24: Unfocused
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I gave myself a goal to write 100,000 words this year. By my calculations we’re at 20% of the way through the year; I’m at about 12.5% of my goal. Not great, not bad, though still something to be proud of and build upon. It’s a foundational goal. In an era of slop and lazy fucking generative content, when you can push a button to generate hundreds of words that are themselves generated into multi-dozen word summaries that are aggregated into knowledge bases and RAGs and vomited back into more lazy content, sitting down and writing one letter at a time feels counter cultural. It is resistance against the currents.
More than that it is resistance against the flows in my mind. I used to write, well blog, often a long time ago, during times when I was in a depressive funk. I was “posting through it” before “posting” was a thing.
The more my life coagulated the less I wrote. We transitioned to microblogging, and video, and podcasts, and everything became more consumption based. Metrics, analytics, and interactions fueled this new ecosystem. A lot of those forms don’t suit me and I’ve realized that in the pivot I’ve internalized everything all over again.
In these moments of clarity I’ve come to realize how non-typical my brain is. You always knew without knowing. In the 1990s you put walls around yourself, you were closed off, your heart was stone, you were anti-social, you’re a loner, you’re a creep, a weirdo, what are you doing here? In the 2020s it’s all masks, and self-diagnosis, and trauma responses, self-help, mental health days, pop-psych influencers, and lots of prescriptions. My truth lies somewhere in the middle, if I were to search for it.
This brain has been particularly difficult to deal with over the last few years. This focus on longer writing, and reading, is meant to act as a mental reset. To find my inner voice. To develop new skills while everything is deskilled. That brain creates a lot of barriers along the way. My pace is slow. My thoughts scattered. My routine inconsistent.
I have not been diagnosed. My 2020s self-help, self-diagnosis applied to my retro 1990s standoffishness paints a particular picture. Do I have ADHD? Probably. Do I have autism? Maybe. Am I high-functioning? I think so?? Do I have the soup mix of ADHD and autism? Also possible. Would a proper diagnosis change anything? Probably not. I’ve managed to get by raw-dogging this since the Berlin Wall still stood. Perhaps drugs would help me move forward. Perhaps sunk cost will keep me raw-dogging.
Though the question is why this particular moment to struggle with it? I look internally. The usual signifiers: I am getting on in age, exhausted; my inability to stay connected with people along with everyone having complicated adult lives has left me more disconnected (the pandemic and the years spent abroad didn’t help); being a father of a new person and seeing their personality form in real time, with echoes back to me, worries me; maybe being vegan for so long has left me deficient in something that my brain needs despite being in general good health; anything else from a list of a dozen items.
I think about the external forces. I’ve been doing what I’ve been doing for 25 years and I’ve never felt so much existential dread. In the broader industry context, but also more locally seeing a space I’ve enjoyed taken over by idiots. I worry about the financial pressures of that dread, especially being a father now.
But mostly I think about the cruelty. I think of the petty, evil, stupid, goblin men in power and the suffering they bring. It’s been over two weeks and I can’t stop thinking about the bombing of the school in Minab, the photo of the mass graves, the photo of the bloody backpack. It devastates me. And those responsible are rah-rah-ing through it, posting Wii Sports edits spliced with bombing footage, torpedoing unarmed ships, treating all this like a Call of Duty campaign while they strike hospitals and ambulances and schools. The tickers show numbers: the stocks, the oil price, the gambling of everything. Nothing for the thousands of lives lost.
I think about the new front for ethnic cleansing by Israel in Lebanon. The genocide in Gaza continuing. The cruelty in the occupied territories continues. I watch the hands of Empire reach out across Latin America and its Blackwater mercenaries spreading horrors in Haiti with explosive drones.
In the heart of Empire, more cruelty. Often towards children and those most vulnerable. They are even importing a very Canadian type of cruelty, tariff free, and deploying it on disabled refugees. It goes on and on and the level of psychopathy is exhausting. I’m exhausted. Every day a new misery. By the time this goes out this list will be out of date.
So excuse me if I can’t focus on ``falls asleep`` our company's AI transformation. My heart’s not in it. Your use cases suck shit. Your strategy is anti-strategic. Your intentions fluctuate like the stockmarket | Your masquerade is grotesque. The leadership is delusional. It’s boring. And the process blows.
