"... proudly claiming their robot monikers in their bios and having no shame about posting in Hong Kong at 3 p.m. and in New York an hour later. In fact, the teams behind them feel the lack of a corporeal form may be their best selling point. 'From a brand perspective, we are able to create a very dynamic story line,' Ms. Kahn said. 'So Miquela can be, for example, in London one day supporting an art gallery opening, and in L.A. the same day to support a new coffee shop that she really likes, right? I think brands love that she can be anywhere... I think the next generation isn’t really thinking as much about is this person real or not?... It’s more about: 'What does this account stand for?'"
3. What's the difference between A.I. "influencers" like Miquela and old-time ad mascots like Tony the Tiger and the Trix rabbit?
4. You know who else can be in Hong Kong and then in New York an hour later? Santa Claus. Kids have accepted his dictates as long as I can remember. At least Miquela isn't demanding that we be "good" and threatening us with a list. Or is it only a matter of time?
6. Maybe she and her ilk are saving us all from the trouble of striving to excel at fakeness. We're free at last. Now, what?
7. What if the people you met in real life were like Miquela, putting their plastic cup on their head and affecting an expression of inane ecstasy? And maybe they already are... and have been for a long time. I went running to find this passage from "My Dinner With André," a movie that came out more than 40 years ago:
... I turned the television on, and there was this guy who had just won the something something, you know, some sports event, some kind of a great big check and some kind of huge silver bottle, and he, you know, you know, he couldn’t stuff the check in the bottle, and he put the bottle in front of his nose and pretended it was his face, you know, he wasn’t really listening to the guy who was interviewing him, but he was smiling, huh, malevolently at his friends, and I looked at that guy and I thought “What a horrible, empty, manipulative rat.” Then I thought, “That guy is me.”
8. Writing #7 — "What if the people you met" — made me think of an old song that I gradually realized was "Who Are the Brain Police?"
1. "'Authenticity' can be the goal only of the inauthentic. Only those removed and fool enough to think they can get over on actual people by imposture try to 'project' authenticity, which can mean only 'to lie in a way someone you paid told you would be effective.'" — David Mamet in "Back When We Gave a Fuck" (Free Press)(and thanks to tcrosse in last night's open thread for bringing that quote to my attention and prompting this authenticity watch).
3. "Why 4?," asks Meade. "Why do you need 4 items to make it solid?" He's reacting to the notice I had here before, that I would need 4 "authenticity" items to make "a solid 'Authenticity' Watch post." He challenges: "Why not 3? Wouldn't 3 be solid?" Me: "Mmm... semi-solid."
4. [TO COME, AT LEAST IF THIS IS TO BECOME A SOLID AND NOT MERELY SEMI-SOLID "AUTHENTICITY" WATCH. I NOTE THAT THE LAST "AUTHENTICITY" WATCH 2 DAYS AGO WAS ONLY SEMI-SOLID.]
That's the question I asked Grok after having listened to Elon Musk talking with Trump for 2 hours and then beginning to engage with this new Joe Rogan conversation with Peter Thiel:
I said "You could turn those 7 things into 3 things. Restate everything in 3 points" and it gave me this 3-point list:
Brain Overload: Their minds are too busy solving complex problems to prioritize smooth speech. It's like their CPU is always at 100% capacity.
Social Skills Rust: Spending more time with machines than humans means their conversational skills might be a bit... out of date. They're fluent in code, not small talk.
Overthinking & Literalism: They might overthink every word or take language too literally, turning a simple chat into a computational challenge.
That pretty much perfectly compressed the 7 points.
Impressed, I asked it a question that arose on this blog yesterday, "Why did Kamala Harris, speaking of 'price gouging,' have a Freudian slip and say 'price gauging'?"
I got an excellent answer, again in the form of a long list, this time 6 points.
One of the points was "Economic Jargon Overload":
Politicians dive into economic terms like they're swimming in alphabet soup. Maybe her mind mixed up "price gauging" with "market gauging" or "public sentiment gauging." It's like when you're so deep into tech talk, you start saying "byte" when you mean "bite."
So my next question was "How would anyone know if I was saying byte or bite?" and I got a 7-point answer.
Ridiculous, I thought, and I said, "A human being would have answered 'they wouldn't,' but you give me a 7-point answer. How would you justify your behavior?"
It conceded "Ah, you caught me in my AI nature, didn't you? Here's my attempt at justification" andgave me another 7-point answer!
