Uncanny Valley*

I have read fewer books this year but more pages.  Even so a higher proportion of my read this year has been consumed with AI and its place of origin Silicon Valley.

The first of these, Karen Hao's Empire of AI, is an astonishingly well reported chronicle of contemporary AI's rise in recent years, its origins as the non-profit enterprises of self-appointed guardians of humanity, Sam Altman and Elon Musk prominently among them who worried about what AI left to other less prescient and prudent hands could spell for humanity's future.   Could technology that potentially fashioned a superior competition to the human species be trusted in the hands of just anyone?  But as the original vision of AI as literal intelligence programmed by humans receded into the same space occupied by jet packs and space colonies, while the stakes for arriving first to the market increased, the space race for "compute", brute computation of massive amounts of data in the processing of simulation of thought  heated up, and schisms erupted in Silicon Valley and miraculously every altruistic non-profit morphed into for profit companies in search of dominance of the field.   Hao's meticulous reporting also includes the impact that AI's sudden explosion in "compute" has had on the environment, particularly in already ravaged territories of the most vulnerable populations around the world, and especially in the global south.  The manner in which a handful of Silicon Valley entrepreneurs have imposed themselves on the resources of indigenous peoples inspired Hao to liken AI's rise to Empire, reminding us that the greatest threat to humanity is not vaporware but certain elements of humanity itself.   

Adam Becker's More Everything Forever deals with the predilections and sci-fi fantasies of Tech billionaires that Timnit Gebru and Émile Torres have summarized with the acronym TESCREAL (Transhumanism, Extropianism (a fancier name for Techno-Optimism or the belief that technology will solve all problems), Singularitarianism (belief in the inevitability of the Singularity), Cosmism (the ambition to spread human intelligence across the universe), Rationalism (Bayes Theorem supremacists),  Effective Altruism (belief that maximizing one's capacity to give charitably by maximizing one's own wealth is better for collective happiness than acting charitably or being subject to taxation for social programs) and Long-Termism (belief that one should behave now in ways that improve the conditions of the cosmically spread progeny that is yet to come even if it is at the expense of those now living).  Becker's book explains each proclivity indentifying the adherents and proponents and deftly debunking them along the way.

I knew Malcolm Harris was from Palo Alto and that his book of that name was a leftist critique of his hometown, but I wasn’t aware that it was basically making a case that Palo Alto was a (if not the) major hotbed for the worst ideas, tools and exponents of capitalism—largely through the auspices of Leland Stanford’s university and expecially as directed by one of its original class’s alumni, Herbert Hoover who lived long, long after his response to the Great Depression got him booted out of office after one term and remained as influential on the cadre of Stanford-affiliated capitalists as he ever was as President.  It was born out of the genocide of the Alta people who were unlucky enough to be at the terminus of the intercontinental railroad when the barons arrived.  It was the place where the most land  raping technology of the gold rush was devised and served as the prototype of exploitation of immigrants for the various projects of capital, especially in ways that assured the thievery of those immigrant’s rights as citizens and neighbors.  And when outcries against immigrant hordes were raised at various times by the temporary white majority, it invented outsourcing as a means of exploiting foreign non-whites on their own lands reducing the cost (and the bargaining power) of labor in the process.  It invented tools of war but more especially proponents of war (including those who urged the use of atomic weaponry and of anti-communist adventurism in Indochina under the pretext of the domino theory.  It was also the willful bastardizer of Binet’s theories of intelligence in devising and conquering the world with the Stanford Binet intelligences tests (literally devised to separate the cannon fodder from the officers in World War I and then adapted to promote pre-believed racist eugenicist policies and to mold the American public education system into a factory for the production of workers.  And it used all these historic means of exploitation and dominance to invent the silicon chip and the personal computer and the high tech bubble, and disruption and financialization and uberfication and surveillance capitalism and now AI.  

