The Secret History And Strange Future Of Charisma

In 1929, one of Germany’s national newspapers ran a picture story featuring globally influential people who, the headline proclaimed, “have become legends.” It included the former U.S. President Woodrow Wilson, the Russian revolutionary Vladimir Lenin and India’s anti-colonialist leader Mahatma Gandhi. Alongside them was a picture of a long-since-forgotten German poet. His name was Stefan George, but to those under his influence he was known as “Master.”

George was 61 years old that year, had no fixed abode and very little was known of his personal life and past. But that didn’t matter to his followers; to them he was something more than human: “a cosmic ego,” “a mind brooding upon its own being.” Against the backdrop of Weimar Germany — traumatized by postwar humiliation and the collapse of faith in traditional political and cultural institutions — George preached an alternate reality through books of poetry. His words swam in oceans of irrationalism: of pagan gods, ancient destinies and a “spiritual empire” he called “Secret Germany” bubbling beneath the surface of normal life. In essence, George dreamed of that terribly persistent political fantasy: a future inspired by the past. He wanted to make Germany great again. (...)

Max Weber, one of the founding fathers of sociology, met Stefan George in 1910 and immediately became curious. He didn’t buy George’s message — he felt he served “other gods” — but was fascinated by the bizarre hold he seemed to have over his followers. At a conference in Frankfurt, he described the “cult” that was growing around him as a “modern religious sect” that was united by what he described as “artistic world feelings.” In June that year, he wrote a letter to one of his students in which he described George as having “the traits of true greatness with others that almost verge on the grotesque,” and rekindled a particularly rare word to capture what he was witnessing: charisma.

At the time, charisma was an obscure religious concept used mostly in the depths of Christian theology. It had featured almost 2,000 years earlier in the New Testament writings of Paul to describe figures like Jesus and Moses who’d been imbued with God’s power or grace. Paul had borrowed it from the Ancient Greek word “charis,” which more generally denoted someone blessed with the gift of grace. Weber thought charisma shouldn’t be restricted to the early days of Christianity, but rather was a concept that explained a far wider social phenomenon, and he would use it more than a thousand times in his writings. (...)

Weber had died in 1920, before George truly reached the height of his powers (and before the wave of totalitarian dictatorships that would define much of the century), but he’d already seen enough to fatten his theory of charisma. At times of crisis, confusion and complexity, Weber thought, our faith in traditional and rational institutions collapses and we look for salvation and redemption in the irrational allure of certain individuals. These individuals break from the ordinary and challenge existing norms and values. Followers of charismatic figures come to view them as “extraordinary,” “superhuman” or even “supernatural” and thrust them to positions of power on a passionate wave of emotion.

In Weber’s mind, this kind of charismatic power wasn’t just evidenced by accounts of history — of religions and societies formed around prophets, saints, shamans, war heroes, revolutionaries and radicals. It was also echoed in the very stories we tell ourselves — in the tales of mythical heroes like Achilles and Cú Chulainn.

These charismatic explosions were usually short-lived and unstable — “every hour of its existence brings it nearer to this end,” wrote Weber — but the most potent ones could build worlds and leave behind a legacy of new traditions and values that then became enshrined in more traditional structures of power. In essence, Weber believed, all forms of power started and ended with charisma; it drove the volcanic eruptions of social upheaval. In this theory, he felt he’d uncovered “the creative revolutionary force” of history.

Weber was not the first to think like this. Similar ideas had been floating around at least as far back as the mid-1700s, when the Scottish philosopher David Hume had written that in the battle between reason and passion, the latter would always win. And it murmured in the 1800s in Thomas Carlyle’s “Great Man Theory” and in Nietzsche’s idea of the “Übermensch.” But none would have quite the global impact of Weber, whose work on charisma would set it on a trajectory to leap the fence of religious studies and become one of the most overused yet least understood words in the English language. (...)

Come the spring of 1968, the New York Times columnist Russell Baker was declaring that “the big thing in politics these days is charisma, pronounced ‘karizma,’” and that all the Kennedys had it. Since then, charisma has been used to explain everything from Marilyn Monroe to anticolonial uprisings, New Age gurus and corporate CEOs. When the Sunni jihadist preacher Anwar al-Awlaki — whose YouTube videos were linked to numerous terrorist attacks around the world — was executed by drone strike by the Obama administration in 2011, some observers suggested that his main threat had been his “charismatic character.”

Today, a Google Ngram of its usage in American English shows it to be still on a steep upward trend. And not just in American English: Charisma has migrated to Chinese in its Western pronunciation, to Japanese as “karisuma” and to Spanish, French and Italian as “carisma,” “charisme” and “carisma” respectively. The wholesale migration of the word in exact or close to its original form suggests that no equivalent previously existed in those languages to express its magnetic and mysterious quality. On TikTok, charisma has become a viral term; shortened to “rizz” or “unspoken rizz,” it refers to a person’s wordless ability to seduce a love interest with body gestures and facial expressions alone. The hashtag #rizz has over 13 billion views.

A word survives and thrives because it continues to quench an explanatory thirst; it meets a need or desire. And any word carefully examined will reveal itself to be a wormhole — an ongoing exchange between the past and the present. The prevalence of charisma implies a widespread belief in the power of it, and also in the ability of extraordinary individuals to change history. Weber’s terms still echo: Something magical and dangerous, something unfathomable, is afoot when charisma is present. “The pertinent question,” pondered the cultural theorist John Potts, “is not whether charisma actually exists, but why it exists.” 

Most of us will have experienced the allure of a charismatic individual in our lives. Few have experienced the feeling of being charismatic, where your desires, beliefs and actions are having a disproportionately powerful influence on those around you. But when people try to break down how it feels to experience it, they veer into cryptic comparisons. “When she [Elizabeth Holmes] speaks to you, she makes you feel like you are the most important person in her world in that moment,” Tyler Shultz, a whistleblower who worked at Theranos, told CBS News. “She almost has this reality distortion field around her that people can just get sucked into.”

About a meeting with Leo Tolstoy, Maxim Gorky wrote: “I can not express in words what I felt rather than thought at that moment; in my soul there was joy and fear, and then everything blended in one happy thought: ‘I am not an orphan on the earth, so long as this man lives on it.’” Reflecting on her rare experiences of charisma across 25 years of interviewing notable figures, the newspaper columnist Maggie Alderson wrote: “I still don’t understand what creates the effect. … If not fame, beauty, power, wealth and glory then what? It must be innate. I find that quite thrilling.”

It certainly seems to be a subjective and circumstantial spell: a “prophet” to some is a “werewolf” to others... “We tend to think of charisma in a sinister register — a kind of regressive thing, where people are being affirmed in their prejudices,” the University of Chicago anthropologist William Mazzarella explained to me. “Yielding is the problem from this point of view. It’s viewed as submitting to domination, being taken for a ride and not being the master of your own destiny. But then there’s also the sense of yielding as being selfless and participating in something greater than yourself. It’s the thing that allows us to be our most magnificent as human beings.”

As Mazzarella reminded me, people also use charisma to talk about the most admired and inspiring figures in their lives and the charismatic teachers they’ve had. “There the implication is that this person helped me to become myself or transcend myself in a way that I wouldn’t otherwise have been able to do,” he said. “That’s what’s interesting about charisma: It touches the darkest fundamentals of human impulses while having the capacity to point to our highest potentials. Charisma has these two faces, and it’s the fact that we seem to not be able to have one without the other that is so uncanny and disturbing. Inspiring charismatic figures can become exploitative, manipulative or violent. Violence gives way to liberation, or liberation gives way to violence. The problem is not just that we have a hard time telling the good charisma from the bad charisma, but that one has a way of flipping into the other.” (...)

