Tag: Culture

Categories
Aesthetics Politics

Day 1971 and An American Pope Meets Effective Altruism

To my Catholic friends, I sincerely hope today brought you closer to your faith. It is my hope that you received comfort from Pope Leo XIV’s new encyclical, Magnifica humanitas: On Safeguarding the Human Person in the Time of Artificial Intelligence.

I myself look forward to reading all 42,000 words of it on an airplane tomorrow. My reader application’s AI says it should take me two hours and thirty minutes. Already the tools have opinions on my study.

I can’t say I fully understand the relationship between the knowledge and teachings put forth by the Pope and a Catholic’s personal faith.

I have very little exposure to Catholicism that isn’t entirely academic so please do not take anything I say seriously or personally, as I’m a mere Protestant.

The Vatican said that Leo had signed the new encyclical on May 15, 135 years to the day since the pope’s namesake, Pope Leo XIII, signed the landmark encyclical Rerum Novarum (“Of New Things”) on the rights of workers amid the Industrial Revolution. I understand is a crucial modern document in Catholic social doctrine

I read his namesake’s encyclical long ago when I studied economics in Chicago (not very far from where the Pope himself studied) so I am looking forward to comparing the documents once I have had a chance to read the new encyclical.

It’s very hard to have an opinion on a document written by a faith leader to whom I do not defer myself so please hold your judgement as I have held mine.

Without careful study I hesitate to say much beyond my initial impressions of the media circus surrounding the encyclical’s release and the social context of several attendees of the event around the signing.

The document is officially addressed not only to Catholics but to “all people of goodwill,” calling on us to seek the “protection of the human person in the age of artificial intelligence.”

I feel this is an invitation to us all to consider the document seriously. Silicon Valley has been anticipating its release for sometime, with both excitement and trepidation.

We have seen venture capitalists speak on fears of an emergent technological anti-Christ and the role artificial intelligence might play in eschatological matters.

There has also been a significant amount of discussion over the last several years as to the role a movement which calls itself effective altruism has played in the development of artificial intelligence.

In particular, there is concern as to whether the movement itself has become its own theology complete with a singularity eschatology.

I make no secret of my concerns around the EA community, its scandalous financial frauds and its intellectual roots in Benthamite utilitarianism.

They aim to be “less wrong” and take a rationalist approach to moral questions. At first glance this appears to be a kind of technocratic solutionism but has millenarian tendencies in singularity thought.

Several years ago an internecine split developed in Silicon Valley with a faction “meme schism” jokingly calling itself effective accelerationism. I myself professsed a preference for their approach as I am neither a utilitarian nor a rationalist.

E/acc encouraged an approach to technological development which focuses the benefits of material progress in reducing human harms while warning of the harms of the precautionary principle.

Neither are real philosophical traditions in any meaningful sense, but rather competing narrative memetics that came out of the diverse group of technologists making industrial progress from nuclear to computing chips and algorithms.

My concern today came from the highly visible corporate representation at the New Synod Hall in the Vatican during the press release. Past encyclical rollouts were normally handled only by curial officials. This was much flashier and included the Pope.

Further, the Vatican chose to highlight large language model developer Anthropic, and one of its many cofounders Christopher Olah. Both the man, and the corporate entity he represents, are part of an explicitly effective altruist world.

That only one frontier lab with a very particular viewpoint was put front and center as an emissary from the technical community may end up sending an unintended message. Or more worryingly, a very deliberately intended message. Only time will tell.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Travel

Day 1970 and Slowpokes Get Out of The Passing Lane

Everyone goes at their own pace. True for kids, organizations, nation states and Americans on road trips. I don’t like to be rushed anymore than anyone else. I probably dislike it more honestly. I take my time with almost everything.

But I understand that I need to get out of the way of someone who wants to go faster than me. I let folks going at a faster pace enjoy the right of way. I’ll encourage them to accelerate by getting out of the way.

