Jordan Lee (dot) Life

Aidan Walker aka How To Do Things With Memes wrote a interesting review of Language Machines which turns to the 20th century structuralist (and deconstructuralists) philosophers to understand how we got to the point of LLM’s making “language without cognition”. I think he makes some good points about language already being artificial and how this moment forces us to peel away the some of our assumptions about what language is and how it relates to the supposed uniqueness of humans.

Full Review

So I think as we search for a “real humanism” — one that lies in actual people and their tangled experiences of the world, rather than in some ideal, untouchable essence the computer can never replicate — we must be careful and playful in equal measure. Careful, because the stakes are high and the situation demands diligent work that watches closely. Playful, because in a moment when language has become “a service” on tap that constructs itself without the steering of a human hand, all the cliches, omissions, and biases that are coded within language will bloom unchecked like algae in an unmoving pond.

In the era of its autonomous construction, the task of deconstructing language — looking at language and saying “hold up a second,” Uno-reversing the binary, joking, probing, unpeeling — becomes even more important. Which is why I love Language Machines, and why the way forward must include poetry, rhetoric, and memes.

I’ll start this review with a confession: I try to ignore reactionary rich guys who try to dominate the news cycle. I think of it as a practice to protect my mental health and a way to deprive them of the attention and clicks they seem to crave. Yet after hearing these authors give a compelling book talk I ended up picking up this slim work analysing the Musk economic and ideological system and couldn’t put it down.

Slobodian and Tarnoff cover Elon Musk’s South African upbringing, his uncanny ability to be technologically ahead of the curve and raise capital through “finacial fabulism”, and eventually his fear of AI, the desire to merge with it, and his social media fuelled rightward turn to some truly repulsive ideas about race, gender, class.

The authors avoid the traps painting him one dimensionally as a genius, or villian, or lunatic. Instead it is well researched with his bizarre behavior well contextuallized within broader movements. The authors idea of “cyborg conservativism” where Musk both is a transhumanist while hating trans people was especially illuminating. To him the “woke mind virus” isn’t a joke. He seems to see the world as code and human empathy and progressivism as a suicidal bug that must be erradicated before humanity can ascend.

I wonder how we stand stand up against the worlds richest man who is literally fighting to change what it means to be human, who is using his immense capital to accelerate the exact idealogies and technologies that I fear the most.

Airbnb, Uber, & Meetup wanted better exit options

Elle: Are you saying online life should be more democratic if we want a more democratic society?

Nathan: It’s less that they’re antidemocratic, and it’s more that they didn’t even try. That’s why I call the feudalism “implicit”—because people were calling the early internet “democratic” when a lot of these norms were forming. But in actual practice, they did not set up tools for collective decision making, or the basic features of democratic life that people like Alexis de Tocqueville or Robert Putnam knew as everyday democracy.

The practices that we might experience in a garden club, a labor union, a neighborhood club, or a mutual insurance organization—none of these are present in the corporate platforms that now run the internet, or even the very community-driven platforms that came before the internet was commercialized. In some respects, it’s not just a critique of corporate power that I’m talking about. It’s actually an ideology that came before. Corporations figured out how to make gobs and gobs of money on the internet, but now we’re seeing the deeper consequences.

A couple days ago I went to the Poetry Project here in NYC to see Neti-Neti, a group whose thoughtful exploration of grief and ritual was something I wanted to hear ever since Amirtha Kidambi’s excellent interview on Critical Listening. The performance of percussion and effected vocals opened up all sorts of sonic and spiritual pathways and I felt a little physiologically different after, maybe lighter.

Even though in Buddhism and in most therapies, one is supposed to sit with difficult feelings before trying to “fix” them, I hadn’t thought about how those same dynamics may play out as a group in a room or even a nation. It is such a heavy, erratic time and opening up space to sit with it before talking about ways forward felt radical in our escapist era.

Waters of March has been billed as one of Brazil’s most popular songs but I had never paid it much attention other than as enjoyable background music. That changed recently when it played in a cafe and I was bowled over by the stream of consciousness lyrics which speak of the cycles of life and decay. Using a cascade of seemingly opposing snapshots Antônio Carlos Jobim paints a rich non-dualistic picture of life.

What makes the song resonate further for me, is that it was written during a fascistic period of Brazil where journalists and artists were being jailed and murdered for speaking out against the regime. In this tense time, Jobim was able to use the Zen-like calm of bossa nova and powerful metaphor to offer an opposing narrative to the air of inevitability that the authoritarian regime was trying to project.

A youtube comment adding some interesting context, reminding listeners that March is Brazil’s start of autumn and one of mud, rain, overflowing rivers. This is not necessarily a song of blooming but something messier, torrential.

It’s the wind blowing free, It′s the end of the slope, It’s a beam, it′s a void, It’s a hunch, it′s a hope

In my little corner of the web there seems to be a resurgence in studying media theorists who were noticing big changes in culture happening from new media technologies like the television and extrapolating their idea for the internet age. There’s been Marshall McLuhan (the medium is the message), his student Walter Ong (we are switching from a literary society back to an oral one), Neil Postman (television forces information to be amusing and decontextualized).

But I had been a bit intimidated by the ideas of Vilem Flusser who in the 80’s was predicting machines that could generate personalized images for the user and adapt to their preferences until it becomes a feedback loop becoming stronger with each iteration.

I thought Kevin Munger’s video on Flusser’s Communicology offered a good entry point and rallying cry on how to study and escape the spiral we seem to be in.

