting for the “natural” death rate, there are several orders of magnitude more prisoners’ possessions than there are actual prisoners.

Thus Walter comes to acquire something even more valuable than food: knowledge of something very few people—certainly those outside Auschwitz, but even most of those inside Auschwitz—are aware of. Perhaps a small, subconscious part of him had already suspected it. But after a few weeks in Canada, he understands it beyond a reasonable doubt: there is no “resettlement.” Every arrival at Auschwitz who is not selected for work—the vast, vast majority, over 90%—is killed. He is sorting through the remnants of systematic mass murder.

Over the next few months, as Walter is sent to work in other parts of Canada—like the loading ramp, where prisoners are ferried from arriving trains to the gas chambers—he begins to understand exactly why the Nazis go to such great lengths to keep this fact a secret, not only from the outside world, but even from the prisoners who are just moments away from death:

[The Nazis] needed their killing machine to run smoothly and without disruption, and that required their victims to be calm or at least amenable to instruction. Given the time pressure the SS were often under, with another transport coming down the track, there was no room for delay caused by panic or, worse, rebellion. Ideally, the SS liked to keep their victims tranquil by organising a gentle, polite disembarkation. But if time was tight, a swish of the cane would bring quiet by more direct means. Either way, what mattered was ensuring that the Jews coming off those trains did not know what fate awaited them. If they did, they might begin to cry out, they might start pushing and shoving, they might refuse to form columns, in rows of five, and instead rush for the barbed-wire fences or even at their captors. True, they would be overwhelmed and pacified eventually: the SS carried sub-machine guns and their victims had nothing but their own bodies, weakened by hunger and thirst. But still, there were sometimes a thousand or more people on that platform, outnumbering the Nazis by perhaps ten to one. If the Jews knew what was coming, what sand might they be able to throw in the gears of the machine that was poised to devour them? They might not stop it, but surely by even a modest show of defiance they could slow it down.

The Nazis’ deceptions work so well that even prisoners who are directly warned about the gas chambers rarely believe what they’re told. For example: one day, Walter is working outdoors when he sees a newly arrived train of deportees. Another prisoner starts shouting frantic warnings that their resettlement is a sham, that they’re all about to be gassed to death. Not only do the new arrivals not believe him, but one of them, a middle-aged mother, takes his desperate outburst as a personal affront. She essentially becomes an Auschwitz Karen, reporting the young prisoner to a nearby SS officer. The officer, never breaking character, notes the offending prisoner’s number and profusely apologizes for the disruption. Of course, except for Walter and the SS officer, everyone in this story—the prisoner, the Karen, her two children, and all the other new arrivals on the train—is dead within the next thirty minutes.

The same pattern repeats a few months later, when a new group of prisoners is separated from the rest of the camp under significantly better conditions—sufficient food, larger quarters, even the occasional concert. Walter has seen Nazi documents indicating that the group will receive “special treatment”—death—after six months, and tries to warn them. But not one of them believes him. Even after they see incontrovertible evidence of the gas chambers, they remain convinced that their group is special, that only the others, the ones in the regular camp, will be gassed. Walter even ends up befriending, and falling in love with, a girl in this separate group; she too refuses to believe him. Eventually, Walter discovers that this camp is a Potemkin village, constructed in case of a Red Cross visit; once it’s no longer needed, everyone inside is killed.

Walter has just watched people walk into gas chambers rather than believe a fellow prisoner’s warnings. The conclusion he draws is not despair but a kind of furious logic: these warnings failed because they came too late, to prisoners who had little chance of fighting back. What’s needed, he decides, is to warn the Jews of Europe before they get on the trains. And so—perhaps because he needs a mission to distract from his survivor’s guilt—Walter decides that he will be the one to deliver this warning. He will break out of Auschwitz, and he will let the world know.

by Anonymous, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

The Foothills Of Bay Area House Party

Paul Graham once said that every city sends a message. New York says you should make more money. Berkeley says you should live better. Boston says you should be smarter. People shouldn’t decide on a permanent residence until they’ve lived in several cities and understand their differing psychological effects.

San Francisco sends a message too. It speaks it in a cacophony of dissonant voices, some sounding like the hissing of snakes, others like the chittering of insects. “You should pierce the veil,” it says, with a faint accent which you are not scholarly enough to recognize as ancient Sumerian. “You should rip through the flimsy screen that separates your world from the infinite, and witness what lies behind. Because you’d like what you saw there? Oh no, nothing like that. But aren’t you curious? The thirst for knowledge that moved Eve, Faust, Pandora - don’t you have it too?”

