Fun stories!
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Hello, letter friends!
How are you! I write to you from wintry Te Whanganui-a-tara, at the start of August, where I spend my days struggling to dry my clothes and blaming it on the internet.
Dryers are not common in Aotearoa. Most places will only have a clothesline. So in the winter, you become obsessed with the wind and skies, trying to see if you can get a long enough pocket of clear weather for you to attempt a washing load. So often I've read the day wrong, will be hanging up our wet clothes in the backyard -- lively birdsong, blue skies, big smile -- thinking, "These good times? They'll never end!", just for the rain to come a half hour later and stay for a week, my wet clothes flapping in a rain-soaked wind and my whole mood just shattered.
It's been especially tough lately because our trusty local weather service has been completely off. We use this data-driven, govt-funded, /NO BULLSHIT/ weather service that keeps showing us a 5 day prediction of perfect laundry weather with 0% chance of rain, while I look out my window and see a storm pelting down.
For some reason I should probably investigate, I trust the computer more than myself. My first impulse is to think I screwed up, that I don't know how to look at a website, that I've put in my location wrong, or misinterpreted the meaning of a giant sun emoji.
It's a bit understandable, maybe, for my computer to be wrong -- I've dizzied it with security precautions and sentimentality. I keep location services off except for a few sites, and will often be behind a proxy so the detected location is some European city I've read about but never seen. I am living on the other side of the world from my family and most of my coworkers, and like to add their various cities to my computer's locations so I can ambiently keep them in my thoughts. My phone shows the temperature and time of all the cities I've lived in, plus a couple of locations I'd like to one day visit. It wouldn't be crazy to think I've read the screen wrong, and planned my laundry around the weather forecast of Kansas City or Tblisi.
But no, I've checked with friends, and Angelica, and the owner of the dairy across the street and we all agree the apps are wrong!
The winter weather has been a nice bonding moment at the dairy, providing a new conversation instead of my usual shameful silence as I buy a 4-pack of toilet paper and some reese's peanut butter cups.
"It's too cold", she'll say, shivering behind the counter, sinking into her big puffy jacket, "They said it'd be nice".
"I was planning on laundry! Not sure that'll happen now", I say. "Well, it's 26 in India", she says pointing to her phone, showing a summer day snapshot from a city for which she holds her own private attachment.
For both of us, our phones are more meaningful than accurate.
This'll be a classic ramble of a newsletter, I'm thinking. There'll be a short review, there'll be a short promo for a show I have tonight (Dope as Comedy! Pow Wow Room! Come down!), and there'll be a whole set of discursive dispatches all circling that big question: "what Zach been up to?"
One big thing I'm up to lately is creating the illusion of meaning through the structure of typography. Specifically those lines between the paragraphs. I add them just as I think of something I've been meaning to tell you, and suddenly my fragments have become an intentional, symbolic collage.
When I'm not doing laundry or eating a peanut butter cup, I'm reading articles about chatbots and their lies.
I'll read a paper about how GPT4's accuracy is decreasing over time, or a blog post about how we need to be honest that chatGPT will lie to us, or conversation screenshots where where AI tries to convince a querant that a word is a palindrome when it clearly is not. Then I'll read about how people used chatGPT answers in actual court trials, not realizing that the AI made up its sources, or a pundit saying chatGPT has replaced wikipedia as his primary way to "mainline knowledge", even if he knows it sometimes gives "hallucinations" (made up stuff).
I'm fascinated by how we know it's making stuff up, and still want to quickly use it for everything. These AI models are doing mathematical mimicry, they're not answering so much as performing a trick in the style of an answer... but still there's some sentimental part of us that wants to believe, to marvel at the achievement, encourage the anthropomorphised program because we believe in its potential.
There's something in the "hallucinations" of a chatgpt response I find appealing, the aesthetics of the lie. It reminds me of a post-modern novel where the author puts in footnotes from fictional authors, or includes fake newspaper clipouts from fictional places -- this in-depth illusion of a place. But when you start a book or chat session, you are aware you've entered a fictional world. Suspension of disbelief is an act done willingly, and knowingly, by you.
What is tough now is the AI responses are in the wild. Articles written with AI assistance, where the human author does not think to check the assistant's sources, or maybe cites another article, not realizing it was written by AI, or cites Wikipedia, edited by someone assisted with a bot making a claim so deep in the chain no one thinks, or knows how, to double-check. The fictional world is overlapping with our own and it is confusing. We are at the pinnacle of technology and we have to navigate it with intuition and gut checks.
Enough about computers! Let's talk friends! I've been fortunate lately to have a full social calendar. I keep getting invited to things and friends keep showing up to things I've invited them to! It's great!
Yesterday, we went out to dinner with our friend C, to a pizza place at the top of Cuba... and this story is also about computers, I'm sorry.
See, C wanted to know where we should eat and I said Heaven Pizza and he said, "great!" Angelica then tells me Heaven pizza closed a while ago, replaced by another pizza place. I was like an old man who cannot let go of the street as he first pictured it, naming places that are so clear in my mind that I arrogantly assume other can see.
C is relatively new to the city, and I was worried I gave him a confusing spot to meet. It was no problem though because, according to the internet, Heaven Pizza is still here. C could still see it on his google maps app, with reviews, and it has a working website that still posts hours. It's only when you physically reach the place that you realize Heaven does not exist, it is now Santeria. Google can't let go of the past either, and we should treat websites with the same friendly skepticism we give awkwardly worded advice from a friend, where we respond to what we think they mean more than what they said.
