[a pleasurable headache] No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it
The last two weeks have seemed like someone has shoved six months into a fortnight. We’ve had illnesses, late night hospital visits, missed gigs we’ve been looking forward to, and everything in between. Hopefully the next two weeks will bring a period of relative calm.
Links
The Digital Workplace Is Designed to Bring You Down
https://www.nytimes.com/interactive/2023/01/23/magazine/cal-newport-interview.html Archive.ph link here
Cal Newport (author of Deep Work) is now writing a book on ‘slow productivity’.
“Right now, I open the book with a story of John McPhee working on one of his first really complex New Yorker pieces. He spent two weeks lying on a picnic table in his backyard trying to figure out, How am I going to make this piece work? On the small scale, you’re like, you spent all day lying on a table, you’re incredibly unproductive. But zoom out to John McPhee’s career, and you’re like, you’re one of the most productive and impactful writers of all time. So how do you actually work with your mind and create things of value? What I’ve identified is three principles: doing fewer things, working at a natural pace, but obsessing over quality. That trio of properties better hits the sweet spot of how we’re actually wired and produces valuable meaningful work, but it’s sustainable.”
This New York Times interview with Newport gives us a good idea of some of the elements the book is going to touch on. Most important is the quote above, a capsule definition of the concept. The key word there is ‘sustainable’.
Sustainable systems = sustainable work.
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The preliminary ballot for the Bram Stoker Awards are up, an annual set of awards for horror fiction and non-fiction. It’s a great list to peruse if you want to get a snapshot of the best in genre work going on right now.
Amid the list, Blame by Warren Benedetto caught my eye in the short fiction section. The tale is epistolary in nature, grafted to modern communication methods, such as emails, messages, GitHub requests, etc. Give it a read and definitely check out the rest of the nominees on the lists.
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How “Battle Royale” Took Over Video Games
https://www.newyorker.com/culture/culture-desk/how-battle-royale-took-over-video-games
Simon Parkin on the concept/sub-genre that has taken over video games from the original Japanese novel to PUBG and beyond.
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Decades Later, The JFK Assassination Still Keeps Some Secrets
https://defector.com/decades-later-the-jfk-assassination-still-keeps-some-secrets
Noah Kulwin (of the truly excellent Blowback podcast) writes the first in a series of columns on the sports-centric Defector site. Kulwin traces the recent release of documents pertaining to the assassination, the effect of Oliver Stone’s JFK on the earlier release of evidence and an overview of the organised crime/intelligence superstructure that allegedly executed the assassination itself. Good stuff.
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Tiktok’s enshittification
https://pluralistic.net/2023/01/21/potemkin-ai/
Cory Doctorow introduces the concept of ‘enshittification’ into the technological lexicon.
“But what if there is no underlying logic? Or, more to the point, what if the logic shifts based on the platform’s priorities? If you go down to the midway at your county fair, you’ll spot some poor sucker walking around all day with a giant teddy bear that they won by throwing three balls in a peach basket.
The peach-basket is a rigged game. The carny can use a hidden switch to force the balls to bounce out of the basket. No one wins a giant teddy bear unless the carny wants them to win it. Why did the carny let the sucker win the giant teddy bear? So that he’d carry it around all day, convincing other suckers to put down five bucks for their chance to win one.”
Doctoro’s more recent article points out that podcasts, as a medium, are (thankfully) pretty much immune to the concept.
“Real podcasts are as open as you could want – encoded in the open MP3 standard, distributed over the open RSS standard – and can be subscribed to and played back by any client. There’s no practical way to spy on podcast listeners, nor to enshittify their experience in other ways, say, by blocking ad-skipping.”
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Sociopathy as a Lifestyle Brand
https://www.currentaffairs.org/2023/01/sociopathy-as-a-lifestyle-brand
Current Affairs on Andrew Tate, Donald Trump and con men of the same ilk.
“Figures like Trump, Tate, and Nishimura attain success in part by being deliberately outrageous. Part of the appeal of “anti-woke” politics is that it presents itself as subversive and anti-establishment. “Owning the libs” by deliberately doing things that upset people has become a core part of the right’s messaging. They take great joy in producing an angry response. This is why Thunberg’s approach to Tate’s provocations was the correct one. When he boasted of the carbon emissions produced by his many cars, she did not get angry, but pointed out that it seemed like he was desperate to affirm his masculinity. Thunberg did something important, which is to make those who try to look cool and subversive seem silly and obnoxious.”
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Amazon Just Saw Its First Strike in Britain
https://jacobin.com/2023/01/amazon-strike-britain-wages-pay-raise-workers-gmb-union/
Apart from the huge strike this week that saw around 500‘00 workers here in the UK go on strike comes the news of a nascent strike movement amongst the Amazon workers here too.
“Amin has worked here for nearly three years now. He never thought he’d find himself on a picket line, but he says he had no choice. “The cost of living is going up. Things are really, really hard, not just for me but for people across the UK. Prices are going up. Energy prices are ridiculous. When you’ve got a family to feed, it’s even tougher.” Also hovering round the fire is Mark, who’s worked at Amazon for nearly four years. “There was nowhere else to go,” he explains. “A lot of people here depend on these jobs, and they deserve so much more money. You shouldn’t be living just above the poverty line when you’re working for one of the richest companies in the world.”
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THE WORST THING WE READ THIS WEEK: Why Is the New York Times So Obsessed With Trans Kids?
“In absolute numbers, there are many, many more people who regret having gotten abortions than who regret a gender transition. But like detransitioners, they are a tiny fraction of the relevant total. Presented with a study showing that the percentage of patients who regret getting abortions appears to be in the low single digits, Reuters did not send its investigative team to find the exceptions, but simply went with the headline “Overwhelming majority of U.S. women don’t regret abortion: study.”
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South Pole Topography
https://brr.fyi/posts/south-pole-topography
Finally, I discovered the above blog recently. The author works in IT and is currently stationed in Antarctica. This blog documents their travels and experiences whilst there. This specific post is about the very niche subject of snow drift and how it affects the topography of the landscape, as well as how buildings are designed. A lot of these buildings simply end up being buried by the snow. Access hatches to underground structures constantly have to be extended and adapted as snow builds and builds. A fascinating post on something I had never even considered up until now.
=== I’m off to wrestle with this grizzly bear of a ToDo list. See you in two!