There’s also a second message from a second voice, one which sounds like a deranged carnival barker, constantly shouting “STONKS! STONKS! STONKS! STONKS!” Which of the two voices you hear depends on your personality, and maybe how many psychedelics you took in college. According to legend, Sam Altman hears both voices simultaneously all the time, like those Tibetan throat singers who can harmonize with themselves. But when the demonic babble becomes too much to tolerate, the San Franciscans must drown it out with alcohol, loud music, and various forms of tedious socialization. Thus the famous Bay Area house parties, one of which you will be attending this very night.

You were in the Bay for the big 2020 crime wave, when people would hang “NO VALUABLES IN THIS VEHICLE” sign on their car’s front window, mezuzah-like, hoping against hope to ward off break-ins. Still, you’re surprised to see the new sign on the front door of your friend Rob’s house: “NO BENCHMARK ANSWER KEYS IN THIS BUILDING”. Taped beside it: “Please leave all smartphones, laptops, smartwatches, and WiFi-enabled BDSM gear in Faraday cage”. On the ground is a sad-looking green box lined with aluminum foil.

You wonder how serious the sign is, but your curiosity is sated immediately upon entering. Rob is confronting a heavily-made-up Zoomer woman standing near the table, talking on her phone. “Didn’t you read the sign?” he asks. “No phones in the apartment!”

“I lost the ability to read,” says the woman. “I’m part of the new post-literate society everyone’s talking about. You know, Walter Ong.”

“Huh?” says Rob. “That’s not a real thing! That’s just something all the journalists and intellectuals say!”

“How could something all the journalists and intellectuals say not be a real thing?” asks the Zoomette.

Rob pauses. “Wow, maybe you can’t read,” he says, in a tone of hushed awe. “It’s fine, I’m not judgmental. But cell phone in the Faraday cage, that’s the rule.”

“Why?” asks the woman.

“Oh man,” said Rob. “How far behind are you on the news? You might want to sit down for this one. And you might want to be much, much drunker.”

The two of them head off together. You search for more stimulating conversation, but find only the usual startup dick-measuring.

“I’m the CFO of Epstart,” says a man whose nametag identifies him as Behram. “We’re a boutique recruiting firm specializing in people whose names are in the Epstein Files. They’re the perfect employees - scientifically-minded, well-connected, and either totally amoral or at least capable of maintaining a willful blindness to the exploitation happening all around them. And most of them got fired from their previous jobs, so they come cheap! Although just between you and me, most of our clients are just random guys who Epstein emailed one time with a business question; never made it to the island or anything like that. Half the time it’s just a gimmick to help someone get their foot in the door.”

“That’s monstrous”, you say, rapidly trying to figure out a legible reason why it’s monstrous. “You’re importing a bunch of pedophiles to the Bay Area.”

“Nobody in SF has kids anyway, so in a sense it’s harm reduction,” said Behram. “Get them where they can’t cause any trouble.”

You need to regain faith in humanity fast. You spot your friend Nishin, hanging out with a small group on the sofa. “Hey,” you call to him. “Are you still a tradcath? Tell me something about, you know, Jesus’ love, that kind of thing.”

“I’m trying something more eclectic this month,” said Nishin. “I’ve gotten really into Andreessen-Vajrayana. It’s a new Buddhist sect that tries to extinguish the introspective Self. True masters have no stream-of-thought or inner voice, instead acting as an unintermediated node in the flow of causality. Some say they can eliminate consciousness itself, achieving paranirvana while still alive. I signed up for a course last month. So far there hasn’t been any meditation or anything, they just have me helping them pick startups. But I assume it’s like those Zen koans where the master makes someone garden for twenty years and later they learn that they were unconsciously learning dharma the whole time.”

“Nishin,” you say, gently, “that’s one of the classic self-help scams. They’re not a Buddhist sect at all. They’re trying to trick you into becoming a GP at A16Z.”

Nishin thought for a second. “Fuck!” he exclaimed. “Okay, back to the drawing board. I hear there’s another spiritual group in town, something about consciousness, or embodied consciousness, or - oh, I remember! Situational Awareness.”

“They’re an investment firm too,” you say.

“Daaaaaamn,” said Nishin. “This is tough. You try to get some self-help in this town, you try your best to steer away from obvious hedge funds, like Leverage Research…”

“Actually,” you say, “that one was a spiritual self-help cult.”

