Robinson Jeffers, standing beside Tor House and Hawk Tower, his handmade stone outpost on the Pacific Ocean. (Image source)

“I am building a thick stone pillar upon this shore, the very turn of the world, the long migration’s / End” (Jeffers, “The Torch-Bearers’ Race”)

The IRS will require you to use ID.me to access your taxes online. Last year, ID.me was locking people out of their unemployment benefits due to facial recognition failures. I had to set up an ID.me account to opt out of the child tax credit advance payments and it was indeed a cumbersome, annoying process. What really bothered me, though, was giving so much critical information to a third party contractor.

Austin Kleon’s latest (subscriber-only) newsletter issue is about the creative seasons. Two things:

1. It contains a pdf version of a zine he wrote on the subject. I know some people around micro.blog have recently been talking about zines and other ideas for analog delivery of writing. This is an interesting way of doing that: digitally delivering a pdf of something meant to be printed and folded.
2. I am definitely a person who goes through creative seasons. In the past, late-winter and early-spring are when I’ve started more creative projects. This latest round has been a bit of an anomaly since it started in early winter - but I think that was driven in large part by my attempt to resist Big Tech and seeking out other ways of communicating.

A Russian farm has given its dairy cows virtual reality headsets in a bid to reduce their anxiety. All comparisons to Zuckerberg’s metaverse aspirations should be avoided in order to keep the herd calm.

“Amazon Prime is an economy distorting lie” by Matt Stoller. Really good explanation of how Prime actually raises prices across the internet - and why it’s a key part of the DC Attorney General’s antitrust case against Amazon.

This article on the yin-yang role of gorse in the ecological concept of succession reminded me of this video showing that process in action. Essentially, leave the land the hell alone and it will “manage” itself into a complex, wonderful ecosystem. “Land management” as it is currently practiced in state DNRs and US National Forests is management toward the end of profit maximization. (In case you didn’t know, in the United States logging is permitted in national forests. In order to be fully protected, an area has to be declared a national park. This seems to me to be some deceptive nomenclature.)

Great article on the current legal fight over recognizing the legal personhood of Happy, an elephant in the Bronx Zoo. Also includes some really interesting history.

Austin Kleon: Cultivate a willingness to be bad

Useful distinctions from Erich Fromm’s book On Disobedience

Fascinating piece by Nicholas Carr on GPT-3, an AI tool for generating text. It has been fed mountains of human-written text and, in turn, has generated some startling text of its own. Carr:

It is drawing on a vast corpus of human expression and, through a quasi-mystical statistical procedure (no one can explain exactly what it is doing), synthesizing all those old words into something new, something intelligible to and requiring interpretation by its interlocutor. When we talk to GPT-3, we are, in a way, communing with the dead.