My intentions are good

Ten people asked me today, "How are you?"  Did you ever notice how many states are uncomfortable?  And I’m not talking Abalama.  But seriously, how often is the answer to the "How are you?" question, “Comfortable”.   How about itchy, sore, nervous, anxious, annoyed, hungry, full, hot, cold, tepid, bored, horny.  Because if you were comfortable you wouldn't have need of so many other words to describe your state.  In conversation, I find it best not to go down the road of truth if you don't enjoy the podium.*   So "Fine" is the only strategically prudent answer.

In truth, I haven't been myself lately.  Unless myself is a depressed malcontent.  In which case, I've been the same as usual. No one really wants to know the truth anyway. 

Why  is it that human interactions so rarely go well for me. Embarrassment, miscommunication, being taken advantage of, missed opportunity, infinite boring tangents, unsolicited lecturing. These are many of the most likely outcomes of almost any interaction-- even the most trivial interactions with people I've never met and will never see again.  It seems to me.  Am I right?  I'm always tempted to think I don't belong in public.  I have been told I'm reserved.  Could that be the problem?

Not like the public space is lacking anything on my account.  Although mask requirements (and even mask suggestions) are being lifted across the country and our president has declared the COVID crisis over, I'm still wearing a mask in public.  If I hadn't seen it with my own eyes, I would never have pegged me for the type.   'He's too self-conscious,' I would have thought.  'He'd rather not stick out.' Outside of major metropolitan areas (also known as germ incubators) I'm in fact more inclined to go with the flow which seems to be an embrace of masklessness, but on my own turf (a major metropolitan area) I surprise myself by not giving a fuck what other people think.  I fantasize about what I would say if I were bullied by some strange asshole who decided to be offended enough by my precaution to openly challenge me on mask-wearing.  I like the idea of pulling down the mask,  violently hacking in his face, and then politely explaining, "I have ebola."

You see, Jayden (for that's the name of the out-of-towner who confronts me about mask wearing in my fantasy), I don't wear a mask for political reasons.  I'm not a fan of performative gestures and that includes performative mask wearing to demonstrate your contempt for Trump as well as performative non-mask wearing to demonstrate your contempt for public health officials  (and I'm no great fan of either).  

True, I barely wear it for health reasons anymore anyway.  As it happens I discovered a comfort level, a commitment to the bubble in wearing a mask.  And part of the comfort is an absence of a need to explain it to anyone. Least of all Jayden.  People do suck.  How can they not see that.  If only they could see what I see they would realize that, the motherfuckers. If people only knew what dumasses they were being, Twitter would be a very quiet place.  The world would be beautiful.  And if people knew who to thank for suddenly being able to see their own dumassery you and I would get the thanks and appreciation we deserve.

I miss quarantine.  So maybe mask wearing for me is just one of my many out of date fashions.

~~~~

Post Script: I wrote this a while ago.  In the interim, a sore throat that had been bothering me for a few days prompted me to test myself for COVID.  Mask wearer though I am, I tested positive.  Trust me, if a masked vaxed hermit can get COVID when the COVID crisis is over, anyone can.

~~~~

* On the other hand, complaint is the stuff of inspiration for a compulsive blogger who has forced a monthly quota on himself.  Apologies.

Good grief

Hugging Faces' Stable Diffusion image of "Skyscraper rising over jungle 1950's paperback style"

Phil Edwards is a video producer at Vox who made a recent You Tube video on his personal channel called "I found the perfect metaphor for AI Art" that is getting some views.  The preponderance of videos on AI art are evangelistic demonstrations of its mushrooming proficiency, made by mostly enthusiastic embracers of it, and are presented-- with very little skepticism or curiosity (or certainly information) about the workings of it-- for the benefit of would-be users.  Phil Edwards' video is for the rest of us. The borrowed analogy referred to in the title, which Edwards sweetens with Dad humor, is to the history of lace making, a highly skilled and specialized human art form developed in 16th century Northern Europe, the practice of which was assumed in the Industrial Age almost entirely by machinery. In the process lace was transformed from a rare luxury commodity prized and enjoyed almost exclusively by the wealthiest to a material widely available and affordable to all with a loss of quality according to Edwards discernible only to the most careful observers.  

Let's set aside the possible objection that Edwards's characterization of the differences between machine-made and human-made lace as trivial is perhaps a bit too eagerly dismissive (and his acceptance of the coming analogous comparison of AI generated art to human art a bit hasty).  AI is expected by experts to be commandeering computer graphic design in very short order in a very similar fashion.  For the time being still the domain of highly skilled and talented humans, AI generated design, Edwards says will sooner than we think dominate the field of art, obviating the need for multitudes of highly trained professionals for what has until now been assumed by those not paying close attention to be an exclusively human function.

