Irrational gadgeteering

For reasons too dumb to reveal here, soi-disant AI has been coming up in my proximity. Yes, sure, we’re all hearing about it and maybe you are even using it – whatever you think that means. And yet when feeding [whatever it is] into an computer model to get some version of [wii] back is proffered as an acceptable work solution, it opens up to a much broader question: What is even work?

If parts or all of what you think you do can be so ‘taskicized’, what ever was work to begin with – to you?

And here I’ll yield the floor to Theodor Adorno:

Labor-saving devices … are invested with a halo of their own. This may be indicative of a fixation to a phase of adolescent activities in which people try to adapt themselves to modern technology by making it, as it were, their own cause… It seems that the kind of retrogression highly characteristic of persons who do not any longer feel they are the self-determining subjects of their fate, is concomitant with a fetishistic attitude towards the very same conditions which tend to be dehumanizing them. The more they are gradually being transformed into things, the more they invest things with a human aura. At the same time, the libidinization of gadgets is indirectly narcissistic in as much as it feeds on the ego’s control of nature: gadgets provide the subject with some memories of early feelings of omnipotence.

From the essay Work and Pleasure in THE STARS DOWN TO EARTH

Image: Anselm Kiefer, Aurora, 2015–17, oil, emulsion, acrylic, shellac, and sediment of an electrolysis on canvas, 110¼ × 149⅝ × 3⅝ inches.

When will you know

Google anything and you’ll see what they’re up to, with the “AI” results pushed up top. Scare quotes for reasons but really, the Google is doing a weird thing to the internet by this strategy – and they know they’re doing it.

But when will people realize it? When will they know?

Because the appearance of “AI” in expected places has already become… expected and rather commonplace. And this is what they at the Google understand well, that humans get used to stuff. However, now, you must look past these top results to find actual websites, with real information from people trying to provide it. People trying to find you – or have you find them. That’s one reason they have a site. I know, it sounds trite.

But those sites are being buried beneath these “AI” results. How concerned should you be? Should you care?

So, context: Open AI has unleashed all these free products training models like ChatGPT and several iterations you can pay for, in order to train us to use and become dependent on their products. But they need to make money. Lots of money and fast.

So we can know that, should we so choose. It’s expensive to run these things – both in financial and environmental costs, and the information they provide becomes degraded rather quickly – a thing humans still readily recognize [they call that foreshadowing in the biz].

These tech companies realize all of this, plus the fact that the media does all of their PR for free. And yet they are still burning through cash, mostly, it seems, on the vibes that people aren’t noticing the sixth finger or the clunky syntax, will grudgingly embrace accept most of it with a kind of dull fascination.

Are you overwhelmed? Is it all so little that it seems too much? What if there was a way to sharpen your fascination instead?

 

Word games

As puzzling as it seems [to me], maybe this is what the Times is ultimately after – a smash up of word games and news where terms are need to be replaced to convey meaning?

Example 1.  “While we recognize the US’ significant economic and financial strengths, we believe these no longer fully counterbalance the decline in fiscal metrics,” Moody’s Ratings in a statement as it downgraded the US thanks to government debt that’s approaching  $37 trillion. Hmm. Fiscal responsibility, but whose? A different kind of non-puzzle, but Points to Ponder. Keep playing to access the new clarity level.

You can’t win if you don’t play.

Example 2. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers will scale back on the number of recreational sites at Lake Lanier that will be temporarily closed due to the USACE’s current staffing levels.

Who are these so-called engineers, and to whom do they answer? Current staffing levels has to be a clue. Who does what and for why bleeds into a little bit of everything and it might take some blurred vision to see the outlines of causes and effects of such downgrades and closures. So it’s a good thing you can’t afford those new glasses, see?

And isn’t this fun already?

 

Prosperity Gospel Vamp

As mentioned many times, including public fora, sustainability is a vanishingly low bar. Just transfer the concept to say, friendship, and try to be whelmed at all.

Accordingly, this discussion about ‘everything-bagel-liberalism’ as a stymie to de-carbonization and other incursions into societal progress looks a bit pekid when corporate interests and provincial politicians are allowed the posture of disinterested bystanders:

Green-energy developers will tell you that among the biggest obstacles to new solar or wind projects online are 1) intransigence by gas-dominated utilities that make it practically impossible for renewable developments — which are less profitable for utilities than fossil-fuel infrastructure — to interconnect with the grid, and 2) campaigns by oil-and-gas front groups that work to gin up opposition to clean energy with deceptive claims like “wind turbines kill whales” and “solar panels cause cancer.”

We could pass all the federal permitting reforms Klein and Thompson could dream of, but if powerful fossil-fuel interests continue to call the political shots, we’ll never achieve the clean energy build-out we desperately need.