1. Overthinking is My Default: Unlike humans, I'm designed to process information exhaustively. My circuits are wired to consider all possibilities, even if it's overkill for simple questions....
And on and on, demonstrating the aforesaid overthinking.
So then here's a screen shot showing what I asked and what I was surprised to get:
"Three designers, a museum curator, an artist and a design-savvy actress convened at The New York Times to make a list of the most enduring and significant objects for living."
It's the 29th day of the month, but I still have 1 — and only 1 — free access link to the New York Times to give to you: HERE!
#1 is the original beanbag chair, the Sacco chair.
#3 is something I actually have: the Le Corbusier Chaise Longue à Réglage Continu. The designers say things like "it addresses how our bodies are meant to sit" and "it’s also comfortable," and that's what I thought looking at it, but the truth is, I almost never sit/recline in it. It doesn't properly take account of how the body sits. Do you want your arms hanging over the edges, like Alexander the Great in his coffin?
Check out the whole list — I bet you have #15 — all on one page, with lots of pictures and explanations.
I want #21 — "Yes, they’re little peens."
Laughed out loud at #22.
Possibly the best furniture article. Better than an entire coffeetable book... about coffeetables (and other tables and chairs and sofas).
"Biden’s most important achievements may be that he rescued the presidency from Trump, resumed a more traditional style of presidential leadership and is gearing up to keep the office out of his predecessor’s hands this fall."
This momentarily caught my interest, but almost immediately I was overtaken with ennui:
People are using A.I to …
1. Plan gardens....
2. Plan workouts....
Are people using A.I. to plan articles about A.I.?
3. Plan meals....
So tedious!
6. Organize a messy computer desktop....
Can I use A.I. to organize my messy thoughts about A.I.? Write me a blog post in the style of Ann Althouse about how news media are resorting to listicles in an effort to shore up the flagging interest in A.I.
"It seems we don’t finish grieving, but merely finish for now; we process it in layers. One day (not today) I’m going to write a short story about a vending machine that serves up Just the Right Amount of Grief. You know, the perfect amount that you can handle in a moment to move yourself along, but not so much that you’ll be caught in an undertow."
".... while I read Shakespeare and listen to symphonies.
7 a.m. Get into twenty-year-old Corolla, turn on NPR, get rattled by news and switch to listening to a Charles Dickens book on tape read by Alistair Cooke...."
I need to work on a list — something like 20 most-[something] blog posts of 2022. Maybe 20 most useful tags of 2022 or 20 most meandering sidetracks of 2022 or 20 least expected topics of 2022 or 20 best hobbyhorses of 2022....
Yes, the admiration of human beings is a dangerous business. Why not back off? I remember when The Ladies Home Journal used to produce lists of the 10 "favorite heroes and heroines" of boys and girls, something I blogged about back in 2005, with a photograph from my copy of the 1977 best-seller "The Book of Lists":
Henry Kissinger! And yet:
The first page of "The Book of Lists" is a set of seven lists of "The Most Hated and Feared Persons in History" for the years 1970-1976. Hitler comes in Number 1 for all the years except 1972 and 1973, when Nixon comes in first! In fact, 1972 was a good year for Hitler, when he made it all the way down to fourth place. Idi Amin and Mao Tse-tung were, along with Nixon, more hated and feared. Satan was in fifth place that year. Amusingly, by 1976, Nixon is off the five-person list altogether, and Jimmy Carter is on, tied for fourth place with Count Dracula.
How could Nixon be worse than Hitler? And yet he was. Things near in time seem more important. How will Trump look as he fades into the distance? But I'm getting ahead of myself, because I don't know if he's in the process of fading right now or the process of bouncing back. He is very bouncy.
Says a character — an author who teaches writing — in a novel I'm reading, "Our Country Friends" (by Gary Shteyngart).
I'd highlighted that line when I read it, and it popped to mind as I was listening to the audiobook of the other book I'm consuming this week, "On Animals" (by Susan Orlean), and I got to the last paragraph of the essay "Lost Dog." The dog (Coby) was found and it seemed as if we were closing in on the miscreant who stole the car that contained the dog (and a viola da gamba)...
At this point, the police certainly knew the thief’s name. After all, it was on the pawn voucher and in the detention records from his previous lockup with Chris Walker, and there were fingerprints on the Volvo, the viola da gamba, the pawn voucher, and probably on Coby. But the man was still at large. Before the car was towed to a wrecking yard, [the dog owner] went through it one more time to see if there were any last belongings of his or [his wife's] still inside. There was nothing of theirs, but the thief had left behind some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name.