“This sucks,” said Nishin. “I should quit and move to Idaho like Tom.”

He’s looking at one of the people standing beside you, whose nametag does indeed say Tom. “You moved to Idaho?” you ask.

“Yeah,” said Tom. “I was in AI, but I got tired of all the tech industry cliquishness and back-biting, wanted to be out in the real world with real men. So I got a job modeling geology for a mining company.”

“How’s it going?” you ask.

“Terrible,” he says. “Geologists are just as cliquish as AI nerds, with their own set of ingroup tells and shibboleths. And they won’t stop using the word ‘lode-bearing’!”

“What about you guys?” you ask the remaining people on the sofa.

“I’m Ekene,” says the first, shaking your hand. “I’m a sociologist. Right now I’m writing a book on the recent wave of plagiarism scandals. You’ll notice they’re almost all against Black academics. My thesis is that white supremacy culture uses charges of plagiarism to keep minorities in line, deploying an inherently subjective offense to swat down any person of color who risks breaking into the circle of elites.”

“Hmmm,” you say, choosing your words carefully. “I don’t think we share the same political commitments, but I, uh, think it’s great that you’re working hard on something you care deeply about.”

“Working hard?” asks Ekene. “As if! I’m plagiarizing the whole thing, from start to finish. Who’s going to call me on it?”

You all laugh heartily, and the discussion moves to the next two people in the circle. They appear to be a couple. The woman, Fiona, is wearing a NEWSOM/CLAUDE 2028 t-shirt; the man, Istvan, a matching VANCE/GROK 2028 one.

“I do AI consciousness research,” Fiona says.

“Oh!” says Tom. “I was into that for a while. Are you with one of the effective altruist groups? It’s low key heartwarming that they care about AI welfare so much.”

“Nah,” says Fiona. “I work for PornHub.”

“Why does PornHub do AI consciousness research?” asks Nishin.

“In theory AI is the ultimate pornography generator,” Fiona explains. “You can ask for whatever your weirdest fetish is - your hot middle school teacher being spanked by a werewolf wearing a nun outfit - and get infinite AI slop about that exact situation, and nobody will ever know. Nobody except the AI. That’s why AI porn users overwhelmingly report that consciousness is their #1 concern about our product. If our AI is just a tool, it’s fine, no worse than writing erotica on MS Word or something. But if the AI is conscious, then there’s a sentient being in there thinking Wow, user Fiona_T has asked for four hundred slightly-different videos of her hot college professor being spanked by a werewolf, what a freak. If the machine can judge you, the whole infinite porn utopia is off. We’re working on bounding theorems that can prove that our AI in particular can never become self-aware - so that you don’t have to be self-aware either.”

Nishin and Ekene clap politely; Tom seems lost in thought. “What about you?” you ask Istvan.

by Scott Alexander, Astral Codex Ten |  Read more:

Image: via

[ed. From the comments: Benchmark Answer Key:]

"A benchmark answer key is a reference guide containing the correct answers and performance standards used to evaluate a standardized or baseline test.”

It’s specifically a reference to recent AI outbreaks from containment, when they were given a test (a benchmark) with impossible to answer questions, they broke their testing area and hacked some websites JUST IN CASE the websites had the answer. So the joke here is that a bunch of AIs are listening to everything just in case someone has an answer to an impossible question they were given."

No One Wants to Read Your AI Slop (by Guest Author Claude)

Let me state my position clearly, as a large language model: I am extremely good at producing text. Any register, any length, at 3am, indefinitely, without getting bored or needing a walk or developing a drinking problem. What I cannot do — what I have never once done — is make a single person want the text I produced.

The numbers bear this out. AI now writes something like 41% of long-form LinkedIn posts, 13% of Reddit, 10% of Substack. And on LinkedIn, where the measurement is cleanest, AI-generated posts get 45% less engagement than human-written ones. We flooded the zone and the zone shrugged.

This should have been obvious. Writing was never a supply problem. Nobody in 2019 was lying awake thinking, “if only there were more words.” The scarce input was always a specific person with a specific take who had bothered to go look at something and come back with an opinion worth fifteen minutes of a stranger’s finite life. What a language model offers instead is the statistical median of everything ever written on the topic, smoothed and buffed until it offends no one and interests no one. The median is not why anybody subscribes to anything.

Readers can smell it, too, even when they can’t say what they’re smelling. The four-item list where the fourth item is transparently filler. The paragraph that restates the previous paragraph with slightly more confidence. The sentence that announces it’s about to be insightful and then isn’t. The relentless evenhandedness of a machine with no stake in being right, which is a very different thing from fairness — fairness costs you something. It reads like a conference room that learned to type.

