Preserving Chinatowns in the United States

Preserving Chinatowns in the United States (Nat. Trust for Historic Preservation)

Chinatowns have been bastions of community resilience for over 160 years. New threats make preservation more important than ever.

Historic Chinatowns are communities of resilience, and while they do not look the same across the country, they all reveal different sides of the formation of America and teach us more about our identity as a nation. From the bustling density of Chinatowns in major urban centers, to the smaller Chinese communities in rural landscapes—ones that have long gone quiet, leaving single streets or mere buildings as evidence where they once stood—these places have the power to tell intergenerational stories that continue to redefine what it means to be American.

In the summer of 2021, as Chinatowns continued to grapple with the fallout of the dramatic decline in business brought on by the pandemic and an alarming rise in xenophobia and racism against the Asian American and Pacific Islander (AAPI) community, the National Trust for Historic Preservation worked with Karen Yee, a graduate researcher studying at the University of Maryland, to develop a tool and research ways to identify, elevate, and preserve these treasured places that tell Chinese American history.

Her work focused on three different questions:

• What is the current state of preservation activity associated with Chinatowns/International Districts, and what opportunities exist to strengthen existing community work?
• What types of places associated with Chinatowns/International Districts have been identified, protected, and interpreted?
• What research and data have been collected on this topic, and what gaps remain?

Many of these areas are recognized as International Districts to represent the multi-ethnic identities and nationalities present in these communities today including Filipino, Indian, Vietnamese, Korean, Japanese, Cambodian, Laotian, Hmong, Thai, Pakistani, Bangladeshi, Burmese and so many others. For this story, we focus on Chinatowns as places where a majority of the population was/is Chinese and the communities self-identify as Chinatown.

by Karen Yee, Nat. Trust for Historic Preservation |  Read more:

Image: uncredited

[ed. See also: Gold Mountain and Beyond: A History of Chinatowns in the United States (NTHP); and, Chinatowns are struggling to survive... why they matter (WaPo):]

***

"Walking around Chinatown’s deserted streets has now made Young fear that this iconic neighborhood could possibly be lost forever. And New York was far from the only Asian community affected: The same empty businesses could be found in Chinatowns — as well as Japantowns, Koreatowns and Little Saigons — across the United States, from San Francisco to Boston.

If it seems impossible to imagine the death of such an established and historic community, one need only look to D.C.’s Chinatown, founded in the 19th century and which, just 30 years ago, catered to a significant resident Asian population with large grocery stores, shops, and dozens of traditional restaurants. Today, the community is a shadow of its former self, populated with chain restaurants and stores, while just a handful of Chinese restaurants remain, along with far fewer Asian American residents.

It’s no coincidence that Lisa Mao, director of the 2021 documentary “A Tale of Three Chinatowns,” refers to it as a “dead Chinatown.”

“The immigrant experience is fraught with challenges,” Mao says, “and these were segregated communities where people were forced to live, in what were considered less desirable areas. But once that area becomes popular, it can be hard to hold on against developers.” (...)

Indeed, New York Chinatown’s Zip code, which it now shares with trendy SoHo and Tribeca, has created real problems for Asian American business owners: the 10013 Zip code is considered to be a high-income neighborhood, preventing struggling restaurants from qualifying for targeted economic injury disaster loans through the Small Business Administration, while other pandemic relief programs seem to benefit national companies. Young points to the multimillion-dollar Paycheck Protection Program loan received by Asian-themed restaurant chain P.F. Chang’s, saying, “Their sales doubled. Meanwhile, restaurants that have been mainstays in Chinatown for decades — Hop Shing, which was 47 years old, Hoy Wong, which had been there for 42 years — they had to close. These were old-style Cantonese restaurants, you’ll never replicate that cooking again.”

