Author: Aaron Weber

I’m Trying

Today’s song is Trying by Bully, which has a sort of a fin de siècle riot-grrl aesthetic. You can almost feel the band tapping through their iPhones looking for the right filter to mimic a badly calibrated Super 8 camera, trying to figure out which vibes of the past to throw into the pastiche, which ones to discard.

Also about trying and also with 1990s vibes, a Slate piece that epitomizes the genre I have come to think of as “Gen-X career disillusionment personal essay.” Obviously this is a generalization so broad as to be nearly meaningless, but these pieces all do seem to follow a pattern, and represent a specific strain of thought and style from people who are roughly my age. The authors are mostly (but not entirely) white men, and they’ve all obviously read Denis Johnson and Douglas Coupland at a formative age. The pieces generally run to a few thousand words: too long for print, too long for 21st century attention spans, perfect for what the authors probably feel was the best era of internet writing.

A typical example is heavy on cynical participation in corporate life. It’s almost always got some vague reference to bad behavior and low places that somehow still manages to provide too much embarrassing information. In this case we find it in the first paragraph: “…in the Johnson County, Iowa, jail, where I spent July 4 and 5 some years ago for reasons I’d rather not go into…”

In the past five or ten years, the Gen-X personal essay has also added a mandatory acknowledgement that its cynicism is passé. It pauses to note that nobody says “sellout” anymore, to remind contemporary readers that the author’s quaint career-related ambivalence and inner turmoil are coming from the era of the payphone and the rented VHS tape.

Critically, such an essay builds up to a conclusion that is well-styled, evocative, and, if you think about it, somewhere between obvious and pointless. Oh, the author has definitely done a great deal of introspection, and I’m sure there’s some personal growth in the writing of this essay, or in the therapy that made the introspection possible, but at the end of it, has the reader gained any insights? Is the reader any richer after what is, in essence, a short description of the sales and persuasion business in three of its least prestigious forms: jailhouse raconteur, telemarketer, and panhandler?

Gosh, are you telling me that sales is a dirty business? That people doing white collar jobs aren’t actually any better than people doing blue-collar work? That seamy and depressing soul-sucking labor and dead-end jobs can happen at any point on the economic spectrum? A truly novel insight. Arthur Miller couldn’t have done better with a smile and a shoeshine and a dead dream.

The narrator of all of these essays is almost always an example of elite overproduction, or at least someone with a degree working a job that they feel is beneath their dignity. It helps if they’re self-aware enough to realize that they’re being both pretentious and classist to look down upon their job rather than just find it irritating. Was the first of these groundbreaking, or was it already a cliche when it was printed?

And yet, as much as I mock them, these sorts of essays hit me right in the gut, because how do you persuade yourself to care enough about something to do it well, without caring so much that you tear yourself apart when things go wrong, or when you have to admit that it’s not, in the grand scheme of things, very important?

To really fall right into it: sometimes this genre feels especially relevant to my work life right now, and it makes me feel uncomfortable. Yes, we all know that being an adult in the working world is occasionally alienating. It’s a job. I get up every day and do it. It’s fine. I don’t want to discount the fact that it’s actually a good job, and many parts of it are also important, and helpful, and worthy. I’m proud to have written a flyer about addiction treatment that can be read and understood by someone who is too ashamed to even pick it up. I’m proud to have been able to explain antiretroviral HIV medications in a way that’s legible to people with only marginal English skills. That’s pretty good work. And I work with kind and thoughtful and collaborative people.

But some of my days could easily be the fodder for any number of these depressing cliches about corporate life. For example, I’ve been working on a project to change a corporate tagline from “funded in part” to “brought to you” in the footers of approximately 2,000 health insurance documents. It’s frustrating, and tedious, and it’s a reminder that I’m just a cog in a giant machine. Especially haunting this month are the constant reminders that the particular machine I’m working for is so widely reviled that a lot of folks were pretty happy to see one of its leaders gunned down in the street. (Following the murder, the headline insurers limit coverage of prosthetic limbs, questioning their necessity is a little too on the nose, you know?)

But as I said, cynicism about one’s career is mostly an outdated and embarrassing cliché at this point. So what if I work for an industry everyone hates? It’s a job. It’s fine.

Nailed It

Did I get that formula right? Let’s play that song back and run the checklist:

  • Contains one or two very specific details that don’t quite make up for how vague the rest is.
  • Acknowledges that nobody’s really too good for any job; still oozes pretentious disdain for this particular job in question.
  • Notes that generalizations are inaccurate; still makes broad generalizations.
  • Admits that it’s coming from an outdated worldview; does nothing to actually change said view.
  • Throws in something heavy or shocking at the close to distract from the fact that the entire piece can be summarized as “having a job can be a grind sometimes.”