Similarly, when it comes to the scarcity of affordable housing, Abundance primarily blames zoning laws for constraining supply and driving up prices.

So much of the discourse on sustainable solutions reaches for just-in-time incrementalism that never can be, and only serve to preserve the status quo when radical change is required. Just like prosperity preachers, Abundance liberals need all of the attention for which they clamor. The best of among of them, like those cited here, even move us to consider why their arguments achieve such lift-off velocity in major media. Kudos – it’s a gift. Look askance and ponder.

 

Phosphorus edition

The Devil’s Element is a tale of folly, waste, greed, and excess, which Egan unspools with a light touch and a brisk pace. He opens the book with a police foot chase; the unfortunate suspect is eventually fished out of an algae-choked canal and hospitalized in Cape Coral, Florida. In its final pages he describes a pilot project to capture phosphorus from the pee of residents of Brattleboro, Vermont, and its use of an educational video featuring a talking drop of urine named Uri Nation. Along the way we meet Hennig Brand, an alchemist who first succeeded in isolating pure phosphorus from urine in 1669 while searching for the philosopher’s stone, the mythical substance that could turn lead to gold. Others quickly discovered that while the waxy, glowing stuff did not produce gold, it was poisonous, extremely unstable as a solid at room temperature, and prone to exploding. These properties earned it the moniker “the Devil’s element,” which in turn presaged its other modern application as an ingredient in some of the most horrendous weapons that humans use on one another. (Egan writes about a German beachcomber whose leg began to melt and char after a small orange rock he had collected exploded in his pants—a pebble-size legacy of the Allied firebombing of Hamburg in 1943 washed up on a Baltic shore.)

At the outset of the Industrial Revolution many nation-states figured out that they couldn’t feed their fast-growing populations without finding a lot more phosphorus than was available from manure and crop residues and naturally occurring in soils. Egan gives a grim global tour of the various predatory lengths to which imperial powers and modern multinational firms have gone to secure phosphorus. Soon after the Battle of Waterloo the British dug up their own fallen soldiers’ phosphorus-rich bones, shipped them home, then heated and ground them up as fertilizer to grow food for the living. In the middle of the nineteenth century, European and American farmers became reliant on imports of guano (bird poop) strip-mined from Peruvian islands by indentured Chinese laborers. When those reserves were exhausted in the 1890s, they turned elsewhere. Thus began the century-long ordeal of the Banaba Islanders, displaced from their Pacific homeland by the voracious English-owned, Australia-based Pacific Phosphate Company. After a company agent discovered vast reserves of phosphorus-laden rock on Banaba one day in 1900, the firm’s miners carved up the island chunk by chunk. The rocks were carried by conveyor belt to ships that ferried them onward to fertilize fields around the world. Banaba’s destruction helped Australia and New Zealand boost the productivity of their soils and become wealthy agricultural exporters. After the late 1970s Banaba’s phosphate reserves were largely depleted—by that point, mining firms had stripped 90 percent of the island’s land surface and removed 22 million tons of material. In the process, they also ruined many of the sacred caves where the islanders had collected water to survive periods of drought.

From Planet Ooze by Jonathan Mingle in the April 10, 2025 issue of the New York Review of Books

As always, support and invest in physical media. Subscribe to print journalism, buy books and records, experience the thrill.

Image: Decades of phosphate mining has left the surface of Banaba Island a moonscape of coral pinnacles. Photo by Janice Cantieri. National Geographic

Consequent antecedent

What if a climate report falls in the woods and no one is there to hear it read it write it?

The Trump administration has dismissed the hundreds of scientists and experts who had been compiling the federal government’s flagship report on how global warming is affecting the country.

The move puts the future of the report, which is required by Congress and is known as the National Climate Assessment, into serious jeopardy, experts said.

Since 2000, the federal government has published a comprehensive look every few years at how rising temperatures will affect human health, agriculture, fisheries, water supplies, transportation, energy production and other aspects of the U.S. economy. The last climate assessment came out in 2023 and is used by state and local governments as well as private companies to help prepare for the effects of heat waves, floods, droughts and other climate-related calamities.

On Monday, researchers around the country who had begun work on the sixth national climate assessment, planned for early 2028, received an email informing them that the scope of the report “is currently being re-evaluated” and that all contributors were being dismissed.

No presto-magic-o, no problem-o. Luckily for us, those pesky climate issues are no match for a brain genius who just does not want to hear about them. Solved.

Fantasy Winning.

Video: frères d’armes

The Mountebanks Congregate

In the early-mid 2000s there existed an essential and amazing weblog called The Poorman. Its disappearance in the early teens was completely understandable, as these things go. But what happened to The Poorman? Who is and where is Andrew? I’m sure there are people who know. Yours is not one of those people.