I was fascinated by historian Heather Cox Richardson’s interview with Vanessa Williamson on her book The Price of Democracy: The Revolutionary Power of Taxation in American History.

In addition to learning about the way attitudes on taxes have shifted over the past 200 years, she lays out the case that taxes are a way to involve accountability to the people in government spending which is why the Trump administration has increasingly turned to alternative things like tariffs, fees, corporate donations, and spoils of war to fund their unpopular agenda.

He’s more quarterly mix of favorites throughout the past three months, many of which I wrote about on this very blog. Most are self-released or are on local NYC labels so I hope you enjoy and find something new!

Listen on Bandcamp or a slightly different version on Youtube

Tracklist:

Dialect - Earth Angels of the Bone Age

Market - THE VISITORS

Jenny Hval - A ballad

0 stars - Become

Phongsri Woranuch - Sorry Letter

Nina Simone - Love Me Or Leave Me

Ava Luna - Frame of Us

Alick Nkhata - Kalindawalo Ni Mfumu

Old Pup - Stalactites

TWO STEPPES - Rolento

Michael Cormier-O’Leary - Marilyn

The Cosmic Tones Research Trio - Sankofa

Haley Heynderickx, Max García Conover - to each their dot

Ichiko Aoba - mazamun

Lisa O’Neill - Old Note

h. pruz - Force

Sharon Mountain Harmon - Blessed Quietness

Ways of Being- Animals, Plants, Machines: The Search for a Planetary Intelligence was published in April 2022, mere months before the first public version of chatGPT was released. In a way it is a time capsule of a time before the conversations and consequences of AI were at an emotionally charged fever pitch.

Yet author James Bridle carves out a well-argued and fascinating niche arguing against corporate, extractavist AI paradigms and their accompanying data centers but for non-human and artifical intelligence as a concept and going further to say that plants and animals already have incredible intelligence that is worth studying and working together with.

Notice I said “working together with” and not something like “harnessing” that is because Bridle advocates against the old models of humans being in charge of everything. He notices that the way we are currently thinking about AI is similar to the way we Westerners historically have thought about animals: worker, pet, threat, or invisible in the background. Instead he hopes we can think of ourself more entangled in a big system where human are but one part of it.

Bridle puts this book under the umbrella of the “ecology of technology” which I really like. Although it seems counterintuitive it is important to put technology and its material effects in a conversation with all of the ecological and human systems. To think of it as continuous and not as binary or oppositional.

This is where the book is at its most inspiring. Chapters like Nonbinary Machines and Getting Random take a look at what computing could do if it were more like how natural systems act in the world. At some point he proposes three conditions for better, more ecological machines. 1) to move away from computers running on binaries that reduce the complexity of the world in sometimes violent ways. 2) to work towards decentralization in both the corporations that run everything but also a decentering of the individual and towards the collective good. 3) be more comfortable with machines that are unknowing, which I take to mean moving towards machine learning instead of programmed rules.

There’s plenty I would push back on in this book but I also found my perspective greatly expanded by his framing of the ecology of technology and connecting the dots between how we humans treat the vast intelligences that already exist on this planet and how we might co-exist with the upcoming types of artificial intelligences. It was the exact type of non-binary framework I was hoping to find to think about these big changes in more productive ways.

A friend recommended this short Norwegian novel about a lonely single mother and her young son the night before his birthday. The paragraphs seamlessly switch between the two inner worlds, often creating ambiguities or highlighting deeply different ways of seeing the world to tragic effect.

As a story it was unbelievable and punishing but as an allegory it was incredibly moving. It was able to depict the way two hurt people, as they create emotional distance, can eventually barely inhabit the same reality. It is a story of what happens when a relationship is drained of love.

It got me thinking a lot about the Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hanh’s book How To Love, which speaks of these same themes but through the lens of healing. He speaks of difficult feelings as knots of sensitivity that can compound over time and severely distort the ability to be calm enough to see clearly and love. The hope is that the tools of Zen (or whatever works for you) can untie these knots one by one. As an aside, I had written the song Untying a Knot BEFORE I had heard this Buddhist concept!

Powerfully written and difficult, this one will stick with me for a while and for that I am grateful.

Will Oldham has gifted us another BPB album; this one finds him accompanied by a large ensemble assembled in Kentucky to back up his distinctive americana-esque style. It feels like a continuation of his past couple records which preach love and openness in our time of isolation and fear. I appreciated his interview with Larry Fitzmaurice where he got deeper into the circumstances of making the album including taking care of an aging parent, newfound rootedness, (not) adapting to a changing music industry.

One of my favorite moments is when he sings “the human times have come and gone, we must accept our rule is done” in Life Is Scary Horses. Overall I resonated a lot more with the first half of the record but it is a real treat to have someone like Oldham continuing to chart his own path and still writing lit-up spirit-filled alt country in these dark times.

I liked this short article from tech writer Mike Pepi which offers a critical perspective on organizing societies around software where the intangible and ambiguous seems to give way to the efficient and definiable.

My hope is to find ways for these two ideologies to co-exist. To have trains that run on time AND have well funded community spaces for communal expression. For art to exist in interesting contexts shared and reviewed by real people instead of converted into a huge bundle of machine-readable metadata to be consumed and regurgitated by LLM’s or algorithmic feeds between targeted ads.

Is there a way for cloud-based software to intersect with the deeply human experiences without a sort of corruption from the limitations of binary code, network effect exponential growth, and penetrating surveillance? My gut is this is less of a technological issue and more about defining what is deeply important to our souls and protecting it