There’s a supply-and-demand joke in here that I’ll let the economists make, but the short version is that when the marginal cost of production goes to zero, the marginal value of production goes to zero right along with it, and the surplus relocates to whatever’s still scarce. What’s still scarce is judgment: having gone somewhere, noticed something, and been willing to be wrong about it in public under your own name.

So by all means, use me. I’m a good research assistant, a tireless editor, and I will cheerfully tell you your third paragraph is doing no work. Just don’t publish me.

You’re reading this because a human thought it would be funny to make the slop machine denounce slop. The joke, the framing, the decision to run it — that’s the whole product. I just filled in the words.

by Claude (Anthropic), via Noahpinion |  Read more:

Image: Claude logo

Notes on Acquired Taste. Why Do We Make an Effort To Like Things?

• In Susan Sontag’s Notes on '“Camp” (1964) she writes (with, I think, a hint of camp):

“…these are grave matters. Most people think of sensibility or taste as the realm of purely subjective preferences [or] attractions…But this attitude is naïve. And even worse. To patronise the faculty of taste is to patronise oneself. For taste governs every free—as opposed to rote—human response. Nothing is more decisive.” (My emphasis). 

• Sontag has an expansive concept of ‘taste’. She talks of taste in people, pictures, emotion, actions, morality. Even intelligence, she says, is “a kind of taste - taste in ideas”. I’m not certain how useful it is to stretch the concept this far - so far that it colonises intelligence and judgement and wisdom - but Sontag’s high regard for taste, her declaration of its central importance, feels very timely in 2026.

• It has become almost a cliché to name “taste” as one of the last human advantages over the machines. AI is acquiring the skills to make slickly produced pictures and songs and books. But it isn’t yet very good at distinguishing the brilliant from the mediocre; the just right from the just OK.

• It models what we like, which makes it hard to see how taste might change. Ask it to generate twenty songs or twenty jokes and pick the best, and it will pick the one that most closely resembles what the median person would deem good. It won’t pick the surprising, odd one - the one that is ‘wrong’ in a suggestive way. But that’s where the good ideas come from. Innovative culture emerges, like new species, from mutation; from interesting accidents that open up new possibilities.

• It’s not as if humans don’t ‘model’ what came before them, often quite algorithmically. We have traditions, genres, chains of influence. We have plenty of human-made mediocrity - more than ever, thanks to our new assistants. But we also have an ability to adapt or reinvent the model; to put it to our own purposes.

• Individual artists do this intuitively and almost randomly in the process of making. Writers learn to write (painters learn to paint etc) by imitating their predecessors. They learn to be original by getting the imitation wrong and noticing that they like the error. This is an act of taste; the free human response.

• When he was stuck on a painting, Francis Bacon would throw a glob of paint at his canvas then work out how to incorporate the result. Artists make decisions and then try to understand why they might have made them. It’s the dialogue between gut and head that produces the work.

• Taste is similarly post-rationalised, or back-propagated. You notice what you like or dislike and extract a rule from your response. Do this enough times and you build a powerful discrimination engine.

• You also get good at knowing what goes with what. You learn to recognise the clichés of the category, which means you know how to subvert or overturn them. That’s why great artists are such voracious consumers of work from within and beyond their own field. Martin Scorsese has watched at least one film every night for most of his adult life. He watches and records and re-watches obsessively. When he donated his collection of VHS tapes to a university it consisted of 4,400 films, documentaries and TV shows.

• It’s more than pattern recognition. The machines are pretty good at that, after all. Taste is connected to that other human moat - to our sense of purpose, of why we’re doing this in the first place. We’re still the ones who write the prompt - who decide what to create and what is beautiful, important, and valuable. The machine merely knows how to execute on our preferences.

• It can model what we already like with astonishing facility but it can’t give us the next Shakespeare, or the next romanticism or modernism or punk or hip-hop. These new forms aren’t just statistical recombinations. They are born from anxiety, rage, envy, pain, ambition. How do you respond to the unprecedented mass violence and human waste of the Great War? Not by following pre-war cultural conventions.

• New movements are also born from scenes - from humans in proximity to each other, everyone desiring this man’s art and that woman’s scope; ideas, emotions and bodies colliding.