Harris’s book weaves the tale very adeptly, revisiting the threads that have been interwoven in the town's history decade after decade.   And in his conclusion he talks about the Muwekma Ohlone tribe that have been in Palo Alto from the beginning, and that survived the genocide, only to become unrecognized by the Federal Government due to anthropology out of Stanford.  According to the US, the tribe is extinct but there has been a continuous presence of activists, working to get recognition and reparation in the sense of return of their lands to their original state.  So Malcolm Harris in his final chapter raises the possibility of ceding Stanford’s land back to the Ohlone people.  And on first reading about it, my brain automatically goes, “Oh yeah, sure!   That could happen!”  But Harris makes a passionate case for the symbolism as well the justice of the act, the start of a healing of the planet by putting an end to the locus of so much of the origin of capitalism’s interminable soulless destruction in the sole pursuit of profit and you can’t help but be struck by the simplicity of giving Stanford back to a people who will tend it back to nature.  It’s the kind of idea that is unlikely to happen on the face of it, but just the notion of it increases the presence of beauty and justice in the world.

~~~~~

* I'm reminded that this year I have also read Anna Wiener's excellent Silicon Valley memoir, Uncanny Valley.

Did it happen?

 

Does it feel real yet?  I was watching his victory speech way after the fact last night and feeling both the kind of horror you sometimes feel in nightmares when you know something dreamy and unusual and good is an illusion that’s going to be snatched away from you by a demon (granted I was pretty close to stage 1 sleep while I was listening), but I was also involuntarily beaming at everything he said.  It got me to thinking.  I think Zohran Mamdani’s victory could well be the very best thing that’s ever happened on the political stage in my lifetime.  They owned the airwaves.  We owned the streets and the streets won.  I shouldn’t hedge or hesitate at all.  I can’t think of anything comparable.  Aside from some Bernie primaries, it's the only victory for any office in any election anywhere in my lifetime for which my gratitude at the outcome is not qualified.  He’s incredibly talented, but he also had phenomenal help from his volunteers.  Thank you for your service.  

I am also thinking that as personable and genuine and likeable as he is, he is something very special.  Not to idolize—it’s admiration that I feel for the qualities that brought him to victory but also I feel like I am witnessing a rare piece of seminal history in the making.  This is what I wish history was more like and what I hope for history for the future.

Judging from the clobbered over the head look that dem leadership and some of our most prominent dem leaning media personalities exhibited in the post mortem to the victory, it doesn't seem that everybody in our soulless clueless age is ready for a new one, but I hope the fascists are quaking.  I hope their days are numbered.

Waltz About Death

 Angela Autumn and Lockeland Strings prove that we are still making beauty.

I don't care what you think about Graham Platner

But these two would like to thank you.

I already liked Graham Platner, oyster farmer, harbormaster, democratic candidate for Senate from Maine who is aiming to defeat the evergreen Susan Collins-- seeking her record breaking sixth term next year as the reasonable republican who only votes against her party's oppressive public policy impositions when they are assured to win-- when details suddenly surfaced of a raucous internet past peppered with what Elie Mystal has characterized as "bigoted" language, and of a skull and bones tattoo that he and his drunk buddies on leave in Croatia thought looked cool that turns out to have a Nazi origin (he has replaced it).  With a voice that immediately reminds you against your will of John Fetterman's sonorousness and a deep, long Military past that involved stints in every American operation from Iraq to Afghanistan, followed by time as a diplomat's bodyguard as an employee of a company formerly known by its deservedly infamous name of Blackwater, there were hurdles that he had to get past to win my enthusiastic support, but he cleared them with his fresh, unapologetic expounding of policy positions revealing a favoring of government that serves the people that resonates with my own aspirations for government, and that earned him an endorsement from Bernie Sanders* (who stands by him) and a joint appearance with the Vermont Senator at an anti-oligarchy and endorsement rally in Portland attended by a crowd filling the Civic Center on a summer afternoon, massive for political events any time of the year even by Maine standards.

Much of the online left however has lost its mind.  The generally helpful Humanist Report has demonstrated a need for a vacation in professing a done-ness with Platner on account of the scandals. Elie Mystal usually excellent on the law at the Nation has a very bad take on the controversy.  The point of that Platner-defending Pod save America tweet that Mystal critiques is not that Woke is bad.   The point is that very few people, and certainly people ambitious enough to seek public office have lived perfectly woke lives.  Mystal links to a digest of the controversial Platner posts which is how I first set eyes on them.  I am not at all offended by Platners’s obviously over the top use of "gay" in his ancient reddit posts that he now as a mature therapized adult disavows (but I’m not gay, which is why I don’t argue with gay people about how much offense they take from people’s past overuse of the ubiquitous 90’s kid slang addiction to the word "gay" which shocked me when I first heard younger colleagues bandying it about like a beachball in the audience of a festival stage.  Platner's usage strikes me as being in this spirit.)   I truly don’t care about anything Platner wrote in the throes of PTSD as he was sorting out how he felt about how he had spent his adult life to that point.  What he says now about gay people and how he came around to regretting his language is what matters to me.

 

My take is people can decide for themselves (and they will—and the only ones who matter are the voters of Maine) how they feel about the past of a candidate who is strongly in favor of everything I’m in favor of as a candidate to replace the Republican who votes against every Republican bill as long as it’s guaranteed to win.  I happen to think they are wrong not to listen to Graham Platner now.  They are wrong to base their support on no longer in-context internet posts from the wildest west of sites.  (For that matter, though I may be blind, I don’t see anything really objectionable or Nazi or right wing about what he has said at heart. We’re tone policing here.  We’re up in arms about the over the top language of a passionate PTSD sufferer in the rough and tumble of internet shit-posting.    If you read the Wikipedia article for a good summary of what is "troublesome" in his reddit posts, you may be able to see through the fog that his posts pretty consistently show a staunch radical who is not opposed to radicals being as well armed as the other side.  I don’t see anything to apologize for that.

Oppo research is not presented as a service to everyone.   The targets of oppo research are not those who already agree with the funders of it.  They are precisely the terminally online leftists who might dutifully, reflexively, obligingly take up the oppo case for them in order to sow dissent among the ranks and weaken the opponent's base.  This is exactly what has happened in Graham Platner's case.  The left parodies itself when it demands that those who get to work to make life better for people must pass a purity test.  It's a parody of the left, and the dream of the right.  The operatives drooled over what is transpiring: the usual pile on of leftists falling over each other to be the first to cancel an easy target.  What Graham Platner should be is a challenge to the left to grow up, grow some shells and get some game for once for fuck's sake.

The whole mess has once again highlighted for me that the election of ambitious people with flaws that may color the dysfunction of their service, by voters with their own flaws that likewise are apt to contribute to the dysfunction of their choice is no way to pick those who represent us in government.  The answer for the 10,000th time is sortition: the scientifically random selection of our leaders from among ourselves -- all citizens, residents, subjects of the places we live-- for short, non-consecutive terms.  It is the only way to remove the types of partisan politics that in this day and age has come to mean battling opposition research, horrifying reveals of our candidate's mistakes and their humanity, and millions of dubiously come by dollars spent on hours of negative ads of performatively fake outrage rehashing those hard-won nibblets of scandal.   I will take sortition anyday.  But as long as we are stuck with our duopolistic system, can you imagine if one day sortition actually won and in an effort to undermine it and get back to oligarchy, billionaires (perhaps using AI) studiously dug up oppo research on every one selected randomly by sortition?   How would you do, comrade, under the censorious scrutiny of the oligarchic oppo machine?

If you want me to take your own false outrage seriously, try to come up with a better candidate than Graham Platner first-- good luck with that-- and if you succeed, let's see how long that candidate evades the oppo trap and your own acquiescence to it.