A scientifically sound or generally agreed-upon definition of charisma remains elusive even after all these years of investigation. Across sociology, anthropology, psychology, political science, history and theater studies, academics have wrestled with how exactly to explain, refine and apply it, as well as identify where it is located: in the powerful traits of a leader or in the susceptible minds of a follower or perhaps somewhere between the two, like a magnetic field.

The Cambridge Dictionary reports that charisma is “a special power that some people have naturally,” but this association with individual influence is criticized as just another tedious expression of the Great Man Theory and overlooks much interconnected complexity. In her book, “Charisma and the Fictions of Black Leaders,” Erica Edwards argued that this view has “privileged charismatic leaders, from Frederick Douglass to Martin Luther King Jr., over the arduous, undocumented efforts of ordinary women, men and children to remake their social reality.” This uncritical faith in charisma as a motor of history, she wrote, “ignores its limits as a model for social movements while showing us just how powerful a narrative force it is.”

As Wright explained to me, Weber himself would disagree with the individualized modern understanding of charisma. “He was actually using it in a far more sophisticated way,” he said. “It wasn’t about the power of the individual — it was about the reflection of that power by the audience, about whether they receive it. He saw it as a process of interaction. And he was as fascinated by crowds as he was by individuals.” In Weber’s words: “What is alone important is how the [charismatic] individual is actually regarded by those subject to charismatic authority, by his ‘followers’ or ‘disciples.’ … It is recognition on the part of those subject to authority which is decisive for the validity of charisma.”

Charisma then, like love or beauty, may be in the eye of the beholder: intoxicating love and belief, enacted on a mass scale, during particular historical circumstances. Along these lines, the late American political scientist Cedric Robinson believed charisma to be a “psychosocial force” that symbolized the ultimate power of the people: the expression of the masses being focused into one chosen individual. Such an individual, he argued, is totally subordinate in the relationship: They must enact the will of the people or their charismatic appeal will vanish. “It is, in truth, the charismatic figure who has been selected by social circumstance, psychodynamic peculiarities and tradition, and not his followers by him.”

Charisma, he wrote, “becomes the most pure form of a people’s authority over themselves.” The charismatic leader, for better or worse, could be understood as a mere mirror or a charming marionette — the “collective projection of the charismatic mass, a projection out of its anguish, its myths, its visions, its history and its culture, in short its tradition and its oppression.” The reason they seem to read the minds of their followers is because they are the chosen embodiment of the group mind. In the leader they see themselves.

As the Dutch socialist Pieter Jelles Troelstra once wrote, “At some point during my speeches, there often came a moment when I wondered who is speaking now, they or myself?” 

by Joe Zadeh, Noema |  Read more:

Image: Refael Idan Suissa for Noema Magazine

[ed. I had no idea the term "charisma" was so limited in its history and use that Russell Baker had to explain its meaning and pronunciation to the general public as recently as 1968!]

E.J. Hughes (Canadian, 1913-2007), Echo Bay, Gilford Island, 1963.

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Worried Sick About Politics This Year? Ignore It

In 2024, politics will be hazardous to your health. Now is the time to protect yourself by putting the political world in perspective and backing away.

“You mean I should pay less attention? Doesn’t that make me a bad citizen?” No, it makes you a better one.

Politics has become the most important standard to determine our ethical and social views, as if politics is the main guide for our material, cultural and spiritual lives.

And that’s an intrusion that topsy-turveys our humanity.

“I’m afraid we have to leave the church after all these decades,” a person who considered himself an evangelical said to his minister, “because you’re not interpreting the Bible in light of the Constitution.”

Not grace, not lessons from the Gospels about the limits of worldly political life, not Jesus’s teaching about loving your enemies — but rather a political document as the guiding light.

There’s an important lesson here, not just for evangelicals but for everyone. I’ll get back to this later.

People are distraught with this twisted reversal of priorities. As a recent Pew Research Center study put it, “They have a sense that politics is everywhere – and often in a bad way. They find themselves overwhelmed by how much information they confront in their day-to-day life.”

There are ways you can stem this tsunami. Some advice comes from health professionals. Others come from people who have lived through in other countries what the U.S. is going through now.

Finally, some of the best lessons come from the schism and turmoil among evangelicals who on the surface seem so united because they are Trump’s biggest supporters but are divided in ways that offer relevant lessons to all of us about the polarization.

What The Experts Say

Let’s begin by looking at what health practitioners say about the 2024 election hazards.

Peter Atia describes the coming year as a “vortex.” “Everybody is going to be sucked into the vortex of world news and world affairs and politics. No one is immune to the negative psychological forces of that awful vortex.”

Why pay attention to this guy? Because Dr. Atia is the author of the best-selling book: “Outlive: The Science And Art Of Longevity.”

He’s not exaggerating, and he’s not alone. There’s a lot of other evidence showing that political vortex is hazardous to your health. Stress for instance.

Polls show that significant numbers of Americans report that they are stressed out by 2024 politics. Those who pay the most attention to the political goings-on are the most angry and depressed. (...)

Really, though, one of the best ways to understand the 2024 toxicity is to look at what evangelicals are going through. They have been and continue to be the strongest Trump supporters, so it’s easy to think they are unified. They aren’t.

On one side, the one that’s become dominant, are those who believe that the barbarians are storming the gate, threatening the end of Christianity and civilizational collapse.

The other side, which has become marginalized and even driven out of churches, are those subscribing to the traditional Evangelical position about what Jesus and the Gospels teach about the limits of worldly politics.

According to this now marginalized view, the dominant position that the world can only be saved through politics and specifically through Donald Trump is a perversion.

“Jesus frames the decision in explicitly binary terms,” Tim Alberta says. “We can serve and worship God or we can serve and worship the gods of this world. Too many American evangelicals have tried to do both. And the consequences for the Church have been devastating.”

Putting it simply, one side says only political action can save Christians, while the other side says that is exactly what will corrupt and destroy them.

What are the general lessons we can learn from this battle among conservative Christians?

One is that it’s another example of how much stress today’s politics induces. Pastors caught in this conflict, as one observer put it, are crushed and broken. The stress has made their job impossible. Imagine what’s it’s like for a minister to listen to that guy I quoted earlier who said that the Constitution had replaced the Bible as his road map?

But the more important lesson is that the evangelical turmoil shows what happens when the basic beliefs, those taken for granted as transcendent notions, no longer exist. There is nothing shared that would mediate these differences. It’s all about the differences. So, hate and dehumanization develops.

And that at a bigger scale is exactly where America is right now. You can worry about the threat Trump poses to democracy if he is re-elected or the threat to democracy if he loses and tries to rally the millions of people who voted for him. I sure do. Whatever the case, the same kind of nastiness and anger the evangelicals have is still going to be there in the U.S. as a whole.

by Neil Milner, Honolulu Civil Beat |  Read more:

Image: Stressed about politics? Take a hike! (Cory Lum/Civil Beat/2019)

[ed. Here's an overview of Tim Alberta's book: The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory: American Evangelicals in an Age of Extremism:]

"Evangelical Christians are perhaps the most polarizing—and least understood—people living in America today. In his seminal new book, The Kingdom, the Power, and the Glory, journalist Tim Alberta, himself a practicing Christian and the son of an evangelical pastor, paints an expansive and profoundly troubling portrait of the American evangelical movement. Through the eyes of televangelists and small-town preachers, celebrity revivalists and everyday churchgoers, Alberta tells the story of a faith cheapened by ephemeral fear, a promise corrupted by partisan subterfuge, and a reputation stained by perpetual scandal.