Yep.

News

Good news: BBC roundup of some climate & nature breakthroughs in the past year.

Bad news: Guardian profile of Curtis “Mencius Moldbug” Yarvin, a neoreactionary influencer whose ideas form most of the intellectual framework (such as it is) of contemporary fascism.

Joy

New favorite subreddit: /r/meow_IRL, featuring cats with expressions that match how you feel when you don’t exactly feel your best. It’s got some great ones.

Whatever the hell this dog is doing.

Negativity in the Time of Poptimism

I’ve been mulling over the rise of respect for pop and popular genres for some time now. Citation needed, but roll with me here: romance fiction always had plenty of readership, but now dedicated romance bookstores are popping up, sales are booming even more than they used to, and the genre has respect it didn’t have before. Critics used to deride pop music and bands used to hate the idea of selling out, but now a “just let people enjoy things” sort of vibe is dominant in most media sectors.

Instead of the grim-dark themes of prestige cable TV like The Sopranos and The Wire we’ve got well-made, well-written family-friendly entertainment like Abbott Elementary, shows that treat the 22-minute situation comedy as a legitimate format and produce things that are, frankly, nice. And of course there’s reality TV, once the domain of mean judges crushing dreams and today the domain of Bakeoff. Even the profanity-filled Netflix rap contest Rhythm & Flow features judges Latto, DJ Khaled, and Ludacris reassuring the losing contestants they’ve got what it takes, and to keep working on their craft.

Feel-good feels good.

But there are exceptions, and worthy ones. One I ran into recently is from Christopher Buehlman, a horror novelist who dipped his toe into the fun side of the pool with The Blacktongue Thief, a frankly hilarious tale that could have been nothing but cliche (a mage, a knight, and a rogue walk into a tavern, seeking adventure…) and managed to be brilliant. The title character has a sense of humor that reminds you why they call a rogue “roguish,” and once I finished that book I went and read some of Buehlman’s other books.

They were not funny, although there were moments of laughter in the one about the necromancer with a drinking problem. And for a follow-up to Thief, Buehlman narrates the tale of the knight in his latest book, The Daughters’ War. This one is a sort of return to form for him: she’s grave where the thief was funny. In fact, she’s deadpan even when all the other soldiers are laughing or joking or whoring.

Buehlman manages to write the narrator as someone who speaks excellent English, but whose first language is not English; she’s betrayed only by a handful of uniquely slanted phrases, like “it is not for laughing.” But the phrasing doesn’t detract from the tale she tells, of a kingdom that’s lost its knights to invaders, then its farmers, and will now send its daughters off to be mowed down in war as well. He manages to bring us a fully realized narrator who has loved and lost, and lost badly. As someone traumatized, haunted by what she’s seen and done. Someone who will do whatever it takes to do the right thing.

It isn’t funny. It will not get called “rollicking” like the prior book did. But it’s brilliant, too.

And Also

There’s room for cruelty and disdain in literary criticism as well. I do not miss the days of the guilty-pleasure hatchet jobs from the likes of Dale Peck. But there’s still room for a burn in today’s literary environment, like this well-deserved, scathing review of the latest from Jordan Peterson:

The last time I reviewed a book by Jordan Peterson, a cleverly edited excerpt of my negative opinion (I described it as “bonkers”) appeared on the cover of the paperback edition, giving readers the misleading impression that I had endorsed it. So this time I shall have to be clear. The new book is unreadable. Repetitive, rambling, hectoring and mad, We Who Wrestle with God repels the reader’s attention at the level of the page, the paragraph and the sentence. Sometimes even at the level of the word.

Or perhaps this one:

The aesthetics of intellectualism, unaccompanied by the rigors of actual thinking, are on display on every page of “We Who Wrestle With God.” … At the level of the sentence, “We Who Wrestle With God” is probably the most unendurable book I have ever suffered through. But its unreadability is the point: Density passes for sophistication, and verbosity conceals vapidity.

Aaaah, that’s the stuff.

And Elsewhere

Utah is an epicenter for crooked adoption agencies. Truly bleak.

Brief introduction to the new right, a sort of glossary of the different factions of horrible people gloating about their ascendant power in the next four years.

52 Things I Learned in 2024.

Is it actually worse?

Declinism is a generalized tendency to believe that things are getting worse over time.