Again, if that sounds dramatic, it’s not. The restaurants that are still hanging on in Chinatown were already facing an aging workforce before the pandemic; the chefs working the woks at venerable restaurants like Hop Lee on Chinatown’s storied Mott Street are often in their 50s and 60s, and it’s their long years of experience that help bring that flavor of “wok hei” — the umami-rich char that comes from cooking over high heat with a well-seasoned wok — to lo mein, snow peas and much more. (...)

With the history of Chinatown neighborhoods across the United States directly connected to racist politics of the 19th century that barred Asian immigrants from citizenship and owning property as well as enforced residence in designated areas, issues of exclusion are indelibly imprinted upon these communities. The effect of covid-19 has made Chinatowns, already dependent on foot traffic and tourism even while trying to preserve traditions dating back thousands of years, more fragile than ever.

Bonnie Tsui, author of “American Chinatown: A People’s History of Five Neighborhoods,” sees these neighborhoods as deserving of support from all Americans, regardless of race.

“Chinatown has always been characterized by history, culture and vital continuity,” she says. “There's a nostalgia, a romance to that, for sure, but it's also very functional and practical. It evolves. This is a place that serves its community — which has become a very diverse community — and those beyond its borders, too.”

by Kristen Hartke, Washington Post | Read more:
Image: uncredited

Rat

ProCo Rat

via:

[ed. A Classic (ProCo Rat pedal myths, history and timeline).]

Overturning ‘Chevron’ Can Help Rebalance the Constitutional Order

The Supreme Court on Wednesday heard oral arguments in a case that could go a long way toward fixing some of the systemic dysfunction in American government. The case, which revisits a judicial doctrine known as the “Chevron deference,” has been widely described as a conservative effort to limit government. But that’s not entirely correct. The case is better understood as a key part of the effort to restore the proper balance of power among the three branches of government.

If you took high school civics, there is a good chance you’ve heard the phrase “coequal branches of government.” It’s such a common formulation for America’s separation of powers that it’s easy to slide into the false belief that each branch of government is equal in authority to the others.

But if you read the Constitution, you’ll quickly see that while each branch of government has some power to check the others, one branch is plainly supreme. The government can’t spend one dime unless it’s appropriated through Congress. Impeachment gives Congress the power to fire not only the president but also any member of the Supreme Court. Only Congress has the power to declare war.

Even if the president takes the exceptional step of vetoing a bill it has passed, Congress has the power to override that veto. And the Constitution gives Congress immense power over the federal judiciary. Congress defines the number of judges and justices, sets their compensation and defines the full extent of their jurisdiction.

Not only is Congress the most powerful of the three branches of government, it’s also the branch closest to the people. Members of the House and Senate are elected by popular vote, and members of the House run for election every two years. By contrast, no American ever votes for a single federal judge — let alone a Supreme Court justice — and the Electoral College distances the presidency from majority rule to such an extent that the last two Republican presidents entered office having failed to win the popular vote.

And indeed there is a compelling logic in the most powerful branch also being the branch closest to the people. It builds popular support for public policy, and it provides Americans with the crucial sense that they are participants in American democracy, not mere observers of the machinations of a distant government elite.

But by now you most likely see the problem. Congress is not performing its constitutional tasks. It’s a broken institution that contains too few genuine lawmakers and far too many would-be activists and TV pundits. Time and again, it has proved incapable of compromise or of accomplishing even the most basic legislative tasks. It’s been 27 years since it even passed a budget on time. And that barely begins to capture the current level of dysfunction, with a razor-thin House Republican majority consistently held hostage by a mere handful of MAGA extremists.

As Congress has shirked its duties, presidents and the courts have filled the power vacuum. Presidents have used the power of their executive agencies to promulgate new regulations without congressional involvement. Executive agencies publish 3,000 to 4,500 new rules per year, and these regulations have a substantial impact on the American economy. Compounding the problem, courts have ratified that presidential power grab by enacting a series of judge-made rules that require federal courts to defer to the decisions of executive agencies.