~~~~~

* There's a contingent of the left who in spite of everything Bernie has done in the Senate to try to end the funding of Israel's assault on Gaza (to say nothing of what he's done for left causes throughout his still very vital career) think he took too long to call what Israel is doing in Gaza genocide.  Good for you you fucking purists.  What has your purity actually accomplished for Gaza?

What it is

No comment

 

Losing Time

I recently got into my head a notion I couldn't shake to read 107 Days, Kamala Harris's new book about the 2024 election.  Nearing completion of a book with nothing else in particular lined up I found myself scanning the list of current titles in the Apple Book store, and Harris's book appealed to me as a quick settlement of the what's next question.  I made the purchase and was dismayed to discover I had accidentally selected the audiobook instead of the ebook.  Being frustrated in my efforts to figure out how to make an exchange (it seems to be impossible), I resigned myself to the audiobook delivery method.  It paid off: at double speed, I was able to finish the unabridged book, read by Harris herself in about 4 and half hours.   That was really about all the investment I had hoped to give it anyway.*

I can't say I didn't have an agenda in even considering Harris's book.  I have been maintaining for months that the impulse felt by so many single-issue leftists to punish Kamala Harris as a proxy for Joe Biden, particularly over Biden's Gaza policy by voting third party (or abstaining altogether) without regard to what a Trump victory would mean instead was a tragically misguided mistake.   The "cease fire" just negotiated comes when Gaza has been flattened after months of  intensified bombing by Israel after unilaterally breaking a January cease-fire in March.  Israel continues to starve those who remain.  Trump did not get the Nobel Peace prize this year-- another few years of degradation and it should be his-- but it's all he wants out of it -- he couldn't give a shit was happens to Palestinians.  And if he doesn't wind up profiting from Israel's development of Gaza's beachfront real estate (as he has certainly indicated are his designs) it will only be because we have been transported to another dimension.  Would a Kamala Harris administration have been any different?