For example, in July 2023, The Atlantic published a short piece about how America’s obsession with long hours is destroying churchgoing, which frays interpersonal ties, which disrupts communities, which, give-a-mouse-a-cookie style, will probably destroy America or something. But we’ve heard that song before (remember Bowling Alone?) We’ve been hearing it since 1929 at least. We’ve been hearing that Boston isn’t what it used to be since Ben Franklin complained that the taverns were better before independence. We’ve been hearing that Kids These Days Are Lazy since ancient Greeks lamented youth were just writing things down instead of memorizing the great epics. But of course, while churchgoing is on the downswing, other forms of involvement are up. We’re not bowling in formal leagues anymore, but Strava users know each other well enough.

But as much as that pessimism was misplaced last time, we always worry. We ask ourselves, well, are things getting worse this time? Are we working too much? Is the latest social media or structural change or trend fraying our communities?

The latest buzzwords in my feeds are polyworking and overemployment, and although the you must work very hard all the time doing as many things as possible theme isn’t new, it’s certainly showing its face in a new style.

Some people, of course, love the whole thing, laughing all the way to the dual-income-one-person bank. There are anecdotes of clever software engineers pulling in two or even three six-figure salaries at once. And why shouldn’t they? Your bosses pay you as little as possible for the most work they can squeeze out of you. Why shouldn’t you work as little as possible for the most money you can squeeze out of them?

When the Teamsters do it, it’s a punchline, but that punchline is basically just clever PR by Pinkertons and their ilk. “Labor unions = lazy workers” is one of the most successful, most malevolent memes in America, even more than auto companies inventing the concept of jaywalking to reserve public streets for their customers rather than the general public.

Substacker Kyle Fitzpatrick sketches out the trend as he sees it today:

In the 2000s, when I first started working, you could just have one job and survive. In the 2010s, you could have one job and a fun, goal-related little something on the side that you hoped became the thing. Now? You have a job and a side-hustle but also another job and none of those ladder into your goals so you still have to keep doing them all despite none of them really being fulfilling. Did I mention you’re doing this while freelance, without set health care or other corporate amenities like holidays?

Anyone in this position knows this isn’t anything new, just that the noise… is getting louder.

The concern here is that creative workers in particular find themselves needing to both do their jobs and spend a great deal of time and energy becoming, essentially, professional influencers selling themselves. It’s not merely enough to be good at something, in other words, you also have to be good at marketing yourself for it.

And to a certain extent I feel that thrum of anxiety myself. I’ve got my main freelance assignment (no benefits, no PTO, but flexible) plus my two or three side hustles, plus my volunteering and my unpaid writing. All of that is both work and a sort of meta-work: marketing and managing my reputation for being good at this sort of intellectual work. And there’s an awful lot of it. An overwhelming amount of it, sometimes.

On the other hand, it’s worth remembering that mandatory polywork may be a new trend for white-collar workers like Kyle and me, but it isn’t at all new for others. And more importantly, being good at something, whether that’s being a village blacksmith or a leading subject matter expert, has always been subtly different from being known to be good at it, and successful people have always had to be both. It’s always been necessary be both good and known to be good, to be both just and seen to be just.

I catch myself doom-mongering about this a lot, I’m afraid, and have to force myself to take a step back. I have to remember I’ve got it way easier than most people in America today, that most people in America today have it way easier than the rest of the world, and that the rest of the world has it way easier than they did fifty or a hundred years ago. I don’t risk being maimed by my job, I don’t get forced to do unpaid overtime, I don’t even commute. I’ve been unemployed and under-employed, and the situation I’m in is far, far better. Hell, it’s far better than certain full-employee I’m-a-real-boy jobs I’ve had. I chose this. I continue to choose it.

I wouldn’t necessarily advocate that everyone choose this multiple-hustles life, and making it mandatory for everyone would be truly horrific. But it’s working for me, for now. I know I’ve got it pretty good, is what I’m saying.

Or at least, it could always get worse.

Joy

Privilege and perspective

I haven’t yet succumbed to fear and loathing, and I’m not going to talk much about, you know, the events of earlier this month. Other people are more informed on the topic and have more actionable messages than I do. And I don’t intend to turn this blog/newsletter into a running commentary on all the bullshit that’s about to come out of Washington. But this week’s song is You Were Right, by Built to Spill.

I like the way it more or less lists out a series of rock cliches — you were right when you said all we are is dust in the wind, you were right when you said we’re running against the wind, you were right when you said it’s a hard rain gonna fall… and then really runs it down with the chorus of you were wrong when you said everything’s gonna be all right.