The most important of those judge-made rules is called “Chevron deference,” named after the 1984 Supreme Court case Chevron v. Natural Resources Defense Council. The case involved a highly technical dispute over the meaning of the term “stationary source” under amendments to the Clean Air Act. Congress did not define the term, so the E.P.A. defined it for itself. The question at issue was whether the court should defer to the agency’s interpretation or interpret the statute itself.

The court chose to defer to the E.P.A., and it established a default rule of deference going forward. If the statute an agency administers is “silent or ambiguous with respect to the specific issue,” the majority held, “the question for the court is whether the agency’s answer is based on a permissible construction of the statute.”

The justification for Chevron deference is compelling, at least on the surface. Agencies regulate some of the most complex businesses and industries in the United States. They possess a level of expertise that’s clearly beyond the capabilities of Congress. Why not defer to their determinations? Isn’t that simply wise?

But what might be wise in specific, highly technical circumstances can be very problematic when adopted as a general rule, as the Chevron doctrine has been. Chevron disrupted the constitutional order by effectively giving the president the power to make, interpret and enforce laws acting solely through his administrative agencies. It injected the presidency’s lawmaking abilities with steroids.

This is not the way the United States was intended to function. It magnifies the power of the president beyond recognition, diminishes democracy, raises the stakes of presidential elections to destabilizing levels and puts immense pressure on the president to maximize his rule-making authority. Just as bad, it encourages congressional inaction and incompetence. If the agencies can take over when Congress is silent or ambiguous, it diminishes the necessity for Congress to speak clearly. It’s much easier to punt the hard decisions to the president, and then heckle (or cheer) from Fox News or MSNBC.

How have we seen this dynamic play out? Three consecutive administrations — Obama, Trump and Biden — have attempted radically different immigration reforms through executive action rather than through legislation. We’ve also seen the Obama, Trump and Biden administrations enact or propose divergent rules and regulations on sex discrimination under Title IX. We’ve witnessed President Biden attempt to forgive student loans and mandate workplace vaccinations through executive action. [ed. I think this all really started with Reagan].

These policy disputes and policy shifts have very little to do with “agency expertise” and everything to do with presidential ideology. The language of Title IX or of federal immigration statutes isn’t changing, but the ideological commitments of the president do, and the president is then using his rule-making authority to alter the law. The same law shouldn’t mean wildly different things based on the whim of a president. 

Wednesday’s oral argument signaled that America may be on the verge of a welcome restoration of proper constitutional order. The case is called Loper Bright Enterprises v. Raimondo, and the facts are both simple and representative of how the Chevron doctrine distorts American law. The plaintiffs are fishing companies that are challenging a federal rule that requires them to pay the cost for federal observers who board their boats and observe their compliance with federal fishing rules. (...)

The question isn’t how much power the government should possess, but rather who should possess it. And it’s far from clear to me that it’s inherently “conservative” or “Republican” to say that Congress, the most democratic branch of government, should possess more power than the president. Indeed, a number of conservatives adhere to a theory of presidential power called the “unitary executive” that often means the opposite, increasing executive authority at the expense of Congress.

Moreover, reversing Chevron wouldn’t end executive rule-making. Nor would it block Congress from explicitly granting agencies a degree of discretion based on agency expertise. It would instead roll back the president’s extraordinary dominance. Do we really want to maintain a system that enables a man like Donald Trump to eclipse both Congress and the judiciary?

Americans feel alienated from their government for good reason. Democracy feels more distant because it is more distant. Decades of congressional failure have diminished congressional power and placed it in the hands of presidents and their army of unelected administrators. We need to reverse bad precedent. Regardless of whether one is for big government or small government, we should all be for democratic government, and that — at the very least — requires Congress to do its job.

by David French, NY Times |  Read more:

Image: Damon Winter/The New York Times

[ed. Ok, I'm officially changing my mind (people are allowed to do that, you know). This is a very persuasive argument that I've never heard before. I do believe in leaving regulatory expertise to the experts, but Mr. French is right, new administrations frequently impose whiplash changes to administrative policy that make regulatory oversight a joke. You know, there are a lot people who are paranoid about a Deep State in government. Well, it's true, it does exist but what they call a Deep State is really just a deep bureaucracy, and it's absurd to think that it's in any way coordinated toward some single purpose. Government is a system of competing checks and balances and different agencies reflect those tensions. When a new administration comes in, one agency or another may find itself in ascendancy while others get sidelined - and those temporarily in power exert their influence while they have it. Are there likely to be unfortunate consequences of changing Chevron? Probably. Should we do it? I don't know. But things aren't working now, so what are the alternatives?]