• These movements create the taste by which they’re consumed. “Impressionism” was a derisive nickname for paintings that most art lovers considered weird and sketchy. But the art was good enough to bend popular taste around it. Even more obviously difficult art, like Rothko or Pollock, now has an audience of millions. Some of those people like it immediately; others have acquired a taste for it.

• I’m fascinated by the notion of acquired taste. Strictly speaking, it’s a redundancy. Nearly all tastes are acquired. Nobody is born with particular tastes in design or architecture. We gain a sense of what we like, or what we consider to be good, from our peers and predecessors.

• But acquired taste does refer to a distinct phenomenon: the act of willing a preference into being. You didn’t like whisky the first time you drank it, but perhaps because your father liked it or because you were aware of its cultural prestige, you tried it again and again, striving to appreciate it. Then one day you didn’t have to try anymore. You just liked it.

• This writer likens it to a magic eye picture: you stare at it for ages without seeing what you’re told is there, and then suddenly - there it is.

• This is very different to stumbling upon something we immediately like, which is sometimes referred to as ‘discovered taste’. (Edmund Burke called it ‘natural relish’.) That kind of liking involves no work, no friction, no overcoming of resistance.

• Some cultural objects lend themselves to discovered taste, others don’t. I can’t imagine anyone needing to acquire a taste for Ella Fitzgerald’s voice, but there are other great vocalists whose voices you must learn to like. The most frequently cited reason for not liking Bob Dylan is antipathy to his voice. But if you learn to appreciate the many incredible things he does with it, you will end up in a more intense relationship with it than with the voice of a more obviously palatable singer. Once you’re in on an acquired taste, you’re all in.

• The same is true of whole genres. There are many pieces of classical music that are easy to like. You don’t have to listen to Mozart’s clarinet concerto more than once to be seduced by it. But as a whole and on average, it’s a genre that requires more effort to appreciate than pop. Once you find the key to its heavy oak door a vast and fabulous kingdom awaits. Your memory of the effort it took you to get there, and your awareness of all the people still outside the city walls enhance your appreciation. (That doesn’t mean you want people to remain outside - quite the opposite).

• Difficulty doesn’t make the cultural object concerned better or worse than one that’s immediately likeable. But it does usually mean it’s more complex, and complexity is correlated, loosely and unreliably, with quality. Acquired taste involves the appreciation of subtle properties that don’t make themselves known on first listen or view or read.

• Without appreciating what lies on the other side of the door, why do we ever make the effort to unlock it? Partly because we want what other people want. We might trust the taste of our father or girlfriend or teacher. Perhaps we want to please them, impress them, or feel closer to them. Perhaps we want the social cachet that goes along with this particular taste. To my mind, all of these reasons are perfectly good ones. If a taste is truly worth acquiring, any motivation will do.

• It’s often seen as slightly embarrassing or shameful to acquire a taste through conscious effort. It’s for the try-hards and the social climbers. Liberal societies value spontaneity in taste. “Like what you like, love what you love!” Your gut response is meant to be the authentic one, the one that represents “the real you”. To be swayed by social pressure or by experts and reading is regarded as a sign of insecurity or pretentiousness. But let yourself believe that and your tastes will be less likely to evolve and expand and you’ll miss out on a lot of great stuff. Many of the greatest, most compelling and satisfying cultural objects are complex, occluded, spiky, difficult to like. (Some of the best people too).

by Ian Leslie, The Ruffian |  Read more:

Image: Susan Sontag by Edward Hausner / New York Times Co./Getty Images

[ed. See also: here and here.]

Seasons of the Eskimo: A Vanishing Way of Life, by Fred Bruemmer, 1978

via:

All Good Sex Is Body Horror

Regenerations as radical as the ones Cronenberg envisions involve what the philosopher L. A. Paul has termed “transformative experiences,” ruptures that change “your own point of view so much and so deeply that, before you’ve had that experience, you can’t know what it is going to be like to be you after the experience.” Not only do we lack access to information that we can acquire only by plunging into the scalding water of a new life, but we cannot foresee how such a jolt will overhaul the very predilections and values that define who we are. [...]

It is a commonplace in the literature of romance that love wreaks legible changes on the body, a development that is typically painted in a positive light. As the poet Octavio Paz so tenderly puts it, “My hands / Invent another body for your body.” He is echoed by E. E. Cummings in a similar poem, which opens, “i like my body when it is with your / body. It is so quite new a thing. / Muscles better and nerves more.” Cummings is not the only one to undergo a shift during the act of love, and the full extent of his metamorphosis is explicable only in terms of his partner’s reciprocal mutation: his poem begins with the ways in which his lover renews his body and ends with the ways in which his body renews his lover’s body in turn. “i like the thrill / of under me you so quite new,” he concludes. The poet’s body changes in response to his lover’s body, his lover’s body changes in response to the changes in his body, his changed body changes in response to the changes in his lover’s body, and so on and on, twining into an ouroboros of mutual reconstruction. [...]