Will things eventually be all right? Well, giving up now certainly isn’t going to help, that’s for sure. And folks like me will probably be fine, which means we’ve got the opportunity to use that power and privilege to help folks who need it more than us.

So let’s not give up. Not yet.

On Travel

I had the incredible opportunity to spend all of October in Europe, and in addition to enjoying it and relaxing and having some incredible food, I had some complicated emotions about it. About the level of conspicuous consumption involved in a lengthy vacation, about Instagramming my travels, about telling people I met what I was up to, about choosing museums and exhibits and neighborhoods and afternoons window-shopping. I’ve written and deleted six different versions of this post, but really, if you have a minute or three, go read the post Taste Games, from Dynomight.

Something about how people talk about travel has long made me uneasy. After all, travel is expensive. No one in my circles would dream of going to a party and showing off their new Rolex. But somehow, travel is this unusual form of conspicuous consumption that isn’t subject to conspicuous consumption taboos. Why?

Basically, travel, and shopping, and the display of cultural and economic capital involved in a luxurious vacation, makes me hyper-aware of things that I don’t normally have to think about. And it feels like work.

Obviously this says more about me than about the nature of society or of taste.

Can’t you just relax on vacation, Aaron? No, of course not, because it feels like I’ve lit a rocket fueled by enormous amounts of compressed time and money, and it is disorienting to watch that fuel burn, and I feel a neurotic need to understand why I react like that.

Recommended Reading

Today’s job market: “I applied to 2,483 roles using AI.”

China cracks down on metaphors, puns, and homophones.

City on Fire: a history of NYC arson attacks during the civil war.

Totally what I’ve been saying all along, definitely agree with this, obviously.

Bad news about the climate, again.

Having navigated traffic recently in both Berlin and Rome, I feel keenly that anarchic flexibility is both a benefit and a curse. A visitor to India has a similar conclusion: “Life in India is a series of bilateral negotiations.”

Joy

Film-Shaped Object

As befits my age and station, I’ve spent the past few weeks in a rabbit-hole of road cycling. I haven’t yet got all the kit to go full MAMIL (Middle-Aged Man in Lycra), but I’m on my way to mastering the jargon. I’m learning about the merits of carbon and aluminum frames, Shimano and SRAM groupsets, and different styles of stems and dropouts. I have spent hours shopping for the right clothes and considering the merits of various app subscriptions.

And critically, I’ve learned the snob’s term for low quality products: bike-shaped object, a thing with wheels and a seat that isn’t truly fit for riding.

The term draws the distinction between good and bad products, of course, but most importantly, it draws the distinction between the speaker as an expert and the masses who don’t know any better. Someone who talks about a “bike-shaped object” is also saying this guy (it’s usually a guy) knows what he’s talking about.

Every subculture and area of expertise seems to have a term like this, an insult that establishes the speaker’s insider knowledge and status. Wine connoisseurs reject plonk or, if they’re especially distinguished, disparage the international style (too sweet, don’t you know). Weed connoisseurs won’t bother smoking schwag or boof or mids, and car and motorcycle lovers obviously have endless disparaging ways to refer to rival marques and styles (except perhaps Mustang fans, who don’t know any better, bless their hearts).

Bike-shaped object resonates with me because the formulation really works for so many other domains. For example, even though I’m not a film expert by any means, I recently encountered something I immediately recognized as a film-shaped object: Borderlands, horror director Eli Roth’s PG-rated adaptation of the ultraviolent video game.

Just like a bike-shaped object, Borderlands has all the pieces of a film but somehow fails to work as one. It’s got actors, including Cate Blanchett, Gina Gershon, and Jamie Lee Curtis. It’s got a hero’s journey, a cast of characters each with their own flaws and strengths, some character development, a bit of pathos, and of course some comic relief courtesy of Kevin Hart and Jack Black. It’s got special effects and a marketing budget and an established intellectual property tie-in.

And it’s unrelentingly, irredeemably terrible. We kept watching simply to see how much lower it could go. Perhaps it will be a cautionary tale for film school students, or a cult classic. But it is, undoubtedly, a film-shaped object rather than a real film. There’s only one reason to avoid calling it that: it’s so obviously bad that even non-experts like me can tell it’s a disaster. And if you can’t use your disdain to be exclusive and special, what’s even the point?

Outrage

I am yet again glad we stopped paying for the New York Times, as their pursuit of false equivalence leads them to try to compare “housing policies.” On the one hand, you see, is the Democratic party policy of housing construction and homeownership. They contrast that with the totally legitimate Republican party “housing policy” of militarized deportations of people with brown skin.