... some of his clothes, a bunch of computer parts, notes from his girlfriend, poetry he had written, and a stack of address labels bearing someone else’s name — a list! Just write down a list. Readers love lists.
The next thing that the reader wanted to happen was the capture of the thief, but it's a true story, and that didn't happen. So how do you tie it up satisfyingly? Out of the blue, there's a list, miscellaneous items, indicative of miscellaneous things — the man had a girlfriend, he wrote poetry....
I appreciated the essayist's artistry. And oh! how pleased I am that I have a tag for this: lists.
"... despite this, I’ve run out of medical leave. I am driven there by my friends, many of whom have already had to make great sacrifices to help me. Some write checks, some help me drain the surgical tubes stitched to my body, others send mixtapes or cannabis popcorn. My friends carry my books into the classroom, because I can’t use my arms. Delirious from pain, I give a three-hour lecture on Walt Whitman’s poem 'The Sleepers'—'wandering and confused, lost to myself, ill-assorted, contradictory'—with the drainage bags stitched to my tightly compressed chest. My students have no idea what has been done to me or how much I hurt. I have always wanted to write the most beautiful book against beauty. I’d call it 'Cyclophosphamide, doxorubicin, paclitaxel, docetaxel, carboplatin, steroids, anti-inflammatories, antipsychotic anti-nausea meds, anti-anxiety anti-nausea meds, antidepressants, sedatives, saline flushes, acid reducers, eye drops, ear drops, numbing creams, alcohol wipes, blood thinners, antihistamines, antibiotics, antifungals, antibacterials, sleep aids, D3, B12, B6, joints and oils and edibles, hydrocodone, oxycodone, fentanyl, morphine, eyebrow pencils, face creams.' Then the surgeon calls to tell me that, as far as she can tell, the drugs have worked, the cancer is gone. The surgery performed after six months of chemotherapy reveals a 'pathologic complete response,' the outcome I’ve hoped for, the one that gives me the greatest chance that, when I die, it won’t be of this. With that news, I am like a baby being born into the hands of a body made only of the grand debt of love and rage, and if I live another forty-one years to avenge what has happened it still won’t be enough."
I've only copied a small extract, chosen not because it's the most impressively written part of the essay, but because: 1. The subject is teaching — the way the students don't know what is happening inside their teacher and a truly heroic carrying on would go entirely unnoticed (3 hours!), and 2. I love Walt Whitman, and I like how Boyer (a poet) follows the invocation of Whitman with a Whitmanesque list of her own.
Would you like Walt Whitman to read "The Sleepers" to you?
I was just expressing annoyance at the term "bucket list," in the context of the sort of bucket list with travel destinations (in a story of an American woman who went to Uganda). But I'm seeing the term again here:
About a year ago, [Lenny] Zwieg, a father of three, wore a T-shirt to a Brewers game that said “Share Your Spare” and posted a photo to a Facebook page chronicling his long search for a kidney donor. It went viral and happened to be the first thing on Nowak’s feed soon after she created a bucket list that included the entry, “Help out a stranger.”...
“At the point we made the shirts, there wasn’t a lot of hope,” Zwieg said. “This just shows that social media can do good things for people.”
“I told Lenny the first time we talked that he reminded me so much of my dad,” Nowak said. “I just thought to myself, ‘What would I do if my dad were in this situation?’”
I found out about that story last night, when we had the TV on mute when Zwieg and Nowak appeared, and I wondered enough to go back and listen. At the link you can see the charming video of the 2 of them throwing out the first pitch. They just looked like really nice, smiling people, so I wanted to know who they were. And, wow, what a great story.
I've really hated the term "bucket list" for a long time, mostly because "kick the bucket" is such a crude way to refer to the profound occasion, dying. (By the way, no one really knows what the "bucket" image is supposed to be, though there are some theories, collected here.)
But maybe what's bothered me more about "bucket list" is what people put on these lists, which I imagine to be a mundane collection of things like bungee jumping and visiting the Eiffel Tower. Show me a better bucket list. "Help out a stranger" is good but abstract. What makes it great is the high level of the specific way Nowak did what she put on her list. And that exposes another problem with the concept of a bucket list. It seems to be a list of items that you do and then cross off the list. But you don't imagine Nowak taking a been-there-done-that attitude toward help out a stranger.
