Hello (again), world
IN THE BEGINNING there was the LETTER, and it was Slow; and there was also the PHONE CALL, which back then got Expensive if it wasn’t local. Then came the E-MAIL (it had a hyphen back in those days), and it was Instantaneous, except that the Computer Lab wasn’t always free, and Dialup was slow, and checking it when en route or abroad was nigh on impossible, but on the whole it was Good, and lo! the calls and letters dried right up.
Then came the ONLINE JOURNAL and its cousin the BLOG, which one could write as easily as an email, except without having to worry about the Recipient, and the emails dropped off; and there was much Oversharing. Then came the TWEET, and there was much Context Collapse; and FACEBOOK, and we had to Like and Share if we agreed. And lo! Google cancelled Reader, and LiveJournal was sold to the Russians, whereupon the Blogosphere diminished, and Social Media ruled the Land.
Soon came the ALGORITHM, and the People grew addicted to DOPAMINE and OUTRAGE, and their friends were hidden from them and their external links suppressed, and BRANDS and INFLUENCERS did their best to ride the wave, and the Land was full of BOTS; and then Elon bought Twitter, and we learned that it could, in fact, get Even Worse; and there was much screaming into the Void.
And the Void took all the People’s words unto itself, and said:
LET THERE BE AI.
And though BLUE SKIES could be seen off in the distance, there was DISCORD throughout the Land. For the People did scramble to find better ways to COMMUNICATE, and CONNECT, despite the inevitable ENSHITTIFICATION of their tools; but some of them remembered that EMAIL was still a Thing, and not yet completely Enclosed, and NEWSLETTERS didst proliferate as far as the eye could see.
A few of which actually weren’t trying to sell you something.
#politics
Ignorance is, if not exactly bliss—
Two days after the U.S. election, the British writer Jonn Elledge posted the following pithy analysis to Bluesky:
- When prices go up, incumbents go down;
- A small but electorally significant number of Americans won’t vote for a female president;
- A lot of voters pay little attention to politics and thus weren't really aware of/don’t believe the bad stuff.
I have some thoughts about point three. Low-information, low-propensity voters are getting a lot of the blame and vitriol for what happened last month, for holding views about the candidates that were wildly disparate from reality, and for apparently living under a goddamn rock for the past decade.
It has been a tenet among political operatives for literal decades—and I know because I read about it back in 2001, and also it matched up with my misspent youth knocking on hundreds of doors—that voters by and large are not interested in politics and are not engaged, not because they’re a bunch of ignoramuses, but because they’re busy: they have jobs and commutes and kids, they’re not getting enough sleep—and in a sick system, being kept busy and tired is the entire point. They don’t have time to doomscroll. They don’t have the bandwidth to keep track of all the chicanery (and they’re liable to dismiss all politicans are crooks in any event). They might have managed the daily paper or the six o’clock news when they were both still things, but not so much any more.
Busy, disengaged voters are why politicos keep their messaging mind-numbingly simple and repetitive: they have to catch voters at unawares and hope their message gets in, and even then the message voters get is not necessarily the one politicians are trying to send. To the politically aware these voters’ decision-making process can make less than zero sense, but these are the voters you have. It is a campaign’s literal job to get through to these voters, and if they fail to respond, chances are that’s on the campaigner for failing to craft a persuasive narrative. These are the voters you need.
One thing busy, disengaged voters do do every so often, at least in a two-party, first-past-the-post system, is rouse themselves to Throw the Bums Out. They’re why increased voter turnout is usually a Bad Thing for the incumbent camp, and why the swing in one direction can be more decisive than expected. An affordability crisis is usually one of those times when said bums get thrown out: grocery bills going up by 50 percent and housing costs doubling are not things for which voters tend to reward incumbents (see point one, above).
But when you’re throwing the bums out you’re not necessarily paying super-close attention to who you’re replacing them with. Tell them that the alternative is worse than horrible and they would say: but they’re bums, and it’s time to throw them out. If disengaged voters were possessed of a consistent theory of politics, they wouldn’t be disengaged. This doesn’t stop politicians from using disengaged votes as endorsements of their entire platform and claiming a mandate to do things that the people who voted for them have no idea are about to hit them.
#photos
#music
Back to Beethoven, part one
Deep in the second movement of Beethoven’s final piano sonata, Opus 111, the listener is suddenly presented with a flurry of syncopated rhythms. During his 2004 lectures on the Beethoven piano sonatas, the pianist András Schiff sniffed at the idea that this was somehow a foreshadowing of jazz, declaring:
This not the fore-story of a boogie-woogie, as many people suggest. I get very upset when I hear that “oh this variation is so jazzy.” There is nothing jazzy about it, it’s only— Of course, today we have different associations and we cannot forget all our experiences of jazz, but with due respect to that I don’t— This is the most spiritual creation of the most spiritual composer, so let’s not associate it with banalities.
No, actually, let’s. Let’s take a listen to Jon Batiste’s new album, Beethoven Blues, which takes liberties with familiar Beethoven works, infusing them with gospel and blues. As the AP reported in October, “The album was written through a process called ‘spontaneous composition,’ which he views as a lost art in classical music. It’s extemporization; Batiste sits at the piano and interpolates Beethoven’s masterpieces to make them his own.” And damned if it doesn’t work. In my favourite track, “Waldstein Wobble,” Batiste takes the Waldstein sonata—the least famous of Beethoven’s works riffed on here—and transforms it on the fly into a ... can I call it a boogie-woogie explosion? In a way that seems absolutely logical and progressive. (So there.)
The thing is, extemporation is a lost art in classical music, so much of which nowadays risks treating the repertoire as museum pieces (Schiff in particular treats Beethoven’s notations as inviolable.) But back in the day classical music was all about improv. Musicians riffed on other musicians’ themes all the time. There were literal improv duels in Vienna, and Beethoven himself was a master of them; sending Daniel Steibelt on his way in one celebrated instance in 1800 (this dramatization differs from the recorded accounts, which were after-the-fact and third-hand in any event). And neither are jazz riffs on classical pieces a new thing: if you haven’t heard of Hazel Scott (1920-1981), then congratulations, you’re one of today’s lucky ten thousand.
#maps #books
Recently reviewed on The Map Room: Paulina Rowińska’s Mapmatics, which explores the math beneath the maps.
#links
- Back in Oct 2020, Greg Pogorzelski had some thoughts on the real point of the Kobayashi Maru test in Star Trek.
- A mystery album of street photos taken during the German occupation of Paris in World War II—when outdoor photography could be punished by death—led to a four-year search for the unknown photographer.
- I guess that if you already own a movie theatre and a railroad, putting up your own money to make four short films based on Howard Waldrop’s stories isn’t the silliest thing to do with all that Game of Thrones money. It may in fact be the best thing.
- The end of Delicious Library, after years of minimal updates, comes after Amazon shut off the feed it used to look up book data. As an offline library cataloguing app it was the sort of thing I was looking to return to after deleting my Goodreads and LibraryThing accounts, but it turns out even an offline cataloguing app needed online data.
- Robert Francis on the disappearance of American robins from the dinner table. Yes, people used to eat robins! But then a lot of birds that poor and marginalized people hunted for sustenance were declared off-limits in favour of birds that were quote-unquote good sport—for wealthy hunters whose survival didn’t depend on it.