And while I’ve avoided having to use this slop thus far, as much as humanely possible, the inevitability, use it or we lose you, weighs on me. There’s been many takes about this recently. A lot of writing, from various types of coders and code managers, about the impact this will have on the craft. I’ve seen a shift in attitudes. A resigned acceptance amongst many. Some more invested in their own gains. Others hesitant yet embracing it. Here’s some of it:
I Started Programming When I Was 7. I'm 50 Now, and the Thing I Loved Has Changed | James Randall
AI should help us produce better code - Agentic Engineering Patterns - Simon Willison's Weblog
AI And The Ship of Theseus | Armin Ronacher's Thoughts and Writings
The common thread amongst the above is that they are solely focused on craft and process and output. They are myopic, looking at the immediate application to their coding day-to-day. The broader implications, nevermind the ethical ones, are inconsequential to the stereotypical ‘logical’ tech nerd using the best tool for the job. This kind of short view, very much in line with corporate quarter to quarter thinking, is what got us into this mess. I mean, look at the last article above about “AI and the Ship of Theseus”: its conclusion is that it’s good to use AI to wholesale rewrite entire open source projects so that they can be relicensed in a less restrictive way is insane. I’m in favour of open software too but it has to be with respect to the authors’, and its community’s, wishes and not to the benefit of billion dollar corporations that straight up stole this code.
The same models being used to make it easier to rewrite open software, and vibe code your security liability of a shitty app, are also being used to more efficiently murder people. Look at this shit.
Palantir’s Maven Smart System is an AI-powered Kanban board for killing people. | The Verge
The Pentagon Went to War with Anthropic. What's Really at Stake? | New Yorker
Peter Thiel and Jeffrey Epstein Had a Yearslong Relationship | Jacobin
It’s being used to spread all sorts of misinformation and propaganda. It’s being used to track and monitor protestors and dissidents. It’s being used to deanonymize people. It’s being used to sexually assault women. It’s giving people psychosis, it’s making them delusional, and worse it’s making CEOs and execs particularly delusional. It’s being used to undermine the sovereignty and integrity of countries. Some are starting to clue in though it might be too slow and too late.
Yes a lot of this has been done before AI and could be done without AI, but it’s the scale of it that is terrifying. It’s not the neural-nets and the inference and the transformation of this software that’s the problem, it’s the vast amount of data they are aggregating, training, processing, and the massive expenditures in data centres to power them. It’s also how this data was acquired and how it continues to be sourced. Trillions of dollars spent on this. Eventually they’ll come to collect.
How my brain is wired was a boon for me through my 25 year career. In my particular line of work it helped to not specialize. I changed tools and technologies dozens and dozens of times, sometimes entirely in the span of a month as different projects had drastically different needs. This I enjoyed. The challenge, the shift. The lack of focus.
Unfortunately how my brain is wired is a curse now. The large language model that is my mind is pattern matching the tools and technology against the systems and culture of the Empire and it wants nothing to do with it. I’ve done mild work to promote some questionable clients in the past. That’s the price we pay for wanting to live with dignity in the Empire. This is different though. The entire toolchain is corrupt. An ethical bankruptcy that is going to bankrupt society.
That dread is there. So please excuse me if I’m a little unfocused these days.
Related Links
Couldn’t fit these in above but all very related:
Whistleblower claims ex-DOGE member says he took Social Security data to new job | Washington Post
Large Language Muddle | Issue 51 | n+1 | The Editors
The temptation to resign ourselves to resignation is never stronger than at a time of overlapping crises. The AI upheaval is unique in its ability to metabolize any number of dread-inducing transformations. The university is becoming more corporate, more politically oppressive, and all but hostile to the humanities? Yes — and every student gets their own personal chatbot. The second coming of the Trump Administration has exposed the civic sclerosis of the US body politic? Time to turn the Social Security Administration over to Grok. Climate apocalypse now feels less like a distant terror than a fact of life? In three years, roughly a tenth of US energy demand will come from data centers alone.1 And in the middle of these concentric circles is the bedraggled individual, their intellectual autonomy — their humanity! — ever more under siege from the ingratiating question answerers in their phones.
Lastly,
Canada Is Already at War with the US—We Just Don’t Know It Yet | The Walrus
That might mean we need to build a world-class foreign intelligence service that stands apart from the existing agencies within the Canadian national security community. We need to consider options for mandatory military service, and we need to rapidly develop a defence industrial base that is capable of providing sovereign capabilities to the Canadian Armed Forces. We need to consider a hardened land border.
Uh, no. You need to start prosecuting people for treason. You need to strengthen our democratic institutions so that one first-past-the-post vote doesn’t elect a corrupt party. You need to start cutting out American tech companies, American AI, slowly through legislation. You need to enforce our own competition laws and dissolve Canadian monopolies. Canada can’t be three corporations in a trench coat. The whole Canadian system of capital is far too vulnerable to being corrupted by the USA. The systems need to be resilient.
That and covertly create our own nukes.
Listen to This
Today, March 18, is the 30th anniversary of the release of the “Firestarter” single. I never had a CD of The Fat of the Land, though I did hear the singles often on MuchMusic, but later in 1996 Wipeout XL released for the Playstation. A legendary game with an even more legendary soundtrack presented on Red Book audio, which meant that it could be played on a CD player. An instrumental version of “Firestarter” was on that disc. It got spun often.
Some you can find your focus in these troubling times,
sometimes.