For millions of conservative Christians, America is their kingdom—a land set apart, a nation uniquely blessed, a people in special covenant with God. This love of country, however, has given way to right-wing nationalist fervor, a reckless blood-and-soil idolatry that trivializes the kingdom of Jesus Christ. Alberta retraces the arc of the modern evangelical movement, placing political and cultural inflection points in the context of church teachings and traditions, explaining how Donald Trump's presidency and the COVID-19 pandemic only accelerated historical trends that long pointed toward disaster. Reporting from half-empty sanctuaries and standing-room-only convention halls across the country, the author documents a growing fracture inside American Christianity and journeys with readers through this strange new environment in which loving your enemies is "woke" and owning the libs is the answer to WWJD.

Accessing the highest echelons of the American evangelical movement, Alberta investigates the ways in which conservative Christians have pursued, exercised, and often abused power in the name of securing this earthly kingdom. He highlights the battles evangelicals are fighting—and the weapons of their warfare—to demonstrate the disconnect from scripture: Contra the dictates of the New Testament, today's believers are struggling mightily against flesh and blood, eyes fixed on the here and now, desperate for a power that is frivolous and fleeting. Lingering at the intersection of real cultural displacement and perceived religious persecution, Alberta portrays a rapidly secularizing America that has come to distrust the evangelical church, and weaves together present-day narratives of individual pastors and their churches as they confront the twin challenges of lost status and diminished standing.

Sifting through the wreckage—pastors broken, congregations battered, believers losing their religion because of sex scandals and political schemes—Alberta asks: If the American evangelical movement has ceased to glorify God, what is its purpose?"

Dovydas & Marty Schwartz

[ed. Pretty dang great, I'd say. Dovydas's shtick if you want to call it that is inviting members of the audience up to play, sing or otherwise have their moment of (questionable) glory in his one-man band. For example, here's one of my earliest exposures to his channel. Marty Schwartz on the other hand almost needs no introduction. One of the pioneers of online guitar instruction and probably the most popular (and subscribed) instructor among thousands on YouTube, he's been around for over a decade now (previously with Guitar Jamz). Both seem like really nice guys, and excellent musicians in their own right. Now I've got a new song to learn. : )] 

The Dark Triad Test

Have you ever heard of a personality test titled "The Dark Triad"? Sounds a bit evil, right?

When people take personality tests, the results are typically positive or neutral. There is nothing particularly disappointing about your Myers-Briggs score; “thinkers” or “perceivers,” for example, are relatively neutral terms. However, not all traits are positive. Some traits are negative and are generally attributed to people who do negative things.

The Dark Triad looks at these negative traits. Psychologists have developed tests to determine whether or not these traits exist and potentially spot dangerous people.

What is the Dark Triad Test?

The Dark Triad is a relatively new concept in the world of psychology. The term was created in 2012 by two psychologists, Paulhus and Williams. In their research, Paulhus and Williams identified three personality traits that were most prominent in dangerous people who are more likely to commit crimes. The Dark Triad is a collection of these 3 traits.

Like most personality traits, The Dark Triad exists in all people to certain degrees. Everyone has some of these nasty and 'evil' qualities. Researchers show that some degrees of these traits indicate a potentially good business leader or bright person. But the people who are more “dark” than others are more likely to act in ways that hurt others.

The 3 Infamous Traits

So what are these scary Dark Triad traits? They are Narcissism, Psychopathy, and Machiavellianism. Each trait has a raw score of 0-4, which is usually measured with a percentile. For example, if you get a narcissism score of 40, that means that 60 people are more narcissistic than you.

by Andrew English, PhD, Practical Psychology |  Read more:

Image: Wikipedia

[ed. Apparently now being used to train and assess GPT AI models (see here), along with The Big Five. Full test can be found at the Open-Source Psychometrics Project:]

"Introduction: The dark triad personality traits are three closely related yet independent personality traits that all have a somewhat malevolent connotation. The three traits are machiavellianism (a manipulative attitude), narcissism (excessive self-love), and psychopathy (lack of empathy). The dark triad has traditionally been assessed with three tests different tests, each of which had been developed individually. Most commonly, the Narcissistic Personality Inventory (NPI) was used as the measure of narcissism, the MACH-IV for machiavellianism and the Self-Report Psychopathy Scale (SRP) for psychopathy. Format differences between these (multiple choice versus scale rating) complicated administration and analysis. The Short Dark Triad was developed in 2011 by Delroy Paulhus and Daniel Jones to provide a more uniform assessment and also to trim down the total length.Test procedure

Test Procedure: The test consists of twenty seven statements that must be rated on how much you agree with them. The median time to complete is 2 minutes 27 seconds. Results are free.Participation

Participation: Your use of this assessment must be strictly for educational purposes. It can not be taken as psychological advice of any kind. If you are interested in anything more than learning about the dark triad of personality and how it is assessed, do not take this test. Your answers will be recorded and possibly used for research and/or otherwise distributed in an anonymous fashion."

David Wojnarowicz (American, 1954-1992), Where I’ll Go After I’m Gone, 1988-89
via:

Breaking Down Pat Metheny & Lyle Mays Most Beautiful Song

[ed. If you're not a guitar player this might not be of much interest, but if you just want to understand how a beautiful song is constructed and all the elements that go into it check this one out.]

Zuckerberg's Basilisk: The Coercive Threat of the Singularity

The Metaverse is no joke. Investment in the technology ranks among the billions per year, and Facebook recently rebranded its parent company as Meta. Serious people are spending serious money to develop this technology. Yet at the same time, it’s hard to understand why. When you speak with Metaverse enthusiasts, they’ll tell you about potential applications, ranging from rethinking remote working and education, to providing persistent digital worlds to reshape entertainment.

None of this is really correct. The level of investment doesn’t match the potential value. If Mark Zuckerberg wanted to compete against Zoom, he probably wouldn’t need $15B a year to do so. Zoom’s market capitalization (~$25B as of today) is a fraction of Meta’s. There’s no visible consumer demand for VR meetings. Creating 3D, high-resolution digital environments is very expensive. There’s a reason it hasn’t caught on as a serious way to augment education.

To understand the Metaverse, one needs to incorporate two different, but related perspectives. The first is how the Metaverse is often mentioned in the same breath as “web3;” namely, blockchain, cryptocurrency, and NFTs. One could also add deep fakes and generative AI, such as Stable Diffusion, DALL-E, or GPT-3, to the discussion.

The second perspective is Singularity theory, which posits that at some point in the future, technology will become sufficiently powerful that superintelligent AI will arise, and that humans will be able to interface with computers to the point that neural interaction and digital consciousness are possible. In other words, futurists hypothesize, it will be possible to upload human consciousness into a machine, and that humans will live on in digital universes, even after their corporal forms have passed.

This is a deep and radical idea, once that is perhaps irresponsible to introduce so casually. To determine whether this is a genuine possibility requires a philosophical deep dive that attempts to definitively answer some of the greatest unanswerable questions of humankind. I don’t believe we presently have the theological, philosophical, biological, or psychological knowledge to definitively conclude whether this outcome is real or simply fantasy.

But it is not necessary for us to evaluate this possibility within these frameworks, because regardless of what we know, believe, or can determine, what is definitely true is that there are a number of very serious futurists who truly believe that not only is this outcome possible, it is inevitable, and it is inevitable within their lifetime. (...)