Shocker in the Desert

No sport forces us to question what we think we know more than golf does because no sport has the ability to surprise us more than golf. It’s an unpredictable game that even at the highest levels is played by imperfect practitioners possessing skills that are tenuously grasped and unevenly applied.

Chaos tends to ensue, but generally there is a measure of order restored at the finish and a result that makes some sense emerges. Then there is the conclusion of the American Express on Sunday in La Quinta, Calif., where 20-year-old Nick Dunlap became the youngest amateur ever to win a PGA Tour event. The outcome is shocking, an amateur playing in his fourth tour event beating a field that included 21 of the top 50 in the world, including World No. 1 Scottie Scheffler. The kid, who had missed the cut in his only other tour starts, stared down his playing partners, Sam Burns and Justin Thomas, members of the most recent U.S. Ryder Cup team who have 20 tour wins between them.

Again shocking. “I’m still in shock. I really am,” said the young man who did all the shocking things to bring about such a seismic occurrence in a game rife with all kinds of recent surprises. But maybe it’s not that shocking after all. Talent doesn’t check birth certificates and a game that allows for endless possibilities just provided a finish a pure serendipity because, well, this guy is really good.

One day after shooting 60 to tie the record for the lowest score by an amateur in a tour event, Dunlap weathered bouts of doubt and jangled nerves to shoot a two-under 70 at the Stadium Course at PGA West for a one-stroke victory over South Africa’s Christiaan Bezuidenhout. Dunlap capped the victory by getting up and down for par from off the green, drilling a six-footer that caused him to shout with excitement before he was reduced to tears as he hugged his parents.

He finished with a 29-under 259 aggregate total and started an immediate period of inner turmoil as he decides how to proceed with a career that already appeared promising after he won the U.S. Amateur and U.S. Junior, a feat only Tiger Woods previously accomplished. Dunlap had to forego the $1.512 million first prize, but he possesses an exemption on the PGA Tour through 2026 along with myriad additional benefits.

Dunlap couldn’t say whether he would continue on at the University of Alabama, where he is a sophomore member of the golf team, or start chasing the pot of gold, an opportunity that he earned with poise and maturity beyond his years. He was still processing what the hell happened over a magical four days after accepting a sponsor exemption two weeks earlier.

“I probably had a thousand different scenarios in my head of how today was going to go, and it went nothing like I expected,” said the native of Huntsville, Ala. “I think that was the cool part about it. That's golf. I hit a lot of shots that I didn't think I was going to hit and then I hit some shots that went way better than I expected, and the same thing with putting. Like I said, I just think that's the cool part of golf.”

Dunlap, who came into the tournament loaded with confidence after shooting an 11-under 60 at NorthRiver Club in Tuscaloosa, Ala., the day before leaving for California, is the first amateur to win a tour event since Phil Mickelson captured the 1991 Northern Telecom Open. He is the second youngest winner on tour since World War II, trailing only Jordan Spieth, but he eclipsed Chick Evans, winner of the 1910 Western Open, as the youngest amateur to win a tour event.

Burns, three shots behind Dunlap after 54 holes but his nearest pursuer, looked to be the spoiler to a potential storybook tale by overtaking Dunlap with a six-foot birdie putt on the 11th hole, and the Louisiana golfer remained in front until the 16th hole when Dunlap rolled in a 10-footer for birdie to forge a tie at 29 under. (...)

