Evolution
Of one thing at least we can be sure: ‘soapy Sam’ would not have approved of the graphic.
Quote of the Day
With the birth of the artist came the inevitable afterbirth… the critic.”
- Mel Brooks
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Gustav Mahler | Fifth Symphony, Adagietto | Leonard Bernstein and the Wiener Phil
The symphony was performed at the BBC Proms last night, with Mark Elder conducting the Hallé orchestra.
Footnote Bernstein once gave an intriguing talk at Harvard on the subject of ambiguity in the piece, which convinced me that I wasn’t cut out to be a musician.
Long Read of the Day
Vivian Maier, the Reclusive Nanny Who Secretly Became One of the Best Street Photographers of the 20th Century
Lovely piece by Ellen Wexler in The Smithsonian about an extraordinary photographer.
It’s a great story.
Vivian Maier took more than 150,000 photographs as she scoured the streets of New York and Chicago. She rarely looked at them; often, she didn’t even develop the negatives. Without any formal training, she created a sprawling body of work that demonstrated a wholly original way of looking at the world. Today, she is considered one of the best street photographers of the 20th century.
Maier’s photos provide audiences with a tantalizing peek behind the curtain into a remarkable mind. But she never intended to have an audience. A nanny by trade, she rarely showed anyone her prints. In her final years, she stashed five decades of work in storage lockers, which she eventually stopped paying for. Their contents went to auction in 2007.
Many of Maier’s photos ended up with amateur historian John Maloof, who purchased 30,000 negatives for about $400. In the years that followed, he sought out other collectors who had purchased boxes from the same lockers. He didn’t learn the photographer’s identity until 2009, when he found her name scrawled on an envelope among the negatives…
My hunch is that if she knew how famous and celebrated she has become, she’d be appalled!
Google’s wrong answer to the threat of AI
Yesterday’s Observer column:
As enshittification unfolds, the experience of a platform’s hapless users steadily and inexorably deteriorates. But most of them put up with it because of inertia and the perceived absence of anything better. The result is that, even as Google steadily deteriorated, it remained the world’s dominant search engine, with a monopolistic hold in many markets across the world; “Google” became a verb as well as a noun and “Googling” is now a synonym for online searching in all contexts.
The arrival of ChatGPT and its ilk threatens to upend this profitable applecart. For one thing, it definitely disrupts search behaviour. Ask a chatbot such as Perplexity.ai a question and it gives you an answer. Search for the topic on Google and it gives you a list of websites (including ones from which it derives revenue) on which you then have to click in order to make progress. For another, if users shift to chatbots for information, they won’t be exposed (at least for now) to lucrative search ads, which account for a significant chunk of Google’s revenue. And over time, experience with chatbots will change people’s expectations about searching for information online.
Overhanging all this, though, is the fact that generative AI is already flooding the web with AI-generated content…
My commonplace booklet
As regular readers know, I have been a keen photographer for ever, and so am partial to accounts of other photo-sufferers’ successes and tribulations. So you perhaps understand why I was a sucker for Jason Koebler’s essay, “Developing and Scanning My Own Color Film: A Rewarding, Infuriating Hobby”, not least because while I used to develop and print my own black & white films, I always shirked doing the same with colour rolls.
If you read the piece, you will perhaps understand why I shirked it!
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Your Body’s Updated Terms of Service From McSweeney’s Internet Tendency.
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