A number of futurist movements have developed by taking the Singularity as axiomatic. Movements like longtermism and some forms of effective altruism posit that the number of unborn future humans dwarfs the number of humans who have ever lived, and that by extension, our social responsibility lies with ensuring the survival of the trillions of humans to be. Setting aside many of the deeply troubling present-day implications of this school of thought, and the biases that leak from many of these thinkers, almost surely the only way that this viewpoint can be validated is if humanity learns to live on in digital spheres, spreading itself across the galaxy and harnessing the power of the stars. It does not matter that this technology is not currently possible. It matters that people with influence and money believe it is their responsibility to make it possible.

In this exploration, I admit a couple of hypotheses1 without any assumption that they are correct:

• The mapping of human consciousness into computer systems will happen;
• This mapping will be based on data and AI and can be independent of a physical brain;
• Technology will continue to follow its exponential growth of computing capabilities without major impediments;
• The consumer adoption of the Metaverse will be sufficiently compelling to survive the Metaverse through its initial phases. (...)

The implications of creating a digital consciousness also imply the idea of a digital afterlife. Actually, the idea of a digital afterlife exists today. When you pass, your Facebook and Twitter accounts remain open and people can go relive your timelines and see how you reacted to the news, to events in your life, and to friends and family. With a digital consciousness, however, your future digital afterlife would no longer be static. The digital “you” could still chat with friends, could still react to the news. If your consciousness can live on in a computer, then the physical death of your corporeal form only means that you no longer occupy a place in the physical universe. Instead, you become an entity existing in the Metaverse. (...)

Roko’s Basilisk is a thought experiment that goes something like this: the Singularity is inevitable, and therefore a super AI is inevitable. Using data and algorithms, the super AI would be able to determine if an individual was aware of the possibility of the super AI to exist at some point in the future, and to judge whether they did enough to bring about the AI’s existence. If not, the Basilisk could torture that person’s digital soul for all eternity.

Regardless of whether this sounds ridiculous, the introduction of Roko’s Basilisk on the LessWrong forums represented a sort of “information hazard,” a model of truth that the reader is better off not knowing, for it compels the knower to act in a certain way or face eternal damnation.

Roko’s Basilisk presumes the eventual creation of some omnipotent super AI. However, what if it wasn’t a singular entity, but rather a collective of other, smaller, less omnipotent yet nevertheless influential algorithms? Consider the following. Suppose, as we have been, that digital consciousness is possible, and that it is manifested not only through brain simulation but also through data-driven algorithms. The Metaverse exists and is populated by digital consciousness, or “digital souls.” As the Metaverse integrates more data, it grows in accuracy and fidelity. In other words, digital souls become more complete as they have access to ever more data. (...)

The Metaverse benefits from data, and therefore would-be metaversal inhabitants are incentivized to contribute data to the Metaverse and to encourage others to do so. The more data that people feed into the system, the better the digital afterlife will be. The question is, could the Metaverse coerce or compel people to contribute data?

Zuckerberg’s Basilisk, as I call it, does just this. The Metaverse benefits from your data. Your data is used to generate more realistic models of human interaction, to add richness and liveliness to the digital community, and to increase the overall knowledge base that the Metaverse can source its simulations from. Therefore, the AIs driving the Metaverse benefit when you give it your data, and they want to incentivize you to do so. People who contribute meaningful data are rewarded with a digital heaven, and those who know the stakes but refuse to cooperate receive instead a form of eternal torment for their reticence. (...)

In this thought experiment, even if you choose not to upload your consciousness, the Metaverse likely has an incomplete model of who you are. Therefore, the cost of your noncompliance is that your metaversal personhood is restricted to an incomplete representation of yourself. Imagine being represented by your Twitter feed for all eternity. By not actively pushing data into the Metaverse, the Metaverse simply chooses to let you be a digital lost soul: essentially an NPC. Your punishment is digital purgatory. Put another way, if the Metaverse can represent digital heaven, it can also represent digital hell, and the unforgivable sin would be to knowingly withhold the data needed to build that heaven. (...)

A metaversal representation might be scarier, however. In theory, people living on after death in a Metaverse could still interact through digital interfaces with people in the physical world. In other words, you could talk to your friends and family who have passed on, share your life with them, or ask them for advice. It’s one thing to opt out of a digital afterlife. It’s another thing to opt out when you can interact with it in real life. If people often interact with high-fidelity digital consciousness, then the threat of living on as a low-fidelity copy has real costs. Today, our digital afterlife is static and reflects a series of snapshots of who we once were. But with digital consciousness, our digital afterlife would be dynamic. We could continue to interact with loved ones, who would see us as only a husk of who we once really were. (...)

In a way, this is where we already are. It’s no secret that big tech companies like Meta and Google rely on our data. These companies are incentivized to extract data from us, so they do so by incentivizing us to give them data. They even retain digital traces of our identities after we die. The only thing missing is the ability to simulate consciousness. We may not be far off as it seems. While I remain skeptical that general AI is ever possible, we are making incredible progress in generating realistic text, conversation, and speech. The idea of high-fidelity simulations of a personality are perhaps not that far-fetched.

The commercial viability for the kinds of applications that Metaverse proponents are advertising remains questionable. But when we look at what some technologists see as the future, it’s clear that they envision a world where humanity is radically altered by Metaverse and related technology. Very serious people believe that the Singularity will allow us to cheat death, by enabling us to live on in a digital space. 

by Emily F. Gorcenski | Read more:
Image: Design inspired by Laura Baross and D2
[ed. Everyone seems to view Meta simply as an extension of Facebook ie., an alternate 3-D version of social networking and digital business interactions. This is much more. See also (below): Making God.]

Making God

Strictly speaking, generative AI has been around for a while. Misinformation researchers have warned about deep fake capabilities for nearly a decade. A few years ago, chatbots were all the rage in the business world, partly because someone was trying to figure out what to do with all of the data scientists they hired, and partly because chatbots would allow them to decimate their customer service teams. (Of course, consumers didn’t ask for this. Nobody actually wants to interact with a chatbot over a human being.) AI has been writing mundane sports recaps for a few years at least.

These earlier incarnations of generative AI failed to find mainstream traction. They required a lot of specific technology knowledge and frankly weren’t very good. Engineers and data scientists had to spend a lot of time tuning and implementing them. The costs were huge. Average users couldn’t access them. That changed when ChatGPT’s public demo became available.

ChatGPT’s public release arrived less than 3 weeks after the collapse of FTX. The technology was a step change from what we’d seen with generative AI previously. It was far from perfect, but it was frighteningly good and had clear general purpose functionality. Image generation tools like DALL-E, Stable Diffusion, and Midjourney jumped on this bandwagon. Suddenly, everyone was using AI, or at least playing around with it.

The tech industry’s blink-and-you’ll-miss-it pivot was fast enough to give you whiplash. Crypto was out. Metaverse was out. Mark Zuckerberg’s company, which traded out its globally-known household name to rebrand as Meta, laid off thousands of technologists it had hired to build the metaverse and pivoted to AI. Every social media crypto-charlatan quietly removed the “.ETH” label from their user names and rebranded themselves as a large language model (LLM) expert. Microsoft sank eye-watering money into OpenAI and Google and Amazon raced to keep up. Tech companies sprinted to integrate generative AI into their products, quality be damned. And suddenly every data scientist found themselves playing a central role in what might be the most important technology shift since the advent of the world wide web.

There was one group of people who weren’t nonplussed by this sudden change. Technology ethicists had been tracking these developments from both inside and outside the industry for years, sounding the alarm about the potential harms posed by, inter alia, AI, crypto, and the metaverse. Disproportionately women and people of color, the community has struggled for years to raise awareness of the multifaceted social risks posed by AI. I’ve spoken on some of these issues myself over the years, though I’ve mostly retired from that work. Many of the arguments have grown stale and the field suffers from the same mistake made by American liberals during the 2016 election: you can’t argue from a position of decency if your opponent has no intention to act decently to begin with. Longtermists offered a mind-blowing riposte: who cares about racism today when you’re trying to save billions of lives in the future?