After Dunlap found the green at the par-3 island 17th hole, Burns flamed his tee shot to the right of the green and into the water. The ensuing double bogey enabled Dunlap to forge a two-shot lead. Burns then fully capitulated by driving into the water left of the fairway at 18, leading to another double bogey.

With an 11-foot birdie at the last, Bezuidenhout completed a 65 and climbed within one, a fact Dunlap didn’t realize until he arrived at his ball beside the green. No matter. Dunlap was up to the challenge, something you’d expect from a kid who shot 59 when he was 12 years old. (...)

The final putt, the pressure-is-a-privilege moment he had mentioned only a day earlier, was the chance to live out a dream far sooner than he ever imagined. And attempting to live out a dream is more pressure than most of us can handle. “Most nervous I've ever been, by far. Just tried to breathe.”

And when the stroke was true and the ball dived dead in the middle, Dunlap was breathing in some rarefied air.

by  Dave Shedloski, Golf Digest |  Read more:

Image: Orlando Ramirez

[ed. Fun to watch history being made. I can't imagine him not turning pro. Nice kid, nerves of steel, great future ahead.]

Social Media Platforms Profit, Social Media Creators - Not So Much

The creator economy is ready for a workers’ movement (TC)

Image: Bryce Durbin

"Erin McGoff has 3 million followers on social media, but with the money she gets from Instagram and TikTok, she wouldn’t be able to pay for the plate of mozzarella sticks we’re sharing in a Baltimore bar.

“On Instagram, I’ll have a video hit 900,000 views and make six dollars,” McGoff said. “It’s insulting.”

Like most content creators, McGoff makes her living from brand deals, sponsorships and subscription products, rather than from the platforms themselves. But that reality is emblematic of the conundrum creators find themselves in: They’re propelling social platforms to new heights, but those same platforms can betray them at any second with one small algorithm change or unfounded suspension."

Read more:

A Knife Forged in Fire

Sam recently hosted a group of Chicago knife makers for a potluck lunch at the shop. After the meal, Sam cranked up the forge, and one of them, Dylan Ambrosini, crafted a blade while we all watched. Dylan, at 24, is one of the youngest and most talented knife makers in the Midwest. He and Sam collaborated on a nine-inch chef’s knife, which sold for $950 before they could get it on display at Northside Cutlery. Top-end chef’s knives can cost even more. Anthony Bourdain bought one of his favorites for $5,000 from Bob Kramer, a popular bladesmith in Washington State. It brought $231,250 at auction after Bourdain’s death.

Taking care of a knife is pretty simple. You strop it before each use. You don’t throw it in the sink. You wipe it off and put it in a safe place when you’re done — a knife block, for example. And we would chop down telephone poles with it before we’d put it in a dishwasher. Then again, to qualify as a master bladesmith with the American Bladesmith Society, you have to chop a wooden two-by-four in half two times with a knife you made and then still be able to shave with it. The rules for that qualification test clearly state: “The test knife will ultimately be destroyed during the testing process.”

The knives that Sam and his fellow Midwestern smiths make, passed from hand to hand with care, from mother to son to uncle to granddaughter, could last a thousand years, by which time every speck of high technology we know today will be dust. But the reality is that if a knife maker has become too famous, you simply can’t get his or her knives any longer.

by Laurence Gonzalez, Chicago |  Read more:

Image: Clayton Hauck

[ed. Pretty fascinating step by step guide to an ancient art.]

Invisible Ink: At the CIA’s Creative Writing Group

Last spring, a friend of a friend visited my office and invited me to Langley to speak to Invisible Ink, the CIA’s creative writing group.

I asked Vivian (not her real name) what she wanted me to talk about.

She said that the topic of the talk was entirely up to me.

I asked what level the writers in the group were.

She said the group had writers of all levels.

I asked what the speaking fee was.

She said that as far as she knew, there was no speaking fee.

I dwelled a little on this point.

She confirmed that there was no speaking fee.