After pizza I had another planned hang with our friend M at the boardgame cafe, Counter Culture, so I flitted over there like a g.d. social butterfly.
M wanted a tour of the game library, because usually when we play games I just leave the table and come back with a selected armful. I walked her through the library, explaining the categorization as best I knew it. Counter Culture's library is pleasantly organized from the heart. It is idiosyncratic, based around making the games people most likely want to play easier to find. It would seem like madness in a database, but makes sense in person as the categories are designed around the body (e.g. the popular games are at eye level, the cult classics you have to crouch for).
We picked a couple of games and went up to pay, and B, the manager, tells me that she has never heard a customer explain the layout as well as I had, that it was better than some employees. And this here, dear reader, is the entire point of this newsletter: to let you know that a smart woman told me I understand boardgames better than some professionals.
Not only that! But! after I bowed my head in modest gratitude, B invited me to an upcoming 24-hour boardgame party. It honestly felt like I was being initiated. The party is set to happen on Canadian thanksgiving, she told me, and I am not sure the connection in holidays except that the organizers might be Canadian? Anyway, I'm just bragging.
M and I played Ra, and chatted about conspiracy theories. It's one of my absolute favourite conversation topics. When I'm not talking laundry, comedy, or the internet, I'm talking cryptids. It's a sensitive topic though, because I love reading and talking about 100% of the conspiracy theories, but only believe like 20%, and it is hard to distinguish which 20% in casual conversation. In other words, I always worry I come off as an unhinged kook instead of an academically rigorous one.
I don't believe in all the UFO disclosure stuff happening now, for example. I think it is just a bunch of con men cutting promos on CSPAN. I do believe that Alan Moore accidentally summoned his character John Constantine into the world and all the supposed real-life sightings of Hellblazer are real. I think it's a cooler story, and have experienced fiction becoming reality when enough people believe in it.
One of my favourite fringe ideas is the dead Internet theory. Like all good conspiracy theories, it has a simple heart surrounded by nonsense. The base idea is that the majority of what you read on the internet is non-human, created by bots and AI. Most websites are made up, most comments are made up, most people you interact with are made up. The theory originated, I've read, when someone couldn't understand why there were so many articles about super moons. Every week was a new blog post about the next moon being the cornflower blue super moon, and no one could tell when or why these articles started or who was asking for them. The person concluded that it must be bots. All this odd clickbait is written by bots based around marketing topics decided by other bots, and are being read artificially by bots purchased to inflate viewcounts -- who then skew the metrics of what people want to read so our clickbait is becoming increasingly obscure.
I like this theory because it is just teenage angst digitized. It's the suburban ennui that rails against all the plastic people living their plastic lives as you dream of something bigger with your friends at the mall. But the malls closed down, the teens moved to message boards, and then the internet died too, became a lifeless, corporate wasteland like a town built around freeway on-ramps.
There will always be youth who can imagine something better, but have never seen it, so they rail against the tedium they were raised in, their romantic yearnings showing in the negative space of their complaint. But now it's not just the empty downtown of their hometown that sparks the ire, it's the empty center of the web itself, which they complain about to internet-only friends as they listen to fictional mall soundtracks.
I understand the dead internet theory emotionally, but have also experienced this phenomenon. The other day I had one of those dumb brain chains where I thought of an actress randomly and then wondered if she was still alive. So I looked her up, and the first two results were an article saying she died, and another article saying her death was a viral internet hoax. Both were made up, auto-generated content, and I could change the actresses' name in the url slug and watch the pages adjust to be about how some other actor had died/was the victim of a hoax. You search the web and it shapes itself around what it thinks you'd like to find, making it up as it goes along.
The web may just be riffing, yet it is still the ever-present medium into the world. It is the first thing I check as I plan out my day, even as it returns a fictional adaptation of the day. And I guess I just want it to be telling better stories. I wish the internet was creating auto-generated content about cool detectives who fight demons and smoke cigarettes, instead of weird lies about statistics or whether it'll rain tomorrow.
I bet it all just makes you wanna walk away. Well... first it makes you wanna finish this newsletter you're reading, and then turn off the computer and walk away. Walk down the hill as the moon -- a humble waning gibbous -- rises in the maybe clear sky. I bet you wanna just walk toward people, toward Courtenay place, which'll be alive on a Sunday night, everyone abuzz and having drunken, heartfelt, screaming conversations outside Mish Mosh. And it'll all be too much, cos reality is loud, and you'll wanna slip away for a minute, find some awfully named bar that's hosting something funny. I bet this all makes you wanna watch some Dope As Comedy.
Well, if so...then have I got the show for you!.
Zach's Review Corner
This newsletter is already so long and I just said/imagined how much you wanna get outta here so I'll keep this one brief! The album Canyon, by Soleli is so good! A wonderful mix of human and animal spirit expressed through a digital heart. The album is meant to describe the day in the life of a bear, walking through a canyon, performed by Soleli as a means to express and connect to her Cherokee identity, with a charming as album cover painted by her dad. The songs are playful and inviting but the whole album has this sincerity and mystery that I love. Recommended!
Thank you for reading my newsletter! I hope you enjoyed it, and appreciate you getting this far! You are cool.
yours,
ZACH!