He then proposes that as with lace making, we prepare ourselves for the coming transition from almost exclusively human produced computer graphics to nearly complete domination of the field by computers by thinking of it as a process of Elizabeth Kubler Ross's Stages of Grief: First Denial (This can't be happening!),  then Anger (I'll be damned if this is happening!), Bargaining (I'll give you a dollar if this doesn't happen!), Depression (I guess no one but me cares that this is happening.) and finally, Acceptance (Oh well!).  If you think about it Edwards is urging Acceptance of the victim's death before the murder has happened.

I confess to some major skepticism about the capabilities that AI programs are exhibiting in the generation of original images.  Are we comfortable it's not just diffuse mechanized collage, if not plagiarism?  From my vantage given that they begin from phrases typed into a text box to the results of image searches presented in a graphically coherent meta-image I can’t get over the hump of thinking that even if I didn’t find it basically hideous to look at for the most part, it’s offensive to me that I'm basically being urged in the video to just accept that it is close to being “good enough” that there can be any sort of recovery of what is lost when it comes to dominate the visual aspect of what we produce and consume from now on.  Make no mistake, owing to simple economics combined with the dearth of imagination, will and character of those who commission art,  AI generated art (much of it as cheaply and thoughtfully made as Dollar Store lace) will become the dominant visual force whether we accept it or not.  And for that reason we will accept it due to inoculation by visual overload which will result in an erosion and atrophy of our will to fight it long before the opportunity to reject it has expired.  And then we’ll just wonder how our souls are being sucked, being no longer able to recognize the oppressive dissatisfaction of our visual yearnings in spite of the assault of artificiality of everything we look at.

Phil Edwards seems to be a journalist and it's tempting to take at face value that his voice is authoritative on the subject of the video.  And perhaps it is. Nevertheless it's easy to overlook the fact (a fact which is utterly absent from every corner of  the video) that acceptance is a choice.  It just happens to be the choice that the perpetrators of AI on the public would prefer we all make.

Proper skepticism here and here.

Little Victories

Giorgia Meloni-- co-founding member of the Brothers of Italy, a far right nationalist, anti-immigation, traditional values party with fascist roots in the ultra-national groups she has been a member of since childhood, an admirer of Benito Mussolini and an exponent of replacement theory-- who is expected to soon become the next prime minister of Italy may not technically be a fascist if you are a stickler for these things. (According to the Italian observer at the link, she's more of a contemporary American Republican if you care to cull out a distinction from that).   But I could not help but be amused by Hillary Clinton's assessment of the prospect of Meloni-- a euro-sceptical, climate skeptical, anti-abortion, pro traditional family proponent-- as Prime Minister of Italy,  to wit: "Every time a woman is elected to head of state or government, that is a step forward."* 

The icing on the cake was seeing that Glenn Greenwald, in making a valid point critiquing EU Commission President Ursula von der Leyden's promise to sanction Italy if it elected Meloni democratically, prefaced his tweet with an utterly vapid characterization of Meloni's significance through an anodyne Clinton-esque lens of identity: "Italy is on the verge of an election that will result in its first-ever female Prime Minister."  He later took pleasure in a tweet mocking Clinton's clueless second wave feminist take by rubbing her face in how Meloni's politics threaten the neoliberal world Clinton helped make. Erstwhile leftists Jimmy "Force the Vote" Dore and Jackson "MAGA Communism" Hinkle likewise expressed their approval for Meloni on different grounds, anti-vax sympathies in the case of Dore and performative anti-globalism in Hinkle's case.  

Harbinger of neoliberalism's long overdue death though it may be, the prospect of Meloni deepening Europe's ultra-rightward drift is disheartening to me at best.  And yet, churl that I am, I do take a perverted pleasure in the way in which Dore, Hinkle, Greenwald and Clinton team up for a chorus of twisted amens about her ascent, and in the process offer an unsolicited, free quartet of rare glimpses into the usually well-hidden logical conclusions of their steadfast commitments to their latest stunted ideologies, schemes, compulsions and predilections.

Granted, I have filtered the foregoing through my own years long struggle to reconcile my gut dislike of all of the aforementioned with the dribs and drabs of their collective output (minus Hinkle) that has occasionally challenged me in the past even when they did not accidentally overlap with my own in enough particulars.  It was a clarifying moment for me though, in a week of clarifying moments.  