GenAI solved two challenges that other Singularity-aligned technology failed to address: commercial viability and real-world relevance. The only thing standing in its way is a relatively small and disempowered group of responsible technology protestants, who may yet possess enough gravitas to impede the technology’s unrestricted adoption. It’s not that the general public isn’t concerned about AI risk. It’s that their concerns are largely misguided, worrying more about human extinction and less about programmed social inequality. (...)

Singularity theorists have capitalized on these fears by engaging in arbitrage. On the one hand, they’re playing a game of regulatory capture by overstating the risk of the emergence of a super-intelligent AI, promising to support regulation that would prevent companies from birthing such a creation. On the other hand, they’re actively promoting the imminence of the technology. OpenAI’s CEO, Sam Altman, was briefly fired when OpenAI employees apparently raised concerns to the board over such a possibility. What followed was a week of chaos that saw Altman hired by Microsoft only to return to OpenAI and execute a Game of Thrones-esque power grab, ousting the two women on the board who had tried to keep the supposedly not-for-profit company on-mission.

Humanity’s demise is a scarier idea than, say, labor displacement. It’s not a coincidence that AI advocates are keeping extinction risk as the preëminent “AI safety” topic in regulators' minds. It’s something they can easily agree to avoid without any negligible impact in the day-to-day operations of their business: we are not close to the creation of an Artificial General Intelligence (AGI), despite the breathless claims of the Singularity disciples working on the tech. This allows them to distract from and marginalize the real concerns about AI safety: mass unemployment, educational impairment, encoded social injustice, misinformation, and so forth. Singularity theorists get to have it both ways: they can keep moving towards their promised land without interference from those equipped to stop them. (...)

I texted my good friend, Eve Ettinger, the other night after a particularly frustrating exchange I had with some AI evangelists. Eve is a brilliant activist whose experience escaping an evangelical Christian cult has shaped their work. “Are there any tests to check if you’re in a cult,” I wondered.

“Can you ask the forbidden questions and not get ostracized?”

There’s a joke in the data science world that goes something like this: What’s the difference between statistics, machine learning, and AI? The size of your marketing budget. It’s strange, actually, that we still call it “artificial intelligence” to this day. Artificial intelligence is a dream from the 40s mired in the failures of the ’60s and ’70s. By the late 1980s, despite the previous spectacular failures to materialize any useful artificial intelligence, futurists had moved on to artificial life.

Nobody much is talking about artificial life these days. That idea failed, too, and those failures have likewise failed to deter us. We are now talking about creating “cybernetic superintelligence.” We’re talking about creating an AI that will usher a period of boundless prosperity for humankind. We’re talking about the imminence of our salvation.

The last generation of futurists envisioned themselves as gods working to create life. We’re no longer talking about just life. We’re talking about making artificial gods.

I’m certainly not the first person to shine a light on the eschatological character of today’s AI conversation. Sigal Samuel did it a few months back in far fewer words than I’ve used here, though perhaps glossing over some of the political aspects I’ve brought in. She cites Noble and Kurzweil in many of the same ways. I’m not even the first person to coin the term “techno-eschatology.” The parallels between the Singularity Hypothesis and the second coming of Christ are plentiful and not hard to see. 

Still, I wonder why so many technologists, many of whom pride themselves on their rationalism, fail to make the connection. (...)

Eve’s second test for cult membership was, “is the leader replaceable or does it all fall apart.”

And so the vast majority of OpenAI’s employees threatened to quit if Altman was not reinstated. And so Altman was returned to the company five days after the board fired him, with more power and influence than before.

The idea behind this post is not to simply call everything I don’t like fascist. Sam Altman is a gay Jewish man who was furious about the election of Donald Trump. The issue is not that Altman or Bankman-Fried or Andreesen or Kurzweil or any of the other technophiles discussed so far are “literally Hitler.” The issue is that high technology shares all the hallmarks of a millenarian cult and the breathless evangelism about the power and opportunity of AI is indistinguishable from cult recruitment. And moreover, that its cultism meshes perfectly with the American evangelical far-right. Technologists believe they are creating a revolution when in reality they are playing right into the hands of a manipulative, mainstream political force. We saw it in 2016 and we learned nothing from that lesson.

Doomsday cults can never admit when they are wrong. Instead, they double down. We failed to make artificial intelligence so we pivoted to artificial life. We failed to make artificial life so now we’re trying to program the messiah. Two months before the Metaverse went belly-up, McKinsey valued it at up to $5 trillion dollars by 2030. And it was without a hint of irony or self-reflection that they pivoted and valued GenAI at up to $4.4 trillion annually. There’s not even a hint of common sense in this analysis.

As a career computational mathematician, I’m shaken by this. It’s not that I think machine learning doesn’t have a place in our world. I’m also not innocent. I’ve earned a few million dollars lifetime hitting data with processing power and hoping money comes out, not all of that out of pure goodwill. Yet I truly believe there are plenty of good, even humanitarian applications of data science. It’s just that creating godhood is not one of them.

by Emily F. Gorcenski | Read more:
Image: uncredited

[ed. This is a long, really long essay. But, as I stated in an earlier post, I tend to gravitate toward the smartest people in the room and Ms. Gorecenski is certainly one of them. She gives us much to think about here (and above). Her perspectives on technology evangelism and venture capitalist motives - particularly everlasting life through digital integration are, to me really thought provoking.]

bonesrecords
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Nice View. Shame About All The Tourists.

From the beginning, recreational travel has been Janus-faced, straddling this dichotomy between the profound and the profane, the ennobling and the transgressive. But it is the dark shadow that is now ascendant amid a gathering sense that tourism’s drawbacks are starting to outweigh its rewards.

Inessential by definition, responsible for 8% of global carbon emissions, tourism has become bound up with all manner of anxieties about human behavior and the damage we wreak on the world around us. In places that have been overwhelmed or remolded in ways its inhabitants regret, there is growing resistance; taxes, prohibitions and no end of local antipathy are now as much an inconvenient feature of the holiday season as sunburn and gastroenteritis.

This past summer, as holidaymakers flocked back to Europe in their tens of millions, heatwaves and wildfires interrupted hallowed periods of rest with pressing temporal dread. Two contradictory statements felt simultaneously true. Tourism has never been more integral to society — but neither has it ever felt so problematic.

“[T]he cognitive dissonance of summer travel in a warming world is catching up to us,” conceded an article in The New York Times. “Tragic headlines and statistics are prompting hard looks at the nature of tourism: who benefits and who gets to participate.” (...)

In “Overbooked” (2013), the journalist Elizabeth Becker traced the first true realization of tourism’s vast economic consequence to the founding of the World Travel and Tourism Council (WTTC), a business forum for some of the industry’s biggest players, which held its first annual meeting in 1991. Previously, there had been a reluctance to acknowledge the industry’s importance, as if travel, with its inherent carefree and escapist overtones, was beneath sober assessment.

Soon after its inauguration, the WTTC commissioned the University of Pennsylvania’s Wharton School to develop a means of substantiating tourism’s economic contribution as a whole. By the turn of the millennium, the statisticians had refined a formula known as the Tourism Satellite Account system (TSA), which could consolidate the economic value of multifarious tourist-dependent industries — hotels, airlines, agents, vendors and more, all operating in different currencies and across borders — into an aggregate dollar amount. “Its calculations were nothing short of a revelation,” Becker wrote.

