My local park on October 1st
One of my goals as set by the CFS occupational therapist is to go to a social space once a week. I’ve picked The Cloak and Dagger on Stirchley High Street as somewhere familar and quiet enough for an afternoon visit (it used to be my regular in its previous incarnation as The Wildcat) but only managed one visit this summer. Realising I was struggling, chum Roo suggested we meet there, forcing me to commit and not back out unless I absolutely had to, and so today I trundled through the park and spent a nice hour in a pub.
And it was OK. Fun even once I got there. While going to social spaces with CFS is tiring, my being homebound these last couple of years has meant the anticipation of visiting them triggers a significant amount of anxiety, and that anxiety is really exhausting. So while getting used to going out regularly won’t fix my CFS in itself, it will hopefully stop my batteries draining so quickly so I crash less often. That’s the idea anyway.
Today’s big read is Erik Davis who dives deep into the origins of the phrase All Watched Over by Machines of Loving Grace. I know it as the title of one of Adam Curtis' video essays which I don’t remember much about as it came out in 2011. I’ve been meaning to do a Curtis rewatch, now I’m older and wiser, but it’s frankly a little daunting. At least when I worked through Jonathan Meades’s filmography they were relatively bitesized. But what is recovery from chronic fatigue if not the perfect time to catch up on very long documentaries.
Anyway, while he spends a few paragraphs on Curtis (“the fascinating and frustrating documentarian”), the main focus is on Richard Brautigan’s original poem from where the phrase came and which is seemingly infused with counterculture optimism about a cybernetic hippy future. That it was most recently used by Dario Modei, one of the insufferable tech bros, to title their “AI is going to save us” manifesto is delicious to Davis who’s pretty sure Brautigan was being ironic.
Irony invites ambiguity, and it is the ambiguity of Brautigan’s poem that has allowed its meanings to slip and slide over the last half century of technological development. The irony of Amodei’s 2024 essay is, then, his utter lack of irony, something not unheard of among engineers, at least in America. (I can say that because I am the child of an excellent American engineer.) I am not talking about Amodei’s refusal to read Brautigan’s own irony, but rather his own lack of irony. When you are offering bold visions of future possibilities, irony reminds everyone, including yourself, that unintended consequences are inevitable.
As always with Davis there are some great lines (“Systems theory created a non-woo way to ‘grok’ the system as a whole — the great big spinning blue marble of it all”) and I find reading him delightful, like being in the presence of a village elder spinning a wild tale. And he injects some fascinating historical titbits, like The Communication Company, “which was basically a mimeograph machine managed by the Diggers, the anarcho-Dadaist street-theatre activists who grew out of the San Francisco Mime Troupe." I love the idea that any weirdo could bring in a sheet of their freaky nonsense and they’d run off copies free of charge to scatter around Haight Ashbury.
Moar linkage:
- Kim Deal: Live At The Barbican trailer (7:20) — I have fond memories of Kim Deal’s 2024 solo album, Nobody Loves You More, but didn’t realise she did a live performance of it with an orchestra at the Barbican — a live album is due out soon. Obviously Kim is one of my heroes but even so I found the trailer — which looks like it’s for a documentary but isn’t, much to my chagrin — utterly endearing and the glimpse of the rehearsal process fascinating.
- Why most of what we think we know about the rise of the Nazis is wrong — I think this ties in a bit with Klein and Taylor’s End Times Fascism, their premise being the far right are not the calculating geniuses they promote themselves as, but grifters taking us for fools. It’s certainly the most frustrating thing about Farage et al: beneath the grievance there’s nothing substantive there. This interview with the author of a new book about the success of the Nazi party in 1930 dismisses all the usual explanations leaving just one. “Ever since Hitler had been in the NSDAP, he had talked about one thing: executing his political opponents. And the Nazi party remained absolutely consistent in that respect. In the run-up to the 1930 vote, it didn’t talk about social policy, it didn’t talk about building the autobahn. It just had murder plots. It’s hard to admit this from a modern perspective, but historical fascism’s lust for violence didn’t make it repulsive but extremely attractive to a lot of German voters. I would not say this is something unique to German voters.
- The zero-bills home: how one family is beating the energy price hikes — The burried lede here is it costs £20,000 to install a zero-bills home, but even so this is an interesting look at how it can work.
- A good definition of the fediverse
Colophonic adminstratum:
I discovered today that this blog generates a Photos page which appears to be an archive of all posts which have an image included in them, listed using the image alone. Given the images I use with each post rarely if ever have anything to do with the subsequent topics it’s not a particularly useful navigational aid. But as an overview of the photos I’ve taken for this blog it’s kinda fun, and maybe gives a sense of what it’s like being stuck at home with chronic fatigue with only the garden to entertain me. Or maybe it’s just a lot of rabbit photos.