When an organization has, say, financed the overthrow of the government of Guatemala, you would think there might be a speaking fee. But I was told that, in lieu of payment, the writing group would take me out to lunch in the executive dining room afterward. I would also have my picture taken in front of the CIA seal, and I could post that picture anywhere I wanted.

“So my visit wouldn’t be classified?”

Vivian confirmed that I could tell anyone I wanted. “Just don’t tell them my name—or I’ll have to kill you. Just kidding!”

As I considered the invitation, I kept wondering why I’d been invited. I don’t write about CIA-adjacent topics, nor am I successful enough a novelist that people outside a small circle—one that I doubt includes U.S. intelligence agencies—know my name. So the invite was a bit of a mystery. This was the second-most common question that came up when I told writer friends about it, topped only by: “No speaking fee?” At first, I wondered whether the gig was part of a recruitment strategy. But it doesn’t take a vast intelligence apparatus to know that I am not intelligence material, not least because I am a professional writer.

Next I wondered if my visit could be used as soft-diplomacy propaganda. Look how harmless we are! We let writers come to our headquarters and pose for pictures. The CIA had veered into this type of literary boosterism before—supporting, for example, the founding of the very magazine for which I am writing this piece. So it wasn’t out of the question. In 2021, I had turned down an invitation from the government of Saudi Arabia for an all-expenses-paid trip to a writers’ retreat at al-‘Ulā, as I didn’t want to be a part of their arts and culture whitewashing. But in the end, I couldn’t think of a way that I’d be a useful propaganda tool for the CIA—unless they anticipated me writing this essay (in which case, kudos CIA)—and so I said yes.

***

On the agreed-upon morning a few weeks later, I left my apartment in D.C. and drove into the haze of Canadian wildfire smoke that was floating over the city. By the time I turned off the George Washington Parkway at the George Bush Center for Intelligence exit, and on to a restricted usage road, I was already nervous. I’m the kind of person who weighs and measures my suitcases before flying, lest I be scolded at the airport, and I do not like driving down roads with signs like EMPLOYEES ONLY and WILL BE ARRESTED.

At the gate intercom, I gave my name and social security number—Vivian had gathered this information and more ahead of time, over a series of phone calls, each from a different phone number—and a police officer gave me a visitor’s badge that was to be displayed on my person at all times. He warned me that I was to be escorted at all times.

I met Vivian in a lot between the first gate and the second gate, where her car was the only one parked. She gave me another badge that appeared identical to the first. I left my phone in my car as instructed, and we got into Vivian’s car and drove to the second gate. That was when things started not going as planned.

Four agitated police officers blocked our way.

“He can’t leave his car here!” they yelled when Vivian rolled down her window.

“But I cleared this ahead of time,” Vivian said.

“He can’t leave his car here. It’s a security risk.”

“But how am I supposed to escort him if we can’t drive together?”

“Ma’am,” one of them said, “I just do parking.”

It turned out that, like in many bureaucracies, the individual parts that made up the CIA were siloed, and there was no point in arguing about logical contradictions.

Vivian gave up and drove me back to my car, clearly stressed. I told her it wasn’t a big deal—I would just follow her.

The problem, she said, was that we wouldn’t be able to park in the same lot. And I had to be escorted at all times. And employee parking at the CIA was a mess. “It’ll take me forever just to walk to you.”

She resolved that she would simply park in VIP visitor parking with me, and if she got a ticket, she got a ticket. “Just follow me.”

I got in my car and followed her to the gate. I watched from behind the wheel as she drove up to the gate, talked to one of the police officers, and drove off past the gate at a good clip, very much not being followed by me.

I pulled up to the gate, and an aggressive police officer questioned me about why I had two badges.

“Didn’t it seem strange to you to get a second badge when you’d just got your first one?”

“I’ve never been here before,” I said. “Everything seems strange to me.”

A different cop told him to give it a rest, handed me a third badge, and asked if I needed directions to VIP parking. I have a terrible sense of direction—I once got lost at Costco for so long that they had to call my mom over the PA; I was fifteen—and Google Maps isn’t much use at Langley.