(Oh, sure, just undocumented immigrants, right? No note of how as many as one percent of all people in ICE custody are actually citizens? Gosh, who would ever have thought that an anti-voting policy that makes it harder to get citizenship documents might also harm citizens?)

Joy

Blame it on the dog.

There is no way you could get me to do this with a tiger, no matter how friendly.

Dead internet: Bots all the way down

A few years ago, I got a short freelance gig writing copy for an internet services company. My assignment was to write explanations of the company’s services that met the needs of two audiences. The first audience, of course, was the people who might buy the company’s services. The more important one, however, was search crawlers that would rank this company’s pages higher or lower than competing providers of identical services. My company’s unique selling proposition, in other words, was its search engine optimization, courtesy of yours truly. I think they paid me something like fifty bucks a page. I may have been the last American to do that job before it was offshored, but I’m sure that’s no longer the province of human workers. At least, not directly: whatever machine churning out replacement garbage was almost certainly trained by ingesting what I wrote, along with everything everyone else wrote everywhere.

Including, of course, AI-generated garbage. What happens when AI models train on the slop generated by other AI models? What happens when AI-generated copy is written to tickle the algorithms of AI-generated readers who then summarize it back to their human overlords?

We’re already seeing the impacts. For example, if you’re in any way attuned to pop culture, you’ll have heard a few weeks ago that someone did a spectacularly bad job in the Olympic breakdancing competition.

Perhaps, like me, you tried to look up the video of the dance to see what the big deal was. When I did, I found dozens of videos featuring the same still photo of the dancer, each with slightly different AI-generated voices repeating slightly different AI-generated summaries of public reactions to the event.

None of them provided any insight, or novelty, and none of them showed me the actual dance in question. The story was ubiquitous but also simultaneously illegible. I knew the outline and there was no depth available. It was just AI-generated slop pitched to the algorithm in the hopes of being at the top of the list, garnering a click, and getting someone to watch just enough seconds of garbage to trigger a fractional ad payout.

Meanwhile, Amazon is full of AI-written books, including mushroom foraging guides that suggest poisonous mushrooms are safe to eat, while Spotify is failing to address AI fakes overtaking actual human musicians. (Yes, we all knew it would start with synthwave and smooth jazz, but it’s sliding into real music as well).

It’s bots all the way down.

News

It’s 2024 and Drought is Optional: Cheap solar power could bring us to cheap mass desalination. One key factor: the waste brine is rich in valuable minerals.

Infiltrating the Far Right: Is this good or bad news? I’m honestly not sure. It’s interesting, anyway.

Police Are Killing More Americans than Ever: The Economist covers American policing, which remains unreformed and unrepentant.

Why I Left the Network: Pro Publica covers the misery of being a therapist subject to in-network payment programs. TLDR: One way insurance companies reduce spending on mental health treatment is making it hard to access, and one way they make it hard to access is making it hard to provide, so providers drop out.

Right on Red: Republicans in Congress are blocking traffic safety initiatives in Washington DC. Why? It’s not just that DC trends liberal and Republicans reflexively oppose its initiatives. It’s because street safety improvements often present minor inconveniences for people in cars, and Republicans in Congress regard the convenience of suburban commuters as more important than the lives of actual district residents.

Quick summaries of books endorsed by JD Vance: Dawn’s Early Light, by Heritage Foundation president Kevin Roberts, and Unhumans, by the truly vile Jack Posobiec. The upshot is he’s endorsing truly extreme proponents of right-wing political violence. (And yes, I am linking to a Times piece by Michelle Goldberg. When even the NYT Hot Take Machine thinks you’re out of bounds, you’re way out of bounds).

Joy

Double catch

Everything is Interpolated (remix feat. Shaboozey & J-Kwon)

Music

Today’s song is “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” by Shaboozey, which seems to be perfectly of its moment, for a couple of reasons aside from the fact that it’s yet another track about how binge drinking is hilarious. First, it includes an interpolation of J-Kwon’s 2004 ode to underage drinking, Tipsy. That song, in turn, samples Queen and The D.O.C, and, well, you get the idea, The Vibes are Endlessly Remixable. Second, it’s a country song by a Black artist. The moment for Black country has been building since 2018’s Old Town Road hit #19 on the country charts before being disqualified for being too, well, you know. Today, though, Shaboozey is the first Black male artist to hit #1 on the Hot Country charts. Because the prior Hot Country #1 was Beyonce’s “Texas Hold ‘Em,” this is also the first time the #1 country spot has been held by two Black artists consecutively.