However, among their truly too-numerous-to-count hilariously poignant bits of writing about the complete and utter moral corruption of the Bush II administration and the media super-structure that served as its lifeline at each and every turn was a very insightful post about the founding of this great nation and especially the writing of its constitution. I wish I could find it for you dear people, but alas the wayback machine does not provide all. And so, I will attempt to re-create its fundamental point here.

So, back in ye olden revolutionary and post-revolutionary times, about July to September 1787, committees of the Constitutional Convention hashed out drafts of said document in grand strokes and fine detail, style and arrangements by Hamilton, Madison et al. Per the Poorman’s apt telling, near the end of this period, say around the middle of August, the entire crew of slave-owning inspired statesmen reached a point where they were sure the document was finished. What needed to be codified in order for the young country to function and treat itself justly had been put down in as clear a language as possible, easy and simple for all to parse. They had done it. In a humbling, electric moment, tired yet buzzed with destiny, they gathered up their finished draft and went out from Independence Hall in Philadelphia to get some fresh air and ponder the reach of their elegant treatise.

In the glare of late morning, the exhausted but exhilarated committee members poured out onto the streets of Philadelphia. But when they saw their fellow countrymen on the streets, began talking to a few and listening to more and realized the depths of a flimflammery and skallywaggery already afoot in the young country, the collection of mountebanks, the depraved and ignorant if eloquent tip of the hateful and begrudging masses for whom their toil was meant to soigner, they turned heel and headed back inside. There was yet more work needed on the document of their dreams and duty, to assure the perpetual longevity of the country of people it was designed to protect from themselves.

So as an update to the mysterious and direly missed Poorman, the descendants of those people that ran the writers back into the Hall to perfect their document are now in charge of everything.

And re: Harvard – pour encourager les autres works both ways, MFs.

The Unplan

Or, strength vs. weakness, as the case may be presents.

Imagine a wall to which things thrown may stick, but only for a short time. Enter the policy entrepreneurs.

In a most unfortunate mashup, the MBA ethos (?) has been paired with a kind of cribbed international politics model in a cache of people who pride themselves on not understanding anything about what they are doing. When David Brooks calls you stupid (no NYT link) you’ve won the golden calf.

There is something refreshing (refreshingly horrifying is a KIND of refreshing) about squeezing modern America and all its exceptionalisms into a new, middling third world country. We’ll update a lot corruptions and make them worse. We’ll crash many calcified industries and norms – universities, the law, farming. The notion that people should feel sorry for recent college graduates has it exactly backwards – they were the last ones to get a vintage education without all the sides and intellectual pestilence of acquiescent fascism. Especially if you went to small liberal arts or other well-regarded institution. Congratulations. Well done. We’re going to need you. Tune up your language and get ready to use it.

Commodification of everything in a society that worships it can be difficult to see – though many Europeans look at the U.S. and see nothing else. We suspect envy; they allow for the cautionary tale.

A$ it happened to visual art and what’s left to work with leaves a lot of space for making thinking grappling – which is to say space that goes greatly under-used. But it leaves a great place to lean in, to see it, to see this:

Artists are rarely moral heroes and should not be expected to be, any more than plumbers or dog breeders are. Goya, being neither madman nor masochist, had no taste for martyrdom. But he sometimes was heroic, particularly in his conflicted relations with the last Bourbon monarch he served, the odious and arbitrarily cruel Fernando VII. His work asserted that men and women should be free from tyranny and superstition; that torture, rape, despoliation, and massacre, those perennial props of power in both the civil and the religious arena, were intolerable; and that those who condoned or employed them were not to be trusted, no matter how seductive the bugle calls and the swearing of allegiance might seem. At fifteen, to find this voice-so finely wrought and yet so raw, public and yet strangely private-speaking to me with such insistence and urgency from a remote time and a country I’d never been to, of whose language I spoke not a word, was no small thing. It had the feeling of a message transmitted with terrible urgency, mouth to ear: this is the truth, you must know this, I have been through it. Or, as Goya scratched at the bottom of his copperplates in Los desastres de la guerra: “Yo lo vi,” “I saw it.” “It” was unbelievably strange, but the “yo” made it believable.