It seems I am a bit unusual in this self awareness when it comes to sharing our transportation paths. Maybe I get it from learning to drive on mountain roads where one unaware driver can slog traffic for hours. Or maybe it was reinforced during years of city living where slow walkers are punished with jostling and cussing. “Get out of the f*cling way you damned tourist!”

But America’s interstate system carries travelers of all kinds from all nations. Especially on a long holiday weekend like one.

Interstate 15 run 1,433 miles long from end to end. Starting in San Diego at the Mexican border and ending in Sweet Grass Montana where it turns into Highway 4 in Canada it covers a lot of different terrain.

I did the Montana through Idaho to Utah portion which is pretty much straight through. It is roughly 558 miles from my home in Montana to the Utah San Rafael Energy Lab in Emery County) and much of that distance is a straight line on I-15 through 3 states.

Montana’s scenic routes merging to I-15

That means I’ve driven over a thousand miles this week. Welcome to the summer amirite?Even if you take a detour for the scenic routes through Yellowstone, or pop up to Deer Valley in Park City like I did, you are running about a third of the route of one of our greatest roads.

I law a lot of misunderstanding of the manners involved in using the left passing lane and the right merging lane. The right lane or lane #2 is for merging onto the highway, exiting, and driving at or below the average speed. Slower traffic must stay here. The left lane or lane #1 is for passing traffic. In some states, cruising in the left lane is illegal and can result in traffic fines.

This system is now how one is meant to aid the smooth flow of motor vehicle traffic on our interstates. And boy I saw a lot of misunderstanding of the manners of this system.

Utah Bluffs

I saw a cop have to ride the butt of an old couple going 50mph in a 75 express lane before he gave up and flashed his lights. They still didn’t yield.

I saw a pile up of 20 plus cars behind a struggling 4 wheeler who inexplicably wouldn’t budge from the passing lane even when he could have gone to the right.

I saw a pair of motorcyclists dodging and weaving between left and right lanes around motorists as they raced each other, several times swerving back and forth around our Subaru. Heck I even saw a tricked out rice rocket style Subaru barrel through the interstate that runs through Idaho Falls.

So please if you take to our fine interstate roads this weekend please remember to stay in your lane. That’s not a metaphor. I mean it literally. And if that’s not for you maybe consider another mode of transportation? You can do 500 miles like Arlo Guthrie that way. Every native son knows the tune.

Good morning, America, how are you?
Say, don’t you know me? I’m your native son
I’m the train they call the City of New Orleans
I’ll be gone 500 miles when the day is done. – City of New Orleans

I will say I’m glad to be home safe and sound in Montana. We took a detour and added a day for our adventures to Valar after our fancy conference and I am sure glad we did. But it’s nice to celebrate the official kick off to summer in my own backyard. I’ll be back on the road soon enough.

Coming up home through Yellowstone
Categories
Politics Travel

Day 1967 and Up In The Air Boss Don’t Care

Will you spare a prayer for the pitiable management class as they fly back and forth on their jets from capital to capital in the hopes of securing any kind of policy that remains in place long enough to do planning? No, I didn’t imagine you would. But maybe you should.

I’m not in anyone’s C-suite and I’d be surprised if I ever am. Being the CEO of even a small privately held company isn’t a great deal of fun. The burden of a fiduciary duty can clash with your instincts as a human.

Working with founders who have these obligations is largely an exercise in providing psychological safety so they can see the truth their hearts don’t want their eyes to see.

But I don’t expect anyone who hasn’t had to shoulder the burden of stewarding resources responsibly and profitably to be sympathetic. People who leverage collective resources to build something that is more than the sum of its parts may only think only of their part.

Still I’d hope anyone who is a parent has experienced the basics of it. Someone relies on you for their needs. Imagine it’s not just your immediate family but workers, investors and customers all demanding that their needs be met.