Another came in reading a review of Steve Bannon's favorite Putin influencer Aleksandr Dugin's latest book by an anti-globalist conservative eloquently articulating the reasons for his endorsement of Dugin's views on what the neoliberal order should be replaced with that gets at the heart of where I part with those who the aforementioned erstwhile leftists urge solidarity with in the project of finishing off our common foes.  In his very reasoned and meticulous analysis of Dugin's critique of Davos culture and transhumanist Big Tech, the author demonstrates to me how in making common cause with anti-globalist "populist" right movements to topple the neoliberal order, the left risks echoing the outcome of the red-brown alliance in Weimar Germany in 1933.  These people may want the same fate for the current power structure that we do, but in terms of what comes next, they are absolutely not the allies of any who want freedom for all from want, from repression, from a doomed future for the species and the planet and for all of us to be able to live our lives in peace to our full capacities and desires.†  We should not be tailing the masses being seduced into allowing if not outright supporting a worldview even more repressive (if possible) (and it is possible) than the one we are in.  We should be leading and encouraging people to support an entirely new world of all of our making.

Finally, a friend shared with me a post  I may not have seen otherwise by Cory Doctorow at pluralistic.net "Federalist Society v Corporate Personhood" that abounded in very relevant illuminating insights about left and right that I will carry with me and for a long time.  For starters, quoting a Raw Timber commenter named Frank Wilhoit (but apparently not that Francis Wilhoit):

Conservatism consists of exactly one proposition: There must be in-groups whom the law protects but does not bind, alongside out-groups whom the law binds but does not protect"

Another quote further on: 

Leftists have an ideology – Steven Brust says, "if you think human rights are more important than property rights, you're on the left; if you think property right are human rights, you're on the right – but the left understands this ideology as connected to, arising from, and mobilized by the material conditions of its adherents. 

 And another:

As Corey Robin writes in The Reactionary Mind, the goal of the right is to create hierarchies in which the "best people" get to boss everyone else around. Christian Dominionists want to put men in charge of women and children; libertarians want to put bosses in charge of workers, imperialists want to put America in charge of other countries, racists want to put white people in charge of racialized people.

And a pithy diagnosis of one of the recurring strains in the culture wars:

Racism is an ideology – a terrible one – but increases and decreases in racism track to material anxieties, not better argument. Trump didn't make your uncle into an obsessive racism hobbyist with brilliant logic. He did it by linking your uncle's material anxieties to racist explanations.

