Emphatically agree with this article. And I do not say that as someone who cannot manage technology; I do okay. I say that because it is increasingly apparent that high tech is a hassle with zero resilience.

Clare Coffey:

Things used to work in this country. This is the stock complaint of the Baby Boomers, and if you are lucky enough to inherit a piece of their technology, you may find yourself agreeing. But when I say “things used to work,” the object of inherited nostalgia is not only manufacturing standards before planned obsolescence and offshoring. Things used to, literally, work. You turned a knob, and sound came on, because the knob controlled the mechanism that tuned the radio to the broadcast that the big metal radio towers dotting the landscape beamed at you. I am not a gearhead of any description and don’t care much about how the insides of electrical devices work, but I know exactly what I, personally, have to do to operate my end of the GE radio. There are no downloads, no platforms, no passwords, no little pull-down menus, no verifications or account recovery protocols. There is no streaming. Personal technology used to be a machine. Now it’s a bureaucracy

I was looking for the “always convalescent from some small illness” quotation a few days ago and found it (where else?) on Alan Jacobs blog. Recording it here for the next time I’m looking for it:

In the work that would make his name as one of the finest medievalists of his generation, The Allegory of Love (1936), he pauses at the end of a learned exposition of the poems of Ariosto and Tasso to make a confession: Samuel Johnson, [C.S. Lewis] says, “once described the ideal happiness he would choose, if he were regardless of futurity” — that is, if he did not need to consider any future consequences of his choice. “My own choice, with the same reservation, would be to read the Italian epic – to be always convalescent from some small illness and always seated in a window that overlooked the sea, there to read these poems eight hours of each happy day.”

Two things that prompted the memory of quitting social media I just posted:

1. Reading Nobody is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood. I second @JohnBrady’s recommendation, which is how I found out about it. Obviously it’s a short and engrossing book since I read it in less than a day. (It may have distracted me from work a bit yesterday…)
2. This from Rhyd Wildermuth:

In the process of breaking my years-long addiction to social media, it was the internalized self-limiting framing of writing with which I struggled most. This kind of reduction and flattening are seen best in the formulaic way in which the algorithms train us to write, the repetition of meaningless phrases like “I don’t know who needs to hear this, but;” “Unpopular opinion, but”, “Okay, sooo,” or the meme-derived rephrasing of opinions in the form of conversational comparisons between “literally nobody ever” and the target of the post.

Becoming trained to read and write by computers, we begin also to think like computers. Our writing becomes as processed as the food available in supermarkets and our thinking as standardized and as unremarkable as its flavors.

EFF: “Congress Should Give Up on Unconstitutional TikTok Bans.” This bit is particularly worrying to me:

[The bill] would also give the President the power to designate other applications under the control of a country considered adversarial to the U.S. to be a national security threat.

And the following seems obviously true. If they’re worried about our data being misused, why not ban the collection of such data altogether? Because such data collection profits those who really matter to the politicians.

The only solution to this pervasive ecosystem is prohibiting the collection of our data in the first place. Ultimately, foreign adversaries will still be able to obtain our data from social media companies unless those companies are forbidden from collecting, retaining, and selling it, full stop. And to be clear, under our current data privacy laws, there are many domestic adversaries engaged in manipulative and invasive data collection as well.

Rhyd Wildermuth has just published an excellent article on degrowth (paywalled).

Put as simply as possible, degrowth states that the relentless expansion (“growth”) that capitalist economies rely upon to survive (and to outrun the crises they create) has a limit. Once that limit is reached and can no longer be postponed, they will then contract in often violent and tragic ways.

And he uses an excellent analogy with credit cards:

Readers in the United States will already be familiar with the analogy I’m about to use for this, while European readers will no doubt struggle with some disbelief that such a thing is even possible. In America, it’s possible to get a credit card without sufficient funds or collateral to show you can pay back what you borrow. Wilder still, once you’ve spent the limit of that first card, you can then get another one from a different provider, max it out, and then get a third, fourth, and even more. You can even use the credit from one card to pay down the minimum balance on another or even transfer balances, constantly juggling your debt load until you’ve gotten yourself into a terrifying abyss.

What often happens for the person using this strategy is that each subsequent credit card comes with a higher interest rate than the previous ones, and there’s a system of debt tracking (a “credit score”) which determines what this rate will be and what the credit limit will be. The more in debt you get, the higher the interest rate you’ll have to pay back, and eventually it all catches up to you.

Degrowth asserts that this is precisely what capitalist societies have been doing since the very beginning: borrowing against a future moment in which they hope they’ll be able to pay it all back.

