We’re all going on a cycling holiday
Spotted on the M5 on the way to the South-West. I reckon this is a family of six cyclists plus a baby passenger (in the back seat of the adult bike on the roof-rack).
Quote of the Day
”The illegal we do immediately. The unconstitutional takes a little longer.”
- Henry Kissinger
The attribution to Kissinger is common but may be unfair. It was probably coined by a senior and profoundly cynical US State Department official years before his tenure of office. At any rate Kissinger himself denied originating the line, claiming that he was merely repeating an old Washington joke.
The funny thing, though, is that it now describes the predominant modus operandi of the Trump administration.
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Bruce Springsteen | Tougher than the Rest
Long Read of the Day
Human Interaction Is Now a Luxury Good
Really interesting interview with Alison Pugh about her research and book. The title of the piece provides a good insight into the long-term dehumanising trends of digital technology.
In part of her new book, “The Last Human Job,” the sociologist Allison Pugh shadowed an apprentice hospital chaplain as she went through her day. The chaplain ministered to a family that had lost a young woman to a Tylenol overdose. She went from room to room, praying, offering hugs, even singing with bereaved and anxious patients and family members. “There is nothing like being in the worst moment of your life and being met with comfort by someone you don’t even know,” she recounted a patient telling her.
The chaplain also had to track all of these profound connections in a janky online record that kept freezing, costing her precious minutes of the day that could have been spent in communion and support. She had to track her work in three separate systems overall.
Pugh interviewed not just chaplains. She spent five years following teachers, doctors, community organizers and hairdressers — more than 100 people in total who perform what she calls “connective labor,” which is work that requires an “emotional understanding” with another person.
Pugh explains that increasingly, people in these jobs have to use technology to obsessively monitor and standardize their work so that they might be more productive and theoretically have better (or at least more profitable) outcomes.
But a lot of care work cannot be tracked and cannot be standardized. Industrial logic, when applied to something like chaplaincy, borders on the absurd. How do you even measure success when it comes to providing spiritual comfort? Unlike with doctors, “the hospital did not bill anybody for her ‘units of service,’” Pugh writes about the chaplain, but she still had to figure out a way to chart her actions in multiple systems, which mostly didn’t capture what she was doing in the first place. This additional labor arguably made her a worse chaplain because it sapped her energy — dealing with the glitchy tech frustrated her — and wasted her time.
This a really insightful piece — so much so that I’ve put Pugh’s book on my reading list.
My commonplace booklet
“What we call AI is really ‘statistical learning from large datasets’.”
The inimitable Alison Gopnik in a terrific episode of the Santa Fe institute podcast series on ‘Complexity’. Well worth a listen if you have the time. And the site provides a transcript.
Linkblog
Something I noticed, while drinking from the Internet firehose.
- Denmark to abolish VAT on books in effort to get more people reading Link
Culture minister says government will propose ending the 25% rate, the highest in the world, in its budget bill.
Nice idea, but I wonder if it’ll make any difference. My hunch is that price is not the deterrent that government ministers imagine it is. More seismic, cultural changes are under way.
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