I’m on a sixteen day streak with Day One. I’ve never been able to maintain a daily journaling habit but Day One is helping me do that. I had never heard of it before I saw several people on Micro.Blog talking about it, so thanks y’all.

I’ve finished all of the films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology and I can’t recommend them highly enough.

This is an excellent video on how Amazon can afford to offer free shipping to Prime members. Basically, it hides the cost of shipping by raising prices across the internet. And that, folks, is monopoly power.

I’ve now watched the first two films in Steve McQueen’s Small Axe anthology and both have been exceptional. But Lovers Rock … that was something special. If I tried to explain the plot to you (there isn’t much to it!) you would never believe it would work. Yet I was entranced. The “Silly Games” scene in particular was pure magic. I agree with this LA Times article (which gives the background to “Silly Games”) which calls it is “one of the most patient and loving celebrations of music ever captured on film.”

Now reading: “The dropout: a history” at Aeon. I’ve been in a sort of project of disconnection for several months now. Specifically, disconnecting in order to re-connect in a more healthy way. This article provides an enlightening history of the cultural concerns (and paranoias!) underlying the “turn on, tune in, drop out” movement. It’s easy to see parallels in the present day.

Now spinning: D-Vine Spirituals. It’s a new release of recordings of Black gospel groups from the seventies and if any of those words light you up, you’ll love this album. It’s also available digitally, of course, in all the usual places.

I’ve been making notes about the influences on my life. I noticed a surface-level contradiction between these two, which is resolved at a deeper level.

Malcolm X: for the way he learned and changed in public

Bernie Sanders: for his moral clarity and stability over time

I value Malcolm for his willingness to change and Bernie because he hasn’t. But change isn’t really the issue, is it? I value them both because they found true north and did not deviate from their course - whatever it cost them in terms of popularity and misunderstanding. It is a rare and valuable thing to find someone who has found and followed their deepest convictions.

Washington Post: “An 8-year-old slid his handwritten book onto a library shelf. It now has a years-long waitlist.”

Austin Kleon recommends studying something you love in depth - and it just so happens that I’m reading through the collected poetry of Robinson Jeffers. I’m keeping notes in Craft and hope to turn those notes into occasional posts. There are themes running through his work that very much interest me.

I’d also love to do something like this for the albums of Over the Rhine, or blog through the Tao Te Ching. Blogging through books (in the style of blockquote followed by commentary) was very common on the blogs I used to read fifteen years ago. I miss that sort of amateur scholarship.

From The Revenge of Analog by David Sax, on the story of digital progress:

Our world would be successively rendered into bits and bytes, one program at a time, until we reached a state of digital utopia, or the Terminators came for us.

The Revenge of Analog presents a different narrative, however. It shows that the progress of technological innovation isn’t a story of a slow match from good to better to best; it’s a series of trials that helps us understand who we are and how we operate.

This brings to mind an analogy to evolution by natural selection. It’s often misunderstood that evolution represents a sort of upward progress to perfection. The reality is that it is progress toward reproductive fitness, integrating whatever allows a species to propagate. An evolved species is not ideal in every way. Rather, in some ways it may be worse off than its earlier iterations. (See Breath by James Nestor for examples of how our evolutionary adaptations have actually devolved our breathing functions.)

Technology evolves, but its latest iteration may not be ideal in every way - may be worse in some important ways. This is where human judgement about the purposes of life and technology must engage, refusing to allow ourselves and our world to become slaves to our technology.