I don't make a habit of reading political memoirs, but it strikes me as a given that politicians who want to continue their careers do not serve themselves by speaking unvarnished truth in their public utterances.  If I were a politician, I would certainly have to hide my atheism and reflexive eye rolling at displays of patriotism and expressions of American exceptionalism.  Not only do I think we should expect politicians to be somewhat hypocritical and duplicitous in their public lives, but I almost think we should want them to be at least in certain relatively benign respects.  If Kamala Harris had said in her book that Joe Biden was the albatross around her neck that prevented her from soaring to the presidency it would have been truthful but might have had a ring of unseemliness coming from her.  For this reason, I was not expecting Kamala Harris to come out and say, "As President, I would have forced Israel to stop bombing Gaza and done what I could to see Netanyahu and Israel punished for war crimes." and she does not, but I did expect to see some coded signals of differences between herself and both Joe Biden and Donald Trump, and I was not disappointed.  She speaks about generational differences between herself and the reflexively pro-Israel Biden, as well as the importance of International consensus and her preference that Israel and the US not be opposed to the rest of the world in wanting to proceed with the destruction of Hamas regardless of the cost to Gaza and its innocent 2 million inhabitants.

In undertaking Harris's book, I was partially interested in seeing if I could get to the bottom of the question “Would Kamala Harris have been a continuation of Joe Biden?  Did Kamala Harris deserve to be punished for Joe Biden’s administration?”  While she doesn’t come out and say, “Are you fuckin’ kiddin’ me?  Of course I would have wiped the floor with Joe Biden’s first term, ” she does codedly indicate that Joe Biden’s Israel steadfastness prevented him from seeing Palestinians as people whom Israel was unjustly immiserating.  We learned last spring that Biden's sense of timing with the demands for loyalty that he placed on his hand-picked replacement was impeccable as on the eve of her debate with Trump three months after Biden's own pratfall of a performance hastened his exit from the campaign when he urged her to allow "No daylight, Kid" between herself and him in public assessments of his administration and promises of how hers might depart from it.  It's also clear that in 4 years of being the racist and sexist Biden's ethnic and feminist beard as his DEI Vice President, she did not get a lot of support and loyalty from the Bidens before or after she took over the ticket, and attributes the deficit in public recognition she was handicapped with at the start of her curtailed campaign to her purposeful invisibility as Biden's second in command.  Notably, she regrets not having had the courage to talk the poorly aging Biden out of seeking a second term (she thought it would be perceived as being self-serving at the time but in retrospect she thinks it would have been the right thing to do for the country.)  Nevertheless, with the microphone hers, she openly mocks some of Joe’s senile foolishness around the election such as his ideological discomfort in pushing the wedge issue of reproductive choice in contrast with Trump's role in gutting it, as well as incidents of tomfoolery on the campaign trail such as actually putting on a MAGA hat that someone handed to him at an event they both appeared at following his dropping out of the race providing helpful fodder for mockery from alt-right media.

My big takeaway is that she called the book 107 Days --not to echo 10/7 as some dummies have suggested-- but rather to emphasize that the curtailed campaign was the obstacle she could not overcome, that it forced her to make decisions and edits and snubs that she would not have taken if she’d had the whole 2 years and left her at the mercy of "the conversation" that was already underway, such as her failure to negotiate an opportunity to speak to Joe Rogan's audience of disaffected young men-- Rogan had congealed as a Trump endorser before she was able to persuade him to have her as a guest.  (Of course she probably would not have been the candidate if there had been an actually open Democratic primary as there should have been.)  

