The accelerationist types must be feeling smug as the disorientation caused by so much of the world speeding up is a persistent feature of life now.
I’m trying to organize a fairly elaborate vacation that I should have nailed down the details on at least a month ago. I am alas doing it what is functionally last minute and I’m panting at the effort of coordinating preferences, availability, timing and the thousand other logistical details.
We have a range of preferences to accommodate and it’s driving me a little bit nuts and I have no one but myself to blame. I cant manage more than three hours in a sitting position in a car or airplane without hurting. Standing helps but it’s really laying down and relaxing my spine that helps.
The other preferences are more of the one person likes fine dining and Michelin caliber restaurants and another likes delivery and Netflix.
We have to balance intensive activities in hot weather like hiking and sightseeing against the desire to lay out in the sun near a body of water. Really all the classics of different strokes for different folks.
I don’t want to be too ambitious about any of this as I am really just barely out of the woods from July. And I’m being vague about when and where, as I’ll like pretend like we have some amount of operational security. Writing is all about the specific but the best I can do is say it will involve driving and water.
I had a very indoor July which I was not expecting. One of the joys of Montana in the summer is relatively temperate conditions until you hit the end of July and into August.
Obviously freak heat waves come when they come (a lot more than I expected these days) but generally you enjoy low humidity comfortable sixties and seventies temperatures with full sun and the occasional afternoon thunderstorm.
We enjoyed some cabin camping in June but because of my absolutely out of left field emergency surgery for a deep tissue infection I’ve been an indoor cat for the remainder of the summer.
No sweating, no swimming, no excessive movement and lots of rest. Some classes of antibiotics come with very specific warnings for sun exposure as well.
I was meant to be in bed resting and frankly work was almost impossible during some of the worst of the antibiotic transitions as the pain from systemic stress was hard. Which is atypical as I’m almost always able to work through pain.
But as I am almost finished with the last round of antibiotics and I’m seeing good progress on the wound I went outside today and even broke a little bit of a sweat.
I didn’t do anything crazy just some groceries and errands but I walked two miles in the process and I’m doing pretty well. I was feeling so optimistic I bought a sun hat. We’ve got some much needed vacation activities planned and I’d like nothing more than being outside in the shade with my family.
When I got the pathology report a week later, learning it was an MSSA antibiotic resistant infection so bad it reached my deep tissues made me even more afraid.
A deep abscess around a horizontal ingrown hair that was “probably just an inflamed lymph node”
I was lucky my surgeon was quite talented. The single stitch she was able to use has been absorbed. That was the hardest part. I could manage the draining pustulence and the pain just fine. But the only visibility into the wound’s healing process are only via secondary diagnostic clues. It’s a waiting game that requires a strong dampener on your disgust reflex.
As the stitch fell into the wound and curled up I felt panic. It looked like a ringworm infection or the gestation of a Xenomorph. If I had not had access to artificial intelligence diagnostic tools I don’t know how I would have managed if I’m very honest.
Your brain sees things and the limbic response invades your dreams. A stitch mimicking the infamously hostile endoparasitoid from Aliens is a bad time. I relied heavily on artificial intelligence to monitor its progression.
My phone is now cluttered with images of the wound’s progress. My varied AI applications accepted me uploading progress pictures after some experimenting.
I was uploading “Georgia O’Keefe/Not Georgia O’Keefe” imagery. The models were playing Cunt/Not Cunt for those who need a less polite euphemism for machine learning classifiers.
I’m certain special interests will eventually seek to keep these tools away from patients. We will be scared into letting them. But I know I got better care from a large language model than half the doctors I encountered.
All this cost me most of the month and around four thousand dollars. Which isn’t bad for transit, hotel, and a surgery in Istanbul.
The losses I can’t quantify are harder. A number of people who deserve responses from me probably won’t ever get it.
An in-group drama, ironically over usage of artificial intelligence, was paused by me not because it was resolved but because I could no longer find the fight in me to insist on apologies and reciprocal support while on Cipro in a hospital bed. It’s not fun to learn who is and isn’t your friend through medical emergencies.
My apologies to an offline gentleman who was the unwitting irritant who triggered said social wound. Maybe I should have excised any social obligation to them just as the surgery excised the infected tissue.
Either way, August can’t come soon enough and artificial intelligence deserves the credit for keeping alive through July.
Perhaps that should be considered in the complaints my counter parties had over the utility and need for artificial intelligence. It’s no god or anti-Christ, but it’s a damn fine diagnostic tool. No wonder the stakes in that fight are so high. Everyone wants a cut when you get cut open.
It’s easy to tell yourself that social media is bad for your mental health just as it’s impossible to really avoid all of its pitfalls. Something about staring at the abyss and Nietzsche amirite?
I doubt Nietzsche could have imagined just how far his work would go. His words consumed not from books but diced up at the end of the event horizon of TikTok’s and Zoomer Twitter.