Reading

Today’s book is The Saint of Bright Doors, a novel that, despite winning the 2023 Nebula, doesn’t fit neatly into any one genre. Sure, there are supernatural elements — demons described as “invisible laws and powers.” These demons are literal invisible monsters, but also the unspoken forces that bind the oppressed and protect the powerful — the inconsistent enforcement of laws; the never-ending classifications and reclassifications of class and race and caste; the unspoken and occasionally impossible expectations parents have for their children. It’s about a boy with supernatural powers, but it’s also about the Sri Lankan civil war, Theravada Buddhism, colonialism, and the formation of our consensus reality. The protagonist has been raised by his mother as an assassin to bring down his estranged father, a spiritual leader known as The Perfect and Kind. When he abandons this destiny to live on his own, he joins a support group for cast-off near-prophets, and is sucked into subversive politics and becomes a spy infiltrating a thaumaturgical research group. When riots and plague break out in the city, he’s forced once again to confront, and possibly avoid, all of his possible murderous destinies. It’s one of the very few “genre” books I’ve recommended to my mother, and it’s brilliant enough that when I finished reading it, I immediately started over and read it again.

Elsewhere

The Food that Makes You Gay: Jaya Saxena explores the intersection of homophobia and sexism and food, starting with Fox News personalities alleging that eating ice cream or soup makes a man effeminate.

The Uninsurable World: The Financial Times explores the ways the insurance industry can’t quite keep up with climate change.

The Shamans and the Chieftan: Alito, the rule of law, irrational political action and identity.

Why doesn’t Oklahoma City have a network of cooling centers for heat waves?

Hamilton Nolan covers the Texas Republican Platform.

Anil Dash: The purpose of a system is what it does.

Ruby Tandoh in the New Yorker: The Maillard Over-Reaction: Have we reached peak browning?

The Baffler takes on The Insulin Empire.

Joy

This very pretentious dog.

This dog wants to check his email for a sec.

Dog observing from inside a tent.

Imagine that you’re wrong

Last month, the New Yorker published a piece by Leslie Jamison about gaslighting, that phenomenon where an abuser manages to convince their victim they’re just imagining things. The term is ubiquitous online, to the point of diluting its meaning, but it’s still useful. It’s especially relevant now that we all suspect we’re being deceived constantly — whether it’s news media, or AI, or spam, or identity theft, or fraud, or literally any interaction whatsoever. And of course it’s a form of abuse that works directly against the key human instincts of trusting and respecting others, and considering that we might be wrong. To live in a society, we must make ourselves vulnerable to being misled, to being abused. How can we consider that we might be wrong, without letting someone else convince us that we’re wrong? How do we know what parts of reality are real, what are made up, what are merely distortions of our perception?

I’ve read two novels recently that grapple with that question in completely different ways. The first is Matt Ward’s 2006 Blindsight, a hard sci-fi tale which goes deep into the sort of truly weird philosophical questions that bedevil undergraduates late at night.

“Imagine that you’re Siri Keaton,” narrator Siri Keaton asks us. Imagine that due to neurosurgery and abuse in childhood, you have no endogenous emotions, and have had to simulate appropriate human behavior your whole life. That, alongside a ton of cybernetic augmentations, has made you an excellent analyst of human and AI behavior. It’s also destroyed all your relationships, because you can’t stop thinking of things like “love” and “sincerity” as evolutionary strategies. You, a few other heavily-augmented humans, and an AI captain are assigned to explore an alien presence in the Kuiper belt.

The aliens seem to be able to speak, but the linguist on board concludes they’re not capable of understanding; they’re a sort of Chinese room that receives and sends signals without any comprehension. Talking to them is like holding a conversation with ChatGPT: it’s confident, it sounds like meaning, but it’s meaningless.

The aliens are accompanied by ridiculously high levels of radiation and magnetic interference, which distort human perceptions. In their presence, crew members cycle through an entire Oliver Sacks book of neurological symptoms: one crew member becomes briefly convinced they’re dead; another feels the presence of God, and so on. That’s where the blindsight of the title comes in — a character is temporarily convinced they’ve gone blind, but can still guess where things are, because they’ve lost conscious awareness of their perfectly functional eyeballs and optic nerves.

After capturing a few of them, the humans determine that the aliens don’t have any sort of consciousness at all. They’re a fantastically advanced interstellar presence, but don’t waste any of their evolutionary capacity on thinking. It’s not at all like the AI captain, because our AI is conscious, isn’t it? And we are conscious as well. Of course. We’re not zombies. We have feelings and self-awareness. Sort of. Most of us, most of the time. Aren’t we?