One of the highlights of the book is when campaign adviser David Plouffe tells her too late in the game for her to re-adjust her strategy the thing she needed to hear from a strategist on her side much sooner: “People don't like Joe Biden”.  But the campaign was already lost by then and it was too late to pivot from its focus on peeling wishy washy Republicans from Trump’s side to add to what she assumed was Biden’s solid support.  More malpractice.   Low point of the book: she talks about her appearance on the View, which she says was marred by an answer to a Whoopi question to the effect of She would have done nothing differently from Joe Biden if she had been president.  She was not prepared for the question she said and she gave a perfunctory answer.  But that’s not the low point.  The low point is that she was prepared to say that she would have had a Republican in her cabinet.  (In keeping with what she thought her strategy was supposed to be.)   Because she blew Whoopi’s question, she actually made a point of slipping her prepared Republican in the cabinet remark into a reply to someone else’s question.  She apparently did not ever see that if “People hate Joe Biden” it’s not because he didn’t coddle enough Republican genitals.  

I’ve probably left important stuff out but the thumbnail is, as an adult who has seen a lot of elections and politicians and as an American in October 2025 who can tell the difference between a fascist creep and a smart enough if rather typical post-Obama democrat, I feel satisfied that I was not deluded that regardless of what Joe Biden was forcing her to say at the time, she would have been a break from the stench of the America of both Donald Trump and Joe Biden.  Not a savior of anything but America from more of the same old old man stink.  

~~~~~

* The downside is that when I appear to be quoting the book I am actually paraphrasing it and paraphrasing it from memory at that, and from memory pieced together from whatever snippets of attention my ADHD brain was devoting to it at the time.

What Times Are These?

US 2025: A faceless force the people did not call fires on the people

Hard times create strong men, strong men create good times, good times create weak men, and weak men create hard times.  -  G. Michael Hopf, from his 2011 novel, The End

I am grieving for my stupid-ass country.  It has fallen into the hands of thick, soulless clods.  Greedy, tasteless twits.  Nasty-spirited fucks.  It happened by accident, because its asinine political system-- designed by a self-appointed committee of slave-owning aristocrats a quarter of a millenium ago-- permitted it.  The people perhaps mean well, if you can mean well by putting your trust in a cadre of over privileged ungrateful louts who believe their thievery of the commons is their birthright-- or worse yet their reward for an imagined exceptionalism-- who promised to restore a nation diseased by the most craven capitalism and in genuine pain to a supposed former greatness by removing a completely conjured cancer called Immigrant.

The epigraph of this post has a pleasing ring of truth to it.  Could it explain how we got here?  But try to follow it back.  Are we in hard times?  Did weak people make them?  Who are those weak people-- is it Biden and Kamala Harris or Trump or all of them?  If Trump is not weak, is he strong?  Is he making good times?  When were the good times that made the people weak?  Who were the strong people who made those times good?  Good for whom?

Truthfully, the course of history in my lifetime brings the lie to that pleasing theory of history.  On the contrary, even the greatest times of my life-- the far distant past-- were tainted by their stinginess to the least of us.  What made them great was not their greater ignorance as MAGA would have you believe and is urging us all to get back to, but rather the greater economic equality in this country between those at the top and those at the bottom.  Social engineering was in the process of enshrining the social equality that science-- the product of flawed humans that was nevertheless still recognized as a process useful for getting at truth (and sometimes used that way)-- was reluctantly coming around to seeing as every human's birthright.  Strong people were indeed required to overcome the inertia of history.  But equally strong people, mostly men whose strength derived from their place at the top of the economic ladder soon came to defeat the heroes of Civil Rights and Liberation Movements in order to impose wonderful times for themselves and increasing misery for the rest of us.  My life has been a trajectory from hope to disappointment to despair as I have witnessed the arc of history wrested from the justice bringers by the thieves of the commons for 50 of my 60 plus years.  Those thieves have won.

"The Conversation" that we overhear on our TV screens and read about in what's left of our news outlets tends to normalize the horrific loss that happens every day.  Political loss, economic loss, loss of freedom, loss of culture, loss of autonomy, loss of the biosphere.  The Conversation would have you believe that on the whole things are getting better; that our vision is clouded by the myopia of our present circumstances.  Just hold on, the Conversation says, until 2028.

"The Conversation" is stupid.  Don't engage in it.  It is designed to distract.  Start your own conversation.  Start the ones "The Conversation" is avoiding.

US 2025: Who ordered this?  What was the order?