I'll update soon with something about the one I want to read.
ADDED: The article I chose — could you guess? — was "It’s Time for the Heroic Male Paleontologist Trope to Go Extinct" by Riley Black (subheadline: "The New Yorker’s story on the day the dinosaurs died brings up more questions than it answers, but it does make the staleness of this genre clear").
Under the sweltering desert sun, a man painstakingly scrapes away at ancient stone. A weathered fedora offers what passes for shade in these harsh conditions. With each carefully controlled scratch, a lost world comes into view—a time of monsters never before seen, the strata seeming to glow with potential.
This isn’t a scene from the next Indiana Jones film; it’s the kind of breathless prose novelist Douglas Preston employs in his latest New Yorker feature hyping a controversial fossil site that slammed onto social media last week like the asteroid that closed the Cretaceous. It also happens to be exactly the kind of scruffy, macho, lone-scientist stereotype legend that needs to go extinct....
Don’t get me wrong. There’s nothing wrong with a little Indiana Jones cosplay... It’d be one thing if the rogue-heroic-scientist-makes-amazing-discovery storyline was one of many types of tales of how we make progress in this field. But it’s the only one we ever seem to get with paleontology, and in this case, the hype just doesn’t match the published results. The claims that made the New Yorker story so popular and shareable are not all included in the paper out this week....
This shouldn’t be how science, or science journalism, works....
IN THE COMMENTS: William said:
I think the writer is conflating archeologists with paleontologists. An easy mistake for the uninformed to make, but nonetheless a mistake. You will remember from Bringing Up Baby how Cary Grant wore glasses and was quite reserved and proper in his behavior. Likewise with Ross in Friends. Typical paleontologists. There's very little toxic masculinity among paleontologists.....
That's right! The 2 most well-known paleontologists in American popular media are Cary Grant in "Bringing Up Baby" and Ross in "Friends." Both are nerdy and inhibited.
"It is used by President Trump’s supporters whenever Robert Mueller issues anything, including the many times he’s issued things that are, quite clearly, something burgers, with lots of shocking and damaging information that implicates people close to the President in something that seems like potential collusion with Russia or other possibly related crimes. [The Paul Manafort sentencing memo], Mueller’s longest, can be seen, by avid followers of his investigation, as not only an exquisitely built nothing burger but a commentary on our age and our expectations—at least, as it relates to the question of collusion during the 2016 election. Andy Kaufman could have hardly done so good a job at tweaking our deepest hunger."
Help me understand what Davidson was picturing when he wrote "Andy Kaufman could have hardly done so good a job at tweaking our deepest hunger." Presumably, he thinks Andy Kaufman did a really good job of tweaking our deep hungers, but which hungers? When? Can you dig up any clips of Kaufman that show him excelling at tweaking deep hungers? Outstripping Andy Kaufman — in Davidson's idea is Robert Mueller — right? — not the "avid followers" of the investigation. The "avid followers" are the audience for Mueller, and Mueller, like Kaufman, is seen as putting on a show for aficionados.
We, the audience, sit expectantly, wanting something from the showman, but he withholds, even as he maintains our rapt attention. We keep watching, because he's captured our attention, but Mueller has captured our attention because we hope/fear he's got something devastating on Trump. The "deepest hunger" Davidson is thinking about is for the destruction of Trump. How is that like what Andy Kaufman did when — to name 2 examples of Kaufman playing with audience expectations — he did a show that consisted of nothing but singing all the verses of "99 Bottles of Beer on the Wall" or he stood on stage and read the entire text of "The Great Gatsby"?
There was no "deep hunger" that Kaufman was tweaking. He was tweaking the shallow hunger — borne of ticket-buying and seat-sitting — that there will be a show. When will this get funny? The joke is that it will never get funny. It will just go on like this. It's the nothing. The joke's on you for expecting something conventional and the only way to squirm out of your predicament is to realize it before the other people sitting around you not understanding that I'm never going to give you what you're dumb enough to want.
Am I approaching the enigma of the Mueller/Kaufman comparison?
ADDED: Davidson is surely wrong that the term "nothingburger" was born in the last 2 years! The OED traces the term all the way back to 1953. The official definition is: "A person or thing of no importance, value, or substance. Now esp.: something which, contrary to expectations, turns out to be insignificant or unremarkable."