My pessimism about the future based on the prospects for meaningful change for the many given the maddeningly reactionary trending of our politics as characterized most recently by events in Italy is severe.  I have spent an inordinate amount of the past 2 and a half years  in fruitless search of a successor to the project of the defeated Sanders campaign and been frustrated again and again by the chaotic state of discourse on the left.  My recent readings have not changed any of that.  But I may have found something I've been missing for the most part-- some validation that my naive belief in a better world is based on a solid foundation.  I am an island in an ocean of quicksand.  But maybe I'm that much more confident in my perception that some of these loudest most repulsive voices on the ostensible left that have been threatening to completely disillusion and dismay me for the past couple of years are not providing the alternative they profess to be; that my reluctance to hop aboard their train isn’t as much about the steadfastness of my reluctance as it is about the shoddiness of their train.  Confirmation of this arriving in snippets from beyond my horizon gives me some small hope that somewhere out there beyond the noisy demoralizing distraction, I cannot be alone in wanting better.  It's not much, but it's something.

 ~~~~~

* By this logic it's the same reaction she would have had if in the alternate reality of 2008, duly elected Vice President Sarah Palin was inaugurated as the US's first woman president following the untimely death of President John McCain in that administration's second term.

† It did have some very good advice for any movement that wants to succeed in building solidarity to accomplish its goals: Resist the temptation (so prevalent in leftist discourse in particular these days) to fight.  Discuss instead.  My suspicion is that taking this to heart is not only the biggest obstacle we have to getting the future we want, but perhaps the surest way for the left to find out who its real enemies are and who its soldiers will be in the process.

Mr. Ease

Adjourn knee ova thaw zen malls bee guinness widow seen gull steppe.

Two one two a third ass hue one half hum two one two hue.

Thee czar thee thai mazda trauma insoles.

Wide id thatch hick kin craw steer ode?  Tag ghetto diode err sighed.

Yes today, yawl mite rubbles see mud sofa raw weigh.  Nah wan kneed up laced two hied duvet. A wobble even yes today.

Ari Espy Yeezy tea. Fan outwit hit mince term he.  Awry Yes Pea Ye Seat Tee. Daycare, Deceive bee.

A vole thee jinn giants sin oldie towings zen oldie whirled, shea woks entomb mind. 

Hooey agony caw? Goose bastards!

Toe tow, Eye gouda filling weir nut tin can's ass enema or...

Icy ewer lapse moo van baud aye kent cheer watch chewer sane.

Fool farthing fife thigh farther lyes.  Office bowings czar corral maid. Doughs harp purr ills dot fur resize. North enough vim dot Darth fay dub bot hot safari see chain gent er sump enrichened stir range. Seen imps orally rink is nail.  Hawk! No eye ear dumb - Dang dawn bale.

Floe wit lye cab bat turf lye. Sot ting lye cabby.

Latch Mia sir writ ma fur ma bell leaf dot twee half nut interfere bat ferrets elf.

Ax naught watch jerk concrete Hindu fur chew.  Ax watch Yukon dew furrier con tree.

Kayyam nada crew wick.

Fuels Russian war range else fur toot red.

Eidolons sardi deaf eels plague round.

Cheeses swept.

Cog eat owe air go sue whim.  Witch mints sample lea, hath ink their four a yam.

Wickers off thaw furled you knight!  Chew cough knotting Toulouse butcher change!

Jawing Jay Cobb think I'll Hammersmith. Churn aim miss mine aim two.

Dionne lea ting verse don been tock tub out, tis snot been tock tub out.

Eat sass mall whirled, boat aye wooden warn nap pain nit.

Eye bull leave ditch chilled run awe thee few chirr.

Vadis dish sheet chew wax?  Deadeye mansion ago trite arse bullock?  

Crisis Point

We interrupt our regularly scheduled programming to bring you the following.

Work It Out

AI generated art.  I'm sorry you have to look at it.

I was reading this morning about how robots are going to be able to do my job in the future and I’m thinking “Bring it.”  I wish I could believe it was true.  They've been saying this was right around the corner for years.  Where is it? 

Obviously the advent of robots and AI heralded as The Future by those who have a ticket to it is meant to be viewed as a threat by the rest of us, but it's taken so long (and the evidence of its progress so collectively weird and monotonously underwhelming) that the thrill is gone.  Do they think they're gaslighting us?

Meanwhile, the workforce seems to be in the midst of an awakening of some kind, an aftershock of the unprecedented super-coordinated response of the managerial class to COVID two and a half years ago which restructured our work lives seemingly overnight.  As the notion of the type of work that really is essential became crystallized in our collective minds, so too was there clarity about the misfortune of the poor souls we underpay and overwork to do it for us.  As for the rest of us, there could no longer be doubt.  You didn't have to read David Graeber's book of the same title to know that 90% of us have Bullshit Jobs.*  

The exposure of the value of our jobs when things got real (and of the abuse that we who work endure whether or not what we do is essential) has had an effect.  First there was the Great Resignation in which, given the opportunity to resume office life as before as the crisis lifted, millions decided to pass.  Now there is Quiet Quitting, a social media misnomer that means merely the growing disinclination of employees to do more than what they're paid to do. Naturally this has been met with Quiet Firing by employers.  In this passive aggressive contest, my money is on the quitters.  You can’t quiet fire me,  I quiet quit.

If I sound ungrateful, it's because I am.  The computers that were supposed to replace us instead gave us ADD, which makes working on the bullshit they want us to do impossible. Forget about giving 110% and getting ahead. It’s soul-sucking enough just staying put. And we're supposed to feel bad about this?

~~~~~

* These are the jobs that reportedly take more than three words to describe, unlike say, "I farm."  "I build houses."  "I teach children."  "I deliver mail."  Bullshit jobs are low concept because they are largely meta and exist solely to support the whims and inefficiencies of modern enterprise.  In my online wanderings, I have seen Bullshit Job holders attempt to rise to the bait of internet challenges to try to justify their essentialness in a thumbnail. "I enhance value." "I meet budgets." "I oversee compliance."  Ok but what do you do?  I'll admit it. I have a Bullshit Job!  Thank you David Graeber for putting a name on it.

Four Preludes

Four Preludes by Dmitri Shostakovich, numbers 10, 15, 16 and 24 from his 24 Preludes, Op. 34, composed between 1932 and 1933.  The violinist is Leonid Kogan accompanied by Andrei Mytnik.  The performance was filmed in London, 26 March, 1962.