Fossil fuels are the best example of this problem. They function as a line of credit to allow increased production, consumption, and accelerated technological change, while their invisible consequences (atmospheric carbon release) accumulated the way compound interest on a credit card does. We’re now starting to max out this line of credit, and will soon need another line.

Solar, wind, hydroelectric, and nuclear are potential alternatives, but again as with the credit cards, they each come with their own hidden fees and variable interest penalties. For all those alternatives, you need a large initial input of energy just to build them. The minerals required to build solar panels and the batteries involved all require energy to mine, refine, and create, while uranium mining and refining also require large initial energy inputs.

Where does that initial energy come from? Currently, fossil fuels — from one line of credit to another — all to make sure we can keep increasing the amount of energy available for technological solutions to the other problems our technologies cause.

Degrowth looks at this problem the way most of us might view a friend constantly getting new loans to pay back other loans. Just as we might ask, “why not cut back on your spending?” degrowth proposes we question the core value of capitalist expansion. It then asks what life might be like if we tried to live within our limits, tried to pay down the debts we’ve accrued (in the form of environmental damage and resource depletion). What might it be like if we stopped borrowing against the future?

My first real introduction to degrowth was Jason Hickel’s book. And based on Rhyd’s article, looks like I need to read this book by Kohei Saito.

Worth reading: “The IKEA Humans” by Samuel Biagetti

Jennifer and Jason are drawn to IKEA because it reflects who they are: they too are modern, movable, and interchangeable, their wants satisfiable in any neighborhood with a food co-op and a coffee shop. More fundamentally, Jennifer and Jason are untraceable, a “composite material” made from numberless scraps and pieces. They have a long catalog of home towns, and their accents are NPR neutral. They can probably rattle off the various nationalities in their family trees — Dutch, Norwegian, Greek, and Jewish, maybe some Venezuelan or Honduran for a little color. From these backgrounds they retain no more than a humorous word or phrase, a recipe, or an Ellis Island anecdote, if that. They grew up amidst a scramble of white-collar professionals and went to college with a scramble of white-collar professionals’ kids. Their values are defined mainly by mass media, their tastes adorably quirky but never straying too far from their peers’, and like the IKEA furniture that they buy in boxes, they too cut themselves into manageable, packaged pieces and market themselves online. They are probably “spiritual but not religious.” They have no pattern or model of life that bears any relation to the past before the internet. For all intents and purposes, they sprang up de novo in the modern city.

Peter Larson, A Year and a Day on Just a Few Acres:

Every place on the Earth has its own, unique energies. When I was an architect, I learned how to sense these energies, define them, and put them into terms others could understand. Healthy, living places were made, or most often grew, via working with, not against, their underlying energies. I think people used to sense these energies of place more than they do now, and used to value them more than they do now. The loss of this sense had increasingly allowed economics to dictate the qualities of places, and resulted in the creation of more and more “dead” places: shopping strips, placeless housing subdivisions, whole centers of communities blown out for corner drug stores and parking lots.

Really illuminating post by James Shelley (via @patrickrhone):

Whether papyrus or the internet, humans doggedly write for influence, status, wealth, conviction, and pleasure. But the so-called sanctity of “authorship” is only a very recent idea. These “rights” of authorship are only true if they are enforced. They are a kind of fiction that only make sense in occasional times, places, and cultures. For the next chapter of the human experiment, I wonder if “authorship” will again recede into the background, as it often seems to do in times of disruptive changes in communication technology.

But the banishment of the author doesn’t mean writing ends. Writers still write even when “authorship” functionally means nothing. And what they write still influences their world, with or without the universe dutifully paying homage to their bylines. In the long arcs of history, what is written typically goes on to mean much more than who wrote it. The future, like today, is built on ideas, not on the people who had them, because people die but ideas never stop evolving.

As we used to say, read the whole thing. I’m particularly struck by his invocation of ancient anonymous and pseudonymous works. It’s the ideas that matter, less so the author.

Adam Kotsko, “The Information Environment: Toward a Deeper Enshittification Thesis”:

The near-total context collapse we are now experiencing was already baked into the workings of the Mosaic web browser and the dream of the “information age” that it encapsulates. Information does want to be free, as it turns out — free of context, free of pleasure, free of empathy, even free of comprehension. The effort to just cut to the chase and give us the information has actively destroyed the conditions for understanding and using that information in an intelligent way.

Wendell Berry, Hannah Coulter:

There can be places in this world, and in human hearts too, that are opposite to war. There is a kind of life that is opposite to war, so far as this world allows it to be.