Eventually, hostilities break out, and everyone except the narrator dies. He’s trapped in stasis in an escape pod, awakened periodically for maintenance, years from Earth, which is dying anyway. Consciousness, in other words, is an evolutionary dead end, as is humanity itself. There is no moral to the story.

Some Desperate Glory, by Emily Tesh, is much more hopeful, although still incredibly disturbing. Instead of imagining that you’re a functional sociopath, Tesh asks you to imagine that you’re one of the last humans to survive a war against an impossibly powerful alien alliance that destroyed the earth. You’ve been raised since birth to be the best cadet in your cohort, a true patriot ready to fight for humanity from a small outpost in a neglected star system. You know better than to waste recreation time on games, and you always push the squad to do their best. You revere your older brother and the outpost leader, and won’t make the mistakes of your sister, who betrayed the station and went to live as a collaborator with the aliens who control the rest of the galaxy. You’re going to be an ace pilot and a hero.

You are assigned to be a broodmare, to pump out children. Your only value to the outpost is your uterus. Your squad has always hated you because you’re such an asshole to them. Your brother is suicidal and you never noticed because you imagined he’d be happy with his high test scores. Your sister defected because the station commander groomed and raped her, and he’s got similar plans for you. The war is long over, and most humans now live perfectly well on a new planet, in alliance with the aliens. The heroic destiny you had imagined would actually be a futile attempt at genocide. You launch a long-shot effort to fix everything, and trillions die.

Tesh uses simulations and alternate universes to give the protagonist second and third chances: if Earth had been saved, she’d be a cadet in the triumphant human fleet, happy and well-nourished. But she’d still be under the command of the same abusive man, now an admiral, preparing to take control of incomprehensible power for his own ends. If Earth had still been destroyed, but she identified the abuse she’s experienced sooner, she could overthrow the commander and reunite the outpost denizens with to the rest of humanity. There’s an almost disappointing deus ex machina right at the end that saves the protagonist from having to make good on a noble sacrifice for the good of the galaxy, but overall it’s a beautifully told tale about the importance of found family and empathy, and about abuses of power.

Elsewhere

Whale on toast: Sure, we remember that we saved the whales. But did you know what whale oil was actually used for in the late 20th century? Probably not.

Staircases rule everything around me: An explanation for why American residential architecture looks the way it does, and a way to improve it with a tweak to the building code.

Joy

When I have nothing to say, my lips are sealed

Earlier this month, Hamilton Nolan came out with a truly excellent analysis of the phenomenon of overpaid, under-talented columnists. Alongside a review of my older posts, it confirmed my belief that I shouldn’t write this newsletter unless I had something I needed to say. (Hence, of course, the subject line of this message, which you surely don’t need to have explained to you.)

As he describes it, “Most columnists are mediocre. This is not their fault. Almost no one on earth is capable of having two good ideas per week. (I say this as someone who writes at least twice a week.)”

But why, he wonders, would a venue such as the New York Times have so many mediocre columnists? A Times column is, after all, probably one of the best jobs in writing, so even if most columnists are not very good, the Times could find truly excellent ones. But they do not.

I want to quote him at length here, because what he’s saying is insightful, and sharp, and hilarious:

The existence of these uninspired and uninspiring people occupying the very best jobs in their industry is evidence of the limits of the ideals that liberal society purports to value. Sure, the institutions of journalism name truth and enlightenment and justice and equality as their goals, but the unspoken qualification, “within the pool of people who went to, at least, Brown,” is every bit as important as the more noble part that is spoken louder. There is no reason for there to be even one shitty New York Times columnist. They can hire anybody they want. Anybody. The existence of shitty New York Times columnists, therefore, is an unimportant thing that reveals some important things about the myths of meritocracy. The most self-assured liberal institutions are in some ways more profoundly corrupt than some of the more raffish institutions that they look down on. I mean, the NFL is one of sickest symbols of America’s barely subdued imperial impulses, but you don’t see a guy playing nose tackle on the New York Giants because he was the owner’s kid’s college roommate at Yale. Can the New York Times say the same?

Short-form

Long-form

I’ve been reading sci-fi and fantasy by Ann Leckie, and both her sci-fi (starting with 2014 Hugo winner Ancillary Justice) and fantasy (2019’s The Raven Tower) take enormous structural risks that pay off beautifully.

