WHEN YOU’RE BLOGGING IN the era of posting (thank you, reader Matthew of Bellevue Hill) you subject yourself to a few annoying constraints, like not having an easy phone app you can tap your malformed thoughts into, like having an effectively infinite word limit instead of a crisp punchy microblog format, like the knowledge for better or worse that your blog is being archived for posterity. Most of all though when you consider the fundamental shift that happened somewhere around 2014, between writing in the different formats, you realise that microblogging, tweeting, or whatever you choose to call posting, involved a fundamental shift away from obligation.
So then, where’s the fire? What’s the crisis? Where is generative AI potentially going to lay waste to the world we live in?
The problem is that it is not being used as a prosthesis to work beyond the frontiers of human capacity. It is being deployed in service to an anti-human ideology by a small class of oligarchs who loathe mass society, who hate democracy, who fear constraint.
Americans are suffering too much, dying too soon, and going broke in order to prop up a completely unnecessary but very profitable industry. The time has come for us to begin phasing it out. The only questions should be how fast to do so and by what means: we could add a public option to Obamacare’s individual insurance market; we could gradually lower the eligibility age for Medicare or allow people to buy into Medicaid. But until we change direction, the problem will just get worse, leading to more despair and to more acts of rage. It is right and necessary to condemn such acts, but we no longer have a right to be surprised by them.
'A feeling of pride and fear mounted in him. Then another commotion, more yelling, disorder, running: nothing has happened they were shouting now: his Majesty was unharmed, a fiendish and dilettantish attempts on his life has failed. People began to slowly trickle back home. He thought of doing the same. But perhaps it was not good to be seen running away right now. It may be suspicious. He walked into a pastry shop. Should he take a baklava or a millefeuille? He decided for the latter even if it was more expensive. He realized that the money was in the same pocket with his pistol, moved a little away from the crowd and carefully took out 12 hellers. He counted them one by one. He had very little money. Like all 19-year olds he liked cakes. Somebody yelled again; cries became stronger and closer. He left the millefeuille after the first bite and walked three or four steps out of the store. There right in front of him was a stopped car, with His Majesty and the wife, berating the driver. He touched the pistol as if to make sure it was still there. Then he took it out…'
ORCS ARE CREATURES FROM Tolkien, and specifically Tolkien, who created them as fantastic creatures of dread, and large numbers. Certainly, JRR Tolkien worked in veins of antiquarianism, and everything he wrote was a meta-reference to some Old English or Celtic or Norse forebear, as anyone who's got bored by his books knows, but the forebears of orc-dom in British, Irish, and Northern European myth are not the orcs of modern myth. Traditional goblins are solitary, intelligent, skilful, tricky. Hobgoblins are humorous, though the butt of the joke might be you. Elves will definitely steal your baby, and fairies will definitely trick you. Demons, though certainly folkloric, relate specifically to the rules of Christianity and formal religion. The orcdom of uncountable ugly barbarian numbers, who are enemies and only enemies, and who have been made massively popular in the Dungeons and Dragons and Warhammer 40K games franchises, appear to arrive fresh, culturally whole, in the late 20th century. Or did they?
An architectural elevation of Ithaca Gardens, by Harry Seidler. City of Sydney Archives
THE CITY OF SYDNEY Council proposes to nominate for State Heritage Register (SHR) listing a set of modern apartment blocks, including Ithaca Gardens in the Eastern Suburbs. Ithaca is a Harry Seidler apartment block and a landmark; the others are similar. All are covered already either by Heritage Conservation Areas or by some other form of protection. Listing on the State register would be an increase. I simply note that the language being used to oppose its inclusion in the SHR is almost exactly identical to that which might have been used in the 1970s in its favour. In the 1970s the heritage system in NSW was created as a response to excessively arbitrary Government power, threatening localism.
Carroll, the Ithaca Gardens owners’ corporation chair, voiced residents’ “overwhelming opposition” to local or state heritage listing at a council committee meeting last week.
“Ithaca Gardens is not a museum, a place of worship, an office tower or an individual residence – it is home to more than 60 people. Owners … love and respect the building,” he said.
...
He said many of the apartments had been renovated internally to make them “more suitable for 21st-century living” and “to deny such rights to others would seem extremely unfair”.
I agree with the Anglofuturists that we shouldn’t resign ourselves to our current economic failures. I think we need to ask ourselves what has gone wrong with the variety of capitalism that we have, that has led us to this stagnation. It’s a problem that’s not unique to the UK, but which seems to have affected the UK more seriously than most other developed countries. The slowdown seems to have begun in the 2000s, crystallising in full at the Global Financial Crisis.
I have come to think of this as the hidden, unspoken ideology of our media and political elites. They behave, in word and in deed, as though what is most important is the protection and maintenance of the status hierarchy.
A thing is wrong and objectionable if it is uncouth — crass behavior that undermines faith in social institutions and the social order.
THISUSED TO BE a good blog, a food blog. What happened to that? I got a job, obviously, and the impetus to post food subsided. So here are the nori rolls I like to make on Fridays (in an exercise of quasi-Catholicism) after I go and get some fresh sashimi.
WE LIVE IN AN age identified by meritocratic principles. Those aren't ones which describe the world as it is, since clearly the best people are not selected to the highest positions of privilege (I mean, look around), they're principles that describe the world as it ought to be, and which serve to justify what will be. The meritocratic model of the world is one in which it's the inequality of human achievements, intelligence, hard work, talents, that justifies the existence of inequalities of power and privilege, and which aims to exclude accidents of undeserved success. The meritocratic model says, good things should come to the good, and by implication, lays the judgement of failure on the failed. From here, let me introduce a seemingly irrelevant but actually critically relevant event: US President Joe Biden pardoned his son, Hunter Biden.
THE AUSTRALIAN GOVERNMENT HAS released its Online Safety Amendment (Social Media Minimum Age) Bill and it's not very good, and can't really work. But that's not what interests me about it. That this bit of legislation has been such a prominent part of the government agenda is, I think, a sign of a move away from Labor's role as a State party.