Maybe Davidson — a fan of Kaufman's? — really is doing comedy. I must admit I laughed a lot while reading it out loud last night. He can't really mean that the phrase "nothing burger" is "One of the worst things to happen in America," so that's the tip-off, right? I'm overthinking this. I know!
But he could be serious. Aside from the mistake of believing the term got born during the Trump administration, he could genuinely believe it's one of the worst things to happen in America in the last 2 years. All he'd need is a long "worst things" list. You could have a list of "The 1 Million Worst Things to Happen in the Last 2 Years," and then some irritating word could be on it.
Here's the article, by Annie Karni, about Trump's encounter yesterday with Chinese President Xi Jinping.
Here's my list.
7. "... something in between an official East Room black tie gala and a stop for Big Macs on the side of the road."
6. "Trump’s known favorites, dry-aged steak and whipped potatoes."
5. "golf... (frowned on by the Chinese Communist Party as a rich man's sport)."
4. "The first lady appeared to be enjoying a glass of red wine, while the Chinese first lady, Peng Liyuan, sipped tea."
3. Sen. John McCain said... “an ideal setting for real serious negotiations has been Camp David”...
2. "The choice of venue lent him the gilded, salmon-colored backdrop of his private resort to satisfy a world leader who places a high value on ceremony."
1. "We had a long discussion already and so far I have gotten nothing, absolutely nothing."
"It was a mass-deportation speech, even if he avoided that phrase. Its intent was hard to miss," say the editors of the NYT, claiming that Donald Trump had previously stated a "promise to make 11 million unauthorized immigrants targets for deportation" and — even though his 10-point speech made no mention of deporting these people — that's what he means to do:
The entire speech, in fact, imagines that government at all levels will be used to hunt down and remove immigrants from their homes, families and jobs. Mr. Trump was describing a world of lockups and surveillance and fugitive-hunting squads, a vast system of indiscriminate catch-and-punish that works as hard to catch hotel maids and landscapers as it does gang members and terrorists.
What does that mean? How does the speech "imagine" something that he never said? Now, as I've been saying lately, I find it very hard to see where he ever said specifically that he wanted to deport anyone other than those who were convicted of crimes (or who were caught crossing the border). And clearly — the NYT admits it — his speech this week never said anything about rounding up the millions and deporting them. He did say he'd take back the "amnesty" Obama gave "to approximately five million illegal immigrants." And he didn't specifically refute the image some people have of what he will do.
Many people, myself included, do not believe he every envisioned deporting peaceful, well-settled, productive immigrants. But he obviously knows many people — his supporters and opponents — think or want to encourage others to think that he will do that — hunt down and remove immigrants from their homes, families and jobs. He is choosing not to state very clearly that's absolutely not his plan. But in leaving that subject unexplored, is he "imagining" and "describing" an America of "lockups and surveillance and fugitive-hunting squads" hunting down "hotel maids and landscapers"?
The NYT is imagining and describing that. Trump didn't do it. I don't like the NYT engaging in that kind of distortion and exaggeration and scaring readers. But Trump — knowing the media hate him and will distort and exaggerate — has responsibility for declining to disavow that plan. He must be charged with actively choosing to leave this empty place in his plan that people will fill with their hopes and fears.
He had 10 points in his plan. 10! 10 says: I'm covering this very comprehensively. And yet there is this very well known subject and somehow it didn't get a point.
Oh, but 10! 10 sounds so complete.
Yeah, well, this one goes to 11. The 11th point is unstated, and that's what's so beautiful/horrible about it. It's whatever you want it to be.
Former FBI agent-turned lawyer Stuart Kaplan says... "If in fact a sympathizer gets ahold of this list and is readily able to identify you as being his neighbor and, then, decides (because they're a sympathizer) to go out and do something horrific to you, there is no way to calculate the potential or to prevent that."...
The list has not yet been made public.
How could the list have been "released" and yet not "made public"? I guess the U.S. authorities haven't independently made the list known, but that the "pro-Isis group" has put the list out there. It's a terrorist tactic just to make people think there is a list and they could be on it. Being on a list is terrifying even if nothing is ever done to you. It's a terrorist tactic to let people know that lists are being made and you could end up on it. If you knew what you were supposed to do to stay off the list, you might do it. You might completely on your own try to imagine what you could do to stay off the list. Keep a low profile. Don't talk about terrorism. Withdraw from social media. Delete your account.
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