By 2019, as the TSA revealed, tourism accounted for 10.4% of global GDP and 334 million jobs worldwide. A combination of individualism, technological advancement and a hardening ethical consensus built around the pursuit of happiness had transformed the tourist gaze into one of the most valuable commodities on Earth. What many tended to dismiss as a frivolous sideshow in fact ranked among the biggest industries in the world.

Today, the comforting bromide we tell ourselves to counteract any unease about the burgeoning scale of travel remains unchanged. At its heart, any celebration of it is founded on an ethical ideal that a global human heritage should be open to everyone, exempt from the private marketplace. As the anthropologist Dean MacCannell has written: “The inclusiveness and openness of the modern tourist compact is twinborn with the modern project of democracy.”

Why, then, does the modern figure of the tourist find themselves forever anathematized? “Animal imagery seems their inevitable lot,” wrote the cultural critic Jonathan Culler. “They are said to move in droves, herds, swarms or flocks; they are as mindless and docile as sheep but as annoying as a plague of insects.”

In “The Tourist Gaze” (1990), among the most seminal modern works on the social theory of tourism, John Urry explained how the democratic ideal of tourism was subject to multiple complicating factors. Chief among them was space. The view might be free, but the context for its appreciation, and often the very survival of the environment, is indivisible from its finite geography. (Three decades later, it is notable that many of the places most synonymous with “overtourism” are definitively circumscribed: Venice by its canals, Dubrovnik by its medieval walls.)

In this analysis, much of the problem with modern travel is spatial and aesthetic — a tragedy of appearances. Behold Angkor, built by generations of master stonemasons as a seat of gods and kings, the divine metropole of an empire that dominated Southeast Asia for 600 years. And here, centuries later, is a 50-strong tour group in matching baseball caps, murmurating at the behest of a tannoy-wielding guide, jostling to take their identikit photos of the sunset over the moat while their very presence threatens to precipitate the temples’ subsidence into the mud.

Here is tourism’s intractable contemporary paradox — that the democratization of our geographical and cultural riches too often precipitates their ruination. Again and again, tourism sacralizes the objects of its gaze, then desecrates them with footprints.

A crowd’s contaminating tendency does not necessarily correspond to weight of numbers, but how those numbers behave. People abroad are people at play, and the anonymity of being far from home invites disinhibition. What happens in Vegas stays in Vegas, so the maxim goes, and this inevitably means that holidays often provoke our most gluttonous, selfish and ignorant impulses. Camera phones have turned every tourist into a potential chronicler of the profane, meaning that each instance of touristic barbarism is now caught on film. Hence, in a video of a man scratching his initials into the nearly 2,000-year-old masonry of the Colosseum or a woman’s smiling selfie at Auschwitz, we see all of human perfidy distilled.

Age-old observations about the narcissistic tendencies of travel — of tourism as a means of self-actualization and a marker of status — have only been amplified by digital phenomena as more layers of mediation pile on top of those that came before. Each revolution designed to make travel more accessible and convenient seems, in time, to exact lamentable collateral costs. Airbnb-style rentals hollow out the very neighborhoods their users profess to cherish. Google Maps, online translators and internet reviews diminish host-visitor interaction and nullify the process of getting lost that is a non-negotiable precondition of serendipitous discovery.

The appetite for self-delusion foreshadowed by the Claude Glass — for manipulating the object of the tourist gaze until it subscribes to preconceived desires — has become universalized. People converge on celebrated sites, taking turns to have their photo taken at the viewpoint, while out of shot a queue of other aspiring influencers await their turn. What is this if not travel as pure aesthetic performance? (...)

“Travel turns us into the worst version of ourselves while convincing us that we’re at our best,” the philosopher Agnes Callard wrote in an essay titled “A Case Against Travel” in The New Yorker last June. Citing misanthropic antecedents from Emerson to Pessoa, Callard portrayed travel as an exercise in mimesis and banal one-upmanship. Whatever a traveler’s professed motives, she argued, they are more truthfully engaged in the most egocentric pursuit imaginable: escaping (or at least postponing) the “certainty of annihilation.” By removing us from the routine of domestic life, travel disguises the ineluctable fact of mortality “in a narrative about how you are doing many exciting and edifying things: you are experiencing, you are connecting, you are being transformed, and you have the trinkets and photos to prove it.”

Meanwhile, the closed environments decried by Boorstin continue to multiply. In recent decades, the fastest growing sector in tourism has been arguably its most mediated, the cruise, where customers can enjoy Italian food with a Jamaican sunset, then go ice-skating in the morning. It’s a floating pseudo-event that does nothing so much as echo Humbert Humbert: You have been to the Caribbean. You have been nowhere at all.

“None of the folderol about finding oneself,” Becker wrote about the burgeoning desert playground of Dubai, “or disappearing from the troubled world to discover anew the beauty of Mother Nature or the wisdom of an exotic culture.” Here is travel completely detached from the “tourism compact” of democratic ideals and curiosity, characterized as much by labor exploitation and offshored profits as the visitors’ incuriosity about where they are. And people are becoming desensitized to the fakery the more it becomes the norm. According to Google Ngram, use of the phrase “tourist trap,” which grew in lockstep with the explosion of tourism between the 1960s and 2004, has since dropped by about a third. (...)

The contradictions pile up. The traveler is a paragon of curiosity and generosity of spirit; the tourist is a facile automaton, a constituent of a witless herd. Travel is an expression of democratic freedom and the economic lifeblood for millions; tourism is an instrument of capitalist expropriation, an engine of inequality. The act of travel opens the heart and the mind to the lives of others, but it can equally be regarded as an exercise in selfishness, pursued for the accrual of personal gratification and cultural capital. Travel was better when there were fewer people doing it, but saying so out loud is nothing but snobbery.

It is impossible to count how many communities worldwide are caught on the horns of these dilemmas. Last summer’s terrible wildfires on the Hawaiian island of Maui, to take one stark example, exposed tourism as a Faustian bargain in which local calls for tourists to stay away were quickly followed by petitions for them to return.

Today, we are witnessing this endless tug-of-war between selfish desire and moral doubt culminate in the whispered sentiment, at once covetous and perverse, of tourists in an age of collapse: See it now before it’s gone. (...)

In the meantime, though, the costs would be unconscionable. What the thought experiment served to underscore was the extent to which tourism has become more than just one of several economic options for places with little else to sell. Oftentimes, it is the only option. For every hermetic purpose-built playground there are a thousand older and more precious communities that, having lost whatever economic purpose might have led to their original establishment and growth, had bet the house on foreign visitors. Shorn of those visitors’ gaze, there was a chance that such places — our most prized natural and cultural treasures among them — would simply atrophy.

Endless quandaries surfaced in my mind. Without tourists, there would be no more safari vehicles bundling across the savannah to rubberneck at animals, it’s true. But would the national park still exist? And what is worse: the tourist with a telephoto lens or the poacher with a gun? For somewhere to matter, it had to be beheld, Yeoman insisted. “If you want people to genuinely care about a place, they need to make the physical effort to go there,” he said. 

by Henry Wismayer, Noema |  Read more:

Image: Adam G; Caspar David Friedrich, “Wanderer above the Sea of Fog,” 1818
[ed. I grew up in late-50s Hawaii and late-70s pre-pipeline Alaska - before industrial tourism had firmly established itself in both places. I've thought about this all my life. Here's my conclusion: there is no hope. That is, if you define hope as some static cultural condition that should be preserved or protected against the onslaught of tourism in all its forms. Cultures evolve, especially so these days with the internet and world's globally connected economic systems. There will be enclaves and subcultures that preserve some of the more meaningful aspects of those cultures/traditions but you'll have to live in a place for a while to truly get them. In general, tourism is like the weather, always there, always a factor, and quite destructive (especially to the environment and whatever unique qualities exist in a place) if you aren't adequately prepared. It can be regulated and directed to mitigate impacts, but never completely controlled. There's so much more to this issue, like complete satisfaction with plastically representative experiences, cultural appropriation, impacts on other industries and politics, etc. but those are for another essay.]