This isn’t meant to be mere apologetics aside, I feel bad for the technology executives who were told to show up in Washington D.C today for a last minute executive order from the president on artificial intelligence. Only hours before they were told actually it’s off sorry. The ones who could make it had already made the trip for a ceremony in which they were meant to smile and nod in obeisance to Leviathan as personified in America’s executive branch.

Either the president didn’t like how the executive order had turned out (something about staying in the lead ahead of China) or not enough of the fanciest executives could show up.

After flying to China last week to bow and nod, they needed to be whisked off back to another capital to bow and nod some more. And then oops sorry it’s canceled. As if they didn’t have other places to be. Heck one of the places they were meant to be was in Utah for a summit on providing the energy necessary to power this next step in America’s technological ambitions.

Instead it’s just all pissing and moaning and horrors from the peanut gallery about how much our bosses don’t care about us. As if the bosses didn’t report to some other big boss. They report to their board. The board reports to their shareholders.

And all of us in the shareholder class (which is most older Americans, a decent chunk of middle aged ones and anyone with social security) are all waiting on the approval of the state, who may or may not give any of us the clarity necessary to know what comes next. Better hold on tight and keep gassed up. Shame for most of us it’s not a jet. Still I’m happy with my Subaru.

Categories
Aesthetics Travel

Day 1966 and America The Beautiful

I’ve written about my love of road trips and in particular the Eisenhower interstate highway a few times. If a destination is within a day’s drive in the west, it’s often worth piling into our trusty Subaru and heading for the hills.

Heading to the West Yellowstone entrance through beautiful Madison County Montana

With a portable mini-Starlink, you can work from even the most remote corners of the mountain west. Nothing is quite so satisfying as being in some of America’s most remote areas and having enough connectivity on call if it is needed.

Driving hundreds of miles in a day is often more enjoyable than attempting to fly and you can take in rolling hills and jagged mountain tops without the haste of the TSA rummaging in your bags and needing to show up hours ahead of time. The open road is freedom in the psyche of Americans.

I’ve done this in Europe as well where the infrastructure is not quite as well suited to this type of transit. There are more borders to manage and no consistent roadways.

Europeans generally seem to regard my fondness for road-trips as selfish folly though I rarely do them alone. I’m almost always with friends and my husband.

The freedom to traverse easily over some of the world’s most beautiful land is a privilege. to see rolling green hills and bright sky as spring overtakes the mountain west is just about the best way I can imagine spending a day.

Verdant Idaho
Categories
Biohacking Chronic Disease Emotional Work

Day 1964 and We Are Who We Tell Ourselves To Be

No one likes a gloomy Gus. The downside of chronicling a chronic disease is the risk of seeing yourself as only the illness. Then other people will see you that way too. And so your identity becomes tied with only one of the many aspects of your life, and often the worst one at that.

Thankfully most humans are centered enough on themselves to forget the occasional gloomy reality from someone outside of their daily lives.

But repetition becomes reality, and eventually we are who we believe ourselves to be because others believe we are who we say we are too.

I came across a startup who is working on one of those classic swamp problems that seems like a great idea until you are well and truly stuck in the muck with bad incentives and no good solutions.

They want to use artificial intelligence to help patients with chronic diseases or complex medical cases to codify the many little details that might add up to the clues that crack the case.

By tracking subject inputs (unstructured data) and overlaying it with the other biometrics gathered by wearables and bloodwork they can help patients. I’ve seen hundreds of variants of this over the years.

Alas this new startup seems to have discovered a flywheel for marketing that relies on the problem I began today’s post with. We believe what we tell ourselves we are and eventually other people will believe what we believe.

They have chosen to market the app with illness influencers. Yes, that’s an actual category of influencer on TikTok and Instagram. Hot girls all have vague chronic illnesses these days haven’t you noticed?

And so a community forms and reinforces the identity that they all share. They are sick. And that makes them special. This gives life meaning. And did I mention lots of pretty girls have the most esoteric and exiting problems? Click to join now!

I find this to be a troubling, even borderline dangerous, approach to anchoring a community meant to help patients advocate better for care with their own personal health records. The incentive to remain with the privileged identity that makes them special only increases over time. Women reinforce themselves into intensely held identities all the time.

I thought about reaching out to them but I don’t want to get tangled with this problem. It is one for professionals which neither myself nor these founders are aside from everyone being a patient with chronic illness.

I do not wish for my identity to be the sick woman. The woman whose life was upended by a fertility protocol gone wrong in the early years of her marriage and in the prime of her life.

It’s one aspect of my reality. I do want others to be saved from my fate so I share it. But it is not who I am. Julie is not a sick woman. Julie is a complicated individual with a beautiful life and family and portfolio.

I had my own glimmer of hope today. Though I have repeated my troubles with my medical history I have never felt it was my identity. I’d happily give it up if I find a path to wellness. And I spend so much of my life trying to walk out of my troubles.

I have walked many side roads and pursued quixotic quests to find health. And some days I even find it. Today I got very good news on a fresh round of bloodwork. I’ve felt recently felt well thanks to some changes and an aggressive pursuit of new modalities.

I never want to get my hopes up too high as this effort has been a rollercoaster of ups and downs. But I won’t let go of the hope. The mere idea that this chapter could close and I might be a healthy woman is an identity I’d gladly welcome. And I’d wish that for anyone who takes on illness as a part of their identity.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Homesteading

Day 1963 and Late Snow and Death

It’s funny that whenever I should have a particularly good week I am inevitably presented with pain and a bad day. And today was a bad day.

I woke up starving at 5am for no reason. Everything hurt. My skin was peeling and I was freezing. A snowstorm barreled in overnight which was cause for some distress and an awkward moment of uncertainty as whether our spring chickens could weather the storm. It’s their first full week out of the barn and in the outdoor coop and the smallest one is still so very little. They did great but they were not happy about it.

Our five new pullets who are snowed in on the first week outside the barn

I also got a sad bit of news about a company that I had witnessed being birthed through its early years as a direct to consumer darling. My first boss had been on its board and their technical cofounder was a college friend who also worked with my prior boss.

If one is to believe the reporting it was sold in debt to a large foreign company whose own brand is the antithesis of what the startup has meant to its customers. It was the first and last of the direct to consumer companies.

I don’t wish to make anyone sadder than they already are about it and I am saddened common stock holders get nothing. It’s a common story in the space and it hurts to see every time.

So I went and bought a bunch of basics in memory of what the company had tried to be and in a show of mourning as I do not trust the new owners to maintain quality.

That’s a common story in all consumer categories now. One is sometimes let down by growing too quickly or raising too much too fast and I have so much sadness in my heart that reality. It was the end of an era.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture Reading

Day 1960 and Return to Tufte

The more power we seem to gain working with large language models, the more apparent it is that few of us are visually literate in a meaningful way. When you hear talk about design, it is all too often moods and vibes with no specifics.

Now, you might say that you know what you like when you see it. That’s also how we let the Supreme Court talk about porn. Clearly untangling the weft and weave of taste (and by extension culture) can be further articulated rather than relying on subjective, non-definitional standards.

How you came to your visual reference preference set is quite a bit more complicated than whatever pre-digested piece of media came across your algorithmic feed.

You can explore design languages from one token to the next, but visual literacy involves a lot more than scrolling or confirming you’d like to see more content “like this.”

When I first began circulating in design circles in the early aughts, the hipster set was obsessed with Edward Tufte and his now classic Visual Display of Quantitative Information.

Edward Tufte taught data analysis and public policy as a professor at Princeton and Yale for 31 years.

Tufte, via his Graphics Press, wrote, designed, and self-published 5 books on analytical thinking and showing, taught a one-day course, Presenting Data and Information for 923 days to 328,001 students.

Who knew Tufte and I both shared a love of marking the days of our work? He influenced many more people than I have but I find some joy in that coincidence.

His most referenced work, which I mentioned above was published in 2001. Visual Display of Quantitative Information was on the desks of everyone designer I knew, from fashion and Silicon Valley to public policy it was a mainstay. The man knew how to lay out information visually and he became the standard.

Some of Tufte’s self published tomes

The long tail of enthusiasm for displaying data beautifully surely owes its ubiquity in some part due to his success in teaching my generation’s designers.

He’s became for a period so universally referenced that Tufte became a cliche. Now he’s classic a quarter century later. His work arguably as successful as a visual language reference anchor as bookshelf favorite, “The Design of Everyday Things” by Donald Norman. His work is also denigrated as cliche in some circles.

The Design of Everyday Things second book cover

Both men offered clarity and practical principles over taste and theory. Those academic predecessors befuddled many who experienced aesthetics primarily through semiotics and critical theory. It felt revolutionary to return to form and function

You “Kant” really learn to love the languages of aesthetics from theory alone as it turns out. I’ll place a little AI synopsis to make the connection clear. This is from Perplexity:

Someone might relate to the popularity of Edward Tufte and The Design of Everyday Things as part of a broader hunger for clarity over clutter in how information and objects are presented.

Tufte’s work is influential because it treats visual design as a serious vehicle for understanding data, while Norman’s book argues that everyday things should be intuitive, legible, and centered on the user.

A Tufte-style chart removes decoration so the trend is easy to read, while a Norman-style kettle shows clearly how to fill it and pour it without guessing.

Both are forms of respect for the user: one respects the reader’s attention, the other respects the user’s actions.

Learning how to use an item or a tool, or how to interpret charts or graphics, can easily overwhelm anyone and feel disrespectful to students. A whole era of computing was stuck between the power of the command line and the legibility of the desktop metaphor.

Norman spoke of the Gulf of Execution as the gap between a user’s goal and the means to execute that goal. Tufte similarly wished to remove the confusion in charts and graphs so one’s ability to glean information wasn’t stuck in a gulf of understanding thanks to overwrought bar chart or sankey diagram.

With new artificial intelligence tools we are bridging some of that gap, not with design but with raw computing power. We are moving beyond the CLI and the desk and into a world of reference and inference.

I just hope we all take the time to learn our reference set so we can do more than say “I know it when I see it” as that will be our only way across the gulf of execution. Some things never change. Learning the languages of your field is one of them.

Categories
Aesthetics Culture

Day 1959 and Chambre Syndicale

I’m in my luteal phase so primed to be grumpy, frumpy and otherwise combative. You’d think this wouldn’t be an issue as I’m currently experimenting with synthetic hormones and all sorts of experimental peptides but the feminine is a mystery.

Thankfully this cunty attitude had a positive side effect of spiraling me into a group chat debate over what constitutes couture. Haute couture literally means “high sewing” or “high dressing making” in French.

I just had to be technically correct as it’s the best kind of correct. I only know as once upon a time I picked a fight with Fédération de la Haute Couture et de la Mode aka La Chambre Syndicale as old school fashionistas tend to still call it.

I may have done a kind of DDOS (allegedly) on their publicity fax machines to get their attention to further my guerrilla reporting efforts. They were not amused by the chron job I set to send them regular faxes at specific intervals. Anyways.

The TLDR is essentially that what constitutes couture is a bit like champagne. It only counts if it’s from the ateliers of Paris with very specific artisans (and a number of them) using hand sewn techniques which sell only to private clients with custom fittings. They then approve your atelier if you meet these standards.

Couture is not custom made clothing nor is it a form of luxury determined by price or self labeling. And it is definitely not “ready to wear” clothing you can buy off the runway. If an elaborate dance of craftsmanship and French bureaucracy. As an American I find it a bit silly but I don’t care for cartels of any kind be it drug, oil or clothing.

Many designers will try to get away with calling a custom made item couture in order to ride on the 170 year aura of French fashions but it’s not really what is meant by couture and it’s absolutely not what is meant by haute couture.

You don’t see Savile Row tailors calling themselves couture designers nor should they. That would be silly and imprecise. They are Savile Row tailors and that’s its own special custom suiting process.

Being imprecise in one’s specifications is exactly the opposite of what you’d want from someone making you a custom wardrobe based upon nearly two centuries of a professional cartel’s specifications.

So please don’t call something couture as a short hand slang for custom design. It may be ready to wear. It may be tailored to you. But only those who meet the standards of the Chambre Syndicale carry the designation haute couture. Otherwise it’s just sparkling custom made clothing.

Categories
Aesthetics Internet Culture

Day 1958 and Skymall Kities

My father loved gadgets. He was always tinkering with something and was always upgrading his electronics to some new specification.

Is it any wonder that I married such a handy husband? Men love futzing around with stuff. Sometimes they have daughters and then you’ve got women like to mess around with projects too.

I am sure we will have endless rounds of nostalgia for the eighties and nineties era gadget, electronics and novelty shops. You could get lots of mileage out of building your own computer.

But even setting up something silly from Skymall or Sharper Image captured some of the joy. The novelty of a new invention was visceral. I wouldn’t say no to a Hammacher Schlemmer renaissance myself.

I didn’t love it when we remade that style of retail into quirk chungus millennial fandom but I didn’t hate getting Star Trek tchotchkes either. And now I dearly love websites that my friends have built like WireCutter.

My husband was humming the tune to a piece of YouTube esoterica that is a deep cut to the original editor of that bastion of shopping guides. Choire Sicha launched the WireCutter but it’s in some ways the least soulful of his franchises. A Mike Albo shopping column already nailed the bit we’ve just been redeeming it since then.

Choire gave us Gawker 2.0 before his his incredible era of independent publishing streak making properties like the Awl and the Hairpin.

In a world with more shops and essayists than good shoppers or readers, Choire found the good ones and shared. And one of his discoveries was Nina Katchadourian’s work.

And so now my husband sings the tune of SkyMall Kitties and he sometimes can’t get it out of his head.

Maybe that is my own submission to the “thing I think about too much” essay franchise. It’s my own personal Negroni season or Supreme’s clusterfuck of totally uncool jokers.

I’m sure we will enter an exciting new era of curating down the perfect piece of cultural detritus with artificial intelligence. But I will always be grateful to electronics dads and savvy buying guides for teaching me to enjoy the joy in making something. Even if it is profoundly uncool. I’m still team Barbara Kruger though. Don’t believe the hypebeasts.

Categories
Aesthetics Media

Day 1957 and Closet Rummage

I am not up for the nostalgia festival around The Devil Wears Prada. It’s funny to have been in the fashion industry as the world of high gloss fashion magazines was rising in the public eye. It was ironically just as the business of publishing was about to be upended by technological change.

I never did take a job at Condé Nast, though I have some great stories. But I have enjoyed the largess of being inside a fashion brand with a closet. Nothing can fix a day like changing your look without spending a dime. Just “shop” the closet!

If a fashion closet doesn’t appeal to you, imagine a beauty closet. I was on the public relations gifting list for MAC during several of its glory years. I still treasure the packaging. Once I had my own beauty brand, I was swimming in samples that were far less polished but no less enjoyable.

So today that was the happy memory on my mind as I pulled together samples for a friend from my own beauty closet. who is about to go on tour for their work.

Finding just the right colors, chemicals and packaging for her needs was such a joy. I still love the hunt for just the right item that will work. From blazers to retinols, the closet contains fixes to almost all style problems. The bigger problems in life never have a quick fix so it’s worth treasuring the joy of the closet rummage.