Ancillary Justice features a narrator who isn’t quite human, and may or may not count as a person, or as a civilized person. The plot — interstellar machinations, political wrangling, epic quest for revenge — manages to dance along merrily as it makes us think about the nature of gender, of self, of humanity, of how a society perpetuates and defines itself, of what happens when it that definition needs to change.

The Raven Tower alternates chapters narrated in the first and second person. It’s not immediately obvious that it’s the same narrator in both cases, nor that this narrator is, in fact, a pagan god embodied in a boulder stuck in a castle subbasement. Until the very end it’s not clear that all the human characters are, in essence, pawns in its plans. How is this a setup for a good story? I don’t know, but it works.

Cute

Dog spots its dog-walker out of context.

Gang of illegally small kittens.

Good Enough to Do Bad Work

404 Media recently did a report on the use of AI-generated images as food illustrations on DoorDash and other food delivery services. InstaCart has also been making algorithmically suggested recipe suggestions with uncanny illustrations. The restaurants most likely to use fake pictures of fake food seem to be ghost kitchens — restaurants that exist only as a brand on a delivery site, operating out of the back of a different restaurant. There are more than a few in my city, like “Send Noods,” a delivery-only joint run from the kitchen of a Korean sushi place. (It sends noodles. Get it?)

Their judgement:

This is all incredibly depressing. A local pizzeria can’t get by unless it makes sandwiches for ghost kitchen brands, the people who make a living taking photographs of food are being displaced by AI tools, and gigantic food delivery apps are still making money by taking a cut from restaurants and screwing over gig delivery drivers.

It’s not good, it’s not accurate, but it’s good enough to be a vague illustration, good enough for a glance if you don’t look closely, if you’re not counting on the product you buy to match the picture on the menu. And who is? We all know food photography is fake anyway. This is just faker and cheaper, just like shitty fast fashion gets you an outfit that’s half as good for a third of the price, and it works OK as long as you don’t think too hard about the pollution, the exploitative labor practices, the millions of coal-fired GPUs churning away to produce the gray goo that passes for “content” these days.

More Bad News

In Oklahoma, where anti-trans and anti-gay rhetoric and laws have been among the most aggressively poisonous, a 10th grader named Nex Benedict has died. One day they were fine. The next day, they were beaten into unconsciousness for not dressing the right way. The day after that, they were dead. Everyone’s in full coverup mode. Coverage from Slate and The Cut has some disagreement about details, but both sources agree that the full story won’t be known for some time, if ever. What does it mean? What kinds of behavior are allowed and tolerated and encouraged at every level to produce a situation where a fifteen year old is dead after a fight in a high school bathroom? Just another pointless death that folks like Chaya Raichik claim they didn’t intend to inspire.

Meanwhile:

Good News/Bad Opinions

In Hoboken, New Jersey, adjustments to traffic enforcement and parking have resulted in a remarkable record: no traffic deaths on city-controlled streets in seven years. The major changes were narrowing intersections to slow traffic, and “daylighting,” or preventing cars from parking right next to a corner, which improves visibility. Noted conservative intellectual Jordan Peterson responded to AP News coverage of this milestone on Twitter with outrage:

Two Excellent Pieces of Film Criticism

An exploration of Dune Part Two, and the ways in which it both subverts and supports the Chosen Hero narrative, which it gives the rather unfortunate but not entirely inaccurate nickname magic dick theory:

In Dune, though? It’s all a con. There is no benevolent higher power.

The connection between patrilineal inheritance, male heterosexuality, and just governance is not a fact of nature; it’s a convenient fiction. The prophecy that makes the Fremen accept Paul as the savior figure… was planted in Fremen culture generations ago… It’s a plainly imperialist fiction designed to exploit an indigenous population, and it works.

A very good meditation on the 1989 film Do The Right Thing, art criticism, and the kinds of violence that make us feel safe:

I think the reaction to Do the Right Thing revealed that the burning of a white-owned pizzeria and a fight over inclusion represented violence that scared white audiences, while a persistent police presence in a Black neighborhood that might at any moment turn into the murder of a resident of that neighborhood did not represent violence that made white people feel scared. It might have even been the sort of violence that made many white people feel safe. In fact, most of the talk by mostly white pundits and audiences didn’t even seem to acknowledge the act of policing on Black neighborhoods to be violence at all.

Like I said, sometimes when people talk about art, the art starts talking about them.

Joy

The old-school comic strip Nancy has been running since the 1930s, but has had something of a resurgence since the latest artist, Olivia Jaimes, took the helm in 2018. Two recent gems: one about the transcendence of art, and pondering the eternal question “is that all there is?”

Also: