February 22, 2025

Wicked, Taxi Driver, Robot Librarians (4 minutes)

The good news: the movie Wicked is wonderful. It is a feast for the eyes and the soul.

As a novice filmmaker, with a few mediocre movies under my belt, let me tell you that the art department (design and builders, painters), the camera and lighting department (the steadicam ops!) and the overall pacing and economy of visual statements (direction, editing) are all as good as it gets.

In other words, Wicked is often perfect. And that is a cause for celebration. Enjoy it, if you have not already.

(Thank you Marley for the tickets!)

The bad news: I started to watch Taxi Driver a few nights ago as I was working late and needed something to help keep me up.

1) It, too, is often a perfect movie.

2) It is not a happy movie.

Specifically: the main character, a violent narcissist, has an exchange with a presidential candidate in which he lays out the Trump / MAGA/ GOP platform as of 2024. And, unlike Scorsese’s dark fantasy (Dostoevsky’s Notes from Underground must have been an inspiration; no I’m not verifying that), in our reality, the VIOLENT NARCISSIST ISN’T THE CAB DRIVER, HE’s THE PRESIDENT. And he’s not alone.

We are all inside a vehicle being piloted by a cadre of Travis Bickle’s. Yes, of course they will crash. The important question is how many people will they kill in the process.

And having just watched Downfall with our youngest, we must do everything in our power to make sure the answer is: “not nearly as many as they intended to kill.”

The new news: for thousands of years, people all over the world have observed, again and again, that we humans require a framework to understand new information.

“Let she who has eyes to see, or ears to hear…”

Every magic trick, every joke, every musical hook is based on this underlying structure: we use patterns to make sense of our world and anything that falls out of the pattern is thus “news” or “notable” or “important.” (Or invisible!)¹

Lately, we’ve had computers to help us automate and thus expand upon this work.

In a delicious and, of course, completely predictable twist, we now are using computers to compute how we compute. (“AI”.)

And, understandably, we are struggling to make sense of what is truly novel and thus useful about this inflection point.

So let me offer a simple analogy:

AI tools like Claude, Perplexity and DeepSeek are robot librarians.

In general, the role of librarians is very, very, very useful. Especially when we are searching for answers to complex problems. (And much of our policy disputes, which in turn fuel political action, are in fact about complex problems.)

More, better librarians are good, actually.

Of course, you may recognize the problem with this scenario (nothing new under the sun!)

GARBAGE IN, GARBAGE OUT.

In other words, the robot librarians are only as good as the libraries they can access. (Our real enemy is not robot librarians, it’s book burners!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!)

Was that enough exclamation marks? One never knows these days.

To prove my point, I tasked a robot librarian with sorting through a dozen of my newsletters.

I asked it: which one best defines the crisis we are in and what is to be done?

It said:

MARCH 23, 2024 - "The Kids Are Not Alright, actually"

Notably:

We are months away from possibly electing a President who has promised to be a literal dictator on day one, purge career civil servants, and eliminate the rule of law for those who carry out his illegal, violent agenda.

We are not in a cartoon. The rules of gravity apply to the USA as well. (cf Brexit).

Culture is not enough to protect us.

Every wave can wash it away. It must be continuously rebuilt, but only if people know how to…

As for that how…

Climate change, mass migration, housing crisis, electrification: these are all complex problems. They must be understood in order to be solved. Understanding requires bringing in new information – what you don't know you don't know.

That's not what the attention economy algorithms are designed to promote.

I’ve previously written a prescription for what ails us:

Linear media, new electronic spaces, mastery of the tools that our would-be masters want to use to enslave us (literally! They literally want slaves. Not hyperbole!)

But, first, maybe, you might watch a nice movie?

I very much recommend Flow, which was made entirely with computers and is also perhaps the most human movie of all the ones I’ve listed thus far.

Take care of each other. It’s the only way we can take care of ourselves.

<3