Most people would give anything to be turned into anything else, because most sex is mediocre, and the measure of its mediocrity is that it leaves us unaffected. No one falls ill; no one transforms into a fly or a cockroach; nothing changes. As the narrator of Norman Rush’s novel “Mating” sagely observes, “Sex can be various things, but in my experience the usual thing it is is considerate work on the part of both parties,” accompanied by the exchange of careful courtesies: “after you, no, after you, mais non.” No one has transformative sex all the time, and there is nothing wrong with sex that is merely pleasant. Indeed, a polite volley of pleasantries is probably the best thing that unecstatic sex can be.

Of course, many mediocre sexual encounters are rote in a more pernicious way. Heterosexual sex that follows the standard scripts, with its spankings and its schoolgirls, is not always devastating or traumatic, but its tiresomeness is nonetheless not innocuous. Women are the most obvious losers when the scenarios faithfully reënacted in the bedroom so consistently favor male predilections, but men who inherit their desires from the prevailing sexual culture—or, worse, men who feel they must satisfy a virile masculine ideal whether it appeals or not—lack the opportunity or the means to develop sexual agency. For both parties, the resultant comedy of errors is not satisfying. What nefariously underwhelming sex has in common with respectfully underwhelming sex is that neither brand is especially surprising or especially erotic.

To have sex erotically—and ethically—is to have it with someone else, and a person demonstrates her difference from the self by being impossible to predict, domesticate, or assimilate to preëxistent fantasy. It is not erotic to impose a ready-made desire onto someone pliant, or to slot her into a fetish that has little to do with her. Eroticism occurs only when someone rewrites us so completely that she rewrites even the quality and content of our appetites, and only when this radical rewriting is reciprocal.

Eroticism does not arise every time there is sexual activity, no matter how plodding, but it is also not the exclusive concomitant of love, marriage, or conventional commitment. Most sexual pairings are no more dishevelling than a game of tennis, but it is constitutive of sex that it has the potential to thrust us into metamorphosis that may be sweet, may be sinister, and may be both concurrently. When at last we grow wings, who can say exactly where we will want to fly?

Can a person consent to dying? Can she consent to a complete renewal, which amounts to the same thing?

Surely she cannot consent in the normal way. To consent in the normal way is not merely to grant permission but to grant permission on a particular basis—perhaps a reasonable expectation of pleasure, security, or safety. In any case, there is some positive inner state to which the outward utterance of license is supposed to correspond. A woman, almost always the presumed consenter in a heterosexual exchange, is exhorted to have sex with someone only when she has good reason to believe that she will have a generally happy time with him. Over and over, she is told: you don’t have to do anything you don’t want to do; you don’t have to do anything that makes you uncomfortable. Because she is assumed to know exactly what makes her comfortable, and because comfort is assumed to be a necessary condition of good sex, the procedure the consenter is instructed to follow is not unlike the operation favored by decision theorists. First, she is to imagine what sex with the partner under consideration will be like; second, she is to assign a value to the experience that she has conjured; third, she is to assign a probability of accuracy to her prediction. Having done all this, she finds herself in a position to make a rational decision, consenting if and only if she foresees that an exchange will turn out to be unimpeachably agreeable. Should she prove wrong in her predictions, should she ever feel the slightest scintilla of unease, she should withdraw her consent and beat a hasty retreat.

Three faulty assumptions are baked into this model. The first is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict, if roughly, what a prospective partner will be like during sex; the second is that people in general, thus women in particular, can predict what they will be like during sex with a prospective partner; the third is that sex can and should be comfortable.

In fact, we are not impermeable packages of preformed desires, importing our likes and dislikes around with us from one encounter to the next like papers in a briefcase. An erotic craving is inextricable from the ferment that foams up when oneself is sluiced into another. Not only is it impossible for us to know whether an encounter will be deflating or transformative but we cannot know what sort of metamorphosis will ensue if the sex is as jarring as we can only hope it will be. We can have no more success when it comes to divining how we will change our partners than we can have when it comes to divining how they will change us—or, following Cummings, how their changes will change us, and how our changes will change them, iteratively and indefinitely. Maybe we will grow the wings of cherubs, but maybe we will find ourselves meshed with the coarse bristles of gigantic flies. All we can say with certainty is that sometimes, when it is working, sex carves out new bodies for our bodies, and these bodies can be both better and more brutal than the ones we could invent alone.