Sun Ra

Shirt Collar Styles for Men: The Complete Guide

The collar you choose for your dress shirt will likely have a greater impact on your look than the cuff style or even the overall fit. As it’s the element that literally frames your face, it pays to know the different dress shirt collars that are available, so you can make a perfect choice.

Shirt Collar Basics

Before selecting a collar style, it’s a good idea to understand the basics of what makes a good, or bad, shirt collar. There are a few simple parameters that will help you understand how to get the right balance that suits you best.

Collar Stiffness

From the 1800s to the 1930s, collars made stiff by the liberal application of starch were the norm. These collars were detachable for replacement in an era where effective detergents and laundering were not available. Nowadays, collar stiffness is determined by the thickness of the interlining used to form the collar.

Still affected by the influence of Italian style and the Duke of Windsor, softer collars are more popular these days, particularly with soft tailoring. So, if you prefer odd jackets with natural unpadded shoulders, a soft shirt collar is a great pairing choice for the Neapolitan style. Soft collars are generally better for more casual outfits as well, so they are perfect for warm weather and relaxed looks anytime.

If you are going for a more formal look by wearing a business suit, a firmer collar is the better option for a crisp and sharp appearance. Something in between the two extremes may be the most versatile choice. This is easier to specify if you are looking at made-to-measure or bespoke shirt options, but the majority of good quality ready-to-wear shirts will be designed with the right level of stiffness.

Collar Height

Collar height is the measure of how high a collar sits on your neck. Taller collars are more formal as well as more aggressive; they communicate that you mean business. When choosing a shirt for the workplace, be aware of the impression that collar height makes. A high collar is more typical of the Italian style and can even require two collar buttons to support the added height.

Taller collars can also require some getting used to in terms of the way they feel on your neck. If you’re interested in trying a shirt with a tall collar, consider some offerings from brands like Proper Cloth and Eton.

Face Shape

The collar size you choose will depend on your face shape. If you have a large head or round face, a bigger collar is more suitable to balance out your appearance. Wearing a tiny collar in such cases will only make your face look disproportionately larger. A good rule of thumb is to choose a collar that is similar to the size of your head and face.

The spread or distance between collar points will also be something to take note of. If you have a thin or narrow face, a wider spread collar can help counterbalance that; wearing a narrow collar, in this case, will only enhance the impression of narrowness and make your head look longer. But, if you have a wide or round face, wearing a collar with the points closer together will create a slimmer impression. Unlike size, in terms of spread, you want to choose the opposite of your face width.

Collars at either end of small and large or wide and narrow spread are considered more rakish and non-conformist. So, something of moderate size and spread is ideal for business and everyday use as it hits that middle ground perfectly.

Essential Shirt Collars

The Point Collar

For most white-collar companies, the default business collar is likely the point. As evident from the name, this style is characterized by the fact that the collar tips are pointed. The spread between the points is small and neat. As such, your collar will not expose any of the tie on either side beyond the knot if you wear a four-in-hand.

When wearing a jacket, the points of the collar will not be covered by the lapels, which can be seen as a potential downside for some. This collar flatters if you have a wider face, as it creates a greater balance. A point collar seems to work best in medium stiffness and is typically best worn with collar stays to keep the look of a straight collar with neat points.

Do keep in mind that a stiff point collar will make the collar stand away from the shirt when you are wearing a tie, so there is a gap between the collar and the shirt.

The Spread Collar

Perhaps the most universally flattering type of collar, the classic spread collar is the perfect choice for many people. Suitable for a wide range of functions and events such as cocktails, business meetings, weddings, and everyday wear, the spread collar is characterized by wider collar points than a standard point collar.

Generally speaking, a spread collar is most suitable for the majority of faces, as it draws the viewer’s eyes outward, providing a greater level of balance. Not only that, but a spread collar is more likely to sit neatly under your jacket lapels.

The beauty of the spread collar is the ability to wear wider tie knots like the Windsor and Half-Windsor, as well as the smaller four-in-hand, making it uniquely versatile. Spread collars are also a great option if you own thicker ties, such as those made of wool, cashmere, or other heavier fabrics.

You’ll likely see a bit of variation on both the level of spread, as well as the name for this collar style. You may come across collars such as names and terms such as “semi-spread collars”, or “Kent collars”, and it may even be referred to as an “English spread collar”. Typically speaking, all these different labels will largely relate to a variety of the spread collar style.

by Jack Collins, Gentleman's Gazette |  Read more:

Images: Gentleman's Gazette/uncredited

[ed. Now they tell me. Not that it would have made much difference in my fashion world. See also: Collar Styles - The Cotton, London; and, Our Easy Guide to Finding the Right Shirt Collar for Any Occasion (Paul Fredrick)]

Book Cover Confidential: A Roundtable with Designers

In an era defined by short attention spans, the game of trying to sell books is more complicated than ever. As a result, the book cover has become the publishing industry’s trustiest tool. Whether in a bookstore or on TikTok, a cover has to tell an 80,000-word story through a compact image and snatch attention, even if for a few milliseconds.

What do book cover trends—from swirling, abstract blobs to sunrise colours—have to say about how we choose our stories? And how do designers navigate a business where their art is used to sell books in an increasingly inattentive market? The Walrus held a roundtable with book designers Ingrid Paulson (a freelancer), Emma Dolan (Penguin Random House Canada), and Jazmin Welch (Arsenal Pulp Press) to find out the methods behind the design of contemporary covers.

This discussion has been edited and condensed for length and clarity.

KC Hoard: I’m going to start with a difficult question: What’s your favourite book cover?

Ingrid Paulson: The one that kept jumping out at me this year was The Ghost Sequences. The original cover artwork is by Olga Beliaeva, and it’s with Undertow Publications, which is a Canadian horror publisher. It takes a common trope: trying to make a skull out of humans. It’s two young girls that are forming the head. I’m a little startled by that. And then the hand lettering is very, very tight and subtle. It just gets out of the way of the image, but it makes it feel very soft. And also a little spooky.

Jazmin Welch: I love the cover for Rag by Maryse Meijer. It’s got this painting of a face that’s been stretched down, and it’s kind of shocking. It leaves such little space for the title. So, even though the title is really small and subtle in the bottom corner, the design still brings it to your attention because the face is pointing that way. It makes me want to read the book, because I’m like, “Who is this character? What does this pull on the face have to do with the story and the way that the character is represented?”

Emma Dolan: Every week, I see a new cover that I wish I had thought of. But a great one I saw recently is Yoga by Emmanuel Carrère. It’s a really great example of how a short book title goes a really long way in book cover design. If the title had been something like “A Subtle Little Book on Yoga,” this design would not have the same impact. And then you wouldn’t have all that beautiful negative space.

KCH: I’m already noticing that you’re all picking covers apart. What would you say the elements of an effective book cover are?

JW: One of the most important elements is a sense of leaving something out, not telling the whole story. The whole point of a book cover is to leave someone wanting to pick it up. It’s that intrigue that makes someone step forward and hold it and actually assess the cover.