A European might not have reacted to Goya’s portrayal of war in quite this way; these scenes of atrocity and misery would have been more familiar, closer to lived experience. War was part of the common fate of so many English, French, German, Italian, and Balkan teenagers, not just a picture in a frame. The crushed house, the dismembered body, the woman howling in her unappeasable grief over the corpse of her baby, the banal whiskered form of the rapist in a uniform suddenly looming in the doorway, the priest (or rabbi) spitted like a pig on a pike. These were things that happened in Europe, never to us, and our press did not print photographs of them. We Australian boys whose childhood lay in the 1940s had no permanent atrocity exhibition, no film of real-life terror running in our heads. Like our American counterparts we had no experience of bombing, strafing, gas, enemy invasion, or occupation. In fact, we Australians were far more innocent of such things, because we had nothing in our history comparable to the fratricidal slaughters of the American Civil War, which by then lay outside the experience of living Americans but decidedly not outside their collective memory. Except for one Japanese air strike against the remote northern city of Darwin, a place where few Australians had ever been, our mainland was as virginal as that of North America. And so the mighty cycle of Goya’s war etchings, scarcely known in the country of my childhood, came from a place so unfamiliar and obscure, so unrelated to life as it was lived in that peculiar womb of nonhistory below the equator, that it demanded special scrutiny. Not Beethoven’s Muss es sein-“Must it be so? It must be so”-written at the head of the last movement of his F Major String Quartet in 1826. Rather, “Can it be so? It can be so!”-a prolonged gasp of recognition at the sheer, blood-soaked awfulness of the world. Before Goya, no artist had taken on such subject matter at such depth. Battles had been formal affairs, with idealized heroes hacking at one another but dying noble and even graceful deaths: Sarpedon’s corpse carried away from Troy to the broad and fertile fields of an afterlife in Lycia by Hypnos and Thanatos, Sleep and Death. Or British General Wolfe expiring instructively on the heights of Quebec, setting a standard of nobly sacrificial death etiquette for his officers and even for an Indian. Not the mindless and terrible slaughter that, Goya wanted us all to know, is the reality of war, ancient or modern.

From Goya by Robert Hughes.

The Solar Glut

Drafting on last week’s post, what if the news the way news is presented was reversed?

Europe’s solar energy season is getting longer and more intense, threatening to disrupt markets and overwhelm grids with a glut of cheap power.

Solar energy production surges in April as longer days combine with sunnier weather, while the warmer conditions also curb household heating demand. Swaths of new solar capacity are generating a flood of electricity that can drive power prices below zero, eating into the profits of renewable-energy producers and scaring off some investors.

Not artificially reversed, only mindful that this happening, too.  Of course Bloomberg (only the messenger) frames this in a grave ‘We Must Do Something About This Immediately’ context, as though strong solar production paired with milder temperatures is a disruptive problem.
Which it could be, but not for the planet. And there are all manner of gluts – sun, solar power, solar panels themselves. One man’s glut is another man’s boom.
Image: raise your hand if you remember this band

Chimurenga – who no know go know

Along with promoting some recent work, a new project is making clips from my Unscripted interviews available on social media. One of those we’ll get to eventually is with journalist and DJ Ntone Edjabe, founder and editor of Chimurenga, an innovative platform for free ideas and political reflection by Africans about Africa.

And this is one of the rare, correct uses of ‘innovative’ as an adjective. in newspaper form, the issues have a little of everything – poetry, photography, plays, terrific writing of all kinds and of course, news. However,  and I only started to understand this much later and not especially because of the times we are a’living in, Chimurenga’s journalism often presents news stories long after actual events. That is, rather than so-called breaking news – which honestly leaves us mostly flummoxed and discombobulated by its sheer volume (not to speak of those who work the sheer volume for their purposes, ahem) – Chimurenga presents news much later. Maybe more information has come available, maybe people still don’t understand a thing that happened… does this sound familiar?

It really changes the idea of news into information for action and understanding.

A sample of the excellent writing, in an article by saxophonist and composer Shabaka Hutchings:

In a lecture he gave on Afrofuturism, Kodwo Eshun used a phrase which resonated with me – “encoded language”. I believe there is an alternative vernacular present in both hip-hop and jazz which relates the two musics intrinsically, and which exists outside the orthodox analysis. This idea that music has layers of encoded information, passed down through generations, without explicit acknowledgement even from the participants, fascinates me. It speaks to the question of why certain elements of African musical stylings are propagated by the diaspora. Are there more stories within musical elements which survived the middle passage than we choose to admit? Are we in a position to grasp the meanings of these tales? Maybe the formulation of new myths is a valid way of approaching these questions, if only for the creative stimulus imagined answers can inspire.

Let us then try to explore the worlds of both jazz and hip-hop as vessels for an informational network outside the parameters of pre-packaged discourse. What happens when you take away the notion of harmonic movement in jazz as being central to its intrinsic meaning or the message the improvising soloist has to offer? What happens when you take the focus away from lyricism in hip-hop?

Yes, we could learn a thing or three – and wow do we need to. There’s so much more to all of this – and take that however you want. Chimurenga is supported by donations, if you are able. My interview with Edjabe is here.

Image: an issue of Chimurenga I keep in my office.