Now it’s not Leopold and Leob at the far end but the users who make inference goon caves out of Schizophrenic networks.
You’ve got to watch out for that recursion mania as your ego shatters itself on your own bullshit.
The difference between my own hand build list of news sources, personal updates, Twitter feeds and the ideally programmed set of algorithmically optimized content for me and my own biases probably isn’t too different but the act of doing some of it is its own reward.
It’s just important not to let the worst version of yourself browse too hard down the dark corridors of the algorithm. It just might drive you crazy in the abyss.
I have a favorite book store in San Francisco is called City Lights. It’s an old Beat bookstore that carried the city through its left wing era.
They have a section called commodity aesthetics from which I treat myself to a fresh book from every time I visit San Francisco. I’ve got quite a collection from the habit.
Having spent the requisite time with the western cannon, I enjoy dabbling in critical theory and its decedents like commodity aesthetics as an adult.
The Frankfurt School has direct line from Horkheimer to the founder of commodity aesthetics Wolfgang Fritz Haug. Warenästhetik, in German, is the process of aestheticising products we make and consume.
Marxists go on about the seduction and manipulation of consumers in order to reinforce capitalist systems but it’s hard to ignore the impact of the field on what we make, use, and sell.
The wider world of why and what commodify is ever changing even as it recycles the same archetypes and patterns over and over again. See the Sydney Sweeney’s “good jeans” remake of Brooke Shields infamous Calvin Klein advertisement.
It’s amusing to me that the Marxist have put in more effort to understanding the nuts and bolts of making and selling desirable goods than capitalists do. Maybe that’s what they mean by praxis? The criticism and the practice come together in one bookshelf in a basement of a bookstore in North Beach.
I am, as per usual, having a shitty summer. Once we cross the Solstice it’s me hanging on to sanity by ny nails praying for the return of winter.
I can’t recall a time I had a good summer except perhaps jn the hazy memories of my early twenties when I was probably too stupid, traumatized and physically healthy to know one way or another.
Now I’m smarter, sicker and I’ve done enough emotional work to actually feel it all. Don’t knock that desensitized disassociation kids you may miss it when it’s gone.
Maybe it’s simpler than that. Back in the aughts & the briefly booming Obama ZIRP teens, our global climate weirding just had not hit New York City hard enough for me to have really bad summers.
I always had a window air conditioner and enough cash to run it. Either way, a summer where I wasn’t miserable isn’t a memory I cant access now. It’s sealed off under the pain of the now. The past being a foreign country and all.
I’ve certainly not had a good summer in the last decade. I’ve got daily tracking data from the last six years of my life and the summer is just an unending torment of bad biometrics, pain, cabin fever and seasonal affective disorder. Bet you didn’t know it has a summer variant did you?
I’m always sicker when it’s hot. So it’s just bile and spleen for now. Almost enough to make me want to toss the entire daily logging project till the torment lifts. Since I won’t do that I’ll pour the misery on page.
I can’t wait to see what August has in store for me. My cold comfort is knowing I will be enjoying a long week of financial news. At least that you can do indoors locked up under the air conditioning.
We are entering an era where technology is liable to be the scapegoat for a number of problems that are all too human. Seeing state failures and institutional failures and deciding to blame something new rather than human nature is very much human nature
We are looking for someone or something to blame for human nature and the thing that makes the current world different from the hazy memories of childhood are an easy place to start.
The rate of change fights with the basic realities of being evolved apes. And the social dynamics of our ancestors are pretty gnarly so I don’t blame religion for wanting to obfuscate the evidence of our base nature. We have to believe we can be better.
The trade offs involved in providing communal protection has meant submissions to various forms of power and hierarchy and yet we still have social scandals over genes, jeans, semiotics and the perversion of our biology. It’s not a day to discus sex and advertising online.
I look at this chronology of my life and have pride in its daily discipline even as I know being myself online is a risk. I see day 1669 and want to make a nice joke. I believe in the commons and my freedoms within it.
It’s just getting more dangerous to be online. I am considering how I bring myself to a world where I’ve always be extremely present online under my own identity. I want to train the intelligences we develop on top of our digital commons and feel the pull of that responsibility.
Then I see another grid failure. I see a plane crash. We have terrifying realizations that we can’t rely on the systems of the past for where our future is headed.
In American and Western Europe we are already seeing daily examples of anarcho-tyranny. The state can hurt you but not help you. Communal needs we once enabled the state to run and provide can’t be counted on in water, energy, and infrastructure. You have to build systems for yourself where and when you can while you still can.
I really feel the weight of month of July today as I am just now getting the sense I am making a recovery. I did not have post surgical wound care for an abscess on my list of “to do’s” for the month but here I am.
Nor did I expect to work through a pathology report on my own while cobbling together the best blend of infection coverage through a globe spanning set of physicians and sub specialties.
