Orchid in a window
Quote of the Day
”For every problem, there is a solution that is simple, neat, and wrong.”
H.L. Mencken
Musical alternative to the morning’s radio news
Teresa Carreño| Venise op. 33/34 (Live in Helsinki) | Michelle Candotti
Short and sweet, and new to me.
Long Read of the Day
Users, advertisers – we are all trapped in the ‘enshittification’ of the internet
In this slot I generally do not post stuff I’ve written myself, but in the last few weeks I’ve had inquiries from a few people wondering if the article has some lessons for ‘AI’. The answer, I think, is ‘probably yes’, if only because we’re at the same stage with LLMs as we were in the early days of what became ‘social media. Most people are currently accessing the ‘free’ versions of ChatGPT, Clause, Gemini et al, with only a minority going for the paid ‘Pro’ versions. It’s only a matter of time before AI companies start to monetise widespread usage of ‘free’ versions by introducing advertising in some fashion. If that happens, then the enshittification of which I wrote will inevitably kick in. After all, AI companies are corporations with shareholders who expect returns on their investments.
Anyway, I hope you enjoy the piece. It was published light-years ago, i.e. March 2023. This is how it opens:
Those whom the Gods wish to destroy,” says the adage, “they first make mad.” Actually, that’s overkill: the Gods just need to make people forget. Amnesia turns out to be a powerful narcotic and it’s been clouding our perceptions of what’s been happening on the internet for at least 25 years, namely the inexorable degradation of the online environment and our passive, sullen acceptance of that.
Examples? Everywhere you look. Take Google search that, once upon a time (1998), was elegant, efficient and a massive improvement on what went before. You typed in a query and got a list of websites that were indicated by a kind of automated peer-review called PageRank. Now, the first page of results from a search for “high-quality saucepans” produces a myriad of “sponsored” items, ie advertisements.
Try shopping for “the best multimeter” on Amazon – once a byword for an efficient online experience – and you are immediately confronted by four “sponsored” results (ie ones the vendor has paid Amazon to highlight)…
My commonplace booklet
Json Kottke (Whom God Preserve) reflecting on hearing Craig Mod talking about what it means to have “enough” and the Japanese term yoyū:
Pondering the shrinking communities and advanced decay he saw during the trip (documented in photos of shuttered main streets and nature vigorously reclaiming the landscape), Mod thought back to his childhood home: a blue-collar American town where the factories had closed, replaced by poverty, drugs and violence.
“The inspiration I’ve always drawn from Japan is that the lowest you can fall is not that low,” he says. “Whereas I grew up watching people fall really, really low — frequently, and kind of hopelessly.”
His explanation for why similar levels of economic decline produce such different outcomes hinges on the Japanese term yoyū, which conveys a sense of sufficiency: enough time, enough money, enough energy. As Mod puts it, yoyū is “the space in your heart to accept another person… another situation, another context.”
“As the economy changes in those rural areas, I think you see a kind of grace because the foundations of support are still there, right?” he continues. “They’re not losing health care. They’re not losing social infrastructure… And that gives them the yoyū to be able to accept the fact that their towns are disappearing, without degrading into substance abuse or violence or whatever. The contrast being in America, there’s none of that sort of protection enabled, so you have none of that excess space.”
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