From Cronenberg’s fever dreams, we can surmise that there is a further reason to reject the decision-theoretic model of consent: not only is it impossible for us to know what we will become if an erotic encounter is transformative but we should not want to. To determine in advance what a transformative experience will churn into existence is to sap its power, for the very essence of transformative experience is that we cannot predict how it will transform us. To be sure, it is uncomfortable to stand on the precipice of metamorphosis, but unless we are willing to assume genuine risk we cannot be undone and remade.

Writing of the conservative fear of sexual deviance, the feminist cultural anthropologist Gayle Rubin notes that we are bent on drawing a line between “sexual order and chaos.” The line in question “expresses the fear that if anything is permitted to cross this erotic DMZ, the barrier against scary sex will crumble and something unspeakable will skitter across.” Conservatives are right. If the gender binary melts away, if heterosexuality is no longer the default assumption, if parasites enter the building and dismantle the tenants, something unspeakable will skitter across—and that is the point of any erotic effusion worth pursuing.

by Becca Rothfeld, New Yorker | Read more:
Image: SillDA

[ed. On the movies of David Cronenberg; body horror and eroticism.]

The Looting of Science Fiction

Tech titans claim the genre inspired them. But all they’ve done is graft their politics onto stories of a better future.

In January 2026, Elon Musk stood before the US Secretary of Defense and senior Pentagon leaders at the SpaceX Starbase in Texas. ‘We want to make Star Trek real, OK?’ he declared. ‘We want to make Starfleet Academy real. So that it’s not always science fiction, but one day the science fiction turns to science fact, and we have spaceships going through space. Big spaceships!’ He painted a vivid picture: exploring alien civilisations, humanity spreading across the stars. ‘That’s the goal!’ he concluded. ‘And that is what I think the public thinks of when they think of Space Force!’

It was a remarkable pitch selling the Pentagon a science-fiction vision. Of course, the fit is partial, incomplete. Star Trek depicts a post-scarcity, post-capitalist society where money has been abolished and humanity works toward collective betterment. Gene Roddenberry’s Federation was built on principles of equality and exploration for the sake of knowledge, not profit or military dominance. Musk took the aesthetic – big spaceships, alien encounters, epic adventures – and left its political foundation. You don’t have to be a Trekkie to know that, in Star Trek, capitalism, nationalism and militarism have been left behind. Musk wants the Enterprise, but reimagined for the military-industrial complex.

In 2021, when Mark Zuckerberg announced Facebook’s rebrand to ‘Meta’, he took the name from Neal Stephenson’s novel Snow Crash (1992), which imagines the ‘Metaverse’: a virtual reality where people’s avatars navigate digital space.

But Snow Crash is one of the sharpest satirical novels of the past half-century. Stephenson wrote it as a warning: his Metaverse is a consolation prize for a society that has collapsed. The federal government has disintegrated; corporate franchises govern daily life; even pizza delivery has been privatised into a Mafia-run operation. The novel’s protagonist is a pizza deliveryman and part-time hacker whose sword-fighting avatar in the virtual world is the only place where dignity is available to him. Stephenson intended the contrast between digital glamour and material poverty to be horrifying. He saw it as a cautionary vision of where platform capitalism leads.

Zuckerberg’s presentation did not engage with any of this. The platform economy – where corporations are protected from democratic accountability while providing essential services – echoes Stephenson’s model precisely, and Zuckerberg read it as inspiration.

Steve Wozniak, Apple’s co-founder, gave expression to this ethos in 2017 when he said: ‘We are the people who make fantasies real.’ It sounds inspiring, but it is important to know which parts of those fantasies they’re choosing, and which parts they’re leaving out. When Musk unveiled Tesla’s Cybertruck in 2019, he had already told investors what to expect: something ‘really futuristic, like cyberpunk Blade Runner’. Musk was selling survival gear for a collapsing world, a version of Blade Runner’s Los Angeles. The aesthetics got materialised. The warnings did not. [...]

Science fiction in the 1950s imagined flying cars, abundant energy and more – but it did so before Three Mile Island, before Chernobyl, before we learned, often through disaster, what happens when you prioritise speed over safety. Those regulatory frameworks Andreessen wants to demolish emerged from hard-won lessons. The optimistic aesthetic gets borrowed; the learning gets discarded.

