Status:

A rest day, spent mostly in the garden because it’s lovely out there, thinking my thoughts and wondering my… wonds.

Reading:

• What I learned about billionaires at Jeff Bezos’s private retreat 🪜 — by Noah Hawley, TV guy behind Fargo, Legion et al. “This sense of invulnerability has deep psychological ramifications. If everything is free and nothing matters, then the world and other people exist only to be acted upon, if they are acknowledged at all. This is different from classic narcissism, in which a grandiose but fragile self-image can mask deep insecurity. What I’m talking about is a self-definition in which the individual grows to the size of the universe, and the universe vanishes."
• The Landscape – On what meets you when you come forward with a sexual abuse story — Do better, fellow men.
• Inside Chornobyl: 40 years after disaster, nuclear site still at risk in Russia’s war — There are many arguments for and against nuclear power stations and “what if it finds itself on the frontline of a war” is certainly one of them.
• Jessamyn’s drop-in tech clinic — Jessamyn runs a drop-in at her library for people with tech problems and does an eye-opening accounting of it each time. It’s just a litany of problems ordinary people have with technology. Anyone working in that field should be forced to do this on a regular basis.

Conferencing:

• Kate Crawford – Mapping Empires — When I was an artist poking at AI systems in the mid 2010s Crawford was one of the people I paid attention to for a clear and concise critique of where this stuff might end up. As I drifted away from the subject I didn’t keep up with her work so when she was mentioned in Sentiers as having done a talk for the Long Now foundation I was curious. Long Now is one of those Stewart Brand-related ventures that on the surface seem really cool but which are wrapped up in all manner of libertarian Californian Ideology nonsense, so what was Kate doing there? Turns out she’s playing the role of the outside provocateur, as evidenced by the subsequent Q&A with Kevin Kelly where his west coast tech-optimism meets her New York media theory cynicism. Anyway, the talk is based around Calculating Empires: A Genealogy of Technology and Power Since 1500, an infographic artwork which tries to reframe our present moment as part of a much longer historical arc, and serves a similar purpose in reframing the AI discourse from the perspective of someone who’s been thinking about this for a very long time. I’ve had a tendency to filter out any and all AI stuff in recent years because I find its outputs fundamentally ugly and boring and the debates around it asinine, but Kate might have made the subject interesting to me again.

Music:

• B(if)tek — Kate Crawford’s electro-pop band from when she was in her 20s.

Telly:

• Star Trek: Strange New Worlds
• Big Mistakes — Fun with moments of audacity and a fab cast but didn’t quite hit the mark overall. Would like to give it four stars but I think it’s going to have to be three.