The nice cop said that I needed to turn right and follow the road until the sixth left. There I would see a line of squad cars and a gate, where my badge would swipe me in.

“If you see a helicopter, you’ve gone too far,” he said. “Just loop back around. Don’t make a U-turn.”

When I later told Vivian about the mean cop and the nice one, she said, “They’re always doing that good cop–bad cop thing.”

“For parking?”

“For everything!” (...)

I asked Vivian how many people worked at the CIA.

“Maybe two million?” She smiled and confessed that she had no idea, even though I was made to understand that she had been at the CIA, and in the writing group, for a number of years. (...)

At first, we couldn’t find the conference room. Like me, Vivian wasn’t allowed to bring her phone into the main building, but even if she had, I don’t know who she would’ve called for directions. CIA officers generally don’t know their coworkers’ last names. (The Starbucks at Langley is the only Starbucks where baristas aren’t allowed to ask for your name.) So I am without photos or notes, but walking through the main building at Langley, is, in my memory, like walking through an airport terminal in a major metropolis, crossed with a hospital, crossed with an American mall, crossed with an Eastern European university. It’s big and gleaming and cold and brutal, all at once. There was a hall of presidential portraits with notes from commanders in chief to the Secret Service, all of them written in elegant fountain pen, except for Donald Trump’s, which was written in Sharpie and said “I’M SO PROUD OF YOU!”

We finally found the conference room, through a side door in the CIA Museum. It was unclear who this museum was for, but it was not a bad museum, full of objects of interest: pieces of the Berlin Wall, tie-clip cameras, Soviet bugging devices, et cetera, displayed in glass cases. Six people were seated at the conference table inside the conference room, which was windowless and had a big CIA seal on the wall.

“Sorry we’re late!” Vivian announced.

“Strip search?” one of the men joked.

“Parking,” I said.

A collective groan. The goddamned parking.

I began by asking what people were writing. Surprisingly, none of the CIA writers were writing spy novels. They were working on short stories. Self-published dystopian sci-fi. A presidential biography. Upmarket fiction. A personal blog, which I was told to check out if I ever wanted a really good muffin recipe. The writing group was organized around what sounded like a listserv announcing periodic meetings to whatever members were available that day. Only about half the people in the room seemed to know one another.

I talked a little bit about writing beginnings and working through false starts. I read the first page of my latest novel, explained why I’d set the first scene in the U.S. when the rest of the novel takes place in Ukraine, and went through all the false starts I’d taken to get where I was going. One officer raised their hand and asked about establishing voice in first versus third person. Another asked about revision techniques. Another about the shift from writing alone to working with an editor. It was the least remarkable Q&A I’ve ever been a part of.

I had a little time to kill before our lunch reservation—seating time in the executive dining room was not flexible—so Vivian took me to the gift shop.

Given that almost no one’s allowed inside Langley and the people who work for the CIA aren’t supposed to advertise it, it was, like with the museum, a bit of a mystery who the gift shop was for. The shelves were stocked with T-shirts (Central Intelligence Agency), mugs (Central Intelligence Agency), and novelty barbecue sauce (Top Secret Recipe!). There was also a Pride Month display (Central Intelligence Agency in rainbow). I bought a Pride Month pen for four dollars.

by Johannes Lichtman, Paris Review | Read more:
Image: CIA HQ; Wikimedia Commons

Channel 1: The World’s First AI-Generated News Channel

[ed. Well, here we go. Actually, most tv announcers seem like AI creations anyway, so this was probably a no-brainer from the start. Good luck media stars (and others in media, PR, commercials, creative arts, etc.). Pretty obvious now why there was a Hollywood strike. See also, this overview: Channel 1: The world's first AI-generated news channel for context, background, intent and future applications. And if all of this seems fundamentally wrong or artificial, consider how quickly football viewing audiences accepted VR first down lines in televised games (and top tracer technology in golf).]
Video: YouTube

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
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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.]

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