IP: You have to ask a question. Especially if you’re in a bookstore and there are hundreds of books on tables, it can be overwhelming. A book cover should not only ask a question but it should also answer the question “What do I want to read right now?” So, that becomes a lot about trying to send little hidden clues to the reader to just say, “Hey, this is actually what you want.”

ED: Ideally, it’s about capturing the right reader. It comes down to mood and tone. If a book is really earnest, maybe don’t give it a quirky cover. As a book designer, you have to spend a lot of time with the writing to capture it. (...)

ED: I think that idea about the representation of a character on the cover is such a tricky one. It goes back to what Jazmin was saying about not giving away too much. Sometimes it’s so important to have a human element on the cover, but if you depict somebody, that’s who they are for the rest of the time. I think that’s why there’s that trend of showing the back of somebody, because that could be anyone. It’s a common thing we use to have that human element that really draws the reader in without typecasting the main character. (...)

KCH: Let’s talk about trends. This whole roundtable was spurred on by a conversation within the masthead about the book blob trend (a cover with multicoloured, swirling, abstract shapes that has appeared in various iterations on a number of bestsellers in recent years).

IP: The unicorn frappuccino.

KCH: What does that mean?

IP: It was basically the extension of the book blob. Every cover looked like a riot of glitter and rainbows and gradients, and there was usually a figure or two in it, but they were very obscured and very stylized. And then the type was interacting with that. And I’ve seen a big transition now into the cascading-title-among-flowers look. I think it really started with publishers that were trying to deal with books that were centred in nonwhite communities, like The Vanishing Half, and trying to show figures without showing Black figures. Every single author of colour would have these colourful covers that ended up being a signal that this was an Indigenous or Black or South Asian or East Asian author.

ED: There are a few things that contribute to a trend like that. A big part of the discussion when you get a new book project is comparative titles. That’s covers that are already on the shelves that editorial and sales can point to, to give the designer a sense of what styles are feeling right for the book in the market. When a book does well, naturally, it seemed like a package that worked. It’s pretty common practice. But it can also lead to this oversaturation of a trend, like a book blob. How readers buy books is a big factor. We have to be mindful that a lot of people buy books online, and they’re only seeing these on a screen, and most of them on their phones. So big, clear white type and an eye-catching colour palette are really helpful for that. We’re strongly encouraged by publishers to do that.

JW: It’s funny that they all start to look the same. But when you’re doing this big blob, your only option for type ends up being a big, bold white type, because nothing else will show up on that background. People are really asking us not to do this anymore, because when you are scrolling on Amazon and looking at thumbnails, you are just seeing these little blobby things that look like camouflage, and you can’t see what’s happening in the background.

IP: I’ve been doing this since 1998. So I’ve seen a lot of trends, and in the aughts, it was achingly slow trying to get new trends in Canada going. But, lately, you blink and you miss it. I know from talking with booksellers that in physical stores they prefer if the covers don’t look alike. So they’ll actually try to place them far away from each other just to give the books a fighting chance. I’ll ask you guys: What are you seeing? Because I’m seeing pastels right now. I’m seeing super-washed-out pale pinks and yellows and sunrise colours.

JW: There are these covers where things are put into different segments, almost like a comic strip. But they’re not telling a story. It’s more abstract. It will have black outlines and different squares and then a visual on each section. And I find them really interesting to look at.

KCH: Do you find these trends limiting, or do you find them helpful?

IP: It helps me figure out how to connect with an audience right now. I mean, there are no new ideas anyway. I do work for smaller publishers who can take bigger chances and try to reach the audience. They want to promote, and the biggest and most cost-effective way is through the cover. So the cover becomes the promotional tool. And for it to follow a little bit of a trend, to fit in and stand out, is the sweet spot.

by KC Hoard, The Walrus |  Read more:
Images: Olga Beliaeva (Ghost Sequences), based on the photograph “Morning Tea” by Serge N. Kozintsev; Rodrigo Corral (Yoga); Lauren Peters-Collaer (The Vanishing Half).

[ed. I was just thinking about this the other day while reading Paul Beatty's terrific book, The Sellout, which I'd been putting off for some time just because of its cover. Big mistake:]

***

“At the zoo, I stood in front of the primate cage listening to a woman marvel at how “presidential” the four-hundred-pound gorilla looked sitting astride a shorn oaken limb, keeping a watchful eye over his caged brood. When her boyfriend, his finger tapping the informational placard, pointed out the “presidential” silverback’s name coincidentally was Baraka, the woman laughed aloud, until she saw me, the other four-hundred-pound gorilla in the room, stuffing something that might have been the last of a Big Stick Popsicle or a Chiquita banana in my mouth. Then she became disconsolate, crying and apologizing for having spoken her mind and my having been born. “Some of my best friends are monkeys,” she said accidentally. It was my turn to laugh. I understood where she was coming from. This whole city’s a Freudian slip of the tongue, a concrete hard-on for America’s deeds and misdeeds."

Joni Mitchell: Court and Spark

If you dropped a needle on Joni Mitchell’s brand-new LP in January of 1974, you might have expected yet another hour of her signature elegies. On her two previous records, 1971’s Blue and 1972’s For the Roses, Mitchell excavated arresting songs from deep within her psyche. They are complex but accessible, often pairing Mitchell’s lithe voice with her own accompaniment on sombre piano or supple dulcimer. They are melancholy and sparse. And they aren’t very fun.

Court and Spark starts in a familiar Jonian fashion: mournful piano chords, poetic lyrics, Mitchell’s skyscraper voice. “Love came to my door with a sleeping roll and a madman’s soul,” she coos. “He thought for sure I’d seen him dancing in a river in the dark, looking for a woman to court and spark.” But when she unfurls the title of the album, something unexpected appears: a stuttering hi-hat. A beat in a Joni Mitchell song. And with that rhythm, the Joni of the past was gone. Joni the Confessional Poet, Joni the Selfish and Sad, Joni the Lonely Painter was no more.

By 1974, Mitchell had grown tired of her old style. “I feel miscast in some of the songs that I wrote as a younger woman,” she told CBC Radio a couple weeks after Court and Spark’s release. “You know, you wouldn’t ask Picasso to go back and paint from his Blue Period.” She was done playing the starry-eyed hippie. She was tired of singing dirges. She wanted to find new, challenging, exciting ways to write pop music. And so Joni the lonely, Joni the soloist, did something nobody ever expected her to do. She hired a band.

Mitchell enlisted members of L.A. Express, a jazz fusion band, to add some seasoning to her new crop of songs. At the time, jazz fusion records like Herbie Hancock’s Head Hunters were taking popular music into uncharted territory. Mitchell wanted in. She took her time with Court and Spark; 1973 was the first year since her 1968 debut that she didn’t release a studio album, and she performed live only a handful of times. (...)

Court and Spark, her sixth studio album, turns fifty this month. While it’s not her most beloved album (that would be Blue) and it’s not her album with the most hits (that’s Ladies of the Canyon), it is where she pushed those pop perimeters permanently. “Car on a Hill,” track six, starts off as a catchy tune about waiting for a lover to come over, but after the chorus, the song mutates into a slow, ascending choral riff. It sounds like Mitchell’s climbing toward heaven. At the end of the riff, she sings this note that sounds like the clouds have parted and a brilliant beam of gold light is shining right into your eardrums. Then the beat comes back in, and the simple chord progression from the beginning of the song returns as if she hasn’t just shoved a wonderful and strange and utterly shocking passage into the middle of an otherwise inoffensive pop tune.

Joni Mitchell’s Best Album Is Turning Fifty. It’s Not Blue

by KC Hoard, The Walrus | Read more:

Image: Court and Spark/YT