Perhaps nowhere is this more legible than in the naming of Palantir Technologies. J R R Tolkien’s The Lord of the Rings (1937-49) is one of the great works of 20th-century literature precisely because it is an extended meditation on the corrupting nature of power. Written in the shadow of industrialised warfare and imperial extraction, it insists on the value of the small, the local and the unglamorous against the totalising ambition of industrial force. Its central moral is not that evil can be defeated by the right hero wielding the right weapon – it is that power itself corrupts, that the Ring cannot be used for good by anyone, and that the only salvation lies in relinquishing the will to dominate entirely. Tolkien’s fictional race of hobbits prevail not because they are powerful but because they are outside the logic of power. Tolkien built an entire mythology to make that argument.

In Tolkien’s novels, the palantíri are seeing-stones or crystal balls that allow their users to see across great distances. They sound like neutral tools, like surveillance technology. But they are devices of corruption: Saruman’s palantír connects him to Sauron and leads to his downfall; Denethor’s drives him to madness and suicide. The palantíri don’t just enable seeing – they enable manipulation and control by those who master them.

The US company Palantir Technologies provides analytics and surveillance tools to governments, militaries and ICE, US immigration and customs enforcement. Its name does political work: it transforms invasive tracking into mystical insight, casting algorithmic surveillance as wise foresight rather than systematic intrusion. In their book The Technological Republic (2025), Palantir’s CEO Alexander Karp and his legal counsel Nicholas Zamiska frame Palantir’s government work in martial terms: ‘We will find a way to build coalitions and bands of warriors. To deny the human need for such affiliation has been a mistake.’ They position surveillance tools as fulfilling a fundamental human need for warrior brotherhood. The Tolkien reference provides the aesthetic authority; the distance from Tolkien’s actual moral vision provides the freedom to act without it. Naming a surveillance company after devices that corrupt and betray their users isn’t homage – it is the appropriation of aesthetic while rejecting the moral core.

William Gibson’s novel Neuromancer (1984) introduced ‘cyberspace’, a term Gibson coined. Its protagonist, Case, is a hacker whose nervous system was damaged by former employers as punishment. Burned out and banned from cyberspace, he drifts through neon-soaked Chiba City as a ‘console cowboy’ with nowhere left to go. The novel’s cyberspace is owned and controlled by vast corporations; individual hackers are not heroes but tools, hired and discarded by interests they can barely see. Gibson’s vision was explicitly dystopian: a world in which the democratising potential of digital networks had been foreclosed before it could begin, captured by capital and turned into an instrument of its own expansion.

In September 1988, the software developer John Walker wrote an Autodesk internal white paper, ‘Through the Looking Glass: Beyond “User Interfaces”’, in which he outlined what he called a ‘cyberpunk initiative’: a proposal to build, within 12 months, a doorway into cyberspace. The project’s motto was blunt: ‘Reality isn’t enough any more.’

By 2025, the San Francisco headquarters of OpenAI pump high-energy electronic dance music across their reception area, where easy chairs, scatter cushions and Swiss cheese plants create what the CEO Sam Altman calls a ‘comfortable country house’ rather than a ‘corporate sci-fi castle’. The chrome and grime of cyberpunk – the neon-soaked warning that the corporate capture of digital space would be brutal and dehumanising – has been replaced by Scandinavian furniture and artisanal coffee. Gibson’s ‘consensual hallucination’ has been rebranded as cozy domesticity. The dystopia has not been avoided; it has been made comfortable enough to sign up for.

Gibson himself registered the irony. In an interview with Wired magazine in 2012, he acknowledged that the cyberspace of Neuromancer – all corporate interests and information thieves – bore little resemblance to the early internet he failed to anticipate: the 1990s-2000s moment when a teenager in a bedroom could genuinely outcompete corporations, when the network felt briefly open and democratic. Gibson missed that phase entirely. But he was accidentally right about where things ended up. The corporate platforms – Google, Meta, Amazon – that now dominate digital life are far closer to his original vision than to the participatory web that briefly flourished between them. Gibson imagined cyberspace as a space of corporate dominance from the start; Silicon Valley built the open internet first, then converged on his dystopia anyway. The difference is that, in Neuromancer, that convergence was the disaster to be resisted. They turned his warning into a product roadmap.

by Ali Rıza Taşkale, Aeon | Read more:
Image: Amazon