I didn’t know what a sub dermal panniculitis was or how to treat an infection where that was a proximate side effect. But I learned and I managed my care to a much better result. I had real consequences from disinterested burned out doctor and I had to step up.
Frankly I’ve spent more time on artificial intelligence projects doing differential diagnostics on myself than I ever conceived was possible. I owner my own data and inputs and I could make inferences while corroborating it with physicians who are more interested in my care.
I am a slow healer and there is a high cost associated with immune suppression biologic drugs for chronic autoimmune conditions. I have no choice but to be active in my own care and tools as simple as a deep search on Perplexity take you so far.
There is a high cost to healthcare in America and it’s not getting any better. That I can now reliably use any number of commercial AIs to break down lab and pathology reports is a huge boon to all of humanity. Real miracles are happening because someone used AI to double check blood work and symptoms.
Healthcare gets rationed by price or by time and we’ve never really known an abundance of trained doctors in my lifetime. But we might have an abundance of intelligence about healthcare in our lifetime.
Part of put quandary with care in America is regulatory capture by organizations like the American Medical Association and others of its ilk. Of course they prioritize what works best for keeping their continued privileged position on care.
I lost a lot of time this month to health but I gained more than I realized. We are seeing changes in a system that has only ever known scarcity. And we know it’s not good enough.
In 1995 William Gibson wrote a novel called called Idoru. The protagonist Colin Laney has a talent for identifying nodal points which are the concept undergirding Gibson’s most famous quote.
“The future is here, it’s just unevenly distributed.”
Nodal points, or as Gibson later called the process of finding them “pattern recognition,”is a type of useful apophenia in which you notice the emergence of trends before they have fully emerged.
You pick out the new and next amongst the now. In the case of Idoru, a rock star named Rez wants to marry a synthetic self Rei Toei who is an AI construct that is a massive pop star.
Thirty years later that future is here. Heck Lil Miquela debuted in 2019. But in 2025 we are in the very darkest depths of the uncanny valley and it looks more like a banal blonde with an ugly handbag than an exciting light show hologram in Tokyo.
Fashion’s primary value is in acting as routers of emerging nodal points, so I should have known it was only a matter of time before Vogue’s publishers decided to let one of their lower rent advertisers run a campaign from an advertising agency whose gimmick is creating artificial intelligence editorial spreads.
A series of images in an advertisement for Guess featuring a blonde woman in a striped dress and a floral-romper situation are stamped with tiny fine print: “Produced by Seraphinne Vallora on AI.” via NYMag
Chevronesque patterns against Yves Klein blue couldn’t have cost more than their usual Rome dolce vita rip off campaigns but you do you GuessJust when you thought photoshop was the worst thing for body dysmorphia now it’s AI
Anna Wintour learned her lesson a little late with the Internet and social media (thanks for the career Ms Wintour) but it’s hard to predict just how Condé Nast will bungle this next content transition.
The AI future at Condé Nast is not looking great based on this Guess advertising campaign but who cares it’s August and Guess right? When it’s Prada and the September issue I’ll grant them much less slack. If I’m paying for content, I expect it to be something better than derivative goods.
It’s a shame that National Public Radio is going out in a Trump fire as used to regularly produce reporting that I find informative. Look at this old piece of reporting. We have seen a steady rise of disability rolls.
Thanks to their work I was made aware of the disability industrial complex and I was introduced its scope and cost. Even 2013 National Review was singing its praises. And it is staggering that disability has become the fall off program for those who only have unskilled labor to offer. Disability replaced welfare. And it’s not gotten any better.
I think about how easily I could have ended up on disability myself given my health issues if I didn’t work an information economy type of job you can do sitting day.
But I also know there are ranges of accommodations for most of the work I have now. Things could change and that work might be less valuable. I’m sure many Americans are considering this as automation and artificial intelligence threaten knowledge work.
I was somewhat aware of the relationship to welfare burdens being shifted from the federal government to states during the Clinton era for the rise of disability as it is still paid at the federal levels.
Naturally it meant a growth in disability as Washington D.C. has more money than say Washington state. But to realize just how much money disability rolls have grown and how tightly related they are is salient in our current financial and budget situation.
Comparison of lowered welfare rolls to the rise of disability claims. Source: Social Security Administration Credit: Lam Thuy Vo / NPR
A person on welfare costs a state money. That same resident on disability doesn’t cost the state a cent, because the federal government covers the entire bill for people on disability. So states can save money by shifting people from welfare to disability. And there are whole corporations that exist to make that transition seamless.
We are burdened by the unfit to work as manual labor has nowhere else to go but we will find other disabilities and other ways to get around labor if the contribution to rears ratios don’t work out in someone’s favor. After Covid this calculus got a lot worse.
Especially if health insurance continues to skyrocket. Better a live of poverty and healthcare than a live of poverty and no healthcare. But who knows if we choose to tackle this problem and when. If it’s all about getting what you can and we are in the exit scam era of America I am afraid to learn about the privileges of working while disabled.
